Natanya Biskar

Interviewed by Payal Nagpal

You write about the independent school your narrator works at with a great deal of fondness and a touch of cynicism. I was wondering how your own experience working at independent schools influences your writing—your experiences have obviously served as fodder for some great content, but beyond that, has working with children influenced your use of language?

That is such an interesting idea, and the short answer is that I don’t know if working with children has influenced my prose. I do know that children tend to show up in my stories, whether those stories are set at a school or not. I enjoy writing about children, not in a kids-say-the-darndest-things way, but rather because I think kids bring out interesting vulnerabilities in adults. For one, kids are often excellent adult observers, and their perception can be unsteadying. They also have an unfiltered, self-serving logic that is so rational it circles all the way back around to being absurd. Their logic is also revelatory: it can locate the seams in all the little rationalizations we grown-ups use every day so we don’t burst into tears. Most of all, I think what draws me to write about kids is how powerless they are, how they have little say about most of the things that happen to them. In the real world, adults tend to forget the powerlessness of kids. We forget what it is like to have other people in charge of our decisions.

When I used to go to teacher conferences, I’d be exhausted by the end of the day because I was so unused to having my minutes and hours regimented by someone else. It made me cranky! Kids exist with very little control, so of course they’re going to grab it where they can. They are going to squirrel away pencils and wear the same rain boots five days in a row and lie about strange things. I think my grown-up characters relate to kids through that shared sense of powerlessness, whether they realize it or not. Before I began my MFA program, I had the privilege of working for two wonderful independent schools. All of the fondness that you perceived in how I write about the fictional school in this story comes directly from my experiences as a teacher at those organizations. The cynicism is just my natural state.

Neve is described as lamb-like in your story, and the narrator’s mother is represented through a snake. What sort of animal do you think your narrator would be?

I love this question! I think she believes herself to be a moray eel. She would like others to think of her as something mysterious and self-possessed, like an albatross or a giant squid. Her true animal self, though, is a possum. She is clever and misunderstood, protective and resourceful. She can be vicious, but only as a mask for her vulnerability. Did you know that possums cannot control when they play dead? I just learned this about possums. Playing dead is their automatic, reflexive response to stress, which seems to me like a pretty great metaphor for the narrator’s defense mechanisms. Are we all secretly possums? I suppose the fact that I am wondering this is pretty revealing, so I’ll stop there.

I’ve always found the phrase “I’m hungry if you are” fascinating—it embodies both passivity and unexpected empathy, something that seems to be characteristic of your narrator’s relationship with her mother. I was wondering if you could talk more about your choice of title?

Passivity and empathy—that’s it, exactly! Years ago, a good friend told me that whenever she offered her mother food, her mother would respond, “I’m hungry if you are.” The anecdote stuck with me, and it showed up in this piece, not by design. The phrase is fascinating to me, too. It has back-seat-driver energy. Again, I think it goes back to power, which is something I am interested in. (Sidebar: I heard somewhere that every conflict in fiction can be reduced to one of two questions: Who’s in charge? How much do you love me? I think my stories veer towards the former question, though obviously there is overlap.) To say “I’m hungry if you are” as a parent to a child is especially fraught. The parent who says “I’m hungry if you are” is pretending to be easy, but really they are saying, “Take care of me, please.” They are saying, “Tell me your needs so I don’t have to share mine.” So there is also a self-protective aspect to it, a deflection of vulnerability, while at the same time the subtext points to the speaker’s buried desire for care.

If you had to choose any artist—living or dead—to illustrate your story, who would you pick and why?

It would have to be someone who is good at illustrating kids, so my initial instinct is Edward Gorey, who draws children wonderfully. I also love the work of Amy Cutler, though I think this story isn’t fabulist enough to warrant her talents (I want Amy Cutler to illustrate the stories of Kelly Link or Helen Oyeyemi or Amelia Gray). The energy and humor of Yuko Shimizu’s work would be fun to see as an interpretation. I feel like she would do great things with the scene with the dryer lipstick. And the intimate strangeness of Nicole Wargon’s women would be fabulous, too. She also has several illustrations of women with snakes already.

What are you working on right now?

I have several short stories in various states of hot-messiness. (Now I feel bad, like I am talking about my stories behind their back.) I am also in the very early stages of a novel about sound art, oysters, and female friendship.

Matthew Buckley Smith

Interviewed by Ashley Kim

“The Octonauts” and “The Quick” both have fairly short lines that reminded me of imagistic William Carlos Williams lines. Each line carries the right amount of weight. When writing, how do you go about striking that balance on a line level?

Both of those poems were originally written in fairly straightforward, metrically regular lines. In the ear, “The Octonauts” is a sonnet, and “The Quick” is two quatrains. But something I’ve done a little bit—Josh Mehigan started doing it several years ago, Maryann Corbett and Stephen Kampa talked about it—is taking a finished poem and then rebreaking the lines. Just after finishing up at Hopkins— I wrote almost exclusively free verse before going there, and I was so stubborn it took me another year or two before I started really writing in form. It’s been fun returning to what sort of function as free-verse lines, although the words themselves hold to a pretty rigorous metrical contract. The lines are very strictly prescribed, and then in terms of the typography on the page, I play with them from draft to draft and just see how it feels. Often, the ends of the lines will still be the ends of these shorter lines, but sometimes I bury them a little bit. I try not to fight against the original form but let it get a little bit submerged in the new rhythm. My inclination is to think of the typographical appearance of a poem as being sort of whimsical, like an artifact of our particular moment’s style or type of presentation. The poem itself really is an object of sound, so I don’t feel bad about adulterating the form by playing with how it appears on the page, because that is less important, finally, than how it sounds. That’s my prejudice I guess.

That’s an interesting point that you mentioned sound. I was just reading something on sense over sound, and the argument was that poetry did start as an oral tradition, but over the years, with the invention of the printing press and typed books and text, sense is beginning to have, or maybe hold, more importance. What are your thoughts on that?

Especially when I think about teaching, I often divide my understanding of poems into two major categories, basically, the translatable and the untranslatable. I find that it’s a lot easier to teach the parts of poetry that are translatable. I taught a class for a while, where the only textbook was the Odes of Horace, the wonderful David Ferry translation. He has a great ear, but the sound has very little relationship to the original. Yet the order of the images and the argument make for a pretty powerful formula. It comes across, even if we don’t get to hear all of the peculiarities of Latin sound or syntax. There’s a whole lot of poetry that is translatable, and that is really powerful, but I think that if you take sense over sound entirely you lose not just music or rhyme but you miss all of the weird, blurry alchemy that comes out of language.

I read a couple of your poems that I could find online and the line that stuck with me in “Swan Song“ is the line, “honest love is not lost ardor.” It’s one of those sentences that I love, partly because I said, “Oh yeah that’s true,” even though it’s still hard for me to unpack quite what it means, but it sounds exactly right because of the assonance. It’s the alternation between these very similar but slightly different vowel sounds, and you get a little bit of consonance with “honest” and “lost.” It sounds perfectly true, and it is a simple and direct and emotionally poignant statement that we need at that moment of the poem because, otherwise, the feet begin to lift off the ground. I think about Donne’s “Batter my heart,” and he has this dense, thorny, thematically but also grammatically challenging poem. Then in the middle of it, he says, “yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain.” It’s an extremely simple, straightforward statement that you couldn’t put at the beginning of the poem because it would be boring and wouldn’t have any impact, but at that moment it’s not as simple. The music of it is nice. It’s also the simplicity of the sound, the directness, the familiarity of it. To take sense over sound is fine, but if you need a tidy definition of prose, that’s it. That’s one of the wonderful things about prose; you can translate it.

I wanted to comment on the formal aspects in some of these poems. “Survey of Love” is in the more expected sonnet form, and very fittingly so. “Chez Bovary” alternates between trimeter and hexameter and also employs a fairly intricate rhyme scheme. It reminds me of Erica Dawson and the New Formalism movement and less directly, Greg Williamson’s double exposure form—the line lengths were so different that I felt like I could almost read every other line and get a different kind of reading from that as well. Was that poem an invented form and, if so, how did you decide what that structure should be?

You bring up Erica Dawson and Greg, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading both of them and admire them a lot. I’m definitely very familiar with Greg’s double exposures, and even when he’s not doing strict double exposure, he plays with the superimposition of meaning. It’s a particular kind of irony that’s hard for me to quite identify because it’s not strictly verbal irony. Like in his poem “The River Merchant’s Wife, a Letter,” which is obviously a sort of pseudo- translation of Ezra Pound—there’s a country girl from Tennessee who’s giving the same argument as the speaker in Pound’s poem. By being a sort of copy it ends up presenting itself, and then the opposite of itself. His New Year’s poem—it’s the very last poem in the fifth edition of the Norton—doesn’t contrast opposites, but by sort of taking a screen print and flipping it over, you end up getting something else: “We were all there. At the start…” “We were all there at the start.” That’s certainly in my head when I write. I’m definitely not doing anything as clever there [in “Chez Bovary”].

I have an ongoing slow-motion project I do sometimes. In the best poems, sound and sense or form and content begin to be inextricable from each other. In trying to confront the problem of making the form of a poem perfectly suited to its content, I came to the conclusion that I’m not usually very good at planning it all ahead of time. A device I’ve used is choosing a form or shape and just writing as quickly as I can, 30 poems in that form. I throw away almost all of them, but in a few, the form and the content seem to match up. The more I write the same form, the easier it begins to feel working with it. I’ve done it a number of times with sonnets, blank verse monologues, most recently, and then with these little Sapphic-shaped songs: ABAB, with a very short fourth line, a 5-5-5-2. I figured that next I should do 3-6-3-6-3-6, so that was where that particular shape came from. And then I just try to come up with a rhyme scheme that feels novel or fun.

A follow up question to that is, more generally, what is your relationship to form and meter, and who are some of your formal influences?

My relationship to form is I like it, I enjoy it. I’m not very good at having what people tend to mean when they talk about a poetics or a philosophy of poetry, but mostly my philosophy is I like things that sound beautiful to me and ring true and move me or make me laugh, make me feel something. That’s really all I try to write: things that sound good and that might make me feel something if I were a stranger. That’s about as sophisticated as it gets, and form suits my purposes because it both sounds good and, as plenty of other people have observed, it maybe requires less invention. It’s funny because I think there’s an expectation that formal poems are more staid or conservative or uncreative, which is true in one respect in that the lines are less spontaneous. But being forced to fill out a line in a certain way or to find a certain rhyme is a way of aerating my word hoard. It cross indexes my vocabulary; words are linked to each other that wouldn’t be otherwise, and I end up pulling in associations that I would never come up with on my own in free verse. If you truly have a more generative mind, then it may be that you don’t need that, but I find it very helpful. As far as influences, I have very boring taste. There’s obviously all the old guys and gals that everybody reads. I have a special fondness for Horace—though I don’t really know Latin so that’s not a formal influence. I think he has a wonderful sense of rhetorical form. I don’t know—I love Yeats, Wyatt, Larkin, Housman, Justice.

“The Quick” deftly conflates multiple meanings of the word in both its noun form, as in the living, and as the adjective, as it’s describing the lives of these people as quick, and the poem itself is very short. The noun form is most commonly known in the phrase, “quick and the dead,” from the Christian Apostles’ Creed. “Survey of Love” also mentioned a couple of other faith traditions and weaves them all together. How does religion play into these poems or into your poetry as a whole?

I was raised in a pretty devout Irish Catholic family and community. Most of my family, which was very big, all lived in the same place, so I was surrounded by that. I went to Catholic school and everybody I knew was Catholic for a long time. I don’t go to church and I don’t believe in God now, but it’s pretty obvious it’s cooked in as a way of thinking and looking at the world, spending so many years listening to sermons and thinking about everything in terms of the many-layered nature of reality, where everything has a correspondence to something abstract or something spiritual. Most of my Jewish friends are atheists, but they also deeply identify with their tradition. Being Irish Catholic is in my blood, and I can’t change that nor would I. That’s certainly a big part of it.

As far as the “Survey of Love,” a lot of it was reading stories and trying to retell stories to my daughters. We got a wonderful set of the D’Aulaires’ myths. One of them is a collection of Greek myths, a lot of which are borrowed from Ovid, and the other one is a collection of Norse myths which are just a retelling of the Edda and they’re wild. We’re not raising our daughters religious, but I also I went to high school with a lot of kids who were raised with no religion and didn’t know who Adam and Eve were. They were completely uprooted from a tradition that I want my daughters to have some understanding of. I try to just flood them with gods so that they are very aware of a multitude of meanings and deities and stories and traditions. We’re talking about all these different traditions, and when we hear thunder, maybe that’s just Thor or, actually, maybe it’s Hephaestus and the Cyclopes. [“Survey of Love”] was probably a byproduct of reading a lot of this stuff to my daughters.

All four poems are very invested in philosophical questions of life and death and love. Young children and girls also appear in a couple of these, and you mentioned your daughters—how has this impacted, or perhaps changed, your outlook on these types of matters?

Before having kids, I would have found it easier to speculate about whether one should bring children into this world and how things are going to look once they’re here. Now, it’s more like, well do we have enough diapers to get through the night, did we run out of toaster waffles, or did we remember to brush our teeth, and it’s just humbling on a daily basis. It’s a physically and emotionally demanding job. Days last a really long time but years fly by. It’s strange to introduce my seven-year-old daughter [to you tonight, because] I’m like, “Oh shit, I had a daughter seven years ago.” If anything, I think a lot less about philosophy than I used to. [Having kids] has made it harder to invest deeply in purely abstract questions, but my daughter asks a lot of questions about life and death and meaning. I think it’s pretty common. It was easier for me to think about those questions before, probably more rigorously in some ways, but also less responsibly, because I could just think about them as sort of mathematical objects I was manipulating in my mind; whereas with my daughters, the questions have an emotional value that’s really immediate. I think of the Larkin poem “Talking in Bed”— I think that’s my general rule with them is that I try to find things to say that are not untrue and not unkind. Beyond that it’s hard for me to think very deep thoughts about big questions I guess. It’s a mess and it’s exhausting, but it’s also just a total wonder and a joy.

Scott Bailey

Interviewed by Sarina Redzinski

The first thing that struck me about “Blue Moon” was its merging of our “human world” with the natural world. For instance, the anthropomorphism of the animals provides the emotional arc of the poem. I found this a useful lens through which we could chart the speaker’s free-associating thought process. What are your thoughts on the overlapping of these subjectivities?

Your observations and questions address a long-standing conversation between literary predecessors about the human in relation to the natural world. Narrowly stated, the crux of the debate concerns the assignment of meaning and value to nature either as an imbued reflection of our sensibilities and intellect, or an entity synonymous with a benevolent or wrathful God, thus a positive or negative influence, a dichotomy classically depicted in religious and literary texts through acts of nature upon us or in correspondence with us. In my poem, a pastoral elegy that is neither an example of light verse nor a standard representation of the peace and simplicity associated with rural life, nature does not so much wail in sympathetic response to the speaker’s grief as reflect the speaker’s mood through a chain of correspondences, a formulaic approach known as the objective correlative. However, the role of nature, in my poem, is more than a mirror of the speaker’s feelings. Rather a symbiotic relationship is established wherein nature becomes a source of consolation and transcendence for the speaker who perceives it as innately good, indicative of a benevolent God, a source of comfort and hope despite his real sorrows. Such a stance runs contrary to Eliot’s The Waste Land which emphasizes a loss, rather than a gain, between the individual and the natural world.Conclusively, I, the poet, am resisting the negative conclusion that we merely read meaning into a deterministic and meaningless world. I’d rather believe in a primitive homeopathy while wandering among the philosophical vegetables of Emerson and Rousseau than swim with Melville’s vengeful whale, inspired by Burke no less, all of which is a matter of perspective. Given that the mind is its own place, endowed with the ability to make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, as Milton aptly says, why not transform the psychological dump into a fertile field? Why not perceive and internalize nature as a remedy to our detriment? After all, nature is an image of transformation. And since we are ranked under the name, NATURE, as Emerson says, it seems logical to conclude that we are in, and of, nature. We all possess the wonder and power of nature: we create; we comfort; we destroy; we wound. Therefore, we are all, unfortunately, divided by our deeds and will to increase or decrease each other in the smallest or gravest sense.

There seems to be two kinds of grief here. The narrator’s grief for his grandfather seems more rooted in mundane dialogue and images, whereas the language around the other loss of a “love” is more existential and abstract. How do you think these different kinds of grief operate in the poem, and how did you go about connecting them? 

The first stanza does indeed establish a solemn and reverent tone, the gruesome and violent image of an owl triggering an emotional memory of the speaker’s grandfather who battled cancer. Given that one perception leads to further perceptions, this moment in the poem serves as a springboard to juxtapose the seemingly negative image of death with pleasant, peaceful images: “may mine [my death] be like the jazzy sap of maple | trees, a moon walking hills & fields of figs & dates, | my atomic spirit a double-helix sunrise, | no second death!” Here, the speaker appropriates nature to offer his definitive stance on the afterlife when he alludes to biblical scripture, “no second death,” a phrase synonymous with everlasting life in contrast to eternal damnation. In addition, the layers of grief unfold as the speaker continues to walk and think, eventually contemplating but rebuking suicidal ideation in the wake of his lover’s death (suspected to be suicide), and eventually analogizing his lover’s death to the loss of vision.

Essentially, losing vision is as permanent as death, vision therein coinciding with life. I could have ended the poem there as a stark reminder of our frailty, but I chose instead to end it with images of optimistic contingencies within an open denouement. In a sense, I inverted Bishop’s conceptual line: I did not write it as a disaster! Within this conceptual context as represented in my poem, I would not argue with anyone who labeled me a transcendentalist. I was a transcendentalist before I ever read Emerson and Thoreau, which is not to say that I have consistently acted accordingly. In writing this poem, I took this task quite seriously. I wrote numerous versions, eventually merging portions of other poems into this final version; sometimes a poem must be wrestled with, especially when trying to figure how to best evoke the sentiment of loss without being sentimental.

This feels like a very Southern poem to me, though I’m not sure if that’s due more to the farm setting or due to the measured, molasses-like pace of the poem. I know you grew up in Mississippi, and you also have a book of poetry, Thus Spake Gigolo, which is set in the South. Could you tell me more about the ways in which you think your deep South background finds its way into your work?

I should visit a Northern farm. Are cows milked differently there? If I were to write about the city instead of the countryside, would I still be considered a regional poet? The hypothetical outcome would depend on my use of language, imagery, tone, and diction, but also my perspective, the lens through which I view and interpret the perceived landscape. Undeniably, stylistic conventions and motifs can delineate the shape and presentation of a text, as demonstrated in Thus Spake Gigolo, wherein I chart the evolution of a self within the conceptional landscape of the southern gothic, my persona poems engaging themes of isolation and marginalization, oppression and discrimination, destitution and decay, decadence and transcendence. Some have said my persona ultimately profanes the sacred, the religious fervor of his upbringing a source of angst rather than refuge, which may be the case, narrowly speaking. However, in “Blue Moon,” a poem that is characteristic of my second collection, now near completion, I have created a persona who, despite his loss—that is, the loss of his lover and his partial loss of vision—focuses on benevolent optimism to counter desolation and views nature as a sacred source of wisdom, hope, and spiritual reflection. Overall, within this literary context, the cultural, physical, psychological, religious, and social landscape of my upbringing provide a rich context in which to reflect upon and historicize the world around me, the South knocking on my door regardless of where I am, the idyllic pastoral and the southern grotesque forming the narrative in which I walk.

You also came from a very religious background. How intentional are these references to God and religion?

Verses of scripture, poems of poets, essays of philosophers, and texts of other influential authors are interwoven in me, synthesized ideas elemental to my deductive reasoning and subjective truths. “Bildungsroman,” an early poem included in Thus Spake Gigolo, captures my struggle with my sexual orientation, an adolescent wrestling with condemning scripture and his “prescribed desire,” a phrase that suggests that desire is predetermined, as natural as walking. “Adolescent Tornado,” another poem from my second collection that appeared in The Ocean State Review, echoes a similar adversity albeit diminished more so by the speaker’s unapologetic acceptance of himself despite the voiced disdain of others. Instead of responding negatively, the speaker quotes scripture from the Book of Proverbs, as in “Blue Moon” he paraphrases scripture: “words can heal, words can kill.” In these instances, my references to God and religion were intentional, as much of a foundation upon which to build as all the other texts I have read. “Blue Moon” can be read, then, as part of a long conversation on the relation of man to nature and on poetry as imitation of nature, in which I portray nature as a representation, even an extension of God, nature as a church per se. When the speaker says, “Nearer, my God, to thee,” he confirms his belief in the existence of the divine; he’s voicing his desire to walk alongside God as he walks in nature, God and nature thus intertwined, with God’s existence evident in the “the dragonfly patrolling the pasture” or the sound of sap oozing from a maple tree. The perceived resurrection of the luna moth flying to the ash tree where the speaker carved the words seen in a dream, “Divine Laughter,” strengthens this correlation, specifically the perceived resurrection of the luna moth flying to the ash tree where the speaker carved the words seen in a dream: “Divine Laughter.” Subsequently, the speaker’s sorrows are overshadowed by acts and images of nature endowed with benevolent optimism. To reiterate Milton’s aphorism, value comes from the human mind reflecting on Nature; the same principle pertains to the assigning of value to all aspects of Our Nature. In other words, perception can be a decisive and transformative action; our lives are affected and altered by how we choose to perceive and internalize the external forces upon us.

To finish on a lighter note, I wanted to ask if you have a favorite memory connected to the natural world. 

I learned to swim in a pond, with milk jugs tied to my back.

Wynne Hungerford

Interviewed by Savannah Horton

The narrator in your story, “Sacred Window Exhale,” is a former guest and current employee at an alternative medicinal retreat that spans the realms of the real and surreal. Could you explain a bit about how you developed this backdrop and whether you began with the environment or its characters? They seem perfectly matched. You so carefully balance the humor and strangeness without dipping into mockery—was that a concern while writing?

I had the idea of a trepanation retreat in the Smokies a few years ago, so that was definitely the first seed. No characters yet. My initial approach was to have it be journal entries covering a patient’s stay at the retreat, but that wasn’t working, so I decided to take that patient and have her end up becoming an employee later on. And I’d had this other idea floating around that I’d like to write something about a celebrity in the midst of a huge scandal, so I thought this could be an opportunity to drop that scandalized character into this trepanation story, and finally I got some traction. 

As I was working on this, I never intentionally wanted to mock alternative medicine or the retreat. Or maybe it’s more appropriate to say that I never thought of this as satire. I had to approach it as earnestly as possible, even if some of the details are pretty wild. I always imagined it as a mix of summer camp and health retreat. This allowed the itinerary to encompass pretty much anything I wanted––like ice cream socials, horseback riding, and rafting trips. This is also a high-end, expensive place, so anything I feasibly dreamed up could be there. Want a float tank? Boom. Sure. That gave me a lot of room to play.  

You manage to very successfully humanize and complexify an accused pedophile through his relationship with the narrator, who is driven not only by an urge to serve and care for others but also by her need to understand. The narrator asks herself: “The question is about me and him, and everything invisible we were wrapped up in together, apart. The question is what kind of a woman likes a pedophile?” When you were developing your story, what led you to frame the traditional villain in the eyes of someone empathetic to his situation?

The empathetic approach seemed like the only option to me––I never considered doing it any other way. I’ve always loved the play Doubt, which never explicitly says “yes, the priest did this” or “no, the priest didn’t do this.” I think it really makes the audience more involved. You get to address that gap in knowledge however you want to and that also teaches you something about yourself as a person––are you willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt? Do you assume the worst is true? How do you handle not knowing?

Another influence was “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus. In that story, the narrator has done something that is morally questionable, and it isn’t revealed until much later in the story, so you have all of this time in the beginning to get to know the character without any judgment. Then you find out what the narrator has done, and you understand why he has done it. I intentionally didn’t use the word “pedophile” until the end of my story. It’s a charged word. It drops and there are ripples, you know? I think if that had appeared on page 5 it would have been a totally different story. 

How did you decide to incorporate an unnamed celebrity into your story? The narrator claims: “I want to offer you the gift of seeing him as I saw him––without judgment. I want to give you the opportunity to like him and know him and remember that he is a person like everyone else. What is good about him is good about all of us.” What do you think this type of anonymity can do for contemporary fiction, especially when blurring the lines between real and not?

Incorporating an unnamed celebrity was there from the beginning. While Flip Goldberg is a fictional character, I definitely drew on examples of scandalized celebrities that I’ve read about in the past. The anonymity worked on a practical level, because the narrator’s job would require her to be discrete. Confidentiality and protecting privacy would be a huge deal, especially considering these guests are also patients. It also adds this other layer of the narrator wanting to protect Flip Goldberg and, in turn, protect herself. This narrator is very empathetic, but I think there’s also a degree of her trying to convince herself of these things as she’s going, almost trying to support the version of the truth that she wants. So, you can read this story and wonder if Flip Goldberg is guilty or innocent, but you can also read it and wonder if the narrator is super compassionate or totally delusional. 

Regarding the anonymity in contemporary fiction thing, I’m not really concerned with what’s “real” and “not real.” If something is published as fiction, then I read it as fiction, and everything is presumably the same degree of “real.” I do think that including known figures in fiction, which I’ve done more of lately, can be really fun. I recently wrote a piece about Andy Richter. And one about Tiny Tim. 

Your narrator’s backstory is subtle yet very poignant, especially because her desire to serve stems from a somewhat difficult relationship with her parents. When you are drafting, how do you typically incorporate a character’s background to ensure it seamlessly flows within the narrative without revealing too much? Do you often use backstory to enhance the events transpiring or to contextualize a character’s actions?

Hmm. It’s hard to generalize, but I hope that any included backstory is enhancing events or providing some necessary information. For this particular story, I knew that the narrator suffered from migraines and that’s why she was a patient at the retreat. A lot of the other details just…appeared as I was writing, and I trusted that they were correct. 

The retreat itself is very much based on undergoing invasive physical procedures to achieve inner peace and change. The narrator also admits to harming herself in an attempt to try to “heal old wounds by opening up new ones.” She refers to her head as a “pressure-cooker.” How did you think to combine these concepts of physical laceration and emotional trauma?

Honestly, I don’t think I consciously tried to combine those ideas. It just happened––maybe because it’s a biological quirk or something. I was going to say it’s a quirk in humans, but even birds will pluck out their feathers if they’re stressed out. I’m not sure if that technically falls under the umbrella of “self-soothing” behaviors, but it is interesting to think about the line when a self-soothing behavior becomes self-harm. The moment in the story where the narrator goes home and cuts herself, I remember that happening very suddenly while I was writing and then I looked back and thought that it actually made sense for this character. Kind of funny to think of stories as a balance between calculation and surprise. 

Vix Gutierrez

Interviewed by Timothy Schirmer

In your essay, Dark Sky City, you recount a violent attack that you and your boyfriend suffered late one evening while crossing the street in your hometown, Flagstaff, Arizona. You use the second person perspective to strap the reader in for an immersive experience. In a technical sense, it has always seemed to me that the second person is like cilantro: people either like it, or they don’t. I personally like the second person, and the effect it has in Dark Sky City, and I wonder if it was an intellectual or more of an intuitive choice to tell the story from that vantage? Can you comment on how writing a long-form personal essay in the second person might have been challenging? Or liberating?

Because this experience was so difficult to revisit, I’d filed it away for years under the general label “That thing with the law.” Recently, though, I began feeling an unrelenting urge to tell the story. I knew I was ready but was having a hard time taking the first step. I joined a creative nonfiction workshop at the Attic (led by the phenomenal Brain Benson) in Portland, Oregon and procrastinated until I only had a few days before my draft was due for submission. Our suggested reading for that week was Jerald Walker’s “How to Make a Slave.” I remember getting the chills when I read it, because of the way the second person voice placed me inside the author’s shoes. By using second person, the author invited me into a complexity of experiences and emotions that I might otherwise have only perceived as a spectator.

Because my role in the story evokes immediate assumptions and connotations, I realized that writing in first person felt almost like I was trying to plead my case in the court of public opinion or tell my side when, sadly, this is essay is not only about my story, but that of many Americans who have had their lives upended or even ended by the same justice system that is supposed to protect them. The “you” voice felt right because it asks the reader to imagine themselves inside a scenario that many reasonably law-abiding, non-marginalized citizens have probably never imagined themselves inside of, just like I never fathomed it would happen to me until it did. Misuse of power is not someone else’s problem, far, far away, but something that threatens all of us, that we need to acknowledge and examine as a society.

Once I started writing in the second person, the story just flowed and within two writing sessions, my first draft was complete. I did try rewriting the beginning in first person, but it didn’t feel right, and I changed it back to the “you.” I like cilantro. As a creative writer, it’s liberating to know I can experiment with voice and form, and that there are many storytelling tools to choose from.

One of my favorite components of your story are the short and sporadic asides about the science of star formation deep in the cosmos. Taken out of context, these sections of text could be seen as educational, or informative, but spliced into the narrative, they assume some serious poetic muscle and shine. Are you especially interested in outer space as a subject? And how did you come to settle on the cosmos—and star formation specifically—as a thematic anchor for the essay?

While I’ve always loved looking up at the sky, I can’t say I understood much at all about star formation, or had even paid much attention to the workings of the cosmos, before this essay. It was only after I’d written the first draft and named the essay “Dark Sky City” that I thought about looking more deeply into the science of stars. The first text I read about star formation was a hair-raiser—all those descriptions of sudden implosions, violent collapse and energy sucked inward—the information could have just as easily been describing my personal experience. The more I learned, the more I saw that our connection to stars is both metaphorical and literal, that we really are, as Carl Sagan said, made of star stuff.

A provocative question is touched on near at end of Dark Sky City, and that is the issue of how—as human beings, and storytellers—we are to better understand our own experiences, including those which are painful to look at. At a healing ceremony in the desert, an elder who hears your boyfriend recount the attack tells him that it’s okay for him to stop retelling the story of that night, and to let it go silent inside him as a way of moving forward. At what point did you know that the alternative approach was true for you, and that you needed to put your story on paper? Did it occur to you early on, or after some time? Did writing this essay transform your relationship to the events?

As a storyteller, I’ve thought about this a lot. In the same way that we have choices with form and voice, there are also important questions of perspective and distance, especially when it comes to personal trauma. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer and there are times when a story absolutely needs to be told, and right away. But I think it comes down to the fact that we do have a choice, that we have ownership of our own stories.

In this specific case, my boyfriend was reliving all the toxic emotions every time he relayed the events. The wound was still wide open and by telling the story frequently, he was not giving space for it to heal. I remember when he told me about his conversation and the elder’s advice, I misinterpreted it at first as “You must never tell that story again,” when in fact he said something close, but monumentally different: “You never have to tell that story again.” The difference between “never tell it” and “the story is yours, you can choose whether, when, how, and to whom to tell it” is the difference between silencing and freedom.

While writing this story, I had to go through an old file of official reports and witness statements, taken at the time. It’s difficult even now, to revisit those events. I can only imagine how painful it must be for people who have to relive traumatic moments through their retelling in court, or for the loved ones of people like Ahmaud Arbury whose murder is replayed again and again on social media and yet who have no choice but to keep telling the story, because otherwise his case would just slip through the cracks of our prejudiced justice system. One personal way that this story has changed me is that I can no longer separate myself from the realities of injustice. I’m aware of living in a white wealth- privileging country with an ugly history that has not gone away but has instead been folded into institutional policies and the national psyche. Even now with Covid-19 threatening health and lives across the nation, the CDC reports that “current data suggest a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.” While acknowledging these injustices can be difficult, ignoring or denying our reality is not an option if we do, as we say, value freedom.

In my case, I think this story had to be written now, years after the incident. Now, with more distance between myself and the immediate trauma, I can look back and see the bigger picture beyond my relatively small experience, now I can also see the large-scale failure of the justice system and the systematized class and race prejudices that are deeply ingrained in policy making. James Baldwin said, “It takes a long time to understand anything at all about what we call the past—and begin to be liberated from it.”

A piece written from the place of fresh pain would have been a different story, one that may have been unable to see beyond the immediate, the personal. Or in star terms, the story might have been too absorbed in its own fiery process and missed the perspective that comes with looking back from a distance and seeing the whole night sky.

There’s a line in the essay that expresses your confusion over the randomness of the attack and its subsequent events: “Because things like this just don’t happen to people who haven’t done anything.” At one point in the essay you share your experience of traveling to South America, where you took Ayahuasca with a shaman, and you were able to see how everything in the Universe is ordered, connected, and perhaps harmonious. Based on your experience, do you think plant medicines like Ayahuasca are helpful for healing old wounds?

Based on my personal experience, yes. However, once again, each experience is very personal and there is no right answer for everyone. My experiences with Ayahuasca were extremely intense and I’d recommend careful research and consideration for anyone interested in going that route. There’s also the matter of respect to indigenous cultures and that if we do ask for this gift, we must approach softly, with humility, willing to admit we know nothing, desirous to learn. My experience with Ayahuasca brought immense release, but first, I had to directly confront the slew of uncomfortable thoughts, memories, and feelings that resurfaced in my consciousness. To quote James Baldwin again, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Plant medicines or not, I think our whole society would benefit from stepping back and considering our connection to one another, to the sky, and to life. And to cilantro.

Daisy Fried

Interviewed by Kayla Beth Moore

You’ve got two very different laundry poems in this issue. How would you describe the role of domestic labor in each of these pieces? Is it background music, the thing that’s happening while the speaker explores another domain in her mind, or is it more intrinsic to the poem or consciousness of the speaker than that?

Ha, I didn’t even notice that connection when I sent the poems off! They were just the most recent poems I’d finished. Mostly I think just enjoyed how different they are, format-wise, paired together. In fact they came from very different places. “A Monkey Thing” wasn’t called “A Monkey Thing” until quite recently, and had a lot of different formats and settings and intersections of material over several years during which I returned to my high-school-band-at-the-laundry material. “Chorus Line” happened rather quickly; I’d been looking through an art book called Madam and Eve: Women Portraying Women and, as an exercise, writing a single quick sentence about 50 paintings each in turn. There was a painting of somebody’s tights on a rooftop clothesline. I took the sentence I wrote about that one, and started messing around with it.

But here’s the thing: Laundry has been a big deal in my life for the last half-decade or so, because first my dryer broke (so I was hanging wet clothes—including tights!—on the line in my tiny back courtyard, as well as in the shower, over the railings, on the radiators, etc.) and then my washer broke a couple years ago, and I couldn’t afford to buy new ones, so I was going to the laundromat around the corner all the time. And while I don’t think of my poems as autobiographical in the sense that I am trying to tell people literally what-happened-to-me-plus-metaphors (after all, I think of “I” as a performance and a strategy, not as myself), certainly whatever I am spending a lot of time on, in my life, is likely to get into my poems. I don’t mind domestic labor, and sometimes enjoy it, although like most women (people?) who also work a more or less full time load, plus act as the frontal lobe for their household, I feel a bit peeved about it at times. I should add that I did finally buy new appliances recently, and in fact, in retrospect I’m pretty sure that coincided with my finishing both of those poems. Hmm. Direct relationship between convenience and productivity? I may be finished with laundry for thematic content for awhile, anyway.

What does prose poetry afford you that other forms don’t? Do you even care for the distinction of “prose poetry” as a form, opposed to more traditional, enjambed things?

I’ve written only four prose poems in my life that I’ve published, so it is hard for me to speak with any expertise about the format (none of the four started out as prose, although occasionally a poem of mine which is lineated in its final form started out as prose). Naturally, my inexperience with purposefully making prose poems hasn’t stopped me from developing a craft class I’ll teach this July at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers (where I’m faculty) about prose poems. I want to figure out more about it: what makes a prose poem work? But I’m not particularly interested in genre distinctions. I mean, shrug. I do love this little thing by Harold Nemerov:

BECAUSE YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LINE BETWEEN PROSE AND POETRY

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

Then came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

And I like Gertrude Stein’s “What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose…” (Quoted from memory but that’s the gist.)

But ultimately what interests me with any piece of writing is what makes it tick, what’s its logic, from the inside out. Why does the format the writer has selected for it, or arrived at, become necessary to the thematic content? So my two questions for myself and for my class (and I try to teach classes mainly where I don’t have the answers) for any poems we will be looking at will be: 1) What makes it good? and 2) Why does it need to be in prose? That is, why does this piece of writing need to give up the power of the line?

“A Monkey Thing” took many forms over several years, most of them lineated. (One of the things I do quite often when I’m looking for the poem in the material is to change lineation: short to long, even to jaggedy, lines to prose to lines, etc.) At one point, under a different name, it was trying to be a sonnet sequence! When I switched into prose, I loosened up some of the language, which in turn suggested other rhythms and syntaxes available to me, when also seemed to dose the poem with badly-needed oxygen, and allow me to meander in ways that felt natural rather than excessively mannered—which is how my digressions in the lineated format(s) were feeling to me. The baboons only arrived in the poem once I started in with the prose. I don’t really know why. They seem to me (at least the ones at the Paris Zoo) chaotic animals that don’t do well in the cage of my line breaks…

So maybe my aesthetic metaphor here, with this particular poem anyway, is Free the Baboons!

Your poem “A Monkey Thing” begins in a laundromat and ends with the speaker’s memory of a Paris zoo. It’s lovely and it called to mind for me Baudelaire’s introduction to Le Spleen de Paris where he says that poetic prose is something of a miracle, that it’s “musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and jarring enough to be adapted to the soul’s lyrical movements […] to the twists and turns that consciousness takes.” Do you agree with this idea, would you amend it?

I’m so in love with that Baudelaire passage. Thank you for reminding me of it! “Supple and jarring enough.” You can substitute that for my explanation of why I turned “A Monkey Thing” into prose: because prose was supple and jarring enough to get from the laundromat at 9th and Christian Streets in Philadelphia to the Paris zoo, not to mention back into the speaker’s teenage past when she awkwardly propositioned a grownup volleyball player! (What was she thinking!?)

You’re a great poet of people-watching. Has this always been an inspiration or interest of yours?

I live in Philadelphia where the people-watching is good: lots of people out and about, lots of character and variety here. My husband and I have always people-watched together. We love sitting in cafes wherever we are, and drinking coffee or beer and scribbling or reading and looking at people and talking. So much evidence passing by. I’m just remembering we used to have this thing where we’d take the bus to NYC for the day (Philly is 90 miles south of NY), and before doing whatever else we had planned, we’d go to the first Starbucks we found near the bus station and sit in the window and drink coffee and count how many passersby actually looked happy, and it was like 1 in 10 in midtown Manhattan. But I mean, yeah, doesn’t everyone write novels in their heads about people they see? Doesn’t everyone look for evidence that other people are doing it right or wrong or differently? I also learn a lot about language from eavesdropping—what’s really idiomatic as opposed to what do authors like to pretend is idiomatic? How do people reveal or evade or withhold themselves by what they say and how they say it? The thing about putting other people in your poems: they kind of disrupt the fixed authority of your “I,” right? They reflect something about the speaker (what I say about somebody else is not only about that person but also about me), but also they don’t let the speaker get away with as much lyric supremacy. They allow the speaker to be embarrassed or hesitant or even shitty in ways that are hard for a lonely “I” to reveal convincingly about herself.

You have a book called Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice. You spend the whole of the book playing with the idea of a “women’s poetry” and teasing strands away from the concept. I’m curious whether you think there is such a thing, or rather, if there is a specifically female consciousness that exists in the poetry women are writing these days.

Re: the title of that book: I mean it with complete sincerity and with perfect irony. The book’s title poem starts by ventriloquizing Marianne Moore’s famous poem “Poetry”: “I too dislike it.” The great thing about that line is that it makes liking or not liking poetry a non-issue while also telling us what’s important about poetry. We don’t say “I like” or “I dislike” about breathing, or love. So why say it about poetry either? The statement is also literally true: I don’t like women’s poetry or men’s poetry or anyone in particular’s poetry. I only like individual poems. I need poetry. Women’s poetry, of course, does and doesn’t exist. It’s like a car (the title poem is about a pimped-out car). It might have purple lights underneath, or outrageous hubcaps, or an enormous spoiler jutting off the back, but underneath it’s still a car.

It does occur to me to ask, at this moment when the visibility of trans and gender-fluid poets and poems and politics is high, whether the question about “specific female consciousness” is the same as it was when I wrote that poem and that book. I mean, it is for me—I only can write out of my own experience. One of my students, whose pronoun is “they,” was writing about femininity, and I realized that I think I have much less of a sense of what that might mean than they did, maybe because I’ve never particularly had to ask myself what my gender was. I’m like, I’m a female, so if I do it, it’s feminine. Is my female experience (cisgendered het married middle-aged mom) different from the student poet’s? But isn’t it also different from all the other cisgendered het married middle-aged moms of my acquaintance? Really, as with the question of genre and prose poems, the question of gender and poems is less interesting than the specifics of each poem. But that—as my undergrads say—is just me.

What are you reading this summer? Any current writing projects you’d like to share with us?

I’ve been reading around for my prose poem class—I’ve been particularly interested recently in Bhanu Kapil’s Ban in Banlieu, Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women, Donna Stonecipher’s book about the prose poem, Prose Poetry and the City, and Kate Colby’s Dream of the Trenches (which is billed as “Essays” but I dunno.) These aren’t really discrete narrative or lyric or dream sequence prose performances, but rather fragments of things rubbing up against and building on each other—and I think that’s one of the things that’s interesting me about them. How do you get incompleteness to perform? I thought Jeffrey Yang’s Hey Marfa was fascinating, one of last year’s best books, written in all kinds of formats collaged together—plus paintings and drawings by Rackstraw Downes—as a way of thinking about place and colonization and history and art and violence.

I’m also very much liking Connie Voisine’s The Bower, not prose poetry, but a book-length personal/political travelogue in couplets, divided into shorter sections, having to do with the city of Belfast and its conflicts and music and stories, with growing up American and working class, with mothering, with reading. Connie is compassionate and steely, lyric and thinky, and I love those combinations. And I’m reading Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady again, third time through, I think. A book I love.

I’m working on my fourth book of poetry, poem by poem. (I don’t write project books; I just write poems that start to link up when there’s a whole bunch of them that are good enough.) I’ve got about three-quarters of a manuscript, I think. An ongoing project, meanwhile, is that of selecting the poems for Scoundrel Time, the online literary resistance journal, where we’re building an archive of responses to the current political climate. One feels so helpless just now, but this feels like creating space for humanity and attention in the midst of everything working against those things.