August 2012 American Literary Review Reading

We had a packed house for the first ALR event of the year with readings from incoming PhD students Karl Zuehlke, Tina Cabrera, Trista Edwards, and Matt Haines. Special thanks to the Graduate Students in English Association, Amanda Kellog, and Caitlin Cowan for the reception.

Karl Zuehlke earned his MFA in 2009 from the University of Maryland, College Park. For the past three years he taught English at UMD, while trying to catch up on contemporary America. Besides continuing to write, he has been translating the selected works of the East German poet, Heinz Czechowski, Time Stands Still, and autobiography, Polar Memory.

Dahlias for James Schuyler 

Karl Zuehlke

At times my mind snaps

            open into a parachute,

but nuance is a wake,

            fingers creasing paper,

the disarray of diaries,

            of laying things out

around you on the floor.

            In the evening I sit

in the park scanning contours

            hills lift westward,

and then I read awhile. 

            I’m looking for one

passage about all the gray

            the Hudson divides

as the grass coats in a film.

            When I looked back down

I can’t make out the words.

            A blue streets leech out of,

the blue a pine turns to static,

            paper to blueprint.

Trista Edwards is a graduate of the University of West Georgia. She received her B.A. in English in 2008 and her M.A. in 2011. Her poems and reviews have been published in The Journal, Mid-American Review, 32 Poems, The Citron Review, and others. She was recently nominated for Best New Poets 2012 by 32 Poems magazine for her poem, "Masque."

Mouth to Mouth

Trista Edwards

It should not alarm you that I despise
something other than myself. I’m not

a feminist for nothing, or else those songs
taught me zilch about owning a vagina.

Sometimes I peruse through the make-up aisle
and think about how nice it would be

to dab that glistening guarantee
of sex on my dry mouth. But then

I remember, when I turn my head too fast,
my hair sometimes sticks to the new

chemical radiance, and I want to return
to skin, to the essentialism of matte lips.

I always loved experimenting with you,

lip gloss—your delicate shine, that love

for contact, the tease. You’re first

after a bath, the initial layer of distraction,

but then I wipe you away, forget I don’t care.
Truth is, I look forward to liking the thought

of liking myself, becoming a kind of first
woman before the others came along.

Tina V. Cabrera earned her MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University in 2009. Excerpts from her novel, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in journals such as Big Bridge Magazine, Vagabondage Press, Outrider Press, Fiction International, City Works and The San Diego Poetry Annual. Most recently, her poetry collection, Beauty Other Than, won Midwest Literary Magazine’s Chapbook Contest of 2011 and is scheduled for publication later this year. An excerpt from Tina's American Literary Review reading:

When Mother finally opened her eyes, they were full of longing. She glanced over her shoulder one more time. That’s when God punished her.  The stainless steel knife began making cuts into her wrist.  I watched with awe as she scooped salt into the wounds. When she stopped, her eyes froze like the cold, still swirls of beautiful marbles.   

Matt Haines was born and raised in Sabina, a small town in southwestern Ohio. He graduated from Kenyon College in 2002 and later received an MFA in poetry from UC Irvine. He was given a Glenn Schaeffer Award in 2007, which allowed him to move to Austin, TX, where he worked as an adjunct instructor at Austin Community College and Huston-Tillotson University.

An Interview with Matthew Olzmann

Justin Bigos: First, congratulations on winning the Kundiman Poetry Prize for your book Mezzanines, which will be published by Alice James Books in April 2013.  I’ve been admiring how the book, and each poem in it, carries a very palpable existential weight, but usually with a light touch.  The voice can be very funny, often conversational, and it never takes itself too seriously.  It’s a very likeable voice, and I don’t think that’s so common in contemporary American poetry.  And so I’ll begin by asking how important it is to you – as both a reader and writer – to feel that the voice on the page is a likeable, regular person, someone you might get some beers with, maybe talk some hockey, maybe some astronomy?

Matthew Olzmann:  Thanks, Justin.  As a reader of poems, I’m actually drawn to a number of types of voices, and those voices don’t necessarily have to sound like or represent likeable people.   They can do that—and that’s certainly appealing to me—but they can also be confrontational, cynical, or even evil.   They don’t have to be regular people either.  In fact, sometimes I turn to poems as a way of leaving the regular behind. In those instances, I might prefer to hear the voice of God in a poem, or the voice of a dinosaur, rather than my next-door neighbor.  So instead of saying that it’s important for the voice on the page to be a likeable, regular person, I’d like to say that it’s important for the voice on the page simply to be considerate of the reader.  And all I mean by that is that the poet is using the voice of the speaker—regardless of the speaker’s particular persona or tone—to make some kind of connection with the reader.  

JB:  Your poems thrive in part on a speaker’s eye that watches a world transform, and the watching—as voiced through poetry—becomes a creative act.  In your poem “Revisions,” the transformation seems necessary for survival; anguish is turned into beauty.  A tumor becomes a “cream-colored trumpet lily,” “broken dinner plates, pieces of pearl./ The ringing phone at midnight, the voice of a lark/ building a nest by your window.”  I’m building up to a big question here: Can art save us?  Gilbert Sorrentino would say no.  Gregory Orr would say yes.  I’m on the fence, and I’m wondering what you have to say.

MO:   Can art save us? It depends on the word “us.” If I’m talking about myself, then my answer would be an emphatic “I hope so.” Certainly, it’s given me a better life than I would have had otherwise.   But if we’re talking about individual artists in general, then my answer is probably not.  It’s impossible to ignore the massive amount of artists who are not “saved” by art, who are marginalized, or feel alienated and are living (or already lived) quick, tragic lives.  Maybe art enhances our lives, but I’ve known too many artists to think of “salvation” as a simple achievement. 

However, if the “us” in that question is society as a whole, then the answer is more complicated.  Graham Hough’s book, An Essay on Criticism, has a passage that I keep returning to.  He says:

The moral experience of the individual is confined by his personal circumstances, his time, his nationality, his class.  He can extend it, in a theoretical and abstract fashion, by a number of studies—history, anthropology, philosophy.  But through literature he can in some degree actually experience, by imaginative identification, other modes of being. 

I’m fascinated by this idea that literature helps us to transcend the narrowness of our own familiarities and allows us to have experiences that would not have been possible otherwise. 

I feel like we’re entering an age where, more and more, we as writers are going to be asked to defend what we do.  Literary arts organizations are fighting for their lives.  Magazines are seeing their funding slashed.  Writing programs are being forced to explain why creative writing is important.  What Hough says there is as good of an answer as any as to why this is important.  I’ve read poems that have offered me the chance to live in different centuries, to walk through hell, to see the traffic moving through blood vessels, and to view the world through the eyes of people of different races, orientations, and religions.  Can that save us?  Maybe, or maybe not.  But it helps us to live deeper, more fulfilling lives.  It creates a more understanding planet.  It calls on us—as individuals—to be more empathetic and humane.  And, ultimately, it helps us—as a society—to be more worthy of the “salvation” that we’re seeking. 

JB:   While I wouldn’t call most of your work surreal, when the surreal does emerge in your work it emerges with great force.  Are you influenced by Breton, or Koch, or other poets who wake us with disorientation?

MO:  This is such an interesting follow-up to your previous question.  In some ways, surrealism was a reaction to catastrophic events in the world (namely, World War I).  Since early practitioners of surrealism hoped to create art that would jar people away from the types of thinking that spurred such devastation, an argument can be made that the surrealists believed art could “save” us.  At the very least, they believed art could change us, and could impact society in a powerful manner. 

I don’t know if I would have fit in their club or not, but I’m interested in the imagination, the impossible, flights of speculation, unanswerable questions, and the weirdness of contemporary life.  To answer your question about “disorientation,” I’m interested in using the “odd” and the “bizarre,” not necessarily to “disorient” the reader, but to provide a metaphor for contemplating the strangeness of the world around us.  Many of the things I’ve written about that seem absurd—magnets taped to the heads of crocodiles, NASA videos intercepted by baby monitors, rabbits being shot and used for fuel, dead beetles stuffed with cocaine—came straight out of newspaper headlines.  I’ll find myself staring at those headlines, asking, “What does this say about us?” 

JB:  I love American cities, and the city that your book returns to most is Detroit.  I am sad to say I’ve never been there.  What for you makes Detroit different than, say, Pittsburgh or St. Louis or Boston?  Are you like one of your crocodiles, whose “memory/ like a compass” draws you back home?

MO: I can’t speak with any degree of authority on those other cities, but I know they all have Super Bowl banners hanging in their stadiums.  As a long-suffering Lions fan, that’s something that makes me look in the directions of those cities with a certain amount of envy.  And even though we’ve only won a grand total of one playoff game over fifty-something years, I keep telling myself this will be our year.  Or next year.  Or the year after that.  I think “We’ll get ’em next year” is the official team motto.

What is Detroit to me? Home. The city where I was born.  And I’ve lived my entire life near that city. 

Currently, my wife and I are living in North Carolina where I have a teaching fellowship for the year. This is the first time I’ve lived outside of Michigan, and the change in environment has been exhilarating and wild. Since the move down here, I’ve been constantly looking around, and comparing what is “here” to what is “there.”    Here are a couple things that they’ve got in North Carolina that they don’t have in Detroit: copperhead snakes and six billion types of spiders. 

This reminds me: I want to thank you, Justin, for introducing me to the idea of the “wolf spider” the other day.  I haven’t seen one yet, but it sounds like they took two animals I’d prefer to avoid, and—through the miracle of modern witchcraft—created one nightmare creature that (I’m sure) feeds only on human bone marrow.

But this area also has stunning mountains, rivers, and fog that hangs like smoke just above the tree line.  There are amazing restaurants where all the waiters can tell you exactly where your food was grown, and who grew it.  There’s store after store filled with things people made with their own hands. 

It’s also the most environmentally conscious place I’ve lived.  I’m teaching at Warren Wilson, and one of the students recently told me, “If you stand in one place for too long, you might get recycled.”

The poem “Crocodiles” that you referred to is interested in place, both literal and figurative, and how we find our back when “displaced.”  I feel like—since moving here—I’m in a transitional space where my relationships to concepts such as “home,” and “place,” and “Detroit” are in flux.  That said, it’s obvious that it’s a place to which my writing will constantly return.

JB: Whoops.  Looks like I forgot to tell you about the bear snakes.

MO: Shit. Does that exist? You’re an evil man, Justin Bigos. 

JB: One of the clues I have that you write a ton of poems is your creation and participation in “The Grind.”  Can you tell us about that project?

MO: It’s similar to the type of the “30/30” thing that a number of poets do every April.  The main difference is that this doesn’t stop at the end of April.   The project has been going nonstop—with a constantly changing cast of writers—since October, 2007.  It now has well over 200 participants, and frequently spans multiple continents. There’s now also a fiction component and a revision component.

Initially, we didn’t plan on the The Grind (or “The Grind Daily Writing Series”) being a long-term writing project.  It began with four poets—Ross White, Dilruba Ahmed, Zena Cardman and myself—who all agreed to write a poem every day for a month.  At the end of the day, we’d send a draft to the group.  There was no feedback or anything; we were just generating poems.  It was intended to be a one-month thing, but two of us kept going the next month with a few new writers.  And then again the month after that.  Each new month, some of us would take a break, and others would jump on board.

I’ll sometimes participate for several months in a row, sometimes every other month, sometimes more sporadically.  Regardless of whether or not I’m participating in the series, the act of writing something every day has become an integral part of my writing process.  I’ve found that if I haven’t written anything in a long time, the pressure I face when I return to the writing desk becomes intense.  Everything has to be perfect.  I need a certain block of time.  I need a clean desk and a cup of coffee. I need an “idea” and a room without distractions.  But when I’m writing every day, that pressure is gone.  It becomes liberating; if you know that you wrote seven rough drafts last week and will write another seven next week, then you’re free to fail on a huge level with whatever you try today.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, or even good. This process frees you up to not only take risks in your writing, but to actively pursue them. 

JB: Aside from writing poems, you also serve as Poetry Editor at The Collagist.  I was chatting with a friend the other day about literary magazines, and how they typically declare two things: first, they do not have what they often call a “prevailing aesthetic” and instead publish what is only “excellent”; second, if you want to know what they publish, “read the magazine.”  Maybe I’m being a bit daft here, but if I know their only criterion is excellence, why do I need to read the magazine?  Also, even if they did have an aesthetic, even loosely gleaned, why is that necessarily a problem?  As an editor, do you find you have any kind of aesthetic?

MO:  It’s a good idea to read the magazines you send your poems to for a number of reasons.  Obviously, one might want to get a sense of different editors’ tastes and preferences, but you also want to know if those magazines or journals are venues that you actually like.  Will they display your work in a manner that is acceptable to you?  Is their audience an audience that you want to connect with? Is it a place that you’d be proud to have your work featured?  The selection process for publication is actually a two-way street.  Editors choose the work they think is best suited for their publication, but first, contributors “choose” the publication by deciding whether or not to even submit their work.  There are seemingly a million publications out there, and The Collagist would not exist if people didn’t send us their writing.

I don’t know if “excellence” is the only criterion for me.  I’d say “interesting” is more important than “excellence.” I’m not even sure I know what excellence means.  Is it a poem that has been perfectly “polished” through a series of workshops? Maybe. But many times, I’ve accepted poems that were a little rough around the edges, but I was excited by what the writer was trying to do.   We get a few thousand poems each year, and can only accept a small fraction of those.   

As for my own particular aesthetic, I hope it’s constantly evolving. As an editor, I get especially excited when I read a poem that is doing something I’ve never seen before.  (In addition to learning what a magazine has published, reading it before submitting lets you know what a magazine has not published).  I’d say I’m open to possibility, but am mostly drawn to poems that contain a certain degree of empathy, poems that do not take the reader’s attention for granted, poems that create an experience for the reader, rather than poems that simply make the reader a passive witness to the speaker’s private experience. 

JB: What are you working on these days?  I know you’re up at the Bread Loaf conference in Vermont right now.  Is Bread Loaf a place you get a lot of writing done, or is it mostly shenanigans?

MO:  These days, I’m working on several new poems, and some pieces of short fiction. But Bread Loaf isn’t the place to go if you’re looking to get a lot of writing done. That’s not really part of the conference.  It’s more about lectures, craft classes, workshops, and discussions with other writers.  It’s a place to go to listen to writers talking about the work of writing, and to become part of that conversation.  But what I’ve mainly gotten from the place is friendship and a sense of camaraderie from being among the other participants.  I’ve been fortunate to attend the conference for the past four years on a variety of work-study scholarships (first as a waiter, then on social staff).  So, I’ve been working at the conference: serving food, pouring drinks, etc. The folks I got to work alongside of have been wonderful writers, but also, many have become good friends.  That’s probably my favorite thing I found out here: friendship.

JB: Thank you, Matthew.  For your poems, and for the conversation.

MO: And thank you, Justin.

Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize and is forthcoming from Alice James Books (April 2013).  His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Rattle, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere.  Currently, he is the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College.   

An Interview with Nick Courtright

Justin Bigos: Let’s begin with the title of your first book of poems, Punchline.   A punchline, in its abrupt pith, kills the joke; but your lines, even your last lines, never make me feel like the gig is over – rather, I still feel the poem moving, singing.  Can you talk a bit more about the title of the book, as well as the title poem, whose “punchline . . . is all our being and all our seeking”?

Nick Courtright: Well, what book of severe philosophical and spiritual questioning wouldn’t be hilarious?  All the great religious poetries are full of jokes: look no further than all the crap that happened to Job.  As for this book, I kind of see the whole thing as a happy commentary on the punchline that is our own lives, i.e.: we are the punchline of our own joke.  Knock knock.  Who’s there?  Human beings.  Human beings who?  HUMAN BEINGS. 

But more seriously, you mention how the poems themselves don’t feel cut off at the end, but seem to sing along, perhaps to the next poem.  This likely has to do with my approach to constructing the book: this isn’t a collection of a bunch of lyrics I had lying around.  Rather, it was all written in order as one compressed evolution of a thought process, but then with a lot of harsh editing decisions thrown in.  I wrote 30,000 words, then whittled it down to these 6,000 or so.  But I didn’t muck about too much with the order—I wanted to record the songs live, not with a lot of superficial studio magic. 

I also like the idea of a book of poetry that moves more like a narrative should, even if there are no characters—the idea that something should be developing, that an idea should be moving forward.  That’s what I went for, and via that, I wanted, by asking the most deadly serious questions possible, to see if I could come to any conclusions regarding the existence of the universe.

JB: Your poems often play with physical scale, whether contemplating the “miniature terror of ants” (“The Despot”), or our own proximity to the moon “if we were eighty trillion times the size we are, just like Florida/ is far from Cuba for the man who swims there” (“Consolation Prize”).  The poem “He Does Not Throw Dice” begins, “Imagine the lawlessness of the subatomic world, but larger.”  This kind of imagination seems, in the best sense, childlike – it reminds me a bit of the “I’m Crushing Your Head” Kids in the Hall skit.  Can you talk a bit abut this recurring theme of flexible proportion?

NC: I love that skit, and there is a childlike nature to those sorts of manipulations of scale.  But I do love considering that idea—have you seen the website scaleoftheuniverse.com?  You can interactively scroll through magnitudes of ten both larger and smaller than human beings, from the theoretical strings of string theory all the way up to the theoretical size of our theoretical universe.  And there, just a bit to the larger side of the middle of this frightfully large spectrum, are we people.  So I’m always fascinated by the idea that we have a “scalar bias,” in that we see the universe through the eyes of someone who just so happens to be this size.  We think ants are small, but they are fucking huge.  We think the sun is big, but it’s actually pretty tiny. 

But it’s this bias that gets me: we have the hubris to say we can understand the universe, why we are here, what happens after we die, what the truth is of evolution or religion or, jeez, even nutrition or the weather or why we like sports, but we’re coming to these conclusions from a very limited perspective.  So yeah, I’d say it’s a thing to think about.  And it’s not nearly as head-spinning as the notion of our “time bias” (the rock lives a lot longer than us, does it not?).

JB: No, I hadn’t seen the web site Scale of the Universe.  It is frightening.  But alternately soothing.  It’s also nice to see that America is bigger than the moon.  Suck it, moon!  Go USA!  Seriously, though, thanks for sharing that site.  I wish there was the option to change the music from Radiohead-lite to maybe Neil Diamond or Brian Eno.  What would your music preference(s) be?

NC: I was also struck that it shows the largest particle that could squeeze through a surgical mask, and then shows that the world’s largest virus is actually smaller.  Good to know.

But music!  You know I have a background in music journalism, so I’m going to have to fight my love for obscurity here.  But, having been inspired by what I’m listening to at this exact moment, I’m going to have to say the new Animal Collective album.  It’s completely insane, full of unexpected turns that somehow, in their unexpectedness, tend to follow a certain logic.  And I think that’s much how this fine sick mad beautiful universe of ours is, a bunch of things that have no business being together—(hydrogen and oxygen, together?!?!  Who would’ve thunk??!)—being together.

JB: Your poem “What Is” begins, “Apocrypha is no less than actual, if it is believed.”  Your poems themselves sometimes have an apocryphal feel.  Quick confession: your book survived a car wreck I was in a month ago, and it is still damp and distended from the water jug that exploded in the back of the car.  And the pages are dirty with who knows what.  Even so, even so – holding your book in my hands and reading one poem to the next, well, has felt like I found something secret, something excavated.  Have you ever felt that you discovered a similar book of poems?

NC: I love that my book has been traumatized by what was surely your reckless vehicular acrobatics!  As surface-level unpleasant as it may be to imagine my book being abused and crushed up, there is no truer sign on my bookshelf of a loved book than one that has been dog-eared, marked up, and battered.  If it is too crisp and clean, it must have done something wrong, or is a sign of my laziness.  As for whether I have ever discovered a similar book of poems, an excavated piece, I can actually plumb into a recent event to find an instance. 

When I was visiting my family in Ohio recently, I was rifling through a box of books that had survived flooding and atrophy and all those other pleasures, and I found a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, a famous book I had never spent much time with previously.  I had had no idea that it was at my parents’ house, or how it got there—the copy was old, the cover torn off.  I was an archaeologist dusting away at the sarcophagus.  And so many great lines!: “And shall my desires flow like a fountain that I may fill their cups?” and “If this is my day of harvest, in what fields have I sowed the seed, and in what unremembered seasons?”  And those are just from the first poem of prose.  Like Poggio must have felt when in 1417 he rediscovered Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things after a thousand years disregarded or unknown, I felt as if I had stumbled onto a secret.

JB: I’m interested in your use of chapter in Punchline.  Some books of poems forgo sections altogether; some simply number sections; and some, such as yours, are even more purposeful in their divisions.  Can you describe your choice to open each of your four chapter with an epigraph that is the latter half of a quotation, such as “ . . . Invent the universe” – which finishes Carl Sagan’s statement “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first . . .”?

NC: It was quite the happy accident, really—I needed an organizing principle, and the “punchlines” of those quotes (get it?) I’d had hanging around for a while, wanting to do something cool with them.  I had a whole pile of quotes, and I narrowed it down to those four, which I think really do encapsulate well the idea of movement through the book: part one is “He does not play dice,” after Einstein, and it deals with (at least in my mind) the issue of fate and order and chance; part two, after the Sagan quote, deals with the universe and uncertainty; part three, led by Lorca’s quote about not worrying about death, said about a year before he was killed, deals with mortality and impermanence; and part four, after Zen master Shunryu Suzuki’s quote that enlightenment is nothing special, is about acceptance, even in the face of the unanswerable.  And I’m glad I did it that way, because to me each of the sections has its own personality, though they also seem to make perfect sense with one following the next—I can’t really imagine them being in any other order.

JB: Another organizing principle I noticed is that the book opens with a drawing of the sun, and ends with a drawing of the moon.  Does lyric poetry come from the sun or the moon?  Mary Ruefle says the moon; Apollo says – well, we know what Apollo says.

NC: Ahh, I got you: you have it all mixed up!  It opens with the moon, and ends with the sun—to do otherwise would be depressing, right?  I did debate heartily which would come first and which would come last, but I decided I liked the almost-counterintuitive approach of ending with the sun; not “the sun and the moon,” but “the moon and the sun.”  It also gives the feeling that the whole book is taking place during the night (I’m just making this up now, but I like it), kind of like an analog to St. John of the Cross’ “Dark Night of the Soul,” in that after surviving this bay of unknowing we can find ourselves alive with a new day.  But, like I said, I’m just making this up now.

BUT, to answer your question: I’ll disagree with Ruefle just for the sake of discussion, although she’s very likely the righter of us two.  I’d say the epic poem is the moon, because all “story” must have sorrow.  The lyric, though, comes to us from the sun, a glimmer of light on what otherwise would be darkness.  Like within every epic is a lyric, the moon cannot shine without the sun.  As for Apollo, it was a shame when he got killed by Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.

JB: Your short poem “No Children” stands out for both its starkness and its poignancy.  The poem seems to release any desire for a heaven without children, even while a children-less life is “blissfully lonely.”  I remember a friend told me years ago that I should have kids because it would make me a better poet.  I have no kids, and I sometimes find myself thinking of my friend’s odd statement.  What do you make of it?  As a father, do you feel your writing has somehow gotten better, or changed in any way?

NC: I definitely feel like having a child improved my work.  Because now my work is no longer so much just about me and my stupid existential problems or ideas of prettiness—now it’s about that, but filtered through the fact that all of my ontological inquiry is enriched by the presence of the very real life that exists and that my wife and I are responsible for.  In Hinduism there’s that big karmic idea that you should do things for the sake of the thing itself, and not for the outcome—that you shouldn’t be concerned with the fruit of the action, but just the action—and I feel like before I became a parent I like many was very ravaged with the importance of my desires and selfishnesses, and this manifested itself in my work; now I do the things I do less for myself and more as a means of figuring out what he my son “means” and how I can serve that meaning. 

I have no idea if any of this makes sense, but I can say for certain that having a kid made me less “anxious” about my writing and how it would be received, and more confident that I just had to do the writing I needed to do, for better or for worse, and that somewhere out there maybe some similarly afflicted human of too many questions would enjoy it.

JB: Thanks for the conversation, Nick.

NC: Thank you for the awesome questions!

Nick Courtright is the author of Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist published in 2012 by Gold Wake Press. His work has appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Iowa Review, among numerous others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He’s Interviews Editor of the Austinist, an arts and culture website based in Austin, Texas, where he teaches English, Humanities, and Philosophy, and lives with his wife, Michelle, and son, William. 

Feel free to find him at nickcourtright.com.

American Literary Review Presents: Back to School Reading for Incoming Graduate Students

Please join us on Saturday, August 25th from 7-8:30 pm for the American Literary Review's Third Annual Back-To-School Reading, featuring original fiction and poetry by incoming PhD candidates Tina Cabrera, Matt Haines, Karl Zuehlke, and Trista Edwards. All faculty and students are welcome to attend.

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