Interviews

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RICK BASS IS THE AUTHOR OF EIGHTEEN BOOKS of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Where The Sea Used To Be, and editor of the anthology The Roadless Yaak. Bass lives with his family in northwest Montana’s million-acre Yaak Valley, where there is still not a single acre of designated wilderness. In October 2003, Rick Bass talked with Brian O’Grady and Rob Sumner at the home of the writer John Keeble, a ranch located southwest of Spokane, Washington. During the conversation they sat on the rear porch, still under construction, and enjoyed a meal of freshly slaughtered pork as the sun settled into the horizon beyond the hills of pine. We are eating bowls of chili.

BRIAN O’GRADY

Before you started writing, what effect did a compelling story have on you?

BASS

Before I started writing, I read a lot, as a child, but certainly not as much as my children read, it’s just what I thought of as a lot. And I’ve met other people along the way who really do read a lot, what I’ve thought was a lot was more just a hobby. I’m in awe and some envy of truly serious readers. That’s a long answer to say I probably didn’t read as much as I thought I did. I loved it and I read everything I could but there’s people who don’t go to sleep because they love reading, I mean they read twenty-four hours a day. In retrospect I realize I’m not one of those kind of people and certainly now that I’ve become a writer I don’t have the luxury or indulgence of becoming that kind of person when paradoxically I most need to be.

A single story can have a huge influence on a writer, or a reader, or any person, and for me that story was Legends of the Fall, the novella by Jim Harrison that really made me want to write fiction. I loved to read fiction, I loved to read nonfiction before that point, but reading that story made me want to try and write it. I don’t why. I mean I know why I like that story, why I love that story, but I just remember having that impression of how big—the cliché about that story is epic, which is an overused word, but I just remember how big the emotions and content, scale, voice, everything about that story was larger and fuller than what I had read previously. And not to take away anything from Legends of the Fall, I’m not saying it’s the only book that way. It could have been other stories in the world but I had not to that point read them. I believe there’s a story like that for every reader. I think eventually, sooner or later, you encounter them. If they make you want to be a writer or not, who knows? There are too many variables there, but for me it did make me want to be a fiction writer.

O’GRADY

Do you aim for that range of emotion?

BASS

No. I wish it were that simple, that I could have a guidepost, or model, or scale against which to measure each work, if that’s what you’re asking, but I don’t aim for anything other than just to do the best I can. And that almost sounds defensive, but it’s liberating is what it is. And conversely or paradoxically it’s not so liberating, because that’s pretty tough to ask of yourself to do the best you can every time. I mean you can only do the best you can one time, and then that’s your best. The only thing I aim for is to do the best I can given any emotion, any range of emotions, any character, any range of characters, any setting. Whatever story or essay I find myself in I just try to do my best, which is usually task enough. That can be taken the wrong way when I say that’s task enough. I don’t mean that, “Oh I’m so wonderful that it’s hard to match my best,” I mean it’s so easy to be lazy, I think it’s hard enough for everybody to do their best every time they go out(,) or even try to have the courage to attempt their best.

Jonathan Johnson comes out with a plate of ham, baked beans, and salad for each of us. His three-year-old daughter, Anya, and John Keeble’s dog, Ricky, come out with him.
Jonathan: I don’t think we’re going to have room for all of them here.
Rick: This is incredible. This is so good.
Jonathan: I’m sorry the silverware has to be inside the toilet paper.
Anya stays outside with us for several minutes while her dad brings out the rest of the food. Rick gives Ricky some pets.
Brian: You were right about getting out here.
Rick: Good.

O’GRADY

Do you still get the same impact that you did before your writing, when you read fiction today?

BASS

More so. Much more so.

Rick smiles.
Rick: That dog.
Jonathan: I’ll bring Ricky inside. Come on, Ricky. Come on!
Ricky falls to the deck. He wiggles about on his back and wags his tail.
Rick begins to talk but starts laughing at Ricky.
Rick: I have not fed that dog. Laughter.
Rick: Oh my gosh, you are a trickster. That’s great. No, I said, come on, not lie down and roll over. You misheard me. Roll over so I can scratch your belly and feed you. Give you pork.
Laughter.

BASS

A great story affects me more now than it ever has. I rely upon reading as tonic more than I ever have. I think that’s probably just a function of age as much as profession. You’ve seen, approaching or in the shadows of middle age, and you still haven’t seen everything but I’ve seen a lot more than I had seen when I started out being a writer, which is to say when I started out making notes about what the world looks like. That’s a bad place to come to as a person. So I really rely on fiction and nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to pull me out of that, the natural tendency we have as individuals to go into that telescopic place of diminished perception, observation, newness, wonder, all those significant artistic notions. A good story means more to me now than it ever did as a young person. Also, having wrestled with writing for almost twenty years I have a greater appreciation now for when it’s done well than I did. And that’s not to say I took it for granted when

I was younger, I still loved reading great things but my palate was not as developed then.

Rick eats between questions.
Rob: I’ll let you chew.

ROB SUMNER

You’ve noted the importance of not overly controlling your writing. When you’re developing a story how do you refrain from interfering too much?

BASS

I would say something like that and it’s true, but you grow and prob- ably contract too, but you grow as a writer, hopefully, and go through phases and spells, play to your strengths and then work on your weaknesses. For me, personally, that has probably at one time been a strength, to not control a story or just go with the intuitive and subconscious and trust those instincts and focus on feeling them as powerfully as possible. It’s hard to argue against that approach, that can be kind of a tiring way to go through stories, one after another, but it can also be deeply and strongly felt. As I get older, for lack of a more precise term, the intellectual side of writing does interest me more, if only that I’m slowly learning my way into it. It becomes like a game to try and control a story now and tinker with it, make it go this way and go that way. That’s still a dangerous impulse, and the best stories for me as a reader or a writer, and the truest stories, are the ones in which I don’t control them, but am tapped into the emotion more than the intellect. That said, I’m becoming comfortable enough with, I guess, theory, for lack of a better word, to be aware of it as I work. Structure, or any of those conscious things, as opposed to the infinitely more powerful subconscious.

SUMNER

You’ve stated that emotional truth informs the structures of your stories. Is emotion always central for you?

BASS

Yeah. To answer your second question, or to answer the question, yes, I mean if you—yes, there’s just no other answer but yes. But I’m not sure I understood the first thing you asked.

SUMNER

Well you’ve talked—

BASS

Or mentioned.

SUMNER

—about how emotional truth, that the emotion of the story that you’re writing develops the structure, kind of tells you where to go with it.

BASS

It can and usually does, and in the past it has for me, but what I’m interested in now, and maybe it’s almost out of boredom or something, but I don’t think that necessarily has to be true. You can have an emotional truth underlying a structural instability or a structural falsity, and a story could in theory be all the more powerful for that. It could enhance that emotional truth, but on the other hand to have a structurally sound and logical creation that has a false emotion, artificial emotion beneath a structure that might fit an emotion you’re trying to get, that wouldn’t work. So the answer to your question, yes yes yes, but again the obverse is not necessarily true. As long as the emotional truth is being felt by the narrator or the author you can have a good structure or a bad structure and you’re still going to have a story.

O’GRADY

Just before we sat down we were talking about your essay in Why I Write, “Why the Daily Writing of Fiction Matters.” In it you stress the importance of engagement with the world as well as with the world of the imagination in fiction. Is that balance between engagement and imagination an evolving process for you?

BASS

I want to say no, I want to say that it’s pretty much a fixed variable, a fixed rate, a constant, that I need a certain amount of x to yield a certain amount of y, and that’s what I believe. I don’t ever write about that. You would think—I would feel like that can’t be possibly true, because people change, everything changes in the course of its existence, but it seems constant to me. When I get enough physical activity, that yields intellectual and emotional growth for me or even an expansion of feeling. And when I’m not in the physical world the other aspects of me tend to shut down too. It’s just that simple. That’s all.

O’GRADY

Along those lines, something else that you mentioned in that same essay, have you been able to follow the advice you give, to be able to write every day and also to be in constant contact with the physical world in light of the other activities that you do?

BASS

That’s a trick question. Let me figure out how to get there. For the benefit of our reader, can you clarify that device of which you speak, of which we speak?

O’GRADY

In the essay you say specifically that you spend your mornings writing and then your afternoons walking.

BASS

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, because sometimes I tell stu—I thought you were talking about another advice, a device, so, good, you’re not, because I don’t follow that one, that other one. But I don’t follow this one either anymore. [With] the activism and family desires and obligations, I just make a choice every day. I’ve got to do what I want to do after writing and some days I don’t even write because of the other obligations of activism and so on. So no, I don’t, and that’s a real handicap. But everybody has handicaps. Some people have to work for a living. [laughter]

SUMNER

You’ve warned of our culture’s increasing corporatization and homogenization and how writing is a way to rage against the resulting constriction and entrapment. How does writing challenge sameness?

BASS

How does writing challenge what?

SUMNER

Sameness.

BASS

Well within writing, back to that notion I talked about [earlier], about literature being about loss or the recognition of loss, you’re also remaking the world. Either you’re celebrating the world the way it is, knowing that it’s not going to last that way, or you’re already actively re-creating an alternative world, an alternative logic, an alternative justice, alternative boundaries in the world. You’re putting on paper and presenting to the ‘true world’ or the ‘real world,’ the existing world or the present world. And that very act challenges sameness. You know, you’re putting your money where your mouth is, you’re investing the time of your life to put down this model, this blueprint, this plan of another world with other values, and giving craft time and attention to that work, just as surely—

Rick is interrupted by Jonathan Johnson, who comes outside with three beers.
Rick: Oh, I can’t, I wish I could!
Jonathan: You’ve been bested, eh? [laughter]

BASS

Writing doesn’t necessarily have to challenge sameness, I mean you could be a press flack for the Bush administration and just be fighting furiously to hold on to the status quo and pull the wool over voters’ eyes and say all is well in Bethlehem. So writing doesn’t necessarily have to challenge sameness, but, on the converse, it certainly can.

SUMNER

You’ve quoted before William Kittredge: “As we destroy what is natural we eat ourselves alive.” That’s quite different than what Bush’s press agents are writing. Your own writing seems to tend to something quite different than a Bush press agent.

BASS

I mean fiction, good fiction, has that quality of naturalness to it, in that it’s being its own thing, and you don’t even know what that thing is, you just know you have an emotion, you don’t know what story is going to come out of an emotion, you’re not trying to advance an agenda, you’re just trying to get an emotion out of the vessel of your body into the world, and that’s the only agenda at play in good fiction. That’s a pretty natural process, it’s an expulsion, and a procreation or a creation or perhaps a re-creation of an emotion in you, but it’s creative. So that is natural, it’s not a destructive or even really manipulative impulse, or exploitive. It’s pretty natural.

Nonfiction, on the other hand, can be a real challenge. You can have other less primary, less elemental goals or desires in the writing of nonfiction. You can have direct values that, by the nature of the medium, come into play. It doesn’t mean it’s less natural, and for that matter to say that to manipulate or exploit is unnatural is like a dog chasing its tail. That’s natural too but I don’t think of it as being as primary or elemental—that’s the raw emotion with the human filter. What I like to think of as really good fiction I think of as being more primal than that, not even having the human filter but just being the thing itself: the physical essence of joy or sorrow rather than the narrator or writer filtering that emotion into creative nonfiction.

SUMNER

In a book like Oil Notes you paint a picture without trying to change anyone’s mind. In other nonfiction books, like The Nine Mile Wolves, you’re trying to affect change. And then there’s your fiction, where you don’t know what’s going to happen.

BASS

That’s a fair gradation. For me there’s pure fiction, and then creative nonfiction which just has kind of an edge of me or the human condition. And then there’s the you-know-what-you-want-and-you’re-going-after- it kind of nonfiction which is more of the latter group, The Nine Mile Wolves or The Book of Yaak kind of book.

SUMNER

So are these different types of writing definitely separate for you?

BASS

It’s almost a question of level, how far into the subconscious I am. With fiction it’s not even a temptation to bring in an agenda or even me. You’re supposed to be in the characters and in the setting and that means you’re not in you, that means you’re certainly not in your politics. And in environmental advocacy work you’re so into the issue your art doesn’t get into it at all. I guess the creative nonfiction part of that triumvirate is where it can get interesting, where you can bring in some pure fiction for a while and then also attempt to bring in some hard core advocacy. That can be interesting. But that’s why it’s the middle ground for me. With fiction I’m not ever even tempted to get on a soapbox.

O’GRADY

You said before that writing and reading fiction can help writers and readers overcome natural and cultural boundaries.

BASS

I suppose it can. I don’t remember saying that.

O’GRADY

I’m paraphrasing of course. Do you think that as a country we look at fiction in that way, as a weapon against those tendencies?

BASS

I’ve never thought about it. Are you asking me how I think in this country we tend to look at fiction? This is going to be off the kettle, calling the stove black or however that saying goes, but I think in this country. There’s a tendency among too many to look at fiction as making a statement of politics or even personal values. I understand what a joke for [it is] me to say something like that, because my environmental advocacy is so fiercely partisan. It depends on the reader but I see a lot of people read fiction and try to filter it through a lens other than what I think the writer was intending, which was the human condition. A lot of readers will try to extrapolate from a piece of fiction into judgments and assumptions that don’t hold up. But it’s always been that way, and that’s a weakness but it can also be a strength of fiction, the fact that it can be mutable, that it’s a universal currency, that it can be a universal dialect in language. It should be, and yet the readings of so many books are slanted toward the times, the culture, this day and age. It’s a good question but I can’t answer it. Most readers are different.

SUMNER

If we could talk about your new collection The Hermit’s Story. Longing has played an important role in your fiction. Earlier work has often focused upon the rage of people as they try to get along in an uncooperative world. In the new collection we find characters such as Dave in “The Prisoners” and Kirby in “The Fireman,” divorced men who can see their daughters only rarely. Both Dave and Kirby have moved from rage towards a more deadened feeling. What interests you in their saddened, hardened emotional state?

BASS

I don’t know, I don’t know. What you said previously, about them moving toward detachment, may be what touches me about characters in those situations, that they’re moved toward survival and their acceptance of pain. Under one reading you could look at characters in those stories and say, “Well, they’re copping out, they’re detaching rather than embracing their pain,” but I don’t read those, or I don’t read “The Fireman” that way. [In] “The Prisoners” the characters have more of a subconscious detachment, they haven’t yet realized that they’re detaching to stay alive, but if you’re trying to stay alive then you’re trying to avoid foreclosing on the possibility of not being able to be sensate. So that is, if not heroic, it is still nonetheless, well it’s maybe not even dying but it’s not a full disengagement. You can detach in order to retain the ability to engage, and I mean that’s what, it’s just a diminution of ambitions, perhaps. Bittersweet would be the emotion there. And that’s an interesting conflict or interesting tension, interesting duality of emotions…[trails off]

Jonathan Johnson is approaching the table with three pies balanced on his arms.
Rick: Good god almighty!
Jonathan: One per each. Pumpkin cheesecake, turtle cheesecake, and pumpkin pie.
Brian: Umm, I’ll have some of the pumpkin pie. Rob: I’ll try that pumpkin cheesecake.
Rick: Ah…My God, that’s the hardest question. Johnson: He’s been rendered inarticulate by dessert. Rick: Yes, yes, all of it.
Johnson: All of the above, eh? Rick: Just the tiniest sliver.
Johnson: Of which? Rick: Of yes, of each. Johnson: Okay. I gotcha.
Rick: I mean, but you can imagine…pie.
Johnson: Pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, tiny sliver of each. Can somebody open the door?
Rick: Yes.

Rob: No more sun.
Rick: Yeah, never was much. Frosty. [eating] What are these little red things?
Brian: Those are pomegranate seeds.
Rick: Oh yeah?
Rob: Yeah, they were good.

SUMNER

Kind of tied into the longing, what we’ve just been talking about, memory in your work seems to work as a type of longing. Ann in “The Hermit’s Story” holds a memory of her trip to Canada “as tightly, and securely, as one might clench some bright small gem,” and Russell and Sissy in “The Cave” are hit by the realization that though their memory of the cave was bright and strong in that moment, “even an afternoon such as that one could become dust.” These are characters trying to hold on to what has already passed. In a way they reflect your stressing of fiction as a way of reconnecting what has been isolated.

BASS

Not to sound like a smart ass, but yes. I mean, I would agree. Certainly. I’m not conscious of those kinds of thoughts but that doesn’t make them any less true or even surprising to me that I wouldn’t have been able to explain them. A lot of people talk about memory as a kind of landscape, and that really interests me, that makes sense that, you know, you’re looking back, but . . .

Jennifer Davis comes outside with plates of pie. Jennifer: . . . cheesecake. [laughing] Sir.
Rob: Thank you. Brian: Thank you.
Jennifer: Here you go. [To Bass:] Yours is coming. Rob: Yours takes more time.
Rick: Bring the wheelbarrow!

BASS

But, in memory, you are obviously looking back at country that you traveled through, you are making a map, a map of that territory, but the way you say it was smarter. […] I mean, fiction is a device to preserve memory? Is that what you meant? Enrich memory?

SUMNER

To try to hold on to our own memories, or things that we’ve lost.

BASS

Hm. I suppose so. I mean again, literature is about loss or the recognition of loss, in celebrating or bringing the attention of art and craft to a story you are both celebrating and preserving something, for sure. You don’t think about presenting it to a future, but I think about presenting a story to the present, because it’s already in the past as you imagined it. There’s some movement across time and it’s almost kind of a resurrection, sure. Take something from the past and bring it all the way back up to the present, take it back to the contemporary moment, and that is an act of preservation.

My own memory is really bad, so I suspect that there’s something larger to that than what I’m grasping.

Rick: You guys are missing out. Rob: The turtle?
Rick: Yeah.
Rob: Yeah, I was eyeing that one. Pumpkin cheesecake. Maybe there will be some left for us when we’re done.

SUMNER

Now here’s another. Let’s talk about work. Artie in “The Prisoners” works in real estate and Kirby in “The Fireman” is a computer programmer. Both men find their jobs either numbing or irrelevant. They make money for their companies but find very little value in their work. So Artie goes fishing and Kirby volunteers as a firefighter, activities that working-class people do for a living. In the fishing and the firefighting there is an immediacy to the activities, a direct physical engagement with the world around them. What’s the relationship of work and passion in these stories and in your writing?

BASS

I don’t know. I don’t even know how to explain it, but work is what you do, that’s how you are—one of the ways—that you are in the world, to state the obvious, and almost everybody has to work. If you’re going to write a story about engagement with the world . . . Let me back up. I guess what it speaks to in part is what kind of story do you like as a reader and a writer, and the stories of the sad, dead weight, heart-dead, bittersweet, life-wasted stories of detachment and desensitization that are not infrequent in contemporary literature, while technically masterful and even emotionally masterful, after a while I get to feel, as a reader, cheated by the repetition of these subdued responses when the point of the story is your response to it. A little goes a long way, I get it! And that’s life, I get it! And so I like to personally look around for almost more elemental stories, where there’s a little less ambiguity. I don’t think that gives up anything in terms of sophistry, I don’t concede that at all in stories that really speak to me. If you’re interested in reading or writing a story about which a partly successful attempt at greater engagement with the world is achieved, it’s hard, a real trick to pull that off with a story about somebody who didn’t do something, as opposed to a story in which it was in somebody’s character to do something, and work is something to do, so it seemed hard to leave work out of some stories. But the wind is in your face if you’re going to write a story about somebody who’s going to feel the world deeply, but that person doesn’t feel deeply enough about the world to engage with it except when he or she is on the pages of your story. It seems artsy—it can run the risk of becoming artsy and artificial. There are, I’m sure, people who do not work who are fully engaged with their senses and the world, but the wind is in your face, in the writer’s face.

Rick coughs.
Rob: You doing all right?
Rick: I’m shoving pumpkin pie in my face. I’m doing all right. [pause] It’s my favorite.

O’GRADY

In “The Distance,” you have a Montana family visiting Monticello with the result that Thomas Jefferson, westward expansion, and the dynamics of one 21st-century family coalesce into a single story. Central to the story is the boundary between wilderness, or wildness, and control and our attempts to balance these elements. What motivated you to dig into the mistakes of America’s past?

BASS

Um, almost sounds like a smart-aleck answer, but—

O’GRADY

If you take issue with the question—

BASS

Well, not even so much as issue but again a lot of the questions you’re asking are so thoughtful, intelligent, that there’s a danger of them presuming an awareness on my part that that’s what I was aiming at, which was not the case. It doesn’t make it not true, I just didn’t know of some of the things that were going on there. The arc of this country at this point in time I find severely disappointing, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t fret about or rage about it. So that’s embedded in my subconscious, it’s embedded in my subconscious that it even comes up into my consciousness, but I don’t set out to write fiction to say those things. I just think, “What am I feeling?”, and then I start painting pictures and say, “This is what I’m feeling. This is what I see.”

So I would not argue with any of that, but it was not a conscious goal, because that would be a political assertion. It’s there, you’re right, but my first impulse was just trying to get the pictures accurate, that landscape, that point in time, that disparity between them. The Louisiana Purchase inhabitant in new-time versus the Louisiana Purchaser in old-time and the crisscrossing, it’s just a good structure, a good zone, good opportunity for conflict and richness.

Something about that story . . . Well, you asked, “What, what was the genesis for that dynamic?” I think what authorized me to tell a story like that, or enabled me to, is that living in the Yaak in the 21st century, we’re faced with the same choices on such a heartbreakingly smaller scale. The scale to Jefferson’s perception, then, was infinite. It wasn’t infinite, but he perceived it to be infinite, his culture perceived it to be infinite. And now, goddamn it, nobody perceives it to be infinite, we all understand how damned finite it is, we can measure down to the last foot how finite it is. There is 188,000 acres of roadless lands left in a million-acre landmass in the Yaak that’s still even eligible for wilderness designation, which is to say let these last 18.8 percent of the landmass go about its own natural processes, to burn or rot, grow old or die, grow young again at its own pace outside of our own manipulations. Not to cast value judgments even on our manipulations, just to say these last 18.8 percent of places in this incredibly wild valley we’re going to save, for no other reason than as a test case, scientific base of data, against which to measure our own future successes and failures. So living there is where that story came from about slavery and control, land and control and science and knowing everything or thinking you know everything. But I don’t think those things when I’m writing a story, I’m just realizing it now.

SUMNER

How’s the Yaak doing, Rick?

BASS

It’s in a tough way. It’s got a Republican White House, Republican Senate, Republican House of Representatives and they’ve had three years to stuff agencies and cabinets and committees with industry lobbyists and right-wing philosophers, and they’re not big fans of wilderness or wildness. They’re not big fans of much of anything of what I care for, so it’s about the worst I’ve ever seen it. We’re in the middle of a forest- planning initiative, so if I can make a request for people who read the interview to write letters I’ll send information on that.

SUMNER

That was our last question. Do you have a final thought?

BASS

Too many final thoughts.

SUMNER

They’re never final?

BASS

They’re all final.

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Melanie Rae Thon is the author of two collections of short stories and three novels, including her most recent work, Sweet Hearts, which is set in the forest and plains of Montana. She has had other work published in Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review and Story. She won the Whiting Award in 1997 and an NEA grant in 1992. Originally from Kalispell Montana, she received her BA from University of Michigan and her MA from Boston University. She has taught at Harvard University, Emerson College, Ohio State University and at a women’s prison. Ms. Thon currently lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah. In February, 2004, she spoke with us at the Ridpath Hotel in Spokane, Washington. Our discussion seemed to weave in and out of the common threads that bind writing and the struggle of humanity, including exploration, risk-taking and redemption. Throughout our conversation, a fire burned in the large fireplace before us in the hotel lobby, complimenting Ms. Thon’s quiet and soothing voice.

Lisa Frank: Your characters are all very well crafted and complex, and are all very different from one another, with various backgrounds. How do you go about creating characters for your stories?

Melanie Rae Thon: I usually have some questions that guide me. Like with the story “First, Body,” I had been to a lecture on autopsy and there was a man there who looked Vietnam-vet age. He was an extremely large man and he had an obviously very serious knee injury and it came out in conversation that he actually injured his knee in the hospital. So, I thought, Wow, there’s a story there! He never said he was a Vietnam vet, he just kind of had that ragged, torn up look and he was about the right age, so I made chose connections and thought, Okay, Vietnam vet comes back from Vietnam intact, works at the hospital and messes up his knee. How would that happen? And so it was the explosion of the question in my mind that set me on the course of trying to discover Sid Elliott and his story. But when I work on a short story, I often do two hundred pages of exploration; in fact, in the story, “Little White Sister,” I did fifty pages of exploration in the voice of the woman who dies and who only speaks seventeen lines in the story. So, I did fifty pages of trying to figure out who she was. But I couldn’t have found the seventeen right lines that she speaks if I didn’t know her well, if I didn’t know her background. It [the exploration] brings me close to the people-the characters-and it helps me see them physically and spiritually, and it helps me understand their experiences. So, I have this massive list of questions in terms of exploration. I think now, because I’m getting older, I actually write less. But I think more.

John Baker: It sounds like a lot of work, but you also talk about the joy that comes in the act of writing. Is that also a big part of it?

Thon: It’s a huge part of it. I’m a victim—as much as any other writer—of wanting to have a product, of wanting to have a beautiful story to send out to the world and have people read it. I get into that, but then underneath it all, there is still the thrill of knowing your characters, of discovering their worlds, of becoming more familiar and less afraid. A good example of that is in Sweet Hearts, with the character of Flint, who is an outlaw. I have been interested in juvenile problems for a long time and I have visited juvenile detention centers, but I had never been to an adult prison, so I had to go to the scare prison and do research for that. The one, huge obstacle in my teaching career at that point was that I had always wanted to teach in a prison, but I was too afraid. I thought they’ll look at me and think privileged professor, Miss Do-A­-Good-Deed or something. Then, while doing a tour of tribal colleges a couple of years ago after working on that novel for years, I visited the women’s correctional facility, where I taught a class. Throughout that experience, I was so completely comfortable. I walked into the room, and unlike a traditional classroom, all the women walked straight up to me as they came in and shook my hand and introduced themselves. We sat at these little tables and it was just like a group of women getting together and talking or playing cards. It was very intimate and I felt safe and comfortable, because I thought, You know, I’m not completely ignorant. I don’t know what it’s like to really have to live in prison, but I’m not completely naïve and small minded, and so I thought that it’s okay for me to be there. And that’s what’s real, this deep, internal satisfaction of saying, I’m not so limited, I’m not so naïve. I can go into any place and have that peace of mind.

Baker: A lot of times we think too much about how our work is going to be perceived, which can be a roadblock for a writer. How important is it for a writer to write unpretentiously, or rather truthfully?

Thon: Writers are both incredibly arrogant and incredibly insecure, si­multaneously, and those two things are so close, really. They’re set up as opposites, but really they slide in and out of each other completely. But as for the pretension—I think chat the way I get around that emo­tionally and spiritually is to do those hundreds of pages of exploration, to spend years doing my research so that I’m not just taking a pose, I’m not just doing something artistic, I’m not doing something in terms of craft, but I’m really trying to understand. And that’s not a bad thing-to try to understand-and I think that when we think, Oh, I’m doing this because I want praise, I’m doing this because I want money, I’m doing this because I want to be famous, all of that, you know, is ridiculous. But if you’re doing it because you want to understand something that you don’t understand, that’s a good thing to pursue and the writing that comes out of it-whether you get there or not, I mean you try to get there, but you don’t know that you will get there—but I think if you do it honestly and you do the explorations and you do the research, you’re going to be changed by that. And you’re going to come back to your life in a new place, and that’s a good thing.

Frank: In Sweet Hearts, the narrator is a deaf-mute and the protagonists’ aunt, which is an extremely interesting choice in many ways. What makes a character a good narrator?

Thon: I didn’t have Marie as the narrator until after I had been working on the novel for about three and a half years. I was lost, actually, in terms of who was telling the story. I had all these pieces from different kinds of perspectives and I hadn’t pulled it all together. It was terrible. I could’ve presented it that way, I suppose. It’s post-modern, everybody. It’s cool you figure it out! [Laughter breaks out.] But I really feel passionately, you know, about helping my reader understand my world. It’s really very old-fashioned, I know [ laughter]. And then I went to Montana to live alone and do research right in the area [where the story is set]. I wanted to live on the lake in the area where the motel was and it was during that time—you know, I was alone all the time, I was silent all the time, and the sounds that I heard were really minimal, they were limited to natural sounds mostly, which was glorious, except for by choice when I would go out into the intrusive world—that I started to hear the voice of someone who couldn’t hear, and that was fascinating to me. She’d been a character in the novel, but she wasn’t the speaker. And then there was a day when I was walking along the river and she started speaking to me fiercely about her father and she had a very passionate voice. And I thought, There it is. There’s where the heart in the story is.

Baker: How important is it for a writer to be or to become uncluttered and uninhibited and unshaped by the mainstream culture? Do you think it’s important to have a view or an understanding of the culture and still try to become as uncluttered and uninhibited as we can as writers?

Thon: I like moving between the two. I have many stories that have urban settings and I am painfully aware of the culture and our current dilemmas and I just really finally have to withdraw to really do the real writing. But it’s almost impossible to live that way and I’m not sure that it would be good ultimately. I mean, I really like moving between the polarities and being exposed and then having my space.

Frank: One thing I’ve really appreciated in your writing—in First, Bodies, as well as in Sweet Hearts—is your willingness to experiment and take risks. But with that also comes the willingness to fail, which I feel is underrated and can also be a good thing, because you ultimately learn from your mistakes. Can you talk about your willingness to take risks?

Thon: I think every story is a failure, that our vision is like way up there [holding her hand high above her head] and that through our revisions, we kind of go like that [starting with her hand down at her head, she slowly moves it up, but stops when she gets only half-way extended] until we only get to here and then we go, I’m not going to get any further with this piece. There’s no way I can get to the vision of it, which is always far beyond what you can render. But you’ve learned something on the way and you go back into new material from a different perspec­tive, and so from my viewpoint, everything’s a failure. So, why not take the risk? [laughter] But it’s the same idea as the exploration, that if you’re going to learn something, if you’re going to hope to become more compassionate through your work, through your exploration, then you have to take risks. And I also really believe—and you know, scientists say this—that we only tap into, at most, about a tenth of our imagina­tions and that’s what I see with my students all the time. When they’re trying to make things fit and make things work and to tell a story and do it the straight way, their minds just clamp down. And as soon as they have an exploration to do, as soon as you say, “Don’t worry about the product, just go,” suddenly their minds are on fire, you know, and they’re going in twenty-five different directions at once and then you’ve got two hundred pages and somehow you have to make sense of it. That’s kind of a drag, you know [laughter] and it’s hard to figure that out, but I think better to have the two hundred pages and never make the story than to do twenty pages that are precise and perfect and well crafted and didn’t get you anywhere.

Frank: If you have a piece that isn’t working, how do you know whether to keep working on it or to pitch it?

Thon: There were a few stories along the way that I pitched, and certainly very early in my writing, everything got pitched eventually. But now what I discovered is that if I stay with it long enough, it morphs until it becomes a story that is okay, one of those okay-failures. If it’s not working—first of all, that language…I always tell my students, “There is no ‘This is working, this is not working,”‘ which I just find annihilat­ing—but if l reach a point where I think, I can’t make this story make sense for myself, then I think, there’s something in here that’s the heart of it that I can take out and I can use that as the core to transform it into something else. So, eventually, if I stay with it long enough, it becomes a story I want to tell.

Frank: That’s something I need to learn a little bit, so I appreciate that [laughter].

Thon: But I think what I said about pitching stories early on…what I always tell people is that nothing that I wrote in graduate school be­ came part of my published work, with the exception of a story that I actually started as an undergrad that was in completely different forms as an undergrad, in grad school, and then finally in the published ver­sion, which ended up as a totally different story. But nothing that I generated in graduate school became part of my published work. All of that was learning.

Baker: I’m glad to hear that, actually [laughter].

Thon: Many people do publish a book right out of graduate school, their thesis becomes their first book. I know a few people like that and I think, Well, bless your hearts, lucky you [laughter].

Baker: You must’ve encountered some self-doubts, like What am I doing writing? But when did you know that writing was your calling, your vocation?

Thon: In my first semester in college, when people asked me what I was going to do, I said, “I am a writer, which was incredibly silly and naïve on my part [laughter]. I had no idea what that meant. I had written very, very little, just bad adolescent poetry and it was just totally silly. But was true for me—and what has always been true—is that I could not live, I literally could not live, if I didn’t do it. I couldn’t survive in the world. The world was too tumultuous, too confusing. My sorrow was too deep for me—and that’s the adolescent poetry still seeping out [laughter] to survive. So, I didn’t ever think of it as a choice and I think that a blessing, really. One of my friends said he had a choice, he could either be a thief or a writer [laughter]. And for me it was like, I could either be a waitress or a writer and I was a waitress for thirteen years. It’s made my mom crazy as you might imagine, but I just never thought I’d do something else, you know, and I didn’t publish for a long, long time. I just never thought that was an obstacle. I think I was really lucky that I grew up in a different time period. People now—your age—are under a lot more pressure to make money, to be successful, to get your careers on the road. I was a waitress for five years straight after graduate school and never during that time did I think I was making a mistake. I thought, I’m becoming a better writer, you know, I’m not publishing, but I’m becoming a better writer. I just kept doing my work.

Frank: The daily experiences also seem to help with writing. All the bor­ing, mundane stuff and interactions with different people.

Thon: Yeah, everything goes in there.

Frank: Yeah, even all those lost years, as I like to call them [laughter].

Thon: You can learn to love anywhere, you know, and ultimately it’s about who do we love and who are we trying to love and you don’t have to be in some prestigious job to figure that out.

Baker: I’ve heard writers say that our work as writers and artists really should be not to glorify the human spirit, but to uplift it, and from reading your work, I would guess you would say the same thing, but I’d like to hear what you have to say about that.

Thon: I would be hesitant to say that artists and writers should do anything. People have different views on making art. But I think for myself, what I’m always trying to do in my work—for myself—is to learn to love more intensely, to learn to be more compassionate toward people of whom I’m afraid and people with whom I’m intimate. And for me, that happens in my writing, that’s how I get there. The product, the writing itself, is the byproduct. The quest for me is to make my life bigger, so I hope that when readers read my work, they feel that it opens them to feel more compassion and less fear, and the possibility of loving more people or loving the people whom they love with greater depth, greater openness. Many people say my work is “dark” and every time they say it, I can feel the dagger. And I think, Oh, don’t you see the joy? Don’t you see that these people-no matter what their circumstances-they’re trying to love, they’re trying to stay alive through their love however difficult their lives are, however much they’ve suffered. All of my people are trying to love, and people who say my work is “dark” never buy that argument. But that’s what I hope that my work does. Once again, with thinking of the work as a byproduct, I think that for me, the work that I do helps me go into the classroom, helps me be with my family, helps me go into the prison. So, the work is at least doing the work on me-slowly, slowly, slowly, with many falls backward [laughter].

Frank: This is in connection with what you just said. Before I actually ask the question, I’m going to first apologize for using the word “dark,” [laughter] although I think you’ll forgive me when you hear the rest of the question. Sweet Hearts is a really dark story, but all the charac­ters—no matter how bad their sins—seem to have a strong desire for redemption, a desire which leads to hope, which in turn lends itself to a more hopeful reading of the ending, which I ultimately find to be more interesting. Can you talk about redemption and its place in humanity and in your characters?

Thon: I think that if we’re seeking redemption truthfully, not some sort of I’m going to make amends and then everything’s going to be alright, but if we’re seeking redemption in the sense of repentance, and repentance meaning literally turning, and that turning isn’t one turn of conversion, like Okay, now I’m going to be a good person, but the constant turning into new situations, and facing new situations with love and openness and trust and to behave decently toward other human beings and other living creatures, as soon as we honestly begin to seek redemption, we are redeemed. It’s just like as soon as we seek God, we have already found God, whether or not we understand that, whether or not we recognize that. As soon as we begin to turn into that place, the process has already begun and hope is eternal in that motion as long as we keep remind­ing ourselves that it’s not okay to feel like, Okay, I’m safe, I made it. I experience this like a hundred times a day, that feeling of relief, when understanding washes over me, and that feeling of despair, when I feel my heart close toward someone, where I start to judge someone or I start to need something from a friend and then am disappointed by them. That kind of closure keeps me from seeing. So, it’s constant and a constant reminder to keep turning and turning and turning.

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Lan Samantha Chang was born to Chinese immigrants, who left China when the communist government came to power in 1949. Her parents moved to the small Midwestern city of Appleton, Wisconsin. Chang said that since her Midwestern youth, she’s “constantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents’ experiences.” Her books—a collection of stories, Hunger (1998), and the novel Inheritance (2004)—demonstrate a desire to not only learn about and replicate her family and cultural history, but also to discover more about how culture and family relate to identity.

She holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale, an MPA from Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—an experience she said was “the best thing I ever did.” She is currently the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University.

Ms. Chang was interviewed over lunch at the Silver City Grill, a restaurant in the Ridpath Hotel, downtown Spokane, Washington. Before the interview, we discussed politics, moving, then her writing process.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: What does an “on” writing week look like for you?

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG: I’ve been fortunate to be able to get up and write right away. So, an “on” week for me would have me waking up in the morning with very little interaction with people and working for three or four hours—until my mind gets tired. For a long time, I lived in a studio apartment, so it was basically twelve feet from my bed to my writing desk. I kind of liked that. I felt like my life was focused in a way it no longer is. When I first moved to Cambridge—because of the high price of real estate—I wrote in my office at school. I think writing at school slowed me down, because of the internet. I would turn on the computer and worry that somebody had written me an e-mail; that would take up a few minutes and divert my mind. When I’m really “on,” I write before I check my e-mail. And I’ve organized my life so the e-mail is at school and I don’t have access at home. After I started living with somebody in my studio apartment, it was hard to work at home so I worked at school. I think that’s one of the reasons the last part of my novel took so long to write.

BRIAN O’GRADY: Did you move as you were finishing Inheritance?

CHANG: I moved constantly while I was writing the novel. I wrote the first draft of the novel in California. Then I moved to Iowa City for seven months. I moved to New Jersey for about a year. One month, I lived in Wyoming. That was my official residence, because I was between apartments at the time. Then I moved from there to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year, then I moved to Iowa City for a year, then I moved back to Cambridge and finished it there.

O’GRADY: With so much moving around, how long did it take to complete the novel?

CHANG: Seven years. And I probably lost a year to those moves. Every time I moved, I lost at least two months. One month to pack up, the other to get settled.

O’GRADY: Did that throw your writing off?

CHANG: It didn’t throw my writing off—teaching threw me off. Starting a new teaching job can disrupt my rhythm, depending on the intensity of the experience. Another thing that disrupts me is changes in my non-writing life. Getting married, that was a disruption. But other writers I know say it’s possible to make these adjustments and figure out a way to get the work done. I think the challenge for writers is figuring out how to write and live at the same time. That’s why graduate school is great. Even though you don’t realize it, you have so much time. It’s really wonderful. Later, you look back and think “Lord, I could’ve done so much more.” I could be wrong, but in general, that seems to be the case.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: In the novel, Inheritance, people move a lot, too. Do you think that’s related to your real life?

CHANG: I think that because of the material I covered in the novel, moving was a structural challenge I had to overcome as I wrote. My characters were born in the eastern coastal area of China, then they moved to in- land China, then to the eastern part again but to a different city, then Taiwan, then two different parts of the United States. I think that was a typical pattern for a person born of that era and of that particular class or group. There’s a whole group of immigrants to the United States who left China in the late 1940s or even 1949, when the communists came to power, moved to Taiwan, then came to the United States for their educations. And they all know each other; it seems like they do anyway. Whenever I run into their children, it always turns out they had some- thing in common with my parents. It was a little diaspora. Their lives were highly mobile. My mother, for example, moved 26 times before she was 18. After that, she moved to the United States, met my father and settled in Wisconsin.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Are they still there?

CHANG: They’re still there. I think that’s because my mother needs to feel like she belongs to a place. Although she’s never said so in so many words, I think their moving around so much when they were young has made them appreciate being in one place, whereas I grew up in Wisconsin, was born and raised in Wisconsin, went to high school in Wisconsin. And since then, I’ve constantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents’ experiences. But I think it’s more that I’ve followed my writing opportunities, and I haven’t had any control—but no, that’s not true: it’s not that I haven’t had control; it’s that I’ve chosen to fol- low the opportunities with nothing to tie me down. Until now. Now I’m married. Now I work in Cambridge. We’ve moved to Somerville, bought a place to live. And we still don’t feel tied down. We feel like we could move. We feel like we could still be free.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Did Inheritance mirror your own family’s history?

CHANG: It’s not a family history. In fact, there’s almost nothing in the book that happened to my family. But my father’s brother was actually a communist. And my father did find out about it sort of accidentally. Not in the same way Li Ang discovers his brother’s a communist. What happened to my father was, he and his brother spent some time traveling when they were young, for college, because the Japanese had encroached upon the north and had occupied Beijing, where they were from. People left the occupied territories in groups, and one of the groups was an educational movement. The universities tried to move to southwestern China, where the new capital was, and form their own interim, wartime university. My father was part of that university. So he left home pretty early on. But his path led him away from his brother, to Taiwan. My father wasn’t a communist but he wasn’t a nationalist, either. He was apolitical, so he left China because he thought there would be upheaval and trouble when the communists took over. There was a period from 1949 until the 1980s when China was basically out of reach to the average person who didn’t live there. My father had no news of his family at all. Then when Mao died, the country began to slowly open up. My father found news of his family and went to visit them, at which point he learned his brother had died. And he also came to understand that his brother had been a very active communist party member. He returned to China in the early 1980s, and when he was there, while looking at some publication, he saw a list of high-level communist officials and saw the name of a guy he knew growing up, his brother’s best friend. And he realized that somehow the two of them had become communists together. This was so interesting to me—because I knew so little about my father’s family—that it worked into my mind. I was writing about a country divided by politics and war, and it seemed that writing a book about a divided family would be an accurate view. I wanted to write about the intersection between something very large and a very intimate story, so that was one of the ways I was able to access such an intersection.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: While Inheritance might not be a “political” novel, it has a definite interest in politics in so many ways—family, sexual politics—but also the politics of immigration. How did the political changes in China affect the families and eventually push them to America?

CHANG: That is something that has happened as long as immigrants have been coming to the United States. Pressure—often political—in their home country pushes a people out in search of a better life, and, as I said, I think my parents belonged to a certain wave generated by civil war, the fall of nationalism, and the rise of communism. That’s interesting to me. I think about all immigrant writers, especially the wave of Jewish writers after World War II…

O’GRADY: I wanted to ask you about that. You mentioned in an interview that you had a real interest in second generation Jewish immigrants.

CHANG: When I was first learning to write, I was deeply influenced by a Bernard Malamud story called “The Magic Barrel.” I don’t know why the story stuck with me as much as it did, except that there’s a deep sense of longing there. In the story, Leo Finkle’s parents are both dead, and there’s a sense that, while he’s living alone, he needs to move on, and yet he doesn’t know how to find somebody with whom to do that. I think that sort of isolation, cultural isolation, affected me, as did the character Pinye Salzman, a sad marriage broker who smells like fish and has an unpleasant home life, who is trying to work miracles for this young man and eventually does. The fairy tale quality of the story seems to have combined the contemporary life of New York at the time with a sense of long ago and far away. It speaks of the idea of an “old country.” The emotional resonance of post World War II Jewish writers really speaks to me. Phillip Roth’s first book was really important to me while I was learning to write as well. I read an introduction he wrote to an anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus. In the introduction, he said that he was completely taken with the idea of departure, obsessed with the idea of leaving, at the time. And really, the book is about leaving your culture and holding on to your culture and I think that really struck me at different points of my life. Particularly because in studying writing, in becoming a writer, I was essentially leaving behind some of the hopes of my parents.

O’GRADY: You’ve talked a little about the assimilation issue and how that ties in with your interest in Jewish writers after World War II. How does that play out in your stories?

CHANG: I think assimilation is a central issue only in one of my stories, one called “The Unforgetting.” It’s about a Chinese family that moves to the Midwest and tries to leave their old life, but as time goes on, they find that they can’t forget the old life. Meanwhile, their son, who was raised American, does what Americans do: leaves home. I think that captured some of my feelings about assimilation—that it’s necessary to a certain extent, but at the same time, it’s a tremendous loss. I mean, it can be a particular loss in the relationship between parents and children and different generations of immigrants.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Related to that, I read that you visited China for the first time as an adult. Did you feel more like an American visiting a foreign country, or more of a “homecoming” feeling?

CHANG: I felt both like an American and a person coming home. We entered China by flying into Hong Kong, then we flew into Guilin, which is in central southern China. It’s a region famed for its scenery, and I recognized the oddly-shaped mountains from beautiful pictures my parents had hung in our living room. But I could tell the people there saw me as a foreigner, since I was clearly raised somewhere else—I didn’t speak the local dialect, and my Chinese is a little awkward. So I felt odd. But as we went further north, closer to where my father was from, I felt more and more at home. China’s a huge country, and the people everywhere are different. People up north are taller—you could say generally they tend to be taller and look more like me. As we got closer to where my father was from, I felt that I was encountering some familiar element I couldn’t explain, partly because the people started to look more like me and the dialect became more familiar, sounded more like my father’s dialect. Actually, he doesn’t speak a dialect, he speaks Mandarin with a Beijing accent. And as we went toward Beijing and then Xi’an, I felt as if I really was discovering where my family came from. I then met my father’s family and there were a lot of similarities, even though we were essentially strangers. I think in that way, it was a homecoming. And I remember going to Shanghai, where my mother’s from, and seeing all the buildings and places I had read about or she had told me about, so I had the feeling I was going someplace familiar.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Do you think that homecoming feeling inspired what Xiao Hong felt in Inheritance when she returned to China to visit her aunt?

CHANG: I do. And it’s also a feeling that many people have told me about.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Were any of the place descriptions of China based on what you saw when you were there?

CHANG: Almost all. The description of Chongqing, the description of the landscape around there, the Yangtze River, the description of West Lake, were things I had seen. I will say, though, there were certain descriptions I had to completely invent. For example, I was in a bomb shelter when I was in Chongqing. I went to a couple of them, but I was never in one when it was being bombed at night.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: That would’ve been hard to simulate.

CHANG: Right, exactly.

O’GRADY: The gambling in the book—did you do research?

CHANG: Well, I went to Las Vegas and I played Paigao.

O’GRADY: They have that in Vegas?

CHANG: Yeah, and it’s actually all over in California, too. I learned a lot about it when I was living in California. And I asked my mother about it. She had played it as a child on New Year’s. It’s sort of a child’s game, but it can be quite devastating. Basically the host either wins or loses big, and it’s entirely up to chance; there’s no skill involved. Not like poker, where there’s some skill involved. Paigao isn’t like that.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: You say your mother knew how to play, but in Inheritance, only the men get to play.

CHANG: Well, the men were the ones who got to leave home and start gambling, although women gambled all the time, too. I mean, my grandmother was a huge Mahjong player; she played constantly. According to my mother, they would start in the morning and play until early morning, go to sleep, then get up and start playing again. I don’t understand what the pleasure was. I’m not interested in games. But my father is interested in games, and my parents play Mahjong now that they’re retired.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: So you didn’t have much fun in Vegas?

CHANG: Not really. I’m not a gambler by nature. It seemed to me that after I’d been writing the book for a while, I realized one of the interesting aspects of the book was that there was an element of extreme chance that was represented by the game, and an element of extreme control, which was Junan, the main character. She was obsessed with trying to control the outcome, control the outcome to the point where she made the biggest mistake of her life—

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: She took it to her death, really. That was the one sad thing I felt about the ending. I felt that a lot of things in the book were resolved happily, though bittersweet. But Junan stuck to her guns until the end.

CHANG: She really did. See, I like her for that. I mean, I was interested in a certain kind of characterization, character development different from the psychological model that says someone undergoes a transformation, or that we, as readers, must understand more deeply the psychological reasons for the characters’ behaviors. And I feel that in my book, no one really undergoes a psychological transformation. Well, several of the characters do not undergo psychological transformations. Particularly Junan. She is the same; however, we see her in so many settings that we learn more about the degree and the nature of her obsessions. That is a different kind of character development.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: But I think as a reader, I rooted for Yinan to reconcile with Junan. Her not achieving reconciliation set a different tone for the end of the book.

CHANG: I like the idea of acknowledging that there are things that are not settled by our lives, and there are questions that can’t really be resolved. That feels more real to me than the idea that everything can be happily resolved. I don’t know, because I haven’t died yet. I don’t know what that’s like and it’ll be too late by then.

O’GRADY: How has your degree in Asian Studies helped your writing? Do you think it’s important for a writer to have knowledge of an outside discipline?

CHANG: I have mixed feelings about how to answer this question. I teach undergraduates, many of them very serious writers, and they want to know if they should major in English. I always tell them they don’t have to. At the same time, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would take a lot more English courses than I did in college. Of course, when I was in college, I had no idea I was going to become a writer, and I was taking English classes as electives that I worked in secretly and enjoyed. It’s not that I didn’t take them seriously, but I didn’t take seriously the idea that I should study English. And when I went to my MFA program, I realized there were all these books I hadn’t read. I feel like I’ve been catching up ever since. So that’s one side of the story. On the other hand, I don’t think I could’ve written Inheritance if I hadn’t majored in East Asian Studies. I learned so much about China in college. And I learned the language, which was very important to me in writing the book. I encourage my students to do as many different things as they can, because once they get writing, it’s hard to get out to do too many different things.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Many writers have mixed feelings about MFA programs, but coming from an MFA program yourself, what do you think are the benefits and disadvantages to attending one?

CHANG: I don’t have mixed feelings about MFA programs. I think going to get my MFA at Iowa was the best thing I ever did. I had not studied writing in college. Reading John Gardner’s book, The Art of Fiction, a number of times, cover to cover, was the extent of my writing education, aside from a few community courses. So, when I went to Iowa, I felt supported and sustained by the mere fact that I was surrounded by people solely interested in writing. They had given up whatever they were doing, and in many cases traveled thousands of miles, to go to this inland, small-town setting in which writing was taken extremely seriously and there was a long heritage of writing. I think MFA programs can provide shelter and sustenance for people at the right point in their lives. I think sometimes people go to MFA programs too early, before they have time off. And in those cases, an MFA program is like an ex- tension of their college educations. I don’t think an MFA program can be appreciated by everybody until they’ve had a chance to leave school and try to write on their own, which is always a real struggle. So it was wonderful—I learned an enormous amount about craft. I met people who are still my readers. I had two really, really good years.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: I saw that your books have several Iowa professors in the acknowledgements.

CHANG: They matter to me. They still matter to me. When I was at Iowa, each person I studied with taught me something. But I think many people who go through MFA programs are disappointed for one reason or another, often because of expectations. They go to the program expecting to meet a mentor who will then help them. That was not my experience. What I found instead was that I met a peer group that became very sustaining to my life as a writer. A poet who I deeply admire told me that it’s more important for a young writer to see and watch an established writer than for an established writer to see and watch a young writer. In other words, people want established writers to notice them because they think it might be some kind of touch from a world they can then enter. It’s actually more important that they watch that person and see how they conduct themselves, the things that they do and don’t do, what they do that you wouldn’t do. I think that’s one thing the MFA program provides. It provides an opportunity for writers in training or aspiring writers to watch and learn from established writers. The learning is not always direct, it’s not always someone taking you by the hand; it’s often things that you glean. And it’s not necessarily what the established writer wants you to glean. I remember going with a professor to a reading at a place the name of which I won’t mention, to watch a visiting person of high eminence give a reading, and having the professor explain to me that “this is how not to give a reading.”

O’GRADY: A couple stories in Hunger have bits of different styles. “San,” for example, has a sort of detective story in it, where she’s picking up clues about her dad’s life. In “Pipa’s Story,” she’s getting stories from the outside world, and there are fairy tale elements to the story. Do you try to try to mix forms?

CHANG: I do try to mix forms. I’m very interested in the tale. The early drafts of Inheritance had huge tales in them. I had a whole generation of characters that aren’t in it anymore. There was this whole big scene in a gambling house, where this big tale’s being told about the evolution of the kiss in lovemaking. This got cut, because, as many readers pointed out to me, it was totally irrelevant to the novel. But it’s always been a form that interests me. In terms of the detective story, I picked up as a child that we are born into time after our parents, and the only way we can find out about them, if they don’t tell us, is by spying on them. And I think that will constantly appear in my work. I don’t see that going away because it’s one of the things that most troubles me, the fact that we’re born forward in time and we can’t go back and revisit. That really bothers me. I think “Pipa’s Story” has some elements of the gothic, which I didn’t understand when I wrote it, with the big house and the conflict at its heart and the magical qualities. There are also elements of the tale in that story. I was experimenting, somewhat consciously—just stretching my wings and trying to incorporate different elements of stories I’d heard. In a way, Inheritance takes a lot of its narrative thrust and flow from a “low” genre—the made-for-video or made-for-TV movies that a lot of Asian people watch these days. They’re often historical, filled with drama, and full of scenes where someone is begging or pleading to somebody for something and they don’t get it. You know, the ones with enormous turns of plot, huge, dramatic incidents. I took some of that and consciously put it into Inheritance; the way the action is handled is a kind of tribute to popular culture.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: There is a strong point of view shift in the middle of Inheritance, when you go from a third-person omniscient to a first-person narrator in Xiao Hong. How do you think zooming in on Hong’s first person narrative intensifies the effect of her character? Or more broadly, why did you do that?

CHANG: Finding the point of view was one of the hardest things I had to do while writing Inheritance. I knew my material before I knew my narrator, I knew what story I wanted to tell before I knew the narrator, and it took me a long time to understand who would be the best narrator for the story. I never understood, when I was reading the Janet Burroway textbook Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, why she had two whole chapters on point of view, because it seemed pretty straightforward. People are always able to say, “Oh—here’s a mistake in point of view,” but I realized as I tackled the novel that point of view is more complex and slippery than I understood it to be when I was starting out as a writer. In the novel form—as in the short story, but especially in the novel—point of view is a crucial choice. The difference between writing a novel and a short story is that in a novel, you have to live with your choice for 300 pages. I look at a novel like The Great Gatsby and I understand why Fitzgerald chose the first person and why he chose Nick Carraway as his narrator. But I can also see how that choice, to some extent, dictated so much about the book’s form in many of its complicated places, like where Nick tries to relate stories of things he could not possibly have seen. And I find it interesting that even a brilliant book like The Great Gatsby can have places where it is hamstrung by its point of view. I knew I had to choose a narrator, and that the narrator didn’t have to be a person in the story. But I also knew I had to somehow knit many years together. It was difficult to rely on repetition as a means of knitting the story together, because the story moved from place to place. There were no physical, geographical locations I could use to anchor the story. Look at a third-person epic, such as 100 Years of Solitude: you’ll notice that it takes place in the house, and indeed, García Marquez’s working title for the book was The House, so that every time he returns to the house, you get a sense of continuity and control of the narrative. You can’t do that if you’re constantly moving from one place to another. I decided to rely on a person to be the unifying force in the book. Then I had to decide who it would be, and I had the choice of using the main character, Junan, or someone of her generation. Or someone of her daughter’s generation. Or someone of the youngest generation, which is what I tried to do first because I had been given an admonition by an editor—not my editor—that I should make someone from America the main character or the book wouldn’t sell. Of course, I didn’t go with that editor, but it stuck with me; I wanted to create an American voice, but I didn’t in the end, because I realized the story encompasses two countries, and that the person who could best tell the story was somebody who had lived in both countries and understood the bridge. Hong was that bridge. But I had to start the book before she was born. So I used the idea of the family story to make it possible to create an opening to the book that didn’t include her.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: It didn’t feel like an enormous shift in voice, and that’s probably because it was the family story, and she could easily have been recounting it.

CHANG: That’s right. And I wanted to create that sense of a tale. I think the tone of the book was dictated by the need to fit the third-person and the first-person parts together. And as a result, I learned while I was writing the book how much choices of material and narrator—all that stuff we learn in beginning fiction classes—have such a huge impact on what kind of object the book turns out to be, what tone it has. I don’t know if this is the kind of book I would’ve written by choice, but it turned out to be like this because of what I chose to write about. That’s how I feel about it.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: What do you mean, “by choice”?

CHANG: Well, I mean, it comes across as an epic. Although really I don’t know because I can’t read it. But I know that I’m perfectly capable of writing a completely different kind of book. But not with this type of material. If that makes any sense. I feel like the material in this book is very different from that in Hunger; Inheritance has a different tone than Hunger, it is an entirely different kind of object than Hunger was. I don’t have a problem with it, but I’m aware that part of it has to do with what I was trying to write about, the choices I made.

O’GRADY: Are you working on anything new?

CHANG: Last spring I wrote a 100-page manuscript about some poets, but I realized I haven’t written poetry as an adult, and I felt I should include some poetry and I couldn’t, so I stopped. I’m still thinking about it; I was actually writing about an MFA program, but I thought, “That’s crazy, too; who would want to read about one of those?” But I felt it would be best to put that aside for a while and try going back to it later, since I’m still interested. Since then, I’ve been dealing with changes in my non-writing life: I got married, we bought a place, and we moved into it. That took up a few months. Now I’m working on a lot of the projects I took on after the novel, the ones I took on because I felt my life would be empty without it. I feel that one of them is particularly interesting. It’s a landscape dictionary, edited by Barry Lopez, that will be published in a year or so. In the landscape dictionary, forty writers describe 800 American landscape terms.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: What words do you describe?

CHANG: Some of them are quite technical, such as “debris cone.” I’m also doing basic words, such as “harbor” and “Back Bay.” New England ocean terms, it seems to me; they must’ve given them to me because I live in New England. And I got a couple of desert terms, such as “slick rock,” local to Moab and that area of Utah. And some fun terms like “lover’s leap.” There are 52 places in the United States named “lover’s leap,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and they all have things in common. One of the interesting things about writing for the dictionary is that I had a struggle—I had to break through my resistance to it—but the struggle was trying to adopt an authoritarian third-person point of view about a subject outside of myself. I had never done that before.

O’GRADY: How long are the entries?

CHANG” They’re about 150 words. And they want us to do them in a “writerly” way. It’s a lot of fun, and I think I’m learning something, but I’m not sure what. That’s the way it is always, though.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: How would you like to see your career go? How might you like to be remembered as a writer?

[A long pause.]

CHANG: I think what writers really want is to be read. If people continue to read my work, that would be my greatest wish fulfilled. [Another pause.] I’m thinking about this. It’s a really interesting question. [An- other pause.] But don’t people all say the same thing? Don’t they say “I want to be remembered as an important writer of the 21st century” or something like that?

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: Something like that. But I think it’s especially interesting to ask because you’re young; you’ve got a lot of books left in you.

CHANG: We’ll see. I’d like my books to continue to develop in depth and substance. Obviously. I’d also like to write more short stories and novellas. I love different lengths and forms. But I think what I want most is for people to continue to read my work.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: So it’s a communication itch with you?

CHANG: I don’t know if I’d put it that way exactly, but I think most writers want to be read.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ: You say “read,” not “liked” or “respected.” Is there a distinction for you?

CHANG: No. No distinction. I just want to be read. I don’t have very big ambitions at the moment. Well, I’d like to be able to keep going. It’s very hard for people to keep going. People say it gets harder and harder as they continue on. But I’d love to keep going. I always had the idea of improving as a writer over a long period. That was always my goal. I never wanted to be a “flash in the pan” or a “one hit wonder” or a prodigy because it can set up disappointment. I always want to continue learning.

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Kate Daniels has described Gerald Stern as a “post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium—the United States’ one and only truly global poet.” He may have had little choice in the matter. Born in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland, he grew up in an ethnically diverse Pittsburgh, where he became friends with the poets Jack Gilbert and Richard Hazley. After World War II, Stern spent time in Western Europe before taking his first teaching job in the mid-1950s.

In the five decades since, Stern has published fourteen volumes of poetry, including Everything is Burning (2005), American Sonnets (2003), and This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award in 1998. His other honors include the Lamont Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, three NEA awards, a fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He is also the author of a memoir, What I Can’t Bear Losing (2003). He has taught at Temple University, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and, before retiring in 1995, the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa.

“You read between the lines,” Stern says, “and discover what the character and personality of another writer is.” Reading between the conventional rhythms and understated images of his own lines, we find a poet who examines justice and injustice, cruelty and tenderness, conformity and freedom, as well as the vibrancy of memory. His work derides provincialism and points to a world of experiences beyond American borders and transcendent of temporal limits. Stern has lived in this rich world, and his poetry calls attention to its failures, beauties, and curiosities without fear, shame, or sentimentality. His is an unapologetically cosmopolitan voice, speaking to a world in need of softer dividing lines.

It is that world, the international and intellectually imagined, that we agreed to discuss on a sunny Friday afternoon. Mr. Stern was gracious enough to be interviewed in his room at the Ridpath Hotel, in downtown Spokane, Washington.

JEFF DODD

Many of the poets you refer to in What I Can’t Bear Losing share an understanding of having a communal experience while also feeling their own “foreignness.” Nazim Hikmet, Miklós Radnóti, Hugh MacDiarmid—none of their books get much airtime, even among Americans who know a lot about poetry. Which other poets do you believe deserve more attention in America?

GERALD STERN

Foreign poets that we customarily read, the main one’s Rilke. But most people who read Rilke don’t know he was a Czech Jew, not Ger- man. Of course, he was very much taken with the Slavic spirit, spent some time in Russia, flirting not with the political movement but with the emotional side of the Slavic syndrome. Then the second echelon of people we read are some French poets, like Apollinaire, 19th-century poets like Lautréamont, though more for the specialist. Then down on the third level, particularly in the past thirty or forty years, South Americans, some Spanish poets like Lorca, Neruda, and so on. So, we don’t know Portuguese poets. Occasionally, a person from Bulgaria or Portugal or even Africa will win a Nobel Prize and for a minute or two we’ll read their novels or their poems. America is not to be condemned for this; it’s so huge, it’s a world unto itself—there’s no time, and there’s no space, and it’s not part of our education.

The book I’m reading now, by Alexander Wat, a Polish poet, is an extended 400-page interview he did with Czeslaw Milosz. Wat grew up in Poland, in Warsaw, and he was a Polish-Jewish intellectual. He had an education like most of us here—a humane, cosmopolitan, European education. But to be Polish and have this is very different than having grown up in Kansas City. His first language was Polish, but he also knew Yiddish, though he probably didn’t think it was a foreign language nor a complete language; it was just what was spoken in the house. How could it be a complete language? But it is another language. And Germany’s right on the border, so he knew German. Yiddish is merely a version of 12th-century German. Mix in some Hebrew, some Slavic words. He knew Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish. And the distinction between Russian and Ukrainian—they’re literally separate languages. Much closer, say, than Italian and Spanish. But we don’t have that equivalent closeness in languages in Western Europe and the United States. So he knew eight languages. And when he was in prison—and he was in prison most of his adult years—a Russian would be in his cell, and he would know if the person was from Belarus, or White Russia, or Odessa, and he would know Ukrainian, and he would know if the person was a Jew—there are a thousand different forms, replicas, shadows, shades to pick from; it’s a little bit more boring here. We have our McDonalds.

We don’t have shades to pick from; things are more uniform. So a writer reflects this, reflects the complications. If you’re Dutch, you don’t just read Dutch literature. How about Danish literature—you’re not going to learn Danish? You’re not going to learn Swedish? You’re not going to learn English? French? Most American poets don’t know other languages, not well enough to, say, speak them or read them. Phil Levine knows Spanish. Bly knows Spanish and some German, a little Swedish. But I can name many well-known American poets who don’t know any foreign languages, let alone classical languages, because we didn’t have that kind of education. So this is part of our problem, if it is a problem.

Pound was born in 1885, I think, and was deeply aware of this. When he was in his late teens, early twenties, he saw America as a desert. One of his fairly early poems, in Personae, which preceded Cantos—the poem went something like this: “What would it be like if America read the Classics?” But Pound was a blowhard and an asshole, also a great poet, and an autodidact, and pushed his crazy ideas. He’s very American. He acted like he was the only one who ever studied Chinese, who ever read Provençal poetry, he’s going to teach everyone what to do and how to do it. That’s another kind of American provincialism. Pound was a provincialist. And it was Gertrude Stein who said the most wonderful thing of Pound. She called him the village—not idiot—the village…I can’t remember the word. She was aware that he was somewhat of a provincial, at the same time that he preached universalism. And he knew German and French and he lived in France and England. But he was always self-conscious of it. You see, Wat would not be self-conscious. He would just assume—of course you know Russian and Ukrainian and Lithuanian and Bulgarian and French; what else is there? But Pound would be conscious of the fact that he had read the Provençal poets. Proud of it. And he was a great student, particularly of the Spanish, Italian—Romance languages. So he had that. But his influence on that score was not long-lasting. Because most people didn’t listen to him at all. It’s a hard culture to change.

DODD

Is there a comparison between Pound’s early career and Hugh MacDiarmid’s, leading up to this sort of political willfulness, that in some ways destroyed their careers?

STERN

Of course, MacDiarmid didn’t have the recognition. I knew MacDiarmid; I met him in Scotland. I lived for a year there. I met him by accident, because my former wife, Pat, and I were living in an apartment owned by some Scottish communists. So, we got introduced to the group of Scottish Marxists. Most of them were painters, a few poets. The leader of them was Hugh MacDiarmid, whose real name was Christopher Grieve. And on May Day we marched down the main streets of Glasgow. I visited him several times in his little farmhouse, which was halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. He complained a lot—Pound got all the attention and he didn’t. They both were strongly interested in politics; they were on different sides. They were both weird, crazy. Although MacDiarmid was not a racist. MacDiarmid’s strangeness was that he was both a nationalist and a cosmopolitan at the same time. How could you be a communist, and thus believe in internationalism, and, at the same time, try to promote a new, local, language that was spoken in southwestern Scotland and be a Scottish nationalist? Because those were the particulars of his life; there’s no logic or reasonableness to it. They wrote in Lallans and they made up their own words. Presumably, these words had some root or connection with the area of Scotland called Ayreshire, which is where Robert Burns was from. When you read some of the poems produced by those poets, you have to read the footnotes. They were communists, but this was not a people’s poetry. They were intellectuals, learned intellectuals.

One of the things I learned over there is that Scotland is a totally different country than England. We used to go to the movies in Scotland, and at the end of the movie, when they played “God Save the Queen,” the Scots all walked out, because Queen Elizabeth II was not Queen Elizabeth II of Scotland. Because Queen Elizabeth I was a bastard Queen; she was not Scottish. She usurped Mary. The Scots speak a different language, really think differently than the English. And they have bad press by the English who are the dominant party—they say Scots are tight, when Scots are liberal, generous, lovely, beautiful people. And MacDiarmid, I love his poetry. It has a good spirit; he had a good spirit. Pound didn’t have a good spirit.

The problem with Pound lovers is that they either ignore or make excuses for his politics. They make a mystery, even a mysticism, a kind of priestly religion, out of his cultural and realistic views, and they hold him up as the great exemplar. But the spirit of the man was not kind. He was not a kind or loving human being. There’s no reason a poet has to be a kind, loving human being, but I like kind and loving people. I like generous, kind, loving, decent, honest, authentic people, and I believe those qualities willy-nilly show up or don’t show up in a poet. Some things in Pound are marvelous. I learned from him, as all my con- temporaries did, about the efficiency of language, how to use language efficiently and sharply, to make poetry as efficient as prose. Not to be decorative, poetic, learning who to read to do that. Learning to read differently. Learning to read Chaucer, and not to trust the Romantics as much as we did. I learned a lot from him.

But I didn’t learn kindness, generosity.

When they talk about the Cantos, they generally say it’s a failed poem, but Pound didn’t intend for it to be a failed poem. He spent forty to fifty years at it. So, he’s a failed poet. Do you say The Canterbury Tales is a failed poem? Or the Comedia is a failed poem? And so Pound lovers, such as my friend Jack Gilbert, will say that in the Cantos, there are perfect lyrics interspersed among the other crap. And I don’t read the crap—newspaper articles from 1906, statements overheard in a bar in 1912, memoirs of Confucius, letters of Madison or Adams, whatever else the Cantos are made of—I read those beautiful little lyrics, forty lines here, twenty lines on paradise, 200 lines on suffering. Pound lovers go on to say the most beautiful section of the Cantos is the Pisan Cantos, written when Pound was incarcerated by the American army and didn’t have any books with him—I think he had one book, Confucius, to read. Well, first of all, reading Confucius was idiotic. I mean, the idea that this guy, Pound—from where, Idaho?—was preaching Confucius when he was sixty to seventy years old is so weird. Confucius was a Chinese Puritan who believed in order. I’m not interested in Confucius. I mean, fuck Confucius. I’m much more interested in how the Chinese produced Zen, or Lao Tse. Why Confucius—“To have order in the state you must have order in the family?” Where did Pound have order in his family? What is this craziness he was talking about? Where’s the order in the state? Or in the city? Was there order in his city? Order in his state? There were a bunch of Nazis over the border, right? It’s totally crazy to preach that—Bob Hass and Jack Gilbert and whoever else sitting there, going, “Great poet. Preaches Confucius.” Assholes! Preaching Confucius, number one. Number two, the Pisan Cantos are highly sentimental, self-pitying poems. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross…?” There’s an beautiful lyric, but I don’t trust it; I don’t trust a voice if it’s extremely sentimental. At one point, Pound had a phrase, “Oh, let an old man die,” and he was sixty-two years old, plenty of life ahead of him. That was sentimental, self-pitying. I think we should’ve shot him as a traitor. That would have been the appropriate thing—we should’ve shot him. It was a mistake not to shoot him. And we should’ve shot some other poets while we were at it. Now, I still read Pound. I enjoy reading Pound. I love the crazy stuff. Because I’m the kind of person who reads The New York Times cover-to-cover—crossword puzzles, ads. In Pound, I like the Madison, the Monroe. Of course, I don’t like the Confucius. And Chinese scholars say Pound’s Chinese was terrible. And he was a rotten anti-Semite son of a bitch, and that’s unforgivable. It’s just stupid, goddamn dumb. You can’t be a great poet and be dumb. Period.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Another poet controversial in his home country, Nazim Hikmet, came up several times in your autobiography. Do you feel a special connection to him?

STERN

I do feel a special connection with Hikmet. I don’t know how I would like him as a person. I think I would like him. You know, you read between the lines and discover what the character and personality of another writer is, and say “I like that guy. He’s human. He’s on the same wavelength.” He has a poem, he’s a quivering old man, he’s sixty-three, and he’s in a railroad station, in a restaurant, and the waitress comes to him, and he’s writing in the waitress’ voice: “This old man’s sitting there, looking sick, I’d love to help him order, talk to him, he looks lonely.” Hikmet was so pure, so available. That was one thing I liked so much about him. And I like the humanity he expresses while in jail. He was in jail for years and years. He was a prisoner of the Turkish government, he was a communist. That’s a problem for me: I hate communism. I don’t hate it for the same reason the stupid Republicans do or the stupid Democrats. I hate it because it’s senseless—a kind of fake utopia that preaches one thing, then ends up utterly repressive. Certainly, all the communist systems we’ve seen have been incredibly insecure and oppressive. Yet Hikmet remained a stubborn communist until the end. But maybe his experience in Turkey was even worse than it might have been, in his imagination, in Russia, and he certainly got special treatment there. So what he saw was not the inside of the prison, but a hall where he was glorified and given medals. It’s his humanity that I love. He remains one of the great European poets of the 20th century.

The more I read the Eastern European poets, the more I relate to them. I’m not really an internationalist, I don’t know that much about them, but the more I read German poets after the war, Polish poets, Russian poets before the breakup of the Iron Curtain, the more I connect with them. And actually, when I look at my own life, I’m still an Eastern European. My family’s only been here for 100 years. Exactly 100 years. And I grew up in Pittsburgh, American-raised, whatever the hell that means—to be American. But I realize now I’m somewhat of a foreigner. The fact is I’m a Jew. But I didn’t grow up in a Jewish world; I grew up at the beginning of the Midwest, Pittsburgh, where the Jew is an oddball, by and large. I was kicked in the ass daily.

ELISE GREGORY

If you had published American Sonnets outside the United States, how do you think it may have been received?

STERN

I have no idea. The whole issue of publishing outside the United States—we’re such a huge country. There are so many English-speaking countries—Australia, England, Canada—we forget they’re there. We dominate. I was in Canada, nominated for a prize a couple of years ago, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of Canadian poets and it’s a whole beautiful world up there, some good and some bad poets. I was nominated for a prize for that book, American Sonnets. It was very well received there. But, you know, Canada’s so much like the United States. I’ve discovered over the years how significant the local is in poetry. We’re such a large country, I might write about fauna in New Jersey or streets or customs there, and you in Spokane, Washington might not understand it or vice versa, let alone the world at large. It also depends on the issue of what kind of poetry one writes. Unlike Yeats, Seamus Heaney, a marvelous poet, is more of a “local” poet. Yeats was more of a “general” poet. Yeats was more English. And during his life, maybe his Irishness was a little bit ignored. It came more to the forefront later. But he’s more of a—not generic—but general poet. There’s nothing about, say, “Sailing to Byzantium” that is not as relevant to someone living in Chicago as it would be to someone living in Dublin. But, when Seamus Heaney writes about fence posts, or gates, or vehicles in Northern Ireland somewhere, he uses the local dialect, the language for it; it doesn’t resonate—or as George W. Bush would say, “resignate”—the same way as it might if he used a more general language. And it may be that Seamus Heaney, as an illustration, is deliberately using a language like that in opposition to the universal providence that has come through as a result of technology. My language tends to be, among these two, more local maybe, if you were to appraise me. So that someone in England might read it but would maybe have a more complicated time reading it. But yet, to tell you the truth, my poetry is not unavailable. On one level, it’s very available. So I find people, surprisingly enough, in Israel, Germany, Ireland, who respond very strongly to it.

DODD

You speak of Pound certainly in a different tone than I’ve heard you discuss W. S. Merwin. One thing they have in common, however, is an early love of the Provençal poets, and Merwin has described how he came to love the Provençal poets through a visit with Pound. You say also, in What I Can’t Bear Losing, that you have an affection for the Provençal poets. Could you talk more about older European poetic traditions and how they influence contemporary poets?

STERN

Yeah, Merwin knows that poetry from the inside. He has a house in France. He knows French like he knows English. He knows it inside out. It’s a whole separate culture, Cathar culture. I wrote a poem a number of years ago about the city of Albi, where the Albigensian Crusades happened, when the northern French descended on the southern French and destroyed their culture, their Protestantism. That’s the culture, generally speaking, that produced the Provençal poets. It was a great and beautiful literature. Dante considered writing the Comedia in Provençal. One of Dante’s Cantos is in Provençal. I was in that area of southern France twelve or thirteen years ago, traveling with my son. We went to some town, the wind was blowing among some oak trees, I took a little nap in the grass, my son woke me up and said, “Dad, these signs are in Italian.” I said, “That isn’t Italian; take a closer look.” It’s Provençal, which is close to Italian, it’s close to French, close to Latin. I’ve read the poets, tried to read them in Provençal. I’ve never studied it the way Merwin has. I had a student at Iowa who really got into that stuff, who knew Provençal poetry. It was wonderful. It’s a complicated, lovely culture. The physical world they lived in was just so beautiful, the weather was lovely—it remains a kind of happy, sweet poetry. It was a blessed time. Of course, they had more complications than you’d think. But their devotion to love, what it stood for, their special vocabulary, particular rhyme forms. It was a big influence on Italian literature and the literature of Spain and all of Europe.

GREGORY

Earlier, you spoke of several modernist poets. Most of the modernists were interested in epics and spent much of their lives completing these great epics—

STERN

Would-be great epics. Are you thinking of H.D.?

GREGORY

Williams’ Paterson—

STERN

If we were really getting into it, we’d have to make a distinction between the long poem and the epic. Then we would have to talk about what an epic is, or has been at least—just because an epic had to be one thing 1,000 years ago doesn’t mean it has to be the same thing today. And it used to be that a poet, all through his career, take Keats, felt he had to write his long poem, his epic. That was a poet’s challenge—whether he was Spenser, Chaucer, Tennyson—he had to write his long poem. Keats wrote some long poems, they’re wonderful to read. Endymion. But the ones we know most of all are the Odes. And some letters, some sonnets.

I was interested in writing an epic from the word “go.” When I was in France in my early twenties, I was working on a very long poem, a ridiculously long poem, called Ishmael’s Dream—Ishmael, the lost soul, the exile’s dreams. It was a total failure. Then, during my early thirties, I wrote a long poem called The Pineys, which goes on for almost 100 pages. It’s a study of the White House, a study of the presidency, a study of our culture. The Pineys is the name of a group of people who lived in southern New Jersey during the 18th, 19th, and part of the 20th centuries, at a distance from what we call “civilization.” America is in love with this kind of living, whether it be in Kentucky or northwestern New Jersey. Except that the Pineys are not an ethnic group. It was a mixture of Indian, Irish, African-American, and English, and they happened to be remnants of the industrial culture that existed in southern New Jersey in the 18th and 19th centuries, where iron ore was first produced and boats were made. It was America’s first West. People fled the major cities, particularly Philadelphia, and went off into the woods and lived there in squalor. So my poem was about the Pineys running the White House. But it just went on and on forever. It was a madness. I sort of threw that poem away. In 1965, I started to get into the poems that are now “my poems,” starting with Rejoicings, the first book in my selected poems.

In more recent years, I wrote a long poem called “Hot Dog.” Is that an epic? What’s an epic? Does it have to have a hero that reflects the beliefs of a culture? Or a heroine? Does it have to have a tragic quality? It would have that if this were a course in the epic. We describe what an epic is by describing what they were and making generalizations about them. But that doesn’t describe the epic of the future. Hot Dog was a woman, an actual person, probably dead now, a beautiful thirty-two year-old African-American woman who lived on the streets. She should’ve been in an institution, but she was out sleeping on the cold sidewalks. She was the “hero.” Right now, though, I’m interested in the short poem. You’re familiar with my last book of poetry, American Sonnets, but I’ve written another book called Everything is Burning, coming out in a month or so, and I’m now writing another one; I’ve got twenty or so poems toward whatever that will be called. One is a long poem called “The Preacher.” A crazy long poem based on Ecclesiastes.

Many of my contemporaries are interested in the long poem: Merwin is interested in the long poem; Phil Levine has written some very interesting long poems; Ashbery has; Olson. Jack Gilbert has never written a long poem, he’s not interested in that. O’Hara hasn’t. I don’t know how to talk about it; I’m not qualified. Somebody in some English Department in Albuquerque should talk about the distinction between the long poem and the epic. Make connections with American Indian hymns, Vedic hymns.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

You said Pound was an autodidact, as you also were, as far as writing—

STERN

I’m a follower of Pound. A Pounder.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Clearly. But do you think a writer can still self-educate?

STERN

Yeah, why not. There are too many writing schools, too much conformism. Too much everybody acting like everybody else. Make some mistakes, waste ten years. I wasted twenty-five years. I have regrets about it. I wasted a lot of time. When I was twenty-two, I could’ve gone to Iowa, Stanford, Bennington, like many of my contemporaries. Phil Levine went to Iowa, Donald Justice. Some did, some didn’t. Later on, everyone went to school. It just struck me and my friends—Jack Gilbert and Richard Hazley, who was the third one among us, and by the way, the best poet, though he didn’t have the will, the stubbornness to make it, which is really what counts, forget about being gifted—that Iowa was ridiculous—God gave us this talent, the muse. What, we’re going to submit to a group of idiots who say, “Take out the second line and make a different ending there, don’t make that rhyme?” What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? But that reticence comes out of shyness and arrogance. Pure arrogance. I think I should’ve studied up here in Washington with Theodore Roethke, whom I really loved. I should’ve done that. Jack Gilbert finally did that, but he did it by accident. Jack went from Pittsburgh to the West Coast because his girlfriend got a job at Mills College, in Oakland, so he settled in San Francisco, in Berkeley. There were a bunch of other poets around—a guy named Allen Ginsberg, guy named Robert Creeley, a guy named Robert Duncan. Gilbert was educated there by them. And I maybe should’ve gone. I have some regrets I didn’t do that. But, then I think, maybe I wouldn’t have had what I did have. It depends on my mood, whether I regret or don’t regret.

DODD

You mentioned poetry schools, MFA programs, in the United States. I don’t think many people consider that a major trend of education in Europe—

STERN

It’s started. They’re imitating America now. In England and Ireland, particularly. Of course the French think we’re insane to study poetry- writing in school. I see the problem as simple: the problem with MFA programs is not MFA programs, it’s that they’re located in universities.

And a university is an institution that is always conformist, conservative, rule-driven. So, if you are studying in Montana, or Alabama, or Iowa, or Arizona, or Massachusetts, and you’re in an MFA program, you’re at a university, or you’re a person who works for the university…. What in the hell’s a poet doing in a university? I got my first university job in Philadelphia, at Temple University, when I was thirty years old—I had squandered my twenties—and I decided, well, I’m going to settle down and get a real job. I remember I was exiled from the main campus to a satellite campus. It was the art school. I was the one-man English Department at the Temple University Art School, which is now called Tyler School of Fine Art, one of the leading art schools in the country. My colleagues were painters, sculptors, printmakers. My students smelled of paint and turpentine. There was a freedom there that I loved. They weren’t wearing three-piece suits. I remember one guy saying to me, a mentor of mine, he wanted me to be successful, get tenure, finish my Ph.D., go to MLA, smile at the annual picnic, and spend my life writing ridiculous little articles on Matthew Arnold. He said to me—I was wearing a pair of corduroy pants I’d bought in Italy, I loved them; they were wide-wale—“You can’t dress like that.” Now, you understand, in the 1960s, ten years later, you could dress like that. You had a different oppression then. He was quite serious. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Finally, I learned I had to wear a suit or a jacket and a nice shirt and a briefcase. Oppression takes different forms. Some are more subtle. You might get a provost or a dean or a president of a college who’s hip. He might even say “fuck.” He might like rap music. God knows what. But let us not kid ourselves. [Sings: “Let us not kid ourselves. ”] That is a problem. And I don’t know the solution.

The problem is you get a degree. Most schools use creative writing students as cash cows. They use writers, make them study theory, or whatever you study in English Departments, take written exams, do various other compromising things they consider appropriate. There can’t be such general rules for a poet. There’s nothing wrong with learning two foreign languages, but what if you don’t want to learn any and be that kind of a poet? Or you don’t want to be a critic, or a teacher? There’s nothing wrong with being a critic or a teacher. It’s kind of nice. But what if you choose to go a different route? What it you don’t know what route you’re going to take? This is part of the problem. Maybe it’s not the major problem, maybe it’s the conformism. You know, before I went to Iowa, I kept getting phone calls. They asked, “Why aren’t you applying for this job?” And I said, “Well, for two reasons: one, you’re too far from New York; and, two, I don’t know yet if I really believe in teaching writing.” (Although I had taught it at Columbia; Sarah Lawrence) But I don’t know to this day if it’s a good thing. It’s nice to have a community. That’s the best thing about MFA programs: a community of more or less young people who exchange books and tears. That’s great! And it’s good to be exposed to someone a few years older than you who has a few books published who can tell you about his or her experiences. That can’t hurt you. That’s the general model, and in our day and age, the form it takes is the MFA. Maybe that will change.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

In the essay, “Some Secrets,” you say you admire the relationship that can form between an older writer and a younger writer. Did you write What I Can’t Bear Losing in part to connect to younger writers?

STERN

Absolutely. Because I’m writing out of a knowledge of something that’s gone forever. You’re talking about memory, and I just want to give away what I’ve accumulated, my treasure trove. And isn’t that what you do with poetry, give away your treasure trove? I guess I also just wanted to write it all down. I’ve been going through my papers recently, and I discovered so many essays I had written and didn’t publish. Twenty or so. They’re very political.

DODD

In the introduction to Passing Through, Stanley Kunitz addresses the question of politics in poetry, when someone asks him, “Why aren’t your poems more political?” He says the very act of writing poetry is political. To what extent do you believe writing poetry is political?

STERN

He does say that. But Stanley Kunitz does not address political issues the way that Bly did in the 1960s, or Levertov, or Sam Hamill, who organized Poets Against the War, as a kind of industry. I mean, Stanley was a conscientious objector. Stanley took enormous political stances—he came from an urban environment, but he lived on a farm and raised his own food. That’s a political act. It says something about rejectionism, says something about consumerism. That’s a really strong political statement. He’s essentially a beautiful lyric poet, a tragic poet, who celebrates certain accidents of his life: loneliness, lots of grief. I guess all the major poets today celebrate grief.

DODD

Do we have a choice?

STERN

We don’t have much of a choice. Anger and grief. I think we can identify poets we can say shouldn’t be political, or aren’t so.

DODD

In the most recent edition of Poetry, Clare Cavanagh has sort of a remembrance of Milosz, and writes that when she was going through his papers shortly after he died, she found a copy of the latest Harry Potter book on his desk. What’s on your desk that might surprise us?

STERN

I don’t read light literature. A lot of my friends read murder mysteries, do crossword puzzles. I’m totally a bore. I don’t play games. I just get bored. That’s a wonderful question, just let me think. I do a lot of drawings. They’re crazy, they’re pornographic, erotic, wild drawings, drawings everywhere. I collect little objects, my house is full of objects. Pottery. Putting them in juxtaposition, creating a collection.

GREGORY

Yesterday, you said you were a “language poet.” I wonder if you could expand on that?

STERN

What I’m really saying is that I can’t stand Charles Bernstein and others of his ilk, claiming the word “language” to describe what they do. It’s so banal, absurd, and we accept it. What the fuck is going on? Language? We’re doing language now. I know that term has a special meaning that’s difficult to explain, but the reason it’s hung on so long, the reason people still talk about it, is that no one can explain it, be- cause it doesn’t really exist! I’m responding to that, saying, “I am the language poet.” But I’m also saying that I begin with language. I don’t begin with ideas, I don’t begin with images. I begin with words. I let the words transform me, carry me, literally, to places and experiences. Occasionally, I’ll actually think of an experience, relive an experience. You’ll read a poem that might describe an experience, but it starts with language. Language is everything.

DODD

Do you find techniques used by language poets, or elliptical poets, or whatever label we put on them, dishonest?

STERN

In a certain sense, all poetry is trickery. Dylan Thomas said, “In my craft or sullen art. ” It’s a craft as well as an art. It’s an artifice. It’s a weird thing. On the one hand, it’s an artifice, a very artificial construct, and on the other hand it’s that which is holy and profound and for which Stalin throws you in prison. How can it be both things at the same time? Well that’s the mystery. It can be a prayer, it can be used in a religious service. And at the same time, it can be a carefully constructed exercise in egotism, some Japanese poet, sitting crosslegged with his quill. It’s all those things at once. And there’s a reason poets should be kept out of the state, by Plato and Stalin and others: poets make people very nervous. They’re finally not just subversive, they’re frightening.

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Lawence Sutin grew up in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. His parents, whose oral history he chronicled in Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance (1995), were Jewish partisan fighters during the Holocaust. “Given that I was raised in a family where there was a legacy of pain,” he says, “there was a middle time in my life where I simply needed to be on my own and find out who I was.” A Postcard Memoir (2000), his collection of lyric essays in dialogue with samples from his postcard collection, reflects a self-awareness that is gentle, affable, and dark. He is also the author of Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (2000) and Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (1989).

Though he knew from a young age that he wanted to write, he early on pursued a degree in law from Harvard University, he says, “out of fear of the world.” Currently he teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University in St. Paul and the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College.
Mr. Sutin was interviewed over lunch at the Silver City Grill, in Spokane, Washington.

BRIAN O’GRADY

What is a typical day or week of writing like for you?

LAWRENCE SUTIN

I write, say, four or five days a week for roughly three to four hours. I like to work steadily. I have come to a point in my life where if I don’t write for a few days I actually miss it. I’m not one of these writers that has to drag themselves to the desk, feeling a great sorrow about the difficulty of the task at hand. Writing is a tremendous joy and I’m fortunate to get to do it.

O’GRADY

How long did it take you to get to that point?

SUTIN

That’s a good question, because I had always wanted to be a writer, but by virtue of always wanting to be a writer I became very frightened of it because it meant so much to me. What happened was, as an undergraduate I wrote something that a writing instructor really liked that was almost published in the Antioch Review, and when it was not I went through a kind of despair and a few years of writer’s block. So in my later twenties I had to fight through a kind of anxiety about the writing process, which I did with might and main and ever since then I’ve been very careful to like it very much. So, yes, I went through some difficult years getting on my feet as a writer, believing it was something I could be, overcoming the sense that it was exalted and unapproachable, which I think is a tremendous mistake for writers. Obviously, what you have to do is write a great deal and achieve more and more comfort and intimacy in the process.

JOAL LEE

Did a specific incident change that for you?

SUTIN

I wouldn’t say there was a specific incident, no. I think it was my own realization that the only way to develop as a writer was to put aside all those self-critical and anxious reasons that would deflect one from doing so. Those were barriers to my realization and happiness—you just train your mind to stop doing that, and trust far more in the process rather than get all anxious about what the process might be like.

LEE

In A Postcard Memoir and Jack and Rochelle, you mention your father’s desire to write. How much did that desire influence you?

SUTIN

I don’t think it influenced me a great deal because as I grew up he did not manifest his desire to write. He was already engaged in making a living and supporting a family and it came up very rarely. His desire to write was more closely associated to journalistic writing than mine was—I did some journalism along the way but I was never that drawn to it. I can’t say it was a huge influence other than sort of a recognition that life’s circumstances had impelled him away from writing and that I wished to remain certain that life’s circumstances did not do the same to me. But his life was very different than mine—far different pressures than mine.

O’GRADY

The pieces in A Postcard Memoir are mostly short, under a few hundred words. Do you work in the longer-form essay or memoir?

SUTIN

Oddly enough, I don’t do that much in the way of essays. Over the years I’ve published book reviews and essays here and there, but I tend to be oriented towards books. My longer-form essays have been biographies, and I’ve just completed a history of relations between Buddhism and the West from roughly 500 BCE to the present day. When I wish to go long, I go very long. Right now I’m working on a novel, in the form of a series of interconnected short forms. I am drawn to shorter forms in creative writing, drawn to trying to write a prose that blurs the distinctions between poetry and prose. But I also feel that my own natural inclination when telling stories or recalling memoir is to focus on distinct, vivid scenes rather than lacing in a great deal of connective tissue which doesn’t seem—at least in my case—to be the essence of my narrative. And I suppose to some extent—I don’t know if I was directly influenced by it but I agree strongly with it—the preface to Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones—I wish I could quote him verbatim; I can’t—where he talks about the possibility for writers to get to the heart, the essence, of a situation without the four- or five-hundred-page novel that seems to explore a situation. It is getting to the heart of a situation, and yet having sufficient depth so it isn’t a skimming, that is my aesthetic, that’s guiding me in my writing. So I’m very drawn to short forms.

On the other hand, when I work in other kinds of nonfiction—biography or history—I tend to go more in the direction of exhaustive exploration in the writing, so there’s kind of a systole-diastole in my aesthetic. In certain nonfiction forms, I just write and write and write, and hundreds of pages, even thousands, are fine, at least in draft. Whereas, for something like A Postcard Memoir, I was concerned with having very precise, distilled pieces that conveyed a great deal.

LEE

In A Postcard Memoir you bend a lot of rules. Do you find the conventions of literary nonfiction to be constraining?

SUTIN

Well, not to be naïve or self-effacing, but I’m not sure which rules I bend. I’m saying, frankly, that my goal was not so much to bend rules. My sense in wanting to write this memoir was not, is not, that my life is interesting as a series of consecutive events—I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this. That was not interesting to me, and hence I concluded it would not be interesting to my readers. The other thing I concluded was that my life, to the extent that it had meaning in a memoir context, was largely a series of what you might call inner realizations and emotional states, rather than great events. Unlike my parents in Jack and Rochelle, which is very much a historical memoir concerned with events, time, place, my memoir is not. My memoir is very much an exploration, you might say, of consciousness, emotion, realization, development. So in that sense I guess if there were any tradition of creative nonfiction that I felt that I was bending, I do often feel in reading memoir as though the inner life of the writer or the characters of the memoir are scantily portrayed in comparison to external events upon which the writer may reflect for a time. I wanted to write a memoir that was directed toward inner experience because that was what I had to offer. So in that sense I was aware that I was writing a relatively eventless memoir. There is no great scene in it where X happens and the reader goes, “Oh, my gosh! Really?” At least not to my knowledge. But then again, maybe that was fortunate in terms of my life.

LEE

It seems A Postcard Memoir follows a loose chronological order. If it were roughly broken into thirds, which it isn’t, it seems like the first third, before you went to college, involved more narrative; in the middle portion, kind of the college, post-college years, it seemed to have more engagement with your interiority; and again, after you got married and became a parent, it seemed to kind of pull the two together with a little more narrative. The first third and the last third seemed to involve more family. How does family interact with writing?

SUTIN

I have never thought of my memoir as divided into thirds, but, as you mention it, I can’t say that you’re wrong. I get what you’re saying. It wasn’t part of my conscious methodology but I think it’s a good point and I would say this: you might say that the early years of my life and the later years of my life and the present are certainly far more concerned with living within a family context and the attempt to make sense of one’s own evolution coupled with the demands, the heartache and the passions involved in being, to use the old Buddhist and Hindu term, a “householder.” In the middle years of my life I think I was engaged in an escape from family and social structures altogether, as I was in the midst of trying to discover myself as a writer. And particularly those years of my life when I was redefining myself in that sense, I was engaged in a great deal of inner reflection, doubt, uncertainty. My own identity seemed blurry to me, and that may account for the more introspective, fantastical, psychological orientation of the middle section of the book.

If your question also refers to the process of writing while living within family, I think for many writers there seems to be kind of a dissonance there. They wish to be engaged in family and yet feel that the demands of, let’s say, marriage or parenting or maintaining a household, are detrimental to their writing. I don’t feel that. As a matter of fact I feel quite inspired by the circumstances of family life now to work even harder as a writer, and I love the admixture of working alone in my office for several hours at a stretch and then popping back upstairs and rejoining this social entity which is family. That immersion into solitude and then re-emergence into family is a lovely thing to have in my life.

O’GRADY

Was that ever a problem for you, something you had to work at?

SUTIN

Yes, very much. Given that I was raised in a family where there were parents whose love for me was clear but whose emotional needs were also very strong, I think there was a middle time in my life where I simply needed to be on my own and find out who I was. It took me years of effort to find out that I could write and respect who I was, as opposed to write and pretend to be someone else.

LEE

I’m curious about that. Your parents’ story is very different from your own. Historically, it’s very important; there’s a lot of emotion, a lot of difficult, horrible experiences. You wrote their story before you wrote your own memoir. Did the shadow of the bigness of that intimidate you in writing your own memoir?

SUTIN

No. When I teach memoir, I try not to be self-referential, but once in a while people ask the question, “Well, what is creative nonfiction and is that an oxymoron? If it’s creative and it’s nonfiction, what’s going on?” You’ve heard these paradoxes and dilemmas about the genre. What I try to tell people is there are many different types of memoir just as there are many different types of visual portraiture. My parents’ memoir, in which I served the function, essentially, of a documentary filmmaker, sort of taking their words, giving them the native English they didn’t have, and arranging the narrative, was very much a historical memoir in the sense that I wanted it to stand as history, as fact, as events that could be trusted and believed as such. I’ve been gratified to see that historians have quoted the book and that it’s formed part of the teaching materials of the United States Holocaust Museum. So that’s all very good. In that sense, the type of memoir I produced about my parents was very much like an official portrait you might see hanging in a capitol building or the like, where the goal of the portrait is to portray something of the actual person, exactly how they looked, how they dressed, the context of their public lives.

In the case of A Postcard Memoir, as I’ve indicated, the portrayal of events was not the heart of it. Nobody’s going to read A Postcard Memoir to find out where I went to school or what I did after school. Presumably they’ll be reading it for other reasons pertaining to style, emotional portrayal, artistic portrayal and the like. I was released from the bonds of facticity. I could employ fantasy; I could employ dreams, reverie, contradictory emotional states and the like with complete freedom because my life, blessedly, has no historical significance. In that sense my own memoir is much more like an expressionist painting or a cubist painting, where the goal is not that kind of precise rendering of what this person looked like, but rather trying to convey the essence of a life by whatever artistic means you feel are necessary. When you look at a German expressionist painting and you see a purple stripe drawn across a forehead or a cheek, you don’t conclude that the person actually had that purple stripe. You conclude that there is an emotional or aesthetic aim involved. There are many different types of memoir. I didn’t feel any shadow from the memoirs on my parents. I actually felt a sense of relief and freedom, quite honestly.

O’GRADY

You did the biographies of Phillip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley. What was it that turned you on to them?

SUTIN

I tend to write books without knowing why I’m writing them, and that seems to be a comfortable place for me as a writer. I don’t begin with a lot of preconceptions or goals. I just begin with a sense of, “Wow, this really interests me, I want to do it.” But looking back I can see that what attracted me both to Phillip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley was that both of them worked in despised genres: science fiction, which, at least among literary folks, is still considered trash, and what you might call the Western esoteric tradition or, more brutally, the occult, which is even trashier than science fiction in the minds of most educated people. But both Phillip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley are absolutely brilliant writers, in very different ways.

O’GRADY

In a craft sense?

SUTIN

Crowley very much in a craft sense. He was a marvelous stylist and a very fine writer by the most traditional standards of style. Phillip K. Dick wrote his books at white heat, very quickly, to make a living. I don’t know that most of his books stand up as things of purely stylistic beauty, but in terms of imaginative and visionary quality they’re as fine as any novels an American has produced in the last few decades. Both Dick and Crowley had a fascination with spiritual and philosophical issues and sought to understand the universe, see it whole, explain it whole—which is impossible, in my view—and yet both of them were passionate about trying to do so. I do not myself seek to do so but I am fascinated by people who do. So really, then, they’re like siblings in my head. I had this sort of rescuing complex, thinking that if I wrote insightful biographies of them they would be revalued and seen as worthy of serious consideration. Now, I think that has happened with Phillip K. Dick. It’s not solely, or even mainly, because of my biography, but from the time I worked on that biography to the present day, fifteen years later, I think his reputation and esteem has quadrupled, if I may make up a pointless and inaccurate statistic. Aleister Crowley is still where I found him in a despised genre, but I would simply say to listeners and readers of this interview, particularly to writers, that if they want to read a book that reveals an intersection between creative nonfiction, poetry, and metaphysical speculation, The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley is a damn good book. And Magic in Theory and Practice is a brilliant examination of human psychology, philosophy, and the use of the mind for creative endeavors.

LEE

In your writings, you often bring up religion—Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity. Maybe you could talk some about the intersection between religion and writing.

SUTIN

It’s very difficult, to my taste, anyway, to discuss spiritual issues in writing. I’m not a formal religionist of any kind, and yet the questions that religion asks are very important and I would imagine that most people, whether they are religious or not, ask the same sorts of questions as they go through their lives. I am fascinated by the types of questions that are raised in religious contexts, and yet I’m unsatisfied with the solutions that any religion has propounded. So I am amongst those writers who draw from time to time from spiritual traditions and sometimes play with them and distort them deliberately without accepting any one of them as the absolute truth that they wish to be. To me, it seems that one of the things that writing can do is carve out a reality of spiritual explorations outside the confines of religion while not ignoring the religious history of humankind. That’s, I think, where I place myself: that I get to ask spiritual questions and even occasionally hint at spiritual nostrums of my own without accepting any dogma or doctrine whatsoever. So it’s really a fascination with the questions rather than an acceptance of any doctrine.

I suppose I should make clear that even though I have just completed a history of relations between Buddhism and the West, and I’m deeply drawn to Buddhist texts and I actually read them for enjoyment, I would be loathe to call myself a Buddhist or an “-ist” of any sort. But asking spiritual questions is part of what interests me about writing. And even as I say that, the word “spiritual” has so many layers of affectation and sugarcoatedness to it that I wish there were another word that could be used as a shorthand for what I’m talking about, but I’ve searched around for it and I haven’t found it.

LEE

Do you find as you’re examining these questions that the religious stereotypes or the conclusions that are already there get in your way?

SUTIN

They used to. Part of what happens in my writing—I’m not sure if it comes out in the actual contact but in the process of it—is liberating myself as best I can from the preconceptions, stereotypes, dogmatic-truth claims that I grew up with from the Jewish and Christian traditions. One of the most exciting things to me about writing is the feeling that writers can ask questions and be true to their own experience without needing to adhere or kowtow to any doctrine whatsoever. But I think it’s difficult to grow up in the world as we now know it and be utterly blank in terms of knowledge of what religions have had to say, or, in my case, to avoid some fascination with what religions have had to say. So, sometimes I use it as material, but I use it as material in the same way that I might use an embarrassing experience at a high school dance as material—it’s all the same sort of material.

LEE

In Jack and Rochelle, your father admits that he doesn’t have the desire to ever return to Poland. Do you have that desire yourself? Have you been to Poland?

SUTIN

No, I have not been to Poland. I don’t have the desire, and the reason is really the same as that of my parents: nothing, essentially, is left of the world in which they lived. The people were killed, for the most part. If they weren’t killed, they left Poland after the war. The buildings, the towns that my parents grew up in were largely decimated by the war. So there’s nothing for me to go back and look at. I grew up being imbued so strongly by the stories my parents told. The reality of that is sufficiently within me. I think going back to Poland would be hunting for something that no longer existed; it would be, at best, a hope of coming upon some archive with perhaps a few photographs. But if I want archives or photographs, I can go to New York. There are archives and photographs there.

What happened in Poland was so ghastly—what happened in Europe during the Holocaust was so ghastly—that my desire to go see it, at least for myself, I’d compare to, let’s say, a woman who had been raped wanting to go back to the scene of her rape. Perhaps some would, perhaps some wouldn’t. I’m in the second category. It’s not any hatred of Poland, per se; there’s just nothing there for me to go back to.

LEE

Do you find that, as a child of Holocaust survivors, when you write, the awareness of the horrible side of humanity separates you from people who have a hard time conceiving of that?

SUTIN

Yes. And when I say it separates me, there’s a lot of misery in the world and I don’t wish to claim a lion’s share of it, or even my parents’ share. The Holocaust was horrible but there are many other horrible events in history. Let’s make it clear that I think many people are very fully aware of the more unfortunate aspects of human nature. But it certainly separates me from people who have a sort of blithe optimism of human nature. I remember a Crosby, Stills and Nash song that came out when I was in college—“Teach Your Children Well,” I think is the name of the song—but it was this very optimistic song that proclaimed if we could just teach everybody peace, love, and understanding what a wonderful world it would be. I remember listening to it back then and thinking, “This is a beautiful song. And it’s complete crap.” And I would say I felt a sense of separation at that time and I continue to feel sometimes a sense of separation from people who are blithely cheery about human endeavors, human ambitions, human aspirations as though we are not capable of a great deal of good and a great deal of evil. I’m always aware that history is difficult and heartbreaking, with a great deal of suffering, and I expect it to remain so and that does definitely inform my vision, yes. But that doesn’t make me a misanthrope. I still feel there is something good in human nature. But there is also something very foul in human nature, and I don’t suppose it’s news to anyone that each one of us has to struggle with that. I’m not a utopianist by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t believe in a progress of humanity to a better and better future. I think we will have peaks and valleys and struggles and misery and perhaps some light as well.

O’GRADY

Would you talk about your current project?

SUTIN

I’m working on a novel composed of interlocking shorts, something in the style of A Postcard Memoir, and the working title of it is When to Go Into the Water. It is an entirely fictional account of a strange man growing up in the east of France who leaves his family and his culture behind and travels around the world and experiences a great many things. Oddly enough many of them have to do with water and when to go into it. I think I’ve whetted the future reader’s appetite enough by saying that much. I’m interested in working in fictional forms more and more since I don’t know that I have another memoir to write.

O’GRADY

What is the time period of the novel?

SUTIN

Late 19th century through early 20th century, far removed from our reality.

O’GRADY

Have you thought about working more in biography?

SUTIN

No, I will never do biography again. I’m announcing that to the world. And the reason for that is, as I was working on the Crowley biography, the second one, I thought, “Why on earth have I done the same thing twice?” Having written two biographies I can say that, even though I think biographies are interesting books and worth writing and all that, for me they’re extraordinarily confining. That is because there’s sort of this set of iron manacles—you extend your arm, and then you are handcuffed to your subject and you have to cover their entire life. As a biographer you don’t get to say, “You know, these ten years here, not a whole lot happened that was really that interesting. I think I’ll just fast-forward.” You have to talk about those damn ten years, unless you’re going to write a very kind of episodic form of biography which doesn’t fulfill most readers’ desires. I ultimately found biography to be an extraordinarily restrictive genre. The first time through it, with Philip K. Dick, I had a great deal of fun, but the second time through, with Aleister Crowley, I thought, “I’m doing the same damn thing over again. I’m stuck with this guy’s life and I have to talk about every year of it.” That doesn’t mean that I think I wrote a bad book, just that I was compelled to retain a certain form. No, I will never, ever go back to it.

Now, I’ve just completed a history and that was way more fun because, since I was dealing with 2,500 years of relations between Buddhism and the West, and no one could possibly expect me to cover every day and every month of 2,500 years, there was a great deal of freedom in deciding upon what I felt was important. So I would say that, for me, that’s a far more appealing genre. I should add that I find history to be as creative as other forms of creative nonfiction. I think it’s a shame that writers of creative nonfiction sometimes feel that memoir is it, or memoir and travel books are it, and the fact is you can write about anything as a nonfiction writer and make it creative if you bring your voice and vision to it.

O’GRADY

You wrote the history as a creative writer and not as an historian?

SUTIN

Well, since I don’t have a Ph.D. in history, I suppose I’m a creative writer. I’m a megalomaniac in terms of what writers can do in the field of nonfiction. If I have one thing to say to the nonfiction writers of the world, it’s that you can write about anything you want if you bring your intellect and your passion to it. I think one of the things that writers can do better than historians, for the most part, is write. They know how to create a narrative with interest and depth, they know how to discern between significant material, and because of their training, which is different from that of the typical academic historian, they have a greater freedom of allowing their voice to come in and interpret. All those things seem to me to be strengths in historical narrative. So I would claim that I’ve written a work of history, but I have written it as a highly informed, fanatically researching creative writer. And I feel that I can write about anything I care to. Which doesn’t mean I’m excused from knowing the facts, just that I can combine my writing skills with the facts and produce a book that I think has a creative voice. Creative nonfiction as a genre has restricted itself to some degree in recent years. If you go back to, say, the beginning of the century, it was frequently the case that writers would write history, biography, essays, memoir, travel, and poetry. That’s what a man or a woman of letters was—someone who wrote about subjects that interested them. We seem to have narrower categories now—poets can write poetry and maybe some essays on the side, and fiction writers, of course, can write novels or short stories. Creative nonfiction writers can write memoir, travel, or essays of a certain type. But I’m rather fond of seizing the entire world as subject matter and any type of book as potential subject. So that’s my outlook and I’ve managed to deceive enough people to enable me to go on doing it.

LEE

You got your law degree at Harvard. Are you still practicing?

SUTIN

I’ve not practiced law in over twenty years.

LEE

Why did you go to law school?

SUTIN

Well, I went to law school because, having grown up in a Holocaust family, where a great deal of fear and anxiety about the nature of the world was conveyed to me, law seemed to be a security blanket. The world is a frightening place, it’s difficult to survive in it. How writers make a living, when I was in my teens and early twenties, I had no clue. And the idea of an MFA track, frankly, had never crossed my mind. It was not a prominent option at the time. I was frightened of the world and I thought, “Well, I’m smart, I can deal with words, I can be a lawyer.” But I found very quickly that I was not a lawyer in any way, shape, or form, that there was nothing about the profession that satisfied my heart and soul. And after a few years of making myself miserable as a lawyer, I decided that I’d better do that which I could do rather than that which I felt I ought to do. And so I quit. I suppose legal training was useful to some degree in my writing, at least in recognizing intricacies of argument, intricacies of point of view, how to parse things so that everything can be debated, refuted, looked at from different angles. But I simply was a very unhappy law student and lawyer. And I went to law school out of fear of the world. That’s all it was.

LEE

A Postcard Memoir reminded me of some of William Blake’s work, the way the visual representation and the literature had a conversation.

SUTIN

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

LEE

Was he one of your literary influences?

SUTIN

Oh, definitely. William Blake is—gosh, how do I put this without sounding ridiculous?—one of the most stunning, remarkable, gifted, and stirring writers in the history of human civilizations. If in A Postcard Memoir, I tiptoe in the direction of Blake just a bit, only in terms of word and image informing each other, it was because if there’s one writer in the history of the world I envy it is William Blake, because he was able to create images of such surpassing power and beauty to go with his text, and I don’t have that skill, so I was forced to paw through a postcard collection to find my visual components. Oh, if only I could create the images Blake did. But yes, the interplay between text and image is a remarkable component of Blake, and I would urge people who know the poetry of Blake only as text to try to find—these days it’s not so hard—reproductions of Blake’s art along with the poems. So, yes, he was definitely an inspiration to me in that regard. I have always, always been fascinated by the interplay of image and text. I have felt that writers can do that and don’t do it enough. And I did it the way I could.

LEE

Who were some of your other literary influences?

SUTIN

In that sort of formative era of teens and twenties, the works of Henry Miller and Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Cowper Powys, the English novelist who is not very well known in America but is still quite well regarded in England, those three were powerful voices. And the French writer Blaise Cendrars was another writer who opened things up for me. Walt Whitman is someone to whom I still turn with a great deal of reverence and joy. Obviously Philip K. Dick has some appeal to me since I wrote a book about him. Way back in the mid-eighties, and I’m a little proud of this because the film American Splendor has just come out and now he’s much more well known, but I actually bought issue two of American Splendor on the newsstands and was reading Harvey Pekar way back when, and I did an interview with him, speaking of interviews, that was published in what was then the Hungry Mind Review in 1990. I remember talking with him about the fact that he could not draw so he did these sort of stick-figure comic-book storyboards as he would call them and then got artists to work with him, which I think to some extent I did in A Postcard Memoir—using dead, anonymous postcard photographers as my artists. The example of Harvey Pekar was always very fascinating to me, someone who took these sort of non-exceptional facts of life and turned them into stories with meaning. I don’t think Harvey Pekar and I write alike or have the same sensibility but his basic approach to the possibilities of word and image is something that I feel some kinship with. These days I read a great deal of poetry. There’s a contemporary American poet working today, Mary Ruefle, who I think is astonishing. I loved Homer’s Odyssey. How’s that? I had a crush on Virginia Woolf in college. I had her picture up on my wall, a little postcard picture. I thought the young Virginia Woolf was just hot. I don’t think we would have had much of a future. But, my gosh, I’ve been swimming in books all my life, so it’s a very difficult question to answer.

O’GRADY

Some people suggest that there’s sort of a divide between West Coast and East Coast writers in their approach and themes. Do you agree with that, and, if so, do you think there’s also a Midwestern aesthetic, and would you fall into that category?

SUTIN

I think sometimes there is a noticeable divide between East and West, and sometimes not. It depends on the writer. There are many writers—don’t ask me to name names—but I know there are many prose writers living on the West Coast who are seriously regarded in the East and the like. I think it shows up more in poetry, where there seem to be East Coast schools and West Coast schools of poetry, sort of New Yorker magazine schools and more free, open schools. If there is a Midwestern aesthetic, it means nothing to me. I guess readers would have to judge whether I fall into it or not. I certainly am affected by the places that I am, and I’m very particular about where I wish to be, but I’ve never felt that I’ve participated in or took on a specific Midwestern aesthetic. And to the extent that there are East Coast and West Coast differences, I tend to think they are more in terms of clashes of ambition and job searches and control of publications than actual differences in the writing. So maybe my fundamental answer to the question is those sorts of distinctions don’t mean a great deal to me as a reader or as a writer. I don’t deny that they do mean something to other people, but for me I don’t care that much where a writer is from, and frankly if I didn’t have the little dust-jacket bio of a writer and you asked me, “Is this person an East or West Coast writer or a Midwest writer?” I bet I’d be wrong eight out of ten times. But there’s a lot of Midwestern writers who are experimental, edgy, strange people. Take the Twin Cities, for example. I guess they have this sort of candy-coated Midwest flyover image for the rest of the world, but just look at the music that has come out of Minneapolis. You wouldn’t expect Hüsker Dü, Soul Asylum, the Replacements, and Prince to be coming out of there, and yet they do. Paul Westerberg lives six blocks from me. So is he a Midwestern musician? I don’t know him very well but I doubt he would nod his head yes to that. To me regional labels have more to do with social preconceptions than with the actual impact and realities of writers.

O’GRADY

How would you like to be remembered as a writer?

SUTIN

I would like to be remembered as a writer. How’s that? I’ll settle for being remembered as a writer. As to how, I have no idea. I think most writers would like their books to continue to be read, and I would be content with that. There’s no particular image or label that I crave in that regard. That the books themselves would continue to have life would be sufficient.

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Amy Tan has said that Louis B. Jones possesses, “one of the best minds of our generation.” This is high praise, but Jones is certainly a writer of uncommon skill and care, for whom the importance of writing lies in the everyday practice of art rather than the relentless pursuit of fame. He states that he wants “to write well, and as a consequence of having a readership, go through the publishing machine—which is not very good for human nature.” As the following conversation makes clear, for Mr. Jones writing fiction is the best way to discover truth in our lives. Despite his gimlet focus on healthy writing communities, he has published three acclaimed novels: Ordinary Money (1990), Particles and Luck (1995), and the 1997 Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, California’s Over.

Mr. Jones lives with his wife and family in Nevada City, California, where he serves as co-director of the Writers Workshop at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, during which notable poets and writers from around the country gather to teach and write. He was kind enough to spend an afternoon with us at the Palm Court Grill in downtown Spokane.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you write exclusively in the novel form?

LOUIS B. JONES

I want to develop my short story skills. Look at what writers do with just a little tableau of events. What you can make out of circumstances is beautiful. I’m writing short stories right now, but even those go long, Alice Munro-length. I’m disinclined toward such an extremely concentrated artistic form that’s so crystalline. I’m just too used to getting below the surface of things. My narrative point of view is always deep, close, inside the complexity of people’s minds. Once I get into that point of view, it’s hard for me to pull back.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What about a book like California’s Over, which goes into many points of view?

JONES

I’m inside Wendy Farmican’s head, way close, for so much of that book—how she feels fat, what she wants, etc. I love being inside people’s heads; that’s where I’m comfortable. I’m especially fascinated by how we know things we don’t know, that we’re driven by motives; there are layers to our personalities, we actually have awarenesses we’re not aware we have on a conscious level. To be able to portray that in fiction is really hard. To be able to show “This is what’s driving the character,” that’s the aspect of psychology I’m interested in.

THOMAS KING

And in California’s Over, you do that with a variety of characters—

JONES

I hope I do it with all the work. I remember loving it—as an example—that Holden Caulfield was sweeter and more trusting than he thought. He wasn’t as cynical as he’d hoped; there was more forgiveness in the world. And that was a first-person unreliable narrator, so while he would be bragging about his sensibilities, complaining about how malicious the world is—about how there are no authentic human beings out there—behind that you can see that the world is warmer, and he is a warmer person than he realizes, so when he goes back home, the resolution of that conflict is that we know him better than he knows himself. I guess that’s a model for me. I use third person, but it’s a third that’s so close, so adaptive to the delusions and quirks of my characters, that it works almost like first person. When you’re inside of Wendy as a child, her misapprehensions about her world are as if she’s a first-person narrator.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel you do a similar thing with the adult Baelthon in California’s Over?

JONES

Yes. He’s a first-person narrator. The book starts out in his perspective, then suddenly develops an omniscient narrator. When we reach Wendy in the basement, looking for her father’s ashes, the first-person narrator, Baelthon, is floored by how attractive she is to him, then the narration follows her up the corridor and moves into her third-person point of view. It’s a little like walking through the wall or into the fifth dimension. Most people don’t notice that. The first-person switches to third.

KING

As a reader, it is hard to notice the shift. How did you achieve that seamlessness?

JONES

I think I was fortunate in two ways. One is that I was able to have the main character confess, on the page before, that this was going to be the woman of his life, that this was his obsession. That licenses him to follow her, gives him enough knowledge to almost know what she did in the minutes after she met him. In practical terms, because she might have told him a year later, it becomes part of their myth. I also did it with enough force that it’s like hitting warp speed in your spaceship. If you don’t ask permission, just do it without any fuss, it can work. But it was interesting to me technically, too. I was writing a book, fishing around.

KING

Did that come naturally to you, or was it the product of revision?

JONES

It came naturally. It just happened, so I let it continue to happen. What I thought was the big experiment in that book was the flash-forwards. I thought, Can I have a story where readers will know how things will turn out in thirty years, then flash back and forth and back and forth, where some times you’re in 1970 and sometimes you’re in 2000? Will foreknowledge ruin or enhance the narration of a present-time moment or a past-time moment? I hate flashbacks; I think you should avoid them at all costs, unless there is an urgent appetite to find out something from the past that will directly affect the present narration. But I used flashbacks anyway, devising that every time I went back into a flashback the reader would think, “Oh, good—we can finally see what happened,” and not, “Okay, I guess I’ll keep reading.” I think plot is a huge, important technical aspect.

KING

To what extent do you structure your plot beforehand?

JONES

About half and half. I have a general idea of where the arc is going to land. But it’s much better waking up not knowing. That’s what gets me out of bed at 3:00 in the morning—knowing I have to jump up and figure out what to say instead of following some outline.

KING

Any examples of fortunate surprise?

JONES

My first novel, Ordinary Money, is about not just counterfeit money, but a perfect counterfeit that creates a kind of metaphysical and moral dilemma. I have these teenage girls who are my main characters in a suburban mall, and on about page twenty, they go to Shakey’s Pizza and they’re talking about some boy, and giving each other fashion advice, and one says to the other, “You need new earrings.” And the other girl says, “Yeah, but this ear is latex.” She had birth defects. That was a case where I was tired of myself by page twenty, and I wanted to make something bizarre happen. So I thought, I’m going to give her a rubber ear, implanted by cosmetic surgery, because she was missing an ear at birth. It turned out to be really useful and interesting, because it gave her emotional and psychological trouble that pertained to what was going on in the book. It was a big, ninety degree turn that paid off. I discovered it on the page and it tied the whole book together in a way.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel your work is character driven, even though your plots are so intricate?

JONES

Characters decide the story. You know those books about how to write, with the chapters on plot, setting, language—all the elements. I think character is the one that drives all the others. You can think it’s about language or think it’s about theme, but each element has to consult character to find out what happens next. Even down to how a sentence is put together. It’s an old-fashioned point of view to believe that; I’m completely saturated with the postmoderns, moderns, with declarations like “The character is dead” and so on. I take a great deal of interest in such attitudes, but I can’t use them upon my own workbench. I’m kind of a fuddy-duddy.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You have said in other interviews that you don’t care if your work is discovered until after you’re dead—

JONES

That’s a nice, cute way to think about it. But the whole business of writing is death-oriented. You put words on the page, and then you’re absent. Your true reader, your soulmate, your true love finds you, and you’re absent. They’ll be in some armchair in Florida or Texas or New Jersey, crack your book at some bookstore, and they’re your person.

KING

Did you start writing with that ideal?

JONES

No, I think it’s grown on me. Any time writers are in a situation where they’re talking about their book, they should just say “Read the book.” I hope it doesn’t sound affected to say this—but I truly believe that I don’t need to meet Jane Austen, but, boy did she make my life better. I learned how to live by reading dead authors. I don’t need to meet Marcel Proust, either. He might turn out to disappoint me. But his books are great.

KING

I know you’re working on a novel right now. What do you hope for the future of your publishing career?

JONES

I don’t know. I’m so hypocritical. Where does my hypocrisy lie? I want to have a great career, but I don’t want a great career. I want to write well, and as a consequence of having a readership, go through the publishing machine—which however is not very good for human nature. Fortunately, unlike actors and musicians, we don’t necessarily have to go through it. Actors and musicians have to suffer the exultations and degradations of that completely phony world to practice their art, and they have to personally be there. It helps if you’re like Charles Dickens, always going along pumping yourself. That’s probably good for your career. But you can also be like Franz Kafka. Or Jane Austen: she didn’t need a great public life.

KING

You’ve said part of the allure of writing for you is the ability to join the conversation of literature, to add to the body of life-changing fiction. At this point in your career, with several acclaimed novels and many years of writing experience, where do you see yourself in that ongoing conversation?

JONES

I think where I got that idea is from Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books of the Western World” series, published by University of Chicago Press. It’s like the canon of all the great books, with uniform bindings—Plato and Aristotle, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, you know. And the introduction that Adler made to the series was titled “The Great Conversation.” I grew up with these volumes in my middle-class, middle-western house, with the gold foil letters on their spines. Plato. Dante. The great conversation. That’s where the metaphor comes from. I don’t know if my books have a place in that conversation.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think MFA programs help writers get there?

JONES

Yes, I think so. They provide somewhere for writers to be for a couple years. They shake them up. So I think they’re great. I was thirty-something when I went to one, and I had written three unpublished novels. Because I was always outside the publishing mainstream, always taking terrible risks. Walking straight off the trail.

KING

Do you want to find a readership for those earlier novels?

JONES

I suppose so. I sure don’t make judgments as to whether a book is good or bad based on publication. That doesn’t make sense. Some of the greatest books in the world are really bad books. Like Moby-Dick. Ulysses. Remembrance of Things Past. They’re obsessed, peculiar books.

On the other hand, a bunch of really mediocre books are sleek pieces of craft. It’s not even the interesting question to me, whether a book is good or bad. Just whether it’s necessary.

KING

You say there’s a strong presence of the author in your books; what do you think is the role of a writer’s morality in his or her work?

JONES

Morality? I’m so morally decrepit myself, I hope that doesn’t get into my books. [Laughs.] I think I’m very present. You know when you look at a Vincent van Gogh painting, the first thing you’re looking at is some mad guy’s brush strokes, his color choices, but there’s more than that. You look through that, and you see how it feels to be on the Paris street or out in the farmlands on a cloudy day. The brushstrokes are there, so you have to pay attention to them, but I hope that in my writing you can look through them. I’m a little bit of a “lay it on heavy” writer, so there are a lot of brush strokes, a lot of language. Sometimes the metaphor, or the long sentence that has a lot of grammatical stuff going on, might be hard to follow if your momentum is not there. So that’s the sense in which I’m present in my writing. Customarily you want the writing to be a clear window that the reader can look right through, but when you read one of my books, there’s all of this “writing.” It is my hope, that like the work of an impressionist painter, you can see through the brush strokes, and you can actually get the feeling for Wendy, and Peter, and Baelthon, and that whole bunch of people. It’s back to the character. Character, character, character.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

But it seems like you tightly edit your lines—

JONES

There is a lot happening in those sentences. Something I’ve been told is that my writing tends to slow the eye. I write assuming people will read each word. To me that’s what the medium is.

KING

In Particles and Luck, the protagonist is a fortunate young physicist—fortunate being a word you use to describe him on the first page—whose early success thrusts him into the vanguard of his field.

How comfortable were you entering the field of physics in the novel? How much research did the book require?

JONES

I remember liking a book called Cosmic Code by Heinz R. Pagels, but just go to any bookstore and look on the physics shelf. They have all these wonderful, attractive titles, and they explain how bizarre the world we live in is, what it’s made of, these little clouds of thought. Physicists are truly having to become religious—or at least metaphysical—because it’s so bizarre, what they’re getting down to. You know, the question, “What are things made of?” is kind of an emergency for some people. So, I just read a lot on that subject. And I had taken a lot of calculus when I was in the university, so I was able to follow certain parts of it. There’s a crucial thing called Bell’s Theorem that depends upon an equation that I was—rather closely—able to follow mathematically.

KING

After you finish a draft of a novel, do you check it against sources?

JONES

I guess it varies from book to book. Ordinary Money had a good amount of research in it, because I had to find out how both counterfeit and real money were made. So I went to the mint in Washington, DC. I also researched the Secret Service, which is the law enforcement branch assigned to protecting the image and value of paper money. And I made up a lot. You can make up research. I simply sketched the world according to a whim, then found something out in the world that corroborated—isn’t that the purpose of research anyway? Particles and Luck was incredibly research-oriented; in fact, it’s an interesting book because it tries to be about something other than fiction. It’s trying to be about what things are made of and I think it’s one of the reasons some critics, whom I agree with, think of it as a failure as a novel; or, not a failure, but it’s trying to do something novels shouldn’t do. The Washington Post guy said that, Jonathan Yardley, who has loved everything else I wrote. And he’s right. It’s an odd book.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What do you mean, “What a novel shouldn’t do?”

JONES

Well, in the end, Particles and Luck is partly about what things are made of, instead of whether Mark Perdue’s marriage will return to solid ground. I mean, it’s a book about marriage and fidelity, but it’s also a book about atoms and electrons. You have to pay attention to the science if you read it. I think that disagreed with Yardley. And I understand. But as I said, a book’s defects—as with Proust, or Walt Whitman, or name anybody—you have to use your defects. And Particles and Luck was a book that was born the way it was born.

KING

The narration of Particles and Luck is so different from the more sprawling California’s Over because the action takes place during the course of one twenty-four hour period. What were the benefits and limitations of that structure?

JONES

I think readers enjoy the cozy sense of being inside a set time. It makes the reader feel very much at home. But perhaps the limitation—the danger that it creates for its author—is that I thought I had a plot structure because I had the day. But I really didn’t. What’s at stake is Mark Perdue’s fidelity. He’s been married for three weeks, his secretary kisses him, and he has this kind of longing. You know he’s not going to act on the longing; he’s kind of like Holden Caulfield in that way. You know he’s not going to do it, but you can play with the expectation. And also what’s at stake is his relationship with his neighbor, Roger Hoberman. He’s kind of a hapless character. Maybe the book is about two men, two different approaches. Roger is not as pretentious as Mark Perdue; he’s a more grateful guy. In a way, you’d want Roger for a friend, and not my main character, Mark Perdue. Anyway, so the book does have a plot, in the sense that those problems are resolved, but I might have fallen into the trap of thinking that I had a plot because I had a time structure. A single day. Time structure is not a plot. To have a bunch of things happen in a series is not a plot; there has to be moral cause and resolve.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think California’s Over comes to a resolution at the end?

JONES

I like novels that end in sleep. So, when Wendy is able to roll over and go to sleep, and Steve is pleased with that, it seems to mean that after all these years they have something like a marriage. That after all the betrayal and disloyalty and remorse, she’s come to see him again and she’s gone to sleep. That means that, after thirty years, they’ll still be married. Sleep is a form of faith.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Does California’s Over mirror how life still is in some of those northern California towns?

JONES

It’s kind of a novel about the bohemian trip, which kind of ends in suicide. In fact, I just started thinking about how I began writing this book right when Kurt Cobain shot himself. There was something about his suicide that really made me mad, got under my skin. I took it personally when Cobain shot himself. And that’s what is really behind California’s Over. There’s this old house where Dad was the beatnik, it’s holy to commit suicide, and the novel is about the children who have to continue living after that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Some critics suggested you were condemning 1960s culture, but I didn’t read the book that way.

JONES

There was a lot of narcissism then. But what I thought was wonderful was what they called the Beat movement. Hippies and that other crowd came later, but some of the original impulse behind that counterculture was to overcome pretentiousness. It became interested in Asian philosophy in a way that did not exist before. It embraced pacifism. It made friends with African-American culture and Latino culture, making the country a million times more interesting. It defied the social-class barriers that had been set up over time. But I think we are a better country now because of what they achieved. Now we go around with our backpacks and our Birkenstocks. There’s a moment in The Dharma Bums where the Gary Snyder character goes into a bar and the Ginsberg character says, You’ve got to meet my friend Jaffy Ryder, he’s great, he’s a Buddhist, man, and look: he wears sandals and carries a rucksack. Fifty years later, everybody is wearing sandals, carrying a backpack, and studying Buddhism. Snyder walked into a North Beach bar in 1945 or 1947 and met Kerouac, but he was the first, he was like the spore. On the whole, I think those are wonderful changes. The book California’s Over is about a later, cracked-up period.

KING

Your novels take place in a very specific region, in Terra Linda, California—how do you avoid the limitations of regionalism? How do you make sure that the book is about more than Terra Linda?

JONES

I guess it’s a publishing business question, whether the book is going to be of interest to anybody in one region or another. In that little town of Terra Linda that I always write about, I think very few people read. So if I were just going to be The Terra Linda Writer I wouldn’t sell any books. It’s interesting, I’m not as big in California and the West as I am in New York and Chicago and Washington, DC. I am a Midwestern person who went out to California with a Midwesterner’s stubborn skepticism, so I’ll always be a little alien to that place. I think there are ironies in my books that most Californians don’t get. For example, the movie business keeps working on Ordinary Money. Ordinary Money will always be under option, because everybody thought, “Oh, it’s about counterfeit money, we could make a movie out of it.” But Hollywood producers and directors really don’t get the book. I think Californians don’t see the irony of California civilization, whereas in New York they know. A lot of people want their books to be made into movies. That’s a vanity fair, there. But it’s a happy thing to just keep getting option checks every year and never have the movie made. You know who really did well with that? Evan S. Connell wrote Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge. There was a movie made of those, I think it was called Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, with Paul Newman. The books are masterpieces of what is not said. The books are made up of all these short scenes, and what’s partly great about the books is everything he doesn’t say about the characters’ lives. The author is so angry with the bourgeois civilization of Kansas City, where he grew up, and he knows it so well: the country clubs and the cars packed into garages. They’re among the greatest books of our time. Those books went in and out of option for years. He got checks and checks and checks and finally Paul Newman made a not-very-good movie out of them. The movie was forgettable, but then he got a big pot of gold at the end, which is nice. The kind of guy I feel bad for is Thomas Berger, who wrote Little Big Man, a wonderful novel. They made a very good movie out of it. So if they’re going to make a movie out of your book, either they’ll make a bad movie, so you’ll have that kind of trouble, or they’ll make a really good movie, and that will be a different kind of trouble: it somehow covers up what you did. Little Big Man was his best book, and it was a medium-sized hit in its time, but the movie was so good that it exploded the old book. I’m ambivalent about the movie business. I want to stay away from it. I’d like to get money from it, you know, but not ever have to work inside. It’s a different world. It’s all showbiz.

KING

You mentioned last night that you’re reading a little less fiction these days. So I wonder: if you were starting your career today, would you still be drawn to being a novelist, or would you tend toward non-fiction?

JONES

I was drawn to writing because I wanted to study everything and know everything. I know it sounds naïve, but that’s what I wanted to do. I think my instincts led me to believe that what truth there is, is in fiction. In psychology and sociology and even physics, which presumes so much objectivity, they run smack into subjectivity. The assumption of objectivity is one of the first things I dispensed with in my life. Somehow fiction, with its useful versions of reality, is the right risk to take. Whenever you read history you quickly realize that it’s fiction. If you care, and look closely, it’s all fiction. There’s something about the world of writing novels that acknowledges subjectivity as an existential fact, and then transforms it into some truth about our lives. So in a way, I think fiction is the only thing.

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According to psychologist Robert Moore, “When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution.” As a groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called “the expressive men’s movement,” Bly remains one of the significant American artists of the past half-century. In the following interview, Mr. Bly speaks about everything from poetics to politics, grief to greed, history to human nature. He ponders the death of culture and the redeeming nature of art, asking people to “develop the insanity of art, which is a positive insanity.”

Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian descent. After time in the Navy, he studied at Harvard and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alongside classmates that included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, W.D. Snodgrass, and Donald Justice. In 1956, he received a Fulbright to translate Norwegian poetry and discovered a number of major poets—among them Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, and Harry Martinson. He soon started The Fifties, a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States, which eventually became The Sixties then The Seventies and introduced a new international aesthetic to American Poetry. He co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War in 1966, and when The Light Around the Body (1968) won the National Book Award, Bly contributed the prize money to the resistance.

While Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) was an international bestseller, Bly has published many books of poetry, essays, and translations, most recently Eating the Honey of Words: Selected Poems (1999), The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2002), The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations (2004), and The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War (2004). His most recent book of poems is My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy.

We met Mr. Bly in his room at the Montvale Hotel in Spokane.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Why did you decide to publish The Insanity of Empire yourself?

ROBERT BLY

Well, I have a publisher—HarperCollins—and one or two others that help, but I thought they’d take a year or more. And I decided, no, too important, try to get it out. And besides, I can do anything I want with it, like give them away if I want to. And I’ve printed a lot of books myself. It was just good expedience to get it out. A friend of mine designed the cover and the whole deal. It was done in two weeks.

KALEEN MCCANDLESS

In the first part of that book, the poems are really direct. Did you notice a change in the voice?

BLY

The first poems are the newest ones: “Call and Answer,” “Advice from the Geese,” and “Let Sympathy Pass.” [Reads from “Let Sympathy Pass.”]

People vote for what will harm them; everywhere

Borks and thieves, Bushes hung with union men.

Things are not well with us.

Well that’s true. It’s quite direct here. I had intended to do an entire book of eight line stanzas. But I couldn’t sustain it. So I went back to old notebooks and arranged them three at a time.

What was it we wanted the holy mountains,

The Black Hills, what did we want them for?

The two Bushes come. They say clearly they will

Make the rich richer, starve the homeless,

Tear down the schools, short-change the children,

And they are elected. Millions go to vote,

Vote to lose their houses, their pensions,

Lower their wages, bring themselves to dust.

All for the sake of whom? Oh you know—

That Secret Being, the old rapacious soul.

That “Secret Being” comes out of the Muslim world. The amazing idea they have contributed is the idea that inside you there’s a nafs—despite the “s”, it’s a singular noun—which is the greedy soul. I have a teacher in London, a Sufi from Iran, and he describes all that in The Psychology of Sufism. That whole little book is about the greedy soul. He says the greedy soul will eat up everything. It’ll destroy a hundred universes for the sake of a little attention—the flutter of an eyelash. It’s willing to destroy everything. When people become Sufis, they are thought that their primary enemy is the nafs. Occasionally the teacher checks to see how much progress they’ve made. I like the concept very much because it doesn’t put evil outside of us, with Satan. It doesn’t imply that a few little things are wrong with us, [in a gruff voice] “What do you mean a little thing? Are you insane?”

MCCANDLESS

Is that the same idea in Light Around the Body of the “inward self ” and the “outward self?”

BLY

That’s said more in the European way. The inward and the outward. I didn’t know about the nafs then.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Is our nafs voting right now?

BLY

Everyone’s nafs together—they tend to be Republican.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Automatically?

BLY

The Republicans, aren’t they the ones who stand and say, “Well, I want what’s mine. And I want what’s yours.” I’ve heard that voice before. In 19th century, the farmers of Kansas were fighters against lobbyists, the big grain companies, etc. Now Kansans vote Republican, even if that means they will lose their houses or businesses. The Republican Party does not represent the people, but the nafs. Forget about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Forget about Social Security. The greedy soul hates Social Security. “God, you’re doing something for someone else? Are you crazy?”

One of the things that drove Whitman crazy was to see the greedy soul at work after the Civil War. So many men died in that war. So many sacrifices were made. As soon as the war was over, the big companies moved in. The corruption was unbelievable. The lobbyists literally bought Congressmen. A positive vote in the House of Representatives cost $100. A Senator’s vote cost $500. That’s how visible the nafs was. Despair over that drove Mark Twain nuts. What we have now is a repetition of the situation after the Civil War, but on an international scale.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Just add zeros to those numbers.

BLY

Exactly. [Reads from “The Stew of Discontents”]

What will you say of our recent adventure?

Some element, Dresdenized,

coated with Somme

Mud and flesh, entered, and all prayer was vain.

The Anglo-Saxon poets hear the whistle of the wild

Gander as it glides to the madman’s hand.

Spent uranium floats into children’s lungs.

All for the sake of whom? For him or her

Or it, the greedy one, the rapacious soul.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

There it is again. That same phrase at the end just like the poem before.

BLY

A few years ago I published a book of poems called Meditations on the Insatiable Soul. My father was dying at that time. I visited him and in two poems I describe my own rapacious soul. I called it then the insatiable soul, but I decided later that the phrase was too pretty—Meditations on the Insatiable Soul. The reality is not pretty. The word “greedy” is better. Anyway, the concept of the nafs is the main thing I’ve learned in the last ten years. The danger of giving poetry readings is that many people—as they did last night—stand up and clap. The greedy soul loves that. It’s great. And if it feels like it, the greedy soul will betray God, your children. You understand? Betray your wife. Betray your parents. It betrays anyone for the flutter of an eyelash.

MCCANDLESS

Is there a way to get away from the greedy soul?

BLY

The consciousness that there is such a thing helps. That awareness is what the greedy soul doesn’t want. You see? There are many references in the New Testament to the nafs. Jesus says, “When you pray, don’t pray in public.” Go into your closet and pray. If you pray in public, the greedy soul will eat the prayer. The Muslim holy books tell a story very like that: a community leader was so faithful as to prayer sessions, he always stood up praying in the front, and everyone thought that was so wonderful. He had done that for years. One day he came in late and had to stand in back. At that moment his nafs was irritated and complained to him. After that he never prayed in public again.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think the nafs is everyone’s primary motivation?

BLY

Ninety-nine percent of the time.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Has that changed, do you think, over the years in America? I hate to be too focused on our country, but—

BLY

I think we are witnessing capitalism substituting itself for democracy. Democracy was always a touchy thing for the nafs because it offers something to black people, offers money to poor people. “Well, what do you mean you’re giving money to them!” When capitalism speaks, it says, “Everything is for the nafs. Period. We don’t care about the poor people in the world. We don’t care about anything but us.” Your nafs might advise you to give to the tsunami relief, because you might get a little flutter of the eyelash there. But you noticed how much was promised and how little delivered. The nafs says, “No, we’ll keep it for ourselves.”

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The presidents on TV, they want some eyelid flutter, right?

BLY

Yes. Exactly. Being democratic would never do it for them now. Do you have my Abraham book here? Oh, here’s a good one. [Reads from “Noah Watching the Rain.”]

I never understood that abundance leads to war.

Nor that manyness is gasoline on the fire.

I never knew that the horseshoe longs for night.

In another poem I use the word “faithful”: [Reads from “The Storyteller’s Way.”]

It’s because the storytellers have been so faithful

That all these tales of infidelity come to light.

It’s the job of the faithful to evoke the unfaithful.

Our task is to eat sand, our task is to be sad—

Being sad is your task if you are fighting the nafs.

Our task is to eat sand, our task is to be sad,

Our task is to cook ashes, our task is to die.

The grasshopper’s way is the way of the faithful.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You also said “our task is to be sad” last night, when you were talking about grief.

BLY

Several people noticed that. I did say that, yes, but the poem also says the reason I am not bitter is because I keep holding the grief pipe between my teeth. A friend says, “Everyone I know is trying to keep themselves from feeling grief.”

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

General grief? Personal grief? Both?

BLY

We were down looking at the river in Spokane. It’s polluted. The Russians come—there are, what, thousands of Russians in town, now—they fish there. They eat it. They’re not willing to accept the grief that we’ve polluted that damn river and the fish are inedible. That’s a kind of a grief we have to accept. More and more, we have to accept the grief not only about our history as a race of human beings, but also the grief of our race as Americans. And then at home you know, you see a little child and you are actually looking at a king of the nafs. “I want this! I want that!” You can’t do anything about it exactly, except to remember that you were like that when you were small and to feel a little grief for that. I think grief is the most valuable emotion we can have right now.

MCCANDLESS

You mentioned at the end of The Insanity of Empire that we have to process the grief, and if we don’t, we will be blind to our truth. You quoted Martín Prechtel—

BLY

He has a brilliant mind. We’ve been good friends. Maybe twenty years ago, a person from Santa Fe said to me: “There’s a strange man living in a teepee two miles out of town.” And I said, “Let’s go.” So we went, and there was Martín, just come from Guatemala, with his wife and two small sons. Later, I invited Martín to join a group of teachers at a men’s week in California. The teachers all got together and asked Martín what he would do with the men. Martín said, “Well, I think I would take the guys out into the woods and get them lost. They wouldn’t have any food for seventy-two hours.” Everyone’s eyes got big because they had been thinking about one hour sessions. Martín was talking about serious stuff—getting them lost in the woods! Alone for seventy-two hours! He is a great teacher and writer.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

I heard he recently started a school.

BLY

He’s always wanted a school. And he finally got it. And he loves to teach. He’s found an old Native American church building down there and every three months people come and spend maybe ten days to two weeks and he teaches them. He likes to start with Mongolia. There hasn’t been any teacher like Martín in this country for a long time. I’ll quote you one phrase of his. [Reads from The Insanity of Empire.] “Many observers have noticed that even though the United States and Canada have many resemblances, we have so many more murders per capita than Canada does. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because we kept slaves and later fought a vicious civil war to free or keep them. We know from Vietnam that the violence men witness or perform remains trapped in their bodies. Martín Prechtel has called that suffering ‘unmetabolized grief.’ To metabolize such grief would mean bringing the body slowly and gradually to absorb the grief into its own system, as it might some sort of poison.”

But this is like the people in the Civil War who did all that killing and the nafs approved of it. Very much. And then what did we do with them? We sent them away to kill the Indians. No one said to these soldiers at that time: “You’ve been in war, you’ve got to have three years of treatment before we let you look at one Native American.” [pauses, reads again] “Once the Civil War was over, soldiers on both sides simply took off their uniforms. Some went west and became the Indian fighters. We have the stupidity typical of a country that doesn’t realize what the killing in war can do to a human being.” That’s the same thing the President doesn’t understand today. [resumes reading] “When the violent grief is unmetabolized, it demands to be repeated. One could say that we now have a compulsion to repeat the killing.”

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

So what do soldiers do now?

BLY

You come home and beat up your wife, that’s the first thing you do. Then you start at your children. You cause an immense amount of damage. Unmetabolized grief is like an unmetabolized poison. Well, that’s a new idea. Psychologists have to take that in.

MCCANDLESS

Did we not have any kind of treatment in previous wars, like in World War II?

BLY

No. The ones who got treatment were the ones who had their legs blown off and stuff. And they’d be in the hospital. Otherwise, we’d turn them right back into the main culture. That’s hard to believe, but we did.

Researchers have identified a part of the brain called the amygdala. Apparently, horrible events get stored there. We know that for centuries people lived in groups of fifty or seventy-five. You might wake up at 4:00 in the morning and realize that strangers have come and killed twenty of your people. The dead are all lying around. Human beings cannot thrive then. It’s too much. The speculation is that the memories of what you just saw, all those dead people, your relatives and friends, are stored in the amygdala. Within two days everyone is back to normal and thinking, “I don’t really remember what happened.”

We could say that Civil War soldiers stored violence they had done and seen in the amygdala. Then when they went West, and fought Indians, it came out of the amygdala.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Is there anything to be hopeful for?

BLY

I don’t know, that’s your problem. [everyone laughs] But I have a friend out here who works a lot helping farmers. He also built up this section of Spokane, about five years ago. And now he does all kinds of things, but he says that he has a hopeful place in him that he always keeps and he won’t allow it to be disturbed. At the same time, to be able to feel all the grief. Not to have it—the whole mind stuns, you don’t feel anything, it’s not that. You feel the grief that you have, and then you make sure that you have hopeful places. And that’s one thing that poetry does. If you get through a poem, I don’t care how much grief there is in a poem, at the end you’ll feel some hope. And that’s what poetry is. It’s a form of dance. And oftentimes—because you start dancing in a poem, I mean the vowels dance and the rhythm dances—by the end, your body receives an infusion of hope. More than it does from prose.

MCCANDLESS

Why’s that?

BLY

Because it’s a compressed form, so in order to make it lively, it has to have dance. The difference between poetry and prose, I think, is that in poetry, there are old, old ways of dancing with the vowels, consonants. And if you can’t dance, you can’t write poetry. Every time one reads Rilke, we see that he talks about the most serious things, but there’s always a feeling of great delight at the end. He’s a genius. So’s Kabir. We should put one of his poems in here.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Did you translate his book?

BLY

Yes. [Reads from “The Great Communion of Being” by Kabir.]

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains

and the maker of canyons

and pine mountains!

All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

And the music from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:

Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

Whew! That should be enough, huh? [Reads from “The Meeting” by Kabir.]

When my friend is away from me, I am depressed;

nothing in the daylight delights me,

sleep at night gives no rest,

who can I tell about this?

The night is dark, and long hours go by

because I am alone, I sit up suddenly,

fear goes through me

Kabir says: Listen, my friend,

there is one thing in the world that satisfies,

and that is a meeting with the Guest.

So, you can say that this exhilaration is the very opposite of the mood around the nafs. Kabir says that inside you there is an energy which is never cruel and always luminous. That’s the source of hope, and that’s why a saint will go out in the desert and spend twenty years, because sooner or later, that Guest will come along.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What did you say at the reading, about “The poet who really writes, standing there after you die?” I believe the poet’s last name was Jiménez—

BLY

Oh, yes. “I am not I.” That’s right. That’s the mood. [Quotes “I am not I” by Juan Ramón Jiménez]

I am not I. I am this one

Walking beside me whom I do not see,

Whom at times I manage to visit,

And at other times I forget.

The one who remains silent when I talk,

The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,

The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,

The one who will remain standing when I die.

It’s a great poem. He puts all he knows of “The Visitor” in one poem. “The one who remains silent while I talk.” So, as long as we talk so much, we can’t feel “The Visitor” to be present. “The Visitor” is the one who “forgives, sweet, when I hate.” The one “who takes a walk when I am indoors.” He’s pointing out the association of that secret one with nature. “The one who takes a walk when I am indoors. The one who will remain standing when I die.” I love this poem.

MCCANDLESS

Yesterday, you said something about the transparency of nature. Can you talk about that a little?

BLY

Maybe I could read you “Watering the Horse.”

How strange to think of giving up all ambition.

Suddenly I see with such clear eyes

The white flake of snow

That has just fallen in the horse’s mane!

There is something here that reminds us of some old Chinese poets. Once they had given up the idea of joining the Chinese Social Service, they’d drop out of ordinary life and become hobos. That was an aim of the sixties, too. Gary Snyder, for example, did that deliberately, knowing well that whole Chinese background. The idea is: “I’m not going to be a part of this. I’m just going to go out and build a little shack instead.” Then a strange thing sometimes happened: you would be able to see things in nature much more clearly. It was as if nature became transparent.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Did it actually work that way?

BLY

Yes.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Your poems that EWU Press just published: were these written in that Chinese mode, too?

BLY

Exactly. I wrote them in the late fifties and early sixties. It happened that I didn’t publish them at the time. So I went back one day and found them. I love that kind of poem. They aim somehow to catch the transparency of nature.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What do you mean by “the transparency?”

BLY

Okay. [Reads from “After Working”]

After many strange thoughts,

Thoughts of distant harbors, and new life,

I came in and found the moonlight lying in the room.

Outside it covers the trees like pure sound,

The sound of tower bells, or of water moving under the ice,

The sound of the deaf hearing through the bones of their heads.

We know the road; as the moonlight

Lifts everything, so in a night like this

The road goes on ahead, it is all clear.

The transparency suggests that we know the road. You long for something? You can do it. We know the road. I like that. You almost never feel that certainty in the city, but you feel it out in the country. I’m a very coarse person in many ways. You can see all these greedinesses in me and my passions. And my body is heavy. And yet, because I try to hold on to that transparency, my body has to put up with it.

One time, St. Francis and his friends were coming back from Rome, and they didn’t have much money. They walked and walked, and it was cold and raining. Finally they got to the house of friends. They knocked on the door, “Let us in!” “What are you robbers doing down there?” And someone threw hot water on them. “No, it’s Francis. It’s Francis and his friends! Let us in!” “Go away you robbers!” They dropped stones on them and trash. “Come on, let us in! It’s Francis!” And the people keep throwing stuff on them. And the people with Francis say, “This is terrible!” “No,” Francis said, “This is perfect joy.” You understand? Because all of that was good for defeating their nafs. They think they’re really something and these guys are throwing stuff on them.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Sometimes when you read, you come back to a poem that maybe you haven’t read in a while, and you seem genuinely surprised by something you said?

BLY

Maybe it’s good I have a bad memory. I was surprised last night when the man who introduced me asked me to read “The Hockey Poem.” “The Hockey Poem” isn’t transparent at all, it’s just funny. It’s about greed of various kinds. But I was surprised at how many jokes there were in it. I enjoyed that. And here is a nafs sentence about the goalie: [Reads from “The Hockey Poem.”]

This goalie with his mask is a woman weeping over the children

of men, who are cut down like grass, gulls standing with cold

feet on ice. And at the end, she is still waiting, brushing away

the leaves, waiting for the new children, developed by speed,

by war….

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What about madness—that’s something from the reading. You said we have to double the madness. You were talking about television and children—

BLY

The insanity of television is really ugly insanity. It’s shameless nafs insanity. We have children, and we let the television teach them? That’s insane. As a parent, it’s important to develop the insanity of art, which is a positive insanity, to meet that negative insanity. Because we had many kinds of art in the house, the positive insanity of art, the children were not quite as caught up with the other stuff. What I’m trying to say here is that parents have a new responsibility now. We used to be able to trust what was coming in. You can’t trust it anymore.

MCCANDLESS

Do you think kids are turning away from books?

BLY

Yes, of course. The figures of the percentage of children who read dropped from 60% in the last decade down to 50%, and now it’s down to 42%. And that’s in only about five or ten years. [pauses] Do you read to your children?

MCCANDLESS

I read to them every night.

BLY

That’s because you’re intelligent. Kids know there’s fun in that. My kids did, too. But we’re talking about developing “throw-aways.” We’re developing a culture that accepts the idea that three-quarters of children will be throw-aways, only good for buying cars and houses. And we’re not going to educate them, and we’re not going to tell them about God. We’re going to use them as throw-aways, to buy the things people manufacture. That’s ugly.

MCCANDLESS

The ultimate nafs civilization, isn’t it?

BLY

Yes, it is. This nafs-life is not what the United States was created for. So, we’re in some kind of trance in which we see these hideous things happening to our children and we don’t do anything about it. The nafs in television has a big hold on adults too.

MCCANDLESS

Is that a recent development, or was it apparent in other media before television?

BLY

You had to go out to see movies. Now, it’s right in the house. It’s sort of like having whores in the living room. Why not make the kitchen into a whorehouse—how would that be? We used to leave the house to see something really shoddy.

I don’t understand how we’re going to solve this, because we’ve trained human beings to be passive. Don’t walk, drive a car. Don’t make your food, buy it. That works for capitalism. Most Senators and Representatives have been bought by the corporations.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Then why even keep a place of hope?

BLY

Hope is what combats it. If you have hope, you pick up the book, turn off the TV. You’ve got to have hope for your children. Because that’s what it’s for. It’s feeding, you’ve got to feed them that hope. And that’s a divine thing that parents do.

MCCANDLESS

And cry when they don’t. Is it a primal thing in everyone, that has always been, or do we traditionally have a “counter-nafs?”

BLY

Joe Campbell told a story about that. He was living in Hawaii, and one day policemen saw a man who was about to jump over a cliff. The two policemen got out of their car. One policeman stepped over—it was very risky—and when the man jumped, he reached and caught him. And Joe said, “He risked his life to save the life of that other man. That’s what culture is.” The willingness to die for another is the opposite of the nafs.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You said at the reading that as you become more interested in culture, America moves away from it—

BLY

That fits along with the way we are becoming a nafs culture. If you really took on the obligation to help every human being in the serious way a Catholic nun takes her vow, you would be much more resistant to the wholesale lowering of human standards through television and buying presidents. I think it is built into the human being—this anti-nafs willingness to sacrifice oneself for another human being. Women do that whenever they give birth. I think that’s one reason men are more nafsish—women sacrifice every time they have a child. The nafs culture doesn’t support good motherhood.

MCCANDLESS

Do you think we’re exporting that to other countries?

BLY

I do, and that’s horrifying. Norway and Sweden, for instance, resist our ways. Sweden has wonderful laws for the protection of pregnant women, whether they’re married or not. They put a lot of money into that. Of course, here that would be knocked down by Tom DeLay. It’s interesting to think that since The United States has become the world leader in encouraging nafsish behavior and selfishness in all forms, we can’t expect a culture of serious book reading to continue, because it’s hard work. Students now are primarily visual; people graduate high school and college and they don’t read. Something infinitely important is being lost. Reading requires great effort. Observers tell the story of a grown man, an illiterate who decided to learn to read. It turned out he had to put blanket over himself eventually when he was reading because his body temperature actually fell two degrees from the effort. In the West, children start early, so we don’t recognize it, but it shows how much energy is required to take these little squiggles and turn them into thoughts and ideas. Reading requires a lot from the body. When kids don’t read, they’re losing something infinitely important. It isn’t only that we’ve become visual. We’re losing what we’ve spent a thousand years, two thousand years learning how to do.

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Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, to logger parents—her mother was a choker-setter and her father was a spar-tree rigger. The fact that she lives in Port Angeles now could make her life seem deceptively simple. Gallagher has lived and traveled all over the world. She has graduate degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Washington, where she studied with Theodore Roethke in his last poetry workshop. She has taught at the University of Montana, Syracuse University, the University of Arizona at Tucson, and St. Lawrence University in New York, among other places, and has made regular trips to Ireland since 1968. It was through friends in Ireland that she met Josie Gray, her “Irish companion,” with whom she has co-authored Barnacle Soup, a collaboration of stories Gray has crafted through years of their telling, which Gallagher has captured and preserved on the page.

Gallagher has participated in other collaborative efforts including translating the work of Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, and writing plays and screenplays with her late husband Raymond Carver. She has published eight books of poetry: Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, Willingly, Amplitude, Moon Crossing Bridge, Portable Kisses, My Black Horse, and Dear Ghosts; two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses and Soul Barnacles; two collections of short stories, The Lover of Horses and At the Owl Woman Saloon; and a book-length interview with Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi, Distant Rain.

Gallagher’s work is “substantial yet lambent, earthy and spiritual,” writes Donna Seaman of Booklist, and “evokes the power of the unseen as well as the seen with breathtaking clarity, creating metaphors so surprising, radiant, and apt that the world seems to expand in their wake.” In a way not unlike Wordsworth, Gallagher manages to enshrine not only the mundane, but the tragic, by seeing the world as her holy place. She was generous enough to invite us to her home where she served us homemade date-bran muffins and raspberries that she had picked the day before. We ate and talked over coffee in a room with walls of windows, surrounded by trees.

MAYA ZELLER

Your connection to the land is apparent in your work. Do you think this connection is amplified because of your roots in Port Angeles?

TESS GALLAGHER

Two things were very important. One was that my mother was actually from farm people in the Missouri Ozarks. They had a thousand acres, and I had access to that land when I was a child and I could range over that acreage—walking and on horseback—and explore. I don’t know how many children really get to explore vast amounts of territory like that; it builds something else in you. I went into caves where the Indians had lived and I was out in the fields planting the grain crops and taking hay to the cattle and helping my uncle deliver calves, and was there for the sheep shearing. My father came from itinerant farmers. They were poor and they rented land and farmed it and made gardens. My mother made her own garden as long as she possibly could and I used to garden with her.

My parents decided they wanted to give us something nobody else would give us and that was the experience of farming. So when I was about ten, they bought a little piece of land, out west of town at a place called Dry Creek, about fourteen acres. We learned milking cows. We had chickens, pigs, and raised calves we fed on the bucket, and we also did planting.

Those two things are important, my grandfather’s land and the acreage my parents bought, and maybe a third thing would be that my mother and I ended up being widows together here in Port Angeles. She had that farming gene deep in her—that need to dig and make outdoor spaces. So she and I gardened together. When I was having trouble with my garden, she would come over and in ten minutes she could make things right. She had a real knack for using tools and improving, and she was strong.

One time we were planting a rose over here on this side of the house before the trees got so tall and we hit a boulder. I said, “Oh Mother, let’s not plant it here. This is a boulder. Let’s just choose another place.” “No,” she said. “The boulder is coming out.” For two hours we dug this boulder. When we got it all dug around, I said, “Well, how in the world are we going to get it out?” She said, “Get a plank,” so I went and found an old board. We stuck this down in under the edge of the boulder. I mean, it was the size of—I don’t know if there’s anything in this room that I could tell you. About two of those dog beds. Huge. She says, “Push down on the plank and we’ll see if you can budge it.” I couldn’t budge it much so the two of us got on the end of that board and we rolled that stone up out of that hole. We got another plank, so the two of us were on two different planks and we managed to pry it out.

It was really an incredible feat, but when I go back to that, I ask, What was happening there? Okay, we moved that stone, but there was something about her will that was aptly demonstrated. I hope if I got anything from her, and I know I did, that one of the things I got is, Just don’t give up. Find a way. She could always find a way, and she was often proving that the way is close at hand.

SHIRA RICHMAN

How does gardening fit into your creative process?

GALLAGHER

Well you know, you have the body—the whole body. You cannot be there writing the poem hour and hour and day and day. You’re not just this walking head. So you have to figure out some things to do with the rest of the body, things that make your body a whole thing instead of just a head running everything.
Gardening integrates my intelligence without my having to think about it. I love digging. I like to plant flowers. I like to water them. I like to feel the sustenance of the water going onto the plant. I like to come over to Mother’s land, which I purchased after her death. I can see where the deer have been sleeping. I like to notice that this plant grew or that the deer snacked on it—all those little things of having a garden.

I like to worry about something that’s not making it, and to think what I could do to help. I like lifting fifty-pound sacks of mulch, slamming them down, and figuring out how to do the hard thing of getting it spread. I like digging weeds, which I was doing over at my cottage in town yesterday, the place you stayed, and not using—as much as I can manage—any chemicals, because you don’t want your baby playing in it, don’t want it going into the aquifer. When my workman says, “Let’s put weed killer around these apple trees—Roundup,” I say no, because I’m going to eat those apples.

I fell in love with an orchard over at my mother’s. People can fall in love with other people and they can fall in love with towns, and cities, and other countries, and languages, and poets—but can they fall in love with an orchard? My lawyers were very curious after my mother died, and her land and house were going to just be sold, and I said, “No, I don’t think so. I’ll try to buy it. I will take the money I had coming from the estate and put some more with it and try to buy it.” The lawyers said, “But you already have enough property.” I said, “Yes, but, I’m in love with the orchard.”

I prune it every February with a young man named Josh Gloor, who comes from Sequim, and we have three glorious days where we’re pruning those apple trees and chatting. I love that time. The sun will be shining, or it might be raining. We might have to take shelter at intervals. I will pick up all the limbs so he doesn’t have to bend over, ’cause I’m close to the ground, a nice way of saying “short.”

One of the things I like doing is to get my body real tired. I want to go to bed with a tired body and I sleep really well when I do that. I used to suffer from insomnia—when I couldn’t get that physical exhaustion from working in the garden. I’m now taking care of three gardens, so I sleep fine.

At Sky House there is no garden because I arranged it that way. I didn’t want a garden there. I wanted a place where I didn’t have to worry about anything, and at Sky I don’t garden. There are ferns and salal there. Things that grow naturally. But I’m glad I have Mother’s now. I can dig there and make spaces. I’m in the process of reclaiming her garden because it got out of control when she was sick and when I had to take care of her, so I couldn’t work on the garden at the same time. She was my garden.

So, now I’m picking out blackberry bramble and other invasive plants that come into the garden. At the cottage in town that I got for Rijl and Tiernan to live in, there’s a very beautiful garden because it’s compact and you can see the difference you make. At Mother’s, it’s hard to see the difference you make because it’s too big really to be a display garden. It does have the delight of encouraging you to wander, which lets you meditate.

RICHMAN

Do you have writing rituals or habits?

GALLAGHER

Really, if a poem is coming to you, you will find a way to get it. When I’m writing I don’t have any appointments that day. It is hard to keep people out of that morning space. You’d think—I have no husband here, I have no children—that I could arrange that time, but there are many other things that can want to come in. Especially workmen. They always want to come in the morning. They are great despoilers of the day. So I try to make all the appointments at what I call the teatime hour, which is three or four o’clock. That allows me my day.

I like to be at Sky House when I’m writing, because people don’t call me there. That telephone is a monster and unless you take it off the hook, you’re going to get calls. Somebody is going to think they need you. They’ll want to ask you something. The computer is a terrible villain, too. I try to save those morning hours. And if I have anything that I should take care of, any business, I get it done the day before.

RICHMAN

Then you don’t necessarily expect to write every morning?

GALLAGHER

Right. I make that time. If you get into a run of poems, that is the most anguishing time because you’re going to run into these impediments. I can remember being really angry at certain people during the time I was writing Moon Crossing Bridge. They were interrupting and bringing fractious things into my life. But that marvelous rippling of poems, you don’t get into that often, so you can’t depend on it. You have to really work most of the time and just hope and expect that something will come. The expectation helps. If you sit down and you don’t expect anything, you might not get much. I know that that’s away from what William Stafford said—to have low expectations, but I am of an opposite view. I think something wonderful is going to come and I’m going to put pressure there. I’m going to ask for that something special to come.

ZELLER

Kind of like meditation or prayer?

GALLAGHER

Yes, I really get out of the world when I’m intending to write. I also assume that all the spirits of the writers I have loved and have read and been with are available to me, that I have access to those energies. Just like invisible apples, I can reach and pick, can bring the images down to me. I might fail, but the expectation is, to me, helpful.

ZELLER

Do you read while you’re waiting for the poem to come?

GALLAGHER

I try not to watch myself very much at the beginning of this process. I’m very casual with myself at the same time I’m expecting. Now, how you can do the two things, I don’t know. As I’m expecting and hoping, I’m also very sideways with myself. These things are coexisting, because if I look too directly in it—at it—I will jinx myself. Isn’t this a crazy way to think? But in fact, this is how it is.

So I will have a lot of little distractions. I might light some incense. I might drink some coffee. I might take Peggy, my dog, out for a quick walk. There will be books lying around, and these will be all manner of books—nonfiction, fiction, poetry. I might pick up any of those and read, just to get some language, to kind of prime the pump.

Right now I’ve got an assignment from Ciaran Carson, who was my old friend from Belfast and we exchange work. I read all of his novels and his poetry and he reads mine. In fact, he’s very much responsible for helping to find a press in Belfast for Josie’s and my book, Barnacle Soup, the book of Irish stories. When I was reading recently at the Seamus Heaney Center in Belfast—that’s where I used to live for a short time, Belfast, in 1976—he suggested that I was such a wild child, why didn’t I try writing in some kind of form? And I said, “Well suggest something.” He said, “Why don’t you write fourteen fourteen-line poems with half rhymes.” So I’ve started to write those. And it’s really hard.

I did write a lot of stuff in form when I was a student of Theodore Roethke. And Nelson Bentley, also at the University of Washington, had us writing in form. I did some things in form even for David Wagoner, but I never really liked writing in form. I didn’t feel like I got from form what I needed to get in writing poems. I hadn’t revisited it, so I thought, Well, okay, I’ll go back there. My Belfast poet friends are very much deeper into form and using form, in the belief that you will get some things using form you might not get otherwise.

RICHMAN

Are you finding that to be true for yourself?

GALLAGHER

I find it very awkward. I think it’s all a failure so far—but I’m not going back to look at it. This is another thing that is different for me this time. Usually, I will bulldog the poem right down and I will be very intense with it for however long it takes to get it right, but this time I’m just writing and not judging. I’m going to accumulate these poems and then I’ll go back. I’m not too sure they’re going to amount to much—but maybe I can bring them around later. I’m going to reserve my judgment about them. I have a sense that I don’t know what I’ve got there.

RICHMAN

How soon after starting a poem do you usually begin revising?

GALLAGHER

I would continue to write that entire day. And then I would work the next day and the next day until I got it just right. The poems are coming with such surety now. It’s like being a tightrope walker—you have your balance after a while. I don’t have as much revision as I had at the beginning of my writing. Maybe I’m a less good writer, I don’t know, but I feel that somehow I have gotten into my way and that it is very helpful to me. I can trust it a lot more.

RICHMAN

If we were to go to Sky House and look at your writing area, which books might we find lying around?

GALLAGHER

I just got Michael Burkard’s last two books from Sarabande. I had not kept up as well with him since I taught him last, at Bucknell University. Of course, he was my husband for four years and we were at Iowa together. During that time we exchanged poems and we had a relationship that really lived poetry. It became kind of the pattern for what I wanted and which I finally got, in a comfortable reciprocal way, with Raymond Carver.

It was a great pity that our timing—Michael’s and my timing, for our relationship—was a bit off because you really need your life well in hand for that whole thing of two writers together to work. We were both trying to find ourselves during that time. It was a very confusing time, early in our poetry lives. We had just come directly from Iowa to our first job at St. Lawrence University.

An unfortunate part of the public life of the poet is that some poets reach the public in magazines that are more national, and others will be publishing more in the poetry venues that poets read, and Michael became the latter kind of poet. A poet’s poet. I so admired the courage in his work, to choose that path, but I don’t know if it was really a choice or just how he was, really. Probably that’s how he is. He was always going to write that way. He has become a bit more accessible, at least in these newer poems, I feel.

ZELLER

Did you choose a different path?

GALLAGHER

I don’t know if the word “choice” is correct, because what one does is governed by talents, by necessities—in the language. I wanted a wide readership, so maybe that determined the way I moved in a poem. Michael would allow a lot more ambiguity and unknowns in his poems, things that would be unresolved. I loved to read that and, as I said, I find his poems now much more accessible than the early poetry he was writing. I love to get close to them again. We’re in contact, which we hadn’t been for quite a while—for no reason, just that I moved off the East Coast and we didn’t meet anymore. It’s such a big country.

We used to meet occasionally, and I, in fact, had wanted Michael to have a job at Syracuse—which is so ironic. I argued hard for him to be able to teach with us because he was friends with Ray and me after Ray and I were together at Syracuse. Ray was instrumental in helping Michael to get sober. Michael has written about his sobriety battle so it’s okay to mention that. He talked with Ray about this. I couldn’t get him in to teach there at the time. Conditions weren’t right with the people he would be working with, but now he’s teaching there and I’m so happy about that. The students were wonderful. One of my first students was Alice Sebold. She took about three classes with me and also took fiction writing from Ray. Lucia Perillo was one of my students there and Jane Mead. Both wonderful poets.

ZELLER

Might you talk a little about your relationship with Lucia Perillo?

GALLAGHER

Lucia came out west and she worked at Mt. Rainier as a guide. She had studied biology in California, but she had also written poetry there with Robert Hass, and then she returned to Syracuse. Her parents were from New York. She became my student and got her MFA from Syracuse. I used to have all my classes in my living room, so it was very cozy. We got to be friends, and Jane Mead was in that class and Lucia and Jane got to be friends. So when Lucia came out West, Jane would come from Iowa or California and the three of us would have girls’ night over at Sky House. It remained a wonderful thing that the three of us could stay close.

When Lucia got this diagnosis of the MS, it happened the year that Ray died. I was, of course, devastated by that loss and she was devastated by her news. I remember us going out to Cape Alava with my sister and her family and we hiked out to the beach across those plank boardwalks through the forest and sword ferns. We made a campfire and I remember staying up the night with her talking about going on despite really difficult and soul-wrenching circumstances.

It was, for me, a very helpful conversation that night, to see what she had to struggle with and to get her also to understand that I had really made the choice to go on in the best form possible—that if I could go on, maybe she could go on. We actually had that conversation. I don’t know if she remembers it, but I felt it was a very special conversation, both of us talking like disembodied souls under the stars.

ZELLER

Does a person have to experience pain or adversity to write purely?

GALLAGHER

I don’t know about the word “purely,” what that is, because everything is so mixed—your pain with your sorrow with your joys. I don’t think you can even experience your happiest times without some dimensionality, and how are you going to get that if you’re not open to really going down with the difficult things? You can’t just be Miss Bubbly all the time. You have to let the hard things come into you and be with them and understand their dimensions and live through them, fully. For me the way to live them fully is my writing. That’s a very big help to me. You can’t escape sorrow. It’s here for us and anyone who thinks they’re going to get out of this life without pain or sorrow—you will be avoiding so many things that could be cherished and interesting and soul-building, so we say. I like to be with my friends when they are in trouble. And I want them to be with me.

I had this experience of breast cancer, which began in August of 2002 and it was instructive—how my friends came to me like I was the little bird that had fallen out of the next tree and they were all around me calling, saying, We’re with you. We’re with you. You can do it, and that really helped me. They came from as far away as Japan. My Japanese translator, Hiromi Hashimoto, flew all that way. Haruki Murakami flew from Tokyo—he and his wife, Yoko. They came to Seattle where I was going into my chemo. I was already bald as an onion. I had put a water-based hummingbird tattoo on my bald head and Yoko was photographing it. It was just one of those rub-off kinds of tattoo. We giggled together over it.

The companioning of your friends can do so many things medicine can’t. Medicine is not going to be able to save you at some point and while it is not saving you, you have to have something else. The reason my kitchen is so full of photographs is that I’m keeping all these people with me. I consult their images in the morning when I’m looking around, at the beginning of the day, thinking, Where are you now? How are you doing? I will, at intervals, be in touch consciously and unconsciously by glancing at their photos with a lot of those people. But yes, you are going to write out of those hardships. Ray used to say, “If there’s nothing going wrong, there’s no story.”

But that doesn’t mean that in your poems you won’t find the joys and you won’t find the light. But sometimes you’re just going in darkness, and you think, Oh, I never will get there. You have to be very patient with yourself and with the poems, to hope they will bring you back round.

RICHMAN

In an interview with Daniel Bourne, you mentioned the “intuitive magician-mind” that allows us to create the “leaping of poetry.” How do you keep that intuitive magician-mind alive, active, and accessible?

GALLAGHER

It’s been different at different points of my life, but Tiernan, my grandnephew, has been a big part of that during this phase of my life. He is so bright and so wonderful—just the exuberance of him—it teaches you what you could have. I surf on him like he is a great rolling ocean. I love to see what he’s going to think of next and to bask in that and try to be in some kind of lively dimension with it that’s not an Old Fogey Girl thing.

When I was nursing Mother in the last year of her life here at Ridge House, where we are, I was at that far end of the life skein in tending to her. She had congestive heart failure and she had Alzheimer’s dementia. I would have the day here and then I would go over to Rijl’s—my niece’s—and see Tiernan and the whole day would be so refreshed. I’m glad, looking back, that I could allow myself that. That I could say, Where can I get refreshed? and to realize that I could go there to be a child with Tiernan.

RICHMAN

How do you know if an idea will be a poem or a story?

GALLAGHER

In a poem, you may have some characters, but if you get too many you’ll write a huge, rollicking book of one narrative strain. Then you need to go to fiction or you’ll lose concentration of energy in the poem, make it scatter and fragment. I find myself cutting out characters in poems in order to preserve that concentration. I think of poetry as having a higher emotional density than prose. I want that in my poems, anyhow.

In prose, you have to be willing to put up with details that are not poetic; they don’t have that strength. These go into writing the kind of fiction I write, which is a kind of realistically based fiction, and these details help establish the grounding for the lives you are going to tell that make up the story. That’s the fabric, the warp and weft of the weave.

If I want a story, I start collecting a lot of details and listening very carefully to what people are telling me and making notes. I’ll usually be working from the template of somebody’s story. I feel like prose comes much more from outside me than poetry does. Poetry is intimate and more generated in my own theater, shall we say. But in prose I have to be responsive to that story that’s coming to me and there has to be some part of me that goes out to meet it.

In my poems I’ll have little snippets of stories that all of a sudden zoom in like a mad hummingbird into the poem. For instance, in the poem, “Sah Sin,” the hummingbird poem, the detail about the mother who has her dead child with her on the bus—I had no idea that detail was going to come into that poem. I had stored it away when someone told me that story, years before, and here it came like a comet falling into the poem.

It’s very helpful in either process to maintain a great openness and freedom to admit whatever wants to come in. That’s what I do and one of my students gave me the best compliment I’ve ever had. He said, “Tess, you taught me how to be free.” What he meant was probably that openness to be receptive to anything. Even your old working methods—throw them out—and allow yourself to have access to all those things that may come to you.

ZELLER

Have you considered writing a memoir?

GALLAGHER

Well, I kind of feel maybe like Ray did about this. He didn’t write a memoir either. Of course, he died at age fifty, but he felt, I think, that his life was very well contained within his fiction and his poetry. His poetry was more alive to his life than the stories. He said that his work was all he had, also, of religion. I kind of feel that way, too, that to come straight on to my life I might drive out the mysteries of it. I love what Emily Dickinson said: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” The memoir—it can ask you not to tell it slant. That is worrisome for me. I like to tell it slant. I like to be cloaked and a bit hidden.

Even as open as you may feel my poems are, they also are mysterious in some elements. Some books more so than others. I think that Moon Crossing Bridge is quite an oblique book in some ways, although one can have deep access to it emotionally. You may not know line to line exactly what I’m saying, but you will have emotional access and that is something I love—to give a person the ability to understand with their emotions what they can’t understand with their heads, their reasoning. To be able to do that in language—because music can do that and painting can do that—this is the attempt I make in poetry.

ZELLER

We talked earlier about your birth name, Theresa. I wonder, because you use Tess for your publishing name, how much of your identity is a self-construct and how much is imposed from without?

GALLAGHER

It’s a combination. Within your family and your private life maybe, more of that birth identity is still available. I remember my mother in the last years calling me Tess and really disliking that, but she began to take on the terms of my life away from the family at some point because no one around her knew me as Theresa—the name she had given me. They all knew me as Tess so they were all calling me Tess—the people helping me with her care. That was kind of an annoyance, frankly. Some of my nieces call me Tess and I don’t like it much, but I don’t correct them. They have to do what they want.

Tess was a name that I took on at the very beginning of my writing and it was a curious event where an actor from Durbin, South Africa, said to me, “Theresa Gallagher—no, it doesn’t sound like a writer.” He was very aware of image, because he had acted with Sir John Gielgud. He had a folder with his own picture, looking gorgeous, that he had to show when he went to get an acting job. He said, “You should be called Tess—Tess Gallagher, now that’s a name.” I was beginning to send out my poems and I sent some under that name and, magically, all the poems were taken. So I thought, He’s right.

At that time, of course, I was in the military zone. My first husband was in the Vietnam War preparation. He was a pilot and the people around me didn’t know me. When I went to them, they asked my name. I said, “Tess Gallagher,” so that began to be what I was called. Theresa Gallagher is still very much alive though. When I write my poems, I draw on that persona, too. Over the years it’s gained its own veracity, its own powers.

ZELLER

Your father called you Threasie.

GALLAGHER

That’s a very dear name. I like that a lot. Josie Gray, my Irish companion, has great names for me. He calls me Scut, which means the tail on a rabbit. I call him Master and he calls me Slave sometimes. I like that Slave because we are making this book, and I have to do so much of the drudgework of it. I must have read this manuscript for Barnacle Soup 150,000 times to get it all right. Josie has no idea of all that is involved in getting a book ready for publication.

He’ll call me Miss American Pie or just Pie. We’re always renaming each other. It’s a bit of fun in the day. I call him Buddha-lugs because he has these lovely big earlobes like a Buddha. Lugs is Irish for ears. He was sixty-nine when I met him, but he was very young in his spirit and he’s still very young. He’s eighty-two but he’s still one of the youngest people I know. Because he’s ready for anything. Any wild notion I have, why, he doesn’t make fun of me. He tries to come on board.

I became a vegetarian in 2000, and he’s a man who loves meat and potatoes, but he makes room for this. He’s concerned about me getting my protein and he starts to read about how I can get it. When I want to save the sheep in Ireland out of his herd, he humors me. He let me have this sheep and the sheep’s baby lamb. Now I have four sheep and lambs in Ireland. Josie saves the wool for me and I’ve been able to get this made into raw roving, cleaned and ready to weave with. He’s an adventurer and that’s why he became a painter, and his storytelling is coming into written form in our book, Barnacle Soup, from Blackstaff Press in Belfast, and eventually, in 2008, by Eastern Washington University Press.

RICHMAN

What else are you working on now?

GALLAGHER

I talked about these fourteen-line poems. Of course, I’m always carrying Ray and different things have come to the surface there— Jindabyne just came out. That was the film made by Ray Lawrence, based on Ray’s story, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and it’s filmed in Australia in Aboriginal country. I’ve followed that along as it was being proposed and as it was being made. I kind of became friends with Ray Lawrence on e-mail. He was so nice to keep me involved.

I’m reading—I forgot to say earlier, when we spoke of her—Lucia Perillo’s nonfiction book, which is fantastic: I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing. It’s about her MS and what that has brought to bear on her art and her apprehension of life and the ways she has steadied herself with her poetry, with her own writing. It’s a powerful book.

ZELLER

You’ve been a mentor for her and she’s become a mentor to you?

GALLAGHER

If you’re lucky, a wonderful thing happens in that your student becomes your friend and they’re working in ways that inspire you. She has always been that way for me. Lucia always gave as much as she got, I have to say. The same with Katie Ford, who was another of my students. Katie was just here at Ridge House before she moved back East. She brought her manuscript, Coliseum, about Hurricane Katrina and we looked at that together. You get to participate later with those writers that you’ve nurtured—that’s a big gift that teaching gives you, that you just don’t get, I don’t think, anywhere else.
I can’t believe I fell into this life where I get to be around so many intelligent, wonderful people—really just interesting and vigorous and searching and courageous people. It’s amazing.

ZELLER

In your essay, “My Father’s Love Letters,” you write, “I began to see poems as a way of settling scores with the self.” What scores do you have left to settle?

GALLAGHER

You don’t know them really until the poems start to reveal them. If I ever lose my curiosity, I won’t be a writer. Poetry is like a witching stick. It’s telling you what’s there, where the water is. That’s how I use it, anyway.

I didn’t know when I wrote “Apparition” how strongly those stories that my uncle had told me had affected me, or what they meant. The poem tries to give the moment its full due, give that story its full due. I couldn’t work it out in life—I couldn’t say to the uncle, I believe you, what you’re telling me. I believe you saw or somehow encountered the spirit of your dead brother. I couldn’t tell him that directly, and again it’s that slant thing, that if I spoke this in the moment, then I would somehow invade the mystery and there is this curious decorum that we maintain with the mysteries. In writing the poem, though, I can come closer to it than I could in life—in my actual, walking-around life. But unless your inner and outer life is very vigorous, your poetry is not going to be very vigorous.

I love not knowing things and that is at the heart of being a poet, that I don’t feel in a place of judgment a lot of my day, although I know very well how I feel about things. I was out visiting an old childhood friend of mine, who actually was with me when Ray was very ill and in fact the night that Ray died. He was my childhood badminton partner, Jack Estes. We read a kind of Zen poem that said something to the effect of how wonderful life is if you don’t read the newspapers. We were laughing about this poem and then I thought, I should have corrected myself and really let him know how politically engaged I am—that I am looking to see what’s going on in this country. I’m dipping in all the time to find out.

I don’t think it’s great to be oblivious in times like this. We all need to be doing whatever we can about the huge trespasses upon our Constitution that this Bush administration has brought down upon us. We ought to be enraged and fighting in every molecule. At the same time, we can’t drink poison all day from it. You have to take in the amount you need to know to inform yourself, but don’t drink the poison. The Buddhists say something like what I was saying in Instructions to the Double so long ago. Ages ago! They say, “Don’t drink poison at the poison temple. Go to the golden temple.”

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MARILYNNE ROBINSON WAS BORN and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho. After graduating from Brown University in 1966, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Washington. While writing her dissertation, Robinson began work on her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), which received the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Robinson’s essays and book reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review, among other places. An essay published in Harper’s, titled “Bad News from Britain,” formed the basis of her controversial book, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), a finalist for the National Book Award.

In 1998, Robinson published a critically acclaimed collection of essays called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. The New York Times Book Review observed that “one of Robinson’s great merits as an essayist is her refusal to take her opinions secondhand. Her book is a goad to renewed curiosity.”

Her novel, Gilead, an epistolary tale of a dying Iowa preacher writing to his young son, earned her the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award.

To consider Robinson only a creative writer is a mistake. She is a serious thinker, demanding of herself and her audience. During this interview, Robinson commented on a wide range of issues, from Darwinism to current political issues. About fiction’s ability to capture any meaningful truth, Robinson said, “I feel there is a great deal of highly conventional thinking in almost every area of life that must be discarded in order for a writer to make something with integrity in terms of that writer’s understanding.”

Robinson was interviewed in front of an audience at Eastern Washington University in Spokane.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: During your talk at The Met the other night, you said that all your characters within a book are actually part of one character. Can you expand on that statement?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: It seems that fiction rarely achieves a sense of anything approximating, anything suggesting, the actual complexity or dimensionality of the human being. That was a problem when I was writing Housekeeping. I felt inadequate. I felt flatness. So my solution was to create what felt like one personality arrayed across a range of possible expressions of that personality. It seemed true from my own observations that a great deal of anyone’s character, of the experience anyone is formed by, their interior, is made up of things chosen against, things that do not fade, things one is attracted to but does not pursue—hopes or expectations or fears that are never realized but are nevertheless an important part of the interior weather any human being lives with.

Behavior you see in other people is the lingua franca behavior through which, normally speaking, we can be adequately intelligible to one another. We cannot alarm or puzzle one another excessively. And this is something that you learn, sort of like manners or the shorthand language of please and thank you. It is not intended to be a revelation of one’s character; it’s intended to allow you to pass through the world without exposing yourself, without damaging other people in ways you don’t want to. There’s inevitable role-playing that is a huge part of anybody’s behavior in life. This is not a negative statement. This is just the way we create a sort of uniform currency to make ourselves understandable, to be able to be adequate in circumstances that are perhaps casual, perhaps formal, perhaps very brief, and so on. If that level of anyone’s personality or character is taken to be a sufficient description of them, then obviously you’ve missed the whole human mystery, as far as that person is concerned. Being accepted at that level of self-revelation trivializes people.

And though it’s rare to see behind conventionalized behavior, you know as a matter of simply being able to extrapolate from experiencing yourself, that in every individual case, there’s infinitely more in the experience of another person. So my solution for the problem was to array characters in ways to show the impulses that might be particularly powerful, for example, and therefore least visible. I used to think of quantum physics, the idea that all possibilities remain until one is observed. I think that established a principle for me I’ve always clung to, which is that apparent oppositions are always oversimplifications. And to set up conflict, especially conflict of values, is something that very much simplifies the actual way experience and value exist in the world. For example, in Gilead, John Ames is not Edward because he has chosen not to be Edward; but nevertheless, because he defines himself against that impulse, he in a certain sense gets suffused with the impulse. He knows all the arguments, he knows his brother’s mind and understands the impulse away from the life he has chosen. And no doubt, if one were to think of Edward, one would think exactly the same way, that he has chosen against John, but in the fact of knowing everything about John, there is self-denial in self-definition of that kind.

THOMAS KING: The opening chapter of Housekeeping is written in Ruth’s point of view, yet it covers events for which she was not present. Can you tell us about the challenges of using an omniscient first-person as an entry point for the novel?

ROBINSON: I always tell my students you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you’re doing, you’re not doing it well enough. You have to circumvent plausibility sometimes, the normal ways people have of understanding or documenting things in a journalistic model that supposedly applies. I think—and this is relevant to my family and their settling in the Pacific Northwest—that a lot of what I knew and a lot of what seemed important in my early life were descriptions of things I had not seen that had a profound reality in my imagination, because they were told among people whose importance to me is mythic, in the way that grandparents and aunts and uncles are to children. So I think there’s a huge psychological latitude with the first-person because we have a much greater store of experience than what we actually witness. The sort of I-am-the-camera approach to point of view is not psychologically rich enough to be adequate in any circumstance. In any case, the description of things one has not seen is something most people are capable of, partly because their minds can’t help embroidering and enriching whatever they’ve been told to attach importance to.

SARAH FLYNN: In your essay, “Facing Reality,” you wrote that the art of writing fiction lies outside the collective fiction we call “reality.” How do you grapple with our society’s collective fiction in your novels?

ROBINSON: I don’t grapple when I can avoid it, but I do feel that there is a great deal of highly conventional thinking in almost every area of life that must be discarded in order for a writer to make something with integrity in terms of that writer’s understanding. We’re in a very special period of time now—I suppose we have been for the last fifty or one hundred years, maybe since the telegraph—where there’s an enormous amount of rapid-fire information. There are huge, groaning burdens of what looks like scholarship lying around. These are things that people typically don’t have time to be skeptical of. But the accumulation of misinformation addles the mind, restricts the imagination. It makes it terribly difficult to think with the necessary degree of rigor. I have spent a great part of my life going to the sources, reading the original material. I learned this in graduate school, when I found out the great and revered scholars did not do that. And it makes many things fall apart, as you realize that things you’ve been told are true are not true. I think people can feel the falseness in the narrative they’re being given, but they don’t know where to begin doubting. My advice is to begin wherever you find a loose thread. The more you pull, the more you will find to pull.

Inside a recent Harper’s magazine, there was an article in which the writer asked, Why do Americans talk about the mentality of the country, the spirit of the country, being anything other than capitalist? He claimed that it was never anything but capitalist. And that’s not true. Capitalism was a bad word in this country for a long time. Banks were illegal in Iowa because they caused accumulations of capital. This writer said that, you know, The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. Well, yes it was, but the book by Adam Smith that influenced the founding fathers was actually another book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a series of ethical lectures that he delivered to classes of Presbyterian ministers in preparation. The Wealth of Nations is about corn laws and how it should not be possible to constrict the flow of products, which caused starvation in England and Ireland. This is the basis of his theory, that there has to be a human economic order that does not starve the working class. The man writing this article, who was being so blustering, so authoritative, in Harper’s, had all kinds of information wrong. He probably learned it when he was a sophomore in college and never checked it or thought about it. The fact that somebody publishes something in Scotland in 1776 doesn’t mean it has any influence on something written in America in 1776. Probably not.

KING: What can be done about the wealth of misinformation people ingest? How does this misinformation affect society at large?

ROBINSON: A lot of people would have to make an epic of criticism, by which I do not mean theory. I mean criticism. I’ve done a lot of difficult study; that’s probably not my best-kept secret. And there is so much junk scholarship around. In the airport, I picked up this little book by Karen Armstrong called A Short History of Myth. It’s a terrible book. The two sources she uses over and over are Mircea Eliade, who was a disaster, and Ibid., which is another name for Mircea Eliade. I pretend it’s one of those medieval Islamic scholars.

I don’t know if any of you know anything about how biblical scholarship is done, but if you take some introductory course, you will discover there’s J, P, E, and D. These are the names for the major traditions that contribute to the Old Testament, supposedly. Now, I gave a lecture at a symposium of biblical scholars—serious people, right? And I said this is a completely ridiculous idea—that you can break these traditions down into these streams. And I made my case. And of course it threatened everybody in the room. There was a kind of silence until one venerable man raised his hand and said, “What does it matter what we write? Nobody reads it anyway.”

It matters. It matters. It matters. It matters. Add the fact that this was what you would call a conservative theological setting; these people were not Karen Armstrong. How in the world can you toil your life away, saying, What does it matter? How can you do that? People trust each other. That’s the whole thing, the reason why people have engulfed themselves in false models of learning about all kinds of things; it’s because they trust. They think if this is in print and this person has an M.Div., this means something. The cynicism of saying, What does it matter? is just unbelievable to me, and I don’t think that this is by any means a problem isolated in theology departments. It’s everywhere.

Indifference has done nothing but drain content out of the collective experience. We have these huge libraries. There’s nothing in the world like the American library system, nothing to compare. You can go to a library or get on your computer and find amazing stuff. I’ve done research on English Renaissance writers, books that were printed in the 17th century, and I had to cut the pages, because no one had read them since the 17th century, in that library, at any rate. But there it was. I could find what I needed.

We have this huge brain sitting there, waiting to be used. The way out of the problem, for most people, is to head down the street, if it’s not in their laptops. The amount of early literature you can call up online from universities is astonishing. But in many, many instances, it might as well have uncut pages.

FLYNN: Why don’t people utilize those resources?

ROBINSON: The idea of individual learning has been subordinated to the idea of getting degrees. Most people are anxious about employment, and the culture continuously reinforces the fact that you go to college to get the diploma because that’s your ticket to economic life. The idea that built the universities, which is that simply knowing is wonderful, seems to have all but disappeared. I visited a university that particularly emphasized theory. The graduate students said, We take theory because we can’t get hired without taking theory because universities need people to teach theory. So there’s this perpetual motion machine. Whether or not you think this is a fruitful way to approach literature is put to one side, because it’s like a driver’s license—you simply have to have it. This is not the life of the mind. This is not what Thomas Jefferson hoped for.

FLYNN: At times, you express doubts about the likelihood that your essays will change public discourse in a significant way. What motivates you to write nonfiction?

ROBINSON: I would worry about myself if I had serious expectations of changing public discourse. That is a large and rather immobile thing: public discourse. Nevertheless, some things strike me as important in a way that makes me have to work through them myself. I have always found that people were interested in these essays. I’ve never had any trouble publishing them. I’ve never had any significant rebuttal to what I write. I got sued by Greenpeace once, but I don’t count that as a rebuttal. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine people will actually read what you write when you’re writing about the French Reformation or something. On the other hand, the impulse is certainly there, and there are people who read these things and to whom what I say is important. And God help us if everybody stopped trying to at least participate in public discourse. You have to try to say what you think is true.

KING: I’ve read that you believe society moves both forward and backward. What gains have we won in our nation’s or our planet’s history that are currently at risk?

ROBINSON: Well, there is the planet. There are obvious sorts of tradeoffs that I worry about. Many people in this country are quite scrupulous about environmental things. There are many laws and customs, national or local, that to some extent control what we do to our own immediate environment, but that has meant that what can’t be done within the limit of those norms here is done elsewhere, so that you get a relatively clean America and a completely poisoned China. I don’t consider that to be a desirable tradeoff. If your loyalty is to the human species, there are more Chinese than there are Americans, and on the most simple utilitarian basis, we have to worry about what happens to the Chinese and the Indians and so on.

The way the world economy has developed, every population has a certain percentage of bright, highly motivated people. The countries that have been slower in developing have huge, avid populations of people thrilled to be part of this cool, global economy, and at the same time, they have governments perfectly willing to make economic hay out of impoverished workers with low expectations. So we have children picking over dumps of discarded computers, pulling out both valuable and toxic things. If you read about China at the present time, they have riots in the countryside because of this hideous, no-holds-barred economic development they have gotten into, if economic development is the right word. There is, for example, a factory that makes a cancer treatment with byproducts so toxic that everybody around the plant for a good distance is sick. And, of course, the drugs are shipped to Europe and the United States.

This is one of those things where you can say, “Yes, we wouldn’t let that happen here,” but that only makes it worse where it does happen. There are tradeoffs as far as progress goes that are very vivid indeed. When people don’t have any control in a country like China or India because they are so poor that anything seems better than nothing, then the constraints that might make a moderate disaster of something that happened in Minnesota, make it an absolute disaster by their absence in China. It’s not something we want to talk or think about. A lot of the warfare in Africa is apparently about a mineral necessary for cell phones. We all have our nifty cell phones and we do not look into the economic consequences, which become warfare and starvation in another setting. I wish it were harder to come up with examples, but that’s just technology. And there’s also war.

One of the things most interesting to me about doing research into the history of the Middle West was learning about colleges created there before the Civil War, in the 1830s and 1840s. They were already racially integrated, gender-integrated. They created a system for making everybody at a college work, including the faculty, so there would be no economic barriers to education, and, they said, to make a more useful educated class. These are things I think we would consider very advanced. A lot of schools, like Mount Holyoke, Grinnell, Oberlin, Amherst, that are now elite institutions, were intended as places where no economic barrier to education existed, where it wouldn’t cost you anything to attend. There’s been a huge sort of turning over, like an iceberg. There has been not only the loss of the ideals that went into the creation of the colleges and the society they influence, but also a complete and absolute amnesia that these things were ever done or intended. And if it can happen once, it can happen again, which is something we must be aware of.

FLYNN: In “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion,” you wrote that, as a liberal, you were disappointed with liberalism as a movement. Have your views intensified or changed over recent years?

ROBINSON: I have certain vivid touch points. When major issues come up like whether we should invade Iraq, I’m very sympathetic to the side that says no, because that seems really smart, and it was smart before the whole enterprise ever began. If questions arise about whether resources should be spent on creating the kind of social equality that will prevent us from stigmatizing or disabling subsequent generations because their parents happen to have been poor, I’m very much in favor of people who support such an idea. Now, these kinds of convictions make me a completely committed liberal. At the same time, there is so much nonsense and flaccidity and uncritical thought on the side of liberalism that it is not a good servant of its own cause.

And my idea of patriotism, given the completely arbitrary nature of our national identity, is that patriotism matters. I consider myself patriotic because I don’t want American people to go hungry. I don’t want American people to spend their lives unemployed when they want to make a creative contribution to the culture. I don’t want women to be forced into abortion because they can’t possibly stop working, supporting their families on a minimum wage that is not adequate to support their family. As far as I’m concerned, patriotism is, first of all, an obligation to create humane circumstances within our country. I don’t think that should be a hard case to make, but I think that when people on the other side say, “We’re the patriotic people,” the impulse of liberals is to say, “Well, we don’t think patriotism is such a terrifically good idea.” They give up their vocabulary. They give up the concepts. They allow people to define patriotism as putting the army, without proper equipment or support, in a circumstance it should never have been in. This is supposedly patriotism. The surrender of the major categories, like family values: I think the minimum wage is probably the greatest family value anybody could articulate, because it allows people to provide for their families. What more, you know? So there are clear liberal issues being very badly articulated.

FLYNN: Why do you think we fail in those areas?

ROBINSON: I just cannot imagine. In my cynical moments, I think it’s because a lot of the leading members of the liberal population actually flourish under administrations like the present one, partially because a lot of them are highly educated people whose income is high enough that tax cuts benefit them. Some people are pretty glad that the government can recruit troops from an economically disadvantaged class disproportionately so as to not draft their children. I’m afraid it’s true, to a certain extent, that unacknowledged self-interest makes them hesitant to actually champion what ought to be their cause.

FLYNN: You’ve said that obsessions drive you and that those obsessions are not often fiction. What are some of your present obsessions, and do they develop into nonfiction more often than fiction?

ROBINSON: Well, my current obsession is with literature of the ancient Near East. I’ve been reading Hittites and Canaanites and Babylonians and Greeks and Egyptians. I’m going to be teaching a course in the fall on Greek tragedy, and I was thinking about the importance of scene and dialogue, then the next thing I knew, it was Euripides, Sophocles. But it seems to me that there’s a narrow view of what Greek tragedy was or what the settings of Greek ancient writing were, so I’m reading all this stuff that would have been culturally contiguous, that they probably would have had some acquaintance with. I want to have a fuller ancient sense of what I’m looking at when I look at these plays, which tend, today, to be read through Nietzsche or somebody. That’s also working its way into my nonfiction, but I don’t want to talk about that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: Running through both your work and published interviews is a sense of your romance with the simplicity—and even adversity—of the past. How does that romance affect your view of contemporary life?

ROBINSON: I don’t know if I believe in a simplicity of the past. Actually, I don’t like the idea of nostalgia. I don’t like the idea that once everything made sense and now it doesn’t, and once everything was easy and now it isn’t. You know, Oh, to have lived before the age of the antibiotic! What are we talking about? But I think that prejudice against the modern period has actually created a lot of trouble in the modern world, the idea that somehow or another we’ve stepped off a cliff and it used to be better and we have to hack our way back to a more meaningful, primal life. That’s basically fascism, which I think we should avoid.

KING: You’ve also said that though your reading informs your writing, you almost never read for that specific purpose. What motivates your study, and how does it develop into a writing project?

ROBINSON: That is so mysterious. I get something on my mind or I pick up a book that seems to call my name, and I read something I didn’t know before or something that makes a better text, a better fabric of something I had known for some other reason. And it just feels good. It’s an enormous pleasure to me. If I could, I would just read and read and read. All kinds of strange things. Difficult things that make me feel that my perspective is richer than it was before. As far as writing goes, every once in a while I feel like I have to write something. I am the driven slave of these two impulses. It’s a nice life.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: Your laughing at your own work while reading aloud the other night fascinated me. Why did you laugh—do you see the worlds you create in your novels as real?

ROBINSON: It’s like remembering a dream; because when you write, you visualize, then when you read, the visualization returns. Also, I remembered what I was doing when I wrote that scene. I had modeled Gilead on a town in southwest Iowa called Tabor, which was founded by people from Oberlin College. They had founded a college, and they had a station on the Underground Railroad. There was a Congregational minister there who had 200 rifles in his cellar and a cannon in his barn. But, in any case, there were tunnels under the green in Tabor. Apparently, you can still see where they were. But I was thinking, If New Englanders were on the frontier of Iowa, how would they get in trouble? I wanted people to have some idea of what they were doing, but not to idealize them, not make them feel like stuffed wax museum figures or something. So I thought, Well, they would dig a tunnel. Tabor is in the sand hills; there’s nothing there but dunes, so even as you drive there’s sand blowing across the road. Obviously they would be delighted that it was so easy to dig in the soil. I started writing this scene and more and more kept happening. I remember thinking, Where did that come from? You create the occasion for your imagination, then all kinds of things come into play and surprise you. The best part of writing.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: The few negative reviews of Gilead imply that John Ames is a one-dimensional character, with faith being his only noticeable trait. How do you see John Ames?

ROBINSON: I get all my reviews from my publisher, and my publisher clearly censors them, so I’ve never heard that criticism. I have a very strong imagination of John Ames that was generated by the fact that I thought of him as a voice in my head. I was surprised to have a male narrator. I trusted this voice. I felt as if someone were speaking. I’ve been very kindly treated by the reviewers. I have no complaints, but there are hordes of millions of readers, and it’s just unbelievable to imagine you could please them all. And, especially at this particular moment in time, there are a lot of people that find a lot of religious thought, and so on, irritating, which only makes it clearer to me how kindly I have been treated, because that is not the most universally acceptable subject at the moment. But, in any case, whoever the reviewer was, bless his heart. I hope he finds books he likes better.

FLYNN: Do people make judgments about you because of how open you are about your religious beliefs?

ROBINSON: I’ve had people say, “Aren’t you afraid to be identified with religion?” and so on. If people said to me, “Marilynne, go home. We don’t want to hear from you anymore,” I would think, Whew! It’s not like I have a big stake in this, and if people reject what I say on the basis of its having a strong religious cast, that wouldn’t surprise me and it wouldn’t be an issue for me. I’m not writing for anyone. From what I see, from what I read, I wouldn’t be surprised if I encountered friction, but I can’t report any. So here I am.

FLYNN: In The Death of Adam, you said that belief in Darwinism is like belief in the existence of God, and that it’s based on faith. And you defined faith as “a loyalty to a vision of nature, of the nature of things despite its inaccessibility to demonstration.” Do you believe that all of science is ultimately based on faith?

ROBINSON: No. And, also in that essay, and in general, a sharp distinction needs to be drawn between evolution and Darwinism. Darwinism has its specific history, and a specific ethos; the idea behind Darwinism is that there is a continuous sort of attrition among the varieties of organisms that is the consequence of competition for survival. If you read the 19th century literature that surrounds the popularization of Darwinism, it leads directly to eugenics; it makes people regret that anyone ever invented the smallpox vaccination. And even before Darwin wrote, when it was Malthus and earlier people, Townsend and so on, who were writing in these terms, it rationalized the death by starvation of the lower classes of European civilization. So it was the you-have- to-be-cruel-to-be-kind thing where the human species became better and better by the fact of the deaths of people unworthy to survive.

This had enormous practical consequences in European and American society and history from before Darwin. “The survival of the fittest” was not his phrase. He got it from the British, Herbert Spencer, whose idea of this was of the progressive attrition of the unworthy or the unfit. And so with Malthus. It goes way, way back into British thought. But what Darwin did was interpret it into a scientific theory that explains, as it were, the origin of species, although he himself said he never did explain the origin of species. Because there are all sorts of things about the phenomenon of speciation that his theory couldn’t address. But, in any case, I believe that it is still true that Darwinism is contaminated with racial theory, eugenic theory, and all kinds of other things. It had a huge surge in Britain while I was living there under the reign of Mrs. Thatcher, who famously said, “God prefers the rich to the poor and nature proves it.”

People have known since antiquity that there were fossils of creatures that no longer existed, so the idea that life forms have changed over time is not a novel idea. If evolution means the change of life forms over time, then I think that it’s not difficult to affirm the plausibility of evolution, but if it means that the changes in life forms over time were the result of an inevitable competition in which the strong destroy the weak or whatever, this is something that is not describable, because we know that, for example, species go right along until they disappear. So if that were true, you would have the continuous modification of a species that would continuously enhance its survival virtues, but instead you have a much more disrupted evolutionary history. In other words, Darwinism ought to be considered as a moment in the scientific-social-military history of the West that does not conclusively, for all time, define the idea of evolution, and the defense of evolution as a theory ought to be disentangled from the defense of Darwin or the ideas attributed to Darwin.

If you read the literature around the First World War, there were all sorts of people in favor of it. If you read a book of Tolstoy’s written just at the turn of the century—The Kingdom of God Is Within You—you’ll notice that he was a pacifist, and he got letters from every significant person in Europe about why he shouldn’t be a pacifist, and many of them made arguments that war clears out the undesirables from society. It is genocide directed against one’s own population. I guess that’s not uncommon, but it’s absolutely horrendous, and it accounts for a great deal of what was horrible about the First World War, which is that nobody really seemed to want it to end. This is the kind of thing where you have to go back and read what people were saying about these things. If you just take it that Darwin is the force of light and William Jennings Bryan is the source of darkness, you have no idea what the issues are. Jennings Bryan himself was a pacifist when there was a huge issue of war addressed precisely in terms of its alleged Darwinist merit.

FLYNN: How do we disentangle abhorrent forms of faith from forms that have value to us as a culture?

ROBINSON: A lot of things can’t be dealt with on a cultural level. One thing interesting about being human is that you are responsible to a great degree for your own sanity, your own ethicalism, your own moral solvency, your own intellectual seriousness. It would be nice if these things could be dealt with at a social level, but whenever human behavior is controlled at a social level, even with the most benign intentions, it goes wrong. I think there is no point in history where people have not used valuable things for destructive purposes. Perhaps what we have to do is make people feel more deeply that they are responsible as individuals for their moral consequences. For example, I think a lot of religious excesses don’t come from religions themselves; they come from passionate identification, the eagerness to say I am X and not Y, and those Y people have always irritated me and it would be much better if the world were entirely X. We’ve gone through this little dance over and over. If we could think beyond those categories, it would be great, but that’s something people are individually responsible for doing.

FLYNN: In your essay on the family, you say that the attempt to impose definition on indeterminacy is about the straightest road to mischief that you know of, yet you define the word “family” in the next sentence—

ROBINSON: I think that my definition is very broad indeed. It has to do with loyalty and affection more than anything else. I think that you know who your family is, in that sense, because you know where your loyalties are and what your fondnesses are, or you probably are in the course of learning. That’s something that you know because it’s created out of your own circumstance, out of your own emotional life. So it’s accessible to definition in that sense, but whether that means there’s a sociological definition that could apply, I don’t think that’s true. I think what I’m saying is that we have to respect the fact that people’s lives constellate themselves in terms of loyalty and in terms of love and that this is something that other people should be sensitive to and acknowledge rather than trying to enforce a definition.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: You said at your reading that you wrote the sinking horse episode in Gilead in one sitting. That section works as a story. Do you often write short fiction?

ROBINSON: No, never. When I was in college, I tried, because I took two workshops, and it’s so nice to workshop a short story. So I would hack and hew at something that always had fifteen characters and three generations. I just cannot think at that scale. I wish I could, but I can’t.

KING: You work a great deal with young writers; are there any emerging voices that challenge your concept of what a poem, novel, or short story can be?

ROBINSON: I don’t know that I have particularly settled notions. I hope not. What you’re always trying to do is help somebody write in a way that is distinctive for their purposes. The idea of trying to conform anybody to pre-existing notions of what should happen—that would curtail their potential, which is not what we want to do. You always hope to be surprised. When I’m teaching a workshop, I ask people to name the best paragraphs in a story, and the degree of unanimity is impressive, which is something that helps break you out of the constraints of subjectivism. Because we all know some writing is better than other writing. Still, it’s hard to make people accept the legitimacy of the distinctions. The most important thing, as far as the teaching of writing is concerned, is to sensitize the writer to what he or she does well. There’s a certain sense of experience or concentration, something that goes into writing well that you learn how to return to. You begin to be a good reader of your own writing because you know what part of your consciousness it’s coming from.

KING: You’ve mentioned a thinness or flatness in contemporary fiction. What do you consider the root causes of that?

ROBINSON: I think there’s thinness in all literature that is not of the highest order of successfulness. I’m not saying there’s anything about this particular moment, or people writing now—I wouldn’t want to generalize by saying it’s more true now than it has been historically. If you go down the wrong row in a library, you find a lot of bad old novels. But I think it’s a major problem of the art, because it is about, as much as anything, human inwardness and how someone who has a profound experience of the self also interacts with other people. That’s where human complexity lies. That’s a hard thing to accomplish in fiction.

KING: Is that part of the reason your two novels are narrated in first-person?

ROBINSON: In both cases, I felt as if I knew a voice. I don’t know where the voice comes from. I don’t know why. I don’t know if I will ever write other than in first-person. But I feel like I’m being faithful to a voice that is not mine and that’s where the first-person comes in.

KING: How can a third-person narrator be handled successfully?

ROBINSON: The most successful third-person writers break all the rules. When you read Dickens, he just plunges in. You get these great panoramic scenes of London or something, and then, zoom, you’re so close in a consciousness. And if you read The Brothers Karamazov, you think, How did I get here? Chekhov does it all the time. The idea that there are these chaste, objective third-person narratives is really a cross that writers ought not to bear. Basically, you can do what you can get away with, and if you look at the great classic third-person narratives, they’re all over the place and they just make it so you don’t care.

KING: You have a lot of stories within stories, encapsulated episodes within your novels. Do you access your own life for that material or is most of it pure imagination?

ROBINSON: They are mostly imaginations. There are things in Housekeeping, because it was set in a very stylized version of the town I spent a lot of my childhood in, that reflect my own life, like the layout of the house with the bedroom that opens into an orchard—that was my grandparents’ house. All these crazy details like that. But when I wrote Housekeeping, I thought it would never be published. I knew my mother and my brother would read this book and would get all these little allusions, so that was part of the fun of it. But I was very struck by hearing stories in my family, little parables in a certain sense. And I think that way of putting a coherent sense of things together probably influenced the fact that I do receive imagined anecdotes for those purposes.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: Speaking of place, what you said the other night about how people love the place they live and think everywhere else is going to hell—do you think that statement is true globally as well as nationally?

ROBINSON: I think that’s fair to say. There are strange things, like that our press covers every crime and that sort of thing. I lived in France for a while, and they have a good handful of newspapers that don’t really cover crime or anything like that. If they do cover crime, it tends to be something that happened in California. And it’s strange, because whenever something bad happened locally, they’d say, “The Arabs.” Because all the sociopathic stuff that happened was passed around by word of mouth and that leaves no public reality for it ninety-nine percent of the time. So they have this really sinister attitude toward whoever are the disfavored people, typically the Arabs, and then they also get this stuff that comes from the American press, which looks incredibly weird and gothic if you’re not used to having that type of information about yourself. There’s a way in which, by virtue of our beloved and forever-to-be-revered First Amendment, we strike most of the world as being a completely crazy place.

When I was leaving France, a little delegation of my neighbors came over and said, “You do not have to go back.” And I said, “Well, actually, I’m happy to go back.” And they said, “It is her country, all the same.” So we’re the dumping grounds for the darker part of world opinion, in many cases, as a sort of accident of cultural history. At the same time, I think it is true that people typically love the place they are and fear the world they don’t know. And, especially at this moment in this country, when there’s such regional polarization, people have categorical hostilities against people because of the color their state turned on election day, and that really fuels this very unhappy habit we have of imagining that if we step outside our own county or our own state, we are in some wasteland.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ: What value do you think writing or art has in transcending that regionalism?

ROBINSON: I think anything that transcends it has value by virtue of transcending it. I’m very glad that dear old Gilead has been warmly received in disparate places, and I’m traveling around partly because I think it would be nice if we were all talking to each other. I wrote an essay that got printed in The American Scholar, and it’s actually kind of an attack on religious fundamentalism from the perspective of a religious liberal, and I startled certain of my fans, who thought I was a different person. They say things like, “It’s so nice of you to write something that puts a fundamentalist minister in a positive light.” And then I say, “He’s not a fundamentalist.” And they say, “Well, he quotes the Bible.” But, in any case, I certainly wish we could all talk to each other. The country needs to have a deliberating population at this time and not just a lot of line drawing.

KING: What gives you hope, if you believe hope is possible?

ROBINSON: I have hope. That’s part of the reason I sometimes think I do a lot more traveling than I ought to. You know, you come to Spokane, which I happen to know from my childhood, but most of the country has no conception of Spokane—and believe me, they do not even pronounce the name right. And I come here. People are happy to be here. They have this beautiful park. They have a nice literary series. There’s a great deal in the city that obviously has been assigned an appropriate value, restored, enjoyed. I went to North Dakota in March for a literary festival and, from an outsider’s point of view, North Dakota in March is a pretty forbidding landscape, but the people there love it and they think, How can I possibly eke out a livelihood that will allow me to stay in North Dakota? Otherwise I might end up in South Dakota! But they have their literature, they have their painters, they have folklore that goes with the Native American population there, and so on. Even though I’d have to train my eye for a while to see what they loved so much about that environment, there is no question that they do and that in the fact of loving it, they are creating value in and around it all the time. And, again, this is not just North Dakota. It’s a phenomenon you find over and over again.

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CONTRIBUTING TO A ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION celebrating The American Poetry Review’s 25th anniversary, Yusef Komunyakaa described a vision of American poetry: “Ezra Pound beside Amiri Baraka and H.D. flanking Toi Derricotte, Joy Harjo back-to-back with Frank O’Hara and Garrett Hongo alongside William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens—a continuum of impulses and possibilities that creates a map…” While modesty might prevent Komunyakaa from placing himself in this vision, abreast Mina Loy, say, or Theodore Roethke, the fact remains that his is one of the most intriguing voices in contemporary American letters.

The “impulses and possibilities” of Komunyakaa’s poetry depend upon precise imagery that points toward an essential experience, while reminding us that this experience must be grounded in external context. In his recent poem “Tree Ghost,” the speaker moves swiftly from a discovery of “three untouched mice dead / along the afternoon footpath” to an embrace of connection: “I can almost feel / how the owl’s beauty scared the mice / to death, how the shadow of her wings / was a god passing over the grass.” How many gods shadow us daily, scaring us nearly to death with their beauty?

The provocation of such questions is a major strength of Komunyakaa’s work, achieved through mastery of image, rhythm, and diction marshaled on behalf of a conviction that “poetry in our complex society connects us to lyrical tension that has everything to do with discovery and the act of becoming.” Poetry is not mere experimentation. That view, he says, “is a kind of selling out—to remain in that landscape of the abstract, when there’s so much happening around us. Not that the politics of observation should be on the surface of the poem. But we want human voices that are believable.”

Komunyakaa has achieved this humanity in more than a dozen collections of poetry, of which Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 is the most recent. He has been honored as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He recently joined the faculty at New York University, taking the position vacated by Galway Kinnell. After giving a public reading for Get Lit!, the annual literary festival sponsored by Eastern Washington University Press, Komunyakaa met with us at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.

JESSICA MOLL

The slightly elongated lines in a poem you read from last night, “Requiem,” allow for a flooding sensation that you can hear when the poem is read aloud. What might tip you off to a formal necessity?

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

For “Requiem,” I think the subject matter dictated the poem’s structure. I had been asked to consider writing a poem about Hurricane Katrina, and after thinking about it for a while, I said yes to the editor of Oxford American. I said to myself, Well, I’ll write the first part for the magazine and then continue, because now I see this as a book-length poem. I knew I wanted “Requiem” to have long and short lines. I wanted movement on the page, because that happens with water, that happens with chaos. And also I remembered Richard Hugo saying that the poem needs a combination of long and short lines. Years ago when I was wrestling with this concept, it took me some time to understand what Hugo meant. But he’d also mentioned that he loved swing music, that he was influenced by swing. Long and short lines—swing music—it now made sense to me. He was talking about a kind of modulation that takes place, a movement that happens in music and language. I knew that “Requiem” was a long poem, its changes and ebbs held together by ellipses. So it’s one sentence, basically, with a one-word refrain. And that one word is “already.”

JEFFREY DODD

Does the role of the refrain in your work—in a poem like “The Same Beat,” for example—find its roots in the musical tradition and diction and speech patterns of where you grew up, or in a broader Western poetic tradition?

KOMUNYAKAA

I think it is associated with storytelling. How I began hearing stories. Having grown up in rural Louisiana, I remember people telling lengthy stories, and such verbal escapades were mainly paced through repetition. One can view the refrain as a call seeking a response. But also, I use the refrain, sometimes, as part of the process in composing the poem. And then I may extract the refrain from the poem. So, in this sense, one could say that the finished poem has been driven by a false engine. Unless a refrain functions as an integral part of a poem, as an element of its natural pace and breath, it can be viewed as merely a formal gesture, as an unnecessary stroke on the emotional canvas. Of course, I’m also thinking of music. After being asked to consider reading on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, I wrote “The Same Beat,” and it began with this: “I don’t want the same beat.” There’s an insistence tangled in this voice, and I think it gave me permission to pursue the poem.

MOLL

So the refrain was just a way to get you into the subject matter of the poem?

KOMUNYAKAA

Yes. And, in that sense, that’s what I mean by a false engine. However, it doesn’t falsify. It helps us to get to a basic truth.

MOLL

I suppose there are refrains in visual art, too.

KOMUNYAKAA

That’s right. Colors don’t remain static on the canvas. There’s movement. The images and the hues force the eye into the rhythm of reason. Colors create a dialogue. It depends on how we’re willing to dance with a painting. How many places we’re willing to stand and view it. I love visual art. Often I daydream about it, not necessarily about putting paint on canvas, but maybe about creating sculpture.

DODD

In earlier interviews, you’ve mentioned Romare Bearden and Giacometti and a whole list of artists who push against representational images. How does that anti-representational move work in your poetry, when your images seem uniquely representational—so striking, so precise. Is there a complementary understanding between your view of visual art and written images?

KOMUNYAKAA

I think where the abstraction exists is actually in that space between images. And that space helps to create tension in a work of art. In writing or music this space often equals silence. I suppose, what we’re really talking about here is a way of thinking and seeing, a way of dreaming and embracing possibility. For instance, in thinking about Picasso, it is important to note that he started out as a representational artist.

Probably because his father was a representational artist, who stopped painting after seeing early paintings by his son. Then, of course, as we know, Picasso’s work takes on an abstracted dimension clearly influenced by West African sculpture. It’s what we now call cubism. There’s that story about Picasso and Apollinaire stealing a few small African statues from the Louvre. Supposedly, Apollinaire was arrested, but he refused to incriminate Picasso. The poet takes all the blame. That says something about Picasso, I suppose.

MOLL

I’m curious about your interest in Bearden—does the idea of finding things in the world and placing them side by side to create art come into play in your writing?

KOMUNYAKAA

Bearden studied mathematics when he attended NYU. When he uses collage technique, it seems mathematical. So many beginning painters have attempted imitating Bearden, and it doesn’t work. But if you look at his more impressionistic paintings, especially the ones painted in France—if you look at those paintings beside his collages, they’re very different. And yet, they possess an aspect of the collage, and I think that has something to do with movement. How colors are juxtaposed against each other. He’s one of my favorite American painters. Along with many others, such as Norman Lewis, an African American painting around the time of Jackson Pollock. He’s rather political as well. There’s a photograph of him with some other artists, protesting the lack of work by black artists exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To get back to the heart of your question, I have to say this: I like how ideas and images fit into a single frame of reference to create tension, how things can be taken from the natural world and placed in the world of the imagination.

MOLL

Listening to you read “The Same Beat” last night, some of the lines that stood out referred to people in the music industry “selling out.” There was the line about a guy with a mouth full of gold—

KOMUNYAKAA

The one already bought and sold.

MOLL

Do writers confront that phenomenon at all?

KOMUNYAKAA

Writers do confront that phenomenon. I’ve written about the erasure that takes place in some contemporary poetry through over-experimentation. That’s a kind of selling out—to remain in that landscape of the abstract, when there’s so much happening to us and around us. Not that the politics of observation should be on the surface of the poem. But we want human voices that are believable, and that’s why Walt Whitman is so interesting to me. Whitman addresses everything, and is clearly influenced by Italian opera, so everything reaches for a crescendo—but he didn’t dodge anything. He really confronts the essence of being an American. Even though there’s fetishism, or, I should say, there are certain characters on his poetic canvas that become eroticized. I do think that contemporary poetry confronts a lot. If you think about the importance of someone like Ginsberg, and “Howl”—if “Howl” hadn’t appeared, in 1958, I hate to think where American poetry would now be. There were some brave souls to come along and confront the Fugitives.

DODD

Ransom and Tate?

KOMUNYAKAA

Ransom and Tate. Was it Tate, who, at Vanderbilt, campaigned against Langston Hughes and his poetry? I think so. Look, we have come so far, in a way, within the last thirty or forty years. There’s Tate pleading to academia, “Don’t recognize Hughes.”
These were the Agrarians, the Southern Agrarians, but this wasn’t the only camp of poetic expression that was stuck in the mud in America.

DODD

Do you think the Fugitives got “stuck in the mud” because they confused politics for art, or confused the function of politics in art? It seems they made so many statements trying to maintain their southern regionalism in the midst of the Depression, trying to make these economic arguments for which they weren’t trained at all.

KOMUNYAKAA

And also, they weren’t farmers either. They were removed from the realities of farm life. But they were presenting themselves as the voice of the agrarians, though they didn’t understand the machinery of economics. They did, however, understand the politics of culture and race in America, as well as the divide and conquer stratagem. The Fugitives had to know that language is political.

DODD

They seemed to underestimate the power of capitalism, even during the Depression, when nobody had anything. They seemed to misunderstand how powerful the popular response to capitalism would be.

KOMUNYAKAA

They didn’t want to deal with a critique of the social realities of the time. And Hughes’s work attempted to criticize the hierarchies of power. The Agrarians didn’t want to face themselves in the mirror, basically, because they were a part of the structure that had systematically benefited from privilege. So it’s interesting that we would have poets who refused to give voice to an individual because of the color of his skin, and also because of his politics, his audacity to confront the beast that hurled hardship onto the backs of his brothers and sisters.

DODD

It seems that Robert Penn Warren was the only one who even made an effort to re-evaluate his position in that social reality, moving into the 1950s and 1960s.

KOMUNYAKAA

Robert Penn Warren was different. I was probably nineteen or twenty when I first read Promises. Penn Warren seems to have had an ongoing dialogue with Ralph Ellison, and I don’t know if the bulk of that has been published or recorded.

DODD

There were a couple of interviews, one in which Ellison interviewed Warren for The Paris Review, and one in which Warren interviewed Ellison for Warren’s 1965 book, Who Speaks for the Negro? But they’re ambivalent interactions, as though Ellison doesn’t quite trust that

Warren isn’t simply an unreconstructed southerner, a suspicion that he’s making these efforts to rehabilitate his reputation. And it seems as though there’s no way to prove the sincerity of his re-evaluation of his early views. He spent his whole life writing against his segregationist essay, “The Briar Patch.”

KOMUNYAKAA

How did he even enter that dialogue—because he’s younger than Tate and Ransom. And, of course, after being beckoned to the Fugitives, he tried to distance himself from that movement and its agenda. But he’d already been implicated. He couldn’t outrun “Here we take our stand,” that line from “Dixie.” I would’ve loved overhearing those discussions between Warren and Ellison.

DODD

Last night you talked about how you see silence as part of the emotional music of Samuel Beckett’s work. Does the silence in music and drama work the same way in poetry?

KOMUNYAKAA

Maybe it works slightly differently in poetry, because the silence begs for an abbreviated meditation to take place. And I don’t know if that happens, especially, in music. It definitely occurs in drama, where silence is an intricate part of the narrative. In that sense, silence is dramatic. In poetry, since the reader is sitting there with the page, and even in a reading by the poet it can take place—a silence—because of stanza breaks. So, I view silence in the poem as a moment of meditation. I think someone said that there should be space enough to fit one’s heart into. That resonates with me.

DODD

Enough space for the reader to become fully invested in the action on the page?

KOMUNYAKAA

Poetry is an action. It relies on the image, on the music in each line. Perhaps that’s why the reader usually refuses to embrace statement in poetry as readily as in prose. There’s an active investment, and that’s why a poem can have multiple meanings. The meaning is shaped by what an individual brings to the poem. A poem isn’t an ad for an emotion.

MOLL

When you’re composing, and you decide how to put the words on the page visually, do you hear the silence as much as you hear the music of the words?

KOMUNYAKAA

I hear the silence because I read everything aloud as I compose the poem. The ear is a great editor. I hear the silence in the music of language. Not exaggerated, but as a part of the natural continuity of process.

DODD

Who was the first poet you learned that from, to hear the music as well as the silence?

KOMUNYAKAA

I suppose when I first began to think about it, I was reading Emily Dickinson. There’s so much silence in her work. But I don’t believe it is a silence that erases content. In fact, in her poetry, it seems to inform content. I was interested in what wasn’t being said as much as in what was being said. Her poetry always makes my mind very active, as if I’m attempting to seek a dialogue with the unknown or the unknowable. This is entirely different from Whitman, although as a poet I embrace Whitman more, with his long lines. And again, the length of the lines, the long lines, seems to beg meditation as opposed to the vertical trajectory of short lines. For the most part, I embrace the short line, and maybe that has something to do with contemporary time, the way everything seems sped up. There’s a kind of vertical plunge of the poem.

MOLL

How does writing plays, with its importance on setting up a dramatic scene and moving the narrative forward, inform your poetry? Are you learning new things from working in another genre?

KOMUNYAKAA

Not really. I think maybe I’m bringing something from poetry over to drama. I realized that poetry could be an ally in my first play, Gilgamesh, which is an adaptation I wrote for the stage. It is primarily a verse play, with limited moments of silence. Of course, it would depend on the director, whether he or she wishes to introduce certain silences. In the play I’m working on now, called The Deacons, there are numerous places for silence—matter of fact, I express it there in the notes: “Pause” or “Silence.” Each piece, whether poem or play, is propelled by its own language and music because the speakers are different in their unique physical and emotional landscapes.

DODD

How does the process of collaboration enliven a project, open new doors, or ask you to look at your work in new ways?

KOMUNYAKAA

I welcome the perspective, the energy. In that way, it’s almost like an ensemble. We begin, and from the outset, we are trying to visualize where the process is going to take us. But it’s always most interesting to see what happens in between, in that space where surprises occur. I trust my collaborators. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. I’m hoping that these kinds of collaborations are going to happen again and again, that poets are going to start writing for the theater, where language is going to again inform plot. Because the stage seems to have been adversely influenced by television and the movie industry.

MOLL

By focusing on plot at the expense of the work?

KOMUNYAKAA

And usually it’s a sped-up plot: one collision after another, one mindless chase after another, one bloody scene after another.

MOLL

Every time you come out with a book or project, it feels as if you’ve found something new. How do you keep challenging yourself?

KOMUNYAKAA

Maybe it has to do with growing up in a small town, Bogalusa, Louisiana, where there was always an embracing of something, and in that same moment a moving away. Whatever it was—dealing with it, going through it, attempting to move past it, and then realizing that everything’s connected. We humans possess this great capacity. The human brain is amazing. But it is also gluttonous. That is, it seems willing to almost embrace anything and everything. Perhaps that has a lot to do with how we have evolved and survived as a species.

MOLL

That’s a pretty optimistic view. A lot of people talk about the narrowing of the human mind, with TV and media.

KOMUNYAKAA

The problem with turning on the TV is that one has too many simplified choices. A glut of ball games, comedy shows, soap operas, whatever distraction is on at the moment. The typical American city is a universe of cultivated distractions. But at the same time, there are probably a couple poetry readings in session in the vicinity. Also, maybe a few individuals are trying to write that first line of poetry, or that refrain as a false engine. And not only in America, though I do think the United States is a healthy place for poetry and other artistic pursuits.

DODD

Has it gotten better? In your interview with Vince Gotera back in 1990, you said that the U.S. is a healthy place for poetry, but at the same time—

KOMUNYAKAA

There is a similarity. But also there are some unique voices that pop out. However, I was thinking this morning about the phrase, “between then and now,” and I wanted to place certain poets beneath that phrase. Certain voices. Tonally, each of these voices seems to exist in his or her own world, and yet there’s a shared personality. They’re later than the Modernists. There were a number of names floating around in my head. This thought came to me early this morning. I was thinking of W.S. Merwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Alan Dugan, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Etheridge Knight, and Donald Hall. These voices. I think this body of work forms a collective voice that’s uniquely North American.

DODD

You’ve written several articles about Hayden and Etheridge Knight. I don’t think Knight’s poetry is celebrated as much as it ought to be, and I don’t know if it’s the politics of his personal life or what’s there on the page.

KOMUNYAKAA

For young poets who aren’t acquainted with Etheridge’s poetry, it is always an engaging surprise for them. He speaks directly to their concerns, without any embellishment or façades. It’s also interesting to think about some of the abovementioned poets who directly embraced Etheridge in friendship, such as Brooks, Bly, Kinnell, and Wright.

DODD

All of whom were doing interesting things on their own.

KOMUNYAKAA

Right. So they felt safe, I think, embracing this man, this poet whose work was different, his personal life entirely different from theirs. They seem not to have been threatened by him. In that sense, this reflects the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, because that movement was truly an American experience accelerated mainly by blacks and whites. Of course, many from different minority groups, especially ones who arrived after those turbulent years, have benefited directly and indirectly from the movement. For many, this is a bone of contention. We only have to look at those thousands of photographs as a reminder of recent history. Just think about those eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds boarding those buses in the Midwest, heading for the Deep South on a freedom ride.

When I was teaching at Indiana University, I used to ask students to look at the photographs of those nineteen-year-olds going south. I said, “Where do you place yourself in this equation? Can you visualize yourself doing this?” Many couldn’t, you know, coming from very safe situations. They couldn’t see themselves stepping forward to help implement change in America. And that sense of change influenced the rest of the world, really. In Australia, I was talking with some aboriginal writers about a decade ago, and they said, “Yes, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s influenced the idea of change in Australia.” This is true throughout the world.

And at the same time, especially during the 1980s and 1990s, there was a concerted effort to undermine what happened during the movement. That should be analyzed, our need to turn back the clock to the so-called good old days. Do we need to hold a national séance to raise the dead in order to know the meaning of the good old days? I know I don’t.

But many helped to prompt some change, and we as Americans should embrace that recent moment in our history instead of agonizing about it. Because I hate to think about our situation here if the Civil Rights movement had not happened. Indeed, many of those post-Modernist poets were in the bloody mire and sway of the movement.

I remember assigning students to write about the photographs depicting those nineteen-year-olds getting on those buses, you know. Some of those protesters are still in our towns and cities. The Civil Rights monument in Birmingham is dedicated to their heroic efforts. But I think our poetry is also robust enough to embrace that moment in our history.

DODD

Since we began by asking you about “Requiem,” how do you envision New Orleans ten years from now?

KOMUNYAKAA

I hate to think of that tragedy being parlayed into a real estate project, but given that it’s in the United States, most likely the Ninth Ward is going to become a boom area for developers. However, we have to keep the horror of Katrina in our conscience, in our psyche, and we have to make decisions based on that awareness. For years, whenever I went back to New Orleans, I thought, “I’m going to move back here. I’m going to have an apartment here.” That’s the furthest thing from my mind at this moment, because I don’t want to participate in that evil at all.

Also, let’s face it, New Orleans is really a composite of cultures. Of course, that is its uniqueness. The Crescent City was where suburbanites would venture to escape from themselves and do things they wouldn’t do in their own neighborhoods and hometowns. New Orleans was Saturnalia, a place of ancient rituals of harvest and feast. It was one of those places where people probably scared themselves: “My gosh, I’m alive.” We can’t stretch a suburban attitude like gauze over the Big Easy and expect to have the same place. Why did this happen to our most African-influenced city, our Double Scorpio?