Interviews

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PRAGEETA SHARMA IS THE DIRECTOR of the MFA program at the University of Montana and author of three poetry collections, Bliss to Fill, The Opening Question, and Infamous Landscapes. When asked about a guiding notion for The Opening Question, she answered, “I started with the idea of a kind of unabashed confrontation with disappointment and worked towards a way of reeling it in with a hopeful lyrical edge.” Her work takes on topics to which many may have aversions – philosophy and feminism – with humor and insight as seen in poems such as “Everywhere:”

I was crafting crafts, I had needles, I was sewing butterflies

like women do – but only in terms of thoughts,

not in terms of doing. Or I thought, alas,

lightness is part of the commune of despair.

The scene of a woman doing needlework becomes increasingly strange when we realize she is embroidering thoughts. The thoughts open passageways that lead into communes in which despair surprises with its lightness.

Poems, Sharma asserts, are “places in which you can actually take ideas on, and figure out how they can be inhabited.” Her poems, Major Jackson writes, reveal “’the posture of the life of the mind.’ ascending, where humor is unabashedly handsome and an enormous intellect alluring even to the most cynical pedestrian.” While Jackson points out the ascendant movement of Sharma’s poems, Lisa Jarno takes us to their transcendence: “Prageeta Sharma’s poems are as ever imbued with a crafty playfulness by which the appearances of the ‘I,’ the ‘You,’ and the ‘We’ transcend tricks of the trade.” Thomas Sayers Ellis also notes the expansiveness and profundity of Sharma’s poems that, as he puts it, “seem to live everywhere we’ve lived without wallowing in identity or judgment.”

Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, to Hindu parents. “Being raised a Hindu,” she says, “I was taught to honor knowledge and books like a religion and so for me poetry keeps this relationship close, true, active.” She earned an MFA at Brown University in 1995 and an MA in media studies at the New School in 2001. In 2010 she received a Howard Foundation Grant. We met with her at the Hyatt in Denver during the Association of Writing Programs Conference where we discussed escaping the institution, poets are creative consultants, and limits of the image.

SHIRA RICHMAN

Your poetry addresses feminism in a playful, humorous way. Does humor feel like a way to be taken seriously when discussing feminism?

PRAGEETA SHARMA

I always felt like I had this split personality culturally – I was very quiet, but in my poetry I felt conscious of what a dramatic voice and a dramatic “I” sounded like. It felt melodramatic to me at times. I wanted to construct a voice that was closest to my personality in speaking, in the way that Frank O’Hara had that kind of conversational tone or Kenneth Koch. It was natural to think about a feminine voice that could be conversational and informal, or intimate in ways that weren’t exaggerating the terms of intimacy, but were playful. It is a kind of feminist position to feel comfortable with your voice and engage the reader without putting on airs or trying to construct an over-determined identity for the poem.

When I was beginning to write, a lot of Indian poets were educating the reader about their identity. I wanted to present my personality rather than educate the reader. I’m interested in how we can be, not our best self, but our quirkiest self in the poem, because we have to be this other self all the time. Our artistic self, or the need to be an individual, should be in the poem. That’s a feminist act: to not be one-dimensional in the poem. But I do think a lot of Indian women, culturally, are set up to not have anything to say – except to explain, or to mediate, or to be a messenger of something “more important” than their inner lives.

RICHMAN

Such as what?

SHARMA

When I went to grad school – I graduated in 1995 – there was a lot of “salvation” fiction about the first-generation immigrants and immigrant experience. The subject matter was also very domestic, and I was sort of rallying against that passive “I,” where the character was examined through an omniscient narrator reporting on the culture the characters were immersed in, but never having an opinion about it. You were basically writing for a white reader, who would learn about your culture through you. You were learning nothing about it. You were just putting it on display.

I didn’t want to create poems that merely educated the non-Indian reader. I wanted poems where thinking was happening, because that was a canonical thing. Helen Vendler would talk about the thinking that was happening in, say, Keats – and I’m actually not trying to align myself with “great poets,” but it became this real whiteness – that writing was cerebral thinking, and if you were a person of color, you were telling your story or you were writing the narrative. You were educating people around you instead of actually thinking in the poem, too. It’s important to explore the variety of cognitive experiences in the poem rather than just telling a story.

AMANDA MAULE

Where do you see that thinking happening, or what kind of thinking are you doing in your poetry?

SHARMA

I don’t know if it’s evident in the progression of the books – this is just something I’ve always returned to – but I like thinking of the poem as that place to speak about theory without it being academic. Artists are developing their theories about the world, and we do that in a poem. We don’t have to do it in an essay. That’s the kind of thinking I hope I’m doing. All the stuff that you can’t do anywhere else.

In all three books, I have poems where I’m proposing ideas, a personal philosophy that I think is lofty in an absurd way, but where it’s fun to be absurd with thought. I think a lot of German philosophy is lofty, and a lot of Hindu is more general – you know, general audience ideas. So I wanted to explore places where you could have extravagant thinking without having it fixed to one movement or another. I think men do this all the time. And going back to humor, when women explore humor, sometimes it’s sort of slapstick or jokey, and that can be awkward. But there are so many male poets who are funny in their poems, like Kenneth Koch.

RICHMAN

I think women are funnier.

SHARMA

Women are funnier. I’m just wondering if it’s as much in the poem as in the way we interact and engage. But we may be funny when we’re making points when we’re remarking on something that’s unfair. We can be slightly snide and funny. Are we using the poem as a place to enjoy our playfulness? We are now, I think. A lot more poets are. Arielle Greenberg is, I think. And Matthea Harvey, in the way in which her humor is felt through abstraction and character. There’s that playfulness to the poems. I think her second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine, does that. She has nouns and objects stand in for people. I think there’s a lovely quality in the strangeness of the humor there.

Among South Asian poets, I think there are a few male poets who explore craft and wit, really think of it formally, but I’m wondering if there’s still not more of that playfulness that could be found. In terms of gender, I’m not sure if we’re still fixed with the kind of confessional “I.” Or when we experiment, do we just extract language from the narrative and not necessarily put our personality in there? I don’t know where we are with humor in terms of cultural identity. But in terms of gender, a lot of women are playing; they just don’t want to be too slapstick. There’s a particular poet who I’m not going to mention, who may be just a little too funny. Then you’re like, Ugh, I don’t want that. I don’t want to be a comic. So there’s the risk, I think. A lot of men can be comedic and even use one-liners, and it’s okay. They just take that kind of space.

RICHMAN

I’m having trouble thinking of funny male poets. You mentioned Kenneth Koch.

SHARMA

Kenneth Koch I really love. And Tony Hoagland.

MAULE

Dean Young can be funny, too.

SHARMA

Yeah. And people have said they see connections between what I do and Dean Young’s work, structurally. I like his work. I haven’t thought about it in relation to my work, but I certainly know he was publishing when I was younger, and his poems were playful and exploratory. Structurally, they had a voice that was working against some perceived notion of the poem he was undoing. That’s something I like to do. If there’s a rule, I want to play with it.

RICHMAN

One of the funny poems of yours is “After the Weekend with Geniuses.” The fiction writers are the geniuses who are full of pages, and the poets are the warriors and false gardeners who end up languishing on the lawn like love-starved lawn ornaments. Are poets lazy and ornamental? How are fiction writers different?

SHARMA

I spent a weekend with a bunch of fiction writers and we were helping Heather McGowan, a fiction writer, think about her first run of edits on her novel, which was experimental. Whenever we talked about it, I would say, “You know, if it were a poem, you could just do this and you wouldn’t have to do those fifty things.” But it was never helpful because she couldn’t just do this. So I thought, “We’re so extravagant, poets. We can just do this little thing and then lounge about and not do any more.” With the poem, you have a lot of autonomy I don’t think you have as a prose writer. We poets have more autonomy to be ourselves. That’s extravagant, I think.

MAULE

Dean Young has surreal tendencies. Do you see a relationship to surrealism in your work?

SHARMA

My undergraduate study was really formal, and I learned a lot about modern and contemporary poetry – the canonical lens – and then went on to Brown, which was an experimental program. There was a new or different, alternative cannon: Stein and O’Hara and Ashbery. And realizing you could read Eliot and Pound and go one way, or read Eliot and Pound and go the other way. You could go to Lowell or you could go to Olson in your thinking. That was really new to me to think that – Oh, there are open parentheticals, or, Oh, language, words can stand in for other words. You don’t need a simile here; we don’t need to do this with craft.

Then I moved to New York and realized that the poets who seemed to have the most fun, in general, were having fun on the page and having fun in their lives. It spoke to me that I could play in the poem, and I could find surrealism. I think there are some poems trying some surrealism….

But I guess, more, it’s imagination – really figuring out where you want your imagination to be. I think it would be easy to say that I’m surrealist, but I don’t think I am. I don’t think it’s a structure I try on. I just like pairing certain ideas. I like being contrary, so a poem is set up to sort of contradict itself. Just as we go from one thought to another, the poem invites another idea. I don’t think I’m as experimental at all. I’m that square peg in a round hole. I’m not sure what makes the poems so different from somebody else’s in terms of contemporary, nontraditional poems – if we call narrative traditional. But I don’t know if we’re doing that anymore.

I do like some surrealism, but after a certain point I get tired of a poem being purely nonsensical, in the sense that I don’t need meta-symbolism for the poem. Tate does an American surrealist thing where suddenly you step back – I forget which poem it is, but he’s talking about a daughter marrying a prince. After a certain point, you realize the absurdity of this father-daughter relationship and where it goes, and it’s quite metaphorical but it’s also absurd, and you understand that the essential part of the poem is that father-daughter relationship can be estranged in such complicated ways that you might not be able to talk about them directly. I love Tate because the surrealism provides a way to talk about complicated relationships. The surrealism serves a philosophical purpose, makes room to talk about something. I think Dean Young does that, too. I think American surrealism, if that is indeed the right term, does something that the metaphor isn’t always able to do.

RICHMAN

In some of your more recent work, you put the urban into a wild setting, such as being mugged in a river. What sorts of things do you do to ground or un-ground your imagination?

SHARMA

I don’t know how I ground myself. I do feel like an outsider in ways in the West. I used to feel like an outsider in suburbia, growing up with no other Indians around me. I can really go to places where things are invented for me. There are social norms I have to explore. I try to create high stakes around some questions, and then my imagination takes over. I position myself in a place where I have to explain myself, and the terms that I’ve set for myself are both real and imaginary. For example, Homi Bhabha, the theorist, talked a lot about – I’m going to butcher this because it’s been a long time since I’ve read the essay – but he talks about how colonized people will mimic the colonizer. That’s a very interesting power dynamic. He has this beautiful line where he says, to paraphrase here, Mimicry represents ironic compromise, not always representationally but even in the language, then I was somehow enacting a theory that felt very close to me, which was about power relationships.

RICHMAN

You seem to write a lot about ideas – your ideas about ideas, and what triggers a viewpoint.

SHARMA

Theory is interesting to me. I’m naïve and excited about it at the same time. Poems seem to be places in which you can actually take ideas, and figure out how they can be inhabited.

RICHMAN

Do you think that’s a common view? I’ve heard that ideas are for essays and images are for poems?

SHARMA

I can’t stand rules like that. After a certain point, you have to have the strength and character and belief to be a writer. Images aren’t going to save you from yourself. Beyond craft issues, you have to start wrestling with why you are who you are. Your poems are going to have to save you. If you think about great poets, they’re always doing something new. If we talk about anyone who’s doing something interesting, we’re not talking about how they follow the rules.

I’m teaching an insider and an outsider class where we read poets inside and outside canon. I think what’s hardest for all of us is to say what makes us uncomfortable. When do we think the poet is getting away with something? Why is that so disturbing? When do we think correcting them is appropriate? What are the problems with over-determining the body of work by any given poet and its significance? Sometimes I just want to stop being in the institution and say, Well, what is the real pleasure here, and what’s the pleasure you’ve been taught to experience in the poem. Un-schooling may allow you to write something different.

RICHMAN

What would it take to escape the institution?

SHARMA

I don’t know if anyone can escape. In grad school, our professor, William Keach, asked my friend what he was doing for the summer, and he was like, “Oh Professor Keach, I don’t even want to tell you, you’re a Socialist/Marxist.” And he said,  “No, I want to know what you’re doing for the summer.” My friend said, “I’m working for Citibank,” and Keach said, “We’re all working for Citibank.”

In essence, we live in the institution. I think I make fun of being in an institution because I work in an MFA program. There are things that naturally happen in that environment. But I think it’s funny to think more ironically about it being an intentional community and that we all agree to be a certain way and do certain things and push against certain things. It seems people don’t generally like work that’s far from the institution. “Language” poetry’s been co-opted by the academy, but people don’t know what to do with spoken word. People see a lot of outsider poetry as being written by someone not knowing, not reading, or not understanding literary traditions. It’s interesting to thing about what inside and outside mean.

I try to introduce my students to poets who either write outside the academy or don’t consider their poetry identity to be their primary identity – you can have a multi-functional, professional identity. Ofelia Zepeda is a linguist at the University of Arizona, and she’s a poet. What she’s don’t for Tohono O’odham culture – she’s been preserving Tohono O’odham language for Native communities – has been primary and has served her poetry, and her poetry enacts it. I think it’s interesting when you have certain ideas and your work enacts them, so that you’re engaged in how your work does something maybe larger socially.

I think that goes back to how I want South Asians to feel good about how complicated they are. Rather than trying to please the reader or aim for certain success, they can fail. So much immigrant culture is based around this idea of needing to be successful, so usually you don’t choose to be a poet because it’s not a choice that can pay the bills or that can make your family proud of you. In some Indian communities, it’s fine to be an intellectual. But being a poet is kind of scary because it’s creative.

I’m interested in communities where people do explore the difficult: being a poet, writing about things that aren’t cool to write about. I think if you’re only success driven, your art will fail.

MAULE

Could you give more examples of outsider poets you’re teaching?

SHARMA

We’ve read Amiri Baraka; his earlier work as LeRoi Jones is so popular. People love how he writes about influences – the Beats, Black Mountain, Olson, Pound, Eliot – in ways that re-center him around racial discourse. He’s not that confrontational in the earlier work, but the more confrontational he gets, the more uncomfortable the white reader is with Baraka.

I found I was in this non-place where I didn’t feel threatened by the work at all. I was interested in the politics, and I’m interested in what the work tries on. I’m trying to explore what it’s like to be a white reader reading work that’s confrontational, having never occupied that space where I’m confronted as the person employing the power. It’s interesting when you’re both inside and outside, and I’m trying to get my students to figure out how their identity is complex but not generalized. They love the canonical work. I taught Jorie Graham’s first book so we could talk about a first book that propelled someone into the canon. They can identify all those moves in Graham. They can very much imitate Graham. But imitating Baraka is hard for them. If we go back to Homi Bhabha’s ideas of mimicry and ironic compromise, maybe they’re not experiencing enough of that compromise in the poem.

I’m also teaching an Indian poet, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, who’s a cognitive scientist. She writes out of the model where there are some strange narrative turns in the poems that you don’t expect. We’re reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Claudia is Jamaican, so she looks at her identity as it relates to being in America, but she also has other ideas of lineage – that’s the thing I’ve really been trying to get my students to thing about. What if they could construct this imaginary lineage that they come out of? What would it be? Would it culturally represent just one thing? What does that mean, to be a contemporary poet writing out of one kind of lineage? Some poets aren’t writing out of just one lineage.

Some of my students – especially at the undergraduate level – are like, “We don’t have a lineage, and we don’t know what you mean by that.” I have to ask them, “Do you want to have a lineage, or do you want to figure out the places you’re writing from? Wouldn’t it be nice to think of it as a lineage, or is it that a cultural thing – that I would want a lineage?” Because in Indian culture, you really love the idea of mentoring, passing down wisdom. I always loved that idea that I had a lineage.

In talking about feminism, maybe you can have a feminist lineage and thing of women you write out of. I’m always thinking: What do we do with class now? or What did Sharon Olds offer or Anne Sexton? I don’t really like Sexton’s work that much, but she was a big outsider poet in a lot of ways. She was a sort of strange housewife in therapy in Newton, Massachusetts – I’m from Framingham, Massachusetts – so I always thought, God it’s funny to think of her getting on the subway and going to Cambridge and taking a workshop and having her therapist. That was very outside.

RICHMAN

Speaking of lineage, it’s been said that in Infamous Landscapes you are responding to Wordsworth and a landscape “cast in hysterics.” Can you talk about this?

SHARMA

I see Wordsworth as naïve and lofty and I thought of what the feminine equivalent of that would be. So I thought, I want to try hysteria. I’m interested in the individual and the sublime and how you have the landscape stand for certain emotional intensity and registers. I wanted to reposition that kind of loftiness in a feminine voice and see what it would look like. But then, I also like George Oppen and Barbara Guest, so those three influences, if you put them together, would feel closest to the work in that book.

I wanted to replace a kind of innocence or idealism with more of a hysteria. I say “hysteria” but I don’t mean that the woman is always cast as hysterical. I just like taking up space in ways that confront the masculine poetic authority. What do we have for poetic authority for women? We can be kind of dramatic and insistent upon certain ideas, but we can also be confrontational.

Somehow we haven’t managed to assume the same kind of, even, romantic poetic authority. It’s very hard to figure out, so I was just trying to assume poetic authority in ways that would mirror or counteract it in romantic work. I mean, Byron has so much poetic authority, and yet he’s transgressive. You know, we’re always hearing how bad Byron is, like, “He’s having way too much fun.” I mean, they all did.

Wordsworth is kind of the most naïve – I say naïve because the poetic authority is always that wandering and speculation – but you don’t really know where you’ve arrived at the end of Wordsworth. I was thinking of inhabiting that romantic space, but enriching it with a more feminine sensibility, rather than a childish one, or a naïve one.

MAULE

Where do we find poetic authority? Or does it just happen and we look back on it and say, “There it was.”

SHARMA

I think we are steeped in the poetic authority of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and we have it in the 20^th century, too – I guess Lowell had poetic authority – but I’m thinking of Eliot and Pound. I always felt really uncomfortable with male poetic authority because I felt that it was a way to flex knowledge. It was like saying, “Okay, pack the poem with everything you know.” And if it didn’t have that, such as in Lowell’s later work that’s more confessional, then it becomes, “I’m a wealthy man who can’t bear it.”

I started to connect to this poetic authority with craft, so that you have to set up the stage, your poem has to have placement, the voice has to be determined, and you have to figure out if your images are really serving what they’re supposed to serve. When you away from tradition, what are you doing it for? Are you turning away from poetic authority or are you reconstructing a kind of authority that has been ignored or has not been engaged with? I think you can do it formally or informally. People always talk about Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott: what Brathwaite does informally, Walcott does formally. You know, Omeros is an amazing book for what Walcott does with Homer. So, wow! That’s an incredible shift in poetic authority.

I’m thinking about whether authority comes out of craft or if it comes out of the space to do what the poem needs to do. Historically, I think it came out of white men who believed in the tradition. I think I’m always trying to deconstruct the tradition, to figure out if you can have authority after that. But I know that I have a lofty authority in my poems to try all this out.

MAULE

If my name was Prageeta I would want to put it in a poem, and you’ve done that. How does this affect the relationship between the poem and the reader?

SHARMA

I like to be self-mocking in the poem and I like to have the reader understand that certain truths are constructed but that I am still trying to play with the seriousness. So we have the “I” as the ultimate authority, but what if you put your name in the poem? What does it do to the “I?” Or what does it do when I’m writing in the third person and I refer to myself as the third person? It’s obnoxious in one sense, but it can also allow the poem to have a natural remove: I am removed in some way from the authority of the “I.” I’m playing with that.

I apologize a lot, and I am interested in how we have certain gestures that are constructed culturally in terms of gender, and how we play with our diminutive self. I try to position myself in these powerless places that are my most vulnerable powerless places, and then play with that. Or, when the reader is instructed or spoken to, it creates an intimacy in the text. It’s almost a reaching out or an invitation. I like trying to break down the spaces of reader and speaker so that there’s an intimacy that maybe the speaker doesn’t always have.

MAULE

I see that breaking down of the space between reader and speaker in Bliss to Fill. The whole first section is called “Dear _______.”

SHARMA

Yeah, I’m interested in the lyric in that book. In that epistolary form, that heartfelt engagement, I really am trying to speak to the reader as a friend, or as all sorts of manifestation. I wrote that in New York my first couple of years there, steeped in a fabulous writing community.

A lot of poems in The Opening Question were my graduate manuscripts that were reformulated with additional work. So, Bliss to Fill was my second manuscript. I knew it could be freer because Subpress Collective was a really generous project. So I could enjoy all of the vulnerability of O’Hara’s lines. That was really an exciting time to think about the immediacy of the poem. I don’t know if my poems now are as focused on that immediacy of the poem. I don’t know if my poems now are as focused on that immediacy as they were in Bliss to Fill. There is a certain rawness to that book that would be hard to recreate.

MAULE

Poetry allows us so much freedom and intimacy and the ability to lounge out on the lawn. What is the biggest challenge of poetry?

SHARMA

Our challenge is that we allow ourselves to exist outside the economy. That’s why we get a lot of freedom. It’s very political and very interesting and if people could sit comfortably with that, they’d feel more empowered.

RICHMAN

Value, worth, and money come up a lot in your work.

SHARMA

I’m lucky in that I have a good job. Before I took this job, I worked a lot of different jobs in New York and I had the same questions with each: “Okay, who is the person I’m working for?” Or, “How’s this environment going to help me be creative, help me believe in a lifestyle, and help me take care of people whom I love?”

I worked for a famous artist who made a lot of money. He taught me essential things about being an artist that were not about the work. And so I realized, The work is private – you do it, you believe in it – but you have to make smart decisions about who you are outside your work. You have to deal with money. You have to know how to. This artist taught me how to insure things. I learned that poets should be collecting art and figuring out how to have assets that are non-traditional. Poets should be immersed in their culture, the culture being produced around them, and engaged with it. And to really live in your mind by being shrewd – don’t think that just because you’re a poet you can’t figure out how things work around you.

I am really interested in money. I don’t know if it’s because I’m first generation American born and my parents are immigrants; they came here from India with 200 dollars. They’ve done well, they’ve struggled, and they’ve experienced a lot of racism and a lot of discrimination. I have, too. I don’t have the luxury of not thinking about money, but I also really love what poetry offers me in terms of my identity.

At a meeting yesterday, I was joking and everyone went silent. I said, “Well, you know, we may not be able to promise our students lucrative careers, but they won’t have a midlife crisis.” I think we’re providing them an inner life, which actually keeps people from buying crazy cars or leaving their spouses. I think there are a lot of interesting things that poetry offers that aren’t about money. But I’m still a director and I recruit people to come to an MFA program. I’m not trying to be a hypocrite. I get a paycheck. I don’t want people to take out loans for poetry. But I also think that people take out loans for the most ridiculous things anyway. Like why would renovating your house be more important than your inner life? I think people should pay more attention to what they spend money on and what it means to spend money on something. What’s actually nourishing?

RICHMAN

I love this set of directions for poets and I’m especially interested in the one about how poets need to be engaged with their culture.

SHARMA

We are so keen to historicize what has been interesting in the past for poets. It’s like saying, “In the 50s, we had O’Hara who’s a poet among painters. Oh, that’s great.” Well, he was smart about knowing what was going on in a really exciting world – a parallel universe of art-making. A lot of those poets were involved in the arts and they knew they were on the pulse of seeing great work as it was being done, and they were also making work and making connections.

We have a weird economy of high and low art, but we forget that curators are looking at what’s happening in strange rural places and seeing amazing work coming out of those spaces. Poets need to participate in everything going on around them or instigate or initiate or collaborate and see themselves as participating and engaging… or articulating a sense of what’s going on around them. That is, creating the history that will then be romanticized.

It just seems strange. I think scholars can do all that historicizing. Poets need to be making work right now and believing that they have some kind of agency. It’s useful to not historicize, to not call attention to something that doesn’t exist anymore, but to look at the living artists. All these careers are propelled by just believing that you have agency – by doing something new – and a lot more poets should worry less about whether they’re being read or how many books they’ve sold and just be more involved in the arts in ways that will feed them.

You don’t have to think you have to be somewhere; you just have to be immersed fully where you are. Dale, my husband, is a performance artist, and I will have a crazy work week where I’ll be talking about poetry and I’ll be writing a little bit or whatever. And he’ll present something and I’ll just think, “Oh my God, it’s just genius.” I know I’m biased because he’s my husband but he has taught me so much about being in your work all the time and believing that it’s the most meaningful place that you have to be in the present, and understanding and engaging with it.

MAULE

Do you see any potential for technology/poetry collaborations?

SHARMA

Well, my biggest fantasy – have you been to BAM in Brooklyn – the Brooklyn Academy of Music? I remember my parents actually went there in the 70s when Peter Brookes had created that adaptation of The Mahabharata. It was a very experimental theater in the 70s, and here was this suburban family from Boston going to see this beautiful adaptation of the classic Indian text.

But then I thought, Wow! Brooklyn Academy of Music has done all the great commissions, and the poets have collaborated with artists and composers. Tom Waits and his poet wife have done these incredible productions. And I’m thinking, Well, all the language in all of those things has the lyric in it. It’s got poetic elements. It’s fragmenting language in order to heighten it, so it all involves poetry when we’re looking at experimental theater or multimedia productions.

I think poets could be more actively engaged in cross-genre productions, in the aesthetic experience and the pleasure of it. In my workshop, I teach Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and I think, How does video art become so extravagant, whereas when you have it in the poem, it’s unreadable? People will watch video art or animation – why is the visual element so much more engaging than what your mind can conjure? Why is it so disturbing when it happens in the poem? But you can spend five million dollars on it and have it represented at a gallery and it’s conceptually the same thing. In some ways it’s more flawed because of its budget.

I think poets need to hijack more things. We need to be out there saying, “You should really have a poet do that.” Matthew Barney should hire a poet to work with. We bring a lot more imagination to pieces. Sometimes what’s surprising about some of the video art is that it’s literal or Freudian. Even David Lynch. But we have his early videos and we see credit to C.K. Williams as a consultant on one of his films from art school. It would be nice if poets were not seen as so “fringe-y” but more useful. Like vessels of imagination.

MAULE

Why are poets seen as “fringe-y?”

SHARMA

Because we don’t make money. Painters are “fringe-y,” too. Until they have big accounts.

RICHMAN

So many people think there’s no need for so many people studying and writing poetry, but it seems like you’re arguing the opposite – that as many people as possible should discover the inner life of a poet.

SHARMA

I don’t think you have to be teaching at a university to be a poet. I don’t think you have to give up who you are to do one thing or four things. There are 5,000 students entering MFA programs a year. But that’s a very American thing, isn’t it, to have anxiety around people studying the subject? Isn’t that inherently competitive? Say we could have 5,000 people a year who are more engaged with their humanity? Though you could be a narcissist going through the program, so you have to split the 5,000. Maybe 2,500 are interested in bettering themselves. Not that poetry has to be therapeutic. But on the flip-side, all of those narcissists are actually doing something productive, instead of being awful people. So, in some ways, however you come out as a writer, it’s all productive.

RICHMAN

What do you do in your life to maintain literary friendships and the kinds of community you need to nurture and support yourself as an artist?

SHARMA

I like community; I like being involved in what people are doing, but I think a lot of people don’t. They want the community to serve them, but they don’t want to do enough for the people around them. I’m not saying I do everything right, but I like paying attention to what people need. What I really like about the MFA program is that you’re all present with each other. And that stays. I think students and faculty get to keep and protect and preserve the community around them. But I think it can be hard being the poet. It’s easy to send poems out and publish, but it’s hard to believe that you did the right thing. That’s where all the struggle is – believing that it’s okay to be a poet, especially when you’re invisible.

But, then it’s kind of funny, too. I’m seeing a family friend tonight – she’s going to come to the “One Hundred Days Reading,” this celebration of Obama’s first hundred days in office. She’s a nurse in Boulder and I was like, “There’ll be a lot of people in this space; it’s going to probably be a little bit unsettling.” It’s like, all of the interest and engagement – I don’t know how many of those poems are going to make sense to her. But Obama makes sense to her. And then she’s going to have this funny experience with these poems playing in rhetoric language. But it’s all play, ultimately. That’s what’s so confusing to non-writers. They’re like, “Oh… this is all fun.” and that’s the secret. We’re having fun all the time

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Richard Russo was born and raised in the “Glove Cities,” Johnstown and Gloversville, New York, which would become the backdrop for many of his novels. In a 2007 interview with NPR, he said, “I’ve always had the distinct feeling that there was a ghost version of myself still living back in that place that’s still so real in my imagination and that I’ve been telling fibs about all this time.” In “High and Dry,” an essay featured in the summer 2010 issue of Granta, Russo revisits his hometown, grappling with the unpleasant history of Gloversville’s leather tanning industry.

Russo is the author of seven novels, including the Pulitzer Prize- winning Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs, and most recently, That Old Cape Magic, as well as a collection of short stories entitled The Whore’s Child. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Esquire. He’s written and co-written screenplays for movies such as the 1998 film Twilight and 2005’s The Ice Harvest.

Russo’s work has been widely lauded for its humor, its sharp storytelling, and its keen portrayal of the world it inhabits. The New York Times called Bridge of Sighs “an improbably neighborly and nonchalant version of the great American novel.” In a review of That Old Cape Magic in the Washington Post, Ron Charles said, “American white guys may have no better ally in the world of fiction than Richard Russo.” We met with Mr. Russo at Spokane’s Davenport Hotel, after attending a panel discussion in which he and several other screenwriters talked about the intricacies of adapting novels into films. We discussed the ups and downs of writing partnerships, damaged characters, humor and suffering, Russo’s doctoral study despair, and how he discovered that he was going to become a fiction writer.

Sam Edmonds

In a 2006 interview, you said that you initially wrote to avoid working construction in college, and then you wrote to avoid doing scholarly research. Did this type of avoidance get you where you are today?

Richard Russo

I did what a lot of people who love literature do. You become an English major, and you think what a great deal this is. You spend your time reading great books, you write about them a little bit, it enriches your life, and if you become a teacher, you can make a decent enough living out of it. So you do a BA, and then you do an MA, and the MA is even more fun, because you get to concentrate. If you liked Huckleberry Finn, for example, then chances are pretty good that you’re going to be able to take courses where you get to read Pudd’nhead Wilson and all the other good Twain stuff; you get to go deeper, and the more of it you read, the better rounded you become as a human being and certainly as a reader and teacher. But to have the kind of career that a lot of people in that circumstance want—why not do the PhD? And then you can become, instead of a high school teacher, a professor. There’s a kind of allure to becoming a professor, but when you get into the PhD program, you realize that you’re not really reading books anymore; you’re reading books about books. You’re reading scholarship. And you keep going, because you’ve started, and you don’t want to stop once you’ve started something. But every year in the PhD program I became more unhappy. I had started down a road that was only likely to get worse. I was looking at my professors at the University of Arizona, the people in literature, and seeing how difficult it was for them to find ever more and more obscure things to write about. You couldn’t just teach the books you loved, because you would never get tenure that way, and so I found myself starting down this road toward scholarship regarding second- and third-ranked writers and some of their most obscure books. I found that I would have to buy that franchise. I would be serving that food, and you’ve got to defend it against other franchises, or other people who want into your franchise. So you become the Twain scholar or whatever. By the time I’d finished my course work and was starting to write my dissertation, I was in a pit of despair. I realized I’d made a terrible mistake that was going to affect and infect the rest of my life. I could see absolutely no way out of it, until I discovered creative writing. I discovered that, in doing all of that reading, I was studying to be a writer. Creative writing gave me another avenue, and it saved my life.

Brendan Lynaugh

So studying literature, as opposed to creative writing, helped you become a writer?

Russo

Yes, especially the kind of reading I was doing. A lot of my colleagues, who were in the MFA program in fiction writing, were reading contemporary stuff. I don’t want to call it a literary dead end, but it certainly wasn’t mainstream. They were reading William Gaddis, Stanley Elkin, Vonnegut, William Gass, John Hawkes, all the biggest names in metafictional, experimental writing, and they were all weaned on it. That would not have been good for me, because as great as those writers were at what they did, I was, without knowing it, going to be writing 20th century or 19th century novels. That’s the kind of writer I was going to be. I wasn’t interested in metafictional games, and it didn’t matter to me how great that stuff was, whereas, when I realized that I was going to have to start reading contemporaries who were doing what I wanted to do, I discovered Richard Yates and John Cheever, and all those people who are much more traditional and had a sensibility closer to my own. I was the kind of writer who was informed by Dickens, the Brontës, and Twain, all of whom were clearly more important in terms of the writer I ultimately became than if I’d been taking contemporary fiction courses in writers who, despite their brilliance, didn’t have much to say to me.

Lynaugh

You’ve done a lot of screenwriting in addition to novels and short stories. Has screenwriting enriched your fiction?

Russo

When I first started writing screenplays, I had some writer friends who said, “Oh, do you really dare to do that? Aren’t you afraid?” They said they would be afraid of all sorts of things—that I would be corrupted by film, corrupted by the Hollywood lifestyle. When I wrote my first script, a couple of friends said, “Are you going to move to LA?” As soon as you mention that kind of work, there’s an aura about the whole thing—“Oh, Russo’s sold out,” as if I’d give up novel writing, move to LA, drive a Porsche, and do nothing but take meetings. Needless to say, none of that happened.

The other thing people worry about, when they worry about novelists working in Hollywood, is that the novels you write after writing screenplays will become more like screenplays and less like novels, that they’ll become dialogue-heavy, take place in time present, that the amount of fictional time that will take place in order for the story to unfold will get smaller, that everything will shrink. They say, “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to become a different kind of writer?” And strangely enough, writing screenplays plays right into my strengths, because most screenplays are about dialogue, which comes easiest for me. The other thing about screenplays—they’re action heavy. You put characters in motion and let them talk and behave in ways that reveal their inner life, and those are the two things that, for me, are easiest to do. What happens when I’ve been working on a screenplay for a while, though, especially if I do a couple of screenplays, is that it almost feels like I’m cheating. Because I’m not required to do the things that are, for me, the most difficult. I’ve always thought that I have a better ear than eye, and when I’m writing badly, it’s like I’m taking dictation. Somebody says something, somebody responds, somebody says something, somebody responds. When I’m writing badly, I’m often writing very quickly, and what’s happening is that my ear’s taking dictation, and my eye’s forgetting to see the world out there. I have to remind myself, Slow down, slow down, because if you’re missing things with your eye while your ear is having a real good time, and if you’re just moving along at that great pace, you’re going to miss important props in a story, important objects. After I’ve written a couple screenplays, when I get back to writing novels, I feel like I’ve been working with a hammer and a wrench, maybe a socket wrench, and when I start on a novel again, it’s like I take out my old tool box. I’ve only been using a couple of tools, and then I flip it up and look at all those things in there that you use when you write a novel; it’s good to be able to use all those tools again.

I started writing screenplays right after Nobody’s Fool came out. I worked with Robert Benton on the film version while I was writing Straight Man. The two novels that came after that were Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs, both of which were bigger, more expansive, more interior. I never spent as much time as I did in Bridge of Sighs describing the physical world; I just luxuriated in all the physical objects, from the trunk that Lucy gets stuck in, to the items on the shelf of that store, and how they were placed, and how the store was going to be run. All of that stuff became enormously important, because I’m not a particularly interior writer. I don’t spend an enormous amount of time in my character’s heads. I like to know who they are as a result of what they say and what they do. And yet, in those two books, I probably spent more time in my characters’ heads than I had in any of my other books. I trace that back to screenwriting, because I had those things denied. So when I came back to novel writing, I was able to embrace them in a way that I hadn’t before, and make them part of my repertoire.

Lynaugh

How is the process of writing a screenplay different from writing a novel?

Russo

Screenplay writing is much more collaborative, although I enjoy collaborating with the director much more than collaborating with other writers. There are two times that I’ve worked with another writer on a screenplay, once with a Colby colleague of mine at the time, Jim Boyland, who was interested in learning the form, had an idea. So I said, “Well, let’s sit down and we’ll write the first act of a screenplay.” We wrote a couple drafts and sent it out to a few people, and there wasn’t an awful lot of enthusiasm about it. Some liked it, some didn’t, and some thought it would be difficult to get made. But at any rate, Jim was having a wonderful time, and that’s the kind of person he is, very collaborative, and he enjoyed the process. Plus, he was learning.

So I worked with him on that, and then I collaborated with Robert Benton on Nobody’s Fool, but it wasn’t so much a collaboration. He was unable to work on it, because it was snowing and he was shooting every day and he was getting further and further behind, so he would send me a set of instructions, and I would rewrite a scene. After that, we wrote a script together called Twilight. I’d send him twenty pages worth of scenes, and he’d write back and revise what I’d written, and then I’d go back and revise what he’d written, and then for a while he would take over the story and write for twenty pages or so and send me what he’d written, and I would busily change everything he’d done and send it back to him. When we got about a hundred pages into this detective movie, neither of us knew who had committed the murder, and we were twenty pages from the end of the script. So we went backward and just decided, All right, here’s the guy who committed the murder. All right, so why?

And then we worked backward and rewrote the screenplay the same way. Even as I tell that story, it’s astonishing to me that the movie could possibly have been made working in that lunatic way, and I think that Benton is a genuine collaborator. He loves to collaborate with another writer. He loves to collaborate with the actors. He even enjoys talking with producers at the beginning stages of things. How are we going to cast this, where are we going to shoot it? For Benton, making a movie is like inventing a family who you’re going to live with for a long time; he loves every aspect of it.

I had been a novelist for so long that the actual rhythm of writing twenty pages and sending it off to him and waiting for a couple of weeks for him to write back drove me crazy. To be honest, I also didn’t want to share. I was having a good time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want his opinion, but I would have rather written the whole thing start to finish and had him revise the whole thing start to finish. It was like reducing a three year film school program into five months, because he’s such a brilliant writer and director. But after learning what I learned, I thought to myself, I don’t think I want to collaborate in quite that way again.

Laura Ender

Is it difficult for you when actors become part of the collaboration? Do you trust them?

Russo

It depends on the actor. Strangely enough, sometimes the actors with smaller roles are more problematic. One of the reasons I love to stay away from the set and rehearsals is that the actors, especially good actors in smaller roles, always lobby for more lines. They wanted to do the movie, but they get into the movie, and then if the writer is on set or there in rehearsals, they’re always saying, “You know, I really love my character, but I feel like I need just a few more lines….” They’re always working behind the director’s back. The director doesn’t want to hear any of that. If the script is being rewritten at the time, it’s to the director’s specifications, not the actors’.

Some actors will want to subtract from another character’s lines. And other actors are curious—Paul Newman’s a perfect example of this. When I was on set for Nobody’s Fool, Paul was the soul of generosity, but he was also the soul of curiosity. When I went to the set the first time, he took me aside. He didn’t want the director there, didn’t want anybody there, and he started rifling questions at me: “When Sully’s alone in his truck, what kind of music does he listen to?” He had a whole list of questions, and it was so deeply embarrassing and humiliating, because I didn’t really have any answers for him. I had no idea what kind of music Sully would listen to. Everything I knew about that guy was in the book, and it wasn’t like there were outtakes that I could sweep up from the floor. But he was voraciously looking for anything that would give him more of a handle on who this character was. When I met him, he was already limping, and I almost asked him if he’d hurt himself, until I realized he was in my character, Sully, who’d broken his knee. Paul limped during that entire shoot, on and off camera. He was always looking for something to anchor his character to—he wasn’t looking for dialogue. It was nothing that was ever going to be on the screen, except in a close-up on his face.

We had a pivotal scene, where Sully and his son are sitting in a truck, and his son has asked him, basically, why he left him and his mother. Sully’s explanation to his son in the script was a page and a half, Sully talking about the kind of man his father was, the kind of woman his mother was, how much his father drank, how difficult it was for his mother, who tried to step between his father and him. It was a writer’s explanation of a character that Paul felt very uncomfortable, in character, giving to his son. So he kept asking us to cut. And I would cut and cut, and it was still too much. We finally got it down to a third of the size it was. It became a wonderful scene. In my script, I had written about one particular night where Sully’s father had just beaten the crap out of his mother, and Sully found her on the floor and she was bleeding. Paul took all of that out and I think kept just one or two lines. He says “Your grandfather… your grandfather…” And he pauses, and just looks off, and then says something like, “And of course your grandmother, she was just a little bit of a woman. He could make her fly.” That was it. “He could make her fly.” All the rest of it, he cut out. Everything that man had ever done to that woman was written on his face. We didn’t need any details. He just had to know what had happened to him as a young man, and all the explanation in the world wasn’t going to get him there, wasn’t going to get the movie there. He just needed a little suggestion and a metaphor, and then let all the viewers see his face and see that woman, as the result of a punch, fly across the room.

Lynaugh

You brought up Sully’s problem with his knee. A lot of your protagonists seem to have disabilities—in Straight Man, Hank has trouble peeing from the onset, and in That Old Cape Magic, the protagonist hears voices. How purposefully do you make the choice to limit or disable your characters, and how do these disabilities help the novel?

Russo

Damage plays a role, and not just with the main characters. Maybe it has something to do with my sense that, that’s just human nature. We all get damaged in some way or other, and if you can make that damage seem real, we relate to it in ways that run below the surface.

In the The Risk Pool, there’s a scene that’s as graphically violent as anything I’ve ever written, a scene in which father and son have gone fishing, way back up the river, and Sam Hall, who can’t admit to his son that he has no idea how to fish, he goes up around the bend and immediately has a nest of monofilament on his line. He can’t cast anymore because it’s tangled. The first thing he does when he’s trying to untangle the line is snag his own thumb with a barbed hook, and he spends the rest of his time trying to get the fish hook out of his thumb, while his son and the other guy are fishing. Sam succeeds only in driving it deeper into his thumb as he’s trying to maneuver it out. At the end of the scene, his son, who’s ten years old, and his best friend, Wussy, come walking back up the stream, and here’s Sam sitting on the rock, still connected to his rod, and Wussy just takes one look at him, shakes his head, comes over, and says, “I need my rod back now,” and he bites off the monofilament, like Sam hasn’t figured out that that’s the obvious thing to do, because he doesn’t have any pliers. He bites off the line, takes his rod and reel back, and Sam has to follow. So all of this takes place over a short period of time, but as they walk out of the woods and get back to the car, Sam, by this point, is enraged. He wanted to take his son fishing and everything has gone wrong. As he’s driving down the road, the monofilament line, which is still hanging out of his thumb, is dancing in the breeze, and at one point they have to pull over. That’s when the car breaks down. Sam’s trying to do something with the length of monofilament still dangling, and he just can’t take it anymore. He wraps it around his finger, pulls, and a chunk of his thumb comes out. I remember the first time I read that to an audience. Everybody in the place went “Gasp!” and it taught me a lesson. We’re living in a world in which we’re seeing people blown apart, where violence gets amplified to these epic, often melodramatic proportions. But if you can get somebody to feel a small pain that they have felt, that doesn’t feel small at the time, and get them to relive that, the rewards are astonishing. I even disable dogs. In Nobody’s Fool, I give a dog a stroke. In Straight Man, Hank’s trying to pass a stone. The moments of pain come in small packages, but they can be enormously, dramatically rewarding. We’ve all had the sliver that works its way under the skin and then comes out later, and the way we worry about it.

Ender

That thumb in The Risk Pool gets injured over and over. Is the thumb symbolic? How does the character’s pain work within the novel?

Russo

Every now and then when you’re writing a book you realize you’ve done something, and it works, and you think, All right, how can I use this again? I’ve always believed, as it’s possible, in what I call the rule of threes. When something really works, it’s good to use it three times. The first time it just happens, the second time it seems to pivot a little bit, and the third time brings it home. It becomes something other than the thing. The first time it’s just a thumb, Sam’s thumb and Sam’s pain. The second time, as I recall, it’s the kid trying to understand about pain, saying, How can you do that, doesn’t it hurt? And Sam trying to explain to him, that’s not the point. It’s learning to deal with it. I think when you stumble on something in the real world, you try to use it two or three times, just to see how much you can get out of it and how you can transform it from something that’s literal into something that might be symbolic, or carry a little bit more weight than its literal weight.

Ender

All your books are funny. When you go into a book, do you think, I’m going to make this funny, or does it just happen?

Russo

I think my least funny book is almost certainly Bridge of Sighs, and I don’t think I went into that thinking it was going to be less funny than my other books. If I thought it was going to be less funny, I’m not sure I would have written it, because I’m basically a comic writer. The material itself has to dictate how many laughs there are going to be. Bridge of Sighs is a book about despair, at least on some level. Lucy Lynch starts that book locked in a trunk, and lives the rest of his life kind of locked in the trunk of Thomaston, and has done a terrible thing, really, as regards his wife. He has been throwing away the letters that Bobby has been sending them, and pretending that they are going to Venice, when he knows perfectly well that they’re not. When he almost makes it across that Bridge of Sighs when he goes into his wife’s painting and he’s trying to make it all the way across the bridge into the darkness, that’s as dark a place as I’ve ever been in a book. His suffering is so intense there. If I could have seen anything humorous in that, I’m not above making a joke, as you know.

I think the best humor is related in some ways to suffering. Most of the time, if you think about them in adjacent rooms, the door adjoining suffering and humor is very often wide open, but as we get closer and closer to suffering, the doorway adjoining the rooms gets smaller and smaller, because you just can’t stand it otherwise. Or you just seem to be making bad jokes, or cruel jokes, at somebody’s expense. So it has something to do with distance, too.

Straight Man was the easiest of my books to write and the funniest. Part of the reason it was the funniest was that it was the easiest. There’s Hank suffering and trying to pass that stone, and there’s also a kind of suffering of middle age, he may be losing his wife, there’s something going on with his daughter. It’s not like there’s nothing at stake, but those stories of academic absurdity I had been storing for years—it had been almost ten years since I walked around at Penn State Altoona. I walked around a pond with the dean. Classes were to start in three or four days. He still didn’t have his budget, and he couldn’t hire his adjunct teachers. And this real-life guy said to me, “Same every year. What am I gonna do, kill a duck a day until they give me my budget?” And of course he meant it figuratively, but ten years later I figured what to do with that, and as soon as I get to make it literal, as you often do with things, you sometimes have a pretty good joke. And then, suddenly, all of the absurdity of my life as an academic gushed out. But by that time, I was out of a couple of horrible jobs that I’d had and into a good one, and I had distance on it, and I could do it without one-upsmanship; I wasn’t writing that book out of revenge. I didn’t want to do any “gotcha,” or get even with any academics. I could do it from, I hoped, a good spirit. Distance gives you the ability to do that, I think. But it’s the material itself that tells you in terms of tone just how funny it’s likely to be.

Lynaugh

When you say it all came gushing out, does that also refer to plot? Was it easy to map the book out?

Russo

Part of a fiction writer’s job is to make it look like he knew what he was doing right from the start. When you read a novel like Straight Man, and you think, Boy, how did this get orchestrated this way? part of what you’re thinking is, How did this writer keep all of that in his mind and know exactly the time to reveal this and withhold that, and when do we bring in the woodwinds? But what happens is that you just do it, and you make all kinds of mistakes, and you don’t have to do it right the first time. It’s not like a stand-up comedian who has to go in front of an audience and get the joke right in the first telling. Really you have years. It took me five years to make it look like all the ducks were lined up facing the same direction, like I knew what I was doing from the start, whereas often what was happening was I would look at it and I’d say, “All right, we’ve gone too long here; we haven’t seen Tony Camilia in a while, and Tony is always good for a laugh.” I had him in another scene fifty pages later, but thought, Let’s move him down here, because he’ll break up this scene. We’ve seen these two characters too often, or I need to separate this peeing scene from that peeing scene. So that might have been in draft six, that I saw that this works better over here, and that over there, and you get things to line up, and then hopefully, at the very end it looks like you knew what you were doing from the start.

Ender

Did you do that kind of juggling with any of your other books?

Russo

Every single one. Straight Man was the easiest to write and Bridge of Sighs was the most difficult, partly because it was so dark, but I’d also made a terrible mistake right at the start. I’d told Lucy’s story straight through. It began with Lucy about to become sixty, planning his trip with his wife, Sarah, to Venice, and then telling the story of his life, and it was interrupted by all these flashbacks into his youth with his best friend, Bobby. I got to a point, about 250 pages into it, where I just couldn’t seem to force his story any further, and I felt trapped inside Lucy’s voice, because he’s not a reliable narrator. He doesn’t know the truth of the story he’s telling. I thought at that point that it would be kind of interesting to have Bobby’s take on all of this, so I started in, and I introduced Noonan. On page 251 Noonan is in Venice, waiting for his agent to come along. They’re going to talk about his upcoming show in New York, and whether he’s going to go to New York, and how long he’ll have to stay there, and he has not been feeling well, so he’ll go to the clinic. I set up various meetings with his agent, and I thought, All right, so he’ll have to go to New York or not go to New York. That’ll be the conclusion, but then we’ll go back and revisit many of those scenes that we saw through Lucy. Bobby’s going to see them differently, and then we’ll understand Lucy’s narrative. I wrote Noonan’s section start to finish, so now I’m up to 500 and some pages, and they’re both in love with the same woman. Well, how fair is it to have them both in love with the same woman—who would see things differently than both of them? You have to give her a say. So all right, now Sarah gets the third part, and so page 551 begins Sarah’s narrative. And now we’ve revisited some of these things three times.

I got up to about page 700, and I seemed to have three different novels. I thought I was suddenly in Lawrence Durell territory, where I was writing a trilogy or something, and I sent the whole thing off to my agent. I said, “I think I might be working on a trilogy, but if so, I don’t have an ending to any of them. I have three novels with no ending. Am I crazy?” I went to New York shortly after that, and we had a little walk around the park, as we often do, and he said “No. This is one book, but you can’t structure it this way. You have to go back and forth between all three narrators. You can’t finish one story before going on to another. You have go back and forth between past and present, and you’re going to have to withhold certain information that was revealed too soon, because it’s going to mess things up, and basically what you have to do is a juggling act, going back and forth, past and present, narrator to narrator.” I spent about an hour on our walk that day explaining to him why that could not be done, and by the time I finished it, of course I realized it could be done. By explaining to him how it couldn’t be, it got me thinking how it could be, and then I went and finished the book. Everything about that book ended up in a different place, almost, than where it was originally. I will always think of Nat as saving that novel, because I really was at a loss. I was completely up a stump. I didn’t know what happened next or how to go about it.

Lynaugh

It seems like in the past there was more of a working relationship between writers and editors, going back and forth, and now maybe that’s been replaced by agents.

Russo

I think it’s true—the editor/writer, agent/writer relationship has changed since I broke in. I think that, number one, there are fewer old-school editors around. My editor puts pen to paper. No sentence of mine goes unchallenged, and he’s a wonderful editor, a wonderful line editor, but there are not that many around anymore, and there are a lot of acquiring editors who will take a book and then turn it over to a copy editor, and that’s pretty much it. There are so many editors who will say, “I can sell this. I’ll send it to the copy editor and we’ll sell it,” which has meant that a lot of agents have, in the last twenty years, begun to take on some of the traditional roles of the editor. They’ll get a book that’s good, but it’s not quite there, and they’re not going to want to send it off to the kind of editor who can’t fix it, and so helping to fix it becomes part of what an agent does now, probably more so than twenty years ago.

Lynaugh

How do you choose a point of view for a story? I’m thinking about Empire Falls and the multiple third person points of view, some of which are in the present tense, some of which are in the past.

Russo

I think it was one of those things I probably just did and thought about later. I can tell you why it works now, years after the fact, but at the time it just seemed, instinctively, like the right thing to do. The present tense is the most immediate, which is why it works so well in film, and why films are almost always written as, “He does, he says,” not, “He said.” It’s happening now.

I think time changes. When you’re young, the clock goes slower, and everything seems to be happening in present tense, because you don’t have that much past tense in your life. In Empire Falls, I was convinced that the point of view was right by the time we get to the final scene where John Voss comes in. That section begins with Tic speculating about the nature of time. Do things happen fast or slow? That’s what she’s trying to figure out as she sees John Voss coming across the parking lot. When I started writing that, I thought, Well, that’s kind of what her point of view is all about. It slows the clock down, it makes everything happen in a kind of teenage time, as opposed to her father’s time. As soon as we go to Miles’ time, everything goes much faster in third person and in past tense.

Edmonds

In the story, “The Whore’s Child,” Sister Ursula is in a fiction workshop, but she’s writing nonfiction. Have you ever considered writing nonfiction?

Russo

I just finished a long nonfiction piece for Granta. I’ve done a little bit of nonfiction before, but never anything as sustained as this. And it was a new experience. It’s a piece about the town I grew up in, Gloversville, New York, and it’s odd because I’ve been writing about that town throughout my career. North Bath, Mohawk, Thomaston, even Empire Falls, although the novel is set in Maine, those are all towns based on my hometown. In those, I was able to start there and just create a world, but re-imagine the geography, do all of that fictive stuff. When I didn’t know something, I made it up, but in this piece I had to call it Gloversville, and I realized I had a responsibility not to the kind of truth that I normally strive for, but to the literal truth of real people’s lives. It made me careful, cautious; it made me absolutely want to get things as right as I could, because I was writing about people’s lives, people who had real names and had experienced what I was writing about secondhand. I had to get it literally right, making sure that their names were spelled correctly, making sure that I understood that part of this was about the kind of lives, the really dangerous lives, that people lived working in the tanneries where I grew up. Those machines were deadly. I was writing about people who had lost arms up to the elbow, hands, thumbs, in these machines, as a result of doing what, back in the industry at the time, was piece work. Everybody got paid by the square foot of stuff they shoved through the machines. The machines had safety devices, which these men took off, because they were being paid by the square foot, and the safety devices slowed them down. They could not feed their family with the safety devices on, and they’d take them off, and work until they sliced something off.

I had been hearing about these machines all my life, but I found out that I didn’t actually know what a staking machine was or how it worked. I just knew it was real goddamn dangerous. I talked with my aunts and a couple of cousins who’d been in the mills and knew how all of this worked, because I couldn’t afford to be cavalier about it. I mean, if people have lost limbs in these things, I could at least figure out how they worked and where the danger was, and what it felt like to be doing this kind of job, what it felt like to disable a machine in order to feed your family, and what it’s like to know that the foreman, the guy behind you, turns his back while you disable your machine. Because he fully understands what you’re going to do and why, and he’ll turn his back so that he’s not a witness to you doing it. That stuff was important, and I had to get it as close to right as I could. So it was different—I should probably be doing that sort of stuff in my fiction, but it was suddenly very important to me to get that stuff right.

Lynaugh

Are there other ways it was different?

Russo

A lot of the mechanics of storytelling remain the same. You still make a decision, for instance, about what to include, because so much of this is about the dangerous work that went on in the tanneries, and the way that people were maimed and the way they were poisoned and later died of various exotic cancers. Because of all of the details, you find yourself realizing that you cannot put all of those things in the same section of the piece. In order for readers not to turn away, you have to take them out of that world and into a different world for a time, so that when they go back to it, they’re not so shocked that they’re tempted to skip through the pages to get to the part where they’re not in that horrible world anymore. You want to structure the piece like you would a story. You want the rhythms of fiction, even though you’re writing nonfiction. I would find ways to go into that world and come out, go back into it again, come out, so you get the shock, you get that sense that it bends both ways. Entering. Leaving. Entering. Leaving. It was almost like a gothic novel or a gothic movie, where you have those portions that are shot in the daytime—and you know, the very fact that it’s shot in the daytime, that nothing terrible is going to happen. But then you look at the sun going down on the horizon, and you think, “Oh shit, here we go.” You know the werewolf or the vampire is out. I found myself shaping this nonfiction in the way I would want it to work if it were a story. Even though it wasn’t fiction, I wanted it to read like fiction, to have the rhythms of fiction. I would ask myself a lot of the same questions. Too much here, too many examples? Break it off? Do it differently, does it work better here, does it work better there?

Edmonds

How did you handle dialogue?

Russo

There isn’t an awful lot of dialogue in this piece, and a lot of it comes from just a couple of characters, a couple of real life people. I was pretty scrupulous about making sure that I didn’t say anything that they didn’t say, either literally or figuratively. I wanted to make sure I caught the essence of what they were saying. But I did play with their speech patterns, in some cases, because I didn’t want to do dialect that would make them look stupid. I didn’t want readers to think that because people did these jobs that their experience was somehow crippled by their inability to describe that experience in language that the reader’s used to. But I was always striving to catch the emotion behind the dialogue. Is this a person feeling rage, feeling fear? I tried to use those fictional techniques, like, “He cannot meet my eye,” or, “He looks off in the distance,” or “It takes him a while to continue,” that same sort of attribution that you’d make in a story. You set it up the same way on the page.

Lynaugh

In the collection, The Whore’s Child, the story “The Farther You Go,” has a lot of similarities to the novel Straight Man.

Russo

That was the short story that Straight Man grew out of. I wrote that first, came through the conclusion, and I liked the character. I put it aside for a while and then went back and I could not surrender.

Lynaugh

Do novels often come out of shorter pieces?

Russo

More often, shorter pieces come out of novels. The Sister Ursula story in The Whore’s Child came out of Straight Man. Sister Ursula was once one of Hank’s students. He’s got the kid that writes the misogynistic ripper stories, and the girl who writes these flighty symbolic pieces, and Sister Ursula was there writing her story about her childhood. But it was so dark. I looked at it, and my editor looked at it, and Sister Ursula’s story is so dark that it just didn’t fit with the rest of the novel, so we yanked it out, and the story “Linwood Heart,” the final story in The Whore’s Child, the boy in that story was Miles Roby. I took all of that out of the novel because it was slowing the story down, and gave him a new name and some other things to do. So, more often, I’ll realize that there’s something really good happening in a novel, except it doesn’t belong there, and I’ll excise it and come back at it as a short story later.

Lynaugh

What kind of truth are you going for in your fiction?

Russo

Well, when you reduce something it always comes out sounding… reduced. But I think it’s the truth of the human heart. It’s when Miles Roby in Empire Falls, after fighting with himself throughout his life, realizes that being a father, and a good father, to Tic, and being an adult in Empire Falls, is better than being a child, because his mother wanted him to have a different life, and he’s always in some way or other, because of her sacrifices, felt that he’s failed her and failed himself, and has always tried to escape. That moment when he realizes, after almost losing Tic, that everything he wants is right there, that’s the truth of his heart. It should have probably been obvious to him and to everybody, but it wasn’t, and he struggled through 700 pages or so to arrive at a conclusion. It’s the truth of his own heart. It’s the truth of his own experience of life.

At the end of a book, I always want to meet at a kind of crossroads where there’s an understanding. I don’t want to say a strictly intellectual understanding, but the character arrives at someplace that’s different. But for the reader, I want there to be real emotion to that. I want the reader not just to understand something, but to be profoundly moved. Take Bridge of Sighs. He begins the novel by saying, “We’re going to Venice. My wife and I. We will be going to Venice. We are going to visit our old friend Bobby. I’ve never traveled, but we’re going to go.” At the beginning of the book, he’s lying. At the end of the book, the last line is, “We will go.” And this time we believe him. Because that enormous journey he’s taken is from one sentence to the same sentence. A thousand pages later. He returns to his initial statement, except this time it’s true. There’s an element of human understanding in it, but I’m hoping that when that moment strikes the character, it hits us as readers not in the head, but in the heart.

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It’s difficult to read a Matthew Dickman poem and not uncover some essential nugget of humanity. His debut collection, Alt-American Poem, charts a wavering world of involved pleasures and intense dramas, where any experience is worth mining, be it a morning trip to die farmers’ market or ruminations on suicide.

While acutely aware of grief, his poems never become steeped in it, and his readers never feel bombarded by it. His voice is a companionable one: funny, warm, profane, yet always springing from some place of incense longing to connect with others, in spite of often violent or bewildering circumstances. Dickman’s drive for communion is refreshingly proactive, as he searches, sometimes manically, for any semblance of hope he can find, such as in “Slow Dance,” when he arrives at a place of sobering clarity:

There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard.

Dickman is also a master of die sensorium. So rich are his poems in sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and textures, reading them is like eating a full Thanksgiving spread with your best friend, men curling up by the fireplace together to listen to all your favorite records. Tony Hoagland, in his intro to All-American Poem, says, “We turn loose such powers into our culture so that delay can provoke the rest of us into saying everything in our minds. They use the bribery of imagination to convince us of the benefits of liberty.” For such art to exist, we are all for fortunate.

Calling Dickman’s rise to literary fame a “rags to riches story” wouldn’t be entirely accurate (when is it ever?) but one might call it “a rags to nicer rags story.” In 2008, when he won the Honickman First Book Prize for All-American Poem, Dickman was thirty-four and working at Whole Foods in Portland, Oregon. That Same Year, All-American Poem won the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ May Sarton Poetry Prize and, in 2009, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Stafford/ Hall Award for Poetry.
Add a New Yorker profile and fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Province town and the Vermont Studio Center, and Dickman seems a literary wunderkind. The man himself lacks all pretension though. During our interview at the Northern Lights Brewery in Spokane, he poured the beer, sporting a faded hoodie, a pair of thirty dollar blue jeans, and some beat up sneakers. He was in town for the 13″‘ annual Get Lit! festival, and talked with us about growing up in Portland, his relationship with Dorianne Laux, surrendering to influence, the importance of empathy, and what it’s like being famous.

TIM GREENUP

Let’s start from the beginning. How long has poetry been in your life and how have you nurtured it to where you are today?

MATTHEW DICKMAN

I fell in love with an older girl in high school who liked poems, so I started reading poems and writing bad versions of them to give to her in hopes she would make out with me or take her shirt off. I failed miserably at that part of it. But I started reading Anne Sexton and other poets, and Anne Sexton totally blew my mind. I’d never read poems like hers. In high school, we were reading Donne and Shakespeare, which were great, but not very exciting for a high school boy. Sexton led to others-Plath and Lowell and later Wachowski- and my reading life sort of took off, and I continued to write poems as well.

I grew up in a very healthy single-mom home in a pretty shitty neighborhood. No one was really hanging out reading poems. It was kind of a private thing, but it was also a way for me to deal with what was happening in my neighborhood with my friends: violence, drug abuse and things like that, also, sort of,  something to have that  was just mine. When I went into community college to start what ended up being my six-year undergraduate program, I got interested in the Beat poets, and I remember seeing a photo of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and all of these people standing on a corner outside City Lights bookstore. And I thought, This is amazing-a group of men standing together on a corner, and they’re not going to hurt anybody. Because, in my neighborhood, if I was walking home and there was a group of men on a corner, you’d want to walk around that corner. Something was going to happen or something had just happened. They certainly weren’t talking about beatific, angelic powers. I thought it was amazing that you could be a guy- you could be a man-and you could be humane and compassionate. You could be an artist, but you look at Neal Cassady and he’s still wearing jeans and a tight shirt. Not that I could ever pull that off.

I also had my twin brother, Michael, who is a great poet he and I started sharing poems. I ended up finishing school at the University of Oregon. I had gone there because Dorianne Laux taught there. But I never took a class from her. I went there, Michael, me and Dorianne all befriended each other- and then I worked as Dorianne’s personal assistant for a while. We would just hang out and talk about poems and write together.

GREENUP

How did you befriend Dorianne Laux? Is she just an approachable lady?

DICKMAN

I think all poets are. It’s poetry. It’s not like being able to approach a cobbler. “God, he makes really great shoes. He really knows how to fix a Birkenstock. Let’s not talk to him.” My brother and I found out Dorianne was teaching at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and we were living in Portland. It seemed really, really close and we were huge fans. So we called and lied to her. We called the university and said we wanted to talk to Professor Laux about an MFA program that we wanted to attend. We set up a meeting, which my brother and I thought was crazy. We couldn’t believe we could just call her office. We got into the only car we’ve ever owned- his station wagon-and cruised down. We went into her office and started talking and, of course, within ten minutes, she could tell we were full of shit, that we were nowhere near approaching an MFA program, but we did talk for an hour about poets we loved, and we wrote her when we got back to Portland and said, “Thank you so much for your time” and she was very sweet and wrote us back. We started writing back and forth.

I always tell people to do that. I have friendships with poets I never would have had if I hadn’t reached out in some way. And it was never like, “Hey, I really like your poems, do you think you’d write me a recommendation?” It was always like, “When my brother died, I read this poem of yours for months afterwards.” Or, “I’m pretty sure that this poem you wrote made it possible for me to have sex with this woman that I really liked.”

So if you reach out to poets and say, “Hey, your work has meant a lot to me; I think it’s awesome,” most people will write you back. If you connect as human beings, then you might have a mentor relationship, or you might have a friendship relationship, and I think that’s really, really important. Sometimes with schools, and different coasts, and different cities, we get into this thing where we feel like we can’t reach out, or we’re embroiled in our own scene. But poets, even the most “famous,” don’t get a lot of letters saying, “Your work meant something to me.”

DANIELLE SHUTT

Do you consciously bring that passion or drive to be in touch to your poetry?

DICKMAN

I think community is really important. I like that people have different communities. I think the danger is when you start only identifying with one community. Then you have things like the East Coast/West Coast rap wars. In my poems, I’m certainly writing out of my own life, and hopefully in some way it’s with a heart that tries to be inclusive. I want that in my relationships too. I have friends that barely read poems and I have friends that that’s all they do. I have blue-collar friends and I have friends who have earned millions of dollars. Bur I think we all have something in common. I’m also kind of a romantic, I think. And kind of naive.

DICKMAN

The immediate audience is always just me. It would be baffling to sit down and write a poem in a way that I would think, Okay, this poem needs to reach this certain person. I would not have the first idea how to do that. In fact, one of my fears is that my second book will come out and people will read it and be like, This is just Matthew talking. Why buy the book?

So I’m my audience, first and foremost, and then, after that, I don’t really imagine anybody in particular. I mean, I want my poems to be read by people. I don’t think any acting troupe ever rehearses a play for months to not put it on stage. And I love it when people read one of my poems and they’re affected by it. In kind of a base way, I’m happy if they’re affected, regardless of whether they like it or not. If they just fucking hate it and think it’s the worse, it’s something. The worst response would be, like, “Eh, it’s a thing.” I know there are people who like my poems and people who don’t, so I feel lucky in that combination.
I used to have rules for myself when I was writing, and ideas about whom I was writing for. However a poem gets written is great, but I used to write poems and do a lot of research first. Like, project-poems. And these poems were in stanzas, and pretty squared off. And then, right after my first year of graduate school, I had what some people refer to as a “mental breakdown.” A son of psychic break. I had to take a little time off, and during that time, I decided that I was not going to worry about poems.
I used to worry about them a lot before this happened. If I didn’t write within two or three days, I’d imagine I was experiencing this thing that people called “writer’s block.”

But during this time of getting my brain and my heart right, I decided l wouldn’t deal with it. I would read poems when I wanted to, but I wouldn’t write any. So I didn’t write poems for eight months or so. And then I went back to school and thought, Well, if I can’t write poems anymore, poetry will still be part of my life. It has changed my life, it has molded my life. I thought about doing something cool like a lit review, or running a reading series, or something awesome like that.

But I started writing again. Those poems ended up being like my poems in All-American Poem. No stanzas, no idea in my head before sitting down, just sort of an emotional feeling, like I needed to get something out. Like the poem “V.” I walked by this girl in Austin who was wearing a shirt that said, “Talk nerdy to me,” and I thought it was

SHUTT

Do you see empathy as the ultimate responsibility in what you’re writing about?

DICKMAN

I think empathy is one of the greatest things besides love. Empathy is in love; it’s a part of it. But empathy is the most important thing a human being can do. And I don’t ever, when I’m making a poem, set out to be empathetic. But I think the world is so scary, and in my experience it’s been, sometimes, so wildly violent, that’s my desire- my hope, and where my imagination goes–for there to be at least a strand of empathy there.

You know, making art and experiencing art are both pretty radical, because, in the end, art is about humanization, empathy, and even trust. I think everything can make art-heartbreak, erotic love, familial love, jealousy, headiness. All of these different attributes of human beings can make art. There are only two things that can’t make it, and those are meanness and violence. They can’t sustain themselves, because they-like some creature from Greek mythology-eat themselves and crap themselves out, eat themselves and crap themselves out. There are no moments of exploration, no moments of epiphany in meanness, like there are even in pettiness. I think that’s the only way that things are somehow ruled. You can do so much more out of empathy and love than you can ever accomplish out of meanness or violence.

You can create art looking at chosen things, but you can’t create art out of them. I have a friend who was a neo- Nazi for seven or eight years, and we’ve recently reconnected. He has not been involved in that gang for fourteen years now, but he writes about his experience. His prose about it is moving and terrifying and empathetic and complicated. He could never have done that when he was a neo-Nazi. He could never have created art that could sustain itself out of that.

KRISTINA MCDONALD

Your poems never feel like they’re excluding anyone. I’m curious who you consider your ideal audience. Do you think about that when you’re writing?

DICKMAN

The immediate audience is always just me. It would be baffling to sit down and write a poem in a way that I would think, Okay, this poem needs to reach this certain person. I would not have the first idea how to do that. In fact, one of my fears is that my second book will come out and people will read it and be like, This is just Mathew talking. Why buy the book?

So I’m my audience, first and foremost, and then after that, I don’t really imagine anybody in particular. I mean, I want my poems to be read by people. I don’t think any acting troupe rehearses a play for months to not put it on stage. And I love when people read one of my poems and they’re affected by it. In kind of a base way, I’m happy if they’re affected, regardless of whether they like it or not. If they just fucking hate it and think its the worse, it’s something. The worst response would be, like, “Eh, it’s a thing.” I know there are people who like my poems and people who don’t, so I feel lucky in that combination.

I used to have rules for myself when I was writing, and ideas about whom I was writing for. However a people gets written is great, but I used to write poems and do a lot of research first. Like, project-poems. And these poems were in stanzas, and pretty squared off. And then, right at my first year of graduate school, I had what some people refer to as a “mental breakdown.” A sort of psychic break. I had to take a little time off, and during that time, I decided that I was not going to worry about poems.

I used to worry about them a lot before this happened. If I didn’t write within two or three days, I’d imagine I was experiencing this thing that people call “writers block.” But during this time of getting my brain right and my heart right, I decided I wouldn’t deal with it. I would read poems when I wanted to, but I wouldn’t write poems for eight months or so. And then I went back to school and thought, Well, if I can’t write poems anymore, poetry will still be a part of my life, it has molded my life. I thought about doing something cool like a lit review, or running a reading series, or something awesome like that.

But I started writing again. Those poems ended up being like the poems in All-American Poem. No stanzas, no idea in my head before sitting down, just sort of an emotional feeling, like I needed to get something out. Like the poem in “V.” I walked by this girl in Austin who was wearing a shirt that said, “Talk nerdy to me,” and thought it was a great shirt. It was was common, but it was also more than that, because I went home and there was something bothering me about the shirt. Something that seemed to be resonating. I sat down and wrote the first couple lines, where this girl walks by wearing this shirt that says, “Blah blah blah.” No idea where I was going. It was like colorful building blocks, sort of being stacked one on top of another.

GREENUP

It’s interesting to hear you say you were working in stanzas and tighter lines, because, just looking through All-American Poem, there’s such freedom in how your poems are constructed. Is that really just a response to your mental state? Like you were one way for a while and you felt constricted by air, and once you broke free it was like, I’m never going back; I just want my lines to do whatever they want?

DICKMAN

I felt that way not just in my writing, but in my life. So, before I went to therapy, I felt that there were parts of my life I was constricting and not dealing with, and I was not as free as I could be. Which is not very free at all, for any of us. So I think it was a reaction to that, but it wasn’t very conscious. It was only after I had been writing like that for a couple months that I realized, This is actually fucking fun. I’m not suffering over the page as much. I might be suffering about what I’m writing about, but not how I’m writing it. I think you can trace that impulse back to the fact that I was a really poor student. It’s like somebody saying, “Well, I don’t do essays. Or paragraphs. I don’t figure out this thing that’s actually very fascinating.” I think stanzas, line breaks-you know, these things are interesting and powerful in molding a poem and your experience of a poem. But I’m horrible with line breaks and, for me, when I’m making a poem, I’m interested in the things that stanza breaks and sometimes smart line breaks don’t concern themselves with- the experience.

SHUTT

When do you get a sense that a poem is coming to its end?

DICKMAN

Sometimes it’s just instinct, like an exhale. Sometimes the exhale is short and sometimes it’s long and sometimes you can write a poem and it sort of naturally comes to the end and it just feels right. It’s like if you ask, “Why are you and this person together?” No one says, “Well, here’s the list of things that make us lit together. “You’re just like, “It feels good.” But, also, I’m a true believer in redraft and rewriting. I once asked Jorie Graham: “How Do you know a poem is finished?” I was particularly interested in a couple of her poems that were sort of listy and went on for a long time, because I’m kind of a listy, blabby, poet too. And that can go on forever. If it’s a bad date-how do you stop it so it’s a good date? She said, “If you’re unsure about the last line, you should write another fifty to a hundred lines.”

The instinct in workshops is often to cut stuff, which is natural, but sometimes unhealthy. Her suggestion might be rough if you’re writing a ten-line poem, but I think what she’s talking about, really, is to go beyond further. You’re not going to keep all of it, but you might figure out something about the poem with that kind of writing.

Sometimes, I’m having a rough time with a poem, I’ll read it and then turn it over and immediately type it up without looking at it. It’s not so much an exercise in memory; the point isn’t to read the poem, turn it over, and remember the whole thing. But you read it and you get a close sense of it, and if you try to write it again, new things will come out. What’s happening, I think, is that the conscious part of your brain is busy trying to remember the poem, and since you’ve got your conscious over in the corner being busy, your subconscious can come out and have more freedom. Other things will come up. And then I print it and look at them side by side. Maybe it’s a failure. Fine. But maybe, scuff that’s come up in this new draft looks better than the old one, or maybe the old one and the new one together makes you think about something else, which could lead to a better ending to the poem or a better beginning.

GREENUP

In an interview on Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt, you were talking about how you’ll read someone like Jorie Graham, someone who’s sort of heady and cerebral, and you’ll think, Why aren’t I writing chosen types of poems? But then, when you sit down to the page, it’s like, you do what you do. I feel like sometimes we put pressure on ourselves-at least I do-to become like, Oh, how can I be headier? or, How can I shatter the world a little more?

DICKMAN

I think we shatter the world in our own way. Jorie Graham Applied to be Jorie Graham. It’s no shock that if I applied to be Jorie Graham, and Jorie Graham applied to be Jorie Graham, she would get the job. I might be shortlisted for the work, but I wouldn’t get it, which is fine. But I think that’s a healthy reaction; it also means you’re a reader. You’re reading something beyond what you write, which is so intensely important.

When I came back to grad school from my waylay, something I started doing, which I never would have done consciously- I started imitating people I liked. Like, really closely imitating them. I remember reading a ton of Lucille Clifton. She’s amazing. And I started writing these Lucille Clifton kind of poems. They were short. I was trying to find these bright, hyper-energetic of crystalline images. A lot of poems were about my own mother’s bout with breast cancer. So, you know, sometimes the subjects sort of overlapped. I would do that for a while, and then I’d pick up someone else and start interacting them. I never sent out any of those poems to get published. I was just digging on them. And it was actually more exercise as a reader than as a writer, because in attempting to mimic them, I got closer to the language that I was reading. And even though each one was a type of failure, it was at least a failure in the left field of the same stadium that this person was in. Whoever said you should be cautious of in influence, or afraid of influence, is just wrong. We are influenced by so many things. If you’re afraid of influence, then don’t ever watch TV, don’t read anything, certainly don’t talk to anybody- I mean it’s a path of insanity to try to
not be influenced.

GREENUP

You’re observant of everything and it’s like, I see this, I’ll Follow it. I feel this, I’ll follow it. I smell this, I’ll follow it. Is there anywhere you haven’t gone that you’d like co go?

DICKMAN

The new book I’m working on is called Mayakovsky’s Revolver. Vladimir Mayakovsky was a revolutionary Russian poet who shot himself. There are rumors that the KGB killed him, but most of his friends believe he committed suicide. This book is called that partly because its center is a group of elegies for my older brother, who also committed suicide. Some moments are about friends of mine who died that way. I’m delving into a place I never went to in All-American Poem, which is this idea of the Shadow- the Shadow being, obviously, the shadowy, darker part of ourselves. We present ourselves like, I’m not going to kill you. But depending on the circumstances, who knows? We’re all nice people. I’m nice, we’re all nice together, but we have this shadowy, dark stuff. I wanted to explore some of that in an artistic way. There are a couple poems in the book that come out of almost exact personal experience. Like “An Elegy to Goldfish,” about killing my sister’s fish, and then chasing her around with a piece of an orange, telling her it was the dead goldfish and making her eat it. And then, another experience when I was younger: telling a very inappropriate joke in what my grandmother would call “mixed company,” and that joke being something that had happened to one of the people in the “mixed company.” And also, not just particular experiences of the Shadow, but also what’s emotionally of the Shadow, like my own failures and things like that. I mean, talk about multitudes: our failures
as well as our great moments of empathy.

MCDONALD

Is there anything you consider off-limits, something that doesn’t belong in a poem?

DICKMAN

If you consider separating areas, like writing a poem, into the spiritual world and the secular world, then in the spiritual world I don’t think anything is off-limits. In the secular world, there might be limits. You might have something you wrote about your grandmother or your boyfriend that you don’t want to publish while they’re alive. Or you might say, “Fuck it, it’s my life. I’m going to publish it.” Larry Levis once said in a poem, “Out here, I can say anything,” and when I heard that, it was this amazing moment about freedom, because we’re not free people, except when we’re making art. That’s the only moment when we’re truly free, the only moment when we’re the people with the key to the lock. I don’t think anything should be cast out as far as subject matter in a poem, though, or how you write a poem, or what you want to include in a poem. I mean, fuck, we’re going to die.

GREENUP

Would you talk a little about your whirlwind rise to poetry fame, because it all seemed so fast- winning the American Poetry Review first book prize and being profiled with your brother in the New Yorker. What was that like?

DICKMAN

Well, it was weird, because I had been part of this group of poets, and still am-me and my twin brother and my friend Carl and my friend Mike. My brother had this string of successes where he’d gotten poems in American Poetry Review, and I got a rejection. Then he got into the New Yorker, and then he got his book taken by Copper Canyon. And after that, Mike won the Starrett Prize, which is the first book prize for the Pitt Poetry Series.

Carl and I were like, “Well, can’t happen for everybody.” You know what I mean? We’re close friends, we all share our writing, we’ve shared it for thirteen years and I sent out to a bunch of book contests and to a couple publishers that were interested though the book I sent them was very different from this one. And they all said no.

Then I sent some more poems off to APR and I got an e-mail, and they were like “Hey, we want to publish these two poems you sent us.” I was fucking stoked. Like, American Poetry Review, which is huge. It felt great. In my e-mail back to them, I said, “I’ve done a couple redrafts on one of the poems that I’d love to send you, and you CU1 publish either version.

A week later, I got a phone message from Eliwbeth Scanlon at APR who’s a wonderful lady. She was like, “Hey, this is Elizabeth at APR Give me a call back.” I thought she was calling because I e-mailed her the redraft of the poem. I called her and she said, “Matthew, we are your new favorite literary review.” And J was like, “Oh, great, yeah. You guys are awesome.” And she said, “Do you know why I called you?” And I said, “Yeah,about the redraft I sent you.” And she said, “No, you just won the Honickman First Book Prize.” I was so shocked, I was like, “Get the fuck out.”

I got off the phone and ran down the stairs screaming and called my brother. From the time I found out to three days after-at least three days-I felt on top of the world. And then, after many months, I got the book in the mail. It didn’t feel like a real book. It felt like something I’d made at Costco, if Costco had a printing press. A Couple days later, I picked it up again and it looked like a real book. But just because it had my name on it, it didn’t seem real to me. A while after that it felt normal, and it was awesome and continues to be awesome.

The New Yorker profile interviews happened right before I got the book in the mail. So the interviews were conducted between finding out I’d won a book prize, and the book being printed. Then it came out, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine- a kind of “big deal” poet in New York- who was like, “So, how does it feel to be famous?” I told her this true story. I was working at Whole Foods in Portland and had recently moved from the dish room- where I’d started as a thirty-four-year-old- to the deli, where I’d just gotten done with this dinner rush of assholes who were really, super rude. That’s the sad tiling; I hadn’t done customer service in a long time and sort of thought we were really brave, just to be human. But then, working the sandwich/pizza lines at Whole Foods, dealing with people’s rudeness was amazing to me. And disheartening. I was sort of broken after the rush, standing there in my uniform, in my apron, covered in pizza sauce and flour, looking out the sliding glass doors at the little lights coming through the Portland sky. The cash registers were right there in my view, and there were all these magazines at the cash registers and the person who always came to switch out the magazines walked into my view. He took the old New Yorker off, and put the new New Yorker on that had this big profile of my brother and me. And then he left. I was at the pizza island, staring at it, thinking, This is life. You know? This is life. You’re working the shitty job, paying rent, but then , sometimes, something incredible happens. And so I wrote my friend about this. I was like, This is what it’s like to be famous.

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The fiction of Robert Lopez occurs in a world simultaneously oppressive and hilarious, in which people fail to recognize their spouses or lovers, in which something is wrong but it’s not clear what, in which characters are subjected to a kind of imprisonment they don’t understand and, at first glance, hardly seem to care about. But they do care; throughout the work, characters demonstrate a deep, subtle resistance to the restrictions of their lives and relationships and institutional affiliations or entrapments-a resistance coupled with an inability to master forces in a world they can’t begin to understand. Often noted for his distinctive voice and style, Lopez creates worlds and characters we somehow at once recognize and yet have never seen before, arising from language and cadences that compel like a kind of beautiful, weird song.

Robert Lopez was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised on Long Island. He’s the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and, most recently, a book of stories called Asunder. The Faster Times notes that “the Lopez syntax has evolved over the years to become both recognizable and utterly unique in its uncompromising approach. Language may be a dull instrument, but it’s the best we’ve got; lucky for us, Lopez is up to the challenge.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction refers to his prose as “like a great jazz performance : pointedly provisional, even damaged, and solicitous of audience participation.”

Lopez’s stories have appeared in Bomb, the Threepenny Review, New England Review, Willow Springs, Norton’s Sudden Fiction Latino, and many other places. He’s taught at Columbia University and William Paterson University, and he currently teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Pine Manor College’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. He’s been a fiction fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center. He edits No News Today, a blog, or running anthology of dispatches from a deep pool of writers, including Roy Kesey, Amelia Gray, Terese Svoboda, Jess Walter, and Nelly Reifler, to name but a few.

We met with Mr. Lopez at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington DC, where we talked about logic and connective threads, damage and its aftermath, repetition and refrain, knowing and not knowing, and how, as a writer, “you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions.”

BLAKE BUTLER

Throughout your work there’s a balance between knowing and not knowing, revealing and not revealing. Your characters seem at once unaware of their social function and hyper aware of it. Is this a product of you, the writer, not knowing what you’re going to write as you’re writing?

ROBERT LOPEZ

I’m always most interested in not knowing. That’s my default. To me, there’s authority in that ignorance, because I know that my narrators and characters don’t know anything and I know that they’re aware that they don’t know. I also know that it’s frustrating as hell to them, but that they, on some level, accept it. They want connection with people, but they know that connection is never going to happen.

JOSEPH SALVATORE

They want connection so badly they can’t do it right?

LOPEZ

They don’t know how to do it right.

SAMUEL LIGON

What makes a story feel complete to you?

LOPEZ

By the time you get to the end of a piece of fiction, I think you should feel that you’ve been someplace, that you’ve had an experience. Somewhere I read John Turturro saying, when asked how he played a character: “Well, what you saw is what I did. I can’t really go beyond chat.” Similarly, for me, the way a story works is how it works. It’s an intuitive thing. I might feel, Okay, here’s the end. But that doesn’t mean I necessarily know how my fiction works, or that I want to demystify it.

I do have a sense of how short stories work structurally and formally, though I can’t say I understand the workings of long fiction, even though I’ve written two novels. There are probably ten failed stories I cannibalized for Part of the World. Same thing with Kamby Bolongo Mean River. I cannibalize what doesn’t totally succeed in its original context but chat has something good or interesting, some language or a situation, and I use chat. The fragmentation leads to something that starts to feel complete. I like what Donald Barchelme said about college-something like “Fragments are the only form I use.” I work with fragments because it’s the only way I know how to work when I put together something long.

BUTLER

Some of the linchpins for your characters are their feelings of comfort when they recall memories from childhood, particularly in Kamby. All else-the concrete reality around the narrator-seems somehow chimerical.

LOPEZ

And what’s funny to me is that I don’t find anything particularly sustaining in memory. The present always beats the hell out of anything we may have done in the past. Same goes for the people in my past­ people I loved. Memory is flawed, hazy, and therefore unsatisfying. So it’s funny that to the narrators or characters in my fiction, memory is the only thing that’s reliable or real.

LIGON

What’s the driving force of Kamby?

LOPEZ

The character is static-he’s confined. But he wants out. It’s his desire to escape that’s the driving force, unlike, for example, Beckett’s character in Molloy, who’s in this bed, in this room. He doesn’t want to be anywhere else. He’s accepting of where he is and what he’s doing. He’s telling his story; he’s going to cell it now, tell it one more time, etc. Whereas, the narrator of Kamby wants the hell out of that place, but he doesn’t know how to achieve the escape. That’s where chose suicide attempts come in-if they are suicide attempts. But if he were to get out, I don’t think he would be able to survive.

LIGON

What’s wrong with him?

LOPEZ

I have no idea.

SALVATORE

You’ve said that you write in a state of not knowing, and that, after the writing is over, you remain uncertain of what you’ve done and maybe even why you’ve done it. One could say that your books enact that same not knowing. So, not only are the characters and the reader kept in the dark, but the writer keeps himself in the dark, too?

LOPEZ

That’s exactly right.

SALVATORE

So you’re totally resisting the old Fiction 101, which is that you should know your characters’ predilections and preferences- what color sheets he sleeps in, which cereal she buys, whether his wristwatch is digital or has a face. This is the stuff we’re told we’re supposed to know, even though cereal and wristwatches are never mentioned in the story.

LOPEZ

Exactly. For example, there’s no mention of the parents of the narrator in Part of the World, and I have no idea about them-who they were, how they brought him up. It never occurred to me. The truth is, to me there’s no such thing as character. There’s no such thing as story. Or plot. All we have are words arranged on a page. It’s on the reader to make character. There’s no such thing as a Holden Caulfield. Somehow readers experience and feel like they know this character, but there is no real character.

SALVATORE

But language has to signify something. Plot exists because the writer chooses to construct language to make meaningful articulations that move in a particular direction. We can’t just say that words are empty signifiers.

LOPEZ

Of course they’re not empty signifiers, because then you could put any words in any order. In the Raethke poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” the words are in a very specific order. Half of the poem’s readers think it’s about child abuse, the other half think it’s a father and son horsing around. Does it matter what Roethke’s intent was? No, it’s up to the reader to decide. As a writer, I’m going to do what I have to do to keep myself engaged. I hope I’m going to keep a few readers engaged along the way. And then, what you make out of it is what you make out of it.

LIGON

In Kamby, the reader does get deep context for the narrator’s life. We end up knowing a lot about him. Why do you show us what you show us in Kamby?

LOPEZ

I never think about what needs to- well no, that’s a lie- I do think about what needs to go into a story to compel the reader. I love what VS. Prichett said: ”A short story is something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye in passing.” I’ve always held onto that. And not just for a short story, but also for a novel. Obviously a novel has to be fuller; it has to be a different experience. But you can cultivate the “not knowing” part of that fullness. And so, what’s left out of Kamby and what’s left out of Part of the World is as important as what’s put in.

The narrator in Kamby talks about his injury, and then he mentions a place called Injury, Alaska. Now, is Injury, Alaska a real place? I have no idea, but he claims to have grown up there. Some of his claims are kind of ridiculous because, obviously, there’s no place in Alaska where they need air conditioning. So is he intentionally fucking around with the reader? I don’t think he’s intentionally trying to be duplicitous.
Unlike many writers, place really doesn’t interest me. Which is why Part of the World doesn’t “take place” anywhere. Kamby might take place in Alaska, or it might not. Very few of my short stories even mention place. And none of these people have jobs-at least that are mentioned. The jobs of the characters don’t interest me. What does interest me in, say, Kamby, is what is revealed about the character through his memories and his feelings about those memories. Whether it’s Charlie being a boxer, or his mother being kind of an abusive deadbeat. But my intention is not to explain why he’s where he is or how he got in that situation.

BUTLER

All of these things we’re talking about-the traditional elements of fiction-are play-toys for what’s really the magic of your writing, which is the logic. In your novella, The Trees Underground, we watch a character’s logic evolve by bouncing back and forth between orchestrations of place, person, and memory. In Kamby, when the character remembers what his brother used to do to him, it isn’t as interesting as him trying to figure out why he remembers that and who exactly that guy was. And it’s logical; it’s like math without anything following the equals sign. How do you use what I’m calling logic as a tool in your writing?

LOPEZ

It’s a great question and it really resonates with me. How do writers create transitions in narrative? My approach is to pick out something that’s come before the time in which the story takes place. I try to create a connective thread. So it’s just a matter of finding out what those threads are and which of those threads interest me. The narrator of Kamby might mention something that his current tormentors are doing to him; and that’s going to catapult him into talking about the time he was with Charlie and they were out early one morning sneaking out of the house or whatever. I couldn’t possibly work without that logical progression from point to point. Maybe I rely too heavily on it.

BUTLER

But that’s where the emotion is for me, because that’s how life feels.

LOPEZ

And that emotion is: How the fuck did I get here.

The narrator of The Trees Underground finds himself someplace and has no idea how he got there. But he’s there and he’s responsible for people who need his help. He doesn’t know what qualifies him to do any of the things he’s doing, yet he has to do them. He’s also hoping to get the hell out of there, just like in Kamby Bolongo. But unlike in Kamby, he has responsibilities. Both narrators find themselves mysteriously confined to a place. Both narrators feel a certain impotence because they have no real free will; they can’t leave for some reason or another.

SALVATORE

And in Trees Underground it becomes a question of, Does he really have these responsibilities, or is this something they do to keep him busy because he’s annoying?

LOPEZ

Yeah, it could be that as well. Absolutely. And I don’t know the answer.

LIGON

Is the logic logical? Is it rational?

SALVATORE

It’s logical to the narrator in the moment he’s in. It’s like a dementia patient. You watch them and in the moment they’re convinced-“This is this way and that is that way”-and the next minute, they’re almost a different person. “No-that’s not how it is.” And it continues to change because something’s wrong with their brain. It’s true now, and it’s true now, and now it’s not true, but it’ll be true again.

LOPEZ

Most of us can connect, maybe, to these narrators or characters to a degree, but not completely. The narrator of The Trees Underground is kind of extreme-dull-witted and totally befuddled by what he’s doing and who these people are, and he doesn’t understand very fundamental things. I think this rubs up against what we know of the world and how we move around the world and feel like we can give the appearance that we’re competent. We’re holding it together to an extent.

LIGON

Does fiction need damage to work?

LOPEZ

I think we’re born damaged. I think we’re marked at birth. You know, you come out of there and they slap your ass, and it’s already traumatic. And immediately you’re thrust into coping mode. As Larkin so famously said: Your parents, they fuck you up. And then our schools fuck us up. So, yes, I find damaged characters, damaged narrators to be the most compelling kind. But they have to be human at the same time.

BUTLER

The damage is always off the page. We don’t know what the hell is wrong with a character, as though we’re getting the aftermath.

LOPEZ

It’s always the aftermath-when they’re taking baby steps toward something that resembles recovery. For the people in my fiction, it’s baby steps all the way through, across tenuous ground. They’re trying to make it across somehow, without getting more damaged along the way.

BUTLER

You use a lot of diched language and repetition and something that almost feels like sampling. Characters repeat things they’ve heard. But you’re not really quoting it; you’re sticking it into the rest of their speech. It’s like they’re dinging to these meaningless ways of speaking.

SALVATORE

Yeah-the characters skew a cliche that reveals some kind of mystery in the story. And then the form enacts it by this recursive-what might be called repetition, but I’m thinking more like Gertrude Stein’s recursion­ where when we return to either a phrase or a sec piece, it’s slightly skewed again. Is that a strategy you practice?

LOPEZ

We all know the experience of deja-vu, like, I’ve done this before. I play with that experience in Part of the World-places and events and thoughts and language occur and reoccur. I use borrowed language to illuminate something and to create tension. In Part of the World, the narrator is totally unaware that he’s ripping off Nabakov or Proust or Wallace Stevens. Sometimes he’s doing it verbatim, and sometimes he’s fucking around with the text. But he has no idea, because he doesn’t know what’s his and what isn’t. He can’t distinguish a thought that might be original from something that he read or that someone said to him. He appropriates what another character says to him the same way he appropriates Beckett or Shakespeare. He doesn’t know what belongs to him.

LIGON

The repetition makes your sentences and word choices feel extremely deliberate. Your teacher, Amy Hempel, has been referred to as a “line writer.” Are you a line writer?

LOPEZ

I think there are certainly line writers, who produce work in which the line becomes the dominant experience of reading, as opposed to work that’s all about story or narrative. You could say Alice Munro is a narrative writer. But Updike, to me, was a line writer. Those sentences are put together in a way that seems much more sophisticated than, say, Alice Munro’s.

Music was a big part of my experience growing up, and as a teenager I started singing and playing guitar. I’m into the ways that music works structurally, and this informs my use of language and line. Repetition is key in music-the refrain is a vital element. If you take refrain out of music then the whole thing can fall apart.

LIGON

Is there risk in too much focus on line?

LOPEZ

There can be, certainly. And sometimes risks work out and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a writer’s prose is so dense that a reader isn’t able to extract any emotion. The language can be meticulous; the lines, the sentences, can be perfect. But one can’t get any feeling out of it. I’ve read well regarded work that has left me feeling cold- not cold as in the chill of fear-I mean cold as in flat-lined: books that are perfectly constructed, but I couldn’t draw a visceral response from the work. Language-wise they might be perfect, but I need something more. The language can’t be-for me, for my sensibility-it has to work for me. Like Gertrude Stein said, there has to be a “there there.”

SALVATORE

It’s interesting that you talk about the need for emotion, and Stein’s “there there” in light of your strategy of cultivating ignorance and not providing characters with jobs, places, and in some cases, past history. You’ve said you want compelling-

LOPEZ

It has to be entertaining.

SALVATORE

So, on the one hand you don’t want to know too much about what’s going on behind the curtain of your fiction. And yet you actually, think, you’re a craftsperson whose more conscious of a craft than he’s admitting. And who, as a reader, responds to the very craft elements that he feigns ignorance of. This is what it seems to me Blake was saying about characters making him feel human feelings. I’m wondering if, when you talk about creating compelling work, you’re not simply talking about plain old plot?

LOPEZ

Ah, God. I have no idea. I mean, for me- it’s like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. I know it when I do it.

Sometimes whatever it is that we’re calling “compelling” happens in the initial composition, and a lot of times it happens in the revision. For instance, in Part of the World it happened solely in revision, because in the very, very first draft, absolutely nothing compelling happened. I was playing with the tenets of the nouveau roman, trying to get rid of everything to see what was left. But then, going over it, I thought, Okay, you need something to happen. So, that sense of a “there there” definitely happened in revision with Part of the World.

LIGON

What bores you as a reader?

LOPEZ

Again, it’s similar to the Supreme Court thing. For instance, each of you goes about creating a story in an entirely different way, but when I read your work, I feel there’s a heat that’s generated. On occasion, I pick up The Night in Question, by Tobias Wolff, and every semester I teach “Bullet in the Brain.” Bue I recently picked up Back in the World and I read all the first lines, and they just weren’t as dynamic as his other first lines. Writers are cold, “The whole story has to be in the first line.” What bores me is the overly familiar, the pedestrian.

SALVATORE

If we apply that logic, “Call me Ishmael” would probably not pass-

LOPEZ

No, no, “Call me Ishmael” certainly does. There’s something arresting about “Call me Ishmael.” Is that not your name? Who are you? What else would we call you? That, to me, is a brilliant opening.

SALVATORE

Amy Hempel used to say that she couldn’t write past one line if that line wasn’t working. Is it that way for you with the first line of a story or novel?

LOPEZ

Every piece I’ve written-the novels, stories, or the play I just finished-comes from a single line. They never come from an idea or an image or an experience; they come from one single line. And the next line pushes off the previous line. In Kamby, that line is “Should the phone ring I will answer it.” I like the contingency of that. There’s power and powerlessness in that line. “Should the phone ring,” which is totally outside my control, “I will answer it.”

SALVATORE

The theorist Gilles Deleuze, in writing about Melville’s Bartleby, says that the comical is always literal. It can’t be metaphorized because of the way it works in Melville, the syntactic queerness of “I would prefer not to,” a linguistic formula that is the story’s “glory” and which “every loving reader repeats.” He talks about different kinds of humor, including works by Kleist, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett. Do you see yourself as a part of this lineage? It’s a humanizing kind of humor, in a certain way.

LOPEZ

I saw this really good movie recently- Winter’s Bone. It was entirely humorless. Now, you can do a dark, dark movie, and I respond to darkness. But God damn it, have some laughs along the way. That was my major problem with that picture- there wasn’t one chuckle or light moment or even a dark funny thing; there was nothing funny at all. When that happens, it’s one note and no matter how compelling it is I don’t respond the way I’d like to respond. I’m not saying I want something to be jokey, like Dave Barry in the Miami Herald or something.

BUTLER

I think there are two kinds of humor: inside and outside. Your characters tell jokes about things they think are supposed to be funny, or that they really think are funny, which makes their shitty world a little better. But then, there’s the humor where you’re looking at this guy who’s keeping track of which way his erections go, left or right. And he’s not joking . The scariest moments are when I see your characters doing things I do myself. I’ll be reading about something a character does and I realize that I do that and I’m like, “Oh my fucking God!” Because everyone does those things in different ways.

LOPEZ

I tell students that you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions. You have to use that stuff because it’s ultimately going to make the work vibrant and come off the page. All the stories we tell have been told a million times before. Nobody’s going to come up with a new story. It’s all the same old thing; somebody is losing something, somebody wants something, somebody is afraid of losing something, somebody is afraid of wanting something. We can’t not write those stories. We cultivate the strange things that make us unique, and that uniqueness is what connects us to other people. Otherwise strangeness is just a freak-show. Like what you see on Jerry Springer.

BUTLER

You’ve said you don’t know how to write a novel, though you’ve written two novels, you don’t think of yourself as a novelist. Do you consider your novels to be very long short stories?

LOPEZ

No, I think they’re novels. But when I think of a novelist, I think of someone who sits down and writes novels. John Updike is a novelist, Anne Tyler is a novelist. I do consider myself a writer, but as often as not, I feel like it’s almost always a happy accident every time one of these things comes together- whether it is a one-page story or a novel; like it was almost the luck of some sort of draw.

BUTLER

The last lines of “Monkey in the Middle” are, “I’ve come to realize that what goes on when I’m not around is none of my business. Mostly.” If it feels like luck to you, why do you keep doing it?

LOPEZ

Because it gives me something that nothing else does, and because it’s what I can do. When it’s working, it’s such a satisfying feeling. And, you know, it’s nice to have the books on the shelf. You can look at them and say, “I did that,” although I rarely do this. At any rate, there’s a line in the Wallace Stevens poem, “The Planet on the Table:” ”Ariel was glad he had written his poems. They were of a remembered time/Or of something seen that he liked.” And then later in the poem, there’s this: “Some affluence, if only half-perceived,/In the poverty of their words.” The desire to make something that wasn’t there before motivates me.

There’s a magic when a line comes and you put another line behind it. I remember Stanley Elkin saying something like-at this point he was in a wheelchair-“Well, I might not be much physically, but on the page, I’m a god.” When we write, we can be gods. Though, of course, our readers don’t think of us as gods. Kamby certainly has some detractors­ a few people have voiced their disappointment about that book.

LIGON

What do they want that they’re not getting? Plot?

LOPEZ

I imagine. But they can go to a million other writers for that. It’s none of my business. I wouldn’t know plot if it knocked me in the-

BUTLER

But you’re a huge movie lover. And plot is a major part of movies, particularly certain kinds of movies that I know you like, like The Godfather. So what’s the difference between telling a story in image and writing a script?

LOPEZ

When you do something visually you have the instrument of the actor who communicates so much without using language-without resorting to the base thing chat language is. One of my favorite moments in film is the brilliant Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day. He’s in his parlor, right? And he’s the most uptight character you’re ever going to come across-entirely introverted and withdrawn, scared of human contact. He’s in his parlor, he’s in his safe place, and he’s reading a book, and a woman he’s attracted to, played by Emma Thompson, invades his space. She wants to know what he’s reading; she’s curious. “What are you reading? Just tell me what you’re reading.” But he doesn’t want to tell her. By not wanting to show her the book, he’s saying, “This is my private time and you’re invading it. I want to be alone.” He’s holding the book to his chest, but she’s insistent; she’s moving in on him, which he is not inviting at all. She’s caking the book physically from his hands. And the heat that Hopkins has in his eyes, of repression-he wants her, he’s extremely attracted to her, but he doesn’t know how to go about the next human move. He can’t negotiate it; he can’t handle it; he can’t express it, certainly. But Hopkins somehow manages to communicate all of that without language. It’s all here; it’s all in his face.
That’s what film can do. And I can think of other moments. The end of Big Night is one of my favorite moments in film. The brothers have had this argument, it was horrible, and you think they’re now estranged. You think, This is it, they have to go their separate ways. The very next morning they’re exhausted, they’ve had this big night and there’s a scene entirely without dialogue that goes on for minutes. It’s extraordinary. Stanley Tucci makes eggs for himself and then for his brother, played by Tony Shalhoub. The whole scene is like a silent movie at this point. That’s the kind of thing that when we write fiction we just can’t do. And in film, I want to know what’s going to happen-I expect to know. I require plot. Whereas, in fiction, I don’t require that at all.

LIGON

You have a deep emotional response to the ending of Big Night. Can you talk about a similar response you’ve had to fiction?

LOPEZ

You know, it’s funny. I’ve almost never had- I’m not quite our new Speaker of the House where I can cry on a dime, but I can get emotional. I can be emotional. Music has moved me that way many times, film has moved me that way. That hasn’t happened in a long time with film, though. But there have been times with film where I’ve either felt leveled in the seat, where I can’t move, or I’ve been moved to tears. I have never been moved to tears, except for one time, with reading. And it wasn’t fiction, it was nonfiction. It was Andre Dubus in Broken Vessels. There’s an essay in that book that moved me to tears. But for fiction, I’m neither-it’s a different feeling. It’s visceral because I do feel stirred somehow. I feel compelled, I feel entertained, but somehow it’s a different kind of emotional connection. Maybe it’s because it’s the thing that I do. I don’t know.

LIGON

Do you get as much pleasure from it today as-

LOPEZ

Not even close.

SALVATORE

In what, reading or writing?

LOPEZ

Reading. I read to my friends, and I get pleasure out of that, but there was a time when-if a new book by a writer I admired was coming out, I was there that Tuesday getting it. And that doesn’t happen anymore. I think I’ve been over saturated. I teach four workshops a semester. That means I’m reading critically all the time. So even if I read somebody I consider a friend and who I like-not even a close friend where I want to read everything, but a casual good friend and I want to support them-I pick up the book, because I’m supporting it and I’m reading them, and I like their writing. But I go for a little bit, and then it’s as if I say, Okay, I’ve got a sense of that, and I put it down. It always feels like I’m on the job.

BUTLER

The pleasure factor has diminished for me, too. I don’t necessarily feel on the job, but I feel the pulling away. Each year I feel a little less pleasure, reading and writing.

LOPEZ

I remember feeling it was a magical experience to get a new book. Magical.

SALVATORE

What are some of those magical books you couldn’t wait to buy? And what are you drawn to today?

LOPEZ

These days, there are no authors other than my friends that I’m excited about. Because it seems I’ve already seen what’s being done. There’s nothing new for me there, which I know is bullshit, but whatever. And the books that I loved in the past- well, I picked up I Sailed with Magellan recently, and I remember the first time I read “We Didn’t”-it was in the nineties-and that story knocked me on my ass. I thought it was one of the greatest things I’d ever read. It lived in my memory as a brilliant, brilliant story. But when I recently picked up I Sailed with Magellan and reread “We Didn’t,” it just wasn’t happening for me.
That story is the same, but I’ve changed and now the story doesn’t work for me. I lament the change. I’ve become too ruthless as a reader. If there’s a line, if there’s a clause that explains too much or feels too commonplace, I can’t abide it and I stop. But I did read The Coast of Chicago recently and totally dug it. I didn’t have a single moment where I thought, “Well, whatever.” But looking at I Sailed with Magellan, I’ve been trying that and it just hasn’t happened for me. And I don’t know exactly why.

SALVATORE

Your work, it seems to me, is influenced by David Markson and Samuel Beckett. Would you talk a bit about those influences or others?

LOPEZ

I’ve said this before, but reading Hemingway’s ”A Clean, Well­ Lighted Place” many years ago made me want to write a story. So I wrote a story or two. I had no instruction, I wasn’t an English major. I took lit classes in college, but didn’t pay attention in them, so I never did the work. I actually paid for the papers I handed in. The way I was taught literature in high school and college was to look for symbols and memorize and extract interpretive meaning that was concrete. We would read a poem and say, “What’s the poet really saying?”
What’s the poet really saying? The poet said what’s on the page.

SALVATORE

But poets do talk about how hard they’ve worked on a metaphor, and to make a particular, very aestheticized event for the reader, right? So poets are thinking about it.

LOPEZ

And that’s poetry I’m not interested in. I read Wallace Stevens. I love Wallace Stevens. I don’t want to know that he’s trying for metaphor, because to me, he’s not. To me, he’s putting language down that has metaphor. To me-and I tell this to my students all the time-it’s like acting. You want to feel the anger, you don’t want to show the anger. If you feel the anger as an actor, the anger will come out. But if you’re crying to play anger, you’re going to be overacting. If a writer is trying to be true to whatever he or she is putting down on the page, the metaphor is going to happen. It has to happen, because everything. I mean, we don’t live in a bubble. We don’t live in a vacuum. Everything is contingent upon something else. Everything is related to something else. So metaphor is inevitable. It arises. It cannot not happen. So, when people say, “I’m trying for a metaphor, I need a metaphor,” I think it’s the wrong way to go about it. It gets heavy-handed. It makes the reader say, “You’re not trusting me as the reader to get it, and so you have to hit me over the head with it.”

LIGON

You mentioned Hemingway-

LOPEZ

Hemingway made me want to read. When I came across Carver, he made me want to be a writer. Not just write a story, but make a life out of this activity. There was something about the power and mystery of chose stories. Every one, at the end, had a punch in the gut. I felt like I’d been someplace. I felt I’d experienced something. And I had an emotional, visceral connection to it, along the lines of “Ballad of a Thin Man;” something has happened here but you don’t know what it is. And I was totally fine with not knowing what it is.

But when I came to read Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and the fragmented way that was put together, I said, “Okay, fragments. That’s something I can move around in.” And so that worked with me and that sparked something in me. And also, Beckett’s Molloy-where he strips everything down, and gets rid of so much. I like what Faulkner said in his Nobel acceptance speech, ”All literature is the human heart in conflict with itself.” And, to me, I try to distill that down to someone in a room-How did I get here? How do I get out of here? How do I make connections with other people? There are feelings of isolation. And disappointment. Beckett and Markson handle that on a language level and a narrative strategy level that moved me and opened up my head to what could be done on the page.

LIGON

In contrast to some of the bleakness of the worlds you create, are you a romantic? Your characters are so often disappointed, like: “It shouldn’t be this way. We’re damaged and it shouldn’t be this way.” There’s something innocent and romantic in that view.

LOPEZ

I’ve never thought of it in those terms, but I think you’re right. I mean, I think all of my narrators believe that life shouldn’t always be this hard. This is how it is, but it shouldn’t be this way. And almost like Jesus on the cross: “Why have I been forsaken, oh Lord? Why me? Why have I been forsaken?” But then, also: They get through somehow. Somehow, they get through.

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In Blake Butler’s work, the ordinary world is made and remade, the familiar becomes strange, the quotidian becomes uncanny, haunted: families discover their own doubles living among them; homes retain their usual dimensions on the outside, but inside are doubling and expanding with secret passages and dark tunnels and strange rooms; caterpillars mysteriously overrun mailboxes and children get inexplicably sick. But that’s mere content. Butler is also a narratologist’s dream dissertation topic. As one of our interviewers, Joseph Salvatore, wrote about There is No Year in The New York Times Book Review: “[T]his novel presents itself as an eye-widening narrative puzzle. Its surface features alone immediately call attention to themselves. Some of the passages are typographically laid down in verse, running Whitmanesque across the page, Dickinsonianly down in thin shafts or randomly in block stanzas. Italics abound. White space abounds. Footnotes are employed, some of them without primary referents: mere subscripts floating on the empty page like gnats.”

Blake Butler was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where he currently lives. He is the author of three novels, Ever, Scorched Atlas, and There is No Year; as well as a nonfiction book, Nothing. Butler also founded and runs the popular website, HTMLGIANT.

A New York Times review of Nothing noted that “Butler is obsessed with the possibilities of syntax, and the most obvious feature of Nothing is a lyric and intellectual buffer overflow that results in long, often interestingly ungrammatical sentences, sometimes stretching over six pages. The most ornate of these is adorned with footnotes, a nod to David Foster Wallace, to whose memory the book is dedicated. As such the book draws attention to its own linguistic surfaces in ways that most memoirs never attempt.” And from the website Creative Loafing: “Nothing is endlessly surprising, funny, exciting, harrowing. There are some cues from the sprawling internal monologues of Nicholson Baker and the genre-defying nonfiction of William T. Vollmann in this expansive exploration of sleeplessness, but Butler is a writer unto himself.”

We met with Mr. Butler at the Palmer House in Chicago, where we talked about ordinary and anti-ordinary worlds, insomnia, dementia, parents and children, the use of footnotes, the internet, popular culture, HTMLGIANT, David Lynch, David Foster Wallace, reading habits, houses and homes, and the problems with metaphor.

ROBERT LOPEZ

All of your books have a post-apocalyptic or dystopic feeling. Can you talk about how the natural world works in your fiction, or how natural and unnatural worlds work together?

BLAKE BUTLER

Those worlds just seem like every day to me, like how going to the grocery store seems hellish. So why shouldn’t I show it in a hellish way? In no way am I the architect. It doesn’t seem like apocalypse; it seems contemporary. That’s what I’m feeling. Maybe it’s more like emotional texture than reality. Maybe I’m angry, without being angry on purpose—like getting up and driving to the room where I’m going to write makes me mad. So, the fact that I have to do it, or whatever other minor orchestration of feelings I have for a day might be what makes me kill people on paper.

SAMUEL LIGON

That room where you go to write is in your former home, your childhood home, and much of your work is about home. How important is that room to your material?

BUTLER

I’m actually afraid of that going away, because I’ve never been able to write anywhere else after getting used to that place. I can do a coffee shop, but it just doesn’t feel right; maybe there’s more emotional texture in that room that comes out in the writing. I write in the dark, with just the computer screen, and for a long time the room was full of crap, like if you turned on the light, it was a room full of trash. But it was all my stuff. It’s the room that used to be my bedroom, and it’s the room I write in now, which is totally weird, right? Nothing was written in that room, and that’s where I edited There Is No Year, but the books before that were written in another room, a second room. I used to write on my mom’s computer. She’s a sewer and an artist and a quilter, and she has a workroom with her computer, and I’d use it to write and if she came in to do anything I’d be like, “You’re ruining my air,” and finally she was like, “Go put your computer in the other room and work in there, and then you won’t be bothered.”

It’s totally weird writing with your parents around, but at this point I do it to save my mom’s brain a little, because she’s dealing with my dad’s dementia, which is pretty deep at this point. He’s basically a toddler: He wears diapers, needs full care at all times, and acts like a child, banging on things all day. He thinks he’s working, so he always wants to be busy, constantly walking around. I get up a lot while I’m writing and go to see him. Someone asked me recently, I think Michael Kimball, “Is the father in There Is No Year your dad?” And I was like, “No man, not at all.” Then I thought more and looked at some of the behavior in the book, and I thought, Yeah, he is.

JOSEPH SALVATORE

There Is No Year seems to include criticism of traditional masculinity, especially regarding fathers and sons. The father in that book is in many ways ineffectual. He’s got weaknesses—his memory is bad, he’s unable to find his way back home, and he watches porn. The mother finds the copy father more pleasant than the “real father.” And the mother is a more active character, with a great deal of agency and depth and heroism, in the Campbellian sense. I don’t hear much about gender issues when I hear Blake Butler being discussed, but they’re at play there with the mother and father. Is that something you think about?

BUTLER

I don’t ever think: The mother’s like this. But when typing, that’s how it comes out. And I’ve always been closer with my mom. She was an art teacher, and read me Don Quixote, Dickens, Twain, all before I could understand any of it. There weren’t children’s books in my house. We read those books. I think I became a big reader because of her.

The way she got me to read when I was little, five or six, she’d buy a bag of books, and she’d let me reach in and take one, without looking. When I finished reading and had talked to her about it for a minute, I could take another one. I don’t think I enjoyed the book as much as I enjoyed the idea of, What else is in that bag? I read voraciously because of that.

And I’ve always been closer with her. I think my dad and I have an interesting relationship, but there was also this distance because he was working constantly. He’d get up at five to go to work and when he was around, it’s not like he wasn’t there, but I just—the one I was surrounded with was my mother. She’s so stellar a person, and creatively, she’s just, like, perfect to me, so I guess that’s where that depth of the mother comes out, just because I see the amount she gives to me and everything around her. I can’t see a mother any way but that. And maybe I like to beat up the dad because I see myself eventually doing things a dad does, and it’s probably more internally me beating myself up than my dad, but some of the agency maybe comes from his actions.

SALVATORE

Does your father have opinions about your writing?

BUTLER

My dad has read one book that I know of—Bill Clinton’s My Life. And he didn’t really read that. He just liked Bill Clinton, so he bought it, but he’s not a reader. He went to a one-room schoolhouse and he never went to college.

LIGON

A mother figure comes up often in your work, but you don’t seem to worry about Freudian implications. Or what the repetition of Mother might mean.

BUTLER

Right. I’d rather look at the thing itself than figure out what’s around it. I’m more interested in images and sounds than I am in plots or unconscious machines behind the thoughts.

LOPEZ

It’s interesting that you say images and sounds. I’ve heard Dawn Raffel—who generally writes short—say that the acoustics of a sentence is basically all she’s concerned about. I think you can get away with that in a short piece, but in longer work, there has to be something more than just sound. Do you consider that in terms of form or the genre you’re working in—that there has to be more than sound? Or is it sound all the way through?

BUTLER

I always thought it was sound, but now I’m thinking it’s more rhythm. I know a lot of people in revision will read their work out loud to see what it sounds like, but I never do. I think I like more the way sentences connect together. I mean, I like interesting sentences, but that’s a given. I’m more interested in how a sentence can reflect an image and then the next sentence comes from that sentence and slightly alters the image. There Is No Year came from one image. The book starts with the mother and father sitting next to each other on the sofa without touching, very close, and that was where the book came from. An image. And I describe the image the way it made sense to describe it, and then started another page, writing scene after scene, and the language was important the whole time and sound was important the whole time and rhythm is what makes me type, because I’m not thinking, you know, just kind of running through what comes to me, analyzing it as I go, you know, as a reader, writing it as a writer and a reader at the same time.

I’m not trying to find anything or reveal anything. I like the feeling of typing and I like the momentum. The times I feel best writing are the times I’m in a frenzy. I get the beginning and then little jumps start happening and you almost completely lose the feeling that you’re typing. And I think that burst is awesome. But you can’t do that for hours and hours. So I’ll leave the desk, letting my mind disconnect from what I was doing. And then I’ll come back and look at where I ended, the feeling of it, and progress from there.

I tried to write books where I stayed and sat in the minute and had an arc that just continued the right way and I was really bad at it. I’d feel like I was under some kind of stress. It wasn’t pleasurable. It was like, How am I going to figure out this problem? I know the guy needs to do this, but how? My solutions were always bad. I couldn’t do the straight line. My line would get so curvy that it was like: This is idiotic; this is a horrible story; you’re not a good storyteller. But I do feel like I know when to respond to images and how to put words to them.

LOPEZ

You alternately use the words “typing” and “writing.” And I’ve seen you refer to “typing” in HTMLGIANT posts. I think about what Capote said regarding Kerouac’s work, something like, “That’s not writing; that’s typing.” Is there a difference in your mind between writing and typing?

BUTLER

I prefer the word “typing,” because it’s not romantic. I don’t like the romantic idea of the writer. I’m repelled by the romance of the ego and the writer. I come from a technical background. I went to Georgia Tech for computer science and I grew up writing code, basic programs, and they told stories on the computer. And that’s typing—you’re typing commands into the computer—and I still think of writing as just that act. I like the more logical, almost proof nature of constructing something. So it’s like I’m not trying to tell a story; I’m almost constructing a proof or a program more than I’m writing. I sometimes think I like writing because all it is is pressing a lot of buttons, and I like pressing buttons.

LOPEZ

So you never write longhand?

BUTLER

I’ve tried and it comes out like I’m an eight-year-old. Just horrible. Or it looks horrible and it feels wrong. It has to be on the machine.

LOPEZ

Your second book, Scorch Atlas, is unlike any other book I’ve seen. Each page is different. Where did that design come from, and how did the visual interact with your text? If that book were to be republished, would how it looks be part of the next incarnation?

BUTLER

The design of the book was all Zach Dodson at Featherproof, an intensely focused designer. I told him I wanted it to look like a beaten up science manual from the 1970s, and he came back with that. The fact that there are like eleven storms raining different stuff from the sky throughout the book, that was all one piece beforehand. It was Zach’s design idea to weave those sections throughout the book, so that he could let each storm affect the look of the pages thereafter, which made the book to me.

My first book, Ever, has brackets throughout. When I sent it to the editor, Derek White, it was all numbered lists and he was like, “The numbers probably work for you to write it, but they look weird on paper.” So he put the brackets in there.

And I got addicted to em dashes. I like visual elements. I think the way you look at something while you’re writing it changes your relationship with it, and that’s why there’s a lot of space play in There Is No Year. Design has always been important to me.

LIGON

When I look at the chapters in Nothing, and the lyrical footnotes, or when I look at the lists you’ve published, I see you playing with form. When are you conscious of the work and the form and shaping it to an end?

BUTLER

I’m a big fan of writing a fast first draft. I like the idea of a book being almost a photograph of your ideas at that time. And because I spent so long trying to write a straight novel—and the longer it took, the more I fucked it up—I try to do a fast draft, because I can get that energy in there. But then returning to it as a reader and revising it, it’s like, Oh, I missed this, or, Look at that thing that’s stuck in here that I didn’t develop at all, and then whole other scenes might eject from that, in the same way that programming is routines and subroutines. It’s very analytical—it can’t be mush; it has to be logically placed ideas that come from not quite knowing what you’re doing.

Those lyrical footnotes try to reconstruct how a thought process works. When I’m trying to go to sleep, the thing that keeps me awake is busy brain. Often, one thought has three thoughts at the same time. So how to mirror that? I can do the run-on sentence and pack a bunch of things into it, but it’s still one thought at a time. And so I looked for moments where it felt like another thought would be inserted, and a lot of times it’s quotes or gibberish, the nature of the other thought so widely varied and particular to a moment. That was my way of trying to replicate multiple thoughts recurring, and they kind of mess you up as you’re reading.

LIGON

I thought the footnotes provided relief in some sentences, acting like punctuation. Sometimes it seemed like a footnote was talking back to the text, while also providing relief, and throughout, the footnotes felt like conscious punctuation. But you’re saying they weren’t?

BUTLER

No. I was trying to punctuate the moment. It wasn’t like I picked any random quote and stuck it there or any random thing. It’s more like this exact thought ejects this exact thought. I could have actually maybe even stuck them in as more of the sentence, but they’re in some way parenthetical and they’re supposed to be happening at the same time. So they’re definitely supposed to continue the logic of the thing. But you can read it without those, too. Still, in order to get that jumbledness of brain, I think it’s important to have them as footnotes.

SALVATORE

The footnotes in your fiction work differently. How would you compare your use of footnotes in There Is No Year to Nothing?

BUTLER

There are only two parts of There Is No Year that have footnotes, the list of people who died young, and the second list mirroring that, and it’s the exact same number of footnotes each time, a mirror image of the sections. That’s why the names look like a spine, because the names were there and now they’re not. I wanted to replicate the list of names, of dead people as being gone, because part of the book is about people being removed from the world before their time. And so that first list is all people who were creators of things, who were then removed and therefore did not create other objects that would have been part of the world. The fact that they’re absent and the objects that they were going to create don’t exist—that’s a residue of sorts. I wanted to show them gone, and at first, the second section was just blank footnotes. But I was like, No, they’re not just blank; there’s something missing where they were going to be, or something left behind, so that’s what the footnotes in the second section do. They’re way more intuitive than abstract, and work in a functional way. The first time the footnotes appear, it’s all, He died in this way; you know, it’s factual and it’s meant to give context to the situation of dying as a human. The second half is the residual.

SALVATORE

And so regarding the missing referents, the footnotes in the second section correspond to the first section of the obituary list—but they seem figuratively connected rather than literally, as in the biographical manner used in the first section. For instance, you have this line, “One white hair grown out on all dogs surrounding.” I read that and had to hunt back through the book and work to understand what that meant. How did you conceptualize that second set of footnotes?

BUTLER

The mirrored section I figured out while I was revising; it wasn’t in the original draft. And when I realized what I wanted to do, I was like, But how am I going to make it work? I was in my mother’s bathtub and I’d go underwater—she has a humongous bathtub—and I figured out that it had to be these pieces like the one you read, and maybe the first one occurred to me as actual words, like I’ll often just think of words and that begins the ejection of other ones. I was lying there and maybe it was the words that came to me or maybe the idea of how it should work. It was probably the words. I got out of the bathtub and went and typed them.

SALVATORE

In a way, the second list functions like a copy family. A mirroring. But in the case of the footnote mirroring David Foster Wallace’s earlier note, when you write the line, “Another Instant for the Night,” should the reader assume that’s the narrator’s comment on Wallace? If so, are we to understand it as poetic? Or something else? Or is it not intended to be read in any way other than merely to experience the language of it?

BUTLER

I don’t know that I did it for each person specifically, but Wallace, he’s last on the list for a reason—because he’s why I started writing. I was at Tech, a computer science major, and I read Infinite Jest and that was the first book that I was like, You can talk like this on paper? You can make these things happen on paper? I became obsessed with him. I think he’s a brain that’s been unmatched. So, to me, he’s one of the biggest examples of that missing thing. He’s a presence still and there’s something not there because he was removed.

LIGON

Do you get irritated when people say they like Wallace’s nonfiction, but not his fiction?

BUTLER

I think it’s idiotic. His nonfiction is amazing, but Infinite Jest is the greatest literary achievement of all time to me. Most people who say that about the nonfiction didn’t read Infinite Jest. And I don’t know if he would think this, but I think it’s clearly his crowning work.

LIGON

When you started writing those widely published numbered lists, it seemed like a move toward nonfiction, because they felt like hybrid poetry/nonfiction pieces. And you’ve now written a book of nonfiction. What’s your relationship to nonfiction versus fiction?

BUTLER

I’ll always write fiction first. Nothing was a specific project. I sold the book before I wrote it and I wrote it to a deadline, the same way I write for the internet for a living. I like the challenge and the puzzle of it, but my heart’s in fiction and I think fiction’s more interesting. That’s you creating space, whereas nonfiction is analyzing space, although you can create space also. But the bigger art to me is fiction. There are a lot of my fictional elements in Nothing that I wanted to get in there, and I’m feeling weird calling it nonfiction, to be honest, because it’s just like a big collage of things to me.

LIGON

But like in the lists, we have these mini-moments in Nothing where you’re bringing the reader specific news from your research. That feels like traditional nonfiction. But then you work against that with other parts of the book, like those lyrical passages.

BUTLER

I don’t know that I’m working against it; that’s just my natural assembly process. I’ve been asked a lot: Do you intend to obfuscate the reader’s direction and challenge them? No, that’s just how I think about things. I started writing the lists because I was working at a collection agency and I came in one day and the guy that was like my overboss, who sat in the desk behind me, I looked at him and I was like, I can’t fucking stand this room right now. The first list came out of me being angry in that room. And then I realized that it was a puzzle, and I challenged myself to write fifty lists of fifty things, and it was like I had a model.

I like the way form can dictate content. I knew certain things about the orchestration of the frame of Nothing when I was beginning it. I’ve been finding that form gives me a structure to play inside of, like it encages you. It’s mathematical more than exploratory.

But as for nonfiction, when I was researching Nothing, I read all these books about insomnia, and they were all so dry and straight ahead. They had an approach, but I wanted to convey the feeling of restlessness and unconscious tension rather than talk about how to solve it. You’re just going to frustrate yourself looking for a cure. Ironically, I entered the best sleeping period of my life after I wrote that book.

SALVATORE

How would you characterize your insomnia? As a clinically diagnosable condition with an objective “cure”? Or is there something more personal and frustrating happening?

BUTLER

I think the latter. I took sleeping pills for a while and they were putting me to sleep, and when I ran out of them I was like, I have to have more of these. What stresses me out usually isn’t the creative thing—like, I have to figure out the next sixteen pages of my novel—or remembering to do something; it’s all entirely garbage thought, and the more you try to stop thinking, the more you think.

I write every day and most of the day, because that’s all I really have to do. The way I work, the way I make money, is partitioned into a different time, but I have most of all day, every day to write. And because of that, I think: I should be writing. I have intense guilt about that. It’s gotten better since I started to accomplish things, but during the time I was having the worst insomnia, I was like, I have to sit down and get something done today so I can feel good enough to sleep tonight. The insomnia would be worse if I didn’t do anything. But that sets you up for a whole lot more shit, because you type and you make this thing and it doesn’t go anywhere and you’re like, Oh, now I feel even worse, because I sat here for eight hours, didn’t make any money, and nothing will come of this except that I spun my wheels some more. But if you’re going to write without the beginning position clear, then you have to do some of that to get to the project that you want to do. And that’s what the list project came from; it was like, I just don’t know how else to get this out of me. I like to have little things between finding the project. It’s almost a puzzle. Like, Oh, I’m going to do this to start the day every day so I at least feel like I did something. I’m completing an equation.

LOPEZ

Your work seems to exist in the moments between wakefulness and sleep. It seems like you couldn’t be who you are unless you were sleepless, and the sleeplessness comes through the work, and almost everything feels born from that and is about that. Would you ever want to be a good sleeper?

BUTLER

Not sleeping knocks you off center a bit. You feel a little crazy. The times I feel most productive are when I am sleeping well, and I’m always fearing sleeplessness, because when you don’t sleep, you can’t get up and write well. It ruins your brain to some extent. But being in that middle zone works pretty well. A good night of sleep for me is five or six hours, so I’m still a little bit off. It takes me like five hours to wake up, before I can really talk to people, so I always feel like I’m in that middle, waking- up-or-going-to-sleep mode.

That’s probably the worst part about sleeping. Because I know I need to be well rested to do what I want to do the next morning, I want to go to sleep. My mania starts around three, and if I’m not feeling tired, it’s like it reverses itself so it’s a self-fulfilling insanity. If I could press a button that said, You will sleep eight hours a night for the rest of your life, I would press it. And I would be the same person. But if I hadn’t gone through that insomnia as a teenager and through my twenties, I’d probably still be coding computers instead of writing.

LOPEZ

Do you think in terms of a body of work, or how your books work together in sequence?

BUTLER

I don’t think about it while I’m writing. I don’t think about anything while I’m writing. I started to think about arc, because I guess I ended up doing more than I thought I would already. But when I sit down, if I think about that, it will make me get on Facebook instead of writing. I have to be blank of mind when I’m typing. It’s good to have an idea of where you’re going, and from the beginning I knew I wanted to write novels and the first thing I ever sat down to write was a novel. I didn’t write poems or short stories—well, I wrote poems when I was sixteen—but after I read Wallace, I was like, I’m going to write a novel now. And I wrote like seven novels that are never going to be anything, because they were all me learning how to write. I learned how to write a novel by writing one and failing over and over, and I finally got to the point where I was broken and wrote the first real one.

I was starting with the story, like, This will be about this. And I’m a bad problem solver in that way. It took me finding out that the less I knew—and actually knowing absolutely nothing and not even thinking—the better. To be able to get to that level of confidence and that level of intuneness with how I type took doing it a lot. And finally, like the fourth of these novels I wrote got me an agent. I published a short piece online and got an agent and he took on this novel. It was called Pupils of an Inflated Giraffe, and it was about two brothers who were in their fifties living with their severely obese mother and it went into all this crazy stuff.

And then I went to an MFA program and they were like, What is this stuff? In the first thing I workshopped, I remember there was some description in there, and the teacher was like, “I can’t see that. I don’t know what that means.” I must have done something weird. But then I was getting beaten up and being encouraged into ways I knew weren’t what I wanted, and writing these novels for this agent, who kept saying, “Oh, it’s weirder, man. You keep getting weirder. Go the other way,” and that’s when small presses were really starting to pick up again, and I thought, I’m just going to send this out myself. Then it worked out its own way and I ended up with a different agent by getting my own book deal. And he probably thinks I’m insane, too. I’m still pretty much selling it myself.

LIGON

Are you interested in plot?

BUTLER

I love plot, but approaching plot as plot doesn’t work for me. I like to fall into plot, write until I figure out what the plot is. The plots create themselves, rather than me creating them. If I think I’m going to write the story of a man who goes home to Wisconsin, the way my brain would want to write that would be horrible. But if I start with a sentence, and the next sentence comes from logic, then that’s still linear storytelling. I feel like I’m telling an A to B story in There Is No Year, even though there are all these weird parts. It has a plot, even if it goes through these weird patterns to get to it.

LIGON

How would you describe the plot of There Is No Year?

BUTLER

There’s a family—a mother, a father, and a son—and the son has been sick with an illness that should have been terminal, but he didn’t die, so he’s kind of living in this phase of death still coming for him, because death didn’t occur like it should have. I would say there are like four plots, though I don’t know how to tell you about all four. It’s the same as the ejection, the thoughts inside of thoughts. There’s a plot about the son not having died and the lure of death and the fact that he’s making this object—he’s writing a book—that should not exist, because he was supposed to die. He’s creating an object that should not exist, and the world doesn’t want him to do that and is trying to destroy him. People living are kind of haunted by this air, like the fact that we live in the middle of all this, and all this has happened over and over again. You know, there’s a kind of air that we live in. . . I don’t even know what it is. This is the problem of me trying to tell a story. I see so many plots working at the same time.

After I gave this to my editor, he said, “So I’ve read the book eleven times, and I think I know what it’s about now—I think the father is molesting the son.” And I was like, “That is not what this is about at all.” Then he showed me all this weird penile imagery. He pointed out these things and I was like, I’ll have to get rid of that. I added 10,000 words and then removed 5,000, because I was like, I don’t want this to go that direction, and I do want it to go this direction, and, Look here’s this thing I didn’t find, like another room I should add.

SALVATORE

If you were teaching young writers, how would you help them understand the notion of plot? I guess to do that you’d have to define it. How would you do that?

BUTLER

Plot is what happens to the reader while they’re reading the book. It’s more effect based to me than a story. Traditionally, plot is the story that happens, but I want it to be more interactive than that, and that’s why I use images that could mean multiple things. People often have different responses to a book, and I like the fact that it’s open-ended enough within the logical plot that it can go these multiple directions. The reader has to be involved with that. Even though the object is the object and what’s in the book is in the book, the person interfacing with it, their approach, is going to change the field, right? I like the fact that I have a vision of what I feel the book does that no one’s ever said exactly, and I like that people say different things.

SALVATORE

Regarding that idea of plot being the reader’s journey, when I get to a section from There Is No Year like, “Passing the parents’ bedroom he heard the mother talking to herself in a language the son had only heard one time,” I wonder, When was that “one time”? In a traditionally plotted book, that might be a moment where you get a flashback to a specific “one time.” The passage continues after a dash, “heard through the crack of his old bed frame, the bed the men in plastic had come to haul away—the bed the doctors said had been infested and was the reason he got sick. The son knew that wasn’t why he had gotten sick. It was a bed. No one would listen. The son had heard the mother’s language noises once coming also from a crack in his newer bed, but he stuffed the crack with gum. The house would sing to him for hours. The son did not try the parents’ door.”

But the source of the son’s illness really isn’t the point, and whether the doctors got the diagnosis right isn’t the point, and this “one time” when he’d heard the mother’s talk is not really a plot point at all. So, for me, there were strands that I felt never got tied up. You said earlier that the one time you tried to write a “straight novel”—and it’s interesting that Lynch has a movie called The Straight Story—you said you “fucked it all up.” So when you talk about extracting 5,000 words and putting in 10,000, are you worrying about connecting dots, or are you going to put this object or that image out there and let the reader do what she will with it?

BUTLER

It’s more like setting up the frame for it to go in. I don’t want to explain away the image, but the image has an order, right? So I’m looking for moments where image is giving too much or giving too little and I’m trying to organize it in a way where it opens more, instead of closes. The reason I love David Lynch and the reason I love reading is that they open things I didn’t understand before. Or they bring me things I couldn’t experience anywhere else that make my brain come alive.

The image of the white horse from Twin Peaks is a haunting image, and the man behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive is terrifying. Why? Because Lynch doesn’t say, “The horse is this. Or that.” He has no idea. That’s not to say that the image of the horse should not be specific. You have to fine tune all the elements of the image, even if you don’t know what the image is doing. And I also like to pile things in. For instance, there’s a reference to every Lynch film in There Is No Year. I like using other people’s containers in ways that, like, I steal the idea, but not in a palpable way, more a way of figuring out how to say what I wanted to say.

SALVATORE

The egg in the novel reminded me of the black box in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

BUTLER

And there’s one point where the father’s walking through the house and I write, “The father aged eighteen months,” or something like that, and that comes from Eraserhead. When they were filming Eraserhead, it took so long to get enough money to film it, you see Jack Nance walk up to the door, and he opens the door and comes in and, literally, in the change of the shot, there were eighteen months between, and he looks exactly the same. I love the discontinuity within the continuity. Or I remember reading William Vollman talking about how he revises. He talked about messing with a sentence, packing things into it and removing things till it pops like a popcorn kernel. It was this egg-shaped thing and all of a sudden it explodes into all these textures. I love reading and thinking about sentences in that way.

LIGON

You often use repetition, even certain words coming up over and over, like “meat,” “air,” “light.” How does repetition serve your work?

BUTLER

I feel comforted by repetition. I try to live every day as if it were the same day. In my ultimate world, every day would be the same day, in which nothing happens except I sit in a room and do what I want by myself. The art I like does that too. And so I keep saying “hair” and “light” because I can’t stop. If I’m writing without thinking about it, those are the words that are going to keep coming out of my hands. I do it too close in sentences, or it feels redundant, I like that it can create a texture—but you can overtexture something. I’ll try not to use the same words in the same sentences unless I mean to. You know, like I’ll go back and be like, Oh, I said this twice and it’s just kind of annoying. It doesn’t have that ecstatic repetition; it’s an annoying repetition.

LIGON

You seem to trust image and metaphor and let metaphor do a lot of work. But in a footnote in Nothing, you wrote, “There’s no such thing as metaphor.”

BUTLER

I have a good buddy and we get in this metaphor argument all the time. Metaphor seems like an orchestration to me. When I say that there’s a closet full of hair, I want there to be a closet of hair. When I say the father aged eighteen months walking across the living room, I want that to happen. The same goes with the copy family. And that’s real; that’s not science fiction. Like you have copies of yourself. I think it’s so defeatist to call that a metaphor, because that compacts the world in a way that’s boring. The art I like makes me know that those things exist, even if it’s like believing in god. I believe in the fact that there can be seven of me in a room that I can’t see. Or that anything can happen.

When you say something in fiction happens, you’re creating that instance, and that’s why fiction’s not just reciting your mom’s bedtime stories. It’s creating space, rather than explaining it. That’s why I love Lynch. Because the rooms in Lynch are places, and they don’t have a name, but they’re places, and you can think about those places and you can traverse those places and they didn’t exist before he orchestrated them, and that’s why the deletion of people making those spaces is so important to There Is No Year.

And that’s why the reader is part of plot to me, because I can’t control what that is. Because you’re going to read “hair” and without even thinking about it, hair is going to mean one thing to you and it’s going to mean another thing to someone else.

Maybe my problem with metaphor is that I don’t want there to be one specific thing that it stands for. It should be all the things that it could be. That’s why you don’t pick one or explain it, and that’s why movies that do explain or books that explain, I don’t think about them after that—Okay, that’s what you were trying to tell me, I got it. I heard that. But I want to be haunted by a book. I want to be haunted by an object. That’s art. I like to read things that wash over me. I like to not have to organize myself when I’m reading. I want to be pushed and knocked around and then think, Oh, what just happened? I don’t know, but I felt something was happening.

SALVATORE

When I first met the copy family in There Is No Year, I thought they were a metaphor for the dark side of a family, but it never turns out to be anything like that. And so I believe you when you say you’re not thinking about metaphor when you write.

BUTLER

I’m saying it’s obsequious or overbearing, because so many people do rely on metaphor, and I think it’s important to counteract it by saying metaphor doesn’t exist. Of course metaphor does things. That’s just an abstract way of saying there are bigger things than the thing is, and that’s fine. But I’m going to shit on the feeling of the traditional use of metaphor, because I think it’s destructive to the language and books.

LIGON

Poets talk about how a poem teaches you how to read it, that you learn how to read the poem by being in the poem—and I think your work operates that way. There was a moment when I was reading Nothing that I realized what I was doing was experiencing consciousness, and needed to let that wash over me.

SALVATORE

And in There Is No Year, I had to admit that I wasn’t fully going to understand everything, but I felt the author was in some kind of control. And so I give up trying to read it as a “conventional” novel, as though certain details were clues: like, Oh, I get it: The son got sick because he was incested or because the mother drank when she was pregnant with him—the family-secret plot. I came around to accept that that’s not the way this book was going to work.

BUTLER

I hope to be in control of the thing. I don’t want it to be a mess, and I get frustrated when a reader comes to a book with expectations, and if those expectations aren’t met, then the art failed, or they just give it up. To me, the fun of reading is going into the book—books shouldn’t be entertainment, or at least the books I’m interested in.

SALVATORE

David Foster Wallace would say that it’s got to be fun.

BUTLER

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be fun. I’m saying a reader should come with a willingness to be open to this game. A lot of people read and they’re like, I want this out of this book, and what I got didn’t make sense to me. And I think, You didn’t even try. Just keep going. Why not experience something without knowing what it is? So entertain, sure. But create a space rather than explain a space. I don’t want to read a book that’s all work for me. And I think there are a lot of funny parts in my work that are dark because of the dark context, but it’s supposed to be a fun thing, though not to provide a solution on a platter. Brian Evenson was important to me in learning how to tell a fun and compelling story, but also to be doing something inexplicable, while incorporating horror tropes and terror tropes—doing the same thing a horror movie does, but also opening into an intense space. And that’s entertainment to me. I have fun reading that. But it should keep you wanting to do it. Books fail that try to do these grand things and don’t get that the reader needs to pay attention.

SALVATORE

Are there any works you’ve come to with certain expectations as a reader, and then found yourself resistant?

BUTLER

Often the way it happens is that the book explains too much to me. I don’t need you to tell me this. It’s disrespectful. It’s like assuming the reader can’t do some work. I’m looking for a reader who’s interested and wants to be in that puzzle. I can’t force someone to work a puzzle.

LIGON

How has the internet shaped you as an artist?

BUTLER

I can’t write without it. If the computer is not attached to the internet, I’m not going to write. Because that comes into play under my anxiety. While I’m writing, my Gmail, Twitter, and probably two other things are open, and I am constantly going back and forth between what I’m writing and links and things. So I’ll write in a burst, and like I said, I get up, or I read a website for a minute. I think that gives your brain a turn off moment where you stop over-analyzing what you just did, and that gives you a reset and feeds you in ways that you don’t realize you’re getting fed. You read a story and it gives you something, changes your mood, and that gives a palette for your writing to change into, unprompted. I like being chaotically programmed by my emotions, and maybe that’s sadistic. To me, typing without the internet on my computer feels like writing longhand. I need that machine.

But I hope I’m not part of that machine. It’s a sick space, but I mean, I sleep with the computer on my bed at this point. It’s the first thing I do in the morning, the last thing I do at night. I spend more time with it than anything. But I’m looking at the same seven websites, refreshing them, e-mailing people, Gmail chatting.

LIGON

How much of your day is taken up with HTMLGIANT?

BUTLER

Usually not very much. I don’t really edit anything. Everyone writes whatever they want. I correct the way it looks. I orchestrate the tastes and pick the people that are in there. I tune in enough to pay attention to the feel of the website. I’m more interested in being a facilitator and putting my own voice in, but not controlling it.

There’s pretty decent traffic and I think that’s because there’s not a critical apparatus for the kind of writing I’m interested in. There are a lot of people putting it out there, but there aren’t a lot of places for it to be discussed and analyzed. So I want a forum. I want a conversation. I don’t have people that I really talk with about writing much at home, and the only way I’m not just a sad bastard in a room typing on my mom’s computer is that there are other people inside this box. I built a place to play with those people.

And it’s a place to get rid of some of the tension that comes from sitting on the internet all day, a place to talk about books. It’s like a mess and intellectual at the same time. Hopefully, it brings people together. The reason we started it is that I was reading thirty different blogs on my RSS feed, all these websites, and I was like, Why don’t we just put these people in the same place, instead of these people just barking in their own area. And why do I have to go to this website and refresh to see if this new thing is up. Why isn’t there a site that will just tell me? I think we meant at the beginning to have more of a “new issue of x or y” and blah blah blah, and we did that for a while, but it’s become more of a conversation now, and a place to have conversations.

SALVATORE

In There Is No Year there’s a string of stuff about celebrities, most of whom are dead. Those sections were the places I felt the author’s controlling hand most, setting up quotes to frame certain sections. What role does popular culture play in your work?

BUTLER

A question I’ve gotten a few times is: Why are the characters nameless, but then, McDonald’s has a name. And I think, Because I thought it was funny. That was where it came from, but I also like the idea of absorbing auras from things. I can mention Sharon Tate and quote her and that automatically sets this weird tone. It’s like stealing the tone. In There Is No Year, the object that the son’s trying to make, that shouldn’t exist, is a book that transcends possible, transcends what a book can do. It contains all things. I like the idea that all objects could contain all other objects. That doesn’t answer why I would use McDonald’s. I think it comes down to the comedic, mixed with eeriness. The child is nameless, but the buildings around him aren’t. That, to me, seems like a kind of deleting in a way, and it makes the body of the person a specific site, whereas McDonald’s is a site that exists all over the world, but with one floor of sorts. Or how Walmart seems to have this weird air, and you think about it as Walmart, but the feeling of being in a Walmart is very specific. And it’s as compelling in its own way as a desert.

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Erin Belieu’s poetry moves. Each line break holds the potential for a rapid expansion of the poem’s emotional and imaginative reach. The result is sometimes unsettling, sometimes relieving, sometimes hilarious, but always wonderfully consuming. To enter a Belieu poem is to surrender to the paradoxes of the heart and mind, and reading her work feels like an act of liberation. Her lines are often chiseled and muscular; they propel readers forward with purpose. A hard-earned, well-worn fearlessness permeates her work. Take her recent poem “Perfect”:

Your sadness gets a perfect score,
a 1600 on the GRE,

but if I had a gun,
I’d shoot your sadness through
the knee. Then the head.
Or if I were a goddess,

I’d turn you to a tree with silver leaves
or a flower with a center as yellow as sunlight,
like they used to do when saving
the beautiful from themselves.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Erin Belieu is the author of three books of poems, all published by Copper Canyon Press, including Black Box (2006) and One Above & One Below (2000). Her first collection, Infanta (1995), was selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series, about which she says, “I don’t know why Hayden selected me—maybe he had a cheese sandwich instead of a tuna sandwich that day, when he was looking at the finalists for the National Poetry Series.” We suspect more than chance was at play.

Her poems and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications, from Ploughshares and Slate to The Atlantic and The New York Times. Belieu is a workhorse, on and off the page. She served as director of the creative writing program at Florida State University, and is currently the artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. She also co-directs VIDA, an organization designed to “explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities.”

We met with Ms. Belieu at a noisy bar in Chicago, during the 2012 AWP Conference, where she warned: “I’m a Libra, so every time I say one thing, I have to say the opposite.” We discussed her poetry, the importance of public service, the perils of technology, and growing up in the Midwest.

TIM GREENUP

Are you a Nebraska poet?

ERIN BELIEU

I am a one-woman chamber of commerce for Nebraska, which is the best of all states. I feel like that landscape is in me. There’s a way of being where I grew up, a kind of openness, a generosity. Maybe it’s because there aren’t enough of us to get on each other’s nerves. When you only have eleven citizens, it’s easy not to crowd each other. But my sense of enthusiasm and, hopefully, if I have a sense of generosity—it comes from that place.

But there’s also a kind of internal astringency Nebraskans have, a rub-some-dirt-in-it-and-stop-whining approach to life, and those things are part of me as well. In a lot of ways, I think Nebraska is where the West begins, and I think I have a Western mentality—as if that were one thing. Even though I’ve spent most of my adult life on the East Coast, I feel real affection and affinity for the West. I spend a lot of time in Port Townsend and Seattle because I’m the artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and my press is Copper Canyon, and in some ways, I think I translate a little bit better in that part of the world.

DANIELLE SHUTT

You translate to me—and I’m from rural southwest Virginia.

BELIEU

Maybe you’re making a good distinction; it’s not geographical; more, as Donny and Marie would say, I’m a little bit country and a little bit rock ’n’ roll. I don’t feel the need to fuse those two together. I feel like that’s an interesting opposition. But, obviously, I have no real idea. I can sort of get hints through reviews, how people evaluate me, but you can’t think about that kind of stuff or you won’t write anything. You’ll spend all your time knotted up about how you’re being received. Let time sort that stuff out, and hope you’re lucky enough to have anybody reading your poems at all.

I don’t think I’ve ever fit neatly into anything. I’ve appeared in formalist magazines, I’ve been a fellow at Sewanee, but my poems have also appeared in magazines that focus on experimental and alternative forms. And maybe that’s been bad for my “career,” as if a poet could have a career; I don’t think Keats had a “career.” Poetry is a devotion, and it’s the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice.

I don’t mean to be cavalier. I have a great job. I’m able to feed my kid. I’m able to live in my house and buy groceries. For a poet, that’s a pretty big deal. I mean, I actually have health insurance. So I feel like I’ve been given this huge opportunity to be genuine and true in what I do. And I’ve also been given the gift to do things like VIDA, because I’ve got tenure, bitch! Academia doesn’t make you a bad poet, contrary to popular belief. But thinking of poetry as a career is definitely bad for your poems’ health.

SHUTT

Does tenure make people lazy?

BELIEU

It does sometimes, but that’s the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to make you brave. I feel that if you’ve been given the gift of a livelihood, then you have a responsibility to others who haven’t been as lucky. I very much believe that. That’s why I helped to found VIDA with Cate Marvin. And founding a national feminist literary organization—well, that can put you on the hot seat sometimes. But I thought to myself, What’s the point of having tenure if I don’t use it to do what I think is important and necessary? Tenure should allow us to never grow too comfortable.

My father was the head of special education and gifted programs for my public school system, and my parents were community-oriented. They were involved in grassroots Republican politics, back when the name Republican didn’t equal bigots like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. But my brother and I turned out to be hardcore Democrats. And once my brother came out, my parents became Democrats. They were like, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” I don’t think they ever voted Republican again. That made me really proud of them.

I come from a family where service was valued, so all my life I’ve had an urge to serve. I still have my First Class Girl Scout certificate signed by Ronald Reagan. I did something like 3,000 hours of community service. I was that girl. I was also on field staff for the Dukakis campaign, and dropped out of college for about a year and a half to organize all over the country. I’ve always believed in political activism. And that’s what I’m teaching my son to do, too. If you want your opinion counted, you have to step up. You better put your money where your mouth is.

SHUTT

Community is a dominant thread in your poems, too. Across your three collections, there are poems that engage people, whether it’s a poem dedicated to someone or talking directly to a historical figure. Could you talk a little about that?

BELIEU

My poetry is almost always written in response to someone, or it’s a portrait of someone. When I think of the fiction I most admire—and poems to a certain degree—it’s almost always novels that are social novels, like Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, and all of Jane Austen, where people are put in these social, moral, spiritual conundrums that reveal the essentials of human beings, what it means to be human. Robert Pinsky talks about how poets have a kind of monomania, an animating obsession, and I think I’m obsessed with understanding why people do what they do.

What does Mr. Bennet say in Pride and Prejudice? “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?” I feel very much like Mr. Bennet sometimes, because people generally crack me up. But I have a lot of affection and sympathy for how ridiculous we are, all of us. The way we front and the way we lie, and our self-important posturing. AWP is such a weird little aquarium for that reason. Every variety of creature is on display. And I know I exist somewhere in the aquarium, too, but again, I don’t invest in thinking too much about how others perceive me.

My poems are frequently responses to some bit of argument I’ve encountered. I have a poem called “Your Character is Your Destiny,” which comes from Aristotle, and it talks about this idea of what it means to have a soul, and whether that sense of a soul is your destiny. Is it predetermined that we are going to move in the world in a certain way, and is that something we can escape? Are we stranded in a universe of hard determinism? I have just enough philosophy and theory to be dangerous. I’ll take a little bit of Aristotle or Slavoj Žižek or Lacan, and throw it out there, not yet necessarily totally understanding what they’re talking about. I just start with, Well, is my character my destiny? Really? I like to think out loud in poems, and find out what I think as I go along. Almost everything I’m interested in is dialectical; that’s where the tension in our lives is, where the tension in our art is. There’s all this absurdity around us, but there’s also the truly hideous. There are big and little tragedies. That’s why I love the poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” where Auden points out: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

GREENUP

In One Above & One Below, the opening poem invokes the muse. Does the muse exist?

BELIEU

There are lots of ways to think about the muse. My background is in feminist and psychoanalytic theory, so when I talk about the muse, it’s my metaphor for those unconscious parts of ourselves, and wanting a fluid access to language and imagination. Being able to access these is the hard part. We’re surrounded by noise and advertising and technology, and it just gets more intense every year, so that voice, that inner muse, gets drowned out so easily. That’s one of the things the poem you’re referencing is about, the feeling that you don’t always have access to the thing that centers you, that part of you which, if you hold still and be quiet, will tell you something interesting.

There are many times in workshops that people automatically want to put poems in stanzas, because they’re overwhelmed by the idea of a three-page poem without stanza breaks. And I think, Wait a minute. Are we doing this because that’s what the poem needs? Or are we doing this because we’re now used to everything being in tidy graphs and sound bites?

Maybe that’s how forms change over time, because forms are just reflections of human beings and their preferences and what makes sense rhythmically and in rhyme at a given time. But I’m not sure how I feel about those things changing. We’ve turned into a collective ADHD society, in which a three-page poem without a stanza break seems overwhelming. We’ve become like flies that mentally zing from one thing to another, so we can’t settle too deeply into anything. I don’t mean to sound like a crabby old lady. You can see I’ve got my iPhone here that I check constantly. But I’m pretty sure I could go to one of these “back to the land” sort of things. I mean, I would complain a lot, but I could probably do that and ultimately be comfortable.

The technological world has created all kinds of wonderful opportunities, too, but—human beings as animals—I don’t know how we can keep up at this pace. We really have to struggle in a way that we didn’t use to in order to create a quiet space. Poetry is more often than not meditative—an interactive meditation between writer and reader— so that you have to have that still space to come together and discover one another. One of the things I love about poetry is that we have to be willing to hear each other. The reader has to be so active when reading a poem, which is why I’m grateful when anybody reads my poems.

SHUTT

You’re often compared to Sylvia Plath or Sharon Olds. What do you make of the critical impulse to construct genealogies for female poets from other women poets?

BELIEU

I think, sadly, there are so few reference points for women poets that it becomes really reductive. We don’t have this long, nuanced tradition to point to. It’s like, Oh, are you Elizabeth Bishop or are you Sylvia Plath? Like you’re choosing between Betty and Veronica in the Archie comics. There’s a lot in between, there are other options to make a comparison, but how many people have ever been able to actually name a good number of women poets? Happily, this is starting to change.

But so much of that kind of comparison just has to do with hype and publication, and that rarely has anything to do with what an artist is doing or why. I mean, seriously, I don’t sound very much like Plath. But some critics make lazy pronouncements and easy comparisons. And I guess they influence some people. But they don’t really know who’s going to be read fifty years from now; they don’t know who’s going to be read five hundred years from now, or how those writers will be received. Some people believe in heaven, and maybe they’ll look down and see their readership from there, but here and now, we don’t know. Which is why I think people who pretend, people who want to be kingmakers or tastemakers, I just find the whole thing tedious. You have your taste and you have what you believe in, and good for you. But to try to make that some sort of poetic law? You, my friend, are puny in the face of time. And that’s the way it should be.

I sort of play with that idea in a new poem, “Ars Poetica for the Future.” I imagine myself burying my poems in Ziploc baggies, because then I win. A thousand years from now someone will find my artifacts— assuming we don’t blow ourselves up—and I’ll be Sappho!

GREENUP

Where does that drive to become a tastemaker come from?

BELIEU

Probably insecurity—the urge to force everyone to believe what you think is truth, with a capital T. But there are poems I don’t love that I must respect. And there are poems that aren’t particularly of value to me that other people admire, and so I think, Well, maybe I need to think about this some more before I reject it. I’ve never been able to finish The Magic Mountain, no matter which translation I read, no matter how many smart people tell me to read it. And I’m pretty sure the problem’s not with it. I’m pretty sure the resistance is within me. But we grow into things when we’re ready for them. Usually the tastemakers are just fighting over power and turf. Which again, has nothing to do with literature itself.

Cate Marvin and I talk about this all the time. There are certain types who seem to think, Oh, there’s only one pie and I gotta get my slice before somebody else gets that slice, because the pie’s gonna be gone! And Cate and I both think, Why don’t we just bake another pie?

It strikes me as a profoundly anxious way of being in the world if you have to prove that you’re more by proving that somebody else is less. And that goes into that whole dustup with Rita Dove and Helen Vendler, when Rita had done an odd, inclusive anthology, which I found really revealing of her. It was a portrait of a reader, as if Rita were saying, “This is my expression of what I think is really right.” And she was willing to acknowledge her idiosyncratic way of thinking about things, and I thought that was honest. I was disappointed that Helen Vendler was so scathing, as if there were some objective truth she felt was under assault. And I think, But Helen, there are no objective truths about poetry. I know you have strong feelings about it and it’s your life’s work, and I have many good reasons to respect you, but we’re not talking about the nuclear codes here. Which is not to say I don’t believe in criticism, or that I won’t argue strongly for my point of view. I just keep in mind that more than one thing can be true at the same time. Sometimes even opposite things.

I don’t have any particular anxiety that poetry is going to hell and then the whole literary culture will die. Poetry is a lot bigger and badder than any of us. And what does Auden say? It’s a mouth, right? It is the mouth. “Poetry makes nothing happen” is a line people misunderstand frequently. He means poetry makes nothing happen directly. Not in the way of commerce and politics and scruffy immediate human intercourse. He’s saying something more profound: Poetry is essential in the way that a mouth and tongue are essential. It doesn’t go away. It’s not going to disappear if we don’t fight to the death about it. How about we try a little more humility in the face of the poetry mouth? Such ego, to think that poetry needs us to protect it.

There are the more immediate things like prizes and jobs that get people all wadded up, but beyond that, there’s the great fear that we devote our lives to this ephemeral thing and we don’t know if we’re right or wrong or how history is going to see it. It’s a total crapshoot. Think about all the writers who have fallen out of fashion, only to have people who were obscure come to the forefront. We don’t have any control over this. But I’m okay with that. I’m okay with being a minuscule dot in the universe. I’ve accepted that fact. I get to eat and drink and have sex and live in a body and I get to make poems and I get to love my son and I get to love my partner and I just feel like maybe that should be enough, and we should stop trying to control the future with our pronouncements.

I’ve never understood why people are so unnerved by the tininess of our human experience. It’s always made sense to me, ever since I was a little kid. We’re just biological blips in the wholeness of time. But what a lovely thing to be. What a gift. I just want to be recycled into a willow tree eventually.

SHUTT

There’s some anger in the poems in Black Box. In some criticism, I’ve read that anger—particularly in women’s poetry—is a limited emotion. Or if you’re a woman poet, writing about anger—it’s just anger that readers get out of your work. How do you feel about that view of anger in poems?

BELIEU

Women get smacked with that stick all the time, and I’m pretty— pardon me—fucking tired of listening to it. I feel like, All right, old man. I know you hate Sylvia Plath. Duly noted. Now move along. You’re boring me.

There was an unfortunate confusion about Black Box regarding the back matter. Black Box isn’t actually addressed to my ex-husband, of whom I’m very fond. We made a wonderful child. We’re still friends and raising a person together. I would not use a book to attack someone. Poems aren’t therapy and poems aren’t journals. Which, as a woman poet, it seems you’re often in the position of having to point out. I didn’t set out to write biography. I write poems, which are acts of imagination. It’s weird that I feel, as a woman, a need to explain that not everything I write is a transcription of my love life, my vagina, and my daddy issues. I actually make things up, and I care deeply about the form of the poems.

In Black Box, I was interested in the performance of grief, and grief as this multiple experience. Grief is so awkward in American culture— maybe it’s awkward in Vietnam and Canada too—but it seems to me a very American thing that you’ve got about two weeks to feel whatever it is you’re feeling. You have about two weeks of casseroles and people really focusing and saying, “How are you doing?” And then, understandably, as Auden talks about in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” people get back to their lives. But you’re still there with your grief. And a big part of grief, especially at the end of a love relationship, but also at the death of a loved one, is anger.

I’m interested in feminist issues and I’ve read a lot of feminist theory, and I was interested in this idea that in some ways female anger seems like our last great transgression culturally. I’ve always been fascinated by how anger is performed by women in literature. Or not performed—sometimes it seems to me it’s enacted through depression, through passive approaches. Eleanor Wilner, a poet I admire immensely, did a translation of Medea. And in her introduction, she deals with this idea of a woman whose grief is so angry, so epic, that it consumes her entire life and her children’s lives. She is vengeance incarnate—suicidal, homicidal, operatic, terrifying, and truly pathetic. I was really interested in trying to achieve and sustain that pitch as I was writing the poems in Black Box. Honestly, I wanted to see if I could write an exorcism. The exorcism as form. That was a fascinating challenge.

So, especially in the long poem “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral,” the speaker keeps taking on different masks. At one point, she’s a Borscht Belt comedian. At one point, she’s the Bride of Frankenstein. At one point, she’s the voice of a Ouija board. She keeps trying on these costumes and putting them aside and taking on another costume to dramatically perform her sense of betrayal and loss.

I am very aware of anger—of female anger—as transgressive. And female anger is something that’s not spoken to often in poetry. Or anywhere, really. I think of women artists who’ve addressed this feeling directly and the backlash is usually intense. Very much a how-dare-you reaction. Which is absurd when you think of how surrounded we are by expressions of male anger in our culture. How venerated they are. Male rage is cool! But female rage is still disturbing, displacing, abject, unnatural. Except it’s not. It’s normal. And more than any other poem I’ve written, people come up to me and say, “Thank you for writing the Red Dress poems. They’ve meant a lot to me.” Which is about the nicest compliment anyone can ever give you. And I think parts of the “Red Dress” sequence are pretty funny. I meant them to be funny, because they’re so over-the-top. It’s worth noting that the poem’s title comes from a quote in the movie Moonstruck, which is a satire. Or like that scene in one of the Batman movies, when Michelle Pfeiffer plays Catwoman, and she’s standing in her latex suit looking totally vatic, and then she just says, “Meow,” and boom! It’s funny and intense and a little scary all at once. And I was like, I wonder if I could write a poem that can do that.

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying I’ve always been interested in this issue, and I wanted Black Box to perform that. Some reviewers got it, and some reviewers—which is typical of the way women are reviewed— focused on what they thought was biographical information. I wonder how it would have gone if that information hadn’t been there. I have a poem in my forthcoming book, Le Déluge, called “12-Step,” and it’s about lighthouses and taking an A.A. pledge not to write confessional poems. Obviously, another satire. Because I feel like there’s nothing safer, nothing less likely to get you in trouble, than writing about lighthouses. I can say, Oh, this isn’t about me; there’s nothing personal here. I’m just a wee poet writing about the landscape. Objectively.

KRISTINA MCDONALD

I believe you’re working on a memoir about your son. How’s that going?

BELIEU

The fun of working with nonfiction has been that it’s not poetry. It’s a different set of problems to solve, formally. And that’s been a huge pleasure. But then I got to a certain point where poems started to come again and I sort of put the nonfiction on hold.

It’s also a difficult subject. My son has a mild form of cerebral palsy. Jude appears as almost completely typical; if you saw him, you’d go, “Oh, cute kid.” But when he opens his mouth—his speech is deeply, deeply impacted because he was strangled by the birth cord when he was born. But the thing about a kid like Jude is—I mean, people say, “Oh, he’s a miracle!” and in a way, Jude really is a miracle, because the fact that he was impacted as little as he turned out to be is very unusual. He should have been dead. He should have been damaged beyond recognition. And he turned out to be this wonderful, smart, beautiful—freakishly beautiful—kid. One of his teachers referred to him as a radiating joy machine, and he does naturally exude joy. He’s one of those people whose smile comes from the inside.

But imagine what it’s like to be such a person and also to have 99% of the world unable to understand you when you speak. It’s been a journey—to have the gift of him, but also the responsibility of him, to try to help him figure out how he’s going to live in the world. His speech has gotten a lot better. If you were to listen to him now, he can make himself understood. But his journey is ongoing. He’s only eleven, and so part of me feels like I wrote to a certain point, but I don’t yet know the end of the story.

GREENUP

In an interview you did with Saw Palm, you described writing a poem as “like being a diamond cutter,” in that it “requires great powers of concentration.” How do you keep your concentration?

BELIEU

I don’t, honestly. I get distracted all the time and that’s my biggest challenge—to find the space for poetry. I’m a full-time mom. I have an academic job. I’m the artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. And these are all things I enjoy. But my biggest challenge is finding the time to sit in a quiet space and make work.

I’m back to it again, but I still struggle to make time. Of course, I run around like a chicken with my head cut off. I mean, I walk in the house and I’ll think, Okay, I gotta go to a meeting, then I’m gonna pick up the dry cleaning, then I’m gonna go get Jude, then I’m gonna come back here to meet the washer repair guy, then I’m gonna meet a student, then I’ll go grocery shopping, and then I have to go to a reading.

I really want to have a commune, like a poetry commune where we all have a big island, and if you want to have kids, we help you raise your kids, we take turns, just a big family, and everybody has writing hours. I feel like this would be a very cool thing to do. Though, as we’ve seen, it’ll all go to hell. I mean, look at the Manson family.

But, you know, when your kid is young, it’s probably not your most productive time as a writer. And that’s okay, because I like Jude more than poetry. He’s my poem in progress. And the world is not going to freak out with, “I can’t go to bed because I haven’t had my next Erin Belieu poem!” They’ll be okay.

GREENUP

When you do get the time, is it something that you can access quickly, or is it something that takes some digging to get back to?

BELIEU

Sometimes it takes digging and sometimes it’s right there, and it really depends on the day and how mentally healthy I am. If I can brush off, in a Jay-Z-like fashion, the voices in my head about how, “She’s too this,” or, “She’s too angry,” I can get clean and write what I want to write.

The big difference between being a poet at twenty-five and being a poet at forty-five is that I’ve spent a lot of time considering what I believe about poems and polishing my formal chops. I have strategies. I’ve read a lot. I’ve learned a lot. It’s good for younger poets to know that time helps you. I mean, unless you’re a totally useless git, after a certain amount of time, things stick to you, and you don’t have to worry so much anymore.

What I do worry about is what’s worth saying. Do I need to write a Persephone poem? Does anyone need to hear that from me? Maybe not. I don’t feel this necessity to put anything out, and I don’t think students should ever feel that pressure. It’s not a career, it’s a devotion. Find other ways to live your life, find other ways to make money, because God knows there are better ways than poetry. Put your energy into finding a way to maximize the amount of time that you have to write.

Some poems I’ve had to work very hard for and considerably fewer have been gifts from my lesbian personal trainer muse, but it’s amazing how many of the ones that were free flowing are the ones that are often anthologized. And I’m like, “But I worked so hard on this other one!” and they’re like “No, no, we want the one that was really easy. We like that one best.” But it’s all part of the process, because that ease probably comes from the hard work of the ones you ground out.

A good example: When my first book came out, I was working at AGNI as managing editor and I got a call out of the blue at my office from The New York Times—not something I’d ever had happen to me— and they said, “Um, we like your book Infanta, and we want to feature one of your poems in The Times this week, and we’re doing a feature on the subject of Labor Day. We would really like it if you could give us all the poems you have on Labor Day.” They said, “You have poems about Labor Day, right?” And I was like, “Yes. Yes, of course I do. It’ll take me some time to go through those many poems I have on the great lyric subject of Labor Day and choose the right one for you.” And I hung up the phone and I was like, The New York Times! Labor Day! Okay, what do I do? Because I was not going to miss the chance to have a poem appear in a place that my parents had actually heard of. So I whipped off this poem called “On Being Fired Again,” which is now one of my most anthologized poems. I didn’t sweat for that poem at all. But for the majority of my poems, I have totally sweated and I feel stupidly wounded that certain ones haven’t gotten more attention. But that’s exactly why you have an audience. The audience wins, the audience decides. And you can’t argue with the audience. You just shut your mouth and say thank you.

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The voice in a Steve Almond story or essay or blog post is unmistakable, shaped by a tone typically anchored in dry wit, and a sharp, hungry intelligence that seems capable of taking us anywhere. The world, as Almond observes it, is at once hilarious and pathetic, sad and intensely beautiful. And it’s his willingness to engage the world that demands our attention. We follow him as he navigates his or his characters’ movement through anger and passion, sex and song, confusion and clarity and political rage, sometimes as a call to action or a commentary on our culture, sometimes as a portrait of the individual in crisis or struggling with the risks and dangers of being alive, and often from a depth of obsession—about music or politics or candy or sex or whatever else engages his curiosity.

“What people are really reading for is some quality of obsession,” Almond says. “They have this instinctual sense that the person who’s writing can’t stop talking about this, is super into it—scarily into it. Because everybody has what they’re obsessed with, but you’re sort of taught not to get into it because it seems crazy and makes you weird, and you should be able to get past that and stop collecting Cabbage Patch Kids or whatever your obsession is… But we are all, inside, obsessed.”

Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, three of which he published himself. In 2004 his second book, Candyfreak, was a New York Times bestseller and won the American Library Association Alex Award. In 2005, it was named the Booksense Adult Nonfiction Book of The Year. His Story, “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched” from his latest collection, God Bless America, was selected for Best American Short Stories 2010. He is a regular contributor to the New York Time’s Riff section and writes regularly for the literary website, The Rumpus. Two of his stories have been awarded the Pushcart Prize.

We met with Mr. Almond at the Brooklyn Deli in Spokane, where we discussed small publishers and big publishers, politics in fiction and nonfiction, obsession and more obsession, what makes a good editor, and how, “in the most emotional moments of a story, writers are trying to sing.”

KATRINA STUBSON

You’ve published books with different houses, and you’ve recently put out chapbooks yourself. What has your experience been like working with different publishers, large and small?

STEVE ALMOND

When you write something accomplished enough that somebody will buy it, that’s an important and amazing accomplishment. But in the euphoria of that—what I tended to overlook, anyway—is this unnatural arrangement, the artist in partnership with the corporation. It’s strange and unsettling for the weird, little freaky things that I have to say—whether in fiction or nonfiction or letters from people who hate me—to be turned into a commodity. What I want is just to reach people emotionally. I don’t want to feel that there’s a price tag on that, though I do charge for those DIY books I make, because they cost money to print and I’ve got a designer I want to pay and I also want to get a little bit for the energy and time I put into them.

I think it’s fair for artists to get paid. And I will say to people now—though I wouldn’t say it earlier in my career—I will not work for free. If you’re getting some money out of it, I’d like some money too. Doesn’t have to be a ton, but if you’re getting dough out of it—if it’s a nonprofit thing, a charity thing, okay. I’m thinking about this agent who sent me a note saying, “Would you be willing to contribute to this anthology?” And I was like, “Sure, just tell me who’s getting paid what and we can decide what seems fair for me.” And he just kept ducking the question. Turned out he was getting a fifty-thousand dollar advance. I was eventually like, “Yeah, I’m not cool with that. If you’re getting money, then all your contributors should be getting some money too.” I’m not naïve enough to be saying, “Oh, we’re just artists, everything should be free and open.” No. You work hard, you should get paid. We should have enough esteem for people who make art to acknowledge it’s worth paying for, worth supporting them in their endeavor. But working with a big company—I knew that they liked my art, but they were mainly trying to figure out a way to make money. They saw Candyfreak and thought, Oh, with our platform and marketing, maybe we can get this guy to write a bestseller. I understand that most editors are interested in good books. But most editors aren’t the ones who acquire books.

There’s a whole marketing team and committee and they have to decide if this thing’s going to make money or not. That’s a calculus that can start to infect your process if you think about it too much. You think, Well, maybe I should do this or that, and then you’re not really following your own preoccupations and obsessions. You’re worrying about what the market wants, what the marketing people want in a particular book.

In Candyfreak, the publisher begged me to take out a line at the beginning of the book that had the word “dick” in it: “You give a teenage boy a candy bar with a ruler on the back of it, he will measure his dick.” She was like, “Can’t we please take that out so we can broaden the audience of this book.” I understood what she was saying. That was a corporation speaking directly to the artist, saying that even though that’s the right word, and even though you want to write a book with a profane edge to it, we could really broaden our audience here. This could be a young adult book that could be marketed in a whole new way, be happily and safely given to kids, and so forth. I’m not blaming this woman for saying it—it’s just the voice of the corporation—but I had to say, “No. Sorry you’re pissed off at me.”

As far as those chapbooks go, I think if you’ve spent long enough making decisions at the keyboard, and if you feel like you have a book or books that you’re ready to move out into the world, books that don’t seem to need an editor—I mean, I had my friends edit those little books—then why not? The technology exists, the means of production for literary art has been democratized to the point that all of us can make a book tomorrow if we want to. Why bother to get a corporation involved when the project is a smaller, more idiosyncratic book? Why not put it out in a smaller, more organic, personal way? To the extent that your patience and talent allows, you can choose your publishing experience now.

I’m happy to have books published with big publishers. I’m happy to have anybody help me out with this stuff. I don’t like schlepping books around and having to do all that stuff. It’s sort of low-level humiliating and kind of a drag. I’d rather have somebody else do it all for me and I could just be the artist, with my little artist wings saying, Yes, I’ll sign your book. Now let me go off and write some more. But that’s not really how my career works. The culture doesn’t have that kind of passion for the work I do. But as long as the means of production exists and I have these little weird projects I want to do, why not try to do them in a way that feels more natural? It’s a smaller thing. I like the feeling of making a book with another artist, putting exactly what I want into it, sometimes in consultation with readers early in the process. There’s no marketing team, no publisher, no editor to mess with you about that—it’s liberating. And even though I charge money for the books, they feel more like an artifact that commemorates a particular night, a reading or some other interaction, rather than a commodity you could get anywhere, not that there’s anything wrong with buying books in stores. But I don’t think a lot of people walk into a bookstore and say, “What do you have by Steve Almond?” Nobody does. Or very few people. My mom does. I realized at a certain point that people find my stuff because I do a reading or give a class, and they think they might like more. You sort of have to recognize where you’re at, and for me, these DIY books make a lot of sense.

I’m delighted God Bless America came out with a small press. I’m glad I didn’t try to put that book out myself. It really only works economically when they’re little books. And Ben George at Lookout Books was a phenomenal editor, and helped make all the stories in God Bless America way better than they were before, even if they’d been published in the Pushcart or Best American. That’s the thing that matters—finding a great editor. Stephen Elliott says there’s no point in putting out twenty thousand copies of a mediocre book. You only have enough time in life to put out so many books, and you invest all this energy, so you’ve got to find the editor who’s going to help you make it the best book possible.

STUBSON

What makes a good editor?

ALMOND

A good editor pays attention. They get what you’re trying to do, they see the places where you’re falling short, and they can explain the problems in precise, concrete terms. Ben George would go through these stories and say, “You have this character shrugging here and I just don’t think it’s doing any work.” A good editor targets what’s inessential in your work, every moment you’ve raced through when you should have slowed down, every place where the narrative isn’t really grounded in the physical world and you’ve missed an opportunity. It’s a revelation to get that kind of editing, and it has everything to do with the quality of attention they’re paying to your work. It can be oppressive when it’s somebody like Ben, who’s so compulsive about it, though it’s also an incredible gift to have somebody who understands your intention so clearly that he can zero in on places where nobody else—great magazine editors, editors of anthologies—has said anything. He zips right in and says, “You don’t need this line. That word is a repetition. You need to show me the airport right now because I cannot see it.”

That hasn’t always happened for me. My editor at Algonquin was great, and my editors at Random House—I had two—did the best they could. But I think they were under certain constraints, and they weren’t line editors. They were essentially trying to figure out how to get a return for Random House on an investment they’d made. Their job wasn’t to make every essay shine and every line perfect and every word essential. I don’t think that makes them bad editors, in terms of how their jobs were defined, but it didn’t help me make the books better.

That’s not as true of Rock N Roll Will Save Your Life. My editor on that book was sharp about saying, “You cannot write ten thousand words about Ike Reilly. Nobody’s interested. You’re going to make the book worse and less accessible to the reader.” That’s a lot of what a good editor does—tells you when you might be confusing the reader, boring them, or writing in a way that isn’t compelling. Not because they want to sell tons of copies, but because they’re sensitive to the places where you haven’t made the arc matter enough to the reader.

ERICKA TAYLOR

How do you distinguish between being a political writer and a moral writer?

ALMOND

I do write about politics, and I get that people want to put whatever label on that, which is fine. I’m interested in cutting beneath the version of politics that’s happening on cable TV, though, and getting to the fact that it’s really all about policies and how people behave toward one another. In American politics, the big argument happening on cable has obscured the fact that we have elected representatives who decide how kind and compassionate and generous we’re going to be as a country or if it’s a moral duty for extraordinarily wealthy or even comfortable people to help out those who have less. There are moral implications to these decisions, and they’re almost entirely obscured in our political arena.

So when I’m writing political pieces, I’m trying to remind people that real moral decisions are being made about how your kids are going to be educated, or whether people in our culture are going to have the opportunity we say America offers. I want to remind people that we have great ideals in the abstract, but we almost never live up to them. America has the best ideals of any country on earth, and yet we’re the worst at living those values and enacting them. We’ve gotten completely distracted by this circus sideshow. But as I say that, I also recognize that I’m up on a soapbox, and that people don’t want to hear that. There are tons of people shouting from the soapbox, saying, “Here’s who you should be pissed off at, here’s what you should do.” You can become a kind of mirror version of what’s happening on talk radio. So I try to write in a way that forces people to realize that I’m talking about what it means to be a human rather than how they should behave morally. I don’t always succeed. I’m not sure my writing is always moral writing. Sometimes, when it’s not quite as good, it feels political and pedantic. I’m not sure that’s worthwhile.

MICHAEL BELL

How did you handle that in “How to Love a Republican” versus God Bless America?

ALMOND

“How to Love a Republican” started as a story based around the 2000 election and its aftermath. A liberal guy falls in love with a conservative. They’re both idealistic, political people working on campaigns, and when I originally wrote that story it was like 15,000 words, and 8,000 of them were me saying, “How can we have an election that’s so unfair?” and, “Dick Cheney’s such an asshole,” and, “The Supreme Court totally sold us out,” and blah blah blah. I had to look at those 15,000 words and see that they were a polemic, not a story. What’s more interesting is this human question: Can you love somebody when you don’t respect their basic sense of fairness and morality? How much do you have to agree with someone’s values in order to conduct an enduring romantic relationship? That’s the real question. And so the political polemical stuff got cut out of the story and what remained was this question of what you do when you love somebody and respect their ambition but run into this historical moment in which you can’t agree and you can’t let it go. Many relationships reach this point. It’s not necessarily about the 2000 election; it’s about some other thing—I cannot deal with the way you treat my family, or whatever it is. That to me is a much more universal idea to pursue.

The stories in God Bless America are reflective of the next ten years, the Bush years, and also since Obama’s been president. Our culture’s become meaner, more paranoid, angrier, more self-victimized. I think a lot of that comes out of how we processed 9/11. That was not a tragedy that caused us to do any reflecting. We just went into a crazy, bullying, narcissistic, jingoistic, proto-fascist psychosis. And of course 9/11 was a terrible thing. It’s not something I am going to try to appropriate—the grief of 9/11. That’s the crazy thing that happened on TV, because it’s a good story, and it became like every other story the media puts out: meant to press our buttons, not to really make us think about our duty as citizens or why we might have been attacked or what our empire’s up to. When I think about how we reacted to that, I feel like it’s cowboys and Indians. It’s this narrative of America as a heroic country that’s actually so empty inside that we have to regenerate ourselves through violence, make up a story about those nasty Indians attacking our forts we built on their land.

The stories in God Bless America are morally distressed stories, and they’re pretty depressing, and I feel bad about that because I like to write stories that have some humor— which is how I try to cut that moralizing I do. But that’s how I felt the last ten years. I walk around my house renting my garments and tearing my hair out, driving my wife crazy, saying, “What is this country doing? When are we going to grow up? It’s got to stop.” When I’m able to deal with that most effectively is when I’m able to imagine my way into a character contending with that world, a character who’s not me, who’s not an ideologue or a demagogue, but is just a person struggling with the first day back from war, having witnessed the kind of violence and chaos that young men are witness to in these wars, and coming back and somehow trying to deal with it. And he can’t. He’s broken and he’s going to take it out on someone.

The amount of that stuff going on—you don’t hear a lot about it. We’ve developed a narrative that the veterans are noble, wounded warriors. But when he comes back, we don’t listen to what he has to say. Maybe somebody’s paid to listen, but as a culture, we just clap in the air and say, “Thank you for your service,” and put a ribbon on our car and think we’re somehow dealing with somebody who got his legs blown off or had to kill someone or had his best friend killed or was shocked and freaked out by the kind of extreme violence he was exposed to. That strikes me as a fraudulent and immoral way to contend with that. So those stories with veterans in God Bless America are my effort to acknowledge that this is what happens. Like most people, I’m a civilian; I’m just trying to imagine my way into it. Maybe I’m doing a bad job, but I’m making an effort to ask what it would really be like to be nineteen or twenty and to be in that kind of moral chaos. To be in that violent chaos. What would it do to you? Who might it turn you into?

TAYLOR

We were talking earlier today about putting characters in danger. Since you were writing Candyfreak while you were depressed, were you conscious of the same M.O., and thinking, This book is manifesting me as a protagonist in danger?

ALMOND

It’s interesting that I was in the Idaho Candy Company factory and there’s Dave Wagers showing me around, and he’s such a nice guy, and I’m trying to distract myself. But then I have to go back to my hotel room and the reportage is over. If I were a journalist, I’d say, “The factory is so wonderful,” and it’s not really about me. It’s about how wonderful their chocolate pretzels are. And that’s fine for a piece of journalism. But with Candyfreak, part of my job was to turn the camera inward and be like, Also, I’m super depressed and fucked up, and that’s part of the story, too. It’s not the only part, but it’s a part. Maybe for some people it’s an indulgent or uninteresting part. But if I’m going to write about that experience, flying around to these places. I’m not going to ignore the fact that I was in a depression and doing everything I could to try to avoid it. To me, that’s what’s interesting.

And when I talk to the guy who makes Valomilks, of course I’m picking up on the fact that he’s this sort of desperate character who, on the one hand, has this story about how we’re bringing back old time candy and isn’t that awesome and wonderful? But it’s also a pitch he’s making, which he makes to all the journalists who talk to him. And that might be interesting as far as it goes, but it’s not literary. Literary is the sudden moment when a mirror is held up and somebody goes, “Oh, my god.” It’s the reason I left journalism, because the questions weren’t interesting. Who, what, where, when, why—not, Why did this guy fuck up his life? Why did this person have an affair? Why did this person make such bad decisions? What part of him got distorted into this particular evil? Those are the interesting questions, the literary questions.

With Candyfreak, my editor said to start right when we get to the factories. And she was pretty convincing and a good editor; she’s paying attention to the text. But I was like, I need people to know that I’m the person to write this book. And maybe what I was really saying was, “Maybe the book’s partly about me.” That sounded too indulgent to say directly, but I needed people to know that I have this especially pathological relationship to candy. And if they’re going to follow me on this, I want them to know they’re going to be following the craziest person about candy they’ve ever met. That happens to be the truth. I’m not some random reporter. With Candyfreak I wasn’t going to ignore the fact that it was me as a person who was obsessed with this one particular thing. The rock and roll book was the same way. I write out of my obsession. I think that’s the engine of literature. What people are really reading for is some quality of obsession. They have this instinctual sense that the person who’s writing can’t stop talking about this, is super into it—scarily into it. Because everybody has what they’re obsessed with, but you’re sort of taught not to get into it because it seems crazy and makes you weird, and you should be able to get past that and stop collecting Cabbage Patch Kids or whatever your obsession is. But kids are obsessive by nature, and they are the most voracious readers of all. They’ll read a book over and over again. They’re naturally obsessive, and we’re only trained out of it. But we are all, inside, obsessed. It’s just polite society that says, “Stop talking about that band so much. Stop talking about that TV show or website or painting or whatever it is.” I think most great books are obsessive either in their manner of composition or their plot, sometimes both.

STUBSON

We’re all obsessive by nature, but it’s okay because someone else is expressing it?

ALMOND

Right. People find stories or essays pleasing because they realize they’re not the only person who’s crazy, who’s that ruined or stuck in some way, or that joyful about something. I feel like everywhere outside of art, in the world of marketing and the day-to-day, nobody’s really telling the truth, nobody’s really going into any dark, deep, true shit. Everybody’s faking it. But a certain kind of person actually wants to get into that other stuff. It’s more painful to live with that kind of awareness, to be honest with yourself and other people, but I’d rather spend my time on earth that way, even though I’m now going to be poverty stricken and choked by doubt and all the rest of it. I think this is why so many people are getting MFAs and trying to do creative writing, or whatever art they’re trying to do. Because they’re deprived of the capacity to feel that deeply by the culture at large and, significantly, by their families of origin.

I grew up in a family where there was a lot of deep feeling and not much of it ever got expressed. It got expressed mostly through antagonism and neglect and a kind of avoidance of what was really happening. I think that stuff gets into the ground water of most writers. I write about it in This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey. That’s where it comes from, that unrequited desire to say, “No, I’m gonna talk about this shit.” A lot of that is reaction to the fact that you come from a family where that stuff isn’t talked about. Your parents are like, “Are you depressed?” Their take is, Wow, it really would be easier and more efficient if you would just get a business card and a healthcare plan and have a more conventional lifestyle. I’m lucky that my folks are psychoanalysts, because they’re interested in the insides of people. But a lot of the people I encounter don’t have that advantage. And it’s not because their family is trying to silence them. Parents want their kids to have a happy life, and they see the life of an artist as an intense engagement with feelings—oftentimes painful feelings—and the struggle to make ends meet and to be heard in the world, and maybe a lot of disappointment along the way.

BELL

You talk about questions you’re interested in, for example the questions journalism asks as opposed to literary nonfiction. Are those nonfiction questions the same as the ones you approach in your stories, or are those central questions different?

ALMOND

Stories allow you to construct a world that’s completely aimed at exposing those questions. With nonfiction you have to choose your topic and root around through the past to find the moments that really mattered, and then you try to unpack them. But with fiction, my sense of plot is extraordinarily primitive: Find character. What is character afraid of? What does character want? Push character to scary cave or happy cave. When you know you have a character who’s a closet gambling addict and a shrink, then you know how the rest of the story has to go. Of course a famous gambler has to walk into his office, and of course they have to wind up across the poker table at the end of the story. As soon as you know what your character desires and fears, you have some sense of what you’re pushing your character toward—or I do. That’s my conception of plot.

With nonfiction, it’s much more a process of archeology and digging through and saying this moment is important, and so is this history. You can choose where to look around, but you can’t choose to make shit up like you can in a story. You’re engineering the world for maximum emotional impact in a short story. Whether you have the courage to do that or you get lost with all the possibilities is another question. When you have no constraints on reality, you can engineer any world you want, put your character in a room having sex with his secretary and in walks his wife, and boom—you just did it, it’s a dramatically dangerous situation. You can’t do that in nonfiction. You might write about your fantasies or wishes, but you have to write about stuff that actually happened and stuff that happens in your head. You can’t make stuff up to make it more dramatic. If you do, you have to call it what it is—fiction.

TAYLOR

Your flash fiction feels particularly lyrical. Do you approach very short work in a different way?

ALMOND

A lot of those started out as poems. But I realized they weren’t poems—they were little stories, little bursts of empathy. I read flash, and I always have a pleased feeling when a writer has somehow plugged into this exalted way of communicating. I feel like they’re singing to me. In those little stories, I’m just trying to capture moments where something devastating happens. I’m trying to capture five seconds in amber—like my great-aunt being walked across an icy street by this handsome young guy who calls back, “Can I have your number?” in front of his friends—a moment of gallantry and how beautiful that is. Nothing more than that. You don’t need to know her whole life. You don’t need to know where she grew up. This is the moment that matters. That’s what those flash pieces are about.

STUBSON

In Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life you write that songs taught you a lot about story.
Would you talk a bit about expression in song versus expression on the page?

ALMOND

Music allows you to reach feelings you can’t reach by other means. The best writing does that too, although it’s a lot more inconvenient because you have to sit there and pay attention, whereas if a great song comes on, boom, you’re in it. You have an immediate set of memories and associations and an emotional reaction. Reading is harder. In a certain way it’s more fulfilling, because with a piece of writing you have to do much more work than any other art form. You’re an active participant in the construction of these images and so forth. You’re making the movie in your head; I’m just giving you the perspective.

So that’s very exciting, but the reason I listen to a lot of music, and kind of always envied musicians, is that it just gets across much more quickly and intuitively through the primal and instinctual language of melody and rhythm. There’s no comparison. And you could ask almost any writer, at least any writer you’d want to spend time with, “Would you rather be a musician and go on tour and be able to do your crazy ecstatic thing of making music, or would you like to be a writer, sitting in your fucking garret going, Ughhh I hope, I hope, I hope?” That’s not to degrade writing. I think it’s great, I love it, blah, blah, blah. But the thing I learn from listening to songs and listening to albums—these guys want you to feel something and they’re not being coy about it. They’re not writing their little obedient, minimalist short story or earnest autobiographical essay. They’re singing; they’re trying to get across to you emotionally.

I think all young writers think, I have to be taken seriously; people have to know I’m a serious artist; let there be no confusion about that. And they’re more reluctant to get into the real reasons they’re working on a particular piece—to get their characters, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, into that real emotional trouble we talked about. With a good song, you’re in emotional trouble right from the first chord. It’s an ecstatic, immediately emotional experience.

In my writing. I want to construct a ramp to these important emotional moments, slowly drawing the reader in. But I also think that in the most emotional moments of a story, writers are trying to sing. That’s what James Joyce is doing at the end of “The Dead.” That last paragraph is like a beautiful song. That’s what Homer is doing, that’s what Shakespeare is doing, that’s what all great writers are doing—Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Denis Johnson, whoever. They reach these ecstatic moments, and in order to describe the complex, contradictory feelings they’re experiencing, the language has to rise up and become more lyric and sensual and compressed in order to capture that kind of exalted moment, whether it’s grief or ecstasy or some complicated mix of emotions.

Listening to songs makes me wonder why I am not writing towards those moments where you just open your throat and sing. And if I’m not, then what am I doing? Of course, you can be sentimental and screw it up and I hate that kind of writing. It’s playing it safe. If the character isn’t at some point in real trouble, if the language doesn’t reach up into a sort of lyric register, what is the point? I’m not saying that’s how all writing should be, but that’s my feeling about it. If you’re not writing for those lyric moments, what are you writing for?

BELL

Are those germs for story? Do you know the moment, or do you start with the character and get there?

ALMOND

I usually start with characters and I have some sense of what they want or what they’re after, what they’re frightened of. And the rest of it, at least to the extent that you can, you’re trying to let your artistic unconscious steer. You might have broader sense of, Okay, Aus is a closet gambler and that’s got to be revealed somehow, and Sharp—I didn’t know who Sharp was—he walks in. I like that he’s got an attitude, I like that he’s sharp and jagged and well- defended, but I didn’t know he was going to start talking about his kid and reach this moment where his wife is on the brink of leaving. That’s just stuff—I don’t even know how to explain it. As you’re writing the character, suddenly that’s who he is, that’s what pops out. Undoubtedly it comes out of my own preoccupations and obsessions, but I’m not trying to figure that out as I’m writing. I’m just hoping my artistic unconscious is going to feed those moments where characters come apart against the truth of themselves.

You can engineer the plot to an extent, but the lines themselves and the journey that a particular character takes toward that moment should be a mystery to you. That’s the joy of writing fiction. There’s this mysterious thing that takes over. And to some extent, nonfiction as well. I didn’t know that Candyfreak would lead me in this, that, or the other direction. That’s part of the pleasure of writing. If you know it all already you start to feel self-conscious and predetermined. There should be lots of stuff you don’t know. That’s what allows you to surprise yourself and keep a preserved sense of mystery in your work. Your artistic unconscious has to deliver so much to you. It’s way more powerful than your conscious efforts to jury-rig things.

STUBSON

Can you consciously train your subconscious so that you can make those kinds of discoveries?

ALMOND

All you can do is be honest about the things that stick in your craw, without trying to psychoanalyze them or understand why. As a nonfiction writer, Susan Orlean becomes completely obsessed with orchids, and she just follows it. She doesn’t wonder, Why am I interested in this. What is it about? She just follows the trail. Can somebody teach you to be that way? No. You’ve got to find it within yourself. I tell my students to write about the stuff that matters the most deeply to them. In fiction, you don’t always know you’re doing that; you have to sneak up on it.

I wrote this story years ago called “Among the Ik.” It’s in My Life in Heavy Metal and it’s based on something that happened to me. I went to visit my friend Tom in Maine, whose mother had just died. Also, he’d just had his first child, a baby girl. I walked in the house and there was the baby and the baby’s mom and Tom’s brother-in-law and sister in front of the fire, and they were having tangerines. This beautiful tableau. But I walked into the kitchen first and there was Tom’s dad, and Tom introduced me to him, this grieving widower, and he’s nervous and for whatever reason, rather than allowing me to move into where the action is, where the new life is, he nervously cornered me and found out I was an adjunct. He was thinking, I guess, about when he was an adjunct, and he told me this story about having to identify the dead body of one of his students.

It was a weird story, but as a fiction writer you’re always on the lookout for that. It stuck in my craw. I don’t know why it did, it just did. I sensed that he was frightened to integrate with the rest of the family. So for whatever reason, this lonely guy telling me this story about a dead body gets in my craw and I start writing about it. I’m not investigating why. I just know it’s stuck in my craw and that usually is the signal to me that I need to write. So I write this story and I change a bunch of things—he’s a poet in real life, but I make him an anthropologist. My artistic unconscious feeds me this memory of when I was in second or third grade and we watched this film about a tribe somewhere called the Ik, and how the environment there is so unremittingly harsh that parents sometimes leave their children behind. It haunted me for years, rolling around my subconscious, and up it pops the moment I needed it in this story, when I’m writing about parents and kids and families and how they connect emotionally or are unable to connect emotionally.

I finish the story and when My Life in Heavy Metal comes out, my dad sends me a long note saying, “Oh, gee, Steve, your mother and I really like the stories; we’re very, very proud of you, and about that story ‘Among the Ik’—I just want to tell you that I never realized I was such a distant father.” And my immediate reaction was, What are you talking about, Dad? That story’s not…about…you. It’s about that episode that got stuck in my craw. When I wrote it, I didn’t sit at the keyboard and wonder why I’d been thinking about it so much. I just chased the story.

I don’t think you can train your mind. But you can spend time at the keyboard and you can try to be relaxed when you’re at the keyboard and write about the things that you’re preoccupied with and be as unselfconscious and as unremittingly honest as you can be. That’s about all you can do. I don’t know of any push-ups for your artistic unconscious. I just know that the best work I’m able to do is when I’m writing about stuff I’m obsessed with, especially with fiction, when I have no idea what I’m doing; my characters are acting on my behalf and my obsessions are disguised and I just sneak up on them.

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Major Jackson’s poetry is clear, fluent, and musical, sometimes relying on formal structure, sometimes referencing pop culture, and often investigating how seemingly disparate subjects can interact and inform each other. He asserts that a poem “becomes a kind of time capsule,” and as such, can contain references to both Kanye West and ancient Greek mythology, as illustrated in his poem “Letter to Brooks,” when Jackson writes: “O, Orpheus grant the skills to stir / the dead like Kanye mixing music with fire, I … Rescue the underground so they can aim higher.” Here, the poet’s use of high­ brow and lowbrow references also connects the present to the past.

Jackson is the author of three collections, the first of which, Leaving Saturn, won the Cave Canem Prize, and was also a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. A former member of the Dark Room Collective, and current Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson experiments with form in his work, without sacrificing the vernacular of the Philadelphia neighborhood he grew up in. As Andrew Dubois pointed out in a review of Jackson’s second book, Hoops, his “greatest strength … is his ability to marry without anxiety the traditional forms of the English poetic tradition with … the human concerns of an urban, black population.”

Jackson’s poetry draws a road map from classic traditions to the heart of the inner city, always with an ear attuned to the blues and jazz rhythms he grew up with. Whether he’s inhabiting the persona of Sun­ Ra or writing an extended epistolary homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, his poems combine striking imagery with muscular, fluid rhythms.

We met with Mr. Jackson at a deli in Spokane one afternoon last April, where we talked about Kim Kardashian, building community, and the seduction of sound.

CASEY PATRICK

How do pop culture references interact with more highbrow references in your poems?

MAJOR JACKSON

I’ve never made distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, although some would say I come from lowbrow. The education I received made everything open and available to me. No one said, “Although we’re teaching you Shakespeare right now, that’s not yours. That belongs to the Brits.” To learn about Plato’s Republic—to read Plato’s Republic­—eventually it’s all kind of absorbed into your DNA, and eventually it becomes part of how you order and shape the world around you. When you put those bricks of intellectual inheritance and knowledge into a form, it creates a certain dynamism, the melding of cultures, and it’s also a nod to the past. Allusions—whether they’re Greek or biblical or whatever—create a bridge to the reader. If something’s in a poem that a reader’s familiar with, they’re on stable ground. And if they’re not familiar, they might seek out whatever’s being referred to, and it might enhance their reading.

AILEEN KEOWN VAUX

Is it optimistic to hope that readers will perform their own research?

JACKSON

I think there’s always a bit of optimism on the poet’s part. Some of my friends who read Anne Carson—a classicist, a scholar—feel intimidated by her, but I believe one of the brilliant strategies in her work is how she makes classical figures contemporary, creating an opportunity for us to look at them as human and fallible. She asks what basic kinds of emotions did Eurydice deal with, or Pygmalion, who wants to sculpt the perfect wife. We exercise this wonderful power as writers; we get to impose meaning and import on the world around us, including how it relates to popular culture. If I write a poem about Kim Kardashian, she might not be the familiar name in forty years that she is today, but my poem will help continue her life. That’s what happened with Marilyn Monroe as a cultural icon. There were enough people who wrote songs about her, or poems, or who created image of her that her story didn’t get lost. We get to shape the future in that regard. We push our present day passions forward in a poem, and the poem becomes a kind of time capsule.

KEOWN VAUX

Do you think incorporating a variety of references into your poems indicates an active searching for a variety of audiences?

JACKSON

If I am doing that, that audience would be geeks like me, people who get kind of high off of history, pop culture, hip-hop, Greek mythology, people who’ve traveled to the places I’ve traveled, who’ve listened to the music I’ve listened to. It’s more like I’m creating a community around me, across boundaries of class, race, gender.

KRISTIN GOTCH

In an interview with Green Mountain Review, you talked about feeling debilitated after the success of Leaving Saturn and the subsequent fear of letting your readers down. Once you build that community around you, how does it change with each book you publish? Do you still experience that psychological connection?

JACKSON

I guess I do, to some extent. First books normally don’t gain the kind of attention that Leaving Saturn gained, and I felt fortunate and blessed, but I also felt like I needed to keep writing similar poems. It was like having a pancake house that everybody comes to every morning, and every morning they want the same order. Do I change the menu? Do I change the recipe? My impulse was to go forward and be loyal to my own aesthetic and emotional and intellectual interests. And if readers don’t follow, the hope is that other readers will appreciate the different types of poems I’m writing. I know that people might want what you gave them before. But I was only one book in, and I kind of felt a shift at that time. And then I had a really drastic shift from Hoops to Holding Company, and at that point I didn’t care.

KEOWN VAUX

What happened between Hoops and Holding Company?

JACKSON

Divorce, heartbreak, falling in love, travel, reading poets I hadn’t read before—Cavafy, for example. I thought the poems in Leaving Saturn were written out of a certain kind of urgency. These new poems were, too, maybe even more so. But some of what helped drive that newer work wasn’t connected to what was going on in my life. Some of it was just being kind of restless with poetry. How could I teach myself something about language and art?

PATRICK

In Hoops, we see a continuation of poems that we first saw in Leaving Saturn. Would you talk about that evolution?

JACKSON

Well, the poems weren’t finished for me. “Hoops” was meant to be a sequence poem, as was “Urban Renewal.” In fact, I had imagined my first book not being Leaving Saturn, which was my graduate thesis, but being a book filled with “Urban Renewal” poems, modeled off of poets I was reading who did similar kinds of poems—Robert Lowell and Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott. All three men put out books that had these sixteen-to-twenty-line poems that felt like extended sonnets. So I starred in that sequence and wrote it for Leaving Saturn when I was a graduate student, and then I wrote some more of chose in Hoops. Now I’ve gone back to writing “Urban Renewal” poems. I want to fulfill chat dream of writing a book of only “Urban Renewal” poems. I’m not sure how they’ll be received, but that’s my mountain to climb.

GOTCH

All of your books seem to be in dialogue with one another, but you’re also in dialogue with different poets, living and dead. Is that emblematic of your own work, or do you see that something poetry does in general?

JACKSON

I come from the African-American literary tradition, particularly the Black Arcs Movement of the 1960s, which influenced me when I was an undergrad at Temple University. I studied with one of those poets, Sonia Sanchez. As someone who’s explicitly interested in social justice and peace, I admired the social function that particular poetry seemed to take on—and part of that project, writing poems that would raise awareness, was in the tradition of the praise poem. So you have poems to Malcolm X and John Coltrane and Frederick Douglass. These are historical figures. But are they likely to be taught in schools? When I was younger, probably not. The poem became a vehicle to raise awareness. And when Sonia Sanchez gave readings, before she read, she would just—in a kind of roll call, in this trance-like way—call out all these political leaders, artists, musicians, poets, and I loved that, because poetry emerges out of a long tradition of praise, but, historically, praise poems were for the fallen dead, a soldier or a great general, and what she celebrated were creative, imaginative individuals. And then I heard the wonderful Polish poet Adam Zagajewski talk about entering the conversation of what it means to be human, and that concept became important to me. One time, a man came up to me at a festival where I was attending a friend’s reading , and he said, “You’re Major Jackson ,” and I said, “Yeah, and you must be a poet,” and he said, “No, I’m a counselor. I run a group for men who batter their wives. But I open every session with your poem ‘How to Listen.”‘ And I was just floored by that. Because I imagined my readers as other poets, or at least as a kind of poetry reading public. The fact that poems can enter into other realms of our lives made me think a little more seriously about chat conversation of what it means to be human.

KEOWN VAUX

You’ve talked about how art influences community, specifically how it functions among communities of artists. There’s a line in “Letter to Brooks” where you call Thomas Sayers Ellis your Ezra Pound, in reference to Ellis’s role in the Dark Room Collective. Can you talk about how these writing collective form and if physical proximity plays a role?

JACKSON

What triggers poetic movements is often a reaction to some sort of dominant poetics. And on other occasions, as in the case with Pound, there’s a dynamic figure who’s politicizing his or her particular aesthetic agenda. I mean, Pound was the manifesto king. I guess with the Dark Room Collective, it was proximity, but what I love about that group is that it was founded by readers who were admirers of a tradition in American literature, or a wing of American literature, that wasn’t being acknowledged, at least visibly in Cambridge when Thomas [Sayers Ellis] and Sharan [Strange] and Janice [Lowe] were students in the Boston/ Cambridge area. And then it kind of widened—I mean, I was down in Philadelphia, Natasha [Trethewey] was kind of close, in Amherst, Massachusetts. So, yes, geography can be important. The thing with the Black Mountain Poets is that it was [Charles] Olson who was there, for the most part, as that dynamic figure. [Robert] Creeley wasn’t there­—Creeley would come later, Denise Levertov never set foot on campus, so it was orchestrated slightly differently than other groups.

PATRICK

Why do you think these groups form so consistently throughout history?

JACKSON

I think it’s out of common interest. Two years in an MFA program isn’t enough. I somehow landed with poets in New Jersey—and I adore all poets, let me just say. But there’s the poets around Princeton and then there’s the southern Jersey poets, and I think we just naturally become cliques. Like I was saying earlier, in terms of reacting to dominant aesthetics, that was very real in the ’50s, when we had a reaction against Modernism and then swung way back in the other direction, with a certain kind of formalism, and then those people were in the academic institutions and became the granters of awards, deciding who got published , and so there had to be a reaction against that.

GOTCH

When these groups form, there seems to be the risk of building expectations. In an article you published in the Boston Review about Countee Cullen, you said he wanted to be read “as a poet, not a Negro poet.” Do you see readers having those same sort of expectations from African-American writers today—or any groups of writers?

JACKSON

Less so today, let’s put it that way. I think what we’re realizing is that there are not homogenous kinds of experiences for ethnic and racial groups in America. There’s many different ways of being a woman, or being an African American. In fact, I like to believe that we’re widening our understanding of what a human being is with these particular markers. How do people both refract and individuate their lives as humans—people who are men, women, white, black, Asian, Latina, octogenarians, teens, transgendered? I had a student who was a female-to-male transgender, an honors thesis student, and I loved the poems he wrote. They were so rich in humanity. One poem was about being young and teaching the girls how to pee standing up. Someone else has probably had that experience, and if I think about the canon as a collection of selves, I want that poem in the Norton Anthology, so that, again, we have a wider understanding of what it means to be human, and don’t so easily fear and hate what’s unfamiliar. With the wide range of poets writing today—I’m hoping we’ll see writing in ten, fifteen years that will be more representative of the rich community of selves that we are.

PATRICK

Understanding what it means to be human seems like it would necessarily involve the political. In an interview with Third Coast, you said, “I do not believe in safe subjects.” Are there any subjects you find too dangerous or off-limits?

JACKSON

You’ve heard of Minnesota-nice. I think about how there are just some things that aren’t discussed, and I see what that does to a family and to individuals. I want to believe that there’s no topic that’s off-limits, and I do believe that all things come to light anyway, at some point. It may be years down the line, but at some point, we see it. What’s great about a poem is that you can go to it with a certain amount of freedom from those temporal and spatial kind of restraints. Sharon Olds told me about an exercise she received from Muriel Rukeyser when she was young. Muriel said, “Write the poem you would never show anyone.”

KEOWN VAUX

And Sharon Olds went on to make a career of that.

JACKSON

Exactly. It takes a kind of courage, a kind of vision and courage. Some people dismiss poems grounded in personal experience that might seem a little too revealing, but you don’t have to read that poet. Just don’t read them. Some people appreciate the personal, though, because we too often live our lives in silence, even when there’s suffering and anguish. And the poem, I’ve realized, really does become a vehicle, a life raft to some extent.

KEOWN VAUX

Sharon Olds has an interesting relationship with her readership, because a lot of people want to read her work as purely autobiographical. Is that something you’ve faced, as well?

JACKSON

I had a neighbor who was a mental health counselor, and one day he said to me, “Major, I read your poems. I see that you’ve had a traumatic life,” and I thought, Dude, you know nothing about me if you’re going to read my life through my poems. It’s too easy to make a one-to-one correlation between a life and a poem. Someone who wants to do that­—a critic, a reader—does not realize the nuances of composition that may transform what was once fact into fiction. And poets, too, exercise their imagination and play with the facts so that they’ll serve the poem, rather than serving up a transcript of their life. One of the things I found frustrating when I read Ian Hamilton’s biography of Robert Lowell was his strategy to start with the poems and then connect them to what was going on in Lowell’s life. It seems dangerous to try to do that, because if we’re writing about our lives, there are things that are being translated­—the language itself is going to play a role in that transfiguration.

I think if l attend to the aesthetic decisions of a poem, if l look at my line breaks, if l think about metaphoric language versus overly descriptive language, I believe—and I’m aiming for a certain kind of cadence, a certain kind of sound—if l tend to those pleasures, because that’s the first order of seduction for a reader, the aesthetic dimension—if I tend to that, then naturally the poem is going to evolve away from whatever “facts” I bring to the page. I tell my students that they can play with a reader’s expectations of who’s speaking. If they’re thinking they’re getting too much of the self, then do a little bit of cross-dressing, you know? Or, truly, write out of some other speaker’s experience.

KEOWN VAUX

What do you get out of writing in someone else’s voice? What changes in the writing process?

JACKSON

Stepping into someone’s shoes creates moments of empathy—and the relief or freedom from having to come up with a subject, particularly if you’re used to writing about your own life, or turning to your own experiences. Writing about someone else can also invite other kinds of intelligences to go to work in a poem. When you write about other people, you’re the historian, you’re the psychologist, trying to figure out motivations. Sometimes I don’t know what motivates me to do the things I do, but I can assess someone else’s behavior and sequence of actions, and theorize about why they did what they did.

KEOWN VAUX

In other interviews, you’ve mentioned place as a vehicle for getting readers to think critically about their own cities, their own towns.

JACKSON

And place is a convenient way of talking about the interior.

PATRICK

Philadelphia appears a lot in your work, though you’ve lived in other places. Has living elsewhere changed how you view Philly?

JACKSON

I think we create our paradises wherever we are. Some people have a difficult time seeing what’s special about where they’re at. When I moved to Eugene, Oregon, my affection for Philly grew. It was almost like I was asleep, and in the waking moments of writing I could reflect back on those times. I could almost smell the rain on the sidewalk, or I’d recall my mother driving along the Schuylkill River, on Lincoln Drive and Kelly Drive, the windows down. Those are foundational experiences, and I guess there’s always a longing for Philly. But it’s been the other way around, too, in that Philly has allowed me to discover my other sacred places. Cape Cod is one of them; the Northwest is important to me. New Orleans is important to me, too. Having lived there, I try to go back every two or three years. So, yeah, I’ve been in Vermont eleven years, but Philly still excites me.

KEOWN VAUX

How do you define a sacred space?

JACKSON

A sense of safety, a sense of my body feeling like—I’m about to get all mystical, but when I land in certain places, there’s a kind of calm, a lack of anxiety. The people are decent. There’s a certain regard for life in all of its manifestations, the natural world and other human beings. And of course, these places are all over the world. I’m just starting to be able to have the means to visit other places and have those same sorts of experiences. I feel like it should almost be mandatory that before you go to college, you drive cross-country with maybe two or three other people. And maybe you do volunteer work where you get to know people, not just driving through and stopping at diners and filling up your gas tank, but really getting to know people. Just imagine all the connections you could make.

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Jean Valentine has characterized Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s work as a “fierce homage to the body and to the spirit.” Landscape may have influenced the intensity of this homage; Goldberg grew up in the harsh Arizona desert, where she currently resides.

“Death is the eternal problem,” Goldberg says. “I can’t write without that awareness—to me it’s constant…. How can you love something and not mourn the fact that it’s going to disappear?” Even when not overtly dealing with death, Goldberg’s work concerns itself with the mortality of humans and the natural environments that shape them.

Goldberg is the author of The Book of Accident (2006) and Lie Awake Lake (2005). Her collection of prose poems, Egypt from Space, is forthcoming. Other titles include Body Betrayer (1991), In the Badlands of Desire (1993), Never Be the Horse (1999), and Twentieth Century Children (1999), a limited edition chapbook. She has been awarded the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, The Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Award, The University of Akron Press Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and her work has also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry series. Goldberg holds an MFA from Vermont College and an MA from Arizona State University, where she was mentored by Norman Dubie. Presently, she directs the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

Goldberg was interviewed over lunch at Europa Restaurant in Spokane.

ZACHARY VINEYARD: What kind of progression do you see from your earlier work to your later?

BECKIAN FRITZ GOLDBERG: I think that’s always a hard question for a writer, because you don’t think about your past work that much; at least I don’t. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and some things hold up for you. Some things, you can only see what’s wrong with them—like, Why did I write that line? What was I thinking? Or sometimes you look back and go, Wow, how did I do that? It looks like I have a brain!

I try to take more risks, push it, because I have a low boredom threshold. And so I always like to try things I haven’t tried before, try to get away with things I haven’t gotten away with before. I trained very early to use narrative in my work because it didn’t come naturally. So I think my earlier work—I could be wrong—has a little more narrative in it, because I worked so hard at doing that. But my natural bent is lyric, and I’ve felt more freedom, I suppose, as I’ve gone along, to go with that.

SARAH HUDGENS: Can you identify certain risks in the new volumes, The Book of Accident and Lie Awake Lake?

GOLDBERG: The Book of Accident had been kind of bounced around, because it had a contract with another publisher, and that didn’t work. So I went back to Akron because they published Never Be the Horse. It’s just now coming out, but it’s been there for probably three or four years. I feel lucky because I suppose if I still had it, I’d just—I get sick of things real quick. So The Book of Accident is very different. I remember being pissed off I couldn’t write short poems. Or I didn’t think I could write short poems. I’d look at people who could write a twelve-line poem and it was a complete thing—it wasn’t a fragment—and I was thinking, Why can’t I do that?

Lie Awake Lake was written shortly after my father’s death. I was staying in Jean Valentine’s apartment in New York. It was winter and I was sick as a dog. But she had an old typewriter and I was so tired that I would just write these short things, and I didn’t have the heart to edit them so I put them away. Then I took them out later and decided to keep them.

In terms of the language and things—there is a “purple scrotum” in The Book of Accident that I’m very proud of. I get some flack for that, but, you know, it had to be. I don’t know exactly if it’s purple—I don’t know, there’s some image in there. I like to surprise myself. You write and stuff comes out and the first thing your little editor head says is, You can’t say that, and as soon as my editor says that, I go, Oh, yeah, I’m ready. Yeah, it’s on!

GRACE DANBORN: Your work can be characterized by those surprising images. Not just the scrotum but other uncommon comparisons, like in Never Be the Horse when you compare a nebula to the steam of a rabbit’s breath on a cracked cellar window. How do you allow yourself such free imagistic range of the imagination, but still maintain a tone of intimacy with the reader?

GOLDBERG: The imagery itself is probably something I’ve always been able to do, because it’s the way I think. Anywhere but poetry it would probably get me into trouble. But that’s the first natural poetic impulse I had. It took me a while to learn how to control images and not just throw them at the reader, but pace them and have the image come at the right time.

HUDGENS: And the voice and tone are still so intimate.

GOLDBERG: Poetry should be intimate. I have to believe I’m talking to someone who’s listening, and who’s like me. It is partly historical. When I read poems and feel like they’re talking to me—that’s what I want to do. I get bored with over-intellectualized stuff. Yeah, sure, we all have a mind. Big deal. Wow, so you’re brilliant. I don’t have a lot of patience for that. Not that stuff like that isn’t any good, or isn’t valid. I’m just not interested.

HUDGENS: In an online interview, you said that writers have to know the audience doesn’t care about their feelings. Do you still hold that to be true? How does that work?

GOLDBERG: You have to make them care. I don’t know how you do that. I think you have to give them enough of your sensibility, touch some sort of common ground first. Part of that is voice. If you read Nazim Hikmet, the Turkish poet, his voice—of course I’ve only read him in translation because I can’t read Turkish, but who the hell can? Turks can—his voice is very immediate. I think you have to surrender to what you’re writing. It really has to—I hate to use this phrase because it makes me want to retch—come from the heart. But it really does.

DANBORN: Are you risking sentimentality, then? If it “comes from the heart,” are you afraid of being characterized that way by readers?

GOLDBERG: No, I’m too weird. [Laughs.] Sentimentality is usually bad because it’s unearned emotion. You know, people writing about how bummed they are that they broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. So what? If you tell them about the relationship to the point where you share the history a little, then they start to care. That’s the balance you have to strike to make that intimate connection with the reader. And sometimes you just don’t know; you have to try to be as true to the poem as you can and hope it works.

HUDGENS: Do you, then, equate the writer with the speaker? Or do you see your speakers as separated one degree?

GOLDBERG: It’s one degree removed, because it’s artifice. It’s not like me talking to you now. It’s art, sculpted and formed and thought about. It’s not spontaneous. Even though an occasional verse will be. But you always have the option to go back and tweak it.

VINEYARD: You’re starting to work in the prose poem, and you’ve previously published other formal poetry, such as the crown of sonnets in Never Be the Horse. Has form in your poetry changed as you further trust your poetic instincts?

GOLDBERG: I always trust what I’m trying to do. Form is nothing I think about in advance. I work a lot on the basis of sound. Sound will tell me its form. The crown of sonnets was sort of an exception. I didn’t plan it. I had serious writer’s block and was trying to write my way out of it. I’d had this idea that connected the devil and the sonnet form for a long time. I was writing it down and I was thinking, That’s kind of iambic, okay. And it turned out to be a sonnet and a half, and I thought, I can’t have a sonnet and a half. So I said, Okay, I’ll go for two. Well, then I had a line left over. I remembered my old forms class, from way back, and thought, Yeah, there’s something where you just keep going with it. So I did, and it was miserable. I would be up nights working on two lines.

But I don’t consciously approach something thinking it’s going to be in a certain form. I do go through phases, though. I had a desire to write short poems for a while, which usually means I end up writing long ones, since that’s the way things work. When I wrote Never Be the Horse, I went for longer, more raggedy-ass lines, because I was like, Why do lines have to be all tight? So I thought I’d just let it roll, and wherever the line breaks, screw it. The two books that followed that are shorter-lined, more lyric, with more space in the poems. I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing.

HUDGENS: So if sound dictates form for you, would you also say that sound dictates meaning or content?

GOLDBERG: A lot of the time, yes. When I’m looking for the rest of the line that’s not there yet, I know exactly how it’s supposed to sound. I know, DUM da da DUM dum dum. So I have to find the words to fit that. Obviously, it has to make some kind of sense. But I will actually hear vowel sounds and things that need to be there. That has every bit as much to do with it as what I’m saying.

I think sound is the hypnotic force in a poem. If that’s broken, things fly apart. I’m much more aware of it now. My poems usually start with hearing the line. Or I hear a certain tone, or something I can’t even articulate until the poem acquires its body. If I can’t hear it, I can’t write it. I can’t think it. And that’s frustrating. Because I will, when I’m writing, try to think it. You want to finish the goddamn poem, so you can go have your coffee and your cigarette, you know? And I’m not allowed to smoke in the house.

HUDGENS: When you’re reading poetry in which the main thrust isn’t sound, do you value it less?

GOLDBERG: Probably. I suppose that if I look at the poets I’m most attracted to, that I return to, probably they have that quality. It’s not that I can’t appreciate the craft of something that’s not quite as musical, but it doesn’t hold my interest. I think sound is an important quality in poems, and I think all great poems have it. It’s an issue with language poetry: some of it’s just—you know, I’ve got TV to watch. Hey, Law and Order’s on, man, don’t waste my fucking time!

DANBORN: You said that trusting sound allows you to play with more surreal images. But are the images themselves ever the genesis of a poem, before being shaped by sound? Do you ever see a rabbit or an olive and say, “I want to write that image”?

GOLDBERG: Usually one thing’s there first, like maybe the rabbit. And then my mind goes off to, what was it? An olive. I like that. Martinis, yeah. My mind will leap to that association. If I’m really on, I’ll hear it and do the association at the same time. Those are the good poet days, where you’re just on, just rocking. Sometimes it’s just a little scribble off to the side of the margin: “Get to the olive.” But if I can’t find the sound for it, I probably won’t do it. The challenge is to make the image make sense to the reader. An associative sense, not a logical one.

My thought process is in image. So the sound will determine how the image is played out. Or sometimes, I’ll go with the sound and that’s where the surprises come from.

DANBORN: Like a horse suddenly starts talking—

GOLDBERG: Yeah, that was kind of a shock. That was one of those moments: A talking horse? Man, you can’t do that!

VINEYARD: In your work there’s so much repetition and recurring image—I think of the last poem in Lie Awake Lake. How does repetition function for you?

GOLDBERG: I suppose the honest answer is I don’t know. Part of it is, again, sound, because the right amount of repetition is musical and gives weight to certain moments. I think it’s a natural impulse of language, too—kids repeat things all the time, obsessively, until you want to slap them. And I like it when I read things that have repetition. I guess it’s one way of keeping the reader in the poem, keeping me in the poem, but it can be overdone. Somebody pointed out to me once that in one book I tended to repeat things in threes, so I was like, I’m not going to do that anymore. You don’t want to fall into a mannerism.

DANBORN: Gertrude Stein suggests that repetition without change is death, but repetition with modulation is insistency, is life. Does your repetition work in a similar way?

GOLDBERG: I am conscious of what Stein said. I don’t want to repeat just to repeat. And even throughout the course of a book, it’s not entirely conscious. Like this last book, there’s a lot of water in it. I didn’t start out thinking, I’m going to do water stuff. When I became conscious of it, I didn’t want to do it every other line or anything, but I became aware there was a lot of water in the book. It seemed right. But that was unique to that book. Never Be the Horse was drier, more desert.

VINEYARD: The desert figures prominently in your work, often as an adversarial character infused with intention—

GOLDBERG: Well, it is. I mean, the desert hates you. It doesn’t want you to live there. It is not a hospitable environment, and you feel that. Especially in Arizona. The summers there, which are six months long, are like living in an oven. And you get used to it in a way, but you’re aware of how much it hurts to go outside. Though I do have moments of tenderness toward the desert. It’s like when you have a worthy enemy—there’s a close relationship even though it’s not a friendship.

I think a lot of people in Arizona feel that adversity. What bothers me is the people who—it’s all becoming gated communities and cement, so the desert is disappearing—get pissed off when javelina, which aren’t really pigs but more like big rats, eat their flowers. They were there first. I have coyotes running all over my property. They run across the driveway and look at me like, What the fuck are you doing? And I’m fine with that as long as they don’t eat my cats. We had a bobcat for a while, that liked to sun on our roof. And that was kind of freaky. I called him Bobby because I am so original with names. And you know, if you leave them alone they’ll leave you alone. Javelina, too. They’re blind as bats but they can smell you. They like cigarettes, too. I was out on the balcony smoking one night—two in the morning, whatever—and a big one came up. I really think he was attracted to the smoke.

I have also noticed that there is some sort of geographical thing happening in Egypt from Space. I don’t know exactly why yet. Well, the book is titled that because I saw a satellite photo. You know how they can take photos now of the earth, and there’s some picture that’s supposedly Egypt, but it looks like shadow and scar? And I suppose that got me thinking about view of places and how only in recent generations have we had that ability.

I saw an art program where they talked about the Eiffel Tower being built, how people were able to go up high and look at stuff for the first time. You know, people weren’t flying in airplanes and they didn’t have skyscrapers, and that changed their perspective in more ways than one—in art and also in their ways of thinking.

HUDGENS: You’ve characterized The Book of Accident as a meta-narrative. How does meta-narrative work in that book, and how has your approach to narrative changed throughout your work?

GOLDBERG: I don’t think about narrative much anymore. I just had fun in that book. It’s not really narrative, and my editor told me it should maybe have more narrative. It’s a series of lyrics and recurrent characters that form a narrative arc. But there’s not a story, no action that leads to an event and then drops off. It’s little glimpses into characters in a particular time and place, which is not quite real—fictional. I like that because I guess I got tired of ending with a pile of shit that I knew was connected. But trying to figure out how to order a manuscript is so awful. It was nice to work with something that took care of that for me, at least to a degree. Not that I didn’t shuffle and change, but at least there was some impetus there. In Lie Awake Lake there is obviously a central event that generated the meditations and the lyrics but there is no narrative as far as I can tell. There are glimpses of things that happened to my father, but it is almost all interior space.

HUDGENS: And you said earlier that in your first couple of volumes, you forced the narrative because you thought you should be writing in a narrative form—

GOLDBERG: Well, I knew it was a weak point with me. You start with your strengths—I could give you an image every line, but that doesn’t make a poem. So, I had to find some other stuff to put in there. It was a good grounding. Now, I use narrative tools all the time. I don’t like poems that have no time, no place, nothing. Narrative also freed me up to take the lyric further; and ultimately, given my bent, that’s where I wanted to go. I was not going to become the narrative poet. I think there is great power in a really good story, but I don’t think in stories. I think that’s the difference between poets and fiction writers. We look at something and think, That would be a great poem. They look at it and think, Great story. I don’t see the story.

HUDGENS: I don’t know that all poets think only in images—some of us also think in stories—

GOLDBERG: Yes, there are great narrative poets. A lot of Larry Levis is narrative. Things happen, he goes places. He screws her, she screws him. And that’s terrific. It’s just a matter of how you see and what you’re comfortable with. I tend to think in images and that’s probably why I’m a lyric poet. But I wanted to be able to tell a story if I needed to. It just didn’t come naturally to me, though it’s easier now. I’m more comfortable with what constitutes a story. I think I was inhibited by my initial idea of what narrative was. And I had to learn that it’s more flexible than I thought.

A lot of times when you first write, I think you’re afraid to have a line that’s not beautiful. And that was me. I had to do fireworks every line or it wasn’t working. People had to slap me around and say, “That’s not going to work, that’s just masturbation.”

HUDGENS: Who are some of your favorite contemporary poets?

GOLDBERG: Jean Valentine. I just adore her work. I love Michael Burkard. Those are the people who, as soon as I find a new poem by them, I’m on it. It’s like I want to suck their brains out. I love Charles Wright. I’d like to have his children. Actually, I want to have Marvin Gaye’s children, but it’s too late. I love a lot of poets. I’m a big Gerald Stern fan, a Philip Levine fan.

HUDGENS: Are there specific poets you look to for inspiration to start writing?

GOLDBERG: Sometimes I have to read my way into writing again because my brain just flat-lines. I read a lot of European poets. I love Rilke but he doesn’t help me write because he’s just too fucking good. After I read him I want to off myself. I like Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak. A translation of his poems called, My Sister-Life, is just a knock-out book.

I don’t think Michael Burkard is getting any props. They’re all writing about Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, or John Ashbery—which is fine. Larry Levis—goddamn, I think he is phenomenal. I’m in the pits that he died, but so is he: damn man, all that cocaine fucked me up. I think he was the great poet of this generation. Poets won’t forget him. I have yet to see a critic write anything, which is an odd dichotomy in this culture. The poets who become well known are the critically acclaimed but not necessarily the ones who inspire poets. Ultimately, both types of poets will survive and their work will survive, because the critics decide who gets into the Norton Anthology, and because the rest of us keep reading really cool poems. I think Levis’ work will continue to be read.

DANBORN: Has your treatment of death changed as your books have changed?

GOLDBERG: I don’t know if it’s changed. I mean, death is the eternal problem. I don’t want to do it, I don’t want other people to do it, I don’t like it. So I suppose I’m trying to find a way out or an answer to why it happens.

I don’t know if I’ve come to any conclusions, but I can’t write without that awareness—to me it’s constant. Poems that don’t acknowledge that seem dishonest to me. How can you love something and not mourn the fact that it’s going to disappear? To me that’s the essential question of the human condition, and if you avoid it, I don’t think you can write an honest poem. I think that’s the reason that essay—I think by Donald Hall—says, “There’s no great poem that is simply happy.” It doesn’t mean there isn’t joy or celebration in poems, but it’s always in the face of the fact of loss.

HUDGENS: But there seems to be a tension between that sentiment and a desire to transcend the body—there are instances where you refer to the body as the “hell of form” or write “somebody has to stay behind and be the body.” So there seems also to be a yearning for death.

GOLDBERG: No, it’s a yearning for the opposite. I’d like to wipe out death altogether. I’m not buying it. And I can’t arrive at a theological belief that allows me to be okay with it. I wish I could—it’d be nice to believe we die and go to heaven and float around happy all the time, but I suspect not. So I fight it and it informs just about everything I do. I don’t think it would be that way if I didn’t love so many things. There’s so much beauty and wonderful stuff. As Woody Allen would say, Death just spoils the whole party.

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Widely regarded as one of America’s foremost living essayists, Phillip Lopate’s publications include three books of personal essays (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body), two poetry collections, and other works on teaching and on film criticism. He is a frequent contributor to such periodicals as Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and The New York Times Book Review, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and other honors. Phillip Lopate is also known as a first-rate teacher of nonfiction writing; currently he holds the Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches for the MFA program at Bennington College. He visits with interviewers Sarah Coomber, Bridgit Hildreth, and Travis Manning on a recent visit to Spokane.

HILDRETH: We are interested in your view of the state of creative nonfiction. What styles of literature are on their way out? What styles are on their way in? I know John Keeble, Eastern Washington University creative writing professor, hates the title “creative nonfiction,” so if you want to address personal narrative instead. . .

LOPATE: I think I prefer the term “literary nonfiction.” Creativity is such a strange thing, as though people would intentionally write uncreatively. It’s a little bit like Robert Frost’s line about the poet: “You don’t call yourself a poet; others call you a poet.” You don’t call yourself a “creative nonfiction writer.”

Certainly I think that the personal narrative has grown a lot in the last ten years. Part of what happened is that with composition, which is the service workhorse of English departments in the university, and the course that everybody has to take, freshman composition, you get to turn more toward personal narrative in the last fifteen years. It just started in places like Stanford with the Voice Project (a program that brought professional writers to campus to teach freshman). There were people in the field who were saying the best way to turn students on to writing is to get them to tell their own stories and work from their experience. Before that it had mostly been taught as a kind of legal-brief way of summoning arguments, rhetoric and persuasion. I still think that is one of the dominant models, and deserves to be, but there began to be more of them for the personal narrative.

Then of course the vogue of the new memoir had a lot to do with it. And the textbooks that were adopted, not just mine (The Art of the Personal Essay, Anchor Books, 1994), which is really not a textbook dealing with the personal essay but which has had a long, popular run. But the real mammoth-selling textbooks began to use a lot of personal narratives, and they also covered the spectrum in terms of multicultural authors. So you started getting these kind of contemporary classics, like Richard Rodriguez for instance, which I think is excellent writing, but basically you have one of every thing: Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American writer, Sonja Sanchez , Sandra Cisneros and so on and so forth. This became a way to placate political correctness.

HILDRETH: In the education field, textbooks were, especially following Birkets book, The Gutenberg Elegies, being forced into broadening their spectrum to become more inclusive.

LOPATE: One of the curious things that happened was that there was this market-driven emphasis on the contemporary. I think the reason why my Art of the Personal Essay has continued to have a niche is that I insisted on starting with the ancients and moving to the present. A lot of teachers wanted to be able to teach not just the contemporary. I think it is really strange to teach only the contemporary, to ignore the whole tradition. This is an old tradition. This is not something that is a recent vogue. As long as there have been writers, writers have been telling their personal stories. A writer has only his or her own experience to work with, however they may transform it. They could make it science fiction but they are still working with the motions that they observed themselves. Many times it’s not science fiction, it’s much closer than that. There have always been autobiographical novels like Martin Eden by Jack London or The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler or Red Burn by Herman Melville, because people want to turn their experience into stories.

Of course, you go back to Cicero and St. Augustine, the personal witness, the attempt to develop a voice that’s flexible and intelligent and sympathetic on the page. This is one of the grand traditions. I am particularly insistent on linking up with that, with that past. My only view is that personal essays, if not all personal narratives constitute a kind of conversation and that we are talking to our predecessors and ancestors as much as we are talking to the contemporary audience. Many writers will tell you that.

COOMBER: You mentioned the new memoir, is that supplanting something else? Is there anything that is getting thrown to the wayside?

LOPATE: I do think that the new memoir has undergone a kind of mutation from the old autobiography, or what they call “memoirs,” plural. It used to be that you sat down to write your life, usually when you had lived a large part of it. There were the memoirs of old generals and actresses whose stardom derived from their popularity as public figures or as politicians, rather than because they were writers. The writer’s memoirs, which is a kind of separate form, also tended to look at the rhythms and the rises and falls of a life, so the subject matter became development. In the new memoir there tended to be a shrinkage of chronology, so that thirty-year-olds were writing about their experience up to age 18 or something, and it became much more a form about the crucible of adolescence. And of course even if they wrote into their forties there was a tendency to pitch the memoir toward a single afternoon talk-show theme, like physical disability, sexual abuse, incest, alcoholism, addiction–and this was a reductive approach which also tended to emphasize the autobiographical protagonist as a victim who got over this problem. You see, if you are writing a long autobiography there is no one problem you get over. It’s life. You have to keep living it. You may start off with some difficulty, but you have to keep going even after you succeed.

It’s a curiosity of many autobiographies that often the first third is better than the rest. For instance, if you look at a book like History of My Life by Charlie Chaplin, his period of being knocked from pillar to post as a kid and trying to develop a sense of self and professional self and making forays into early film-making, all that is quite exciting. All that is the construction of a self. Once he became a big star it tended to be, “Then I had lunch with the Duke of Windsor and then I saw Lady So and So afterwards,” and it becomes much more boring, it becomes now a period of being with other wildly successful people. The major issue has been solved.

The new memoir has tended to focus on one issue and also the new memoir has tended to bring in a lot of techniques from fiction and poetry. This probably has to do with the genesis of nonfiction in MFA programs. In the beginning God created fiction and poetry [laughter].

MANNING: And drama somewhere back there.

LOPATE: Somewhere drama. In fact, now there is a magazine called The Fourth Genre, dedicated to essays. Which is a nice magazine and the title is wittingly saying: “We’re the last ones.” Nonfiction was the Hagar and Ishmael of the literary biblical family.

A lot of writers who began in poetry or fiction began by writing memoirs. They found that they could actually get a book of memoirs signed up more easily. Mary Carr, or Lucy Greely both began in poetry, for instance, and took their MFA degrees in poetry. What I have found is that the prose of the new memoir is affected by the techniques of fiction and poetry. There tends to be a greater emphasis on lyrical language, and some of the invidious notions of “show, don’t tell” have even percolated into the nonfiction sense of the craft of nonfiction. “Show, don’t tell,” it seems to me, is far too broad a rule even in fiction since a lot of great eighteenth, or nineteenth-century fiction certainly does show and tell. It’s a crude formulation, which has a greater truth in it. Of course if the teller has a wonderfully modulated voice and mind, I can see it in any method of telling. When Stendhal is on a roll, who cares if he’s showing or telling? I don’t want to fight that battle. What I want to say is that this interdiction against telling began to percolate into the craft of contemporary nonfiction, so that in workshops that I teach I’ll often hear students say, “Well I think you should do this as scenes,” and I’ll think, well, maybe yes, maybe no. The issue is not to do it as scenes or not as scenes. The issue is to bring a lively understanding or intelligence to voice in the material.

My idea, and it’s not just my idea—it’s the cornerstone of Vivian Gornecks’ book The Situation and the Story: It’s not so important what the experience was you want to tell, it’s what you make of the experience. People think they are entitled to tell the story because they have suffered. Emily Dickinson who would sit in her room and hardly go out and have a universe at her disposal. I remember saying to this class in Minneapolis: “It’s not enough to have cancer and have been sexually abused as a child. You’ve got to make it interesting on the page.” There is nothing intrinsically interesting about any material. If your mother was a prostitute, and your father was a drug pusher, that might just play as tawdry. It’s really what you do with the material.

So that puts a premium on mind and style. I do think that the personal narrative taps more directly into powers of thinking and reasoning than, let’s say, fiction and poetry. Or to put it another way, the unconscious plays less of a role. For instance, in fiction it may be important to develop a narrative where unconscious symbols resonate inside the narrative. That may not be important at all in a personal essay. I think that part of the resistance the fledgling autobiographical writers have to working in the form, is they use it kind of as a resistance to the mind. Because in our culture, the heart is privileged over the mind.

For instance, I was teaching a workshop and there was a presentation by one student who had earlier in the term written a very good narrative about her early years. In fact, her mother was a prostitute and drug addict, but she had done a brilliant job in making it interesting and showing how she thinks about it now as well as how she experienced it then. The second presentation she made was filled with a kind of confusion and myopia, because she wanted to get into the immediate sensation of what it felt like to be so confused. I said: “This will not do,” and several students defended her and said it recaptured her vulnerability.

I thought this was a misunderstanding of form. That you don’t just replicate the vulnerability and confusion, that you have an obligation to access as much understanding and wisdom that you can. That used to be the attraction of the personal essay and autobiographical narrative: that you were in the presence of somebody who was not dumbing down, who was trying to share as much worldly understanding as he or she could.

HILDRETH: Can we look at how that’s been received. I think about Loren Eiseley, who was definitely influenced by Montaigne’s rambling Sallies of the mind. He was also influenced by the affects of Edgar Allen Poe’s application of story and myth, and applied this to his personal essay.

LOPATE: But do you know the wonderful memoir by Eiseley, All the Strange Hours? Eiseley led a kind of gothic life.

HILDRETH: Well, he was not received well and so he did kind of turn inward. He wrote to no audience, is what he said.

LOPATE: He wrote to no audience. His mother was deaf and he was a hobo for a while, riding the rails, very poor. He witnessed his father’s tragic death. He had a lot of those sensational deficits going for him. But he had one of the most intelligent profiles of the twentieth century. Every sentence of his is modulated and he is drawing on whole centuries of formal writing. He’s not only trying to situate you in the moment of confusion and make you feel that confusion; he’s trying to give the emotion of it, but also his understanding of it. I’ll go farther and say that in Eisley’s case, his use of metaphor and myth has real resonance because you don’t feel that it is coming out of Creative Writing 101. You feel that he is somebody that has extreme difficulty in making relationships with other human beings. He has to look to fossils, to creatures, to the stars in order to feel out his relationships.

COOMBER: Turning the questions back to your work in particular I’m wondering if you can tell us about the vulnerability that there is in being a well-read personal essayist. People know your family dynamics, parts of your body, your relationships. When you walk into a room of readers, do you feel overexposed? And do you care?

LOPATE: I don’t care. What’s surprising is that people read and forget. I’m sure the most attentive readers don’t, but in a way they read for the pleasure of the moment, and they’ll remember some things but not others. So you know, I’ll meet a reader and it will come up that I’m Jewish and they are surprised, and I’ll say: “Well, didn’t you read the book.” But they are not reading to compile a dossier on me; they are reading for something else.

Also, I don’t entirely identify who I think I am with this person. It’s not that I’m lying —essentially I’ve told the truth— it’s that it’s one experience to know the page and another to be in a social situation. Montaigne said something like, “Friends of mine who I wouldn’t dream of telling things to can go to any local bookstore and find out any of that stuff.” I am to some degree a reserved person, a little shy, certainly not somebody who rattles on about my self socially. Most of the time I would rather get somebody else to talk about themselves. I don’t need to hear my story; in fact, before I remarried, it was a problem in dating because I would get bored having to tell this stuff over again. I really felt like saying: “Why don’t you go to the bookstore and you can find all this stuff out.” When I’ve written an experience satisfactorily to my mind, then I don’t think about it much more. It’s a strange using up of one’s experience. The written account comes to replace the memory.

COOMBER: Do you think you are losing your memories, almost, by putting them down?

LOPATE: No, because so much happens to a person in a lifetime that you can never write about everything. There is always going to be much more that you haven’t written about than you have written about.

HILDRETH: And always things that are unresolved.

LOPATE: And always things that are unresolved. So I get pleasure in confiding on the page, or pushing myself to a point where I feel like I’ve gone deeper or I’ve gone further. That’s a reward. I’m looking to get to those passages. So it doesn’t bother me, because it doesn’t affect my interactions at the moment. I still have to feel my way through my defenses and another person’s defenses when I meet a stranger. The same awkward catch-as-catch-can experience.

COOMBER: How about another part of this issue. You write very personal things about people you’ve known: family, lovers or whoever. Do you run these things by them before they go to print, or is everything that happens to you fair game and it just goes without saying?

LOPATE: Well, I don’t run it by them; I don’t want them to have censorship rights on my material. I don’t think everything is fair game and I don’t feel entirely justified. That is, I don’t have a single ethical formula I can apply. It’s true that by yourself you can portray other people, and it’s true that writing personal narrative, you are going to write about other people because nobody is an isolate. So you define your own personality by projecting through other people to a certain extent. I think that there are ethical questions that need to be decided on a case-by-case basis. What I try to do is not to use my writing as a vendetta, to get back at someone or to prove that I was right and they were wrong. But obviously I am more vivid to myself than other people are to me, so to some level what I am doing is conveying what it feels like for life to come at this particular individual.

COOMBER: What you said a few minutes ago is that you don’t feel completely justified in what you do. Its sounds a bit like your credo: You won’t use it as a vendetta, but you are trying to show how your consciousness perceives the world.

LOPATE: If people are looking for a nonfiction license issued by me, in the same way that a poetic license works, I am not the one to give it to them. I continue to have ambivalent feelings. I continue to hold back material that I don’t write about. I don’t write about everything. I do protect some people. It all depends. I have hurt people by the things I’ve written, so I can’t offer myself as a model on the safe way to do this. All I can say is that if you are going to be a writer, you are probably going to have to accept the guilt of articulating your visions which may not suit other people.

HILDRETH: And would you say that that is also a distinctive character in your personal narrative, the Montaigne’s concept of apologist? That you formulate an apology on the page for what’s about to be said?

LOPATE: I think you have to reflect on your practice. I think that you can’t start out with the assumption that you are a good man, or the last good man. If you are observing yourself, you have a need to be prepared to find dislikable evidence. So it’s a form both of self-justification and self-condemnation, perhaps.

MANNING: What thoughts do you give to audience as you are writing the personal essay? Are you writing to a specific person? A demographic? An aspect of your own personality? How does that imagined audience affect how you write various personal pieces?

LOPATE: I would say that I take audience into consideration in a few ways. On one level I don’t take audience into consideration; I just try to write as close to the thoughts that are being dictated to me through my brain as I can. The first draft, I’m trying to get my thoughts down. I try to write for the illustrious dead who will be forgiving and understand that I am trying to walk in their footsteps. So I write to the shades of Lamb. “How’s that, Montaigne, Stevenson saying, “Here’s my little missive, I’m trying to do what you guys have done.” I know they will understand some of the gadgets I’m using because I do see myself in the literary tradition. So some people might say they are writing for God. Since I’m never sure if I believe in God, or doubt I do, I would say I am writing for someone who’s smarter than I am, who will at least be tolerant of my flaws. If you write down, you’re going to get in trouble, so try to write up. That’s my understanding of my practice.

The other thing that I do is I try to keep my audience in mind to the degree that I anticipate the audience’s boredom or irritation. So it isn’t so much placating the audience as just trying to keep the audience engrossed. Cynthia Ozick once paid me a compliment in that she found my writing to be engrossing. I thought that’s as much as I want. Engrossing is good. If I can just keep it engrossing, a person can disagree, but at least they don’t go into a zone, the flat-line boredom. When I read another personal essayist and I feel that basically I know what is going to come from the next five pages because I’m just going to tromp through the expected positions, I just want to skip. So you want to keep it engrossing.

COOMBER: When you say you’re trying to keep it engrossing, are you talking about for an audience, like Montaigne? Ivy Leagues? Readers in the working class?

LOPATE: Not Montaigne. I mean what Virginia Woolf called the common reader, which I think of as somebody who is educated. They don’t have to be Ivy League—my father had a high school education and tried to go to night college, and it didn’t work out, but he read a lot. There used to be much more of this understanding of the working-class autodidact. It really doesn’t matter the level of formal education. What matters is how much someone is willing to open himself or herself to a book.

I can’t write to the bottom level of the typical magazine editor. That’s like a grasshopper. I fortunately had the experience of being a book writer before being a journalist or magazine writer. So now when I write for magazines, they know to expect a certain thing from me and I’ll never be entirely able to be processed into their extraordinarily quick attention spans. If they’re going to publish me, it’s because they like the idea of having some other kind of voice coming in. They like to think they can tolerate a certain amount of literary, “old-timey” voice. But I can’t write for that short attention span. It’s so inhibiting. I have to feel like I can at least develop some points.

MANNING: Do you think that the audience for a personal essay or memoir is still growing? In the 1996 Writer’s Chronicle article with John Bennion, you said that your attempt with The Art of the Personal Essay was to reestablish the genre of the personal essay. Do you think the book has done that, looking back seven years now, and is the personal essay genre or sub-genre continuing to grow up?

LOPATE: I don’t think that my book did that, but I do think that my book contributed in however a slightest way. There was a hunger in the culture at large for personal narrative. Not very different from the hunger people have when they watch the Oprah Winfrey show when somebody says, “My mother was shot to death by a killer and then he put a bullet in me and then I almost died.” I mean, there’s a curiosity about authentic experience, and with that a kind of impatience with the artifacted, fictive plot. I think that fiction has lost a certain claim of intensity. There’s always pulp fiction and genre fiction, but I think that the whole culture has wanted to hear people stand up and testify. I think that speaks to a certain religious inclination in American culture.

MANNING: Like the sermon.

LOPATE: The sermon has a connection to the personal essay and not just the sermon but the revival meeting, where someone stands up and says: “I was a drunk, I was a gambler.” Also the media magazines, newspapers, have a constant need for copy that is readable and that they don’t have to edit much. There are tons of hybrid, semi-essay articles. Someone begins by talking about himself or herself to establish and determine authenticity. Let’s say the author knows someone who was bulimic, for instance. And then, the author interviews the experts in bulimia, and then goes to a different party. This is a kind of hybrid, semi-personal essay, semi-article: The person goes out and gets some facts. This isn’t the practice of the art at its highest. We have to look at the fact that magazines, newspapers have an endless appetite for topical articles and that one of the ways of approaching topical articles is the personal experience. And they also have these niches like the back-of-the-book, the six hundred-word article; there are even newspapers where somebody not on staff can send in something, as long as its six hundred to a thousand words for the op-ed pages.

MANNING: How about the other forms of media—Internet, TV, radio—how is the personal essay creeping into those media?

LOPATE: On NPR, you see essayists on TV, Andy Rooney. Certainly the Internet has encouraged many more people. There’s a big market and appetite for the watered-down product, but there may be no greater market for the most literary examples. I think it’s just as hard to get a collection of personal essays published now as it was ten years ago. I don’t think there’s any further market. I think what you have is a kind of disguised collection of personal essays: Somebody writes a self-help book, somebody writes of his experiences, like Lee Iococca, basically in a series of essays. Nobody thinks of it as a series of personal essays; basically it is.

But for someone who is enamored of Didion or Baldwin or Lamb or Hazlitt, Montaigne or Stevenson, to be writing a collection and then trying to get it published, I counsel patience and forbearance because it may be just as difficult. I happen to be one of few lucky writers who can publish collections of my essays. Most writers who publish collections of their essays are famous already as novelists, let’s say, an Updike or Ozick or Saul Bellow can get a collection of essays published. But to not have established distinction in another area and try to achieve it directly as a personal essayist is difficult. There are collections that continue to be published, sometimes by small presses and sometimes by very small presses [laughter]. I’m trying to make a distinction between the very large, broad area of demand, which made some people say, “This is the age of the essay”, and on the other hand a very small demand for the art of the personal essay at its most refined.

MANNING: How many copies of The Art of the Personal Essay have been sold?

LOPATE: The Art of the Personal Essay has done very well. I can’t count the number of copies, but I can tell you that I continue to get royalty checks and was able to buy a car, make other purchases, basically it’s been a good story for me. I’m now attempting to do another thing like that, which is I’m editing an anthology of American movie criticism from the silent era to the present, which will attempt to assert a canon of the best American criticism, which I hope will be adopted by film programs and English programs. Occasionally I experience a twinge of chagrin that my most popular book is an anthology and not one of my own one hundred percent Phillip Lopate books. We take what we can get.

COOMBER: I’m interested in your view of truth in the personal essay. It stems from an earlier discussion we had about “The Moody Traveler” (in a collection of essays, A Portrait of My Body) It was about a situation you encountered in the past and when you described your writing process, you mentioned that after writing it, you went back to notes taken at the time of the actual event and found that they differed, somewhat substantially, from the essay that you wrote. You opted not to change it then, and went forward. How do you justify that as practitioner of the personal essay?

LOPATE: I guess that because I consider the personal essay a story, and consider myself a story-teller, I do feel sometimes that I can take liberties. For the most part, I don’t take liberties. I’m a great believer in purity. It doesn’t bother me so much to break the rule in that way. It’s not as though I was describing the negotiations for the end of the Vietnam War, where it would really be important not to distort the truth. This is something that I don’t lose a lot of sleep over. I try to work from factual materials as much as possible because I enjoy the idea of shaping what actually happened into a narrative. But I’m aware that I’m slicing and shaping, and I’m leaving out so much, so I’m already distorting. This is another acceptance of guilt on my part You almost have to be a little shameless to be a personal essayist.

COOMBER: Do you feel that in a case such as this—where it doesn’t matter that much because it’s your story—does that impinge on your credibility for other nonfiction pieces?

LOPATE: Is someone going to say, “This person admitted that he changed one detail in one of his pieces, therefore we can’t believe him in another piece?” No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this issue has ever really come up, where someone has challenged the veracity of something I’ve written. Maybe because I’m writing about such insignificant people, including myself, that it’s not really an issue. But also it is because whenever possible, I do tell the truth. This is an interesting issue. There is honesty, candor, the truth, facts . . . I try to be as honest as I can. I like the sound of honesty. Sometimes when you’re having a conversation you exchange small talk for a while and then your friend says something or you say something that comes from a different place, a more honest place, and it is as though in the soundtrack of your life, the music changes keys at that moment. I like that changing of keys. I like that moment of honesty.

HILDRETH: In your forthcoming book, The Waterfront, you are dealing with a lot more factual information and research-oriented topics, and it seems like a slight departure from what you have been doing in the past. How do you go about putting that into a story format and how do your keep the story from “flat-lining”?

LOPATE: What I had to do in The Waterfront was find stories all along the New York City waterfront, and go with them and try to convey my enthusiasm for the story. For instance, I have a long chapter on public housing in my book because in New York the projects were built on the waterfront due to the fact that a lot of that land had been abandoned. The land in parts was quite decrepit, sometimes toxic, and so the projects were easy to assemble, particularly above 96th Street where you get into Harlem. So there are all sorts of issues of race and class, but what interested me is that it all began so idealistically. There was this tremendous movement of reform to build public housing. I know that I still believe in public housing, and that the federal government should go back to funding public housing.

So what I tried to do was to disentangle the past and try to figure out how it began so idealistically, how that dream was deferred and became rather grim so that a writer like James Baldwin could write about the projects and Harlem as a kind of nightmare. And then, to give it another twist, these projects were not destroyed the way they were in other parts of the country, but they continued to work. To find what was still reclaimable about them is to understand the current optimism of the New York Housing Authority to improve them, to complicate a story because most middle-class people regard the projects as unredeemably awful. And I was coming from a different place. I was coming from having grown up poor and asking myself, “Don’t they continue to perform a good function by giving decent, affordable housing?”

The fact is that nobody picking up my new book, The Waterfront, would think they would find a chapter on public housing. It’s just not what you would think. I like the idea of finding a story that was unexpected and carrying it out so its vicissitudes about idealism, cynicism, despair, more idealism, come to a kind of stand-off, you might say.

MANNING: What sorts of research did you do for that chapter?

LOPATE: I did a lot of library research, read the controversies and arguments of the time. There was no one book that had a history, so I had to go to articles. For instance, the initial idea of building towers was seen as progressive because you have more green space around it. The [project] towers were originally coming from that “towers-in-the-park-notion,” which has since to a large degree been discredited. There was this impulse to tear down the slums and build these clean spanking towers. Of course, you’ve got people arguing, “Well, maybe those tenements have more vitality and are more comfortable than these towers in the park.” You go through a lot of ironies and ambiguities. Everyone is proceeding to some degree from a good heart, but it plays out in very different ways.

HILDRETH: I don’t know the terrain myself, but I have spoken with friends who grew up near the waterfront and grew in the Sea Scout program, which was free for every child. Children who have grown up in the projects have access to a geography that many adults have no idea about.

LOPATE: Would they have access to that geography? Because highways were built around the waterfront in Manhattan, they would have had to cross these major highways to get to that waterfront. That’s one of the great tragedies of New York is that the highways cut people off from the water. A lot of what I’m doing, in effect, is to question the knee-jerk politics of my peer-group and to say, “What do I really think?” and not “What am I supposed to think?” Actually, there’s a lot of politics in this book. It’s the equivalent of asking yourself about the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War: “What do I think about this?” and not “What am I supposed to say?”

HILDRETH: So you’ve embedded the politics with story?

LOPATE: Yes. For instance, there’s this very important figure in New York history, Robert Moses, who was kind of a master builder of New York. Moses has become an archvillain in the mass narrative of New York and I went back and looked at some revisionist takes saying actually he did an incredible number of great things. He did some bad things, and we think of [him] because it’s paralyzed us from doing anything new and bold.

We’re so afraid of planning in general. I’m trying to assert my own view of the city and the city in the making. That interests me. At one point in America, it seemed easy to make cities. People seemed to know how to do it. Now whatever they do, they feel like they’re acting in bad faith: They feel clumsy. And that happens in Spokane (Washington) as well as in New York.

MANNING: So which narrator is going to walk the pages of this book? Which Phillip Lopate persona have you chosen?

LOPATE: A middle-aged Phillip Lopate. Because I say at one point, when I was younger, all I needed to do was walk around and I would be filled with poetic lyricism. And I can no longer pretend to have that sense of the younger man walking around and turning everything into writing. So it is, in effect, a more disenchanted observer, but there are positives to disenchantment as well as negatives. It’s somebody who has a lot of affection for my native city and has seen so many ambiguous developments: good plans that didn’t get built, bad plans that did get built. Things that have had different results.

I’m trying to explore a place because a lot of me is that place. I consider myself, my identity, as a New Yorker almost more central than my identity as what, as a Jew? Probably I’m more New Yorker. It’s a central part of who I am.