"Loose Ends and Blind Spots": An Interview With Nicholas Grider

Nicholas Grider is an artist and writer whose work has appeared in Conjunctions, Caketrain, Drunken Boat, [out of nothing] and many other publications. 

An excerpt from Tiny Gradations of Loss appears in Issue Forty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Nicholas Grider talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about breathlessness, unnamed protagonists, and failure.

1.Tell us about Tiny Gradations of Loss and its origins.

The months after my mother’s death are hazy, so I don’t remember the book’s exact origins, just a feeling of pressure that I had to write something down, not to “let it out” but as some kind of impartial document that, in my shock, made it safer to accept my mother’s death as real.

2.What made you decide to take the unconventional approach of using a third-person point of view in this work of nonfiction?

I used third-person mostly to distance myself from the painful subject, but also with an eye towards Samuel Beckett’s short plays populated by nameless protagonists always on the edge of some kind of loss and never quite able to speak for themselves or as themselves.

3.I look at sentences like this one—“The closer Day 1 gets the more often he has to call the hospice hotline they give him instructions they send out a nurse”—and I feel the structure evokes a frantic, panicked stream of consciousness. What are these strung-together sentences meant to achieve or capture?

The omitted commas are meant to evoke the panic of being helpless in the face of terminal illness and to mimic breathlessness itself; my mother had lung cancer and I’ve grown up with plenty of lung conditions so something as simple as just breathing can become so tenuous and complex that it overwhelms things like the logic of proper usage.

4.On your website you say your work is “most concerned with failures of memory and history.” How does this theme come across in your writing? In a work of creative nonfiction, must you compensate for your own failures of memory, or can you use them to your advantage somehow?

I think every piece of writing of mine is a specific kind of failure to articulate something, but it’s the failure that I’m interested in, loose ends and blind spots and blanks instead of a smoothly narrated history or even just a smooth narrative.  I’m not too pessimistic but I glean most speech acts and writing expression as a kind of response borne out of failing to listen and/or understand the world or the people in the room or yourself in a Chekhovian sense that everyone has a lot to say but nothing gets said and in the end it’s the silences that are most meaningful.

5.What projects are you currently working on?

I’m at work on a parody of a detective novel and have a book of short stories, Misadventure, coming out from A Strange Object next January.

6.What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

I’ve mostly been reading art books (Sol LeWitt, Fred Wilson, Mary Heilmann) but in terms of things on my radar I’m excited about I’d include Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too, Steven Zultanski’s Agony, and this great medical book I got at a used book sale, Alan C. Tjeltveit’s Ethics and Values in Psychotherapy.

"What Was Water Has Blossomed": An Interview with Danez Smith

Danez Smith, a Cave Canem Fellow and 2-time Pushcart Nominee, works in Madison, WI, as an Student Advisor for the First Wave Program at UW-Madison. He likes tattoos, bad food, drinking Capri Suns, reading manga and good poems. His work appears or is forthcoming in PANK, Anti-, Vinyl, Radius, Southern Indiana Review, and other places. He thinks you look good today.

His poem "A life ago, I was a lake" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Danez Smith talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about water, wetness, and the body. 

1. Could you please talk how/why you wrote of “A life ago, I was a lake”?

I used to live by Lake Mendota, one of the major lakes in Madison, WI. There has always been a lot of water in my poems, but when I lived by that lake, there was water ourside my window and all over my stanzas. Then I moved off the isthmus, and all the wet of my work dried up. One night, I was sitting around thinking of the lake and all the mornings/nights that we and a lover looked out onto it, and this poem kinda flowed out. I was also reading a lot of great water poetry at the same time, work by Saeed Jones and Douglas Kearney specifically.

2. I love how this poem is self-aware of its poemness. with lines like, “Who says that? // I have no idea. / Work with me.” It makes me feel more aware of the lines breaking and moving. How do you think these nods toward the poem as poem work within the poem? How do they work for you as writer of the poem?

My God, I hope they work within the poem! I love moments like that in poetry. I am fascinated with tools that either make the poem aware of it’s own body and form, or moments where the writers gets to talk directly as a reader. Poems, as with all art to me, is a conversation between the creator, the viewer, and the work itself. For me, moments like that are a fun way of saying to the reader, ‘I know you are there! You have a say here!’

3. This poem investigates nature vs. body in a way that seems like the speaker could inhabit both, either simultaneously or discretely. Why did you decide to compare the body to the lake? How do you see these investigations working?

For me, the body is a part of nature. I wanted to compare my body to a lake specifically because I wanted to make my body something more grand, with a little bit more flare, and what is more a diva than a lake? I didn’t want to go the ocean, its too big, and I’m a Midwest boy at heart. The lake is humble and fierce, pristine and dangerous, much like I imagine the body to be.

4. What have you read that’s great recently?

I just finished reading Angelo Nikolopoulos’ collection ‘Obscenely Yours’ and I am floored! I am in awe of how he handles desire and the body. Miles Walser’s ‘What The Night Demands’ left me as a pile of nonsense, how he handles the body & the self in that collection makes me what to grow. I’ve also been re-reading Angel Nafis’ ‘BlackGirl Mansion’ and losing my mind in her words. 

5. What else have you been writing as of late?

Besides the ever evolving manuscript, I’ve been writing a lot about twerking, the body as always, and how our communities treat the black male body. I am releasing a chapbook in August through Penmanship Press, so I’m working a lot on finishing that up right now.

"Global and Local, Personal and Public": An Interview with Rachel Marston

Rachel Marston’s fiction and nonfiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Event, The Collagist, and Religion & Politics. She received her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah.  In Fall 2013, she will join the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University as an Assistant Professor of English.

Her essay "Our Nuclear Age" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Rachel Marston talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about the sublime, the horrific, and making sense of our histories.

1. What made you begin to write this essay? Does the essay do what you initially set out to make it do, or did it become something else, new and surprising?

I was researching urban legends for a folklore class and decided to explore the sublimation of atomic horrors and Cold War fears in B-movies and comics.  Along the way, I encountered the stories of people in Utah and Nevada who’d casually watched atomic testing with friends and families, including my grandfather’s own experience of watching the tests.  The descriptive language in these accounts always conveyed a sense of awe and beauty, often evoking a religious vision, even in the accounts condemning nuclear testing. 

The essay took on many different shapes.  The first version used images (I had a great and terribly disturbing map showing fallout patterns in the United States, in which Nevada and Utah were almost entirely obscured).  Earlier drafts also used a more distant, historicizing voice.  I took the images out partly for practical reasons (such as the difficulties of obtaining copyright), but also because they ultimately worked as scaffolding for early drafts.

2. A good deal of concisely consolidated history comes to the reader before you turn your attention to family and personal experience. How much time went into researching before you could write those first several paragraphs? (Did you learn the history in order to write the essay? Or had you already learned a lot on the subject beforehand?)

I had done only a small amount of research when I first wrote the essay. But then I began writing a novel about nuclear testing (a hybrid novel, incorporating nonfiction, including this essay), so I spent a good part of four or five years researching, including a visit to the Nevada Test Site.  The essay evolved both separately and as part of the novel.

The tenuous strands of political history inform and shape family history and personal experience and vice versa.  All history is global and local, personal and public. 

3. In this piece you write, "I was not alive, only see this history through the lens of the present, the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for me inextricably linked to the history of nuclear testing, my family in Las Vegas, Reno, and Utah." I really like this concept of "history through the lens of the present," as I feel it can inform how I read many works of creative nonfiction. What, in your mind, is the function or purpose of this "lens"? (Do you feel you are rewriting history? Reappropriating it? Making sense of it?)

I want to make sense of this history, but don’t know if that is possible.  This essay and my novel project are certainly an attempt to do so, as well as to rewrite and reappropriate the nuclear history of the American West. 

The lens of the present is really the only way we can understand history, no matter how hard we try to understand and represent the historical context(s).  Also, this lens allows me to take up emotional residence in a piece, a kind of textual empathy, one that allows me to reference a larger historical event, such as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not reduce or exploit that history.

4. The final lines of this essay are brilliant: "They told him it would be beautiful. He tells me it was." This secondhand message made me sense nostalgia and longing to see the beauty, on the part of both narrator and grandfather, which complicates the grim facts of the nuclear side-effects you've presented to us. What sort of mood did you intend to evoke with this ending? (And/or what were you feeling yourself, writing it?)

This particular history always evokes the relationship between the sublime and the horrific, a shadowy borderland, where both might exist simultaneously. There is also my nostalgia, a desire for a kind of innocence, for a world in which one can watch this destructive force and see it primarily as beautiful, as well as sorrow for the ways in which our beliefs can betray us.

5. What writing projects are you currently working on?

I’ve been writing an essay about my father’s health and the Grace Paley story “A Conversation with My Father.” My summer writing is scheduled for revisions to my nuclear novel project and for completing the first draft of new novel project about a family who sends away their young, troubled son.  

6. What have you been reading recently that you want to recommend?

I recently reread Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Michael Henry Heim).  The book is shaped as variations on a theme. Each section of the book introduces different characters, each appearing in only one section (with one exception).   The exploration of loss (personal and political) connects the stories and Kundera uses the authorial/narratorial “I” in really interesting ways.

I also recently finished Kirstin Scott’s Motherlunge (AWP Award Series in the Novel 2011), which is a lovely and lyrical first novel about growing up, sex, motherhood, and how our families shape who we become, whether we want them to or not.

"The Urge of What Might Be": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Owen Egerton

Owen Egerton’s novel Everyone Says That at the End of the World is due out this April from Soft Skull Press. He’s also the author of The Book of Harold, the Illegitimate Son of God, which is currently in development as a television series with Warner Bros. Television. As a screenwriter, Egerton has written for Fox, Warner Brothers, and Disney studios. Egerton is also a regular performer with the Alamo Drafthouse’s Master Pancake Theater.

An excerpt from his novel Everyone Says That at the End of the World appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Owen Egerton answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Everyone Says That at the End of the World. Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

She turned up the volume till her ears hurt. That’s how she liked her music, just a little painful. She knew Mingus would approve. Hell, he put the pain in himself. He slammed two notes together that harmonized, but just barely, two notes that had to work at it. They weren’t a C and a G, more a C and an A-sharp. That’s how she saw her and Milton. No one would choose to put these notes together, no one but a mind like Mingus. And when Mingus did it . . . when he played or wrote or yelled, he said, “Yes, this is how it is supposed to be. These notes belong together.” He told the notes, “You can fight, you can twist, but know that you are home. This is where you are supposed to be.” And the notes listened. And the notes sang.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Deepak Chopra wearing nothing but an impressive erection.

3. When you do it, why?

He didn’t mind confusion. He was used to it. As a child the confusion would come in waves. Confusion and sadness. A home-desire sadness. Jesus-18 believed this home-desire was the primary emotion of all people. Home, he also felt, had very little to do with where one was born or raised. Home was the urge of what might be. What could and should be. Home was the kingdom rising up within the empire, the flower growing in the rock wall, the kind want emerging in the cool heart. He saw homesick souls in all he passed, no matter how foreign, how crippled, how cruel. He saw this home-desire even in the dead.

4. When you don’t, why?

So the Floaters built a hell in North Dakota. It was a nasty place.

Hell had no light. No sound. Hell was an itchy soul feeling. A restlessness coupled with a certainty that no rest exists. An aimless anger. A soul-deep ennui.

But (and this floored the Floaters) the occupants of hell all seemed incredibly content. A little research revealed that these people had experienced the itchy soul syndrome their entire lives. But now, in hell, the feeling was understood as punishment. Finally their misery had meaning. There was a point to an existence they, in their heart of hearts, felt to be pointless. The Floaters took note.

"Absurd Teenage Ambitions": An Interview with Tessa Mellas

Tessa Mellas is the 2013 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Her debut collection Lungs Full of Noise will be released from the University of Iowa Press in October of 2013. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and is currently a senior lecturer at the Ohio State University.

Her story "Dye Job" appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Tessa Mellas talks to interviewer David Bachman about the work of lips, a girl’s questionable accomplishments, and the natural cruelty of teens.

1. At least twice in this piece, Ruth actually succeeds in gaining access to that for which she at one time reached, namely a grape supply and intimate proximity to Felix. How do you want the reader to view the accomplishments of this character - empowering, validating, compromising, sad, tragic, any or all or none of these?

Wow! Hard question to start with. I think that “compromising” is the best adjective you’ve chosen given that Ruth defies her own intelligence in eating fruit that she knows is “tainted” and in engaging with Felix in such a way. I do also see these actions as empowering and validating, though, albeit in misguided ways. At this point in her life, I think that Ruth needs to believe that she can do daring things that challenge her reputation as a studious innocent girl. I see Ruth as being on the cusp of great changes. This story seems to take place right before her friendship with Lily comes to an end. She is realizing that her relationship with Lily is not really a friendship, but she is using Lily’s condescension as an empowering device to become a stronger, more willful person. Though I do see these actions as sad, I also see them as evidence that Ruth will be a very different person in a few years, someone who is not so easily pushed around and someone who makes the right decisions for who she is rather than for who her friends or parents are.

2. Do you consider Lily’s treatment of Ruth especially cruel or is it just par for the course for characters of this age, who naturally have such volatile dispositions? Can you talk in general about how you designed the relationship between these two girls?

I do consider Lily’s treatment of Ruth to be especially cruel, but I also think that this treatment is extremely common for girls in both middle and high school. My own experience as a girl was very much like this. In the transition from elementary school to middle school, I found myself losing friends as they transitioned into the popular group and I got lost in a no man’s land of grouplessness. This seems to be par for the course. The girls with social power retain that power by verbally harassing girls with less social power. I taught high school for a few years and was also a counselor at summer camps, and this behavior never seems to change. I wrote Lily’s character by channeling the voices of certain students and classmates and imagined a relationship between Lily and an awkward introspective girl, who was just hanging onto that friendship, desperately, longingly, and perhaps knowing that it will soon come to an end. And when it does come to an end, perhaps it will feel like relief.

3. The first line of this story provides an image of a pair of lips sucking on fat grapes. The last scene is that of genitalia being brought to another pair of lips. Was this specific arc and resolution, if it is one, deliberate or is this how the story just unfolded? How conscious were you that the piece was beginning and ending with this oral imagery?

I don’t think that the first draft of the story was bookended with such sexual imagery, but a writer named Randy DeVita suggested it in a workshop at Bowling Green State University. Thanks, Randy! Since then, I have quite intentionally kept it in as I think it is thematically fitting.

4. What are the challenges and limitations of writing teenage characters? Or does the fact that younger people are less predictable and more capable of rash turns in behavior liberate the writer whose job it is to create them, in that anything can go and you can cast a wider net than you would with more predictable adults?

I do find it liberating to write about teenaged girls perhaps because this time in my own life seemed so traumatic and cruel. The angst of that age is so rife with possibilities for fiction. I think that you’ve nailed down many of the qualities of teenagers that make them so interesting in fiction. Also, as a teenager I remember feeling like I had so little control over my life and that helplessness produces so much angry energy that can just fuel the writing process even more than a decade after the fact.

5. Do earlier drafts of this piece offer different narrative arcs or resolutions? If so, are you interested in talking about those drafts and why you took the paths we see in the published draft?

The first draft of the story ended with Ruth (who previously had a different name) watching from Felix’s closet as another girl, the girl from band, gives Felix a blow job. Another writer Mark Baumgartner from my Bowling Green MFA group said, That’s not right. It’s gotta end with Ruth giving the blow job. At first I thought he was nuts. I thought, Ruth would never do that. But after two seconds of thought, I realize how completely right he was. Thanks, Mark! My fellow MFA writers are all such excellent writers and helped shape this and many other stories in extremely important ways. Earlier drafts also included a Greek chorus of mothers at PTA meetings in the school cafeteria, but those really weren’t working so they got the axe.

6. What are you writing these days?

I am currently working on a few creative nonfiction essays about environmentalism. Also, I am working on a novel with another teenaged protagonist. The novel is speculative and takes up environmental issues. I am hoping to get a lot of work done on it this summer. Thanks so much for asking, and thank you for your interest in my work. I was excited to see Lily and Ruth find a home in such a great journal.

Podcast Episode 13: Helen Rubinstein reads "Two Sisters"

Helen Rubinstein's "Two Sisters" appears in the December 2012 issue of The Collagist. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Ninth Letter, Salon, Salt Hill, Witness, and elsewhere. She is a member of Brooklyn's Trout Family of writers, and an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she is working on a book.

Listen to Helen's reading of "Two Sisters" here.

Episode 13: Helen Rubinstein reads "Two SIsters"

"Because the Ocean Distilled": An Interview with Kendra DeColo

Kendra DeColo's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, CALYX, Muzzle Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, Split This Rock: Poems of Witness and Provocation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and residencies from the Millay Colony and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She is the founding poetry editor of Nashville Review and a Book Review Editor at Muzzle Magazine. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Her poems "The Vocalist," "I Heart Pussy," and "Blue and Green Music" appear in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Kendra DeColo speaks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about public spaces, scrawling, and decadence. 

1. Could you please discuss how you ended up writing “The Vocalist”?

“The Vocalist” is probably one of the hardest poems I have tried to write in terms of revision and content. It is more or less a narrative poem as it attempts to describe something that happened. The challenge was in understanding and coming to terms with the narrative’s angle: the speaker’s gaze. There is a lot of discomfort and ambiguity, and a lot of psychic drama in trying to occupy that space. The speaker therefore is evasive, slippery, and resistant to the very language she is trying to manipulate. However I did not intend for the poem to be self-conscious. I really just wanted to paint a portrait of this amazing singer, a trans inmate who I saw perform at a commencement ceremony at the women’s prison where I used to work. The experience of hearing them sing in this context brought up so many complicated feelings about gender, desire, witnessing. It is a poem I will keep writing.

2. In “I Heart Pussy,” you reimagine someone carving this phrase into a bench.  Why, out of all bathroom scrawls and bench carvings, did this particular one stick out (and thus seem worth writing about?)

I have always been drawn to (and repelled by) public spaces. I love the way a green park bench can trigger feelings of domesticity and transience, privacy and exposure. I associate them with paper bagged 40s and other fun things you can try to get away with in public. But really the place is a platform and signifier for what we see/hear everyday: how the female body is praised and objectified in a single gesture. I wanted to explore a premise in which these declarations are uttered in earnest and manifested in the world. Wouldn’t you want to live in a world where pussy is king?

3. Could you talk about the three-line “waterfall” stanza that you use in “I Heart Pussy” and “Blue and Green Music”? What draws you to this form on the page?

For me the 'waterfall' stanza’ evokes a sense of decadence and disintegration, like a chandelier in a flooded room. I love how the form becomes physical, exacting from the reader a kind of intimacy and dance as the eye moves along the body of the poem. It has a feel of turning (tuning), shape-shifting, and obscuring itself in the way of a sequined dress. I also see the form as a nod to poets I love such as Lynda Hull, Hopkins— lyric poets who search for grace in the ruins.

4. What could you recommend for us to read?

Lately I have been enjoying the understated sensuality and eroticism of the novelist Yasunari Kawabata. I have also been working my way through the collected journals of Tennessee Williams. (I truly believe he is my best friend). I find his descriptions of anxiety and self-loathing as a writer extremely comforting. I am excited for A. Van Jordan’s new collection, Cineaste, especially for this poem: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22987.

5. What can we expect from you writing-wise?

I hope to keep peeling back layers of my identity, exposing my fears and desires, and going after that shifty huckster I call my shadow-self. More than likely, you can expect more pussy-positivity, more longing, and more struggle.

"Roll for Traps": An Interview with Amorak Huey

Amorak Huey is a longtime newspaper editor and reporter who now teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His poems can be found in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Cincinnati Review, Linebreak, PANK, Subtropics, and other print and online journals. Follow him on Twitter: @amorak

His poem "Dungeon Master's Guide to Eighth Grade" appears in Issue Forty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Amorak Huey talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about panama jack shirts, games, and the shark tank of middle school.

1. Could you please discuss how you ended up writing “Dungeon Master's Guide to Eighth Grade”?

I wrote the first draft of this poem while completing the April poem-a-day challenge in 2012. For me, part of the appeal of that challenge is how it pushes me on subject matter. This poem appeared on April 13, when I’d pretty much run out of things in my immediate vicinity to write about (my annoyance with lingering wintry weather in Michigan, whatever I’d just seen on Facebook, what a pain it is to try to write a poem every day).

I don’t remember what brought Dungeons & Dragons to mind, but thinking about the game led to a string of memories and associations, so I retrieved my old Dungeon Master’s Guide from a mildewed box in the basement and found the epigraph. The poem developed from there.

It had been quite a while since I’d thought about Panama Jack shirts; it’s hard to overstate just how stupidly popular those were in my junior high, how must-have a part of everyone’s wardrobe. And parachute pants, good grief.

2. This poem does a really fantastic job of showing the lines drawn around a young person as the kids around them start to decide what is and is not cool. I wonder, though, why did you write this as a poem? How do you think this form fits the material?

One answer is that it’s a poem because poems are what I write. Poetry is how I interact with language and the world.

Another answer is that maybe that games and poems seek to order the world in similar ways, offering structure to make sense of the chaos.

3. Could you talk about the logic of using a game to understand the world? The speaker in this poems seems unable to decipher the world in another way. Or, perhaps, this way is just the most manageable.

Here’s how isolated I was in eighth grade: I never did find a peer group to regularly play D&D with; I had friends who played, but I wasn’t part of their game.

For a long time, I thought my eighth-grade experience was atypical, because I had been homeschooled and didn’t attend public school until that year. Talk about jumping into a shark tank: all those junior high hormones and hierarchies; I thought I was the loneliest person in the world. I found out much later that lots of people feel that way, that my precise experience might have been unusual but my emotions were far from it. The reaction I’ve gotten to my poem after it appeared in The Collagist has confirmed again that I am not alone, people telling me I had captured eighth grade as they remembered it, too.

Anyway, games have clear rules. There’s a manual. Things make sense and follow a pattern; the path to success is evident; the goal is explicit. Kill monsters, collect treasure. Junior high is the opposite of that. There are rules, but they’re not written down anywhere, and nothing makes sense, and the path is always obscured. You can’t plot your way through eighth grade social interactions on graph paper, and you have no idea what your strongest attributes are. Are you lawful neutral? Chaotic good? How would you even know?

Maybe it’s not just junior high. Maybe all of life is like that. How often would it be nice to have a Dungeon Master’s Guide to consult? I’m sounding kind of fatalist here, gloomier than I mean to. My life is great. Eighth grade wasn’t that bad, and it didn’t last very long (thank goodness).

4. Any reading recommendations?

As often as I can, I recommend Catie Rosemurgy’s The Stranger Manual and Traci Brimhall’s Rookery, and Mary Ruefle’s book of lectures Madness, Rack, and Honey. Brilliance all around.

Collier Nogues’ On the Other Side, Blue and Catherine Barnett’s The Game of Boxes are two recent loves. I envy the poems in these collections.

5. What other writing projects are you working on?

Always writing the next poem. Occasionally trying to organize them into a manuscript – talk about a process for which I wish had a Dungeon Master’s Guide.

"The Fly Cannot Know My Heart": An Interview with Erin Keane

Erin Keane is the author of The Gravity Soundtrack and Death-Defying Acts, a novel-in-poems about circus life. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, working as a public radio arts reporter and critic and writing strange plays about, among other things, opossums and girls.

Her poem "The Living Dead" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Erin Keane talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about zombies, dads, and zombies. 

1. Could you please talk about the genesis of “Living Dead”?

Not all of my poems begin with facts, but this one does. My boyfriend (now husband) and I did go to Pittsburgh for a long weekend, just for fun. He’s a big horror film fan, and he did drive us outside the city to the cemetery where George Romero filmed the opening scene of “Night of the Living Dead.” (I’ve seen that opening scene maybe half a dozen times, though I’ve never managed to watch the whole movie. For me, it’s all in that first scene: the brother and sister visiting their dad’s grave when everything goes horribly wrong.) My father died when I was five. I didn’t go to his funeral (we were living across the country when he died) and here I am, decades later, and I still haven’t visited his grave. There’s some guilt there, definitely. But I suppose I’m afraid of what could happen. Not a zombie attack, you know, but something.  

2. This poem focuses a lot on the image/concept of zombies.  Where do you see this poem fitting in zombie culture, which is very popular right now? More broadly, where do you see zombies’ place in poetry?

Right. Well, there’s a lot of truth to the idea that if you want to know what a culture fears most in a particular time and place, look to their fictional monsters. In a broad cultural sense, zombies represent the fear of unchecked global pandemic alongside the nagging anxiety that everything we work to build in our lives—career, home, family, savings—can be rendered meaningless by one accident that spirals out of control until we are forced back into our primal selves, the self that has to wield an axe without flinching or be left for dead. But yet it’s so appealing, I think, because there is the undeniable fantasy aspect of being allowed—encouraged—to bury something sharp in the skull of a person (who is not really a person anymore, so it’s okay). And then there’s the unnatural aspect of it all, the complete disintegration of the very core of our truth as living beings—that when we die, our bodies stay dead—which can be a way of repudiating some basics of science and faith all in one really gross package.

And man, people love the zombie fantasy. The meme for a while was the “zombie contingency plan” — do you have a plan, where would you go, what would you do? Which strikes me as a way to talk about general disaster contingency as a way to alleviate anxiety without having to actually plan for disasters, because I bet nobody sitting around dreaming up their zombie contingency plan even knows where the batteries to their flashlights are. The sirens go off and we sit around on Twitter and make jokes until the all clear is issued.

All of this is to say, I’m not sure this poem fits tidily into zombie culture. I watch “The Walking Dead” but I only care about the relationships between the survivors and how they live on the edge of constant death and find a way to either remain tender or brutal to one another (both choices fascinate me equally). For me, the zombie father was almost too easy of a metaphor—what’s dead is never dead, to cannibalize a saying from another  cable show. The old man keeps popping up—in my thoughts when I’m on vacation with my boyfriend, touring a zombie movie landmark, for example.

3. I feel like this poem has two pretty distinct turns. The first “they wanted to visit their father's / grave. I confess: I have never visited mine” and the second “What do you do / with a drunken sailor, so earl-aye in the morning? / Take him to Pittsburgh, let him meet / my love.”  Both times, the speaker shifts from a sort of silly, movie-referencing tone to a more serious and person one. How did you balance these two voices in this poem?

I blame the Irish in me. My whole family has a really dark sense of humor and it’s impossible to write like myself and not have it creep in. Growing up, death and gore and trauma (battlefields, hospitals) were just regular dinner table talk in my house, and you can either wilt under the weight of tragedy or you can give it the finger. It’s just second nature to my voice, not something I consciously craft.

4. Have you read anything that’s kept you warm this winter?

What I loved this winter: Carol Rifka Brunt’s “Tell the Wolves I’m Home.” Tears streaming down my face as I finished it, hand to God. I just brought home from Boston Amanda Smeltz’s “Imperial Bender” and Chris Mattingly’s “Scuffletown” and they haven’t left my nightstand. I’ve been entranced by Marcus Wicker’s “Maybe the Saddest Thing” (Flavor Flav is a 21^st century muse) and knocked out cold by Frank Bill’s “Donnybrook.” And if you don’t know Jonathan Weinert’s poems, his new chapbook “13 Small Apostrophes” should throw you right into the fire. 

5. What other writing can we look forward to from you?

My next collection of poems comes out in February from Typecast Publishing. “The Living Dead” will make an appearance along with more mixed-up love poems masquerading as elegies and vice versa. I’m also working on a play about Phil Collins. It’s a long story.

"I Can Feel Them, But They Don't Know I'm There": An Interview with Emma Smith-Stevens

Emma Smith-Stevens' stories have appeared in Conjunctions, PANK, Web Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Her story "Mercy" appears in Issue Twenty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Emma Smith-Stevens talks to interviewer Joseph Scapellato about "tracking" characters, unspeakable need, and endings that deepen.

1. Can you tell us about the origin of “Mercy”?  Where did this piece begin for you, and how did it get to here?

I wanted to write a story that captures the feeling of simultaneous revulsion and attraction, the experience of flinching in the face of intimacy. I started with Nina’s voice and a few images: Sergei’s bedroom with the kinky modifications, Nina’s forced smile for the group photo, a dead deer bloodying a snow bank. For me, writing fiction involves crawling under my characters’ skin, connecting with them through empathy, and then sneaking away. It’s sort of like when scientists tag wild animals with tracking chips. My characters carry on with their lives, but I maintain that connection—I can feel them, but they don’t know that I’m there.

2. I love this story’s honest exploration of intimacy’s liberating and oppressive aspects.  Nina tells us that Sergei’s “warmer, spongier qualities” are scaring her off, that he “modified his apartment for me with hooks in the ceiling and the floor, ropes bought at Home Depot, an attempt to meet my fetishes halfway.”  To her, even Sergei’s native language, Ukrainian, is intolerably intimate, sounding “nonsensical and made-up, as though invented by identical twins.”  At what stage do you discover the ideas that your fiction is engaging?  And what do you do then?

The ideas in this story presented themselves first, and led me to these characters. The dynamic between Nina and Sergei gives life to ideas about intimacy, fear, sexual attraction, and control, and all of that is the natural result of these two people coming together.

Everyone wants to be desired, but no one wants to be desired too much. “Mercy” is a love story, but with romance in the background, and discomfort up front. Sergei and Nina crave each other intensely, but each of them wants what the other wishes to withhold. Some would assume that a relationship involving power struggles is doomed, but in the case of these two, it is exactly right. Their disturbances are compelling to one another. Nina needs to fear Sergei in order to respect him, and in the end his actions make that possible. Sergei needs Nina to express her longing for him, and that is what he ultimately earns. There is unspeakable need, for both of them, to be together.

3. The ending of “Mercy” is powerful.  In the second-to-last paragraph, Nina thinks, “I will let him inside,” and the reader, who’s been pulling for this couple, rejoices—but the story pushes past this patch of hope: while driving, Nina and Sergei see two women stranded on the side of the road.  Although Sergei wants to stop and help, Nina persuades him—in a striking way—to keep driving, to abandon the women “in the midst of their struggle.”  This action, and the image that results, resonate.  As a writer, how do you find your endings?  What do you look for?

This story had three different endings over about six months before I finally landed on this one. I had to take time away from it in order find the image that would best express what I wanted to say about Nina and Sergei. I suppose that I often try to end that way—a sort of freeze-frame image that, hopefully, deepens the readers’ understanding of all that came before, and what will come next.

Some of my favorite story endings depict a beautiful moment with a very short lifespan. The past and the future are bearing down. As a reader you just want to hold on, but you also know it’s time to go, to get out before the whole house comes crashing down. Those endings gave me inspiration while finishing “Mercy.”

4. What other writing projects are you working on right now?

I’m writing a novel.

5. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

Until recently I’d only read a handful of Nabokov’s short stories, so I’m making my way through those, which is exciting. One of the best books I’ve read in the last few months was Chess Story by Stefan Zweig. I absolutely loved Michael Kimball’s Big Ray and Padgett Powell’s You and Me. Next on my list are Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle and Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances both of which I couldn’t be more excited about.