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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.What projects are you currently working on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Marston’s fiction and nonfiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. What writing projects are you currently working on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. What is writing like?

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

2. What isn’t writing like?

Deepak Chopra wearing nothing but an impressive erection.

3. When you do it, why?

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

4. When you don’t, why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. What are you writing these days?

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

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

Kendra DeColo's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. What could you recommend for us to read?

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

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

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

Amorak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Any reading recommendations?

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

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

5. What other writing projects are you working on?

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

Erin Keane is the author of 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m writing a novel.

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

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

Her story "Land Beast" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Kate Wyer speaks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about research, memory and trauma, and what characters hide from themselves.

1. Where did “Land Beast” begin for you, and how did it get to here?

“Land Beast” began with an image. I follow a tumblr of animal pictures, like blue-tongue skinks or red-legged honeycreepers, some dogs, etc. It’s a pleasant way to spend a few minutes. So it was all the more startling when I saw the picture of the female rhino. My mind couldn’t process it for a moment—the strangeness of the animal without its distinctive feature and then the brutality of what remained of her face. The caption described her assault, the death of her calf, her rescue and subsequent rehab at a preserve. It also mentioned she was inseparable from the male rhino at the preserve—a very rare thing for solitary animals. She had a wild look in her eye.  That look wouldn’t leave me alone. 

But my way into telling her story is a little less straightforward. I already had the first stanza or paragraph—I think calling it a stanza actually works a little better. It was going to be the start of something else, but I wasn’t sure what. I knew I liked the sounds that were working within those sentences, but I didn’t know what to do with them until I realized they fit into the rhino’s experience of being out of her element, of being thrown into something as large and foreign as loss. The idea of collapse became really important to me.  Of no longer resisting a fall.  I wanted to play with how water supports you and yet it doesn’t, much like memory.

Opening myself up this way also permitted me further strangeness, like the moon door and jumping blue arcs of current.  Those things allowed me to have the rhino reach for connection.

2. As a reader, I’m enchanted by this piece’s spell of defamiliarization—the narrator, who I read as a rhinoceros, allows us to see beauty, terror, and strangeness in the familiar.  I found many passages to be haunting, especially this one:

We heard them from the air. We knew they were coming. We could smell them. We knew that there would be nowhere without them. Men want to believe there is power in our horns. And there is, there is the power they give them. We are full of the life that makes each cell push another out of the way, build and build until they push off the body. We are full of the life needed to make horns.

My question is, to what extent did this narrator surprise you?  (I’d love to hear about how/when the narrator surprised you the most.)

Seeing the photo once was enough and I wanted retain the initial strength of my reaction.  After working on the story for a few days though, I wanted to see pictures of other rhinos to further some softness in my descriptions. For example, I imagined rhinos to have huge eyelashes, like a giraffe or a horse-- they don’t.  But I found out they do have incredibly soft looking cone-shaped ears. I used The Soul of the Rhino by Mishra Ottaway to rediscover these details. It’s a book about conservation efforts in Nepal and India. I read the book several years ago. I forgot that rhinos kill people. Rereading it, I realized my rhino was going to kill someone.  That was very surprising, but in a terrible way it felt comfortable. Brutality /brutality.  I am able to write violence, even though I can’t stomach it when others do. I am very much a “close my eyes, block my ears” movie watcher.  I realized that her violence would be fed by the larger violence of habitat loss, poverty, colonialism, war.

I also have to say that I surprised myself by speaking as a rhino in the first place!

3. When we read, “It is hard to keep circling around the thing that happened and not say it. But it is also hard to say it. So, I circle some more until it tells itself. I can trust that it will,” I can’t help but think of this as a description of this piece’s meditative modular structure.  Does this passage in some way describe your writing process?  (And/or, how do you usually find the structures for your pieces?)

It does reflect my writing process.  My MFA is in poetry, but I write fiction. Or I write really long poems that look like stories.

I saw the poet Alice Oswald read in New York City a few days after Sandy. It was an incredibly raw time. She read from Memorial, which is her translation of the Iliad, except that it contains only the death scenes of the 200 soldiers killed within that story. Well, it contains their death scenes, with alternating blocks of similes. Oswald had memorized her entire reading, which was about thirty minutes long. I felt relieved, but also punched in the gut, when the similes came. They allowed a break from death, but contained such menace, beauty and loss that they didn’t relieve much intensity.

I knew that I wanted something like that for “Land Beast”. I wanted to have her firmly rooted and also in the sea; to have her pull back from the telling, but in such a way that lets the reader know just how bad things were.

I write some linear pieces, but usually I lose interest in them. I structure my pieces in a way that allows memory and trauma to surface in an organic way. I’m most interested in what characters hide from themselves. That interest is best explored out of time.

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

I’m working on expanding “Land Beast” into a novella. The story continues by exploring captivity and how it shapes relationships.

I finished a novella titled Martin. It’s about an old man who puts himself in a dangerous and vulnerable position in order to force himself into a particular woman’s life.  The questions the characters don’t ask move the plot forward.  

5.  As we work our way to the end of winter, what knock-out writing have you been enjoying recently?  Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco is an incredible piece of journalism. Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks is major. I’m reading Gravesend by Cole Swenson. I just picked up In My Home There is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda by Rick Bass. 

I’m looking forward to Anne Carson’s Red Doc >. Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods. I heard him read from it while he was in Baltimore; it was phenomenal. Anything and everything Mud Luscious Press is releasing. And, I’m going to AWP! I’ll leave plenty of room in my suitcase for books.

Her story "Parachute" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Chloé Cooper Jones speaks to interviewer David Bachmann about a young girl’s despair, a poor girl’s justice, and children finding equality.

1. This story starts with the despair of there being “little to like” for Margaret since she is denied the one condition that validates her and is thus forced to suffer in the middle of the line. How do you want the reader to feel about Margaret after the first two paragraphs? Do you want us to sympathize or merely recognize this as a machination of most children? (Do you care either way?)

I do, of course, care about how the reader feels about Margaret.

When you say, “merely recognize this as a machination of most children,” I’m not sure what you mean by “this.” Do you mean the self-centeredness of wanting to be first in line? Do you mean her need for validation? Or do you mean her unwillingness to like anything about school unless she gets her way? These are accurate descriptions of Margaret, sure, but not necessarily of all or most children. I also don’t know what you mean by “machinations of most children.” The word “machination” implies a plan or plot to do harm, which I do not believe widely applies to children. Although children can be cruel, their intentions seem to be to just want what they want and have what they want. In this way, the reader will probably see Margaret as being like most children, however her particular wants manifest themselves in her need to seen, whereas mine as a child would have manifested themselves in my seeking to be hidden.

I don’t think feeling sympathy for Margaret makes much sense, but perhaps the reader might feel a sense of recognition. We recognize these self-centered desires because we, in order to be adult members of our families and communities, spend so much time repressing or mediating them. The transition from children qua immature agents to adults qua mature agents might be best represented in the shift away from the question “What do I want?” toward “What should I want (to be)?”

2. Is the small girl’s presence in the “treasured spot in the center” of the parachute yet another form of charity for her and thus a deliberate consolation for her obvious hardships at home or was she merely selected at random? Does the story change if the latter is the case and if so, how? (Also, does her time at the center qualify as a form of justice?)

These are great questions. Thanks so much for asking them.

I think there is a navigation of justice happening from a few different angles in this story. First, there is a sort of palimpsest of adult concern that operates behind the action of the story. Margaret and the small girl recognize the other as being poor by seeing the way poverty is actualized in concrete objects belonging to the other, namely, ill-fitting clothing and wrapped squares of other people’s casseroles. These objects are delivered to these girls from well-meaning adults who are blurring the edges of pity and a belief in what is the just and moral act. Then there is the adult (presumably a gym teacher) who is in charge of choosing the small girl to be the star player of the Popcorn game. Is the adult compelled to choose the small girl out of a reaction caused by that abstract pity/justice space? Does being chosen in this way assuage the injustice of her difference or just highlight it through a pitying act? These are certainly questions asked, but not answered by the story.

What is more explicitly important to the story is the children’s interaction with and education in justice. In the Popcorn game, one child gets chosen to have all the enjoyment and none of work (gets to be lifted into the air again and again), while the rest of the children do all of the work and get none of the enjoyment (must do the lifting). Continental philosophy spends a lot of time dealing with this type of dynamic (theories about labor: the free, creative activity of the many being usurped by the few; theories about power: maybe the parachute is a sort of Panopticon of pleasure?). The acts of children can often offer up introductory instances of the same issues that dominate a type of philosophical and theoretical inquiry. I’m interested in/curious about where/when it is that we are initiated into concepts like justice. The answer seems to be: very early on in childhood. The girls in the story, Margaret and the small girl, are aware that they are poor, but it won’t be until much later that they really understand the relationship between their economic status and social and political (in)justice, so that is not the site of their education, but rather is just a source of abstract awkwardness and embarrassment. They really learn about justice when chosen or not chosen for the parachute game or, maybe, in other off-scene moments of play—not getting a turn on the swings or something. How those sorts of pangs of injustice get multiplied along with one’s expanding awareness! As adults, we know that their future holds such deeper pains.

3. When you shift to the Mushroom Cap game, you go abruptly from an intensely personal moment centered on the feelings of two girls to a simple explanation of a group activity that everyone enjoys seemingly without any thought. In this transition, is all jealousy and pity wiped away and replaced by the equality of a shared experience? (If not, what is the value of going from the deeply personal to that group mentality free of conflict?)

No, all the jealousy and pity doesn’t go away, it is just contained within one person who we, as readers, are forced suddenly to remember is just one among many. Then the reader can imagine what might be happening internally within any number of children—all of whom are having their own solipsistic dramas unfold as importantly for them as Margaret’s is for her.

The tension between the internal and the external—well, that’s everything, isn’t it? The study of justice is a study of the relationship between an individual and a community. The same statement can be applied to any number of fields of thought. Ethics, politics, moral psychology, and on and on; however, I am most interested in how this tension between the I and the They is presented in various artistic forms, narrative moves especially.

I mean, here’s what is happening to me right now as I type this: I’m sitting in a café in Brooklyn feeling any number of internal anxieties—my chair is uncomfortable, I am remembering that you asked me to send this interview to you in two weeks and that was four weeks ago, I’m avoiding a stack of papers that I should be grading, I’m feeling the constant low-level guilt that always appears when I leave my child and spouse at home so that I can work and be alone, the barista is blasting (BLASTING) Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” which is making me feel annoyed, then old, then nostalgic (I used to roller skate to this song), then super old. However, if one was able to take in the whole picture of the this coffee shop scene, I would look like just another member of a group—a peaceful and seemingly “free of conflict” group. How I behave as a part of this “café society” intimates something about my sense of justice (I don’t demand that someone move in order to give me a more comfortable seat). The way that Margaret responds to her “gymnasium society” says something about her developing sense of justice (and a type of maturity, maybe). She allows herself to be subsumed under the parachute in the Mushroom Cap game and decides to be part of the community instead of acting in reaction against it, despite her probable desire to knock the small girl off the parachute and take her place.

4. Was this piece ever longer? If so, are you willing to talk about what those other pages included in terms of narrative and/or character?

Yes, this piece was longer. Those other pages just contained boring pieces of information—the kind of information that writers put into stories when they distrust the sophistication of their readers, the kind of information that makes a piece read more satisfyingly (I think stiflingly) like a “real story,” which we’re all taught must have a readily measurable beginning, middle, and end.

5. What are you reading these days?

Edward Weston’s Daybooks.

6. What are you writing these days?

I’m finishing a novel. Aren’t we all.

An excerpt from his novel Edie & the Low-Hung Hands appears in Issue Forty Two of The Collagist.

Here, Brian Allen Carr answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Edie & and the Low-Hung Hands.  Enjoy!

1.  What is writing like?

I shrugged and picked up the cup and threw it back in a swift swallow, and as soon as it was down my throat my whole body seemed to glow inside. My arms went warm and my tongue went soft, and I felt like a child in a blanket, or like a bit of sap softened by sunshine, and my mind became a rattle, and the light became loose.

“What do you think?” the man from the road asked, but his voice seemed stretched in several directions, or spun on an axis, or dripped from a blue cloud and then caught in a wind. And when I opened my mouth, in attempt to answer, all that came out was breath not nearly baked right, because it couldn’t push the air from the world in front of me enough to become voice, and then many colors seemed to fold down on me, mostly through my eyes. I tried to move my arms, but they seemed to be across a river from me, and then I tried to stand, but the world seemed hung from me, the dirt floor an appendage that I couldn’t lift. Then there was laughter, slow and sugary and slathered with dull colored bird feathers, that lifted the edge of everything out of the corner of my eyes. Ah. There a blackness ensued. A desert of night. Perhaps I’d been fit into a shell. 

2.  What isn’t writing like?

But in my dreams those moments often cease to be. There is music gently somewhere. Perhaps there is a party. It’s for me, and there is cake. Light, soft as lullabies, bleeds in from a window. Balloons hover. Candles are lit. People sing my name. I hold my arms above me. There is a ceiling, but my hands are far from it. There’s my mother, but her breath is just plain sweet, not Sweet- Jane sweet, and she holds me to her. Maybe she says, “You make your mother and father proud,” and maybe my father says, “You’re my favorite son,” and Welder says, “I wish I looked as much like Dad as you do,” and then perhaps Edie, the young Edie, the Edie of the first time ever I saw her, dances toward me shyly with her hands held behind her. “I brought you a present,” she tells me, “I picked it out special.” And she produces a small box, wrapped in paper with a bow, “I’ll open it later,” I tell her, “Right now we should dance.” And then the rest of them will disappear, the way dreamt things often do, and we’d be in a small space all our own, nobody in sight of us, and we’d hold each other and move with a music that would speak to our souls, and in unison, and with grace. We’d be together. 

3.  When you do it, why?

“Your mother,” I told him, “was fat and smelly. She found my arms hideous, and I found her girth disgusting, but people told us we’d be perfect for each other, because I’d be the only person in town who could hold her, who could wrap my arms around her hut-thick frame, and it was a joke they’d all say to us, carrying along with laughter in their throats and hearts, pointing at us at socials, and giving us a hard time, and once, when we were somehow alone in the evening, and I was loose with liquor, I clutched her to me, and we laid in a hay bale, thrashed around nude, the smell stills hangs about me,” I waved the remembered stench from my face, and it was natural, I wasn’t teasing, “and that is how you came to be. Me, drunk. She, fat. My long arms wrapping the expanse of her and crashing her into me with thoughts of other more suitable women running my imagination. It lasted longer than I’d hoped for. She went off first. A quick comer. And I had to think of many things, on account of my drunkenness and my company, and she dried up in the endeavor, which didn’t help matters, because she became bored with the situation, and, in the quelling of the lust, again sick with disgust at the arms that laid upon her, the same arms you’ve been cursed with, she asked me, time and again, if I was close, and every time she spoke it seemed to knock me down a mountain, but, like Sisyphus, I endured, until the task was toward completion, but, unlike he, I achieved, though at the end I did not feel glorious. I didn’t get to the top of the mountain with my rock and feel successful. Instead, shame filled every molecule of my being, and I had to drink more, swallowing much liquor, trying to kill the brain cells that contained the memory of it, but, as you can see, I was not capable of the task.”

4.  When you don’t, why?

When I was very young Welder would often find me while I played alone, and he’d throw a blanket over my head and hold me down so I could not move. I thought of this as I trailed Pahnder on my own horse. He rode with purpose, and I knew he needed away from the thoughts he’d just had. His thoughts, though, birthed thoughts in me. Welder would hold my head in the fold of a pink quilt and lean his weight on me, and keep me so I could not move, and I would thrash and claw, throwing all of my energy into each movement I made, trying to kick him off me. I’d scream, and Welder would laugh. Often this was done in front of my parents. They would see my struggle and laugh along with Welder. My father would entice him. “He’s getting loose,” my father might say, “hold him tight now.” My mother’s cackle always came through the quilt the cleanest, and, as I laid there with my head in the dark, and with the weight of my brother upon me, it was she I hoped to kill first when I escaped, but I could never thrash Welder from me. I’d always go limp, and my father would grow concerned, and he would hoist my brother off of me when he realized I might suffocate. They’d pull the blanket from my head, and my mother would look straight at me, her drunken face like a smudge of hate. “Got some growing up to do,” she’d say to me. “Your brother’s a man already,” she’d say. Then, “Come hug your mother, little boy.”

Jen Michalski is author of the novel 

An excerpt from her novel Could You Be With Her Now appears in Issue Forty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Jen Michalski answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Could You Be With Her Now.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Sometimes when Alice closed her eyes, she saw the woman in Sandra’s pictures. She kept one picture in her bag, close to her. In it Sandra was sitting under an umbrella at the beach, a cottage behind her. Southampton 1967. Her legs were tucked under, firm and tan, her hair spilled over her shoulders, and her cheeks scrunched into a smile. Alice was in love with that woman. A book was open beside her, pushing onto the sand -- Norman Mailer? Alice did not know why she thought Sandra had not already read Alice Munro and Virginia Woolf.

Alice wanted Sandra to know that she saw her, she wasn’t invisible, that when she rounded the bookshelves and saw Sandra standing there in her suit at the information desk, waiting for her, that her stomach hurt and she was thrilled and scared that she knew such a woman. She wanted to love this woman, just as she loved the woman in the photo, but Sandra was so moody, so scarred with age, bitter with memory. Alice wanted to say all those things but she said nothing. After Sandra left the bookstore, she went into the bathroom and big, stupid tears formed in her eyes. It was not pity she felt. More that something had been lost, or taken, or was never hers to begin with, even though she realized with a ferocity that she had wanted it more than anything.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Her arms, legs searched through the layers of water for something to anchor onto as the current pulled her further out to sea. Now she was beyond the boys. And they stared at her dumbly as Heather cried at her, her mouth a perfect O. Sometimes she still woke up at night with Heather’s expression burning in her mind. As if she had been the one who died. She struggled to get back, the beach, the boys, Heather disappearing as she took in water, the waterline filling above her eyes.

3. When you do it, why?

Alice wrote about relationships and heartbreak and people who were unsatisfied and disaffected but whose dissatisfaction and disaffection seemed somehow larger, more momentous than other people’s. She wrote about parents dying, lovers dying, pets dying, dreams dying, seasons dying, night dying, day dying. And sometimes children were born and sometimes dreams were born and days were born and certainly nights. Sometimes love was born. Alice wrote about all the things that everyone wrote about and she didn’t know why hers would be any better or different but she knew it didn’t matter because she could never stop. When she got home she was going to write about the bulbous and waxy grape in Sandra’s fingers. Alice would write that Sandra put it in her mouth and felt it with her tongue but did not break the skin, taste the juice. 

4. When you don’t, why?

It is time for school. Some of the kids on our block say I go to a retard school, but Mom says that they are jealous. Josh goes to the school for bigger kids. If he went to my school too he would have to learn twice. Today we are learning about adding tables and yesterday we are learning about adding tables but I don’t know about tomorrow. I know that three plus one is four and three plus two is five and three plus three is six but I don’t know after. Last night Mom was supposed to help me with my homework but we had pizza and she forgot and I forgot.

We learn about how to dial 911 on the telephone if we need help. But it has to be a really big kind of help because I asked my teacher Mrs. Rawlings if I can call 911 if I need help getting my shoe off and she said no. I asked Mrs. Rawlings can I call 911 if I didn’t do my homework and she said no. I asked her what if I hit a girl and she make-believes sleep? Mrs. Rawlings said I should call my parents or family member because someone would be home with me at all times. Mrs. Rawlings asked me if someone was home with me at all times and I said yes. I asked Mrs. Rawlings can I call 911 if Peanut gets out of the yard and she said that I had asked enough questions. Then I had one more question I said what if I get lost? And she said yes so maybe the next time I can’t find my way home I can call 911 and not have to sit in the lady’s house.

Mrs. Rawlings is a black lady and she is nice. I am not black because my parents are white. My Dad doesn’t call black people black. He calls them something else but I am not allowed to repeat it. Mom tells me never, ever to call Mrs. Rawlings that word or tell her I know of it. Mom tells me to pretend that word is pretend, but I can’t.

Sometimes when Mom tells me not to do something I feel like I’m going to blow up because I keep thinking about the thing. Like if Mom told me before school not to say the word asshole I feel like I will blow up and I will feel better if I say asshole at the top of my voice to shout it out of me but I can’t. And that’s how I got in trouble with the word Dad calls black people. We were in the mall and I said it to a black man and my mother slapped me and then I felt like I was going to blow up. But I didn’t say it again.

But sometimes I’m afraid I will say a word I don't want to. It will just come out of my mouth and I didn’t mean it. Josh told me that if I wanted to say a bad word I should just shout blue because no one can punish you for that.

Mrs. Rawlings gave us a card with 911 on it so we can call it if we’re lost. I put it in my wallet with my other card. I asked Mom why I can give strangers the card with my name on it but not tell them my name. She said not to show the card to anybody but a policeman. I showed my card to the lady yesterday. And if I call 911, I have to give them my name. But Mom says not to talk to strangers, not even Mr. Pete.

I get in trouble at school for not having my homework. I tell Mrs. Rawlings that it was pizza night but I don't tell her about California because Josh told me not to. Mrs. Rawlings says that pizza is not a reason for not having my homework done. She gives me extra homework and she also gives me a note to take home to my Mom and Dad. I have never been in trouble before.

Mrs. Rawlings tells me not to cry, that everybody gets in trouble sometimes.

Even superheroes and army men? I ask. She does not hear me.

His poems "Macho Man's Last Elbow Drop" and "Miss Elizabeth Said 'Oh Yeah'" appear in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, W. Todd Kaneko discusses the myths, opposites, relationships, and WWF with interviewer Amber L. Cook.

1. What (or should I say who?) inspired these two poems?

Immediately, the poems are elegies for two characters from the World Wrestling Federation back in the 80s and 90s. Miss Elizabeth and the Macho Man Randy Savage were two of the most popular performers of all time. Their relationship was at the heart of most storylines and feuds they were involved in. Elizabeth died after mixing drugs and alcohol back in 1993 and Savage had a heart attack while driving in 2011.

But the poems are also inspired by the mythology of wrestling. To a lot of men and women I know, watching wrestling is something to be ashamed of—something that you have to apologize for knowing anything about because it’s lowbrow or “fake.” We may have watched different wrestlers, depending on when and where we grew up, but if we can have that conversation, it often ends up being about times spent with our fathers or grandfathers back in the old days when the business tried to maintain the illusion that the matches were real contests.

So, I guess these two poems are inspired by wrestling, as well as those times that we’ve had with those people we can’t ever have back.

2. There seem to be defined roles for the man and the woman that lead "Miss Elizabeth Said 'Oh Yeah'". These two characters seem to be polar opposites, but it also seems like the man and woman feed off of each other out of necessity. Is this the way you intended for them to be read? If not, how did you want this binary to come across?

While I’m sure that Savage would have been a popular wrestler on his own, the degree of his success is due in great part to his partnership with Miss Elizabeth. When Savage proposed to Miss Elizabeth in the middle of the ring, it was after a long on-screen relationship that saw Elizabeth always bringing out the best of a wrestler that fans wanted to root for, even when he was playing the bad guy. As characters, they were polar opposites. Elizabeth was beautiful, glamorous and quiet; Savage was near-psychotic and violent—he needed Elizabeth’s calming presence to help keep him from going over the edge. Defining the binary was easy because it already existed on television. I tried to apply it to the mother and the father as well to give the Savage/Elizabeth moment more value for the speaker. 

3. This poem feels very Plathian in its ability to confess something intimate, which I truly admire. Do you often write “confessions,” whether factual or not, through characters on the page?

Thank you for that compliment. When professional wrestling is at its best, it mimics the things we desire or fear in real life, drawing on those things to make us know who to root for and who to root against; at some point, the performers make us forget that we don’t believe the violence is real. I think that a poem can work in much the same way, drawing us in and delivering something personal in ways that involve sleight of hand more than outright confession. For me, a poem nearly always confesses something intimate, even when the material of the poem is not factual—I don’t see the two as being mutually exclusive. 

4. Did you (intentionally or unintentionally) create parallels with the mother to Miss Elizabeth and the father to Macho Man?

The parallels between the mother to Miss Elizabeth and the father to Savage was intentional, and I think there also exists a parallel between the speaker and his wife even though there is less space in the poem devoted to that relationship. In my head, there was this one moment in time when Savage was proposing and a happily-ever-after ending seemed inevitable. Of course, as we all know, a happy ending is really just the moment before the next story begins. The father and mother divorced. The speaker is married and uncertain about his relationship. Elizabeth and Savage divorced (but not before Jake the Snake Roberts busted up the reception wielding a live cobra). The parallels were intentional, but I always have to write my way into intentionality. I knew I was looking for a parallel, but I didn’t necessarily know what that parallel was going to be until I got there.

5. What made you choose an epigraph from Randy Savage to start "Macho Man's Last Elbow Drop"? Why this quote? How does it inform the poem?

When I was visiting my family in Seattle one summer, there were a pair of bald eagles that were hanging out on the Evergreen Point Bridge that spans Lake Washington. One morning, we read in the newspaper that one of the eagles was struck by a truck and killed. The next day, as we crossed the bridge, there was that lone eagle sitting on top of the bridge. It perched majestic and sad, and we couldn’t imagine how it must feel, if it felt anything. It certainly wasn’t crying.

I like to use quotes from wrestlers who are good on the microphone, as there is often an image or a rhythm to their speeches that I can use in the poem. That epigraph is from an interview Savage did on the Arsenio Hall Show back in 1992 when he was WWF Champion, about to defend against the Ultimate Warrior (he lost the match but retained the title). Savage was always great on the microphone, and in that moment, he was answering the question, “Has the Macho Man ever cried?”

It turned out to be an important decision, as the quote gave me the snake and eagle images that were important to my figuring out how the poem would work. The poem is an elegy for the Macho Man, but also a poem for the father. Neither the speaker nor the father are crying men. They have to find other ways of expressing emotion.

6. I’m reading a loose connection between the family, Randy Savage, and the eagle throughout this poem. How do you make bridges between the seemingly unrelated?

If we are to believe Richard Hugo when he advises the poet to get off-topic as soon as possible (and I think we should), then it makes sense to start off-topic and see how the poem might find its way to topic. Unfortunately, there is no magic to the way I make bridges between seemingly unrelated things. For me, writing is a lot of trial and error, forcing things together to see if they fit, and then breaking them apart again if they refuse to work together. It’s cruel and sweaty and often unpleasant. That’s how metaphors work for me.

7. The two poems seem to be in conversation with one another. Do you often write poems that are able to talk to each other? How do you feel about sequence?

I am the kind of writer who thinks in projects. I look to sequence to help me figure out where the next poem comes from. I sometimes understand my own work better because I understand how it fits within a certain sequence. Once I have a poem, I will often start casting about for the poem’s siblings or cousins or evil twins. I often use one poem to figure out how to approach the other, looking at how one poem might work to answer questions that another poem has left unanswered. Sometimes, it’s challenging to write poems that are part of a sequence but not reliant on one another to function.

8. What’s something you’re reading right now that you think everyone should pick up and peruse?

When Jake Adam York passed away near the end of 2012, I started going back through his work, reading and re-reading his three books: Murder Ballads, Murmuration of Starlings and Persons Unknown. Those books should be read over and over by everyone to remind us about the serious, beautiful work a poem can do.

9. Are these poems part of a larger project?  

These two poems are a part of a sequence of poems I’m calling The Dead Wrestler Elegies. I have a sequence of about thirty of them, with several still planned. The poems form a larger narrative about the speaker and his father’s death, about learning to be a man, and about the mythology of professional wrestling.