"Each Line Ending is a Little Death": An Interview with Elisa Gabbert

Elisa Gabbert is the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010) and The Self Unstable (forthcoming from Black Ocean in 2013). Her poems, prose, and collaborations have recently appeared in journals including Another Chicago Magazine, Conduit, Court Green, Notre Dame Review, Salt Hill, and Sentence. She blogs at http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com.

Her poem "After the Piano" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Elisa Gabbert speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about pianos, what Chuck Norris has to say, lineation, and vacancy.  

1. How did you begin writing “After the Piano”?

I can’t remember exactly what my point of entry was. I know that I started writing it in my head at a Perfume Genius show on Broadway in Denver. That’s the setting for the poem, insofar as it has a setting outside my head. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the minute differences in circumstance that can produce happiness one day and existential despair the next. I do really have a friend named Tina (the poet Tina Brown Celona) and she really did tell me that things change. I suppose I started writing the poem from the beginning, but bits and pieces of the lines had been gestating for a couple of weeks I think – I am obsessed with paraphrasing “You must change your life” – and the “hanging suspended”/“like a blade” metaphor is actually lifted from a poem I wrote many years ago, a persona poem told from the perspective of a rapist.

2. How do you hope your line/stanza breaks are working? In lines like “my brother loves me//but he doesn’t miss me,” for instance, do you intend for the stanza break to be a cliff, a waiting period, delusion, silence, a reckoning?

I always try to think more about lines as lines, as units, rather than focusing on the “breaks,” which makes it seem like the end of the line has some monopoly on poetic meaning. That said, I think the element of surprise, to quote Chuck Norris, can and often should play a part in the structure of a lineated poem. A line break can force you to linger a little longer on a word or phrase, slowing down the anticipatory reading we do when reading prose. If it’s too much of a cliff-hanger or bait-and-switch, it can get gimmicky; you want the break to cause some semantic blooming, some expanded resonance, but not to feel all, “See what I did there?” In any case, when lines work, it doesn’t seem like someone labored over the breaks; it feels like the lines reveal a pattern of thought, the rhythm of the thoughts. (Also, I kind of like the idea of a break as a moment of silence, like each line ending is a little death.)

3. What role does absence play in your poetry, in your titles?  A whole piano seems removed from the room in this piece, grooves in the carpet, chord held and diminishing : “hanging suspended on the chord//like a blade,” before the piece even begins.  Does absence play a different kind of white-space-role for you?  How do you hope your readers grapple with vacancy?

“A whole piano seems removed” is a beautiful way to think about writing. Mention a piano in a poem and the reader is forced to confront the absence of piano! I don’t believe in “No ideas but in things” (ideas are things!), but things in poems create things in your mind and those stand in contrast to the “actual” things outside your mind, and I like that doubling/shadowing. (Poetry makes nothing happen my ass.) I don’t think of this absence as white space. Thought space is clear and in color at the same time. Anyway, you’ve discovered something in the poem I didn’t realize was there – the poem ends up being about absence (“the difference between something and nothing,” the missing brother), but I wasn’t conscious of the way the missing piano sort of primes you to the idea of vacancy.

4. What have you been reading recently?

This weekend I read Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, a German Christmas novella, and a chapbook in manuscript form by Jeff Alessandrelli. And the January issue of Food & Wine. Before that, the last novel I read was Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and the last poetry book I read was Nervous Device by Catherine Wagner.

5. Is this piece part of a series, or have you other projects blossoming, finishing, unfurling undone?

For the past couple of years I’ve been working on a prose manuscript (maybe prose poems, maybe poetry-essay hybrids, maybe koans, IDK). In that time I’ve only written a handful of poems in lines, and this is one of them. You know what I said about lines revealing patterns of thought? I guess I’ve gotten out of the habit of thinking in lines. Instead I am thinking in sentences.

"A Photograph of Someone Who Was No Longer There": An Interview with Jess Stoner

Jess Stoner is the author of the novel I Have Blinded Myself Writing This from Hobart's Short Flight / Long Drive Books and the choose-your-own adventure poetry chapbook You're Going to Die Jess Wigent from Fact-Simile.  Her book reviews, poems, essays, and short stories have been published or are forthcoming in Necessary Fiction, The Rumpus, Two Serious Ladies, Alice Blue Review, Super Arrow and other handsome journals.  She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Denver and now lives with her linguist-of-rollerblading husband, Frank, in Austin.

Her essay "To Look Lifelike in a Photograph One Must First Pose as if Dead" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Jess Stoner talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about post-mortem photography, interactivity with inviting literature, and the ancient, urgent question of truth with a capital T.

1) What made you decide to write an essay about photographs and the people in them? Was the impetus for this piece a particular photograph or series of photos?

The essay is part of a collection of, well, I guess I’m calling it a novel of essays called Because of you I am a photograph.  The title comes from this great moment in Tod Papageorge’s Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography which comes from something Papageorge said, in accidentally bad French, when he bumped into Henri Cartier Bresson in Central Park. The impetus for the entire project is this one tiny moment from Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, this idea of a “literate projector,” which turns image into text and “enables the user to fail insignificantly / and at the same time show up / behind a vocabulary of How It Is”.  And while in her introduction to Dorn’s epic poem, Marjorie Perloff calls the literate projector the “ultimate useless technological tool,” I was entranced and found the futility inherent in that device full of endless possibilities. As for the images, they come before I write the text, or they come after or during, it really depends—in this essay, I was thinking about how I wanted to write an essay about the people who broke me in the past (to be honest, at least for some of them, in a really vengeful way), and then I had previously been obsessed with post-mortem photography, so everything came together, at least for me.  Each chapter in the novel revolves around a kind of photography—a family portrait, a mugshot, a photo album, a crime scene photo, etc. 

2) How did you choose the photographs included in this piece? Where did they come from?

I knew if I wanted to talk about exes, to talk about people from the past, the only way to do that was to use post-mortem photos—this tradition, to me, is so fascinating and demonstrates so exquisitely the relationship to absence and presence.  It was such a heartbreaking and important tradition—the need to have a photograph of someone who was no longer there, so they would always be there.  There are beautiful books of post-mortem photographs like Stanley Burns’ Sleeping Beauty and the weird, weird, whatever they are in Wisconsin Death Trip, though I usually find the photographs I’m using by sifting through the Smithsonian’s online archive—the last photograph I used in the essay I found because the caption said “Man with Cat” and I knew I had found what I needed for something that I would eventually write.  In getting a “feel” for the photographs I need, I buy all the books that Terry recommends at Vertigo and I’ve also have spent the last two years stealing photography theory syllabi and then reading everything the professors assign. This is how I found Geoffrey Batchen, who I think is one of the most exciting and intellectually and emotionally engaging photography academics; his writings have inspired me to seek out and incorporate different kinds of images and to think around them in ways I would never have expected. 

3) In this essay you write, "Photography, some argue, captures too much information to function as memory. It obeys the rules of creative non-fiction: everything is malleable." This made me wonder: can there really be said to be any rules of creative nonfiction? How far, then, are works of creative nonfiction from the reality of events described? 

This is an ancient, urgent question.  Errol Morris’ Believing is Seeing is a revelatory exploration of how we can ever know what we see is what we’re actually seeing anyway, and it invites the question afterwards, of how is it that we can write about what we saw if we can’t even be sure what we know what we’re seeing or experiencing is what it is.  There was a nice big fight about this via Triquarterly in November, when they published a previously published essay called “The Facts of the Matter.” I wrote, let’s just call it a “scathing” response, about the author’s insistence that there is somewhere truth with a capital T and that that’s the creative non-fiction writer’s only path.   Jill Talbot’s anthology, Metawritings: Towards a Theory of Nonfiction, where the essay was previously published, has pieces from Pam Houston, Robin Hemley, Ander Monson and others which approach this complicated idea in inventive and open ways.  It’s one of those things, I think, that we circle around and circle around and come closer to but never arrive at.  Maybe I’m just a slave to ontological pluralism, maybe that makes my reasoning intellectually specious or something, but what the hell, I guess I don’t care.  That being said, I’ve been nervous about what to call these chapters/essays of mine. Included in them are a whole bunch of things that are my versions of things that happened to me, but I’m not sure about calling them non-fiction, because sometimes I know for sure they’re probably fiction, except that I want them to be engaged in theories of photography, which seems to be in the realm of nonfiction.   For the past seven years, I’ve been reading The Blue Cliff Record on and off, and one of the koans goes “When you get to this point, as to whether there is something or there isn’t anything, pick and you fail.” Whatever in the hell that means, that’s what I think, I think.

4) Your bio says you are the author of a "choose-your-own adventure poetry chapbook." What inspired you to adopt this form of children's writing for your poetry? (Do you think more literature should be interactive for the reader?) 

Interactivity is my goal, always.  And it’s always my hope, as a reader, that I’ll be invited to participate as well.  I just want to be invited.  Not necessarily challenged or goaded. Invited.  Like the book buys my next pint and inebriates me into going back to its apartment or at least participating in its meaning, which seems less than child-like (I hope).  There are so many ways of doing this: caring about characters, feeling the need to flip back and forth between the pages of a book.  This connects to my wanting to have the physical, emotional, and intellectual connection to a text.  I want it all, I want everything, and I feel like it’s fair to expect that, as a reader. 

5) What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

I spent the last few weeks reading every piece of fiction online I could find that was published this year to write a year-end-review for Necessary Fiction.  All of them, like Justin L. Daughtery’s “What Men’s Deed’s Do” and  Anne Valente’s “Mollusk, Membrane, Human Heart” and Saeed Jones’s “Boy, a History” do something to me that made me want so badly to share them with a stranger. I’ve also been listening to Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, which the New York Times called “lionhearted” and I do not disagree.  I’ve also been plowing through Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen’s Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, which is important and makes me hysterical, like shaking in my car thinking about it hysterical. My to-be-read pile is criminal, but the beginning of this year has been chock-full of romantica (erotica/romance). Kristen Ashley self-publishes her novels and I’ve read seven of them in the first days of the new year.  This, in the romance world, is called “glomming.”

6) What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m still working on Because of you, and am in the middle of a number of different projects, including a romance novel and a book about my year spent on an island in Wales.  I was lucky enough to watch Matt Hart do his thing in Austin a while back, and have been thinking about poetry a lot lately, because he reminded me of what I forgot it can do, although mostly, I find myself drawn to essaying as I’ve been reading supreme court oral arguments and amicus briefs and the Alabama Constitution and all the ways in which our country quietly keeps people from voting that are criminal and antithetical to democracy.  It is utterly miraculous that anything I write ever gets finished.   

"Signs, Suspicion, Sideways Luck": An Interview with Leah Bailly

Leah Bailly is a Canadian fiction writer currently working on a PhD at USC in Los Angeles. Lately, her fiction has appeared in subTerrain, Pank, Hobart, Diagram and in the anthology of Las Vegas fiction Restless City. "Born Again" is from a collection of linked stories titled The Vegaboy Chronicles.

Her story "Born Again" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Leah Bailly speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about Vegas, rebirth, and the urge to move relentlessly.

1. How did you begin this particular piece from The Vegaboy Chronicles?  Where does it fall in the chronology of the other linked stories?

There are five principal characters in these chronicles: Vegaboy, his girlfriend Slots-a-Fun, Bosscat, Captain Rick, and this narrator, a nameless man I hardly knew. I started this piece thinking I would finally write the seedy back-story for Captain Rick, former military pilot and pusher of speed up on Nellis Air Force base. The original title for this story was “Captain Rick is Born Again.” But Captain Rick barely showed up…. Instead I was stuck with my protagonist, a runaway not yet ensnared by the junkie world, an outsider in a band of outsiders, and a scaredy cat. I got to know him, I guess. This story comes early in the collection; it is one of the few in which they’re not striving for a ‘handsome ransom,’ but my narrator’s in deep with this gang after this. It was kind of a cross-the-threshold moment for both of us, my narrator and me. Now I call him Jimmy.

2. Your opening paragraph feels supremely biblical, mysterious, full of pause and premonition – can you speak a little towards placement – why lead this way, departed from the story’s primary affect? 

Las Vegas is a profoundly religious place. People are praying all the time, on free cable, in front of the slots, in the thousands of churches all over. I wanted that pentecostal power to sort of seep into the text from those first words— I wanted signs, suspicion, sideways luck. Because Las Vegas gets to invent everything again (Paris, the Pyramids, etc) it reinvents religion too, in the form of casino chapels and Criss Angel shows. Jimmy wants to see stallions and flaming torrents, but really he’s just watching a cop on a horse, or melted foam dropping from the roof of the Monte Carlo. This says a lot about Las Vegas; people want Sin City to be magical, a place where God could deliver a miracle at the blackjack table. But no. Jimmy’s miracle is divined by Vegaboy of the Desert, and it comes in the form of crystal meth.

3. What are these characters’ relationships to denial/autonomy/“Mind Erasers”/inevitability?  I’m struck by the stacking of lines like “There is no magic in this.  There is nothing pastoral” and “I’m the only one who is stuck in this life…incapable of being born again as someone new.”  How much free-will-mobility do you want your characters to possess?  Even the speaker, at the end, himself seems surprised (and yet not) to realize it was his car burning in that lot, that he did it.  Are these characters – as addicts, as creatures vulnerable to the elements, to love, to themselves – helpless because they’re hapless, or is some Higher Power wielded over them?  Which interests you more?

You are so totally right about this: Junkies are vulnerable to the elements, to love, to themselves. Like the grimy trunks at the bottom of the pool, they are moved by “invisible currents pushing them around,” but the ebbs and flows are unromantic and difficult. They want drugs, money. They quest after these things, they yearn for them, they get them, they want more. Jimmy is not so jaded by the junkie life, not yet, and he wants very badly to see a higher power in the drugs, in the colors in the sunset, he wants to ride palominos with Wayne Newton. Jimmy wants to be reborn as someone better, or less hurt, than himself, but he doesn’t understand the rules: don’t get Pastoral, don’t eat the hot dogs. He makes all the right mistakes and lets his desire drive him around, from score to handsome ransom to filthy kitchenette. So yes, he’s hapless and helpless both; he wants a higher power but he’s stuck with free will. Imagine being so fucked up that you wreck your body, abandon your family, burn your car. The Mind Eraser (served at the Stakeout, a violent, delicious drink) is the perfect medicine for that kind of hurting.

4. What do you look forward to reading this New Year?

Some guaranteed winners for me in 2013 will be new novels from Jonathan Dee, Alissa Nutting, Peter Orner and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and new stories from Sam Lipsyte. Also, some of my favorite Canadian authors will have books out this year, Lisa Moore and Lynn Coady. And the art critic super giant Dave Hickey is putting some of his essential essays into anthologies. These people are all mad geniuses.

5. What else have you been working on?  How are the other Vegaboy Chronicles coming?

I feel tremendously lucky and happy to be working on a PhD in Los Angeles now, a dream city, after a few years drifting between Las Vegas, West Africa, Scotland and Vancouver. The Vegaboy Chronicles are going well; I recently won an arts grant from Canada to turn the stories into a kind of art-book/graphic novel with my tweaked out photographs from Las Vegas. My other big project is a novel about a runaway celebrity who shows up dead in West Africa; it’s big and sprawling and scary, it traverses six countries, it’s about fame and following. All of my characters move relentlessly, as a means of curing some strange restlessness I see a lot in our generation. Shockingly, I’m doing the opposite here in LA; finally, after many transient years, it will feel very good to stay in one city and work.

"A Flashlight in Purgatory": An Interview with Chad Simpson

Chad Simpson lives in Monmouth, Illinois, and teaches writing and literature classes at Knox College. His chapbook, Phantoms, was released in April by Origami Zoo Press. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in Orion Magazine,matchbook, Wigleaf, and Crab Orchard Review.

His story "You Would've Counted Yourself Lucky" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Chad Simpson talks to interviewer David Bachmann about a boy who does more with less, the importance of sounds in the night, and the transformative power of the calf muscle.

1. I see the boy in your work as existing in a state of purgatory, put there by his age (10), by parents who are drunk and indifferent but also intolerant, by his absent sister, and by his moves being dictated by a disabled neighbor girl. Is this true or does this character have more going for him than that?

I think purgatory is a great way of describing where this boy exists in the world. He’s definitely between stations. Annie Dillard has this line in her memoir An American Childhood, and I’m going to have to paraphrase it, about how at ten years old we become conscious for the first time of the world around us, of ourselves in that world.

The boy in this story is definitely in that place where he’s becoming conscious of his place in the world, and I think that’s something he has going for him. He hasn’t figured much out yet, but by the end of the story, he’s beginning to. I also think of him as thoughtful and curious and creative, so he has those things going for him as well. Ultimately, I don’t think this boy is going to grow up to be like his parents, even if he’s a little afraid of the idea of growing up any other way.

2. The flashlight quickly becomes an important object in this story, one with which the boy develops almost an obsessive-compulsive relationship. It acts as a vehicle for his speculation on the stars and space, it gives away his presence to Rebecca, and it stops his sister in her tracks. Did you originally have grand plans for this flashlight or did its uses become apparent only during the process of writing?

This story began for me with the image of a boy out in his backyard in the dark, later at night than he should be out alone, shining his flashlight toward the stars. I didn’t know anything else about what was going on other than that, so I certainly wasn’t aware the flashlight would remain in the story as much as it does. This story was kind of all process for me. I knew almost nothing about anything until I started making sentences.

3. Your work pays close attention to the senses, particularly sound as it occurs in darkness: “The familiar crunch of car tires on the gravel in the alley,” “the boy can feel the sound the door makes in the small of his back,” “her metal braces clack and squeak,” etc. In fact, the word “sound” occurs seventeen times. Can you comment on the role of sound in this work and how the acts of listening and hearing serve the boy and this setting in general?

Wow. Seventeen times? I had no idea.

I think one reason sound became important for me while I was writing this story is that most of the piece takes place at night, in darkness. There is less for him to see, so the boy has to rely more on what he hears.

There’s also that conversation between his parents the boy overhears very early in the story, during which they talk at but not to one another. I think this boy exists in a world where there’s a lot to hear but not much listening going on. Then, when he has his encounter with Rebecca, there’s a kind of shift that occurs. He has an actual conversation with her, when in the past, she’s just been shouting at him, teasing him.

4. Did Leanne ever have a larger physical presence in this story? If so, why did you diminish it?

No, Leanne’s presence grew as the story progressed. After I began with the image of the boy out in his backyard, shining his flashlight at the sky, the idea of the absent sister followed soon after. I realized that he was actually out there kind of waiting for her, that he wasn’t just being a kid and shining his flashlight at the sky. And then I started wondering about what was going on with the sister, and I liked the idea of this boy loving his sister but thinking she’s doing something wrong—via his parents—by dating black guys. I liked the idea of him trying to reconcile these things; Leanne, his beautiful sister, with whom he used to have a meaningful relationship, was kind of a vehicle for me to put the boy in that purgatory you mentioned.

5. This work features a young woman who often makes the boy and reader uncomfortable as a result of her insistence to remain a social creature despite her condition. The boy may well be with her out of a sense of human duty. Yet, when he rubs Rebecca’s calf, “It's like his world has become small. Manageable. Perfect.” Can you talk about what you are conveying in this moment?

Rebecca is very much “other,” especially as far as the boy is concerned. She’s older and physically different from him, and she seems to have suffered some kind of brain damage from the accident she was in, as well. The boy ends up having this real moment of intimacy with her, though, despite their differences. He has a specific physical reaction to this moment of intimacy, and he has a kind of general emotional/intellectual reaction, which eventually leads him to wonder whether it would be OK for him to have a relationship with Rebecca, if he were older, despite the fact she’s different from him, since it’s wrong—according to some people, including the people who’ve raised him—for his sister to date guys who aren’t the same race as her. Essentially, I think what I’m trying to convey in that moment is something about the transformative power of human intimacy, of human connection.

6. Part of the beauty of the boy’s last plea/demand that his sister stay right where she is is that it could mean a number of things: he’s trying to stop time for his own sake, trying to save his sister from intolerant parents, etc. What is the boy trying to accomplish with his last lines? What does he actually accomplish?

I personally like the ambiguity of the final image because it conveys those things you mention as well as the idea that maybe the boy wants to stop time because he’s confused and undone by that moment of intimacy he experienced with Rebecca. I feel like he’s been truly shaken, like he’s never going to see the world in the same way again, and this terrifies him. He’ll be better for it down the road, but right then, maybe, just maybe, he can keep his flashlight’s beam trained on his sister and things will remain as they are. I’m not sure he accomplishes this, of course, but he does have his sister’s attention; she is listening to him when he speaks. He feels like something of a ghost in his own house at the beginning of the story, but here, in this final moment, unseen, he has a voice and his flashlight, and he is making himself known.

7. What are you reading these days?

This afternoon I’m going to finish reading Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions, which has been great. I’ve also been reading Autoportrait by Edouard Levé, and I have C.D. Wright’s One With Others and Michael Kimball’s Big Ray and about fifteen other books on my nightstand, just waiting for me.

8. What are you writing these days?

My writing is pretty scattered these days. My short story collection, Tell Everyone I Said Hi, was published this past October. I found out this was going to happen in early January 2012, and I spent much of the past year doing things related to that book. I also revised several stories and essays, but I didn’t work on much new stuff. So, now I’m having this problem related to that, which is basically that I have five or six things I really want to be working on. I’m mostly tinkering at this point. And I recently started a new project on tumblr: http://thewallyletters.tumblr.com/ It’s my hope that working on this project will magically lead me toward the thing I should be working on next.

"This Border Between the Recognizable and the Dream": An Interview with Dawna Kemper

Dawna Kemper is originally from the Midwest and has lived in Los Angeles since 1998. In addition to writing, she works as an editor and teaches at Santa Monica College. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, The Florida Review, The Idaho Review, Quarterly West, Santa Monica Review, Shenandoah, and Zyzzyva. She has completed a collection of stories, and is working on her first novel. Her website is: www.dawnakemper.com.

Her story "Wardrobe" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Dawna Kemper speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich of fabulism, chronology, critical density, and the novel vs. short stories, how she can't seem to stop writing them.

1. How do you begin a story this quick, brief, packed?  Does it come to you all in a flash, or did you sense the brevity in its first few sentences, or...?

I can usually sense pretty quickly when a story will end up compressed into a very short piece. For instance, “Wardrobe” began with a very specific, contained situation. (Other flash fiction pieces I’ve written began with an image that I also knew would end up very focused and tightly packed.) So I could tell from the outset this one would be very short, that it would lose its critical density if expanded. I quickly drafted a loose version all at once, so I had the gist of it, then went back and paid close attention to working with language, paring away, but also striving to make each line and each image as highly charged as possible. I write longer, too, but I love working with these super-tight pieces that, hopefully, feel complete and weighted in some way, in spite of their brevity.

2. Near the end of sections, this piece quickly merges the fantastic with the tragic – very Aimee-Bender-eske (I’m especially thinking of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake), when the mother starts coughing up dolls’ clothes, when she “hurdles shopping carts leaps strollers jumps mailboxes—running running running.”  Do you utilize the fantastic to buffer the tragic or help bloat it, like a very serious kind of caricature? 

Yes, exactly (!) … both of those things, buffering and bloating. I think the fantastic can provide just enough distance from the tragic so we can bear to look at it. But it also can amplify the painful in surprising ways. I believe this works in much the same way as dreams. When we move through uncanny elements in a narrative, we’re making unconscious associations. We feel something working on us, and even if (maybe especially if!) we can’t really describe or define what this “thing” is, we are haunted by it. (This, of course, is what Kafka does so brilliantly, especially in a story like “A Country Doctor,” for instance.) So, I’m very interested in exploring and working along this border between the recognizable and the dream. For me, the two examples you mention (as clearly peculiar as they may seem) also expose some key thing about who the mother and the daughter are, individually and in relationship to each other. So I think fabulism also can reveal character in unconventional ways. (And, by the way, I’m a big fan of Aimee’s work, which, when I first started writing, opened up all sorts of possibilities for me about what a story could be.)

3. What guides your leaps in time?  Would this story not survive (as well, as beautifully, at all) chronologically, or on a line like “I stare at my useless hands until they become something monstrous”?

More and more, I find that my stories, of any length, tend to blur or ignore chronology, and that this happens very intuitively while I’m writing. It just feels right to me. I think it may be because I’m more interested in how a story reflects a certain kind of consciousness than linear reality. I want to be careful not to over-explain or impose meaning, but I think that in the case of “Wardrobe” the mother’s death, in a troubling way, is not an end, at least for the daughter. Also, at least in my experience, during a painful event, time does not make any sense at all; we become utterly dislocated from “normal” time. So, to me, that disjointedness seems to make sense for this story.

4. What made your end-of-the-year reading list?

I read a lot, but I’m always, sadly, behind on new releases, it seems. So my favorite books this year weren’t necessarily published in 2012. In any case, here they are:

• The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. Such a wild ride... and surprisingly poignant (I loved Eli Sisters as a narrator), and so darkly funny.
• The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (the new translation by Benjamin Moser). I especially loved how the narrator self-reflexively examines the very act of storytelling in all of its false starts and forward lurches and existential questioning.
• Dancer by Colum McCann – So, so masterful. An exquisite fictional biography of Rudolph Nureyev. The writing is so beautiful and full of life I kept going back to re-read paragraphs.
• I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson. This is steeped in such melancholy and loss, yet I found it also strangely, quietly funny. I felt such empathy for this hapless narrator.
• Parsifal by Jim Krusoe. Jim is my mentor and friend, and I think his books deserve a much wider audience. I think Parsifal is his best yet. It’s myth on a human scale… it’s also absurdly funny and dark and strange and, ultimately, moving.
• Taking Care by Joy Williams. I’ve read (nearly) all of her other books, but somehow missed this, her first story collection. I think Joy Williams is a genius; she’s certainly one of my idols. Her paragraphs pull you in and the next thing you know you’re pierced by something profound and totally unexpected. Her stories are utterly idiosyncratic in their sharp intelligence and dread and emotional heft. At the end of each story, I’m left stunned. And what more could one wish for as a reader?

5. What are you writing now—mostly the new novel?  Or more tiny tragic tales?  (Is one an antidote to the other?)

Though I’ve finished a story collection, I can’t seem to stop writing stories. So there you go. I’ve also written about 300 pages of a novel that ultimately wasn’t coming together, and which I’m now taking apart at the seams and rewriting. {sigh.} Yes, I do find it useful to break from the novel and go back to stories, from time to time; partly because I honestly enjoy writing them, but also (a) so I can actually finish something (!); and (b) because the stories, especially the very short pieces, keep me focused on voice, on language, on the shape of the piece, which is a very good thing to bring back to a sprawling work like a novel in progress. Or at least I hope so. 

"Am I Crossing a Line? Am I Making an Impression?": An Interview with Sarah Ameigh

Sarah Ameigh is a recent graduate of Penn State University. After backpacking across Australia, she moved to the Washington DC-Baltimore area, where she currently works in publishing.    

Her story "Hip to Knee" appears in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Sarah Ameigh speaks to interviewer Melissa Goodrich about what sentences are doing, James Baldwin, cluelessness, and the kind of spills we take as we attempt to become adults.

1. Did this story originate with the image of the bruise?  How did you start conceiving it?

It did, I started thinking about the way kids hurt themselves growing up, the bangs and the scratches, and the recklessness .  There’s something taboo about wearing those kinds of bruises as you get older.  You don’t want to show them off to friends, you don’t want to see them in the shower, but they’re still there.  You’re not proud; you’re marked.  That spun into reconciling with the kind of spills we take as we attempt to become adults, little bumps that turn out to be large and ultimately ugly.  There’s a kind of shame in it, a bruise coloring the skin. 

2. I’m in-love with your halting half-sentences, like “Something about long hair and brown eyes and cruel beauty and ‘no chance’” and “The ‘I shouldn't’ and ‘too much’ and ‘always’ and ‘never’ and ‘I can't’ and ‘I won't’ and ‘I will.’”  Such lines feel very stop-frame, plunging off a cliff, or into clouds, or stepping forward into a wall you didn’t realize was there, that you pause to reckon with.  How cognizant are you of the ways in which you like your readers to twist inside your sentences?  Do you approach your work more on the sentence level, scene-by-scene, or more telescopically? 

Well thank you, I like to play with rhythm a lot when I write.  I think because I’ve played various instruments over the years, I find myself splitting my time between how a sentences sounds, what the sentence is doing, and how it sounds beside the other sentences.  Once I’m satisfied with those details, I try and move the story forward.  I’m able to focus on that kind of thing more with shorter stories, the longer the piece the more I work more scene-by-scene.   I tend to treat shorter pieces like songs, if that makes any sense. 

3. What is your relationship to intent and reception?  There’s something about rehearsing, apologizing, “lean[ing] in the doorway like a dare” that denotes this character as much as writing itself : “What had my hands done, I needed to know…” or “Like I have answers…I don’t.”  Are you ever plagued with a similar crisis, craft-wise? 

I know when I set out to write something, I always end up asking more questions than I answer, which can sometimes feel disappointing, and sometimes invigorating.  In think in the case of this story, there’s a sense of wanting to know how you’re impacting another person.  Am I crossing a line?  Am I making an impression?  Am I learning from all this, or better yet, should I be?  I think it’s difficult to fully understand our effect on others day to day, and I think in terms of writing, that’s especially true.  You throw something out in the world, and have no idea how it’s going to be digested.  

4. Best thing you’ve read the past month, week, hour?

I recently read “Screenwriter” by Charles D’Ambrosio and it completely knocked the wind out of me.  I also reread Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, just as stunning as when I saw it produced at Penn State.  I found some really great essays in Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin, who I think is as close to a perfect writer as any can come. 

5. What are you writing now? 

I’m currently working on a few projects, one about an Australian outback bar, and another about a woman who stumbles on a car accident.  In terms of comedy writing I’ve been working on a new non-fiction blog that essentially makes fun of my friends and I, living in different cities and figuring it out.  Let’s be honest, if we couldn’t laugh at the fact that we’re completely clueless twenty-somethings, we’d probably never laugh.  

"Her Tale Shaped by Telling": An Interview with Sarah Malone

Sarah Malone's writing has appeared in Parcel, Five Chapters, PANK, The Common, The Good Men Project, The Awl, and elsewhere. She blogs at sarahwrotethat.com.

Her story "Bridal Discount" appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Sarah Malone talks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about dialogue, Ancient Mariners, the conditional, and happy accidents.

1. What is the origin story for this story?

It began with setting: a wedding at a Finger Lakes hotel, October eight years ago, and the season’s first flurries as the last of us staying elsewhere stumbled to our cars. The leftover wine I brought from another wedding.

All the characters arose wholly in writing, as did what develops, except the talk about the bride. I was remembering a group at the Finger Lakes wedding who peppered conversation with tales of another they expected and who never showed, remaining legend.

Occasions set aside from routine by ritual or geography—weddings, funerals, holidays; writing conferences—do much of fiction writers’ setup work. They have three-part structure built-in; they can contain, compressed, acquaintanceships’ entire arcs. At the time, they seem to culminate more unmarked days, epitomizing, signifying more. Weddings especially evoke a sense of summiting a peak that will be visible from years to come—and yet, for most guests, soon recedes into the blue distance. “The crowded past,” is Jay McInerney’s phrase in Brightness Falls.

2. It seems all the characters in Bridal Discount are talking past each other, Juan and Trevor buried in each other’s necks, Rich asking questions to no answer, the narrator staring at snow.  Even in direct conversation, such as during the story of the police on the train in Peru, the characters talk past one another, as if only half-hearing.  What kind of effect do you hope to have with dialogue like this? 

Writing this story, I soon sensed its drama less between characters, even between Rich and the narrator, than between the narrator experiencing and relating it. Often past tense stands in unobtrusively for present; readers pass through the fourth wall to go onstage with characters. Here, the time between telling and events is real. The narrator doesn’t report live, on scene, but recounts, an Ancient Mariner, her tale shaped by telling. Indeed it transpires in telling (though that anticipates your next questions).

We’re never really in-scene in the usual sense. While some conversation seems in real time—characters answer, disagree with, even dislike each other—we cut rapidly between direct and reported dialogue, remaining in the narrator’s cadences; and we don’t know how much she excludes. The dialogue tends suspiciously toward her point. If scenes ran longer, we would get more crackling of interaction, but we would lodge in events rather than in her telling, and the end of the main action would register as rupture rather than culmination. The story would become “what happened at the wedding,” not “I can’t shake off the wedding.”

3. What is the narrator’s angle?  In lines like “We—I—had spent so long with people who turned out not to be serious,” she seems to be uncertain of who she’s connected to, and what’s worth being serious/unserious about. 

She’s wary from lousy hookups; she and Trevor, longtime co-workers, have drunk each other through many poor choices. She’s either from the city or went there for one reason and stayed for another, or lack of a better idea. I see her choice as ambivalent but wise—Rich ends up seeming a decent guy, but who wants to be with someone who’s talking about someone else? She’s alone, but intact; she chooses for herself, and not from insecurity or obligation, and she’s propelled to empathy that doesn’t seem habitual.

4. Several “woulds” consume this piece: “We would bundle together and when the wine was gone we would heat brandy and tea by the fire,” “I would have [paid the police],” “She wouldn’t sleep with me,” “That would have been when to ask Rich to start a new bottle…and not start to say goodnight until Rich and I were by one of our bedrooms and one thing seemed as easy as another.”  What is your relation, especially as a fiction writer (when anything may happen!), with the might-have-been? 

This may be the only story where I’ve used the conditional so centrally. It needs to make sense for the characters, narrative, and shape of a story, or else it’s simply a move. It lends time a spatial feel, but sharply; readers tend to assume they and the teller are moving through events in sync, and then suddenly the writer runs them off a cliff like Wyle E. Coyote and leaves them staring down at the bottom of a canyon.  Here, however, the might-have-been gives us the narrator’s vantage and attitude and complicates time, maintaining the linear progression of what did happen—we have details to fill in what she infers—while adding two temporal strands: the narrator ruminating at the time of the telling (which is as “real” as the events), and what she imagines—and likely didn’t imagine until later. Her vision culminates the “woulds” and shifts them from might-have-been to never-now-will-be. The conditional lets the story inhabit a great expanse of time, and I think there’s an elemental narrative pleasure—one we recall from fairy tales, hopefully—in feeling a story’s time signature veer away from and return to the time we take to read it.

5. Is there some punning going on with the title, “Bridal Discount,” the character “Rich,” and the “Nothing” the narrator comes away with at the end? 

“Rich” is a happy accident; he seemed a “Rich” as I wrote him. The title is definitely punning, its ambivalence—is the story only available to the narrator through the discount; is it to be discounted?—relating back to such occasions residing outside the normal flow of things.

6. What are you reading as winter winters on? 

Right now I'm reading Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Alice Munro's Dear Life, and also dipping back into Munro's older stories; I return to her probably more than to any other writer, and I'm particularly interested now to revisit stories I thought I knew well. I recently read Barbara Comyns' The Vet's Daughter, and greatly enjoyed the most latest issues ofParcel, Gulf Coast, and Missouri Review. First up in the new year will be Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. 

7. What are you writing now? 

I’m revising a novel of ’90s and ’00s New York City, and starting several new stories.

"A Pit Bull Gnawing on Another Pit Bull": An Interview with Sarah Marshall

Sarah Marshall grew up in rural Oregon and recently earned an MFA from Portland State University. She spent her summer vacation traveling through Manitoba (where she saw the snake dens in Narcisse and the Icelandic heritage museum in Gimli), North Dakota (where she was stranded outside a train station in Grand Forks, and saw the geographic center of North America in Rugby and the oil boom in Williston), and Montana (where she wrote). Her work has recently appeared in The Rumpus, Propeller, The Awl, and Hobart, and she is currently at work on a novel, from which "Rosebud" is excerpted.

Her story "Rosebud" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Sarah Marshall talks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about imperatives, Texas Chainsaw Massacres, women as victims/victimizers, and fairy tales -- unbriefly and beautifully.

1. This piece opens almost as an incantation, buoyant and mysterious (it seems begged to be read aloud).  How did you start this story?  How did you know to start it here, this way, limp-yet-living (“Baby hangs taut as a plumb weight”), prophetic, in the kind-of-future? 

Like everyone else I know, I wish I had all the time in the world to write, and like everyone else I often have just a few minutes here and a few minutes there to work with in a given day. In the last couple of years I’ve focused on making those minutes usable, and so when I begin a story the first thing I write often takes the form of a moment frozen in time. If I can’t write a sizable portion of a draft I can write a few sentences or a paragraph or so, and then come back to it later. If I used my minutes well, then I can often locate images, sounds, and ideas that I know will be important to the rest of the story. I began Rosebud by writing the first paragraph, setting it aside for a while—at least one week, probably several—and then coming back to it and allowing it to expand. When I read it again I heard the abrupt rhythms of Larina’s voice, her numbness to her life and her use of her child and her body as shields—really as so much meat. I knew those strands would be enough for me to follow to the finish. I’d also already decided on the plot by then, though I didn’t yet know how it would end. 

2. What guided the logic for swivels in POV, from a close third to an imperative (“Wake up on the loning nights and walk barefooted […] Pull the sharpest knife from the kitchen drawer”) to the second person completely, at the end (“Unclasp your hands, Larina, my sister, and let your daughter go”)?  Is the narrative pushing out in the same way Larina is, “push[ing] until she does not know what she is pushing out of her, whether it is just the baby or all the rest besides”?

The imperative and the loss of pronoun really begin, I think, as Larina starts to lose her identity as an individual, and become a Slaughter wife. That’s something I realize now, but wasn’t entirely aware of at the time—the imperative just felt right to me as I began a new section, and I went along with it and thought about what that change in voice meant later. Larina’s voice, which is a sizable presence in the opening sections—breathless, angry, and hopeful—fades away, and when a voice does peek through, it’s usually in Rosebud’s form—gentle, calm, and apparently forgiving whatever failing Larina thinks she is guilty of.

3. What draws you to the motif of names/naming : like Missoula, “by or near the place of fear or ambush” ?  Who (or what) really is ambushed in this story, if that is Larina’s goal?

Names have always been important to me, especially town names. I spend a lot of time looking at maps and picking out places for my characters to wander through: Lima, Montana; Lovell and Greybull and Meeteetse, Wyoming; Thalia, Texas; Plum Coulee and Narcisse and Gimli, Manitoba. I like names that mean something, particularly something ominous—a lot of my California characters make some mention of Chowchilla, which is another corruption of an American Indian word, this time the name of the Chauchila tribe, which translates to “murderers.” It’s also home to two women’s prisons, and California’s death row for women. Diane Downs is there, Nancy Garrido is there, Susan Atkins was there before she died a few years ago. I write a lot of female characters who have descended or could easily descend into brutality, and who fear being trapped far more than they fear the darkness within them—who may fear nothing but being trapped. So Chowchilla seems like an especially ominous place for them.

I’m also interested in how the geography of a place gives birth to its names Rose is an imaginary town placed in a part of the world I know very well—the sleepy, rain-soaked part of Oregon between Portland and Astoria—and the real towns that surround it have names like Jewell and Mist and Rainier, roads with names like Neverstill and Ironhorse and Gnat Creek. You couldn’t have names like that in Texas or California, and you couldn’t have a Thalia or a Lima in that part of Oregon.

In the course of the story I think that Larina is ambushed more than anyone—by the impossibility of her desires, by the limits of her strength, by the complexity of the world she has invaded. I took a wonderful class on the southern gothic last year, from a professor who went on to be one of my thesis advisors, and became fascinated by the idea of all gothic narratives essentially being about opening a door into a world too choked with its own history to be comprehensible to an outsider—and then being dragged into that world. It’s a theme in so many different kinds of narratives, and a terrifying one. I’m a huge horror junkie, and I wrote a term paper for that class comparing Absalom, Absalom! to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  To me, Quentin Compson opening the door to Rosa Coldfield’s room is the same as walking into what looks like a normal Texas farmhouse and getting butchered by Leatherface. In both cases, you’re entering into a world you have no way of understanding, and the consequences are nearly always severe. After that class I consciously decided I wanted Rosebud and the other stories I set at Slaughter Auto to be a kind of Oregon gothic—though I’ve been told by my readers that I didn’t include enough rain.

4. Do you believe what your character believes about stories, their potencies, defenses, vulnerabilities?  That somehow stories soften blows, “because the worst part of her death is that she is not here to make it seem less awful in her telling,” act as sedatives, that keep one “alive by telling a new story each night, until her husband fell asleep and could do no harm to her”?  I love that moment when she threatens (yet protects) a narrative by crouching by it bedtimes and waiting with a knife, knowing “All she wants now is the telling, but she cannot get at it, and she knows that if he dies it will be gone for good.”  Colt seems transformed by his role as (potential) narrator : so authors matter only as much as their stories?  Or the inverse?

My goal right now is to spend the rest of my writing life answering that question. We all live our lives, to some extent, based on the narratives we assign ourselves, and the roles we see ourselves as inhabiting within those narratives—I am the good daughter, I am the mother, I am the baby, I am the protector, I am the provider, I am the one that can’t be trusted, I am the one that can’t be loved. Of course, these narratives are also assigned to us, based on our sex or our race or our economic status or our birth order or any of a thousand other things. Larina’s life seems to be not just about finding comfort in others’ stories—Rosebud’s old stories, and the promise of a story from Colt—but in the story she assigns herself: she is the avenger, the strong one, the fearless one, the one who will put things right. When the complexity of her situation undermines her ability to fulfill her role as a warrior—an ambusher, an “Injun”—she stops being able to cope with the realities of her life.

A lot of my writing lately has dealt with the narratives that allow women to become victims and victimizers, and about giving the reader a way to understand a character through the narrative she creates for herself. I’m working on a story about one of Colt’s other wives, who becomes the most powerful woman in the compound because of his high regard for her, and eventually helps him lure his victims. The question I want to answer is whether a woman who mitigates her victimhood by victimizing other woman—by appointing herself queen of a narrative which, though sadistic, may be the only narrative she can locate within her life—can be made understandable to a reader. I want to know whether we can look at this narrative from start to finish and understand her actions, the sources of her cruelties, and the diminishment of her humanity, and see her as not just human but perhaps even sympathetic. I don’t know if I can make do it, but I think it’s possible.

5. What have you been reading this winter?  What has kept you warm?

Yesterday morning I picked up Lynn Crosbie’s Paul’s Case, which imagines the inner lives of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Canadian serial killers active in the early nineties, as well as their families, their victims, and other players in the investigation and trial. It’s part poetry, part prose, part criticism, and it was a hugely controversial book when it came out: people called for it to be censored, and for Crosbie to be assaulted or thrown in prison along with Bernardo. It was a hard book to to track down, but it was worth the effort. What I love about it so far is its fearlessness: Crosbie makes some very risky moves both as a writer and as a citizen (of course, those often go hand in hand).

The Bernardo and Homolka murders were immensely shocking for a number of reasons: because one of the perpetrators was female, because the couple who committed the murders were young, white, well-off, and beautiful, and because nothing like it had really happened in North America before, but especially not in Canada. At the time I’m sure it was comforting to move on from the case with a pat idea of what happened—they were unmitigated evil; they weren’t like the rest of us; they weren’t even human—and Crosbie uses Paul’s Case to interrogate those easy, pat conclusions about the nature of “evil.” She works at the subject like a pit bull gnawing on a bone—or, maybe more accurately, like a pit bull gnawing on another pit bull.

Sometimes the writing is bad. Sometimes the writing is amazing. It’s always breathtaking to watch. It’s also the kind of fearlessness I aspire to in my stories, most of which are at least as dark as Rosebud. I got a rejection from a literary magazine earlier this year that said something like “If you’d read our guidelines you’d have known we don’t accept stories about rape.” For better, or for worse that disqualifies nearly everything I’ve written.

6. What are you writing now?

I’m currently working on a series of stories about the other Slaughter wives—where they came from, how they ended up in Rose, and why they stayed. It’s taking the shape of a novel, though a title is still evading me. My boyfriend thinks I should call it Slaughterhouse 5, and a friend suggested Slaughter Daughters. I have a few ideas, but they’re only slightly less terrible.

Several of the stories are reworked fairy tales that two of the wives tell to each other—a hybrid of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Robber Bridegroom, a retelling of East of the Sun and West of the Moon in which the husband doesn’t regain his human form at the end, and Larina’s version of Isis and Osiris, based on her search for Rosebud. Like all quiet, bloody-minded children I loved fairy tales, and playing with those childhood narratives, in a work about women who have been in many ways reduced to a kind of childhood, has allowed me see them in a new light. It’s also been tremendous fun. I was hacking away at the collection this summer and at a certain point, when my relationship with my work had become somewhat grinding and cheerless, I thought, “You know what I really want to write? A fairy tale.” And so I did.

"The Rhythm of the Sea's Crashing": An Interview with Iris A. Law

Iris A. Law is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame, a Kundiman Fellow, and the editor of the online literary magazine and blog, Lantern Review. Her first chapbook, Periodicity, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2013.  

Her poem "Watching The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I think of my father." appears in Issue Thirty Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Iris A. Law talks with interviewer Amber L. Cook about passing, process, patterns, and the “ebb and flow” of the sea.

1. What made you write this poem, “Watching the Voyageof the Dawn Treader, I think of my father?” Is it a direct response to The Chronicles of Narnia, or did you take more liberty with the poem?

Yes, it’s a response to Lewis, but it’s a bit of a sideways one: the moment that provided the impetus for the poem came not from the books themselves (though they are very near to my heart), but from the experience of sitting in a darkened theater four months after my father had passed away, watching the movie version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In one of the final scenes of the film (spoiler alert!), the main characters (Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, Caspian, and Reepicheep) row to the edge of the world, where they encounter an enormous, glassy blue wall of water that rises up out of the sea, forming an impenetrable border between them and Aslan’s country on the other side. Aslan appears, and tells them that only the mouse Reepicheep may cross through to his country; the rest must wait until it is their time. So Reepicheep passes, alone in his little rowboat, to the other side. Sitting in that theater, I couldn’t help but think of my father also passing, alone, to a country on the other side of our world: how it must have felt for him to arrive in a place that was all at once new and yet familiar; what it must be like for the vestiges of one’s earthly existence to be stripped away from the soul as one crosses into God’s country. And as I watched Caspian and the children bid an emotional goodbye to their friend onscreen, I thought about my own experience of loss. About waiting while someone you love crosses into the next life. About the heartache of being left behind, of not being granted permission to cross with that person into the sun-warm beauty that you know lies on the other side of that wave—not yet.

So the poem is a response to that moment: of watching the blinding majesty of that wall of water rise up out of a twelve-foot screen (we were watching the movie in 3-D), of the sound of the sea filling the cavity of my skull, of gulls crying and of salt water streaming—both across the camera’s frame and down my face—of being transfixed there in the darkness; transported, dazzled, momentarily overwhelmed.

2.  You very nicely combine long line and short line free verse throughout the poem. How do you think this variety helps progress the reader through the poem?

I’m not sure that it was a conscious decision to use such a jagged pattern of syntax, but I do know that I was thinking about the rhythm of the sea’s crashing as I was writing—hearing its ebb and flow in my head—so it makes sense that the same sort of tidal motion seems to have found its way into the trajectory of the finished piece’s arc. It’s my hope that the reader would be able to experience the same sense of being wrapped up in the sea’s movement as the speaker; that they would be pushed along by the force of language, riding the current of the action and syntax as the figure of the father crosses through the wave and the poem reaches its moment of resolution.

3. I love the sonics of lines like: “shells and rough silica scrape out the catacombs of/ my ears,/ bathe them in blue oscillations.” Do you often turn to sonics in your poems? How do you respond to sound in your personal writing and in the writing of others?

Sonics are definitely very important to me, both in writing and in reading others’ writing. I grew up playing a lot of music, and my teachers spent a lot of time training me to listen for tone, or the quality of the sound one produces on an instrument—the roundness, resonance of a note, its fatness or transparency. Maybe that’s part of why the sonic quality of words within a poem—its music—is so important to me, as well. I am drawn to—am instinctively moved—by the way that words turn in the ear, on the tongue; the way that breath and phrasing (the silences between sounds) string together to create sense and meaning.

My mother used to read a lot of poems aloud to my brother and me when we were small, and she often had us practice reading them aloud, too. She was always very insistent that we pay attention to our inflection and enunciation, in much the same way that our music teachers trained us to listen to the shapes and tonalities of the phrases we played on our instruments. Once, when she was helping me to memorize Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain”  for school, she pointed out that consonants in the phrase “cold currents thrid” were imitative of the soft, percussive thudding made by waves beating the body of the wrecked ship in the poem. I remember being really impressed by Hardy’s cleverness at the time. I thought it was amazing that he’d been able to choose words whose pronunciations so perfectly heightened the vividness of his already-evocative imagery; it was the first time I realized that the pleasure of a poem can lie as much in the experience of its soundscape as it can in the visual landscape that it paints for the reader.

Listening is still an integral part of my writing process. I often work out things like pacing and texture aurally, silently “orating” what I’m writing inside my head. When I’m revising, I’ll often stop and read aloud what I’ve written, in order to get a better sense of how the poem’s sonics are working as a whole. I’ve found that I can sometimes “hear” the rough spots in a poem better than I can see them.

4. What’s something you’ve read lately that you’d like to share with the world?

Henry W. Leung’s chapbook, Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe, 2012). It’s beautiful: bravely vulnerable and rich with layers of myth and memory.

5. Is this poem part of a larger project?

Yes; or at least, I hope it will be. I have been working on a full-length project about my father for a while now. It initially began one way—I was first interested in approaching it through the lens of his passion for science (he was a chemist) and how that inflected our relationship as I grew up—but after he passed away in 2010, it started to become much more about the experience of losing, and later, grieving for him.  The middle section of the original manuscript—a series of (mostly) persona poems about historical women in science and their relationships with influential male figures in their lives—has since become a separate chapbook that is being published by Finishing Line Press, and I am now focusing on reworking and reenvisioning the remainder of the project into a new manuscript. This time, I’m working with a lot of epistolary poems, many of them elegies. It’s been difficult and very slow-going, but I know that the process of working my way through the wreckage is necessary for me, both as a writer and as a daughter. 

2012 Collagist Chapbook Winner: THE ROBING OF THE BRIDE by Aditi Machado

The Collagist is proud to announce that The Robing of the Bride by Aditi Machado has been selected as the final winner of our 2012 Chapbook Contest. The Robing of the Bride will be published by Dzanc Books in print and eBook forms early next year, as the second release of The Collagist Chapbook Series. 

Aditi Machado hails from Bangalore, India, but currently lives in the United States. Her poetry is forthcoming or has most recently appeared in The Iowa Review, The New England Review, Blackbird, and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (ed. Sudeep Sen, 2012). She earned her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where stays on as the Third Year Fellow in Poetry for the academic year 2012-2013. She is the poetry editor of Asymptote, an international journal of translation.

It was, as always, a difficult decision choosing from among so many deserving manuscripts, but The Robing of the Bride stood out from among our list of finalists: It's an exceptional short collection of poetry, one that I'm personally very excited to have with us at The Collagist.  We hope you'll join us in congratulating Aditi on her selection as our winner, and in welcoming her to Dzanc's list of authors.

(We'd also like to take this opportunity to wish the best of luck to Rochelle Hurt and her manuscript The Rusted City, which was initially selected for publication through the contest, but has since been withdrawn while Rochelle pursues other opportunities for her manuscript.)

Thank you again to everyone who entered, especially to those of you who pre-ordered the winning chapbook with your entry: We appreciate your patience, and look forward to getting The Robing of the Bride into your hands in early 2013.