An Interview with J. Nicholas Geist

April Murphy: I was blown away by your essay “A Murderer’s Work” in the Spring 2012 issue of Creative Nonfiction. The essay explores the tumultuous relationship between virtual violence for entertainment (as in video games like Far Cry 2 and Bioshock), and real-life violence based entertainment (like bull fighting). The narrator's strong, vibrant first-person voice relates these two experiences.

Writing from the point of view of the character in a video game - so much as to say "I" - raises interesting questions about perspective and narration. If you're playing a character that  someone else created, whom does the "I" represent?

JNG: For me, I think it’s like any other game. I was playing Settlers of Catan last night with some people who aren’t nonfiction writers, and I don’t think either of them thought, “Who am I when I am playing?” It’s certainly true that I’m playing a character that someone else has created–and, generally speaking, that a second person (or team) has written and a third person has voice acted–but it’s still me who’s playing. The choices I make are mine. Videogame characters are a sort of collaborative identity, but it’s the player’s contribution that actually individuates the character. 

Recently, there’s been a bit of a mad hullabaloo about the ending to Mass Effect 3, and a lot of the frustration has run along the lines of “My Shepard wouldn’t do X.” I think that’s telling. When first I read Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, I was struck by a story he told about the first Mass Effect. (I’ve written a bit about this on my blog.) In short, he describes how, no matter what else is going on in the game, “his” Shepard always has a specific reaction to a certain character in the game. “My” Shepard always has the opposite reaction. We’re playing the same game, but in a very real way, we’re not playing the same character.

To say it more simply, even if the scenario is constructed for me by a team of designers, writers, and developers, the experience of playing the game is still mine, and the things that happen to my character are happening to me. They become a part of my experience, and a part of how I make sense of the world–which is ultimately why I think videogames are worth writing about. 

AJM: As someone who is a thinker about several different types of pop culture narrative, including comic books, I'm curious about your take on the emerging genre of graphic nonfiction. I'm a scholar of graphic narrative myself, so I'm keen to notice a structural relationship between graphic novels, popular comic books, and memoir - but not many academics agree. 

JNG: I'd hardly call myself a "scholar of graphic narrative," but I certainly read a lot of comics. I think more than anything using a graphic medium to tell stories is much like using text to tell stories--there are lots and lots and lots of ways to do it, and we do ourselves a bit of a disservice when we lump them all together. (We hear people dismiss "comics" and "videogames" all the time; we don't ever hear anybody say, "Pfft. Words.")

I think one of the most useful things about graphic media for a memoirist is the fact that comics already have a cultural acceptance of an interstitial authorial or narrative voice.

Consider:

The medium affords three different voices presented side by side--the voice of a character speaking in a previous panel ("His name is Jason"), the voice of Robin in the present action of the scene ("YEEEEEEEHAAAA!!", etc.), and the voice of the narrator (probably Alfred--"He liked having him out there"). Each voice serves a different purpose, and so the writers are able to contextualize the scene in a way that a written text can't easily emulate.

One of the things I love most about nonfiction writing is the way in which the different voices intertwine to help make meaning in complicated ways. In any given scene in an essay, "I" may be speaking with three different voices, all of which are in direct conflict--that is, what "I" as a character in the essay am thinking may conflict with what "I" as a character in the essay am saying, which may conflict with what "I" as the author of the piece am suggesting. I think this is something that graphic media let us do really well, and in really interesting ways. (I just wish I could draw.)

AJM: While memoirs like Fun Home, Persepolis, and Maus have been 'accepted' as literature, it's been difficult for other graphic novels to break into the canon. Do you think this has something to do with the need of a first-person narrator? Any other theories?

JNG: One of my favorite quotations on the subject comes from Marshall McLuhan, who writes, "The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be." Which is to say, any new medium seems both inferior and simplistic to those whose literacy is built on older media. Today, people wish their kids would spend more time reading novels; when the novel was young, people looked it as a fanciful waste of time for flighty layabouts. Having grown up a late-20th-century geek, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that comics or video games can be art, but I have a lot of trouble accepting the idea that a tweet can be literature.

I think for the ensconced literati, Fun Home, Blankets, American Born Chinese et. al. are the exceptions that prove the rule, the shining examples that show how clearly all the rest of it is junk. Our kids, though, will grow up with the understanding that comics can be art, and so they will look for art in comics, and make art in comics, and then it'll just be normal. And things will be that much more awesome.

AJM: The structure of “A Murderer’s Work” weaves together several different locations - Madrid, California, virtual Central Africa, and even a city under the sea - can you talk a bit about how you connected these disparate places and characters so that they fed into a larger narrative?

JNG: I think of the essay–and possibly all literary writing–as the art of making connections, and I feel like Montaigne’s essays really exemplify this. For Montaigne, the movement of the narrative almost never comes from a discrete, sequential set of events–what we think of as a “traditional” narrative–but from the way his thinking about his subject takes shape as he considers his feelings and experiences.

In “A Murderer’s Work,” because the places and settings are so distinct and disparate, it made sense to me to separate them out as discrete chunks, rather than try to weave everything together. This was especially true because in a sense each of the settings has a completely different set of rules governing it–Bioshock’s plasmids, Far Cry 2’s weird political situation, the ritual of the bullfight–and so using the setting of each as an organizing principle seemed to make it easier to keep track of what to expect of the world at any given moment.

AJM: Nonfiction writer Abigail Thomas has said that the structure of a nonfiction essay arises from thinking deeply about the content - essentially that if you write, the form will start to take shape without you consciously thinking about it. It seems that this may be true in the structure of "A Murderer's Work" - but I'm curious about whether you think about structure while writing, or in revision, or, if structure seems to take care of itself? 

JNG: I love that idea--that form comes from thinking deeply about content--but I don't think that's quite the same as saying that essays take shape without intentional direction. I think really what an essay is for me is a sort of crystallized thinking--a record of the process by which I have come to make and understand a connection between things.

(Forgive me. Things are about to get a bit ridiculous.)

So: content. Let's say I've got some ideas I want to write about.

My writing process involves lots of junk writing--stuff I do just to get the ideas out, to figure out what I think, to help me understand myself--which I think is pretty common. Most of what I write doesn't end up in the essay, but it's necessary for me to get to the point where I can get a sense of how these ideas connect, for me. A lot of my prewriting takes me places I don't need to go; I spend a lot of time retreading the same ground, wandering down dead ends, branching off needlessly, but eventually, I get where I'm trying to go.

And so I think my way into these things making sense. Once I have a sense of how everything fits together, then I can start thinking about structure--but that structure comes from the thinking. I try to figure out which connections, which strands, which digressions and convergences are really necessary to the understanding I've built, and which were the necessary superfluities which were artifacts of my process, but not really a part of the essay proper. There's a lot of whittling here, and it is for me a very conscious process, but it's really a process of finding the the structure in my thinking and solidifying it.

And maybe it's at this point that I figure out that that thing I thought was a digression is actually what ties it all together, or that something I thought was crucial really doesn't matter. In the initial drafts of "A Murderer's Work," there are two big scenes--one in a Spanish dorm room, the other in a (real, non-digital) car on my commute--that were actually the first things I wrote. They were the starting point of my thinking about the issue, and they were definitely connected to the conclusions I come to. But eventually I realized that they weren't a part of the connection I was trying to understand in the essay.

The structure of the essay--bulls, Bioshock, Bowa-Seko, and all that--came out of my thinking about the interface between videogames and violence, but it was a product of a concerted effort to make sense of the question of what, amid all of that wild thought, was actually meaningful

I like the way Philip Lopate said it: "I am more interested in the display of consciousness on the page. The reason I read nonfiction is to follow an interesting mind.…I’m arguing more for reflective nonfiction where thinking and the play of consciousness is the main actor."

AJM: Many people think of nonfiction as existing on a tenuous border between fact and fiction, blending together reality and the imagination. Your work expertly makes takes this border and stretches it to its limit - but can you tell me where you think the steadfast boundaries of nonfiction lie?

JGN: The tagline of Creative Nonfiction is “True Stories, Well Told.” And I think what we mean we say “true” with regards to a story is that the events presented are consonant with reality.

And so, at the risk of sounding like an enormous dink, I think “nonfiction,” as a designation, will always be hampered by the fact that reality is always filtered through subjectivity. This isn’t necessarily to say that there’s no such thing as objective reality, but I do think we can’t access that reality except through our sensorium, such that everything we encounter gets filtered through our biases, our assumptions, our prejudices, our peccadilloes, our passions. If there is such a thing as objective nonfiction, then I think probably nobody can write it.

If our access to reality is filtered through subjectivity, then I think the only useful way to call a story “true” is to say that this story is consonant with my perception of reality–i.e., that it is honest. If I tell the truth as I see it, then I’m not lying, fabricating, misrepresenting, or fictionalizing. The worst I can be is wrong. (Which I am both comfortable with and accustomed to.)

Where I think the people who run afoul of the creative nonfiction police do so is when the write something that doesn’t align with what they know to be true. James Frey knew he wasn’t in jail for three months. If it was the “emotional truth”–if it really did feel like three months–then that’s fine; that’s real, and legitimate, and I think Frey had every right to say, “It felt like three months.” But he didn’t. He said it was three months, even though he knew that wasn’t true.

Thankfully, I never killed my father in order to secure access to escape from his undersea empire. (I’ve never killed my father at all; he’s quite alive and happily occupying the surface world, with no empire to speak of.) But I have had the experience of occupying the mental space of a videogame character that did do those things, and so those experiences are a part of my subjective reality. I can be honest about the way that they affected me, the role they have in their life, and the significance I’ve found in them without having to treat them as “real.”

Truth, I think, is probably too big a job for me. Honesty, though, I can do.

AJM: And this, honestly, has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us at American Literary Review. We look forward to following your writing! 

J. Nicholas Geist is an essayist, gamer, programmer, teacher, feminist, and all-around geek about town. He earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction writing from California State University, Fresno in 2008. His work has been published in Creative Nonfiction and Ninth Letter, and he frequently publishes weird stuff with Kill Screen. You can find him on Twitter as @jnicholasgeist or on his blog at geekabouttown.com

American Literary Review Spring 2012 Issue Now Available

Contributors

Fiction:

Marc Dickinson, Smoked

Kyle Mellen, Just Like A Man

André Mangeot, One Day of Life

Austin Gilmour, On Huron

Nonfiction:

Barbara Cameron, Hawk Blood

D. W. Martin, Bloodlines

Kaitlyn Palacios, The Waiver

Poetry:

Joseph Duemer, Lake Surface Full of Clouds (contest winner)

Lisa Fay Coutley, Shooting Geese

Derek Mong, Midnight at the School of Cosmetology; Heliotrope, or Man’s Mind Angles Inevitably Toward God

Amy Eisner, Guide for Monsters

Richard Jackson, No End to It; Prophecy

Josiah Bancroft, Burning the Ship Home

Roxane Beth Johnson, Geode; Honeymoon; Sermon to Self

Liz Waldner, Royauté

Nick McRae, Forgiveness

Leslie Adrienne Miller, Roget’s; Collette as Trope

Judith Skillman, High Strung

Keith Flynn, The Agnostic; Rembrandt’s Mirror

Ross Leckie, Still Life

Britton Shurley, Babel

Bobby C Rogers, Archival Quality; Interesting Case

Dave Nielsen, Awkward Sonnet for My Father

Meredith Stricker, “The Whole Battle of the Century Inside Him”

Luke Hankins, A Shape with Forty Wings

Philip Brady, To Banquet with Worthy Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet

Beth Marzoni, My Mother Tells Me About the Steel Pier

An Interview with Dilruba Ahmed

Justin Bigos: Your first book, Dhaka Dust, is an impressive debut in many respects. One quality of the book I particularly admire is the ranginess of its voice: sometimes narrative and shrewdly cosmopolitan, sometimes childlike yet aging quickly, sometimes historical, sometimes persona, and sometimes sounding like lyrics reaching us from ancient Greece or Spain or India. What is it, in your mind, that holds this book together?

Dilruba Ahmed: I can only hope that part of what holds the book together is as sense of multiplicity. The book brings together a host of voices, as you point out . . . voices of (mostly) women across generations and contexts—with some voices that lean toward story and some toward song. I hope that the voices and tones delivered by various poetic devices come together as facets of experience—at times harmonious, and other times, contradictory.

If I had to name one thing that holds this book together in my mind, it’s a kind of haunting—a haunting that I began to understand more clearly upon reading, as an undergraduate, Agha Shahid Ali’s lines about discovering an “exit to Calcutta” in Ohio and an “India [that] always exists / Off the turnpikes / of America.” John Keats wrote in his letters that poetry should “appear almost a Remembrance” to the reader – Ali’s lines had that sort of effect on me. In a way, many of the poems that I’ve written over the years have been in response to those lines, which startled me into a state of recognition. In my poems, I also hope that part of what emerges is a longing for the seemingly unattainable – for home and a homeland, for permanence, for language, for a family undivided by time and geography.

JB: You mention Agha Shahid Ali. I recently attended a one-week poetry workshop at UT-Austin and we read Ali's introduction to his anthology of formal ghazals written in English, Ravishing Disunities. The form is very seductive, at least in part due to its "formal disunity," as Ali calls it; the ghazal relies on music to hold together its "thematically independent couplets." I'm curious about your poem "Ghazal" in the collection. It's a beautiful ghazal, but it does not use a qafia, which is the rhyme preceding the refrain, called the radif. Why did you choose to write a more nontraditional ghazal in English?

DA: While I attended to the ghazal’s strict requirements when I began writing the poem, that particular aspect of the form fell away as I wrote. That’s part of what I love about tackling given forms—sometimes the conventions are strict requirements, and other times they serve as mere suggestion, depending on the direction a poem takes.

In Ravishing Disunities, Agha Shahid Ali emphasizes that a writer must depart "from somewhere . . .” Would he have recognized my poem as a ghazal? I hope so! While my poem, in the end, did not use a qafia, I did attempt to stay true to the spirit and shape of the form—its themes of longing for the beloved, the conflation of the earthly and divine, its non-linear movement, sense of repetition and variation, inclusion of a makhta, etc. (this is when I must reveal that my first name, Dilruba, roughly translates to "stealer of hearts,” which appears as “heart-thief” in the makhta).

I also began having fun with other sonic devices—the repetition of the “er” and “n” and “uh” sounds, the rhythms of stressed and unstressed syllables, variations in the caesuras, etc. Had I not strayed from the ghazal’s qafia requirements, some of the lines that emerged unexpectedly may not have surfaced. As a writer, I find that kind of surprise much more interesting than strict adherence to a particular form.

JB: “Stealer of hearts”! Wow, that is an amazing name. For the record, I photocopied your poem for my peers and teachers in the workshop at UT-Austin, and I think your ghazal stole at least a few hearts.

Another thing I love in your book is the sense of double vision. There is the sense of being in one place and being in another at the same time. There is the particular immigrant experience of visiting a parents’ native land, which is foreign but also a place where the daughter/son might have belonged—and maybe does, a little. There is also, in a poem like “Venice during an Election Year in the US,” a very subtle sense of distance/intimacy, with much political subtext (great use of title in this one!). This sense of double vision that I am trying to describe is, I think, very important for our times. Aside from reading poems, what do you think poets need to do to see the larger world in its parallels and contradictions? What if a poet lives her whole life in a town in southeastern Ohio? (Or, does the poet always have to leave?)

DA: At a recent poetry reading, an audience member described poets as people who have a sixth sense, a kind of super-sensory power that allows them to detect things that are not readily apparent to others. I think that’s probably accurate—that poets possess a kind of hyper-sensitivity to people and places, to relationships and history, to language and its capacity to capture/shape/disrupt experience, and to the collision of imagination and perception in making sense of the world. So maybe it’s just that sensitivity that lends poets the kind of double vision you describe—permitting them to fashion, for example, from two unlike things a powerful metaphor that transforms understanding and helps us see the world anew, or to somehow stand simultaneously here and there.

Must a poet always leave? I don’t think it’s necessarily a requirement. Small towns are full of their own mysteries and contradictions, rich with stories and rife with conflict. A poet who lives her entire life in a town in southeastern Ohio may reside, for example, with the history of decimated native peoples; with the destruction and potential of industry; with ever-shifting race relations that bring generations and neighbors into conflict; and, as anywhere, with the small gestures that make us human and the transgressions that break us down.

It may be difficult to see much of that, of course, or to understand it within a broader context without some distance to provide a sense of perspective. I suppose this is where the “leaving” comes in . . . but I don’t think that travel alone helps writers experience or develop the kind of double vision you describe. It’s possible to leave and return unchanged if one isn’t willing to spend some time with the feelings of discomfort and displacement that can accompany a departure from home. Elizabeth Bishop’s work possesses a keen awareness of this discomfort in poems such as “Questions of Travel,” “Filling Station,” and “Arrival at Santos,” to name a few. Poet Mona Van Duyn, in a poem called “Into Mexico,” writes of the exhilaration of first-time travel but not without contemplating experiences of alienation and discord as well. Jack Gilbert, too, tackles this uneasiness as he describes the “laughter / every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta” in his poem, “A Brief for the Defense.” And in “Blackbottom,” Toi Derricotte’s speaker ventures back to the inner-city neighborhood that her family has “freshly escaped,” both mocking the former community and acknowledging her family “had lost [its] voice in the suburbs.” So while it’s problematic to say that the poet must “always leave,” I think that many writers have shown us how travel has the power to be transformative: it jars us out of our complacency, making the familiar strange and the unfamiliar commonplace. Which, of course, is part of the poet’s task.

JB: One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Translating Tagore,” which I read ultimately as an ode to Tagore, the “Mother bird” who feeds words to the speaker, who struggles to translate them. The poem ends with the speaker “in dream” trying to read Tagore’s “curlicued Braille.” The image is wonderful in how it gives textured form to the Bengali language, as a different way to “see” it. I don’t want to ask about your efforts to translate Tagore because the poem already speaks so beautifully of that struggle, but can you talk about Tagore’s influence on your poetry? When did you discover him? 

DA: Somewhere in my parents’ basement are a few reel-to-reel audio tape recordings of my mother reciting Bengali poetry along with handfuls of cassette tapes with the same. My mother was deeply involved in poetry recitations and competitions while in school back in Bangladesh, and in my very earliest encounters with poetry I heard her reciting the poems of Tagore, Jibanananda Das, and others. During my childhood in Ohio I would sometimes find her recording her recitations with a tape recorder, or, as an adolescent, I would stumble across an unlabeled cassette that, when played, surprised me with the familiar sound of her voice hypnotically delivering indecipherable verses.

The recordings were always deeply mournful and dramatic, full of great yearning and pathos. I understood very little of it, as most of the poems were written in a more difficult, “textbook” version of Bengali while I was only familiar with the everyday spoken Bengali of our household. My mother would sometimes translate the poems from the difficult Bengali to the understandable Bengali and/or English that I knew, all the while mourning the loss of the poem’s music, spirit, and beauty. In many ways these encounters with Bengali poetry were similar to my experience of hearing Arabic prayers: both contained verses in which something unspecified but significant resided. My lack of fluency transformed my experience of these languages to one of pure music.

So I came to Tagore through my parents, with the layers of translation and without direct access to a beautiful and deeply poetic language. As a result, my introduction to what Neruda refers to as poetry’s “small and mysterious exchange of gifts” was doubly mysterious – it was as though my parents wanted me to love (as they loved) something I couldn’t fully perceive or experience, as though the reading of poetry were a kind of mystical experience I would never fully behold but rather, simply experience secondhand through my parents, who served as conduits to the source. I think these early experiences probably shaped my tendency to write for sound or music rather than for meaning in many of my initial drafts.

JB: Your poem “Return” is a love poem to Pittsburgh, a city – I will concur here – that can be difficult to love, at least for the newcomer. And yet so much poetry comes out of this city; it really does seem to be a poetry-lover’s kind of place. Off the top of my head, there is Jack Gilbert, Jim Daniels, Gerald Stern, Lynn Emanuel. What is it about Pittsburgh that inspires people to not only write poetry, but poetry in praise of Pittsburgh?

DA: I’ll start by saying that Pittsburgh is a very significant place for me, personally: I went to school in Pittsburgh. I fell in love in Pittsburgh. I got married in Pittsburgh to a man who was raised in Pittsburgh. I still have family and dear friends in Pittsburgh and visit regularly. And while my earliest efforts with poetry preceded my studies in Pittsburgh, it is in that city that I began, tentatively, to think of myself as a writer. I owe a great debt to the writers and scholars there who mentored me formally and informally: Judith Vollmer, Shalini Puri, Toi Derricotte, Geeta Kothari, Lynn Emmanuel.

While I lived there, Pittsburgh’s often-dreary weather put me in a pensive mood that inevitably drove me to write. (Upon moving to the sunny West Coast after living in Pittsburgh, I remember thinking I would never write again!) More specifically, if I had to say why poets write in praise of Pittsburgh, perhaps it’s because its charms can go unrecognized. Pittsburgh’s a city that you come to appreciate over time, I think.

In “Return,” I was attempting to capture a mindset in which the speaker feels that if only he or she left her current location, change would be possible. While the stagnancy is embodied by the landscape, it also rests within the speaker.

JB: " . . .the speaker feels that if only he or she left her current location, change would be possible." This reminds me very much of a poem I was just introduced to: "The City" by Cavafy. Do you know it?

DA: No, but I just looked it up (thanks, Google . . .). Cavafy’s poem is very powerful—so brutal and emotionally “true.” The ruin of Cavafy’s speaker is not location-specific; the ruin—and the capacity to create ruin—resides within the speaker. I was tackling a similar idea in “Return,” I suppose—the speaker rejects a particular landscape as a home, but the feelings of disillusionment and restlessness stem from internal sources. There’s a kind of inner reconciliation that has yet to take place. In a sense, the speaker has not yet discovered that a sense of “home” is as much created and actively constructed as it is found.

In Cavafy’s poem, the speaker wants to believe his or her dilemma is context-specific, but the poem’s counterargument frames the problem as a psychological one. The experience of ruin, or of creating ruin, is something he or she can’t shake or escape—he or she carries it with him. The poem is pretty damning—a real kick in the pants. I love it.

Both speakers seem to desire something that doesn’t or can’t exist—call it longing, or melancholy, or suadade in Portuguese, or maya in Bengali. In my poem, the speaker remains in the state of melancholic searching, while Cavafy’s poem confronts and dispels it.

JB: Now that your first book has been published, are you hard at work on your second book? How is your work changing? Let’s end our discussion with some hints of what we might expect to see from Dilruba Ahmed in the future.

DA: The new poems are taking shape . . . I don’t think I have enough distance yet to speak about them articulately—it’s a bit like peering through a pane of glass smeared with Vaseline! I can say that, in my earlier poems, I was deeply interested in place, which resulted in a lot of descriptive language, while the language in the new work (which does not have a focus on place) feels much more pared down. 

Thanks so much, Justin, for taking the time to ask these thoughtful questions about my work!

JB: And thank you, Ruba. It’s been a pleasure.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), winner of the Bakeless Literary Prize for poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. A writer with roots in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Bangladesh, Ahmed holds BPhil and MAT degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has taught in Chatham University’s Low-Residency MFA program. Web site: www.dilrubaahmed.com.

Photo credit: Mike Drzal

An Interview with David James Poissant

Erin Stalcup: I’m so pleased that the American Literary Review will be publishing your story “Wake the Baby” in the Fall of 2012! The writing world knows you as David James Poissant, but I’ve had the pleasure of knowing you as Jamie, and as a friend. The best way for me to describe the stories of yours I’ve read, or heard you read, is that they each feel like a distinct texture. Some, like your story published in One Story, “Refund,” are pure, devastating realism. Some, like the story I heard you read at the National Society of Arts and Letters award banquet in Clearwater, Florida, “100% Cotton,” (which wound up being published in the Summer 2011 issue of The Southern Review) are starkly realistic, but also a bit strange: in that story a man seeks to get robbed because his deaf father was killed when he couldn’t understand a thief’s instructions. Some stories are even stranger than that: Lizard Man, your single-story chapbook, which also won the Playboy College Fiction Contest, involves dragon tattoos, a dirty child holding a blue balloon, an alligator, a child thrown through a window, and a torrential storm. And, your magical fairy tale (which could be read as a real-world Appalachian allegory, almost) appears in the current Fairy Tale Review. I’d describe your stories on a spectrum from the familiar tragic to the surreal comic to the otherworldly fantastic. Do you consciously try to stretch your writing into different modes—is each story a place to purposefully explore something new? Or does your range just naturally occur?  

David James Poissant: If I have a style, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know whether that, the not-knowing, is a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t think it’s bad, necessarily. I can’t say that I consciously attempt to stretch myself or to challenge myself to write in different modes, though I will say that nine times out of ten, when I sit down to begin a story, I know the direction in which I’m headed—not how the story ends, never how the story ends, but whether I plan to enter the woods or stick to the sidewalks of realism. I think that this is less a product of any personal choice or any stylistic tic as much as it’s a byproduct of my reading habits. I’ll pick up a collection by George Saunders or Aimee Bender as quick as I will one by Charles D’Ambrosio or Lorrie Moore. I read widely. As a result, story ideas arrive both zany and grounded, and I do my best to write them all. Whether they’ll all find a home together one day, I don’t know, but, on their own, I try to make each what it is the best I can without worrying about larger questions of mode or range or which kind of writer I am. In a recent interview, Adam Levin, author of The Instructions and Hot Pink, said, “I was taught that there’s this division between realism and experimentalism, and I think that the other writers whose work I admire, as well as myself, we sort of don’t care about that anymore. And it’s not because it was ever irrelevant, it’s just that now the point of experimentalism seems to be to still tell a good story and to move people.” That sentiment strikes me as just about right. I’m wary of experimentation for experimentation’s sake, but I think that the best of the genre, works like Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father or A.S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest,” get at the truth of life and longing just as earnestly and honestly as anyone working in more familiar modes.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is a seismic shift from where I stood in grad school. At the University of Arizona, I was entrenched in the realism camp, not because the program incentivized such ideologies but because, somewhere, I’d gotten the idea that one must plant his flag and stick to his territory or else. Then, I was in Atlanta for AWP in 2007, and Redivider was sponsoring the AWP Quickie Contest, a contest for stories written on a postcard-sized slip of paper right there at the conference. I put more thought into the thing than probably the contest designers intended, but I wound up winning with “Knockout,” a short-short about a husband and wife who intend to resolve their marital differences by erecting a boxing ring on their front lawn and beating each other up. The neighbors come out to watch, and, of course, the story turns ridiculous, but I hope that the story gets at some weird—if exaggerated—truth about how we interact with one another and how far we’ll go to get what we want. I like stories that do this, that work toward truth with a capital T in some sideways way rather than head-on. You look at a novel like Aspects of Love by David Garnett, and it’s just this disaster of bad dialogue, characters discoursing on who they are and what they want. Then you read Lady into Fox, which McSweeney’s brought back into print in 2004, and you see just what Garnett was capable of when he quit trying to be so proper about everything. Anyway, that story, “Knockout,” writing it, somehow that tripped a switch, and it wasn’t long before I was writing about glowing babies and talking wolves alongside the realism that I still kind of think of as home base.

ES: I think that’s so well said. I really appreciate your sense that all storytelling is that, telling a story, whether it’s in a mode that seems familiar, or a form that feels invented on the spot. The phrase “experimental” has always bothered me, because it implies the writer doesn’t know what he or she is doing—hey, let me just try this out, and we’ll see what happens. Instead, forms we label as experimental are often the exact right form for the story being told, a conscious, thoughtful choice the writer makes. I really feel that way about your work, that you’ll use any structure to tell the story you need to, and you’ll leave reality if you must, because, as you say, that sometimes tells us more about life here in “the real world.” My quick intro above may have not made it clear that you have twenty-five published short stories, and you’re putting together your first collection. You say above that all your stories might not live in the same book, so how are you thinking about which of your various modes of storytelling will live between two covers? Are you aiming for diversity in the collection, or are you trying to have some clear thread run through each piece?  

DJP: The collection, which is finished and out to publishers for consideration, is one of mostly realistic pieces. A few magical episodes snuck in there, but, were the book to be picked up and an editor wanted those stories banished, I wouldn’t be offended. Likewise, if someone wanted to collect all twenty-five of the stories I’ve so far published, I’d be happy to have them all share page space. What the book as a whole looks and feels like is less important to me than the integrity of each story as it stands on its own. So, above, when I say all twenty-five, I guess that I really mean twenty, since I’m no longer crazy about a few of my stories that first saw print.

But, if the collection is published and reviewed, I feel like it could get slammed either way. Reviewers of short story collections seem to criticize a book when all of the stories are cut from the same cloth, and they seem to criticize collections that are too eclectic. Maybe story writers can’t win. I don’t know. For me, I just love stories. I almost never read a collection in order, and I almost never finish one before moving on to another. I’ll read a few stories, savor them, put the collection away for a while, read a few novels, read a graphic novel, a book of poetry, a few more stories from other collections or anthologies, and eventually I’ll get back to that first collection and read a few more stories from it. I finish collections, but it takes years, and often a new book out is a good reason for me to finish reading a writer’s last collection. In truth, I seem always to be reading twenty books at once. It’s not something I recommend or am proud of, I think that I just love variety. And because, as my wife puts it, I have a “freakishly good memory,” I can open a novel after having set it down a year before and pick up right where I left off. It’s a rare book that captures my attention and finds me reading straight through without stopping. The last two to do it, that I can remember, were Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts a few months ago and Marilynn Robinson’s Home last year. So, in short, I guess I don’t care so much about the design or composition of the collection because I think that most readers, like me, seldom read stories in order, and that most readers don’t mind when the fantastic rubs elbows with the realistic between the covers of the same book. As the writer, I feel like my job is just to make each story its best. Everything else is marketing, and I’m happy to go along with anything that helps the book to find the widest audience, anything short of tampering with the stories themselves in some way that makes them no longer my own. Does that make sense?  

ES: That makes perfect sense—it’s in fact exactly how I feel about my own work, and the work of other writers, but I never know if people agree with me or not! I can’t wait until your book is out in the world, in whatever form. I want to talk a bit about a specific story of yours, “Lizard Man.” One thing I really admire about that story is that it’s simultaneously larger-than-life, full of bright colors and dramatic happenings, yet also very human, and very real. There are two main conflicts in the story: one character is dealing with the death of his abusive father, and the other is dealing with the fact that he abused his own son by throwing him through a window when he learned that he was gay. These very real conflicts are set against a backdrop of swamps and poverty, and I’m most impressed with how you treat problematic people with dignity, and allow them to tell stories of being hurt and hurting others. You allow your readers to empathize with people they might not normally have much compassion for. Do you consider that a goal of fiction? Should that be every writer’s ambition?

DJP: Erin, first, I take that as high praise, so thank you. Second, I can’t speak for every writer, but, in my own writing, my ambition is absolutely to present the reader with “unlikeable” characters that, by story’s end, the reader will, if not like, exactly, at least empathize with. Empathy, for me, is the magic word. I was brought up in a Southern Baptist church, and the thing that got me away from the church for a while was the church itself. The focus was seldom on empathy and often on sin. Instead of talking about how to love our neighbor, we were talking about why our neighbor was doomed to spend eternity in the fiery pits of hell. But I did love my neighbor, and I didn’t want to think about him or her in hell. Nowadays, my wife and I attend a Methodist church, and the focus there is on grace and love, and if that sounds cheesy, it’s at least life-affirming. I no longer believe in hell, and I’m not interested in stories that present a character who deserves it.

Many of my stories are set in the South because I grew up in metro-Atlanta and now live in central Florida. I’ve called the suburban South home for most of my life, and most of my neighbors have been middle-class and white and Republican. That’s what you see parodied in “Refund,” the One Story story you mentioned. It can be difficult to write about some of these characters without skewering them too hard. And when I’m watching John Stewart or Rachel Maddow and cheering them on, it’s easy to be dismissive of anyone who voted for Bush or McCain or who will vote for Romney. But, when you actually get to know someone who voted for Bush—when you have many people who voted for Bush in your family, and when these same people, given the choice, would strike down gay marriage, yet, in some ways, they’re very good people who do great things for the less fortunate members of their communities—then you’re forced to acknowledge that things are complicated, that people are multifaceted, and that all people are capable of good and bad regardless of the political party with which they are affiliated. For instance, I know this guy, a friend of my father’s, who is so racist I can’t even talk to him. He’s homophobic. He’s xenophobic. He’s ignorant of so many things that engaging him in conversation makes me furious. Yet, when this guy’s sibling abused and abandoned his teenage son, this guy and his wife took the boy in and loved him, seemingly unconditionally. It’s a long story, but, basically, they saved the kid’s life. So, how do you reconcile an act like that with the guy’s rhetoric? I don’t know. I still don’t want to have lunch with the guy, but I can’t help respecting this one tremendously loving thing he’s done. Then again, if the kid were to come out as gay, I can’t help wondering whether he’d be kicked out of the house. And, if he were, would that undo all of the good that came before? Would that mean that the love wasn’t love at all, or would it mean that we just don’t have enough good words, the way the Greeks did, for loves of many breeds? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but stuff like this pinballs through my head constantly when I write a story. My goal, then, is less to come out on some side of an issue, but to present reality as I see it, to keep it complicated, and to never play it safe. The voting booth is where I’ll push the button for Obama. I don’t need to push it in my fiction, and I don’t need to stick to the characters who would.

Of course, as soon as I take on the point of view of a sexist or racist or homophobic character in my fiction, my first impulse is the worry that a reader will take the voice of the narrator for my own, but I work hard to ignore such worries. Once, at a kind of famous writers’ conference, I read from a story in which the narrator makes light of his dog’s death. The episode garnered both laughs and frowns. Following the reading, the conference director looked me in the eye and said, “You’re not as nice as you look,” and I wanted to say, “No! No! I am as nice as I look. Nicer, even!” I wanted to explain my heart for animals, how many pets I’ve had, how, watching Hurricane Katrina footage, it was the shots of stranded dogs and cats that got me sobbing. Still, a few people couldn’t get over that story or get that, reading it, I was in character. If you’re a pretty good reader and your first-person narrator is kind of an asshole, then the risk you run, reading, is coming off as kind of an asshole. Still, I think that most readers can separate the author from the narrator, and anyone who reads “Between the Teeth” and thinks that I’m a dog-killer or reads “Lizard Man” and sees the story as an endorsement of Dan’s behavior throwing his son through a window, well, that person is probably not the best reader for my work.  

ES: First, you look like the nicest guy on the planet, and you are in fact nicer than you look, I’ll vouch for that. Second, bravo; I love your answer above. It echoes a lot of the conversations I’ve been having lately with my parents and friends and students and strangers on Facebook . . . there’s so much hate being expressed by so many people these days, it’s hard to know what to do in the face of it. Lots of us want to share love and share kindness, those of us who are Christian and those of us who aren’t, but it’s also hard not to turn the hateful into a parody of themselves, it’s hard not to hate them back. And I really want to believe we can write our way through that, into seeing the complexity and wholeness of people. Thank you: you really help me to continue to think about the state of our country, and the potential of fiction writing. I’ll quickly mention that your story published by The Atlantic, “The Heaven of Animals,” which I just read when visiting my mom (and her Kindle), is a sequel story which explores the relationship between Dan and his grown son. It’s a beautiful story, very different than “Lizard Man” but equally powerful, and I was thankful to revisit these characters, and empathize newly with them. I list some links below, for readers who want to access your magnificent stories. I’m going to shift to some practical territory now: your current job—a tenure-track gig teaching creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida—is what many readers of this blog aim for. What’s it like to get the thing you’ve been working toward for many, many years?

DJP: Landing the job at the University of Central Florida was a dream come true, not just because it means working in an MFA program but because it means living in Florida. When you grow up in Georgia, most of your family vacations take place in Florida, so the state—from the panhandle to the warm springs, from great cities like St. Augustine and St. Pete’s, to the beaches and fishing and manatees and amazing birding opportunities—has, for me, always been associated with paradise. Even having lived here a year, I still take this place for paradise. I was setting fiction in Florida long before I lived here, and I’m very happy to call this big, weird state home.

But, to answer you more directly, it’s been extremely gratifying and humbling to see six years of hard work culminate with a job teaching fiction writing to graduate students and undergraduates at a really good, really big (third largest in the nation after Arizona State and Ohio State) university. I never expected to land an MFA “gig” before having a book, and, frankly, I don’t know how I got the job. I knew no one at UCF, and, in a market of job descriptions advertising 3/3 and 4/4 job loads, plus positions loaded down with composition teaching, UCF looked to me like one of the year’s best jobs. I didn’t expect to get an AWP interview, and I didn’t expect, then, to get a campus visit. But somehow I did, and somehow I got the job. And it’s proof of something, I guess. Proof that there are still good jobs in this market for writers without books, which is good; proof that it’s not all about connections or inside candidates, which is reassuring; proof that, if you write your ass off and keep publishing and apply to enough jobs (last year I applied to 97), then you might just land on your feet, which, I hope, is inspiring.

Of course, getting the job and keeping the job are two different things! My goal now is to keep writing as close to every day as I can. I love teaching, and I love writing, and I’ve managed, pretty well, this first year, to do both as well as I can. Sometimes the teaching takes over and I worry about the work, but not to the degree that school took over the last few years while I finished up work on my PhD at the University of Cincinnati. Those years were both the greatest and the hardest of my life, but I think that they prepared me really well for the job market and for my first job. Given the chance to do it again, I’d do it the same. The first collection is finished, and I’m more than halfway through with a second. I’m also deep into a novel begun in 2011. The novel’s my priority, at this point, my hope being to finish it sometime next year. It’s straight-up realism, a big family drama set—where else—in the South.

ES: Thanks for ending with hope for all of us who want to make lives out of teaching and writing. I’m of course very much looking forward to reading your collections and your novel. In the meantime, readers can access your incredible stories in many places: Lizard Man is available as a chapbook through RopeWalk Press, single issue copies of “Refund” are available at One Story, “The Heaven of Animals” is available as an Atlantic Kindle edition, and we look forward to seeing your work in the American Literary Review in the Fall! Thanks for talking with me, Jamie. I’m so glad there are writers like you doing good work in the world, and thank you for making me feel encouraged to go do my own work.  

DJP: Thanks, Erin. The pleasure’s been all mine.


David James Poissant is the author of Lizard Man, winner of the 2011 RopeWalk Fiction Chapbook Prize. Other stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Playboy, One Story, The Southern Review, Mississippi Review, and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews have been published by Tin House, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, and Ploughshares. He is a winner of the Playboy College Fiction Contest, the George Garrett Fiction Award, the Alice White Reeves Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts & Letters, the Matt Clark Prize, second and third prizes in the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest, and he was Runner-up for the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona, where he served as Co-Editor of Sonora Review, and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, where he was a Taft Fellow. Currently, he teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Central Florida. He lives in Oviedo, FL with his wife and daughters.

Another Zombie Apocalypse in Suck City

I had a four-hour stretch in front of me, a beautiful spring day to squander beneath the sleek silver cover of Zone One. I ended up taking a three-and-a-half hour nap. Even with the concrete steps pressed against my back and the wind lashing my hair across my face, Whitehead’s words still lulled me into a near-catatonic state. It seems strange that a book imbued with suspense could have this effect. We’re dealing with zombies, after all, and though Whitehead goes to great lengths to describe “the dead” in stunning detail and to construct impenetrable sentences, still... so sleepy.

Whitehead shows his skill for poetic cadence, but because the sentences give the reader little information about the characters, they end up feeling hollow. For example: “[O]n Gary the weight loss registered not as the result of scarcity but as the slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing.” The slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing. Beautifully rendered, but what does this sentence tell us about Gary or the narrator, Mark Spitz? The dominant presence here is Whitehead, not the characters or the effect they have on one another.

Another example: “What impotent rebellion they enacted, feebly tapping the leather facsimile of their horns and spitting the top-shelf profanities.” Spitting the top-shelf profanities. Lovely, but can we hear the profanities, please? Can we see Spitz interacting with his surroundings? I kept waiting for Spitz to lose control, to dissolve into the chaos that spawned his new-found identity. Instead we get Whitehead’s measured prose, his bloated language and heartless characters.

I continued to read. Each night I would open the book and let lifeless sentence after sentence wash over me. I felt apathy toward the characters and their fate. And yet when I fell asleep, I would dream exclusively of the dead. For weeks after I finished the book, they haunted my dreams, invading my apartment, crashing into windshields, dodging shotgun bullets. I would awaken, sweat-drenched and afraid, and fall right back into the same dream. I lost hours of restful sleep in breathless flight.

At the same time that I was reading Zone One, I was finishing Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn’s memoir about becoming and not becoming his father. Surprisingly, I noticed many congruences. As Spitz sweeps Manhattan’s high-rises, searching for dead to eliminate, Flynn navigates Boston’s streets, plucking the homeless from park benches. Both Spitz and Flynn work for government agencies, both voluntarily confront that which others would prefer to ignore.

I used these parallels to trace a path to the underlying cause of my nightmares. Like the protagonists in these stories, my dream-self was caught in a running loop, motivated by fear. In one of the latter nightmares, I dreamed the dead approached my apartment, and I had to make a split decision, leave or die. I wedged one cat beneath each armpit, confident of our escape, and looked down only to discover my lovelies had slipped into the realm of the undead. Heartbroken, horrified, I watched my life transform into something unrecognizable, something that I could not maneuver into a recognizable place, and so I ran.

Interview with Alicia Oltuski

by Jessica Hindman

Alicia Oltuski’s debut, Precious Objects: A Story of Diamonds, Family and a Way of Life, (Scribner, 2011) received glowing reviews from Jonathan Yardley and Gary Shteyngart. As part of ALR’s efforts to provide a literary platform for emerging Creative Nonfiction writers, Oltuski recently spoke with fellow Columbia University MFA colleague and ALR’s Creative Nonfiction Contest Coordinator, Jessica Hindman, about the craft of nonfiction writing.

ALR: You only get one first book. Why did you choose this particular topic for a debut?

Oltuski: The topic of diamonds was at once incredibly personal for me [Oltuski’s father is a diamond dealer in the Diamond District of Manhattan] but also, every writer seeks to uncover some hidden world. The diamond industry, with all its secrecy, seemed a natural place for that endeavor, to uncover its mysteries. The book was also about uncovering the mystery that was my father. I mean, I obviously knew him, but there were so many things about him that were a mystery to me. The book was an attempt to uncover both of these mysteries.

ALR: One of the things I love about Precious Objects is how fearless you are in fusing different Creative Nonfiction techniques. The chapters alternate between intimate family portraits and journalistic reportage and research that is academic in its thoroughness, if not in its style. Why did you choose this particular organizational structure for the book?

Oltuski: Structure is something I thought about a lot. And it’s something I really changed as I went; it’s probably the aspect of the book that I spent the most time thinking about…To me, structure in both fiction and nonfiction is incredibly important because it not only shapes the narrative arc but the reader’s impression of the characters. I say characters even when the “characters” are real people; I think it’s useful to think about them that way when you’re interviewing them and writing about them. So structure is the single-most influential part of the writing process in how you make a reader think about your topic and your characters.

When I was writing, it was very important to me to not write a “subject” but to write a “story” even though I was writing about a subject that I think a lot of people have some sort of inherent fascination with—diamonds—which is completely unrelated to me and my family and how I wrote the book. What I tried to do is excavate the history of the diamond industry and the diamond district but at the same time to attach all of this to characters. One of the reasons it was so important for me to let the characters emerge in shapely ways was that the diamond industry, from its inception, has really been an industry full of characters, and not just the ones that I happen to know but also this entire cast of historical characters that all seemed oddly larger than life—even before diamonds emerged as a major commodity. So what I really wanted to do was have this emerge as a story of people. I tried, even in the parts that were history-oriented or journalistically-minded, to show these people and what they were about and what made them so perfectly suited to this business. To a large extent, the reason the diamond industry has come to mean so much to so many people is because of these odd characters who almost forge a sense of importance upon this one mineral. And I think the reason for that is because the people who were involved in shaping diamond history were such idiosyncratic people, and I think that’s one thing that hasn’t really changed.

Getting back to structure, I wanted to capture this one moment in diamond history, because I do think the industry is on the cusp of transformation. Obviously, the topic of “diamonds” is overwhelmingly large, but I think we find ourselves in this strange time in this larger history where everything is about to change. I looked back at the creation of DeBeers and the whole advertising campaign that shaped the industry [i.e. the idea that diamonds are a staple for engagements] and in a weird way I felt that we are at another similar threshold of sorts. I wanted to tell the story of how we had gotten from there to here, and where we were headed in the future. And of course it was also a family story—how I came to see my father and the occupation he had chosen in a different way.

Surrounded by Water, Stories by Stefanie Freele

Congratulations to Stefanie Freele, whose new book, Surrounded by Water, was published by Press 53. Here's some information on the book from the publisher's website: 

 

     Awards for stories in Surrounded by Water include First Place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open for “While Surrounded by Water”; Second Place in the Glimmer Train Family Matters Contest for “Us Hungarians”; a 2010 Million Writers Notable Story award for “Buccaneers”; an Editor’s Pick in the Mid-American Review Fineline Competition for “Removal of Oneself From Corporate Identity”; and a Pushcart Prize nomination for “Pozniejszy.”
    
     Visit Stefanie online at www.stefaniefreele.com