An Interview with Kyle McCord

Justin Bigos: Reading your latest book, Sympathy from the Devil, I feel like I’m under the spell of a young poet who is drunk on words, who revels in the sheer delight of making shit up, combined with an older poet who is acutely aware that the poems being uttered are artifice, and ultimately surrender themselves in language (“We don’t stand a chance in our own vocabulary”).  It’s a tension I admire very much.  Can you talk about the voice in this book – if you do indeed hear it as one speaker – and how this voice got in your head?

Kyle McCord:  Man, this is a difficult question.  I think the most honest answer is that all of the voices are different, and all of them are some exaggeration of me.  I’m the befuddled director, the dog lost in space, the broken-hearted dilettante being comforted by Satan.  I’m hesitant to make that statement because there’s obviously always a limit to the type of self the poem can capture.  Because poetry demands abbreviation, there’s a weight on the poet to distill the images, people into discrete perceptions.  The self is no exception, which is one reason why it’s often erroneous to associate the speaker with the self.  It’s too limiting.

I wouldn’t make the same argument—that the speaker was some permutation of me—with my previous two books.  They weren’t personal in the way that Sympathy from the Devil is.  The voice and some of the balance between the surrender to language and the poem’s self-consciousness that you’re hearing probably finds its source in two competing impulses:

After my first book came out, I went on tour for three weeks with Keith Montesano.  Keith’s book Ghost Lights, which I highly recommend, bloomed from a completely different universe than mine.  Keith’s tutelage had been under Christopher Bakken then David Wojahn.  In all his poems, you could hear these small echoes of Larry Levis, who he loves.  During my MFA, I read Ashbery, Lorca, Ruefle.  There was always someone who wanted to talk about post-modernism or the New York School.  I really fed on a type of poem that I now sort of imagine had itself as an audience.  That’s the best way I can describe it.  And that’s a type of poetry that I still love. 

Anyway, at the end of every reading, Keith would read two poems he’d written for his wife Jess, who he’d married the year before.  They were these incredibly lovely, short poems, and, beyond the fact that they were hard as hell to follow, they were the kind of poems I began to feel I desperately wished I’d written.

The backstory on Sympathy from the Devil is awful, and if you know me, you’ve probably heard it.  I traveled to a residency in Australia that ended up being a scam.  The owner of the residency wouldn’t let the residents leave, so I eventually bribed a bus driver to drive me and another poet back to a bus stop in the middle of New South Wales where we were eventually rescued by another bus traveling to Sydney.  I was writing the book in hostels in Sydney and Melbourne for a month.  These were the kind of places where the police would break into one’s room in the middle of the night looking for guys who’d assaulted someone down at the pub. 

At that point, I felt like I needed the kind of emotional crux that I heard in Keith’s poems, but I still wanted my poems to be playful and ironic.  The voice in Sympathy from the Devil is often trying to convey an outlandish experience with a shadow of sincerity that is quite genuine.  James Tate once told me that the best poems make you laugh and cry.  He failed to mention that it’s nearly impossible to write them.  It’s hard to write a poem where the speaker can discuss both making a silly hat for Sparkles and the idea that people you know might really be in hell right now and that you might be one of them.  Resolving, dissolving, and intertwining this desire for play and pleasure with the demand that a poem has to mean something to me and arise from some lived experience decides so many issues in terms of voice.

JB: I like that you refer to yourself as the “director” of the poems.  There is something theatrical at work in most of these poems, and although there is much observed absurdity, we sense a mind putting it all together, rearranging it, stepping back and reconsidering the rearrangement, all while the camera is rolling.  Very French New Wave of you, Sir!  Do you find film an inspiration for your writing?  The film Love Liza, which is one of the strangest and most beautiful films I have ever seen, shows up in one of your poems, which declares, “I think it’s impossible to remain alive/ without idolizing beauty even a little. Even if there comes a day you can’t/ even detect the smell of gas on your own fingertips.”

KM: I’m so glad you’re a fan of that movie too.  If anyone you know questions Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s genius as an actor, tell them to go see that movie.  I don’t think Hoffman’s character’s friendship with Jack Kehler’s character is something I would have believed if I saw it on the page, but on screen it’s perfect.  It’s such a weird and dour premise, but the movie evolves into this study on how broadly and quietly tragedy can evolve amidst the backdrop of a film.   

Film is huge for me.  During college, I took a class in documentary film from a filmmaker for Frontline.  A few years later, I took this class on Soviet film.  If you can imagine this: 30-40 students huddled in a drafty student lounge in Wisconsin each Thursday, watching Eisenstein, Vertov, or Mikhalov.  It was one of the most popular classes at Beloit.

Mostly, what I learned from studying film in that context was how and why and when to bump perceptions against one another.  For example, I love the opening to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but the Coen brothers found a way to make me love it more by contrasting and connecting it with this incredible montage of shots from West Texas.  The Coen brothers don’t need to pop on screen to say, “There’s dangerous people out here, ya’ll.  And there are more kinds of death than you can imagine,” because they know how to capitalize on the associative power of montage, something Eisenstein really pioneered.  I think that’s a big part of poetry’s capability too.

While I was revising the book, I got exposed to a whole different set of films that migrated into the work.  Antichrist, The White Ribbon, and Monster’s Ball all get a shout-out.  “Childhood with Hypnopompic Overture” is based on Lars Von Trier’s opening to the movie Europa.  I wrote “Portrait of Satan in Southern Arkansas” after watching Winter’s Bone, which if you haven’t seen, you must go rent.  A good movie can teach the possibilities of structure and how and when to violate expectations in a way that I think would be difficult to learn from any other medium. 

JB: At the risk of turning this into an interview about film – which would be so easy for me – I will second the praise of Winter’s Bone, though I’ve struggled to get into Haneke.  And, yes, I can certainly imagine a class in Wisconsin huddled together watching Russian cinema – I had a similar experience in Pittsburgh when I took a German cinema class, and where I fell in love with the New German Cinema, especially Fassbinder.  I like that you bring up montage, and I wonder if we can also think of your poems in terms of collage.  I was reading Lynda Hull this morning, and came across a poem titled “Utopia Parkway”  There is an epigraph connecting the poem to an art work by Joseph Cornell called Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall), 1945-46.  Heard of him?  I looked him up online and his stuff looks fascinating.  Something he once said is, “Collage = truth.”  What do you make of that?  Is collage something you’re interested in as a poet?

KM:  I saw you had that poem about Fassbinder in Ploughshares, which I still need to check out! 

I have a poem based on a Joseph Cornell piece in Informal Invitation to a Traveler.  I wrote much of that book in the Des Moines Art Center, and that season, the museum had the box on loan from Chicago.  I was fascinated, so I checked out his collection the next time I was at the Art Institute.  It’s incredible the range of feelings each of his boxes produce, but all of them have this nod toward a type of order that’s being reimagined by the box’s contents.  I’m very much a fan.  So, you’re spot-on about the line of influence.    

I’m not sure I could weigh in on truth (that’s a tough word to wrestle with), but I can say that I think there’s a well-meaning falsehood to linear representation.  For example, I often feel like poems that try to capture a particular time and place—a White Sox game with one’s dad in 1988 or the street where one fell in love for the first time—often bend more quickly than they imagine toward a type of coherence that likely didn’t exist.  Good elegy doesn’t really do that.  I’m thinking here of James Wright’s “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave” or any of Levis’s elegies.  Collage resists expected methods of ordering, which perhaps is more true to lived experience.  That much I certainly believe.

I am into collage, and I think that’s begun to morph into bricolage.  I’m digging deep into my French history courses here.  As a writer, I’m consistently balancing between the urge to revise and consider and the impulse to do something reckless.  Dean Young has a terrific book on the subject.  To me, collage involves a considered arrangement, which is the large majority of what we do as writers, but bricolage demands writers take from what’s at hand, what’s immediate.  It’s even better if that object or event doesn’t seem to want to belong in a poem.  When I find a poem gets so big that it can’t accept a mechanical bull or a flower pot falling on someone’s head or the abrupt appearance of Michael Bay, I try to add those things.  I think it’s that kind of egalitarianism that often keeps me honest.           

JB: Who is Michael Bay?  (And please don’t tell me to “Google it” – you will hurt my feelings.)  My question does betray a fundamental ignorance of popular culture, one my students and younger friends often tease me about.  And I suppose I simply don’t care.  But based on what you’re saying about bricolage, I wonder if my poems may be missing out on the opportunity to be more engaged with the world as experienced by those around me.  Do you have any advice for me?  What happens to a poet who only watches movies from 1983?

KM:  I would never demand you Google Michael Bay, Justin.  That’s a promise you can bank on.

The good news is that I would never suggest that viewing Transformers 2 is a prerequisite for good poetry.  In fact, it may be antithetical.  I feel like I may be singing a similar refrain throughout this, but knowledge of pop culture is just another tool in the box for me.  I would make a similar argument for versatility with Greek and Roman mythologies, familiarity with historical events, and knowledge of foreign languages.  You don’t need any one or all of them to write a good poem, but it certainly helps to have a little of all of them.

I actually suspect that I might be of the minority opinion in considering pop culture a valid form of reference.  At dinner one night with Dara Wier, James Tate, and my fellow UMass students, I remember debating the merits of Daffy Duck in Hollywood.  I can’t say any one at the table was fully sold.  I still get a little leery of inserting Lost or Denny’s in a way that I don’t when addressing the Pegasus or adding in Ancient Greek.  So, I’m not wholly without skepticism either, but pop culture can be good fuel for a poem, especially when the work is tongue-and-cheek enough (as often it is in Sympathy from the Devil) to explore that type of material.  Anyway, even if Return of the Jedi is the final movie you made it to the cinema for (and I know it isn’t), I wouldn’t count it as a handicap.  I’d much rather read a sonnet on Tchaikovsky than Justin Bieber; though, I admit, I might be tempted to read both.                  

JB: You alluded to Dean Young’s poetics book The Art of Recklessness, a book I also greatly admire.  And toward the end of Sympathy from the Devil there is a poem dedicated to Young, titled “The Poem is Not the Anatomical Heart.”  It’s one of my favorite poems in the book, and I can hear some homage in its tensions between daily, ordinary crap and what seethes unruliest inside us.  Is this homage?  What has Young’s work meant to you?

KM:  One of the poems that means the most to me is Young’s “Poem Without Forgiveness.”  While I was in seminary studying ancient languages in Richmond, Wendy sent me that poem.  I’d read Embryoyo and Skid while I was at UMass, but those books didn’t really unfold for me until I read that poem.  Maybe I read that line in the poem “Some piece of you/ stays in me and I’ll never give it back” as ars poetica.  It was like bits of the world were embedded in Young, and they jutted out into the poems—the hilarious, the juvenile, the heartbreaking, the unspeakable.  And he was letting you have all of it as the reader.  That had never occurred to me until that moment.

Perhaps I’m waxing a bit sentimental here, but when I read that line, I was just glad someone had the heart to write it.  When Young got ill, Wendy and I read that poem at a reading we held where the proceeds went to his health fund.  We also wrote and dedicated two poems to the event.  “Poem for the Anatomical Heart” was my dedication; Wendy’s poem “Ruptured Heart Theory,” which is so wrenchingly good, is over at Drunken Boat if anyone feels like having their breath taken way.  Anyway, when I think about how to generate energy and authority in a poem which includes such a swarm of tones and everything from crucibles to cannibals, Dean Young is one of those voices I consistently return to.

JB: You seem to have a real attraction to the epistolary poem.  Your previous book, Informal Invitation to a Traveler (co-written with Jeannie Hoag), is a series of epistolary poems written between two fictional personae.  In Sympathy from the Devil, the speaker is often addressing someone, named or unnamed.  Sometimes you use a delayed tag to reveal that another person is speaking in conversation.  For example, one poem ends, “A city is hopelessly lodged in the girl’s eye, and every branch/ which does not bear fruit surely burns, her father tells her and returns to his paper.”  Can you talk about your attraction to dialogue inside poems, or poems that are entirely epistolary?

KM: You’ve stumbled upon a dark secret here, Justin, which is that I actually wrote Sympathy from the Devil as an epistolary book.  When I first wrote the poems, I wrote each of them as a letter to someone I knew.  After writing in the epistolary form for two years, it felt strange to be just a voice in space shouting down at whoever was passing on their way to The Dress Barn or Costco.  It helped to imagine someone different reading the poem each time.  I always knew I’d pull out the names as soon as I revised the poems, but it helped to envision friends, family, sometimes total strangers who I’d shared some brief connection with.

I think what I really love about epistolary writing is its interiority.  It’s an issue that I don’t think gets enough page space in poetry.  I’ve been a reader and/or editor now for four different magazines, and as I read, I find myself more and more attracted to poems where there’s a sort of orderly mystery that emerges.  You can find it in “Walking through Woods on a Snowy Evening” (Whose woods are they, Bob?  Why are you stopping?) or “Blueberrying” (What’s turned the world so desolate?).  I once read a poem for The Beloit Poetry Journal where the first part of the poem was a series of dull landscape images—birds doing whatever, some rocks, a fairly ordinary simile about the sea.  But the last line of the poem was “I was wrong about you.  I was wrong about so many things.”  Suddenly, I was involved in the poem (Why were you wrong? What were you wrong about?).  What was said was so mysteriously broad and dangerous that I felt compelled to reexamine the poem.  Epistolary poems give the writer more of an excuse to access this kind of interiority because they are seemingly only responsible to their correspondent.  The reader is obliged to accept that they are glimpsing inside another world (which is what poetry is anyway) where completeness may not be a possibility.

I love dialogue because it allows me to vary syntax and, like you pointed out, do some handy tricks with tagging.  I’m not big into leaving out punctuation, though I admire poets like Merwin or David St. John.  I often find a writer can only do some many double-meanings or deflations of expectations with linebreaks before the trick becomes a little hollow.  But dialogue!  It’s pretty easy to pull the tagging one way or another and still make it sound like natural speech, which is a goal.  Because the syntax is variable, I can augment or weaken that iambic echo that’s often behind the poem.  In the case of “The Soft Machinery of the Dark,” dialogue let me echo the ghazal form a bit by bringing in that self-critical voice at the end.  There’s so much dialogue can do in a poem, and I love any effect that I can multi-purpose.     

JB: Funny you mention the ghazal.  The last poem in the book announces a “Kyle McCord” as the speaker, and I thought in that moment how the announcement sounded like the makhta, the final, signature couplet of the ghazal form.  And so I thought the whole book, in a sense, was being authored by a single, multi-faceted self.  How did you ultimately decide on the structure of Sympathy from the Devil?  And when did you know you had your title, which I think is perfect for this collection?

KM:  You’re too kind about the title.  After nearly a decade of working as a poet, I do have a confession and an accusation that I’ll voice here: I don’t think I fully understand how to structure a book, and I’m nearly certain that most other poets I’ve met don’t either.  I get the general principles: strong poems in the front, strong poems in the back, weaker poems excised (preferably) or in the back third (if one must).  But what about when you get beyond page ten?  What does one do then?  I get the feeling that so much beyond that point is intuition or guess-and-check.

Most of the advice I’ve heard about structure seems wholly contradictory or certainly not hard-and-fast.  For example, Tessa Rumsey once told me that the first poem should teach the reader how to read your poems, or at least get them started.  If you read her books, it’s clear she loves a gentle entry into a book.  I’d always adhered to this ideal when arranging a book.  Then about a month ago, I interviewed David St. John about his new book The Auroras.  It’s a terrific book. However, contrary to my expectations the first poem is syntactically jagged and shocking.  It gives the first section a unique feel.  When I brought up what Tessa had said, David’s response was more or less “Sure, but I didn’t want to do that.”         

I think it’s a bit of a chicken and egg issue.  Should pieces that have content or rhythmic similarities go together?  Should one poem go before another for chronological reasons?  Should the last word of the book be one word or another?  The answer I often hear is, “Well, it depends on how you envision the book.”  But I can’t envision the book until I’ve put it together!  And then it might not sound the way it should.  Anyway, this is a real bane for me as a writer, but it’s a bane I enjoy struggling with.

So, I always turn to other writers for advice when it comes to final determinations about arrangement.  I owe big thanks to Wendy Xu and Ezekiel Black, who were so generous and thoughtful in picking through my suggested order.  Wendy suggested some particularly bold moves—putting together the two poems that begin “To Me at Twenty-Six…”, closing the book with the current final poem, keeping the title of the book—that I think pay off in the manuscript as a whole.  Corey Marks helped me refine what I took from her suggestions.    

Titles, on the other hand, are much more my speed.  I nearly always create titles for poems after writing them.  When I came up with “Sympathy from the Devil” as the title for its poem, it seemed like such a perfect fit that I was pretty sure that it would fit the manuscript as a whole.  My dad, who’s a big Rolling Stones fan, objected when I showed him the manuscript because the book didn’t have enough Mick Jagger in it, and I played with the idea of titling it “Lycanthropy and You.”  But I pretty quickly assessed that the first title was better since it showed more of that balance of playfulness and surrender that you pointed out earlier.  It’s the shortest title I’ve ever come up with, and it feels like the right one. 

JB: We were briefly chatting the other day about the responsibilities of the poet versus the responsibilities of the reader, and how your views on this may be a bit unorthodox.  Can you share your thoughts on this?  Are these responsibilities actually in opposition?

KM: I’m glad you brought that up.  I have a short essay on the topic that we may yet run at LitBridge—I throw in an essay now and then when we have room in the weekly feed.  But I will do my best not to repeat any of that here!

To give a little background on this topic, I was responding to a discussion about how we as writers balance the effort we expect the reader to put in to make the poem cohere and the effort we expect the poet to put in.  At the heart of the argument was the idea that if one puts too much weight on the reader that the poem doesn’t cohere into meaning, which was a high priority for the writers in the discussion, while poems that are too spelled-out indicate an insufficient burden on the reader. 

My disagreement on the topic is two-fold.  First, I disagree with the word “meaning” as it was understood in the discussion.  Basically, I think the term “meaning” is too limited.  It often signifies an idea or feeling or contradiction that a writer is struggling through on the page.  The definition rewards poems like “Psalm and Lament” by Donald Justice but spurns poems like “How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher” by John Ashbery.  However, as a reader, I have the capability to love both poems.  I think meaning is one element which needs to be on the poet’s mind, but it’s one factor among many.  I enjoy meaning in a poem, but I think more about “emotional crux,” a moment where forces in the poem converge to offer some sort of emotional invitation or disclosure or opposition or explosion that the poet can’t hold on to.  I need that in a poem. However, the idea of meaning carries a bias toward a type of poem that is overly normative in the interest of perceived access; that’s not on my must-have list.   

Second, I have a different definition of what a writer’s responsibility is.  I mentioned earlier that I’m often trying to write the kind of poem that can make a reader laugh and cry.  I’m also trying to shock, reward, thwart, and enthrall the reader at different points in the writing.  I think a poet is responsible for all of those things throughout the poem, which means no poem will do it all.  The question is: what can I make you reimagine, and how can I do it?  As an editor, I see a slew of poets struggling to “make it new,” but maybe Pound would have been better off saying “remake new.”  A good poem will make something I haven’t seen before, but a great poem makes me reimagine the face of novelty.  I’m of the opinion that poets should strive for that with the same effort they apply toward making meaning.    

JB: You just mentioned your position as co-editor of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry.  I imagine this job allows you to come across quite a swatch of contemporary American poetry, especially the work of younger writers.  There’s a lot of pissing and moaning about younger writers not being vulnerable enough, avoiding narrative at all costs, and basically trying to be too cool for school, and though those poems are certainly out there, there is a lot to like.  What do you find exciting about this moment in American poetry, especially the work written by younger poets?

KM: Your list of complaints is pretty accurate.  I would say a big part of the grumpiness toward contemporary poetry also has to do with distrust by older poets of the changes in the way poetry does business.  In particular, I hear plenty of complaints about the proliferation of journals and the rise of independent publishers, especially when that means less people are reading whatever it is that they “should” be reading, which is usually someone about a half a century their senior.  I sympathize with writers who worry about the way publishing is changing and what poets are forfeiting from the past, but I think a lot of that criticism is tied in with the expected disconnection between different generations of poets.   

I feel like I have so much I can say about this.  Wendy and I swore off  the idea of having other readers for iO when we started, so when someone sends poems to iO, they’re talking directly to us.  We publish about 1% of our submissions, and I’ve noticed that writers tend to fall into one of two ruts.  Either they’re too orthodox and attached to a type of reality that doesn’t feel honest because it’s too sentimental or nostalgic or formally committed, or they’re writing poems that are so disconnected that they don’t pack an emotional punch.  I’m not sure which of those two types are too cool for school, haha, but I don’t want to publish either of them.

Poets who we do publish usually walk between those two worlds, and I find that exciting.  They’re writing poems with titles like “The Insomniac’s Guide to Oblivion” (Jeffrey Morgan) or “But When I Get to Heaven I Will Have Sex with Clouds” (Laurie Saurborn Young).  They’re connecting a broken relationship with a house floating down a river (Wayne Miller), or they’re writing an ode to Blood Feast (Glenn Shaheen).  They’re closing their poems with lines like “. . . and this is what happens/ to meek things when there is no future” (Rebecca Hazelton) or “If only it would snow and there/ were time to catalog everything/ that stayed the same” (Sarah Bartlett).  There are such an array of ways that writers are walking over and around and between these ways of approaching poetry.  That’s what’s most exciting to me.

JB: What have you been working on since Sympathy?  What do we readers have to look forward to?

KM: I’ve got a new manuscript that I wrote while on residency in Latvia that’s making the rounds now.  I decided to go for broke with the lengthy titling, so it’s called You Are Indeed an Elk, and This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze.  You can check out some of the poems online at Linebreak, New Orleans Review, and Verse.  Others will be coming out in print journals in the next few months.  I took some cues from younger contemporary poets like Chris Deweese, Heather Christle, and Nick Sturm, but I also looked over work from Bob Hicok, Peter Richards, and Mary Ruefle.  I’m particularly proud of some of the titles like “[Put down that pint of human blood and tell me you need me]” or “[When you’ve been scoutmaster as long as I have]” which is forthcoming in Jellyfish.   If you were a fan of the linguistic and syntactic play of Sympathy, I think this new one will be right up your alley.

JB: Thanks for this conversation, Kyle.  I look forward to many more.

KM: And thanks so much to you, Justin.  I can’t wait.

Kyle McCord is the author of three books of poetry including Sympathy from the Devil (Gold Wake Press 2013).  He has work featured in Barrow Street, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Third Coast, and elsewhere.  He’s the co-founder of LitBridge and, along with Wendy Xu, co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry.  He teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton. 

ALR reviewed on NewPages.com

Hey everybody, have you caught our glowing review over at NewPages yet?

Here's a teaser:

On Kaitlyn Palacios’s essay “The Waiver”...

"Palacios’s essay is an unfurling testament to memory, love, youth and nationhood, and it is an irony such as the husband’s statement that makes you suffer on her behalf. Her memories become the reader’s, as the cadence of her language echoes her conversion. The narrative is so well-crafted, ebbing and rushing in an almost oceanic pull, I am late for everything today for reading it, unable to rescue my index finger from holding the page."

On Kyle Mellen’s short story “Just Like A Man"...

"Mellen uses the voice as a clever ruse; what you perceive as an exercise in the voice of the typical American man takes a story wildly out of the formula’s context—when you might expect a certain outcome, you are arrested by escalating violence and grotesque murder in a nihilistic framework that will freeze your blood. The risk in the plot development is well-managed; I found the pacing to be virtuosic. I think the effort would be terrific even in translation."

On our poetry selection...

"From a layman’s perspective, many of the poems tend to inform each other and complement the prose while invoking tradition."

Thank you, Mary Florio, for your wonderful review! 

An Interview with Catherine Lucille Sharpe

April Murphy: I discovered your writing when "One Thousand Kittens" was a finalist for Cutbank's Montana Nonfiction Prize in 2011, and then went on the hunt for more essays from your unpublished collection Ambition Towards Love. What I found surprised me. 

Some essays of yours, like "Proxy" and "Somewhat Organic" are what I think about as being kind of traditional memoirs, but then there are essays like "Shades of Gray" and "Another Lesbian Space Fantasy" that seem to break out of old ways of thinking about the CNF genre - blending the imagination and a sense of magic without the same authentic and honest (and charming!) voice that characterizes your longer work. Can you talk a little bit about these different forms your writing takes? 

Catherine Lucille Sharpe: I am certain that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important, for reader and writer alike.  It must be important; people get quite upset when they discover that the writer has cheated--stepping outside the bounds of "literal truth" to copulate with fiction.  But why don't people get upset when nonfiction parades around as fiction? I am guilty of this.

The Ambition Towards Love collection deliberately flows back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.  Whatever the genre, I continue to circle the same ole boring human stuff--love, loss, more love, more loss, lies, less love, gain, a little more loss, joy, heroism, duplicity, frailty, failure, growth, shrinkage, doubt, love again, loss again, truth, etc..  The usual.  

As a writer and self-avowed nutpouch, I've clearly been trying to sort one or two things out on the page--the mere two dimensions of the page seem so much more manageable than the infinite dimensions of my head and heart. 

I know that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important to me because I take the trouble to know the difference line by line, paragraph by paragraph.  In my nonfiction, I might forsake a perfectly good "real" detail, simply because it does not add to the meaning of the story, or what I want to emphasize in the story.  And guess what!  I might include that same detail in a short fiction because it creates ambiguity--one of the best ways to make fiction seem just as true and confusing and unknowable as real life.  

The decision to approach an idea through fiction or nonfiction profoundly affects my writing process, even when there are thematic congruities.  I've noticed how the struggle to craft readable fiction has improved my nonfiction writing, in both predictable and surprising ways.

Predictably, being forced to dredge up a believable character is good practice for bringing your Great Aunt Susan to life for the nonfiction reader.  She's the one who always sucks the knuckle of her pinky finger so that she can twirl her wedding ring.  It doesn't fit on her ring finger anymore, and anyway Uncle Frank's dead, so it doesn't much matter where she wears it.  There's something pathetic and familial about all that saliva, and now the reader gets Aunt Susan, too.

Unpredictably for me, engaging in fiction demands that I suffer a vulnerability I don't necessarily feel in the process of nonfiction.  In fiction, my judgment must fade way, way back, allowing the story to emerge from its mysterious place, a place I hardly control.  It can be frankly terrifying to tap in to my subconscious--my id whines, my ego hits, and my superego makes me write the same sentence a hundred times on the chalkboard.  The reader, even as she nods her head vigorously, agreeing that she's reading fiction, is still coming to some conclusions about the writer.  She can't help it!  If the writer goes on and on about cup size, the reader is not going to mistake the writer for a leg man.  Or a leg woman.  (Boy, I can't make that sound right.)

When you read my fiction, don't you dare tell me I'm lonely, or wimpy, or flailing, or crazy-in-love with my offspring (thus doomed to suffer), or bitterly angry, or actually quite sad at times. 

When I am writing the truth, or at least my nonfiction version of the truth, it is so much easier to control what the reader thinks about me.  The persona is deliberate, calculated, securely insecure, always ready with a deflective quip.  The reader will certainly mistake my persona for me, and thus I am safe from scrutiny.  I believe that I am in charge.  Which is, of course, a different kind of fiction, but luckily, the kind I reserve for therapy sessions.

To my dismay, all of this precision about fiction and "truth" does not ultimately prove useful to me in the real world.  Some people tell the truth only to discover later that they lied.  Others lie only to discover the truth.  Some don't even bother to lie, they just keep their mouths shut, suddenly go on diets, go to work early, come home late, and wait to be caught.

Your resumé is one big piece of creative non-fiction.

My Amibition Towards Love collection approximates the experience of a whole story--one where the reader swims through truth, both designated and actual, as well as the lies we call fiction.  Nonetheless, like me, the reader still has to figure out what really happened.

But by the time the words hit the page, it’s all true.

AJM: Do you think that queer writers are obligated to write queer nonfiction? I suppose since nonfiction is about personal experience, the subject matter is inevitable is one is queer. The writer, then, gets to figure out how their queer identity is expressed what (if any) resonance it will give to their more 'universal' life story. 

One of the things that's refreshing about your writing is that the central struggle isn't your queerness - the narratives don't get their tension from a 'coming out' plot, nor do they have a political abrasiveness despite the fact that they are about gay marriage/divorce/reproduction - instead your work exists in a world where all of this is secondary to the love you have to give your daughter and yourself. 

CS: As far as I'm concerned, nobody is obligated to write anything. Well, unless contracts are involved. I do, however, this it's Super Nice when people write about stuff they really care about. The form - fiction or nonfiction - is less important than the question at stake for the writer. When I'm reading, I'm engaged in the investigation that the writer is making into the subject matter, so it better be a real question the writer has, with some juice.

I'm totally way flattered that you find my work refreshing in its absence of Queer Identity Conflict, which I'll just call QIC for our purposes. I haven't written much specifically about QUIC because it is not a painful enough question for me - plus I already know the answer. I'm special. 

When I say I'm special, what I really mean is that I'm like everyone else. That makes me special, because not so many people realize that. And I've decided to worry less about being original and worry more about being average. And writing about that instead.

I'm really, really, really, really, really interested in what it is like to be human. More precisely, what it is like for me to be human. My current line of inquiry is how I am like so many others, not how I feel apart from these other creatures.

AJM: It seems like you really have a focus when you're creating your persona. So, how do you navigate your real lesbian identity with your lesbian narrators? 

CS: Poorly. They are all mixed up inside. Therefore, I try not to think about it too much. The idea of a continuum of truth - from lies (fiction) to truth (nonfiction) - is inept at best. Truth is a blob, a DNA strand, a froth of delicate, short-lived moments. I've had perfectly good fiction turn into nonfiction on me more than once. On the page and in real life. Freaky.

AJM: As someone who didn't enter academia after completing your MFA, can you tell us a little bit about what your writing life is like now? 

CS: Oy.  I’m scattered and slow. I’m undisciplined about my creative work. I prefer black pens and write longhand in a college-ruled spiral notebook.  Usually early in the morning. Sometimes my daughter has to borrow my notebook for drawing or math or to teach me something by diagramming.  For now, I let her because she can’t really read cursive (this is de-emphasized in school now, did you know?). Also, I like what she inserts into my ridiculous musings.

For my paid work, I write all day (or at least sit in front of a computer all day as if I’m writing) for a corporate healthcare services entity. Sexy.  Adjectives are discouraged, as are complicated sentences that involve semi-colons; apparently these are too difficult to follow. It is a constant struggle to avoid being sucked into the undertow.  I have to remind myself that writing has saved my life—connecting and re-connecting to that source is an end in itself even when progress on new creative work is slowed down to a drag-drag-crawl-sob-crawl.

Sharpe wrote mostly for live performance in San Francisco before turning her attention to gay marriage, in vitro fertilization, gay divorce, parenting, dating, fiction, and nonfiction.  Her first collection of interlocking essays and fictions Ambition Towards Love hasn't been published, but you can read some excerpts in Opium Magazine, A cappella Zoo, Word Riot and CutBank, among others. A couple of pieces have even been included in anthologies and she almost won several prizes--one from Montana and one from North Carolina. If you would like to know if she actually ever wins a prize or publishes her collection, join her email blast list by sending a note to catherinelucillesharpe@gmail.com. Put "join email blast" in the subject line.

Review of Michael Martone's Four for a Quarter

Four for a Quarter. By Michael Martone. Tuscaloosa, AL: FC2, 2011. 300 pp. $16.50 paperback.

            Four is not normally a holy number, not miraculous or charmed, not usually held in the collective consciousness as worthy of praise or blame. It’s after three, on our way to seven, not the number of fingers per hand or even a prime. Except that in Michael Martone’s art, four becomes sacrosanct, a number of the body and of the mind and of the spirit, a number to be enamored of and troubled by, a number beyond duality or dialectic. Nothing like Four for a Quarter is being written right now, and while Martone lives in the same world as Kevin McIlvoy, Amy Hempel, and Donald Barthelme, I’m not sure he’s from the same world. I’m also not certain anyone else can so astonishingly balance repetition and variation, obsession, meditation, and revelation—a juggling not of four balls, but of a spinning top, a sparkler, a phial of tears, and a pair of worn, sexy underwear.

Each story in this three-hundred-page collection is told in four linked parts. The first, the title tale, recounts four stories of four booths, and begins the book-long investigation of watching, seeing the self, and seeing others. From the first booth—a photo booth—the speaker delightedly watches four clothed, swimming Amish people; the speaker enters the second booth, a see-through, educational photo booth at the Children’s Museum, and says, “I imagine that they have replaced the camera too with one that takes X-rays, and my souvenir will record a transparent me. My heart will be an opaque dollop in the airy cage of my ribs”; the third booth is a confessional, with a priest hearing cardinal and venial sins, which will be “hauled into the air by fluttering cardinals […] leaving me white and clean as new paper”; and the narrator emerges from the fourth photo booth, one at Woolworth’s, thinking, “I am the same person now as when I went into the booth. I am the same in each of the four black-and-white pictures of me,” while escaped parakeets and canaries perch and flit throughout the store. This blend of internal investigation surrounded by and enmeshed with images of fancy and fantasy occurs throughout the book, creating a texture not surreal but playful, not insincere, but not quite so serious. The stories feel weighted, like they have mass and matter, but they are also full of space. This mix of the marvelous, the mundane, and the momentous allows for an investigation of a wider range of ideas than most story collections hold. Other things that come in fours in this book include, but are not limited to:

                        Four lost pregnancies.

                        Four fifth Beatles, described through haibun written by Yoko Ono.

            Four descriptions of a teenaged farmer whose hands are cut off, titled “4H”: subtitled “Hands,” “Head,” “Heart,” “Health.”

Four tales of days and seconds lost in the historical changes between calendars, in the shift of daylight savings, and in the delay of leap days—lost time two lovers want to preserve.

                        Four seasons.

            Four postcards from four towns in Indiana: Story, Santa Claus, French Lick, and Muncie.

                        Four states that start with the letter I.

                        Four monologues describing the sex lives of the Fantastic Four.

                        Four ways to tie a tie: Windsor, Bow, Half Windsor, Four-in-Hand.

                        “The First Four Deaths in My High School Class.”

                        Four foursquare houses.

                        Four Corners.

                        Four speeds of vinyl records.

            Four sexy stories of four Susans: Lazy, Black-eyed, Sue Bee, and Susie Q, involving sex in the parents’ house, sex wearing glasses while naked to better see the sex, sex with honey as a prop, and sex on a passenger train, respectively—three told from the points of view of the men, the last told from the last Susan’s perspective.

                        Four faces of Mount Rushmore.

                        Four Fourth of Julys.

                        Four Calling Birds.

            But this book does not list—it coils around its subjects, and it magnifies, making the micro macro. This book explores the purpose and possibilities of narrative, and these fragments of people’s lives often compactly capture a moment that feels more resonant than what is contained in an entire novel. Cleverness abounds, but these stories are not slight or sly—or, if they are sly, they are always devastating, as well.

            I’ve had the privilege of listening to Michael Martone talk about the art of fiction, at lectures at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, and in bars at AWP. This book enacts his philosophy of writing, though he’d probably consider “philosophy” too strong a word. In my paraphrases, Michael Martone says and asks things like this:

                        Fiction is an ingredient in a form.

            Where do we culturally put things when we don’t want or need them anymore? In the university. But institutions need not only be storehouses for knowledge, places we call when we need to know something—they can also be generative, places that create new things.

Apollo can play the lyre. But Hermes is the patron demi-god of innovative writers, because he made the lyre out of a tortoise shell, cat gut, and horns, after he stole Apollo’s cattle and made them walk backwards, so Apollo would follow them the wrong way.

                        Learning the rules then breaking them is bullshit.

                        Conventional fiction can be taught. Innovative fiction cannot.

            There are four kinds of stories: narrative realism; nonnarrative realism; narrative irrealism; nonnarrative irrealism.

            I’ve never studied with Michael Martone, but he’s taught me, and others, through his stories: form can be invented, and it is still possible to feel you’re in the presence of something that exists nowhere else. In a time when more people are studying the art of writing fiction than ever before, many people fear that short stories will be codified, normalized, made tame. With Michael Martone teaching and writing, there’s at least one force of resistance. His stories make the question “Can anyone really write anything new anymore?” feel like a stupid question, one with four answers: “Of course”; “Who cares?”; “Why not?”; and “Watch this.”

Erin Stalcup's fiction is forthcoming in The Tusculum Review, H_NGM_N, and a Swiss fashion magazine called Novembre, and her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Sun, [PANK], and elsewhere. She serves as an Assistant Fiction Editor of the American Literary Review.

What I'm Looking For: CNF Assistant Editor April Murphy

Hello ALR readers and submitters!

As we're in the thick of our reading season, and as we're working our way through submissions, I'm starting to see some trends in what's making the cut to the second round and what's not. In the spirit of transparency, I thought I'd offer some insight on the selection process (you really don't need to be chewing your nails).

I feel I should also offer a caveat - these insights are by no means the ONLY things we're looking for, nor do they reflect the tastes of Bonnie Friedman, the CNF Editor, nor Ann McCutchan, ALR's steward. You can take them or leave them.

1. Reading submissions takes a LONG time. 

 If you've already submitted to ALR, chances are your submittable status shows you are "in progress." What does this mean? If my story is really "progressing" then why is it taking several weeks, if not longer, for it to complete this process? 

The short answer is that we have several rounds of readers and your story must make it through several different levels to ultimately be accepted. Readers will often be assigned up to 5 essays (even more if it's fiction or poetry) at a time. If they take 2 weeks to read that before passing it along to an assistant editor who may take an additional week or two to read it and they pass it along to a busy professor/editor who may take a few weeks to read it.... you get the idea. It's a hot minute. 

This is long process, while tedious and a bit nerve wracking I'm sure, but it is awesome for you as a writer.  Every set of eyes that lands on your piece sees something different and can call attention to these merits. It allows you to build momentum inside of our office. So even if it feels like your submission is stagnant, I assure you that it's got a life of its own. 

Often, a reader will become invested in something and root for it. "Hey! Have you read that essay about the comic book store? AMAZING. I just sent it along." "Check out the scene on page 5 - delicious." etc. We're all involved with ALR because we love great writing. You guys send a lot of it. Keep sending it!

      2.  Cover letters are important. 

I should just state that this is a bit of a personal preference. I always read the cover letter an author sends along before I read their essay. Why? It shows me how seriously you take yourself as an author. Are you professional and friendly? Are you a goofball who writes a haiku? Do you have any previous publications and where were they? 

Cover letters also show me whether or not you are familiar with ALR and our policies. If you've noted that your essay is a simultaneous submission, I will move it up in my reading list because I don't want to  miss out. If I don't know that you've submitted it elsewhere - I can't do that. 

If you send along an essay without a cover letter - of course I'll still read it and if it's awesome, I'll be blown away by it. But! If you can help yourself with a cover letter, why not just take the extra 3 minutes to write one? 

      3.  Essays should have action AND reflection. 

Creative nonfiction writers may be familiar with Vivian Gornick's ideas about the "situation" and "story." She describes nonfiction as being broken up into the plot/action (situation) - learning how to ride a bike, how you found out that you don't like cheese, shopping for a pen - and the reflection on that experience (story) which explains to readers why shopping for a pen was important in the first place. 

Many of the CNF submissions to ALR are filled with well written situations, essays that read almost like short stories. Compelling characters, good description, etc. But by the end of reading these pieces, I often wonder why the author wanted to write about it. I feel as if they are a puzzle that I don't know how to solve. I've been given all the pieces but there's no picture on the box to follow. What's the story? 

I, of course, don't want to suggest that you should dog your essays down with too much reflection and not enough in-scene development. There is a balance that each essay requires and a little reflection goes a long way in covering/framing action. Both of these things are necessary for CNF to work: action so your readers can share your experiences; reflection so that they can identify with and understand why those experiences  resonate with you. 

Some essays that you may want to check out that do this really well: "The Way We Are" by Thomas Lynch, "Street Haunting" by Virginia Woolf, and "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin. 

Thank you, ALR submitters, for the opportunity to read your work. I hope this blog post was helpful. Keep sending your words! We cannot wait to read them!

Best,

April Murphy

Creative Nonfiction

Assistant Editor


April Murphy is a Doctoral Candidate in UNT's Creative Writing Phd Program. April is the Assistant Nonfiction Editor at American Literary Review. She is currently working on her first book Shrouded: Women Who Work With the Dead. 

American Literary Review ABD Graduate Student Reading

Please join us Friday, November 16th at 7:30pm for the American Literary Review's ABD Graduate Student Reading, featuring fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction from Hillary Stringer, Jessica Hindman, and Elishia Heiden. The reading will take place at the home of April Murphy and Nate Logan. All faculty and students are welcome to attend. Please feel free to bring spouses, significant others, and buddies as well.

Elishia Heiden, a Missouri native whose Gammy dated Rush Limbaugh's grandpa, writes non-fiction and fiction (she is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in fiction)--but usually mingles the two brilliantly. For instance, she might've tried out for American Idol--or maybe she didn't? She might've taken her high school basketball team to state--or not. Or maybe she plans to move to Austria in April after her pending book deal is finalized. Or maybe not. What is true is that she likes to meddle with the "what ifs" and "or maybes" against professional advice, and this obsession leads her to write things.

Jessica Hindman's work has appeared in O., The Oprah Magazine and Invisible Citizens: Youth Politics after 9/11. She is a winner of the Hands Across the Middle East essay contest and Joyous Publishing’s Fiction Contest.  She has worked as a freelance researcher for The New York Times Magazine and MTV, where she was the first person to compile research on the show that would later become the nationwide hit Teen Mom.  She also worked as a reporter for her local paper, The Shenandoah Valley Herald, where she wrote stories with headlines like this: "Local Woman's Lap a Pitstop for Flying Rodent."  Her dissertation is a memoir about her past life as a professional fake violinist.  

Hillary Stringer is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of North Texas, where she is working on a novel. In addition to being a Teaching Fellow, she is the Production Editor of the American Literary Review and a coordinating editor for Pakistaniaat, a Journal of Pakistan Studies.  Her fiction has appeared in Synergies, The Tidal Basin Review, and Microchondria, an anthology of short-shorts complied by the Harvard Book Store. She was nominated for a 2011 AWP Intro Journal Award. She received her Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati in the spring of 2009.

You can also add the facebook even to your calendar so you don't forget:
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower in Books We Love

This summer I read Stephen Chbosky’s the perks of being a wallflower, and I found it charming and complex.  I decided to teach it this fall, and my freshmen loved it, too.  A friend told me I was  trending on tumblr because my students were discussing the book so much.  It isn’t flashy in terms of literary devices; however, it is a humble, coming-of-age story about a group of friends set during the early nineties.  My students laughed when the characters gave each other mix tapes.  (Most of my students were born in 1994, so there’s that…)  We also enjoyed the film adaptation of perks.  I suppose that it is a rare treat to connect with students on a shared turf.  I cherish this book because it enabled us to discuss diversity, depression, friendship, music, literature, Rocky Horror Picture Show, bullying, The Smiths, politics and even abortion.  A lot of reviewers refer to it as a modern Catcher in the Rye, but I think the act of comparing it to anything else strips it of its funky-freshness.  Check it out, yo!

Shannon Sawyer is a Ph.D. candidate in English, and an instructor at the University of North Texas. 

A Quick Chat with Abigail Thomas

*Abigail Thomas will give a reading at UNT on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012, at 8 p.m. in the Silver Eagle Suite.

ALR: I loved the brevity of sections in your first memoir, Safekeeping­—the way each section seemed to pop off the page, as well as the poetic feel of the book. The sections in your second memoir, A Three Dog Life, are longer, and your voice feels more resigned. I wonder if you can talk about the trade-offs and benefits of such short sections, and why you chose to write in longer sections in your second memoir. Also, were sections orchestrated to talk to each other?

AT: Safekeeping was written after the fact (if fact is the right word). The pieces came flying out of me after my second husband, Quin, died, and I realized, as I think I wrote, that I now had a past. Something was over, there was no changing or fixing it. I needed to face it. The pieces came willy-nilly, one often spawned the next. I think the first piece might have been apple cake, but I can't remember now. I had originally believed the book, if it were to be a book, would end with the death of my old friend, but realized after a few months that although he had died, my life continued without him, and I was left with the fallout and questions and grief and guilt and rubble I found around me. Plus I was alone with it. Quin was gone. This realization dictated that the thing (whatever it was) fall into three sections and three sections are often a very useful way to look to what I'm doing, to try to order it somehow. I don't know why.

Nothing is really chronological, past and present melt into each other, but when I was done I hoped what I'd made was the portrait, messy though it was, of a girl born in the nineteen-forties, who lived through the changes of her times. It is partly as an explanation to my children, and certainly as an apology to what happened to their lives, but that wasn't all of it either. I needed to make sense of it for myself. I also needed to find a way to begin to forgive myself. The pieces were moments I vividly remembered, and writing them I hoped would finally make some kind of sense. Sort of like a constellation. The book was meant also to be an apology, in the form of an explanation, of what had made me who I was, and who I had failed to be, who I was still becoming.

A Three Dog Life was written as it happened. There was no looking back, it was all happening as I wrote it, although it took six years to write. The experience was so tragic, and so precious, and parts of it so mysterious, I didn't want to lose any of it to imperfect memory. It is far more chronological than Safekeeping, given I was describing, recording, events as they occurred. The business of guilt was huge, I had to face that as I was in the midst of it, very difficult. It was also extremely painful in Safekeeping, especially when I wrote about my son, Ralph.

Also the endings were just gifts. The last bit of A Three Dog Life, when Rich collapses time into a happy year, was a conversation I wrote down verbatim, and realized that was where I wanted to end the book. The last piece I wrote for that book, is the opening chapter. You never know.

As far as orchestrated to talk to each other, that wasn't a conscious thing. If they do, great.

ALR: I am also drawn to the ambiguity, the subtlety, in Safekeeping. Some sections veer off into strangeness or mystery, like a poem. Other sections (I’m thinking of your father swimming with a school of bluefish) ask the reader: What is this? Where does it fit? And I love that you don’t feel the need to answer these questions, or edit out memories for seeming irrelevance. I wonder what the criteria is for what material stays and goes.

AT: There is not much point to memoir if you don't surprise yourself somewhere along the way, often banging up against material you'd rather skirt. No skirting allowed. You can't really fool yourself/ it saps all your energy.  If that's what you're after, a pretty picture with angel wings and fairy dust all over you, or a picture in which you were a victim, go mow the lawn.

Of course I don't mean YOU.

As for what I put in and what I leave out, and don't explain, that is entirely a question of taste. If it interests me, it goes in. If it makes me feel whole, it goes in. Bluefish and Daddy? It was who he was. As good an example as I had.

ALR: Follow-up question: I am curious about the function of seemingly ambiguous or irrelevant details/memories. In what ways do such details help readers experience what you want them to experience? How do they work the reader’s mind? Another way to think about this question: Many sections of your books give us the whole memory, rather than only the logically relevant part (e.g. most of the section “Watching Her Father Eat Cake” details you making cake, and only at the end do we see the brief interaction with your father). Why is this?

AT: Cake. I wanted to write about making cake because it was the high point of my day back then. All that delicious batter! The miracle of cake! Making a cake! It was only after that I realized the pleasure of watching my father eat it that was the end result. (The cakes were terrible.) I don't know about [the effect of such a section] on the reader, nor am I sure, in the process of writing, that I give a shit.

ALR: Safekeeping uses first, second, and third person. Did the sections just come out this way, or was this a calculated move? It seems that the intimacy of second person is balanced out by the distanced third-person sections, and this exchange gives the narrative a different feel than one written only in first person. The variety allows us to distinguish shades that would otherwise be overlaid. I wonder if you might speak to this point—the benefits and trade-offs of using multiple voices, how you see these voices working in your book, etc.

AT: The option of first and third persons wasn't a conscious choice…to write certain things in first person made me sound either saint-like or a victim. I also wanted to see myself from time to time through what I imagined my children’s eyes had been. Some pieces were written over and over both ways to figure out how to get at what I wanted. I chose the voice that seemed to be the most honest. The third person was also necessary when I had no connection anymore to the girl I'd been. I knew who she was, but she was no familiar or part of me. I wish I had [a more] intelligent answer about using first second and third persons. Mostly it just felt right.

My memory is poor for interstitial material, long years went by with only a few vivid memories, but  those were the ones I wrote. The piece that took me longest, almost as long as the whole book, was the last one about my daughter Sarah, and the birth of her daughter Abigail. Once that first bath happened, I knew I wanted to end there, but it took months and months and months to get it right. It's helpful when you discover where you want to end, then all you have to do, besides write it, is earn it.

ALR: How do you see the title “Safekeeping” (and the section by the same name) instructing the reader on how to read the book? How did you decide on this title?

AT: My editor named the book "Safekeeping." I wanted to call it "Short Controlled Bursts" and had a little semi-military paragraph to go with it, which I've since lost. I love the title now.

ALR: On your website, you also describe painting: “I’ve been trying to make an ocean. For some reason it never works. So I make another forest which also doesn’t work, but I don’t give up on forests, so I scrape and add various blues and greens to make more trees, but it’s still not to my liking. Some days are like this. I do a little halfhearted scraping, turn it over, and presto, there is the ocean, beautiful, many colors blue, deep water, no sky. I love the way this crazy shit works. When you’ve given up, when you least expect it there it is.” Does writing (or the pursuit of truth) work like this? Do you know where you’re going when you sit down to write? What happens if when you least expect it, it is not there?

AT: I don't know where I'm going when I sit down to write. I think I know where I'm going, but often end up elsewhere, which is the thrill of it. It's just much easier to see with the paintings.

When you're writing and expect it to be there but it isn't, you take a nap. Naps are key. All kinds of stuff swims to the surface. And if it doesn't, you haven't beaten your head against a wall, although that may come next. What I try to do is make something else. A painting. A cake. A caramel sauce, something humbly creative so your mind can wander (and you can eat it at the end). But too often you have to wait years to find what you're looking for, usually when you've stopped looking.

ALR: “I think that’s what we’re all after, truth, although I’d never have said such a thing when I was young.” You say this on your website. So is this a guiding concept in your writing process? Do you use “truth” in the editing/revising process as a filter of sorts? What does “truth” look like? And why is it that you wouldn’t have said such a thing as a youth?

AT: I never talked about big concepts when I was young. Truth? Who was I to talk about truth? What did I know about anything? And it's truth in terms of honesty, I guess, that I really mean. There's no such thing as Truth, although there's good and evil, but there's scouring your dark places for the honesty you'd perhaps rather avoid. That's personal truth. Not facts, of course, that's a whole different category. We're stuck with the memories we've got, they are stored any which way, but that's what's made us who we are, don't you think? I don't use truth for much, no. When I'm stuck, I use grace as a filter. What awful means is sometimes the deliverer of grace? A little Flannery O'Connor in there, I think.

ALR: Your writing is such a pleasure to be with. Thank you for your contributions, and thank you for your thoughts here.

AT: These are marvelous questions. Thank you. If you need more, please ask me. I wrote this very quickly, as I have hideous asthmatic bronchitis, and I'm flying high on prednisone. But your intelligent questions make me look forward even more to coming down to Texas, despite which way it might go.

About the Author (from www.abigailthomas.net): Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She’s lived most of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. Her memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. She is also author of Safekeeping, a memoir, and Thinking About Memoir.

Bear v. Shark in Books We Love

I used to kind of be a traditionalist snob, in that I went around telling everyone how great Flannery O'Connor was and how useless John Barth is.  But Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark really changed all that.  The premise of the book is simple:  If your had a bear face a shark in a fair fight, who would win?  That I liked a book about a bear fighting a shark is in no way surprising, but that I liked this book was a bit out of character. 

Bachelder loosely follows a single family who has won tickets to the main event because their son won a national Bear v. Shark essay contest, but interspersed within that free-ranging and all together non-arcing, non-narrative narrative arc, are disconnected fragments.  Sometimes rants, sometimes commercials, once a radio interview with Bachelder himself--the bits in between are as postmodern and non-conformist as any bearded Dentonite would want, but what makes this book stand out is that these bits all unquestionably work together to create a sense greater than the whole, and in the end I came to the conclusion that there was no other way to tell this story.  

So while I still love Flannery O'Connor, and I still hate John Barth (a lot), Chris Bachelder proved to me that you can really write anything so long as you write it good.  And if any one book gets the credit/blame for me trying to write a novel about reality, television, and their freakish offspring--it's this one.


Andy Briseno is a PhD student in Creative Writing (fiction) at the University of North Texas. His quirky personality and insightful comments are always much appreciated by the program.