"Limitlessly Mined for the Strange That Was There all Along": An Interview With Gabe Durham

Gabe Durham is the author of Fun Camp, a novel forthcoming from Mud Luscious Press. He lives in Northampton, MA, where he edits Dark Sky Magazine. 

His story "The Different Thing" appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Gabe Durham talks to interviewer Joseph Scapellato about asking questions with fiction, a strange church experience, and what happens when you aren't asked to explain why you picked one poster over others.

1. Where did “The Different Thing” begin for you, and how did it get to here?

I was writing another story—what I’m tempted to call a real story with character, event, etc.—that began, “It was that perennial time of year when clouds shifted restlessly and comedians passed out flyer coupons just off Times Square.” I liked the game of that sentence, the way it pointed to the perpetuity of comedians handing out coupons, and imagined writing a short story in which I might gorge myself on sentences like this.

At the same time, I was in a rut. I’d moved to a city I didn’t much like with a degree that didn’t much help me, and my agent was forwarding me these lovely glowing rejections by career-maker editors on a manuscript, and though I’d prided myself on being a persistent and goal-driven guy always in pursuit of the next thing, I was very unsure what the next thing was. I began to fear my own decision-making. This story seems to me now (over a year later) to have been born of that fear: I wrote a story in which I made no decisions about who anyone was or what they were doing.

2. I’m struck by this piece’s compelling narration—right off the bat, the reader encounters unspecific specificity (or specific unspecificity?): “The young couple was informed: Something today would be different. It was a time of day again and the sky was active, casting rays onto things, making the things look different in this light than in other light.”  The characters’ actions are at times interchangeable: “They resisted making contact until one risked it. The other was glad.”  These are only two examples of this voice’s playful energy.  Can you tell us more about this voice—what your goals were with it, how you found or followed it?

As I wrote and revised, I pushed the story as far as I could into what you’re nicely dubbing this specific unspecificity: About the young couple, I asked: Could this be said about any couple? About the different thing, I asked: Could this be said of any event?

What excited me about asking those questions was that it turned out I was asking myself: What do I think couples are like? And many of the answers were so basic, the kinds of things it’s rarely worth mentioning: Well, okay, when they meet, they like to look at each other. And I’d scan it and make sure I agreed with it. It’s nice to get to say something true like that, even if that true thing is obvious.

But then of course in this story, as in all stories, there had to be the turn. The story had to get away from me somehow. And I tried out a number of things, and the one that stuck was the idea of meeting avoidance head-on: “You could paint their shirts red or their trees oak or fashion their coveted different thing into a sexy Panamanian burglar from Amnesty International and spend the rest of your life paying for it.” And of course, near the end, we do all of that stuff and more—but tentatively, hypothetically—and then run away from it.

3. This piece includes many moments of insightful and comic defamiliarization: “The clothes the young couple wore reflected their beliefs on temperature, mobility, modesty, comfort, and style.”  To what extent do you think that all fiction makes (or should make) the familiar strange? 

I’ve heard other writers talk about the mental game that goes, “How would I explain this to a space alien?” Which isn’t so different than asking, “How would I explain this to a very precocious child I’m babysitting?” To me, the object of the game is the attempt to clear away our received ideas and start from somewhere closer to scratch.

Around the time of the writing of this story, also in the new city, my wife and I attended a church service recommended to her by an acquaintance. They met in a very appealing space and catered to twentysomethings, especially musicians, lots of tattoos and artificially darkened hair, and the band there performed loud midtempo praise medleys very proficiently—kind of that “drone of worship” mentality where the words don’t especially matter. And it wasn’t until their minister got up to speak that we realized we were in the most radically conservative church either of us had ever been to. The minister was a large and kinda sloppy man, but he had a real aggression in him. His rambling message was all about prosthelatizing, peppered with bits about Hell and the domination of men over women, and whenever he felt like he’d made a killer point that hadn’t gotten its due from the crowd, he would say, “I think that deserves an amen, don’t you?” And while he was speaking, before he brought up a trembling ex-gay with a testimony about how Abba Father had cured his affliction of homosexuality, the minister said this of his own sermon: “I’m blowing your mind right now. And the reason I’m blowing your mind is because you’re not used to people telling you the truth.”

I don’t think the familiar can be made strange, I think the familiar can be limitlessly mined for the strange that was there all along. It’s the recognition that makes it satisfying. And for that quality, I think “Louie” might just be the best show on TV right now.

4. Some literary magazine editors say that their position as editor affects their own writing/writing process; others say, “Not really.”  How has being the editor of Dark Sky Magazine affected (or not affected) your relationship with your writing?

You can’t edit a magazine without quickly discovering that all editors for any magazine are just people like you. And with that knowledge ever in place, you can never again fault one of them for rejecting your writing. Taste is mysterious.

I am not going to fact-check this—They did a study: They put the subjects in front of a box of posters. To half of the subjects, they said, “Take whatever poster you want.” And the most popular poster was an image, no text, with this cool ineffable quality. And to the other half of the subjects, they said, “Take whatever poster you want, but first tell us why you picked it.” And the most popular poster was some stupid motivational poster with a caption about following your dreams or something. They picked the motivational poster because they could think of something to say about it, an easy justification for their decision.

Because I never have to explain my decisions, I think editing pushes me further toward the “know it when I see it” and away from “here’s why I like it,” and that’s got to help my writing.

5. What writing projects are you working on right now?

Before too long, J.A. Tyler and I will embark on the edits for my first book, FUN CAMP, due from Mud Luscious Press about a year from now. And I’ve got a story collection in the drawer.

At the moment, though, I’m working exclusively on a nonfiction account of September 22, 2011, and have slowly been becoming the expert on that date. And there are no other experts on that particular date, so I’m breaking ground on an entirely new field of study. It involves looking up a lot of stuff on the internet.

How I know it’s a good project for me is that before I was writing it, I would try to work on my writing and then accidentally find myself on the internet. Now whenever I try to go for a relaxing stroll on the internet, I accidentally find myself doing research for the book.

6.  What knockout writing have you been reading recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

Okay, ready?

Recently I blew through a number of the short books that had been happily accumulating: Victory by Ben Kopel (wildly openhearted teen punk poems edited with a brain—most ecstatic voice since Bailey’s Drunk Sonnets), For Out the Heart Proceed by Jensen Beach (calm and sly short stories of fathers discovering ugliness and glory inside themselves—even when they’re not fathers, they’re fathers), Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell (my favorite is easily “Justine,” in which three daughters put their philandering father on trial and enact swift justice, taking first a thumb and then more), Baby Leg by Brian Evenson (one of those cool recursive loop books—you can tell early on the end is headed straight for the beginning), Life Is with Other People by Atticus Lish (book of evil sketches in which the artist makes great use of the opportunity for surprise in the distance between drawing and caption, and even greater use of the dramatic effect of the hair on a hairy man), and A Cloth House by Joe Riipi (a short and emotionally raw story of loss).

I just taught my reading class Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a short novel I really admire about a guy using journalistic tricks to try and figure out how it was possible that his friend got murdered when nearly everyone in town knew it was going to happen. The book juggles an enormous cast of characters, dips from past to present whenever it wants, and maintains a complicated register that is both darkly funny and not at all. There’s no fluff—I like it much more than Hundred Years of Solitude.

Also, Mel Bosworth has loaned me the autobiography of Felicia “Snoop” Pearson. She had it tough. Michael K. Williams recruited her for The Wire just by watching her in the club one night, convinced her to go audition. She continued selling all throughout the shooting of Season 3 before giving it up.

On deck: Wise Blood and some Alice Munro stories. And I just found out today that the new Leni Zumas novel is out, which I got to publish a bit of last year when I was editing Keyhole Magazine last year. Her fiction is consistently terrific—I’m eager to read it.

"So as Not to Give Away His Predicament": An Interview-in-Excerpts With Robert James Russell

Robert James Russell is author of Sea of Trees (Winter Goose Publishing, 2012). His fiction and poetry has appeared in  Joyland, Thunderclap! Magazine, Red River Review, LITSNACK, Greatest Lakes Review, and The Legendary, among others. He is the co-founding editor of Midwestern Gothic. Find him online at www.robertjamesrussell.com.

An excerpt from Sea of Trees appears in Issue Thirty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Robert James Russell answers questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from Sea of Trees.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Inside Shinji felt different—more powerful. He picked up the nearest racing form and scoured it for information, watching others like him and feeling, for the first time, superior. With the brick of money in his coat pocket he selected what he thought were sure bets. As he approached the teller—an automated machine could not be trusted with this sum—he had planned on making a few small bets, at least today, a few trifectas, perhaps even an exacta, but as he stood there, the young girl on the other side waiting for him to place his bet, the words slipped out on their own: “Pick six. Two-point-five million.” The girl processed the money with little regard for this man, and when she handed over the ticket, Shinji took it and held it like an infant—careful not to crumple or crease it on his trek to the stands.

2. What isn’t writing like?

She hiked another thirty minutes into the woods, assured she was now alone, stopping near a small shrine someone had erected to the memory of a loved one, someone else who had died sometime before, and Kimiho wondered if anyone would erect one in her honor—but figured probably not. She walked away from the path directly into the woods then kneeled and emptied the belongings of her purse onto the ground and sorted through them: make-up she never wore for Dai, a phone she used to use to call Orito with, various trinkets that reminded her of how horrible she had been, then: the gun. She picked it up and felt the weight of it and imagined her grandfather in the cramped cockpit, the great whirring of the jet engines surrounding him as he flew to his death in order to protect his country—his family. Kimiho then placed the pistol in her mouth, the barrel cold on her tongue, and thought only of Dai’s smiling face on their wedding day as she pulled the trigger.

3. When you do it, why?

Every time I find it more beautiful than the last.

4. When you don’t, why?

He vomited at his desk and was told to go home. His mind spun, his body had become numb, floating him everywhere, his feet inches off the ground, in a daze, completely oblivious to everything. Every idea he could think of, every scheme and notion that popped into his head in order to get the money back, was greeted ultimately with failure. He had no extended family he could ask for help—neither he nor his wife came from money—and he had no real friends he could confide in, not for something like this, anyway. So he watched the days tick away, unable to do anything, spending the time with his family while he could, watching them and crying when they were not looking, so as not to give away his predicament.

"These Streets Stitched Your Eyes Asleep": An Interview With Jane Wong

Jane Wong received her MFA from the University of Iowa and is a former Fulbright Fellow. She is also the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle. Poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in CutBank, Mid-American Review, Versal, Octopus, Barrow Street, The Journal, Front Porch, and others. She has two chapbooks: Dendrochronology (dancing girl press, 2011) and the forthcoming Impossible Map (Fact-Simile).

Here, Jane Wong talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the before, the after, and imagery as a rest stop. 

1. Could you talk about how you went about writing “Centipede”? 

“Centipede” is from a longer series of poems called Kudzu Does Not Stop that I wrote when I moved to Seattle. I’ve always been driven by narrative and poems that continually echo off each other. In fact, “Centipede” opens in the middle of things. I really wanted this poem to focus on the imaginative eye, which transforms the terrifying/the ugly into something magical. So that the curled end of a rug becomes a wave, becomes the memory of my brother going too far into the sea, becomes my distance from him, becomes the materiality of the centipede which lives underneath everything. I’ve always wanted to see the ugly animal thing, to hold onto it, and maybe become the ugly thing itself: “moth” right through. I also couldn’t help but have Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” in the back of my head, as one of those totally terrifying and tender poems.

2. In reading “Before the War,” I noticed a sort of semi-theme amongst your poems.  In them, you tend to talk about the way things were before and after a specific event.  In “Before the War,” it’s obvious, “Before the war, / these streets stitched your eyes / asleep.”  But I also see it in “Drift,” the way the whale turns into pieces of a whale, how the speaker refers to herself stuck in the way things used to be, “fallen / phlox upon my floor” and the “This is a distance I do not want / to keep but I keep / returning to.”  Could you talk about how this sense of before and after integrates itself into your poems?

Wow, thank you for such a generous reading! Maybe a way of answering this question is that I tend to situate myself in a state of continual aftermath: the “after” becoming the “before” becoming the “after” and so on.  The consequences of history and how we construct time has always been important to me. Especially with “Drift,” I had this sense of circularity and return. As Emerson writes, “under every deep a lower deep opens.” I remember writing this poem after leaving Iowa, trying to figure out what to do next. I wanted to write something that honored that feeling of loss I had. I started writing this poem after watching a time-lapse sequence where a whale disappears over time on the sea floor. And to think, it was so whole! This massive thing returning back to the sea, piece by piece.

3. Your poems move seamlessly between images: in “Drift,” you move from the whale, to the body, to October and the geese.  In “Centipede,” you move from the morning with the coats to the brother in the Atlantic, back to the coats.  Could you talk about how you move between images and why you choose the images that you do? 

When I started to write poems, I tried to make clear connections between images. I loved “or,” “like,” “as if,” and “how a.” Someone once told me that I needed a “rest note” between my images. The danger? Accumulation. But what if the images themselves are rest notes? A place where you can dwell and expand for a moment? I realized that I didn’t have to use connectors if I didn’t want to. I think moving from image to image is partly this bratty proclamation and partly trusting myself to follow my imagination. I have always loved imagery. I love the material of the world. And in particular, I love the material of the world that I feel connected to and moved by. I wouldn’t throw in a wolf if I didn’t care about that wolf being there. The image of my brother in the Atlantic is a really clear one for me; I remember his little arms, the shiny black hair under the sun, and the confusion over distance (how far out was he, really?). And I remember the physical reaction I had when seeing him, as if something was coming up my throat. I like to think that there is a story behind each image, that images are alive. They can break us open.

4. What have you read recently that’s caught you off guard? 

So much! I’m caught off guard so often, I don’t know how I stay leveled! I recently read Dawn Lundy-Martin’s Discipline and was struck by its necessary bravery. Also, Susan Howe’s That This shook me in its intimacy. Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice has been particularly inviting, since I’ve been re-reading Emerson and Thoreau. Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem caught me off guard with sound. CA Conrad’s fragments in The Book of Frank create such a transformative narrative. Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting marvelously crosses so many distances (home, national identity, the material of language itself, etc.). And Mina Loy still strikes me with her ferocity in language, light, and love of the hideous.

5. What else have you been writing recently?

Good question! I’m doing a critical Ph.D. at the University of Washington, which doesn’t allow for too much time writing poems. But this also creates a positive kind of pressure. Right now, I’m going back to my first manuscript and swapping some old poems with new ones. I’m excited to see how these new poems echo against older ones. I’m excited to return to writing long, serial poems – a form that feels closer to how I approach writing. Almost like a continual postscript. I have such trouble writing a poem that sits on its own! The most recent project I’ve been working on is Kudzu Does Not Stop, which is chapbook-length. These poems merge my childhood with invasive species and ugly things we love to kill (i.e. my mother smashing a cockroach with her fist… oh, the pleasures of growing up in a take-out in Jersey). 

"Swallowed Altogether Into the Belly of the Earth": An Interview-in-Excerpts With Kirby Gann

Described in the blogosphere as one of the nation’s most underrated writers, Kirby Gann is the author of the novels The Barbarian Parade (2004) and Our Napoleon in Rags (2005). He is also co-editor (with poet Kristin Herbert) of the anthology A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play, which was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Anthologies). His work has appeared most recently in The Lumberyard and The Oxford American, among other journals. He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and two Professional Assistance Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, and an Honorable Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology.  Gann is Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.

An excerpt from Gann's novel Ghosting appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Gann answers interviews "in the form of excerpts"--with further exceprts from Ghosting.

1.  What is writing like?

The light from his hand works like an intangible guiding rope drawing him behind its lead. He has been in this place many times before, yet at each entry feels utterly lost—even, in some way, bereft; his heart in his throat. It has always struck him as the backdrop to undesirable dreams: inexhaustible in its rooms, tangled by puzzling stairways and corridors, often presenting mystical compartments with no function he can divine. In dreams he has staggered from hall to hall with slow-thighed dogs panting unseen behind him; he has fled down stairs and stone slides; he has been swallowed altogether into the belly of the earth. As if this building masked a portal that led deep into ancient caverns, sculpted by slicked flues and hidden rivers.

2.  What isn’t writing like?

When Ponder finds the desired verse he raises his free hand and signals the audience with splayed fingers again. “Thou has caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water: but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place. ‘How’s that strike you,’ God asked. I told Him He was the Man. He reminded me: God’s Will never leads you where God’s Grace will not protect you. And He reminded me again, ‘Check Deuteronomy eight-eighteen.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the ability to produce wealth.”

3. When you do it, why?

The shotgun sits across the Adirondack’s armrests like the safety bar on a thrill ride, the barrel anchoring his elbow to steady his hands (clothed in fingerless gloves) as he reads. Spillane and MacDonald novels, mostly, but he’ll take whatever mysteries they got at the secondhand shop in Foster, even the occasional Western. He especially likes accounts of the gangster heyday before the war, the stories of Capone, the Barker-Karpis gang, Pretty Boy Floyd (who was nowhere near pretty, Erly has seen pictures). Stoned or sober he reads deep into the night while Greuel and guests curse and joke over cards and business inside. He reads and then drifts into daydream—wonders if daydream is still the word for it when it occurs after dark—and considers how he might invent a better story than many of the authors he has read. If he were to ever recount on paper the things he has seen! In fact he has composed eventful beginnings, harrowing scenes of suspense, chases that lay waste to entire towns; designed foul murders and extortion schemes and methods of blackmail that would land him lauded in Hollywood if he could set them down, lay them out (what would Greuel and his illiterate cronies have to say to Professor Mule—that odious nickname—then?). But then with sunrise comes sleep. When he awakens his mind is a clear slate, empty of the scenarios conceived the night before. On the rare occasion that he can recall a snatch of story or a line of dialogue it never seems as thrilling as it had in the throes of creation. Characters never seem to get their due. Mule conceives a failure to all the murder mysteries he kills time with in that they center on one person only, an investigator who uncovers clues by clever wit and judicious brawn, and in real life no story works like that. In real life a story occurs among legions; to understand the story you have to know all the people it touches, too. The disappointment he feels after finishing a novel is that there’s nothing more than a problem solved, and everyone in it except for the main guy exists to tweak the problem one way or another, they’re either bad or good or torn between the two and have no life outside their brief appearance on the page. These authors narrow the scope too far; even a murderer with the coldest blood has his hopes and dreams. 

4.  When you don’t, why? 

The moment was as he had hoped it would be, his tongue searching hers, this instant so longed for in secret and with the guilt of a brother’s betrayal, but these concerns fell aside easily as his hands, his arms, came alive. It did not take long before he was naked above her. She cradled his face in her hands, casting warm smiles into his own. They wrestled one another, twined themselves in the blankets; he pressed into her and tried to slide her jeans down but she was adept at preventing him, he couldn’t figure how she managed it, a twisting of her body or a flex to her legs so that, somehow, the jeans would not move. He tried everything he could, shifting his mouth from hers to her jaw and to her neck and then down, taking in the palm-sized wonder of her breasts and the smooth belly, managing to get his tongue to graze the top of her pubic line and inhaling the deep true smell of her there—but her hand grasped his jaw gently and tugged him up again. Over the next hour the bed turned on dyskinetic awkwardnesses: Shady over-ardent, almost penitent, Cole relaxing, forcing himself to a degree of calm in disappointment. The jeans stayed on. Soon the kisses shortened, died away, and he rolled onto his back, drawing the sheet over his waist, painfully aware of his full nakedness next to her half-clothed.

“I’m sorry, Cole,” she whispered. “I’m not ready.”

Collagist Podcast Episode 7: Nate Pritts reads "The Translation"

"The Translation" appears in Issue 32 of The Collagist. We are especially impressed with Nate's sonorous reading voice here. Hope you will be, too.

Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing.  His poetry & prose have been published widely, both online & in print & on barns, at places like Forklift, Ohio, Court Green, Untoward, and PopMatters, as well as Rain Taxi and Boston Review where he frequently contributes reviews. He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal & small press.

Episode 7: Nate Pritts reads "The Translation"

"The Night Sky Crashes White": An Interview-in-Excerpts With Justin Sirois

Justin Sirois is a writer living in Baltimore, Maryland. His books include Secondary Sound, MLKNG SCKLS, and Falcons on the Floor, written with Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy. He also runs the Understanding Campaign with Haneen and co-directs Narrow House. Justin has received several individual Maryland State Art Council grants and a Baker "b" grant in 2011.

An excerpt from Falcons on the Floor appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Justin Sirois answers questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from Falcons on the Floor.

1. What is writing like?

Fleeing blindly in the failing dusk, Khalil and I scramble free, the burning city behind us. We scale toppled walls and blown brick hovels. We run through market squares and the crippled township, to the river running west and closer.

All I can think of is Rana and how she’ll assume I’m dead if I don’t contact her soon. Her family was smart to flee to Syria before the real war began. Before the siege and the fire within it.

Khalil pushes my backpack from behind. We reached the stone plateau, slipping on talcum, hints of gypsum.

The night sky crashes white. We turn toward Fallujah. Empty steel drums roll under clouds. A few drop on the town, sending ripples through our teeth. Great gales of depleted uranium scatter like seed. Deltas of oil smoke leech the sky.

We breathe like dogs.

The river is at our backs.

In the quiet muck, we’re alone.

2. What isn’t writing like?

We took position after clearing the building, SnackWell covering the exit while I waited for the target.

We could see all of Ramadi from that roof.

I remember the dump mostly.  

Cooked by the evening sun, moldering dunes of garbage fumed putrid and persistent. Westward gales flapped great aprons of rot over the rooftop. A recent avalanche had breached a hole in the garbage mountain, releasing pus and milky seepage into the breeze. No one dared roam too close to its perimeters spread deep – and neither did we – as concoctions of boiled piss wafted off the range. It only added to the misery of the inflicted city.

It was perfect. Who would spot us here, three stories above the sizzling junk?

“Anything?”

“Target’s in route,” I said.

We knew where they were going.

“Target has entered site Calico.”

Site Calico was what we called the café. They’d been there night after night.

3. When you do it, why?

Embers sparkled, perishing in the wind. The rancid tang of phosphorus chlorinated their tongues until it was all they could taste. Khalil turned. He didn’t lean down to retrieve the rifle.

4. When you don’t, why?

It was my mother.

"The Power to Make Me Forget": An Interview-in-Excerpts With Jac Jemc

Jac Jemc lives in Chicago.  Her first novel, My Only Wife, is out now from Dzanc Books.  Her chapbook of stories, These Strangers She'd Invited In, sold out from Greying Ghost Press in 2011 and she's the poetry editor for decomp.  She blogs her rejections at jacjemc.com. 

An excerpt from My Only Wife appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Jac Jemc answers questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from My Only Wife.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

I liked the broad inflations of her chest on the inhale.  I liked the collapse of her shoulders, heavy with all that weight, on the exhale.

2. What isn’t writing like?

My wife looked at me expectantly and I forgot everything I had planned to say.  My wife had the power to make me forget: a bittersweet fact, for when I needed most to forget, she was gone.

3. When you do it, why?

“Did you want me to say something?” “I thought you were going to say something.”

4. When you don’t, why?

“You know better,” she said, locking it behind her and struggling to reattach the bracelet to her wrist, key dangling.

"Multitude of Selves": An Interview with Corey Van Landingham

Corey Van Landingham recently completed her MFA at Purdue University, where she was Poetry Editor of Sycamore Review. She has won the Indiana Review's 1/2 K Prize, the 2012 AWP Into Journals Award, an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and was awarded a Bread Loaf Work-Study Scholarship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, Devil’s Lake, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Redivider, Third Coast, TYPO, Washington Square Review and West Branch.

Corey’s poems “Parallax Designed as Endless Disappointment” and “Diurnal” appear in Issue Thirty-One of The Collagist.

Here, she talks with interviewer Amber L. Cook about writing in and out of forms that are uncomfortable, unsettling, and undoing of themselves.

1. Where did these particular poems, “Parallax Designed as Endless Disappointment” and “Diurnal” originate from respectively?

Unlike most of my poems, “Parallax Designed as Endless Disappointment” stemmed from a specific image I kept coming back to, that of Tereza’s dream in The Unbearable Lightness of Being with all the women marching around the swimming pool while Tomas shoots them one by one. Kundera writes: “She was ready to dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of her body.” I kept coming back to this idea of agency (or the lack of it), and how it seemed almost liberating to Tereza. That has always been maddening to me, as is a country (or its leaders) telling women what to do (which seems quite relevant right now). This seems more didactic and political than my poem ends up being, I think, but it does seem to harken back to a gaggle of people telling the speaker what to do, and, ultimately, her being unable to escape any of it (except maybe with a really good cup of coffee).

“Diurnal” began, as an embarrassingly large number of my poems do, during a storm (thank you, Indiana!). Aren’t big storms so simultaneously scary and sexy? This seems a good mental place to begin a poem to me. To begin with, there was a “you” in the poem as well, and the “girl on the floor” was largely passive, perhaps some failed metaphor for a failed relationship. Ho hum. Instead, the poem wanted to navigate a plurality of selves, so I let it.

2. I love the repetitions of “some days” in “Parallax” and “a person can” in “Dinural.” How do you see these repetitions morphing or staying the same when they are used again and again? How does repetition work for you in these poems?

I’m really interested in anaphora and its capabilities, its benefits and drawbacks. It can seem like an easy poetic device, something to return to when the poem slows down. But it has the ability to create such an interesting emotional space. There’s this artist, Kara Walker, who casts these silhouetted figures onto the walls of a room to create an interesting kind of gothic feeling. There’s this one piece where she did so in a round room, so that there was a kind of narrative that never began or ended, or, rather, was always beginning and ending. I wondered how a poem might do something similar, and I decided that might be a role anaphora could play.

Both of these poems feel really claustrophobic to me, in that they are both birthed and bound by their respective repetitions. While there are moments of departure, each poem is unable to escape the anaphora, which, at least to me, falls back to the mental state of the speaker. For me, repetition creates a comfortable pattern that can then be used to create discomfort in its breakage. It places the reader in its lap and strokes its hair repeatedly, so that when it’s replaced by something sinister (what nice hair you have!) it almost goes unnoticed.

3.  I’m so drawn in by your language, especially when you write something so jarring like: “A person can/ say things that cleave open the roof like a falling tree.” How do you see the forms (stepped couplets and tercet lines) of your poems informing the language? What else is working to inform things like line break, pronoun shifts, etc.?

I wish form informed my language more, as this seems to be the case with so many poets I admire. Form often comes last for me, and each poem often gets forced into many different, uncomfortable forms before it finds the right one. More so than stanzas, I’d say the long line has had more of an influence. I’ve always thought longer lines were more suited to narrative poems, of which I write very few, and so I’m interested in the pressure put on a lyric poem when it’s forced out of its comfort level. The amalgamation of images goes back to that idea of claustrophobia, I think, so that the silence that has always comes so easily to the lyric poem is interrupted. Ultimately, too, these forms—the couplet and the tercet—seem somewhat unsettling to me. And I do write to unsettle. The couplet seems to force two things together and make them confront each other. The tercet seems to enact a kind of third-wheel awkwardness.

The pronoun shifts in “Diurnal” go back to the idea of multitudes of selves. Because, really, what poet can say that any “she” or “he” or “you” in a body of work doesn’t have an “I” involved, too? I feel, as a younger poet, like I’m supposed to distrust the “I,” to distrust poems with ideas about the self. It’s something that I think about a lot. And so I wanted to write a couple of poems that seemed to go over the top with them, to get almost vitriolic in the aggressive use of the “I” and the self.

4. Who have you been reading lately that you’re especially fond of?

Oh, let’s see. My problem is often that I’m often too fond of everything! I have recently been reading Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning and Tracy Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins, both of which are lovely, and I’m trying not to devour them too quickly. I just finished Stacy Gnall’s Heart First Into the Forest, which I wish so badly I had written. I’ve been reading a lot of Paul Celan lately, too.

It’s also always important for me to have something around that I’m mining for material, and right now that’s The Encyclopedia of the Occult—demons and devils and witches, oh my!

5. Are these poems part of the same project? Different projects? What other projects are you working on?

I wouldn’t really call it a project, but these poems are both from my manuscript Dear Body Count, Dear Bother.

I’ve been wary of projects as they seem so in, now, but hell, that’s a silly reason not to do something. I recently began a series of prose poems enacting surrealist reinterpretations of Annunciation scenes, where Mary has a lot more agency, and isn’t just passively being impregnated by some creepy light. 

"Remembering a Certain Memory an Uncertain Way": An Interview-In-Excerpts With Joseph Riippi

Joseph Riippi is author most recently of A Cloth House (Housefire Publishing, 2012) and Treesisters (Greying Ghost Press, 2012). His other books include The Orange Suitcase (2011) and Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! (2009), both from Ampersand Books. He lives with his wife in New York City. Say hello:www.josephriippi.com. 

An excerpt from A Cloth House appears in Issue Thirty-Three of the Collagist.

Here, Riippi answers questions in-the-form-of-excerpts--with further excerpts from A Cloth House.  Enjoy!

 1. What is writing like?

Scientists say a person remembers moments better when they hurt, when there is pain, because of the way the brain works, associatively. You remember not to touch
 an oven after touching it once. A dog learns not to pee 
in the house because its owner will scold and drag her outside by the collar. Harsh tones and dragging hurt. (p 80)

2. What isn’t writing like?

Something to pass the time. (p 88)

3. When you do it, why?

Our mother is dead and there are so many stories she never told. Not full, never finished. Maybe she never meant to. Whether or not she believed she had done sufficient things in life so that it could be considered worth something, for instance, I do not know for sure. 
 I would like to think she believed she had. I work at remembering her that way, if only because a mother deserves to be honored by her children, and because it might change the way others remember her. Life in death is memory only, familiar to imagination, a dead friend not wholly unlike the imaginary friends of childhood we encounter under sheets and in daydream daze. A person can do that, you see. Can work at remembering
 a certain memory an uncertain way, can mold it into something new, change history, a mother’s story. It is not like the love of our father’s god, which cannot be helped or changed or forced any more than lapping waves or crisping wind. Memory is nothing like love or ocean. (p 39)

4. When you don’t, why?

Who knows why we do what we do? Who is to judge?...Maybe all of this is just bad memories changing. Maybe you were never even born…I don’t remember quite right. (p 52, 62, 86)

"Wisdom While You Wait": An Interview-in-Excerpts With William Walsh

William Walsh is the author of Unknown Arts, Ampersand, Mass., Pathologies, Questionstruck (all from Keyhole Press), and Without Wax: A Documentary Novel (Casperian Books). He edited an anthology of fictional appropriations called RE:Tellng (Ampersand Books). His work has appeared in Annalemma, Artifice, Juked, New York Tyrant, Lit, No Colony, Caketrain, Quarterly West, Rosebud, and other journals. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their four children.

An excerpt from Unknown Arts appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Walsh answers questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from Unknown Arts.

All responses are derived from Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922.

He reflected on the pleasures derived from the literature of instruction rather than of amusement as applied to the works of William Shakespeare for the solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life.

1. What is writing like?

Two apples a penny! Two for a penny! That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn. Like Shakespeare's face. Shakespeare's reverence.

I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you. After God Shakespeare has created most. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.

Too poetical that. Music did that. Music hath charms, Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Shakespeare's ghost. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied HAMLET all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. Shakespeare, a ghost by absence. The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake.

Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. praises of Shakespeare's songs ineluctably preconditioned to become. What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare?

3. When you do it, why?

To create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet.

(And) payment at the rate of one guinea a column to the writer. With the help of God and His blessed mother, I'll make it my business to write.

4. When you don’t, why?

The birth of William Shakespeare over delta in the recumbent neversetting constellation of Cassiopeia.

(And) the plays of Shakespeare's later years. Shakespeare himself forgot. Good Bacon: gone musty. Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare. Shakespeare. Shrewridden Shakespeare…

THE FACE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, BEARDLESS, APPEARS. IN THE MIRROR.

What does Shakespeare say?

—GOODBYE, NOW, GOODBYE! WRITE DOWN ALL I SAID AND TELL TOM, DIEK AND HARRY I ROSE FROM THE DEAD. WHAT'S BRED IN THE BONE CANNOT FAIL ME TO FLY... GOODBYE, NOW, GOODBYE!