Midwestern Gothic staffer Marisa Frey talked with author Joe Kapitan about his collection Caves of the Rust Belt, how to link the fantastical and the real, what “caves” are to him, & more.
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Marisa Frey: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Joe Kapitan: Um, pretty much everything. Other than four years spent in the military, my entire life has been spent here in the Midwest—most of it in the Cleveland area, plus my college years in South Bend, Indiana.
MF: The stories in Caves of the Rust Belt are character-centric, diving into one person’s experience in each story. What was important to you about approaching the writing this way?
JK: I try to keep Tim O’Brien’s advice in mind when I write. He said that good fiction has both imagination and emotional gravitas; that it must engage both the mind and the heart. And the only way to the “heart” is through characters, whether likable or unlikable, heroines or villains. In a lot of my stories, especially the stranger ones, characters become the link between the fantastical and the real. So many great writers do this: Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Colson Whitehead, George Saunders. Saunders’ classic novella Pastoralia is a great example. The outrageous premise of the bizarre amusement park only works because it’s tethered to the real world through the normal human problems of the characters: getting along with difficult co-workers, and being the parent of a sick or drug-addicted child.
MF: The “caves” in Caves of the Rust Belt are sometimes physical and sometimes emotional—a sinkhole, characters who get laid off from their jobs, murky and unreliable memory. How did you come to the title? What are “caves” to you?
JK: That’s a very insightful point, and one that eluded me for quite a while. I originally sent this collection out in a different form, under a different name, not even labeling it as a collection of Ohio stories. What a mistake. It collected a dozen rejections. Once I decided to repackage and re-brand it, so to speak, it dawned on me that the idea of “caves” was so pervasive in many of the stories, from literal sinkholes and pits and the shifting earth’s crust to metaphorical “caves” of depression and loneliness. That’s what caves are to me: dark and unknown voids, where you’re bound to encounter fears.
MF: Your stories have a gritty edge, often giving off an air of desolation and hopelessness. What was it like to write them?
JK: I believe there is something fundamentally Midwestern about the dogged pursuit of the positive amidst the negative. In my lifetime, Cleveland has battled a polluted lake and a burning river, political corruption and civic bankruptcy, economic downturns, vacant buildings, the vacant faces of addicts and the urban poor, and (until recently) chronically underachieving sports teams. Any glimmer of positive news—young people flocking to the city to live! Hosting a political convention! Cavs win 2016 championship!—is splashed across the front page of the news because we crave it. Q. What gets us through the nasty winters here in Cleveland? A. Knowing how great the summers are here. So to answer your question, it didn’t feel different to write this way. I just felt real, and normal.
MF: Caves of the Rust Belt is a collection of short stories. What appeals to you about this genre?
JK: I guess I love that short fiction is so approachable. I think that’s how most of us experience life each day—as a series of short stories or flash-fictions. When you see an ancient, one-armed man selling hot dogs at the ballpark, or a well-dressed woman standing at the highway exit with a cardboard sign asking for money, don’t you start to build their back-stories in your mind, even subconsciously? I know I do, and I don’t think at novel-scale. I imagine in snippets.
MF: What does your writing process look like?
JK: Disorganized and anemic, mostly. I have a full-time career and a family, so my writing consists of the time-fragments I find in the liminal spaces between those larger spheres of my life. Most of Caves was written during lunch hours at work, over a period of years. It’s a hard way to write, because I feel time-pressured and it’s difficult to find the “zone” under those conditions. I look forward to the day when I can flip the script and set aside dedicated writing time.
MF: You’re also an architect. How does that work its way into your writing?
JK: I’m a very visual person, so my writing ideas often come from visual cues—an imagined scene, or one from a dream. I guess I always look for the structure beneath my writing, too, just like a building. I need to understand the framework of a story and how it will support what I want to do, and those frameworks can be orderly or fragmented, whichever best serves the overall design.
MF: How has your writing changed over time?
JK: The biggest change I’ve seen in my own writing is that I’m now more trusting and courageous about my voice and my choices. Over the past several months, I’ve heard two veteran writers, Benjamin Percy and Matt Weinkam, say the same basic thing—that you need to learn the rules so you can break the rules. That message really resonates with me. It’s like becoming an architect. You must go through a training period and pass a standardized licensure test, not so you become homogenous or an automaton, but so you can learn the appropriate limits of expressing your individuality. So you learn how much you can break the rules before it all comes crashing down around you.
MF: What’s next for you?
JK: I’d love to finish my novel, but at the rate I’m going, it will take another decade. I keep telling myself it’s a marathon, not a sprint. But it’s a marathon I didn’t properly train for.
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Joe Kapitan writes from a glacial ridge line a day’s march south of Cleveland. Besides being a proud two-time Midwestern Gothic contributor, his short fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared or will appear in The Cincinnati Review, Booth, PANK, Wigleaf, Hobart, Notre Dame Magazine, and others. His collection of Ohio-based short stories, Caves of the Rust Belt, will be published by Tortoise Books in October 2018.
December 7th, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Jo Chang talked with author Jamie Wendt about her poetry collection Fruit of the Earth, the significance of religion in her work, being an English teacher, and more.
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Jo Chang: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Jamie Wendt: I was born and raised in the north suburbs of Chicago. I spent four years in Iowa at Drake University getting my Bachelor of Science in education and my Bachelor of Arts in English. I also spent some time in Nebraska for the University of Nebraska low-res MFA program. After college, I returned to Chicago, where I currently reside. The city has such an amazing literary culture. I am enjoying raising my two kids in such a diverse environment.
JC: As a graduate of Drake University in Iowa, and a current resident of Chicago, can you speak about what the Midwest means to you, and how the region has influenced your writing, if at all?
JW: I am very much a product of the Midwest. I love Chicago and cannot see myself living anywhere else. My street is lined with more trees than the suburban street I grew up on. Chicago has so much natural beauty mixed with stunning artwork and architecture, and it has so many characters and unexpected images that make walking through my neighborhood part of my writing process. When I was in college, Iowa had a big impact on me as well. Going back and forth between the Chicago-area and Des Moines during college helped me figure out who I am. Iowa is beautiful and my experiences there occasionally pop up in my poetry. I was often the first Jew that my classmates ever met, and it caused me to read dozens of books on Judaism in order to answer their many questions. Those books caused me, in turn, to fall in love with Judaism as a lifestyle instead of simply a religion. While my new book, Fruit of the Earth, does have a handful of poems set in Chicago and Iowa, the book focuses more inward on my personal grappling with my community, my faith, and the moving on through stages of life.
JC: As a high school English teacher, do you feel like your relationship with your students has influenced your development as a writer?
JW: Being a teacher is such a rewarding challenge on a daily basis. I have often been inspired by the stories that my students tell me. As a teacher, I try to get them to realize that writing is an outlet to help them make sense of their experiences and to own those experiences. I want my students to realize that writing can help them figure out what matters to them most and that by writing well, they can gain the power of influence and persuasion. I have always wanted to be more than a “teacher who writes” and now that my book is being published, I feel like I can define myself as a “writer who teaches.” I like that, and I hope that my students see that it is possible to do what you love in your free time while having a very fulfilling career.
JC: Your pride for your Jewish heritage shines through in your essays on Jewish writing, your contributions to the Jewish Book Council, and your forthcoming book, Fruit of the Earth. Can you speak about this relationship, and what personal significance it holds for you as a person and writer?
JW: When I think about places that have personal significance to me and that also recur in my poems, the Jewish home is the place that keeps reappearing. Everything that I do throughout the day, from food I eat, to the Jewish artwork and mezuzot throughout my home, to the prayer I say before bedtime as well as the interactions I have with others and the books I read, they are all somehow connected to my Jewish values. Writing “Jewishly” is subconscious for me. Jewish images recur throughout my poems because they are such a part of my daily life. I have been writing book reviews for the Jewish Book Council for many years, and I treat those reviews somewhat as donations to the continuation of the Jewish literary tradition. I want to be a part of the conversation, whether it is through a book review, a poem, or an essay, many of which can be viewed on my website: jamiewendt.wordpress.com.
JC: Fruit of the Earth explores displacement and division as it travels between the Old Country and the Promised Land. Can you explain how you gathered inspiration and research for this book?
JW: Writing poetry helps me make sense of my life, even though I’m rarely conscious of what a poem will focus on or where it will end up until I go back to revise. But oftentimes, I am writing about Jewish experiences, which Fruit of the Earth revolves around. Israeli culture is very inspiring to me. I’ve been to Israel four times, and whenever I arrive home, I find that my writing returns to the beauty of Israel, whether it’s the land and the sea, or something simple, such as the appearance of Jewish garb on so many people, or the initial strangeness of picking up hitchhikers, which is normal there. The sand seems to get everywhere: your toes, your hair, your towels, your pockets. There is just so much sand from the Mediterranean to the desert, and the land literally sticks to your skin there. And then, freedom and war are so intertwined and complicated, and the histories are enormously thick and layered. I feel a much stronger connection to the land of Israel than to America. When America makes politically atrocious decisions, I am disgusted. I talk about it; I protest. But when Israel does something that I find appalling, part of me feels personally responsible simply because Israel is the Jewish country. Israel is the place mentioned on nearly every page of Jewish prayer-books and it’s the country whose news I read daily. I try to explore and understand my Jewish heritage and roots through many poems in Fruit of the Earth. I am very interested in the way that personal moments, whether mundane or significant, intertwine with the political.
JC: Your first collection of poetry, Fruit of the Earth, debuted in 2018. Can you describe the process and your feelings as Fruit of the Earth’s publishing date drew near?
JW: It took me about five years to write and revise Fruit of the Earth. Many early drafts of these poems were part of my MFA thesis for the University of Nebraska. I’ve removed poems, heavily revised many, added others, played around with the order over and over again, and each time I changed something about it, I would submit the manuscript to a contest or open reading period. In late 2017, I printed out the whole manuscript for probably the dozenth time and laid the poems all over my living room floor, experimenting with a new order. I ended up creating five sections. Soon after I switched the order around, I submitted it to Main Street Rag Publishing Company, and they accepted it. I was thrilled, of course! There have been a high number of pre-sale purchases, so while my book was slated for release in September 2018, it was actually released on July 30. I’m very excited about hearing from readers about their thoughts on my poems, and I’m looking forward to participating in many readings.
JC: What does your typical writing schedule look like when you are working on a project? How do you allocate your time spent drafting and editing, but also to tasks such as your day job and personal obligations?
JW: Making time to write is one of my biggest challenges, mostly because I have two young children. Typically, I spend about four hours writing on weekend afternoons when my kids nap. I’m a teacher, so having summers off helps me focus more intently on a specific project and I am able to write more than I do during the school year. But due to being busy with my kids, my time is only available in short blocks, so I always create a goal for myself during the specific window of time that I have on a given day. My goals usually include something like, “write a new poem” or “revise two poems from last month” or “provide feedback on my writing partner’s poem.” I am often inspired by reading poems, so I always read before I write, usually for about twenty minutes. I rarely take notes or draft in a notebook; although, occasionally I will create lists of images surrounding a particular place or subject. I like to just get right into a poem by typing and letting my subconscious guide me through a first draft.
JC: What’s next for you?
JW: My book tour! I’m so excited about the release of Fruit of the Earth and to have the opportunity to read and discuss my poems with audiences around the Midwest. Please check my website for event details! In terms of future writing projects, I have been writing many poems lately on pregnancy and early motherhood as well as poems about my family’s connections to Chicago. I am excited about the possibilities for these poems, but I am focusing most of my energy right now on Fruit of the Earth. Please view sample poems and purchase information at this link to my publisher’s site: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/fruit-of-the-earth-jamie-wendt/.
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Jamie Wendt is a graduate of the University of Nebraska Omaha MFA program. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Drake University. Her debut poetry collection, Fruit of the Earth, was released in July 2018 from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Her poetry has been published in various literary journals, including Lilith, Raleigh Review, Minerva Rising, Third Wednesday, and Saranac Review. Her essays and book reviews have been published in Green Mountains Review, the Forward, Literary Mama, and others. She teaches high school English and lives in Chicago with her husband and two children. Find her at jamiewendt.wordpress.com.
November 15th, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Jo Chang talks with poet Gary Lemons about his collection Snake III: The Hunger Sutras, being inspired by dreams, the importance of kinship, and more.
Jo Chang: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Gary Lemons: I moved to Washington, Iowa—a small town south of Iowa City—from Vermont—to qualify for the less expensive tuition rate for in-state students at the University of Iowa where I’d been accepted into the undergraduate poetry workshop. Prior to that move I’d never been to the Midwest.
Washington was an Amish community and the house I stayed in was in the middle of an Amish enclave if you will. I stumbled on to this the first day by going into a cafe/general store thirsty as well as curious about the horse-drawn wagons out front—something you only see in Vermont during the mid-winter when the maple sap is running. The Amish people were wonderful to me. They knew of any empty house one of their members moved out of and before I knew it they moved me into it. The community cleaned it and aired it out and hauled firewood for the winter and filled the cupboards with canned vegetables and fruits and brought fresh oil for the lanterns and re-installed the gravity feed water system from the elevated cistern to the house. There was no electricity and the hot water came from a pipe run through the box of the wood stove into a holding tank where it was then mixed with cold water to control the temperature. There was a standpipe in the front yard beside a trough for watering horses.
I spent that summer and fall working on Amish farms—haying and planting and weeding and harvesting—cutting wood and caring for horses. I learned so much about patience and tradition and compassion and tenderness but I also learned about discipline and to the degree I was able—character—and what it means to make a vow and keep it. I turned 21 that summer.
So my first exposure to the Midwest was transformational. The long bright buttery sunlight—the smells of horse and fresh cut hay—the sweat running out of your hair into your eyes and the goodness of a people seemingly lost in time all contributed to a sense of finding a sort of beginning—a ground in myself where I could build something for the years to come. I fell in love with Iowa you might say and no one was more surprised than I was to find that a slower more contemplative life could offer more nourishment for a poet than the fast-paced urban existence I knew from growing up in Washington D.C.
JC: You spent two years in the undergraduate poetry workshop at the University of Iowa. Can you speak about your time there, and how the world of academia has affected your writing, which, by contrast, is very focused on nature and the earth?
GL: After my year establishing residency ended I left Washington and moved to Iowa City. It was hard saying goodbye to my community—my first Sangha if you will—but I was completely stoked to jump into the workshop life. I had already audited classes with John Berryman and William Stafford but it was now time to fully enter the crazed and almost caricature existence of a young poet in an extremely exclusive literary incubator.
My first teacher was Donald Justice. I admired his work tremendously and was—as we all were—in awe of him. He seemed to tower over us—blotting out the sun—his proclamations regarding the merit or mostly the lack of it in our writing caused earthquakes in the heart and drove many of us directly into the Iowa City bars to assuage the ensuing angst the comes from having Mr. Justice listen to your poem and then raise both eyebrows and say something like, “No—that is not quite it at all.” Crushed.
But he instilled critically important lessons that are a part of my writing life to this day—discipline to write every day—which built on the time spent with the Amish doing daily chores exactly at the same time in the same way over and over again—reading all poems but especially my work out loud while listening—truly listening—to the way the words touch each other to form subtle meanings—how they evoke subliminal responses not readily available in the words alone or as they lie silent on the page. He also harangued on the importance and privilege of editing—of never being satisfied with what you wrote but knowing it is a surface beneath which more important and more significant understandings are waiting for release through the process of emergence and reemergence in the drafts. He taught us never to stand in the way of the original outpouring but from that point to ceaseless question yourself as you amended it until only what you wanted to say—the reason you wrote the damn thing to begin with—remained. I honor him every day for that.
I also had a semester with Marvin Bell who was a singularly kind and accessible teacher whose main contribution to my life as a poet—and it was a huge one that I appreciate even more as I grow older—was how to talk about a poem—how to reveal those secret urges and flashing insights that are a part of the composition into a language in which the poem can be discussed and shared. A byproduct of this skill is the ability to talk about—or critique constructively—the works of other poets without insult or injury. We learned how to discuss and improve our work within a community of poets who became trusted advisors and not enemies.
And then my last two semesters I spent with my favorite living poet Norman Dubie. This is where my work became my own. Norman’s greatest gift to me was his refusal to acknowledge my inauthenticity. He knew when I was faking it. He kept up a fluid wall that I walked into every time I spoke in a borrowed voice. Through his interest and dare I say—love—I discovered my voice; not that it doesn’t change somewhat with every poem but what Norman helped me find was that place in me where the summaries of personal experience wait for words to find them. Norman taught me to believe in and trust the dissonance of images and thoughts and dreams that are uniquely mine in the same way his were uniquely his. It was at this point that I began to believe that a life spent writing poetry was not a secular calling but a form of spiritual practice in that every poem is drawn up and out of one mystery into another.
JC: When you used to live in Vermont, where you became “entangled more deeply in the changes the ’60s offered young poets,” you speak about the kinship and shared passion among the other young poets you shared space with. Can you also speak about the importance of community among poets, especially young or beginning ones, and about your own experience?
GL: Oh it’s so important. My earliest memories as a poet are all about hanging out with like-minded friends. When you’re young everything in this world is new and yet has already received a label defining and naming it—we get to do that all over again as poets and this act of discovery and identification is sharpened by learning where to look and how to see—which are two different and equally important parts of creating anything new in my opinion—we learn to look and see from birth and the way we assimilate this into experience—how we educate ourselves—is pressured and formed and controlled by exterior forces like parents and teachers and ministers or gurus or others in authority. Most of what we see and how we look is dependent on influences not of our own making or choosing. That’s just what being a child is all about and the big hope is that when it’s all said and done we were at a minimum treated kindly.
Then you’re a teenager or a young adult—you’re on your own and your friends become your family—your new world. This is wonderful and liberating until it isn’t—until the freedom to escape becomes just another perhaps larger and more interesting limitation. And the realization comes that once again you’re wasting time doing things that don’t kindle an inner flame.
So that’s when the process becomes more selective. You hang with people that excite you—that teach you, that care for you—that disagree articulately without punishing you—that share if not the same path then a common direction. And you walk with them.
So many nights and days spent with other poets reading from Sexton or Rilke or Baudelaire or Eliot (“I will show you fear/in a handful of dust”) or Dickinson or Plath and really digging into the words: feeling them together and shouting them—memorizing them—rolling in them like they were (and they are) great fields of grass with a gentle downhill slope to the sea, taking them in and letting them live inside of you while all the time hoping one day to find similar but original material in yourself.
There’s nothing like the friendship between young poets. Essentially the idea of the artist as a loner is just another anachronism that all the juice has been sucked out of and that now hangs inside a sarcophagus waiting for some explorer to pry it open and declare they’ve found the long-lost mummy of a really bad idea.
JC: To follow the question about community and networking between poets, what do poetry workshops mean to you? The Bread Loaf writers workshop played a role in shaping your craft and securing you a place in the University of Iowa’s undergraduate poetry workshop. Who were your most memorable mentors? How did you feel about the communal aspect of workshops?
GL: Poetry workshops are really important. They changed my life in so many ways mostly by supplying directions on the blank signs along the road I was on—suddenly I had a sense of belonging to something far greater and older than myself—a sense of tradition that required only curiosity and a degree of reverence to join.
I was at Bread Loaf twice. I got to work with poets like John Ciardi and William Meredith and Diane Wakoski and Miller Williams and James Tate among others. Wow—every hour of every day spent in their company or with fellow students like Carolyn Forche—one of my favorite poets or Bill Ransom or John Huey. You have to remember this was the late ’60s—everything was being redefined and personal freedom was tops on the list—how to become yourself—how to find and define your character—whether or not to wear straight leg or bell-bottom jeans—it was a privilege to participate in that particular moment in history. Maybe young poets feel that way today—I would if I were suddenly 19 again. These are momentous times and so much is riding on the next twitch. And workshops are places where solidarity happens and where life-long friendships begin. From which the poetry of the future waits for the current now moment to arrive.
Perhaps the most valuable thing I came away with from Bread Loaf and I imagine this is true of every workshop is the gift of reading my work out loud in front of an audience. I’d never done that before. It scared me to death to stand up every evening and read the poems I wrote that day to a group of other students under the eye of one or more of the teachers. It was expected of us and after awhile I grew to love it—I love reading my work to this day with the same feeling of amazement and the same underlying excitement bordering on panic that I did when I first started.
JC: You have stated that at the University of Iowa you “studied the craft of poetry. Then [you] went out into the world to learn the lessons of poetry.” Evidently, your time spent living on the Assiniboine Reservation and in Alaska has been essential to your craft. When did you realize that nature holds such potential for poetic influence? Did you actively seek it, or was it serendipitous?
GL: By craft of poetry I mean specifically the way poems work metrically and syllabically. How the lines relate to one another. I studied and practiced over and over again writing sestinas and villanelles and sonnets and heroic couplets and played with other tools for releasing the underlying music in words. I loved this. I still do.
But there’s something lost when your work happens at a cluttered desk near a window looking out at the real world. I began toward the end of my second year to feel I’d wrung just about every drop from my life experiences on the planet. My poems became less real. More and more abstract in an attempt to create linkages between what I felt and what was going on around me. Eventually it came to me that if I wanted connection to the big planetary world I needed to see more of it. I refer to this as Jack Kerouac syndrome in that it’s almost a cliche for young writers to lose themselves out on the highway in order to bring back something found in the ditches along the way. But that’s what I did.
Norman was nice enough to offer me a 15-hour independent study class for my graduating semester at Iowa. I only needed 15 hours to graduate so this meant I didn’t need to take any other classes. It meant I could be gone all semester as long as I sent weekly poems back to him and kept up with other assignments—in other words I could hit the road with his permission if I was responsible enough to do the work and send it back on time.
So I did. I wandered in Mexico—especially Oaxaca and Mazunte. My recent book—Dia de los Muertos—published by Red Hen Press—came out of that experience some forty years later. I went to Alaska and worked on the Pipeline. I built grain elevators and feed mills all through the Midwest and still got my poems to Norman and finished the semester while on the road.
Then I couldn’t stop. Rather than go on to graduate school I stayed out there at the extreme edge of very hard work getting my ass kicked by hillbilly foremen and learning what I referred to as the lessons of poetry. This is again about seeing and looking. I was seeing things I’d never otherwise see. Pushed into experiences—some of them near intolerable and some soaring and achingly beautiful—that were unavailable without maximum effort to find them. And I looked and gathered and mostly just lived without real intention until at some point I grew tired of it—about 25 years later as it turns out.
An incomplete list of what I did during this time would include welding pipe, fishing in Alaska, high steel in the Midwest where I also built grain elevators and feed mills, logging in the Pacific Northwest, and my favorite job of all—tree planting high elevation clearcuts all over Washington state and Oregon. It was retrospectively my redemption to finish my manual labor career by planting over 500,000 trees wandering just below the snowline in places of the most surreal and desolate beauty imaginable. With a crew of men and women—mostly artists—many of whom planted millions of trees over the course of their time in the woods.
The 5 years I spent on the Assiniboine Reservation in Poplar Montana—well—that’s a whole book in itself but a thumbnail edition would say something like this is where I learned not how to fly but how to land.
So yeah—I got a big kick out of working with my hands. Doing things. Contouring things or reshaping things. In a strange way it’s not so different than the poet’s work of walking a feeling into an idea into a finished poem through the application of all sorts of tools.
JC: Your forthcoming book of poetry, Snake III: The Hunger Sutras, is the third book in the Snake Quartet, and continues the journey of Snake, who is the sole survivor of the “cleanse” that wiped the Earth nearly clean. What was the inspiration behind this book, and the entire Snake Quartet? Was there a certain image, or moment, that sparked inspiration?
GL: The original voice of snake appeared in my book Bristol Bay & Other Poems—Red Hen Press. That poem came from an actual dream and was a sort of an apocalyptic vision where the Earth get tired of hosting parasites and destroys all life on it by unleashing cataclysmic forces such as hurricanes and earthquakes and fire and floods (sound familiar?).
The dream kept coming back in more detail narrated by a strange voice. I wrote down what I was given—mostly late at night—sometimes all night—as the poem decloaked. This turned into the first book in the Snake Quartet.
The last living thing—and there will always be one last thing before there is no thing—discovers the dreaming way even as it was being killed—the path out of form back into cosmic consciousness if you will where life goes during times of destruction and where spirits reside once their bodies are gone. The Buddhists call this Pralaja, or when the manifest universe returns to non-existence. So just as Earth was finishing this last living thing—rolling it and pulling limbs off it (making it snake shaped)—it popped out of view. It dreamed itself into a safe place. Taking the collectively destroyed plant and animal world with it. But not just living energies but their dreams and superstitions and mythologies and intuitions and fantasies and lies and grievances and essentially housing the entire kit and caboodle that once existed on Earth. Snake was born.
But only for a while. Because it was still alive it could not reside permanently in the dream world—it had to return to its body—now snake-shaped—at which point Earth came for it again. Around and around for thousands—then millions of year until Earth grew tired and slept—which was and is her natural state until activities on the surface disturb her. Now snake is alone on the the empty planet—wandering through artifacts and remnants—phantoms and ruins carrying the missing life forms inside of her. She is now the repository for what is gone.
This came out of a dream. A long sequential story pretty much as I just described poorly filled with horror and beauty and sorrow and moments of deep grace that together turned into a—oh why not just use the word—channeled experiences something like what I understand people to mean when they use the term automatic writing. I didn’t edit or censor it until the first book was finished. Then I went back through it with a very small pen making very light strokes so as not to disturb the force of what I consider a gift. The ensuing three books came from the same source through a similar process. Essentially I am occupied.
I felt the entire time and still do as the fourth book wobbles toward the finish line that I was being presented with a new way of looking at an ancient—perhaps inceptional mythology that was born at the exact moment the universe came into being. The end of a thing held inside the creation of it. It is a frightening thing to write from this place but ultimately it feels in phase with my life’s work as a poet.
JC: Why did you choose to tell this story through the narrative of a snake, rather than a man? What did it add to the story? What were some of the challenges of this approach, and how did you work through them?
As mentioned above I really didn’t decide. The vision if you will came uninvited and fully materialized into my dreams and imposed its weight in such a manner that the poems were made to pack it into view.
And to be clear—snake is not a man nor is she a woman exclusively. She’s both. He and she are the composites of all and the all—so I’ve been told by snake—is genderless. How could it not be. Gender is a point in time whereas forever or eternity or better—infinity—is timeless. Snake would say something like we are infinite consciousness momentarily expressed in specific forms obsessing over temporary identities rather than our true nature—which is formless. So snake will speak from the perspective of a man or a woman and sometimes both in the same poem. I can’t do anything about this. If you think it’s confusing you should talk to W. Nick Hill, who is attempting the Herculean effort of translating some of this work into Spanish, which is very precise about pronouns.
The challenges were largely two-fold. The first one was to endure the sorrow the poems instilled as I wrote them. Sure all I had to do was look at the headlines every day to confirm something catastrophic is moving our way—but still—that was no consolation for the real pain some of the poems evoked. Secondly I needed to stay out of the way of the poems as I wrote them. Which I realize is a strange confession but part of learning to write these poems in a new voice was to learn new skills as a writer and this was the most important one. To let be.
The voice of snake was originally spoken/written in a southernish dialect similar to the ones I heard around me growing up in Virginia and D.C. That was hard—to phonetically get the words right required lots of misspellings which the computer didn’t like at all.
After the fact, I sort of got what was going on with snake by seeing her aspects in other mythologies. The Garden of Eden—the Ouroborus—the Damaballah—Onjare—there are endless stories and gods and goddesses related to or created out of snake energy. I didn’t understand this as I was writing the books—which is a good thing—but I later came to understand that our societal and cultural myths and superstitions likely share a single source—fear. And in the non-dualist tradition this is balanced equally through action and service and sacrifice by courage and the dynamic interaction between these two giants eventually turns into love.
JC: The two themes that are introduced in Snake II and continue throughout the rest of the Quartet include appetite and history, or “the consumption of things at the expense of things” and “the idea that thoughts, imaginings, made objects, past events, inert forms, mythical narratives, rumors, and beliefs have an actual life and that our history is always incomplete if it doesn’t recognize these are real.” What is the intersection between these two themes, and how did you instill them into your poems?
GL: At the beginning of the Hunger Sutras you’ll find Patanjali’s Sutra 31 offered as a mantra repeated over and over again to diminish or even end the urges or appetites of the flesh. It’s what I call the Hunger Sutra.
We have the first book—Snake—describing events and their causes at the final moments of life on Earth. Armageddon unleashed—the End Game in which all the pieces are swept from the board—the last of things shouting and crying out grief and pain into the poems snake carries through the dream world into these books.
The Hunger Sutras asks the question—why is this chaotic and destructive influence happening whenever and wherever life is found? Why are families separated at borders—why is there ongoing war with increasingly more deadly weapons resulting in truly horrifying loss of life—why are diseases mutating and resistant to best science—why such inequity between those at the top and those at the bottom—what systems are in place acting as a garrotte around the neck of the planet—why are rivers burning and coral reefs dissolving and the oceans so choked with plastic and sewage the creatures there have no place left to live—why famine on a national scale—drought on a global scale—fires burning entire cities and those in charge walking around behind a little white ball with cigars in their mouths?
Snake begins with the premise that injustices and cruelties—wars and violence—all maladies and most illnesses are caused by hunger. The need to eat to survive. And what do we eat—other living things. We satisfy our hunger by killing something else that also wants to live. And for those of us evolved enough not to kill animals we still kill plants as if they are not sentient entities equally alive and present in their bodies.
Snake is sure that all things—from cancer cells to lichen on a rock to the Kings and Queens of State to the antelope and sponges and elephants and egrets and tulip bulbs underground all winter—you get the picture—all things are driven by the same imperative—they must eat to live.
So the question becomes: How do we find—as a world—any level of grace and non-violence when the seminal urge of life is a violent one—is essentially a murderous one that requires the death of one thing to continue the life of another?
There’s no answer to this—that’s what I’ve discovered in the writing of the Quartet. I thought at first the fourth book—Original Grace—might provide an alternate reality in which things lived as, say, minerals live. I thought a solution would appear. But it didn’t because I’m convinced in this reality this is the underlying truth. If so the question then becomes not how do we fix it but how do we live in the space around it—how do we accept hunger as the necessary cornerstone of existence while at the same time learning to love and honor one another?
So this is what I meant earlier about poetry in my life being part of a spiritual practice if you will. I’m trying to answer these questions at a personal level—not just conceptually.
JC: Do you have any advice for becoming more attuned to nature and its poetic capabilities?
GL: Well I’m always giving myself advice but by the time I get around to offering it to anyone else I typically realize they probably know more than I do. I’m trying not to know stuff—I’m convinced that “knowing” is also a form of appetite and the best thing I can do is just feel and intuit my way through the darkness rather than construct well-lit rooms where theories based on current facts turn to nonsense. Today’s science is tomorrow’s voodoo so to speak.
But for what it’s worth I believe in the medicinal value of silence. Less noise—more quiet moments. Feel the body you’ve been given—no matter your age or abilities—feel the life force coursing through the flesh of you—soon it will become apparent it’s the same life force in others—in trees and chickens and polar bears and strangers and children and enemies. We are connected by the essential truth that we’re alive and the best way for me to understand this is by finding a place to simply breathe in silent council with a tree or a mountain or a friend. To attempt in my poor way to illuminate the threads that at the end of the day connect us to one another.
I also understand this seems impossible for some. It’s seemed impossible to me. If you’re in a war zone—if you’re homeless—if you’re working for minimum wage or less and can’t pay bills or feed children—if you’re sick or elderly or displaced or pursued it is difficult and apparent fantasy to believe in a place of grace or rest.
My yoga teacher—Erich Schiffmann—says something like—if even for an instant we can stop energizing the old beliefs there might come an inkling of another way. And the practice of doing this whenever it occurs to you every day over time will start to dissipate the fog that keeps the actual true nature of things unclear. But again—when hunger is the driving force behind existence it takes an amazing amount of desperation and/or character and/or practice to trust into the goodness of the totality and believe that what is happening right now is not big picture real and not the truth but a lie fueled by consensual turning away.
JC: What’s next for you?
GL: I’m working on the final edits for the fourth book in the Quartet—Original Grace which will publish with Red Hen in the spring of 2020. Another book—The Book of Spells—is finished and scheduled for a spring 2022 launch. I have three other books—Collateral Joy, The Undertaker’s Mute and Dark Sky Preserve finished and I’m not sure what to do with them. There are numerous other books in progress.
I should pay homage to Red Hen Press and particularly Kate Gale and Mark Cull and Tobi Harper. Red Hen takes chances by publishing outside mainstream literature and is a fantastic force for change not just in the literary world but in the schools and sub-cultures of Los Angeles and the greater world. Even if I had no relationship with them I’d admire them. I am constantly amazed at the professional support I receive from them both as a poet and as a person.
My wife who is German and I are going to Germany this fall to seriously take a look at the possibility of living there. For lots of reasons. Otherwise, I walk our little dog, tend the gardens—hang with my friends, practice yoga and enjoy the gift of having the beautiful and truly amazing Nöle Giulini as my partner on this wave. Oh yeah—and write four hours every day as Donald Justice once advised.
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Gary Lemons received an undergraduate degree in poetry from the University of Iowa in 1973 and then spent the next five years living in small towns throughout the Midwest—mostly in Iowa—building grain elevators and feed mills. He fished for many years in Alaskan waters from Nome to Dutch Harbor but mostly in Bristol Bay (Bristol Bay & Other Poems—Red Hen Press) and later worked as a tree planter re-foresting clear-cuts all over the Pacific Northwest. He has seven books of poetry in print with two more scheduled. He is a yogi and currently teaches gentle yoga with his wife at their studio—Tenderpaws—in Port Townsend, Washington.
November 8th, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Jo Chang talked with author Susan Hahn about her book Losing Beck, the temporality of all things, the peacefulness of writing, and more.
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Jo Chang: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Susan Hahn: I have always lived in the Chicago area. I was born in Chicago at Henrotin Hospital—a place which no longer exists—and spent the first nine years of my life living in my grandparents’ apartment in West Rogers Park with my parents and other family members.
JC: As an Illinois resident, how has the Midwest shaped your development as a writer, if at all? Do you draw inspiration from the place you grew up in?
SH: Absolutely. I think those early years spent in West Rogers Park affects so much of what I write. That crowded apartment, with my grandparents being immigrants from Russia (just about the whole neighborhood at the time was made up of immigrants from Russia or Germany) and World War II having just concluded, with many of the older members in the community having lost relatives, most definitely had an effect on me as a small child. From an early age I had the feeling of temporality about all things—animate and inanimate.
JC: Can you speak about your experience working at the Woodlawn Mental Health Center as a group therapist, and how you managed to incorporate art and writing into your practice?
SH: I had been at the University of Chicago on a PhD program in educational psychology but knew I was in the wrong field and asked the placement office to help me find a position. They did, with a job at the Woodlawn Mental Health Center. There I was a researcher for a psychiatrist affiliated with the University—mostly I went into schools gathering information for a project they were working on. I knew this wasn’t quite right for me either and I enrolled in a year long program at Forest Hospital (another place which no longer exists) in Des Plaines and became certified as a group therapist. It was actually there that I saw how to use creativity to reach deep emotions.
I finally ended up at the Gestalt Institute of Chicago in a program involving the use of art in therapy—another year long program. However, half way through it one of the directors read a poem of mine and said some life changing words to me. She said, “If you just wrote this, go home, shut the door and become more the poet you are.” (I have to add that another person there, of some authority, said my work would never be published.) What to do? I chose to go with what felt intuitively right!
JC: Your work with TriQuarterly literary magazine has spanned more than two decades. How have your roles as both editor and co-editor in chief impacted the development of your craft, if at all?
SH: There was an irony to being Editor of TriQuarterly and Co-editor of TriQuarterly Books because I am a very slow reader. I avoided English classes in college because I knew that books took me a long time to read—I’d examine every sentence I didn’t quite understand, always asking if it worked. So with thousands of manuscripts a year coming in I had to develop ways to get through them. It soon became clear to me that I knew I had to publish something if I almost held my breath reading it, hoping that the author would not mess up the story or the poem by its conclusion. And, I was known for calling writers, asking them what exactly they meant or were intending with a particular phrase or paragraph or stanza. I would, however, only do this if I intended to accept their work and just need further clarification. I know I learned from this and I think the writers did too—at least I hope they did.
JC: Your book Losing Beck explores the intersection of art, passion and history spanning from 1912 Paris, the two World Wars, and the present. What was your inspiration for Losing Beck, and did writing it require much historical research? If so, how did you begin the process?
SH: Again, back to my experiences at TriQuarterly and TriQuarterly Books. There were a few writers (mostly female) who would get close to panic as their work was about to be published and want to withdraw it, fearing that what they wrote, when published would ruin their careers, or a relationship—that someone would identify it to be about “him” or “her” and that there would be repercussions. This reaction affected me and troubled me deeply. As a result, some of the female characters in Losing Beck, most especially Jennie Silver and Christiane Juul, confront this issue and it forms an important part of the book.
In addition, I did do a lot of historical research. I read extensively about Nijnsky’s life and watched videos of his dances. Also, I took a class at the University of Chicago about the poetry that came out of the trenches of World War I. I needed that one poet and that one poem for the narrative and toward the end of the class I found him and it. Much of what shaped Losing Beck came from this singular poem. Also, there was a lot of fact checking when it came to historical events and the ages of my characters – the need that they be in sync with certain events in history. I had several rough timelines. Finally, it was interesting to me that for all my reading and research, how much just singular details I learned about captivated me and helped give form to the book.
JC: The main character Jennie Silver channels her emotions into writing as a way to manage her conflicting desire and repulsion for a certain individual in her life. As someone who understands the ability of art to bring peace to people in times of need, does writing also serve a cathartic purpose for you?
For me writing is the most peaceful, centered place I can be, even when I’m dealing with difficult emotional subjects. So yes, it is cathartic and ever so life giving.
JC: Do you have any advice for up and coming writers?
SH: My advice would be don’t be afraid to put it on the page. You can always cut it back or take it further—embellish it. But don’t be afraid to write it. Just put it down, think about it, and strengthen its power.
However, if what you’ve written doesn’t fit with your larger manuscript or you are truly uncomfortable with it, put it in a drawer or somewhere you can find it for later use. Clearly, what you’ve written has some meaning for you—the time to include it just might not be right in the present time.
JC: What’s next for you?
SH: While waiting this past winter for the copy-edited pages for Losing Beck I became tremendously restless and realized there was another book I wanted/needed to write. It sort of insisted on being given voice. So I wrote it rather quickly—I honored it. Now it is finished and I think I will soon send it into the world for others to weigh in on it. Whatever happens, it exists in solid form and, as its only reader so far, I am excited about it. So for now, before Losing Beck appears in December, I rest….!
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Susan Hahn is the author of nine books of poetry, two produced plays and two novels.
Her second novel, Losing Beck, was published in December 2018. Among her awards and honors for writing are a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes or Special Mentions in fiction and poetry, The Society of Midland Authors Award, a Jeff Recommendation, and selection as the inaugural writer-in residence at The Hemingway Foundation.
November 1st, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Jo Chang talked with author Brian Laidlaw about his collection The Mirrormaker, incorporating music and songwriting into poetry, retelling historical myths, & more.
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Jo Chang: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Brian Laidlaw: My dad is from Minnesota, so I’d visited a few times as a kid — the lightning storms left an impression on me — but my own Minnesota roots didn’t really sink in until I moved to Minneapolis in 2008 to begin an MFA in Poetry at the U of M.
I had expected to complete my degree and then hightail back to the West Coast, but I found that the literary and music community in the Twin Cities was something genuinely remarkable — unimaginable, really. The institutional support and public funding for the arts, along with a fantastically attentive and enthusiastic audience, made it an ideal place to be.
So I made it the more-or-less permanent home base for my career…. My publisher, Milkweed Editions, is based there, and I continue to do tons of performances, workshops, and community-based collaborations, both in the Twin Cities and in the (amazing and beautiful) rural parts of the state. I spend quite a lot of time on the road at this point, bouncing between Minnesota, Colorado and the West Coast, but it’s always a calm and joyous homecoming whenever I return to the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
JC: As someone with ties to both California and Minnesota, regions that seem to exist on opposite ends of the spectrum, how has your experience with space and place affected your writing and/or creative processes, if at all?
BL: For better and for worse, I’m beginning to realize that all my writing is profoundly place-based. Although I don’t write exclusively “about” landscape, the landscape has near-total control over the texts I produce: my geographic setting determines what books I choose to read at a given time, and shapes what activities I choose to do; it influences the way I make sense of those texts and adventures; and it shapes the way I synthesize them into poem-stuff and song-stuff.
So — because of their radically different climates, terrains, and rhythms — I find that I produce starkly contrasting work, depending on whether I’m in Minnesota or California (or someplace else in between.) The new book is all about the Iron Range, and it arose from spending quite a bit of time up in Hibbing, staying with various families, talking and collaborating with locals, and trying in earnest to digest the complex social, economic and geologic history of that area.
The glacial cold and (at least by comparison to my frantic Bay Area home) the glacial slowness of that place are certainly borne out in the style of the project…. The poems are a little more pulverized than usual, and the songs a little more sprawling. Hibbing is Bob Dylan’s hometown, and I think the aspect that excites me most about the project is that, by way of that landscape, the work shares a bit of the North Country-imprint that one hears in Dylan’s own writing.
JC: You incorporate elements of music and songwriting into your poetry; for example, your forthcoming book, The Mirrormaker, has a companion song suite that is available for download along with the book itself. Can you explain how music and poetry coexist and commingle in your craft?
BL: When I first started writing, my poems and songs were formally indistinguishable from one another; they were all highly regular and metrical, often rhyming-or slant-rhyming, often using some degree of repetition.
Over the years those crafts have diverged; I continue to love (to a highly nerdy degree) formal prosody, but now that side of my writing lives almost exclusively in my songs. My poetry, meanwhile, has trended in a more fragmentary direction — so I feel like I have widened my palette. Generally speaking, I’d say that for more linear or logical “arguments,” the sustained, tight, rigorous space of a metrical song is the right formal fit; for more uncertain inquiries, I’ve found that a fragmentary poetic form is better able to guide me into/through the unknown territory.
But this is always in flux: My challenge to myself now is to write more song-like poems and more poem-like songs, whatever that might mean.
JC: What inspired you to incorporate music into your poetic work?
BL: It was largely in counter-response to the way that mainstream audiences respond to poetry. I think that the national poetry conversation is exceptionally vibrant right now, but I think it’s also a fair generalization to say that most poetry — and especially most experimental / fragmentary / weird poetry — is read largely by other poets.
So I started composing these companion albums for my books as a way — hopefully! — to bridge the gap between the admittedly somewhat “difficult” poetic work, and those readers who might be unfamiliar with this style of contemporary poetry. The songs are a kind of “gateway drug,” I guess, to establish some of the book’s thematic concerns in a more user-friendly medium — and provide some context in which to ground the poems.
That’s part of it. The other part is that, once I’m in a place and doing the research for a project, my creative output is never only poems or only songs — so it makes sense to present the poems and songs in tandem, because in my mind it’s all the same body of work.
JC: Your forthcoming book, The Mirrormaker, is a companion work to your previous project, The Stuntman. What made you decide to expand on The Stuntman?
BL: I actually began The Stuntman and The Mirrormaker at the same time; they both took shape out of an immense stack of poems and repertoire of songs that I had written during various research trips and musical tours on the Iron Range. It was clear that there was far too much for a single volume (I had almost 400 pages of material), so I separated out a cluster of the work that was internally coherent (and Dylan/Narcissus related), which became The Stuntman.
At the same time, I also set aside another manuscript’s-worth of poems (and album’s worth of songs) that, after quite a bit of re-sequencing and revision, would become The Mirrormaker.
JC: The Mirrormaker, as stated above, expands on the previous retelling of the myth of Echo and Narcissus, along with another famous couple, Bob Dylan and Echo Helstrom, to explore topics such as celebrity, history and myth, love and loss, and, to quote the publisher, “[pits] romantic obsession against self-obsession.” What piqued your interest in these two famous couples, and what particular similarities stuck out to you in the beginning stages of the project that made you decide to explore the dynamics between both?
BL: At that time I was taking my first dive into contemporary ecocriticism and ecofeminism, some of which suggests that “Nature” is a construct onto which (Western) humans project their own values and desires. In this way the landscape becomes a kind of mirror for its inhabitants; the residents, rather than genuinely seeing their environment, see only a reflection of themselves.
During that reading, it had occurred to me that Echo is a perfect embodiment (or en-symbolment?) of this phenomenon; we often associate echoes with “natural” spaces like cliffs and canyons, and when we yell HELLO in those locations, it feels like nature is speaking to us when it yells HELLO back — but really that echo is nothing but our own voice. I had long observed that love songs work in almost exactly the same way: for all that the love-song singer purports to be focusing his/her attentions on the beloved, love songs usually end up revealing more about the singer than the “singee.” Again, the beloved is nothing but a mirror in which the singer reflects.
This all came together during a visit to Dylan’s hometown, shortly after I moved to Minnesota. The landscape there is stunning. At the edge of town there’s an overlook that gives onto an enormous red canyon which, mind-bogglingly, is manmade; it’s the Hull-Rust Mahoning Mine, the largest open-pit iron mine in North America. It set me thinking about the rhetoric that underlies extraction economies, like the iron mining industry in Northern Minnesota…. And I was also thinking about the way that songwriters like Dylan (and myself, and all of us) may be guilty of similar behavior when we write songs about the landscapes and people that we love — just like miners, we refer to our relationships, our family dramas, and our hometowns and upbringings as “good material.”
Strangely, it all clicked one night when I was sleeping in the basement of a friend’s house in Hibbing, just a few blocks from Dylan’s childhood home. I had an uncommonly vivid dream in which the basement window slid open and the figure of Echo crawled through — in my dream logic I knew that she was both the Echo from the myth, and also, in a gestural way, the real-life Echo who inspired Dylan’s tune “The Girl From the North Country.”
Although it took several years to come together, the book and the song cycle arose out of that dream.
JC: How do you find inspiration for both your music and your poetry? Does this process change according to each medium?
BL: It has taken me about a decade of doing this poet-musician life full-time, in order to understand the mechanics of the process… But I’m realizing that at this point the inspiration almost always originates in reading other writers and listening to other musicians. That’s the first step.
And then the second step is to work through those ideas in a more embodied — and less intellectual — way. The readings and listenings subconsciously filter through the experiences I’m having while on tour, or while hiding out in the woods or the backcountry, or while leading a workshop, or whatever it may be. But I’m realizing that the physical activity and the geographic movement are essential catalysts to the creative process — whether the eventual output is poems or songs.
JC: What’s next for you?
BL: Just last month I published my first-ever creative nonfiction piece, an essay about a desert hermit named Burro Schmidt who spent decades hand-drilling a tunnel through a mountain in the Mojave. It’s part of an essay collection that I’m working on, which I’m tentatively calling Vertical Pastoral, about the intersection between poetics and rock climbing/mountaineering.
So right now I’m doing a bunch of research about the history of alpinism and mountain aesthetics… I’m also a very enthusiastic and reasonably competent climber, so for the next year or two I’ll spend as much time as possible living in my little yellow school bus, reading about climbing, writing about climbing, and climbing.
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Brian Laidlaw is a poet-songwriter currently based in Boulder, Colorado. He has released the poetry collections Amoratorium (Paper Darts Press) and The Stuntman (Milkweed Editions), each of which includes a companion album of original music; another book called The Mirrormaker is forthcoming from Milkweed this year. Brian is working toward a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, and continues to tour nationally and internationally with his band The Family Trade. News, music, and tour dates are available at www.brianlaidlaw.com.
October 11th, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Henry Milek talked with author Nick Dybeck about his book The Verdun Affair, perseverance and community among writers, love in war, & more.
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Henry Milek: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Nick Dybeck: I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I went to college in Ann Arbor and graduated school in Iowa City. Most of my extended family is from Chicago, and I even lived and taught for a year in the Twin Cities. I’ve got the upper Midwest well covered.
HM: You’re a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teach at Oregon State University. How does your academic experience inform your teaching? How do both inform your writing?
ND: Like so much else involving writing, the lessons I learned at Iowa were essentially contradictory.
When I arrived at the Writers’ Workshop, I had this notion that I was pretty good—I’d gotten into a competitive grad school after all! It didn’t take long to learn that if I had any hope of actually making a go of it as a writer, I had to get a lot better and work a lot harder. The classmates I grew to admire most were not necessarily those whose talent was immediately apparent—they were the ones who chained themselves to their desks and wouldn’t take no for an answer no matter how many times The New Yorker or Black Warrior Review rejected their work.
In class, I learned a ton from my professors—Elizabeth McCracken, Edward Carey, Frank Conroy, and Jim McPherson, among many others. I still hear their voices when I work, still parrot their wisdom to my own students. At the same time, the nights I spent talking and joking about books—over drinks, poker games, Wiffle ball—were just as important and formative for my writing and teaching as anything that happened in the classroom, mostly because they bolstered my faith in the form we were all devoting ourselves to, and offered me the support and courage to press on.
Now that I teach in an MFA program myself, I continue to embrace this contradiction, encouraging my students to chain themselves to their desks, while also finding as many opportunities as they can to hang out with the writers they are lucky enough to form a community with for two years.
HM: You recently released your second novel, The Verdun Affair. What was different about writing this than your debut, When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man? How do you feel you’ve grown as a writer since your last book?
ND: The old saw “write what you know” has never really worked for me—that’s why I haven’t published much about the Midwest, despite growing up there. In fact, it wasn’t until a year or two after graduate school when I began writing Captain Flint—a coming-of-age story that takes place in an apocryphal town on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, an area I’d only visited once when I wrote the novel’s first sentence—that I really began to feel the imaginative wheels start to turn and offer me a story I could stick with. When I began to think about my next project, I decided take this approach a step further, setting The Verdun Affair in 1920s Europe and 1950s Hollywood—places that were impossible to “know” because they no longer existed. Had I not written Captain Flint, I probably never would have had the guts/hubris/foolishness to take on this material.
HM: The Verdun Affair is a period piece taking place in post-WWI Europe and then later in 1950s Los Angeles. What were the challenges of writing a story within these eras? What kind of research did you engage in and how did it change the way you approached the story?
ND: The Verdun Affair started with a single image I heard described in a story on the BBC’s Newshour: a man roaming the moonscape of battlefields near Verdun, picking up bones for a nearby memorial called the Douaumont Ossuary. I was haunted by this image for months but knew very little about the time and place, and less about what might happen to the characters I was beginning to create. There was a lot to learn. I did mountains of research. I read books on WWI in general, Verdun and the Italian Front in particular, life in rural France, war trauma, the rise of Italian Fascism, fin-de-siècle Vienna, midcentury Hollywood. It was only in reading book after book, encountering story after story—those of American ambulance drivers, Hungarian cavalrymen, Italian army deserters—that my own story began to take shape, often in surprising ways. For example, the story of a French amnesiac named Anthelme Mangin, which I discovered by chance on the shelves of The Strand in New York City, became a vital plot point in The Verdun Affair, completely changing the direction of the narrative. All to say that research didn’t aid the writing process of this book, it was the writing process.
HM: Did you have a particular strategy for getting into the heads of characters from this era? How did you aim to make them relatable and realistic to a modern audience?
ND: Historians have often referred to World War I as the defining event of the twentieth century. World War I gave us violence on an industrial and global scale and redrew the map of the world, while simultaneously dismantling centuries-old power structures like the Hapsburg Empire and many of the cultural traditions and assumptions that attended them. I think that the men and women of the interwar years are inherently relatable to a modern audience because their perceptions ultimately informed and defined ours. That said, part of what drew me to the material was the challenge of wrapping my head around what it would be like to live in a time of such intense upheaval and trauma (I don’t think our current American moment compares, at least not yet!). I found the actual voices of people who lived those times—which I encountered in journals, memoirs and letters—to be essential. I was living in New York City when I started writing the book, and spent many hours in the Rose Main Reading Room of the NYPL tracking down some pretty obscure books. It was a lot of fun, actually, to watch as these old memoirs—many of which had not been checked out in years—arrived from the basement stacks via dumbwaiter, and to wonder what stories might lie within. Who would I get to meet?
HM: The book follows the complicated love affair between two Americans in post-war Europe. How does the aftermath of the war inform the characters’ love?
ND: Part of what drew me to the Anthelme Mangin story was what it suggests about the power and ubiquity of grief in the years just after WWI. When the doctors at Mangin’s asylum published his picture in newspapers hoping that someone would identify him, they received thousands of replies and identifications, many of which were obviously erroneous (respondents freely admitted that the son they had lost was, to take just one example, six inches taller than Mangin, yet they were still certain the man in the asylum was their boy). The world had just survived a cataclysm on a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few years before. The formerly impossible had become possible. And it was almost as if people were saying: Well, if that was possible, then what else is? Consequently, there was a shift towards the irrational during the interwar years, evident in Dadaism and Surrealism, in a resurgence of Spiritualism, in radical politics like Italian Fascism, for example.
In the early pages of my book, Tom, the narrator, meets Sarah Hagen, an American widow who has come to Verdun in search of her missing husband. Both Tom and Sarah are traumatized, both are grieving, so it makes sense that they might be drawn to each other. But, given the context of the time, it also makes sense that they might want things from each other that are irrational, even impossible. In some ways, the private extremity and desperation of the love affair between Tom and Sarah is meant to get at the larger mood of the time.
HM: What connections do you see between themes of love and war? How do these themes help connect the era of The Verdun Affair with the present?
ND: The characters in my book would have had no choice but to take Freud’s theories about the opposition of Eros and Thanatos seriously. There’s an early scene in the novel where a troop of school boys have come to Verdun to help Tom and other officials of the Verdun Diocese collect bones. To clown around for his friends, one of the boys picks up one of the bones and pretends that it is his penis and that he is…pleasuring himself. Of course, had this boy been a few years older, he might have been one of the casualties at Verdun himself, but, having missed the experience directly, he’s not just able, but perhaps compelled, to make a joke of it all, to generate some mischievous, erotic energy as a way of coping, of going on. On one level, the boy is both callous and callow, but there is also something understandably human in his response, in the desire to cancel out, or act against, the destruction and tragedy evident all around him.
In a sense, Tom and Sarah are doing something similar, falling into a love affair that, for a time anyway, is all-consuming, existing in opposition not just to the tragedy that surrounds them, but also to the obligations the war continues to impose upon them, even after the armistice. Their affair offers them a more hopeful, coherent, and familiar narrative, one that might even redeem the losses they have borne, at a time when the old stories seem to have been destroyed along with the world order.
I certainly wouldn’t be the first to point out the political parallels between the interwar years and our own historical moment. I would be lying if I said that I don’t experience the same desire to cancel that larger moment out in my day-to-day life, to trick and soothe myself with jokes and fleetingly reassuring narratives.
HM: What’s next for you?
ND: World War II, obviously!
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Nick Dybek is a recipient of a Granta New Voices selection, a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and a Maytag Fellowship. He received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Oregon State University. He is the author of When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man and The Verdun Affair.
October 4th, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Henry Milek talked with author Simon Jacobs about his book Palaces, getting lost in the city, book tours, & more.
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Henry Milek: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Simon Jacobs: I was born in Dayton, Ohio, where I lived until I went to college in Indiana. When I was 21, I moved to New York. I was molded in the Midwest.
HM: To what extent—if at all—would you classify your work as Midwestern? In what ways does your connection to the region distinguish your writing?
SJ: I think my work has gotten more Midwestern over time: having some distance from the region for the last six years has allowed me to take a broader lens on it, I think, and to better inhabit its spaces whenever I go back. PALACES ends in New York because that’s where I was when I started writing it, but it reaches back to Indiana and Ohio, which are formative in the novel as they were for me. The novel I just finished, String Follow, is set aggressively in the kind of southern Ohio suburbs where I grew up, but I don’t think I could have written it any earlier: it took those twenty-odd years to seed. I’ve always been a slow, methodical, and deliberate writer – it’s a working style that comes from my mother, who’s a novelist, and from Ohio.
HM: Your new book, PALACES, follows two Midwesterners who head out east, much like yourself. How do you feel your origins in the Midwest changed your perception of New York? How did your own experience influence your story?
SJ: The narrator has my timetable (Dayton to Indiana to NYC), but that’s about where the direct connections end. I was new to NYC when I started writing PALACES, so I filtered my new experiences of the city through the narrator, especially in a sensory and spatial way. I have a terrible sense of direction, and when I first moved to the city whenever I traveled somewhere new I would carry post-it notes on which I’d written step-by-step directions guiding me there. If I strayed more than a block or two in any direction, I’d get totally lost. I’m sure that this found its way into PALACES.
HM: PALACES is your first novel. What was different about writing a full-length novel compared to your previous shorter work?
SJ: It took much longer, which gave me more time to be wracked with doubt. The novel began as a set of fragmentary scenes that I knit together over 3 or 4 years, connected by tone, and they gradually became part of a larger framework. I was interested in exploring this tone – the second person perspective describing this insular, conflicted relationship – which I’d been working out for years in my short fiction. With the book, I felt like I’d finally realized its fullest form.
HM: Much of PALACES actually takes place in New York, where you portray it to be in a near-apocalyptic state. What was your strategy in crafting the city in such a distinct, original way? What effect do you hope this achieves?
SJ: I was trying to present a city that was falling apart in crucial ways, but where it wasn’t always totally clear which ways, because you’re presented it through the eyes of a narrator who’s convinced that everything around him is terrible and loaded with ominous significance. Through that lens, everything becomes a portent. It brings you into the recursive, paranoid headspace that the narrator occupies: the inner becomes the outer.
HM: There’s a sort of surreal blanket cast over the entire book—it takes place in the real world, but never quite seems to fit into it. How do you go about writing in this style? Did you ever worry about crossing the line where your work was so absurdly surreal the reader would get lost? How do you balance surrealism with reality just right?
SJ: Yeah, this was a very conscious effort as I was writing the book: I wanted to keep the reader tied as closely as possible to John’s insular perspective, so even as the book drifts away from reality I tried to cleave to the narrator’s physical experience and spatial sense, so that even when the action became opaque it was physically immediate, and the narrator remains embodied even as the world changes around him.
HM: You recently had a book tour where you performed several public readings of your work. Aside from being part of the traditional ritual of releasing new work, do you think that a book tour is an efficient means of reaching an audience in this day and age? Is it more difficult—or easier, even—for this type of thing to prove successful in the digital age, with digital distribution, social media, and everything else that entails?
SJ: I have no idea how successful my tour was in practical terms, but I loved doing it. It was definitely my favorite part of publishing PALACES, even if there were events where I was reading to just a handful of people. Performing is my favorite part of the process – after complete solitude for most of the writing, it’s refreshing to bring it out into the open and see how the work lands on live ears. It gives me an opportunity to interact with the writing in a new way, to find collaborators, or to play off other readers. I would continue to find ways to do it even if it was a terrible business decision.
That said, I do think a tour is still an efficient way to reach an audience, especially as a writer who’s published mostly on the internet: when you publish stuff online, you’re not tied to one regional community, and you can build up a lot more of a following that’s not necessarily tied to a book. I was lucky when I did my tour that for most events I was able to partner with local writers in the places that I visited, and most of these writers were folks who I first read online. You’re not writing in a vacuum, and doing a tour like this is a great way to try and engage with literary communities all over the place.
HM: Would you say you’re more influenced by your contemporaries, or by writers of the past? Which do you think is more important to read for those who hope to be a writer today?
SJ: Well, everything being written now responds in some way to writing that already exists, so truly there is no way of escaping the past. I guess I would say my reading is a pretty evenly split between past and present: PALACES, for example, was influenced as much by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (in its structure, jokes, and obscure rules) as it was by Charles Burns’ Black Hole (in its tone, teens, and totemic objects), and those books are 150 years apart.
That said, I never read poetry or short fiction until I read them on the internet, so in many ways, the present can crack open the past: Margaret Killjoy or Ben Kopel could lead you to Ursula LeGuin or Patti Smith. Regardless, if you’re a writer I think the most important single thing you can do is to read as diversely as possible, to steep yourself in as many different perspectives as you can.
HM: What’s next for you?
SJ: I’m working on the edits for a new short story collection, Masterworks, which is due out from Instar Books in late 2018. I’m also slowly expanding my first book, Saturn, a collection of David Bowie stories that Spork Press first published in 2014, steadily transforming it into something new. Administratively, I’m questing for a home for the novel I mentioned earlier, String Follow, which is about a group of suburban Ohio teenagers who slowly become enthralled by a mysterious and occult force that winds its way through their community.
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Simon Jacobs is the author of the novel Palaces (Two Dollar Radio, 2018), and of two collections of short fiction: Masterworks (Instar Books, 2018), and Saturn (Spork Press, 2016), a collection of David Bowie stories. He is from Dayton, Ohio, and currently lives in New York City.
September 30th, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Henry Milek talked with author Keith Taylor about his book Ecstatic Destinations, celebrating nature, local writing, & more.
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Henry Milek: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Keith Taylor: My family moved to South Bend, Indiana, when I was 11. For many years I had a terrible time – it was, after all, the late sixties; we had moved from rural Western Canada to a beat up Midwestern city in decline (Bendix, the largest employer in South Bend, had recently closed and all the factories were empty); and I had to get through my adolescence.
I probably blamed the Midwest for many things that other explanations. I left as soon as I could, after my first year of college. I went to Europe on a one way ticket and stayed, mostly penniless, for the next three years
In 1975 I moved to Michigan, and things began to get better. Michigan culture – or at least the culture I first got to know – is focused on the Lakes. Those Lakes, the Great ones, anyway, share a border with Canada, and many of my ancestors had lived just on the other side of them. I almost felt as if I were home.
By 1979, after I had moved to Ann Arbor and married a woman from Detroit, I was seeing a larger set of connections in the region. As I got to know Detroit – then in it’s most difficult period – I grew to love it, too. The simple fact that within five hours I could drive from Detroit to Sault Ste. Marie, cross the bridge, and be in the northern forest of Canada that stretched all the way to the Arctic – well, those differences intrigued me. They still do. I like to think that they inform my writing.
At the same time I became a bookseller in a large book shop in Ann Arbor. The first and, at the time, the only Borders Book Shop. I had already read widely in the regional literature and both my employers and our customers began to expect a certain expertise about Midwestern literature. So I wanted to read this stuff and my job rewarded it.
The attitudes of Midwestern literature and the Midwestern literary life became many of my attitudes. Later, when I became a teacher at the University of Michigan, those attitudes shaped my teaching.
HM: You recently retired from a long career of teaching. Now that we’re few months past the end of the school year, do you have any final thoughts on the whole experience? Any achievements you’re particularly proud of?
KT: When I am asked how I got my job at UM, my usual response is that I went around back and climbed in through the bathroom window just before they bricked it up. I like to think I did a good job at Michigan, but I’m not at all sure someone like me could ever end up in a position like the one I had ever again. After all, I only have an MA from Central Michigan University. When I came in, I had a couple of very small press chapbooks, a fairly long list of mostly regional small press publications, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Michigan’s English Department needed some help, and I could help them. There weren’t nearly as many unemployed MFAs around then as there are now. And then I didn’t screw up and I wasn’t completely self-absorbed; that was important. Even though it wasn’t great money, being a Lecturer at a university paid better than being a clerk in a bookshop. And (my teaching friends hate it when I say this) the work was a lot easier than selling books; the vacations were amazing; the benefits were good.
I was always interested in student work, undergraduate work at first and later that of the graduate students in Michigan’s MFA program. These students forced me to keep up with the changing patterns of contemporary letters. I was paid to stay fresh, and that was amazing.
And, of course, the greatest lasting pleasure of that work is reading the books by the successful graduates. There are probably more than a hundred people whom I worked with who are regularly publishing books, and I try to keep up with all of them. As a teacher I was more important to some than others, but I still think I added something to the process of their work, even if only by removing a tiny obstacle or two.
Books are important to me. I am proud that I could help a new generation of writers produce theirs.
At Michigan, just to keep myself interested, I reached out to other departments, other kinds of artists and thinkers. I worked with musicians, biologists, dancers, scholars of modern Greek, historians and others. I’d like to see some things I’ve helped create – like the undergraduate concentration in creative writing, or the writing course at the Biological Station, or the Bear River Writers’ Conference – continue.
All of that said, I’m not yet missing the teaching. I still feel kind of relieved I don’t have to live up the expectations of students and colleagues any more. It was getting harder to do, anyway. To misquote one of my own poems – I have fewer people to disappoint.
HM: You’ve been involved with a couple different programs through the University of Michigan that combine writing and nature, namely the Biological Station and Bear River Writers’ Conference. Why do you think it’s important for writer’s to work in such environments? How specifically does it help a writer grow?
KT: I’m typing these answers sitting at a picnic table on the south shore of Douglas Lake at the University of Michigan Biological Station. I’m not teaching this summer but have an appointment as their Artist-in-Residence. It will probably be my last summer up here, because other people, other artists, need to have the experience I’ve had here.
I’ve already passed the reins of the Bear River Writers’ Conference on to Laura Kasischke and Cody Walker, two remarkable writers who have had a long connection to the conference. I think the money situation there is in pretty good shape and the conference shouldn’t have to worry about things for quite a while.
Now I won’t make a blanket statement that an artistic experience of the natural world is important for all writers. I read and honor too many writers who don’t feel that at all, even some who make fun of those of us sometimes categorized as “nature writers.” I’m far too old to get pissed about that now.
But much of my most intense experience of the world is in the forests and on the waters that flow through wild places. I have spent much of my life learning the names for things and trying to understand the natural history and science of these places. I am comfortable here (even though I just swatted a mosquito).
Then there is the simple fact that the world, all of it, all of us, need these places to stay alive. Need clean water, need clean air, need to find a way to ameliorate the effects of climate change. If anything I write can reinforce these attitudes, even in only a tiny way, then I certainly think it is worth it. I cringe a little bit here because that sounds as if I have some non-artistic agenda, and I don’t really. This is the material that often moves me to the work.
I will be happy simply to celebrate it all. While I was trying to figure out the answer to this question, a ruby-throated hummingbird buzzed past my head and a loon called from the lake. I wish you could all hear this and hope your children have the chance.
Specifically? Working with scientists or having an in depth experience of the natural world helps a writer learn the names for things and processes that shape that world. A writers’ conference helps remind us all that we are not alone in the process of making things.
HM: On top of your academic career, you’ve been an active and prolific writer for years. How did you manage to balance your professional and creative life for so long?
KT: I was a writer long before I haphazardly assume “the profession” of teaching. It had already become the way I defined myself and the way I understood the world. I came from people who didn’t have a lot of money, so I always had to work. My reading and writing always fit around the day job – before, after and, yes, during.
All of my jobs, even teaching at the University of Michigan, came after and were incidental to the writing. The real work. Many times I was willing to sacrifice the job for the writing. After I became a teacher of writing, then the job didn’t seem as far removed from what I really wanted to do. A big university provides people a lot of resources to help pursue undefined ideas, and I took advantage of that. And there are those vacations – did I mention that? Long extended periods of time when I could read and write – the two greatest pleasures of my life!
I have gone through periods, never very long, when I haven’t been writing, but I’ve never blamed the day jobs for that. I’ve blamed my own lethargy.
HM: Your new chapbook, Ecstatic Destinations, is based around a very specific part of Ann Arbor. Why write about this? What did you hope to capture and share about the city with your reader?
KT: First, it started because I was moved to poetry by watching the skate-boarders at the local park as they did their thing so elegantly. I drafted that poem while sitting on a park bench across the park. It seemed that they were flying. When I looked up from that work, I saw that there were two used condoms lying down at the end of the bench. Then I thought that the poem wouldn’t be true if I didn’t have the condoms in there. That became the last poem in the chapbook. So there was a very specific occasion that began this.
I’ve often made noise about the necessity of the local, so I thought I would act on that idea as this book began to take shape. Lots of the good liberals in my sometimes overly precious little town are embarrassed by the place, the easiness of living here. I understand that entirely. Yet I live here, and I like it. I decided that in this small way I would exercise ideas I give lip service to. I would find the poems in my otherwise unassuming neighborhood.
If readers outside take something from this, I hope they can understand the appeal of some of things of that neighborhood. Or, at least, they might be sympathetic to the process of finding poems at home. For the people in my neighborhood, I hope they recognize the poems that are around them.
But this collection has smaller ambitions than some I’ve done. I’m happy to keep it in its little place. I was really happy that it was published by an Ann Arbor press, too. That seems right.
HM: Do you hope that Ecstatic Destinations connects more with readers who are familiar with its setting, as you are, or with those who are not, allowing you to introduce it to them? Might your chronicled experiences in the book apply to anyone’s experiences with a place they are intimately familiar with? Or would you describe it instead as a portrait of your experience alone?
KT: Oh, these are my experiences, my perceptions. I don’t think I’ll convince anyone to turn a little piece of unmaintained parkland into a sacred grove of biblical proportions. I don’t think anyone will find the hand of God writing cryptic messages in jet trails. Yet I hope some readers might recognize the possibility of this kind of perception.
This is a very small print run by a small press in a particular place where I have a few readers. I expect that most readers of this book will be in my town, where I’m lucky enough to have a small audience. If it reaches past that, won’t that be something! A very pleasant surprise.
HM: How does Ecstatic Destinations represent where you are today as a poet? Compared to your earlier work, for instance, what do you see having changed about your process or purpose?
KT: I don’t think the process has changed that much. I am moved toward a lyric poem, usually short, by a specific image or a series of words that have a distinctive sound to my ear. I work with that until something starts taking shape, and then I spend a good deal of time trying to determine if that hangs together.
By claiming my neighborhood as the place of these poems, it changes things a bit. I’m not our searching wild places and trying to understand the things there. I’m not sure yet if that’s actually a new direction or simply a short diversion. We’ll see.
Again, it’s too early to tell, but I’ve noticed that most of the poems I’ve written since Ecstatic Destinations have people in them, are centered on other people, tell their stories or find images in other people’s actions. That seems new, but I have no idea yet if it will continue.
I’m also working on two long poems, ones I imagine as 10 pages long or even longer. Poems I’ve had to do research for and think about over long periods of time. I have no idea if these poems will come to be anything yet, but I’m hoping. They will definitely be different.
HM: Looking back over your extensive list of collections and books, what do you find connects all of your poetic work? What are the core ideas and ideals that pervade your poetry?
KT: That’s a tough one, and perhaps it might be best to leave to someone else to answer, if anyone wants to spend that much time with my work. For most of the last half century, I have tried to define, imagine, and often celebrate my place in the world. I have tried to do that in language that is direct, unadorned, complicated when it needs to be but as simple as possible.
HM: What’s next for you?
KT: At the very least, I hope to continue reading and writing at the pace I’ve always worked.
Right after I finished at the University, I decided that I would step up my book reviewing. I’ve always done it, but I think now I could do more. I have some good venues open to me that I haven’t always taken advantage of, mostly because I was too busy and they didn’t pay much or anything. I think an active discussion about books stimulates the literary environment, and I can help in a small way. So I will.
I have three large prose books I want to finish while I’m still here, in this vale of tears. We’ll see if that happens.
The poems will keep coming I think. I’m hoping to have a New and Selected Poems out when I’m 70, four years from now. The trouble is I don’t think my main press (Wayne State University Press) is much interested in that. I might have to find someone else to do it, and then I’ll have to negotiate rights. That won’t be much fun.
Although I hate the phrase “bucket list,” I do have a couple of big things on that, things that will necessitate some travel and that will cost probably more money than I an afford. It will be fun.
And I want to work at keeping my perceptions of the world fresh and open. I know there’s a complacency that comes with age. I’ve felt it waiting out there just on the edge of my imagination. Old folks sometimes try to say it’s “wisdom,” but I’m not so sure.
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Keith Taylor has authored or edited 17 books and chapbooks. His most recent, the chapbook Ecstatic Destinations, was published in 2018. His last full length collection, The Bird-while (Wayne State University Press, 2017), won the Bronze medal for the Foreword/Indies Poetry Book of the Year. His poems, stories, reviews, essays and translations have appeared widely in North America and in Europe. He has recently retired from the University of Michigan, where he taught Creative Writing for most of 20 years. He has received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and one from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs. He has been Writer/Artist In Residence at Isle Royale National Park, the Detroit YMCA, The International Writers’ and Translators’ Centre of Rhodes, Greece, and the University of Michigan Biological Station.
September 30th, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Henry Milek talked with author Julie Schumacher about her book The Shakespeare Requirement, poking fun at academia, Shakespeare, & more.
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Henry Milek: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Julie Schumacher: I am an accidental midwesterner. I moved to Minnesota thirty years ago with my spouse, when he landed a job in the Twin Cities; we intended to return to the east coast where we both grew up, but got too comfortable here and decided to stay. I love the Twin Cities. I just wish we could have an ocean here.
HM: You’ve written eight novels, several short stories, essays, and even a coloring book. Where does all the inspiration come from? How do you keep things fresh? Do you actively change up your process or style?
JS: For me, changing things up is essential. When I begin to write something new, I need to feel I’m engaged in a low-stakes experiment. Nothing too serious — I tell myself I’m just messing about. That was the attitude I brought to writing novels for young adults; it was also the impetus behind Dear Committee Members (written entirely in the form of letters of recommendation) and Doodling for Academics, an academic coloring book. On the one hand, discipline — sitting down at the desk — is crucial; and, on the other hand, I want to remind myself of why I began to love to write in the first place: because it involved open-ended possibility and a sense of play.
HM: In your experience, how does a writer best start working on a new idea? Is there such a thing as an ideal first draft? If so, what does it look like? If not, then why?
JS: An ideal first draft, I suppose, is one that has some structural integrity and a sense of purpose — without being too embarrassing to read. Only once or twice have I managed to live up to that standard. More often, my first drafts are hideous things: bits and pieces of mediocre and meandering prose. The challenge is to keep writing through the lousy passages and not impose high standards on early drafts, but instead to allow for failure and to keep going.
HM: Your latest novel, The Shakespeare Requirement, is a follow-up to your bestselling novel Dear Committee Members. Did you always know you wanted to write a sequel to that book? What drew you back to that world and characters?
JS: Some people who read Dear Committee Members found my main character, Professor Fitger, incredibly aggravating. But I realized I loved him. He is aggravating, of course, but he’s also a champion for so many of the things that I care about — literature and the humanities, the state of higher education, undergraduate and graduate students. After the first book was published, I kept thinking about him. He was so thoroughly alive in my mind; I wanted to bring him back for another academic year.
HM: What exactly is different about writing a sequel rather than a completely new piece? What is the advantage to having the world and characters already established? Are there new challenges that come with continuing a series?
JS: Yes, an interesting question: there were advantages as well as challenges. I already knew my main character and the world in which he lived; but I had to be careful to adhere to and be faithful to that world and its many details. While writing The Shakespeare Requirement I found myself re-reading and combing through Dear Committee Members to make sure I didn’t get anything about the setting or the minor characters wrong. I have a new respect for writers who produce a series — but I don’t think I’ll go beyond these two related books, myself.
HM: Between this series and your coloring book Doodling for Academics, you have a history of poking fun at academia. What drives you to return to this topic? Why is it necessary for someone within academia to call it out for its flaws?
JS: I don’t know that it’s “necessary”; and I’ve probably returned to the topic of academia because I’ve been immersed in it myself for decades. I didn’t set out to poke fun at higher education at all: I wrote Dear Committee Members as an experiment in form (wondering whether it would be possible to write an entire novel as a series of recommendation letters), and it emerged as a satire. It has been strange to find myself called a ‘satirist’ and a ‘humor writer’; but I’m very happy to know that the books have made people laugh.
HM: The Shakespeare Requirement follows protagonist Jason Fitger through various crises, including his struggle to get an out-of-date professor of Shakespeare to retire, prompting backlash as his actions are interpreted as an attempt to eliminate the teaching of Shakespeare altogether. What prompted you to take the story in this direction? What interested you about the questions this particular plotline poses?
JS: When I was just starting to write the second book, thinking about Jason Fitger’s second academic year and what it might entail, I was casting about for some sort of structural hook on which to hang the plot. And then one day during a lull in a faculty meeting, a colleague mentioned to me that at her previous university, the faculty had engaged in a year-long battle over a Shakespeare requirement — whether Shakespeare would or would not be required for the undergraduate English major. I felt a little bell ring somewhere at the back of my brain. I count on those sorts of fortuitous moments.
HM: The promotional material for the book is filled with Shakespearean language and references. Can you tell us a bit more about the role Shakespeare’s work plays in the story, as well as how it influenced your own writing?
JS: I am not a Shakespeare scholar. I majored in Spanish as an undergraduate, and never took a dedicated Shakespeare class. Like Jason Fitger, I’m a fiction writer in an English department. So I had to do some research in order to create my Shakespearean, Professor Dennis Cassovan, who is immersed in that field. Though Cassovan has no patience whatsoever for Fitger, I wanted them both to be sympathetic and appealing. I created an undergraduate in the novel who runs into trouble; despite their enmity for each other, both Fitger and Cassovan care deeply about her, and set politics aside to help her along.
HM: What’s next for you?
JS: I am doing some daydreaming, casting about for the next experiment.
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Julie Schumacher is the author of ten books (including a coloring book, Doodling for Academics). She is the first and still only woman to have won the Thurber Prize for American Humor — for her best-selling novel Dear Committee Members. Her newest novel is The Shakespeare Requirement, published in August 2018 by Doubleday. She is a member of the MFA Creative Writing faculty at the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities.
September 13th, 2018 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Ariel Everitt talked with author Emily Strelow about her book The Wild Birds, her experiences as a naturalist, different types of love, & more.
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Ariel Everitt: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Emily Strelow: I moved to the Midwest two years ago from Oregon where I was born and raised, but my Mom and Dad are originally from Michigan and Wisconsin, respectively. I have spent many summers visiting midwestern relatives and lakes and have always had an affection for the midwestern landscape and people. My husband Andrew grew up in Ann Arbor and now finds himself back in his hometown to finish the last year of his Masters in Landscape Architecture and Masters in Ecology at University of Michigan. So far, I’m really loving life in Ann Arbor. Shoveling all that snow in the winter not only helps keep a person warm, but kind of makes you feel like a badass.
AE: Your new novel The Wild Birds follows the lives of a mother, daughter, and lighthouse worker in the Northwest United States, and has been described as a sort of love song not only to nature, but also to the region. What do you take with you into your writing from the regions you visit, whether intentional or unintentional? What has stuck with you about the Northwest, and what has stuck with you from the Midwest?
ES: I was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Starting out in the south of the valley I slowly roamed north. I came into the world in Eugene, then after a few years my family moved to Salem, then I moved to Portland for college where I also lived as an adult. Both my children were born in Portland. So when I first started writing The Wild Birds some 10+ years ago, that region was most strong in my mind in terms of its architecture of people, culture, and landscape. The main narrative of my debut is dominated by two characters, a young mother Alice and her daughter Lily living on a filbert farm in rural Willamette Valley. Salem has many hazelnut orchards in the vicinity and I used to go visit them as a teenager looking to be alone with her thoughts. The solace that I took in walking country roads and hanging out in picturesque graveyards, writing moody teenaged poetry about life and death made its way into the book. I’ve always loved the idea of a country goth, so I manifested one on the page.
The novel took me over ten years to finish, and during that time I lived in many different bioregions. I worked as an avian field biologist in differnt rural parts of the West including seven states, all four North American deserts, several mountain ranges, the coast, and rainforest. I observed these varied cultures of the West and wove them together in the novel as I moved from place to place for work. My plotting of the book was organic in the sense that I was writing and incorporating elements of my experience of the surrounding places and people. It was almost a way for me to process the various forms of life around me, by fictionalizing them and placing them in my novel in one way or another.
So while there isn’t anything about the midwest in my first novel, it’s bound to make its way into one of my next projects. In the midwest’s absence of mountains or ocean and the largesse that accompanies those bold geographical features, I find myself looking closer at little things, really getting into the subtlety of glacial topographies like kettles, and reveling in the intensity with which spring spreads across the landscape. The four seasons have really impacted my life in a positive way. There is always a sense of revelation when you move through that point marking a new season.
In the future, I expect I will find myself writing something mysterious or dark and brooding that takes a look at the understory of both the midwestern landscape and people. I’m a huge fan of Jim Harrison’s work and have always admired his ability to make prose that explores the beauty of a natural setting while also plumbing the depths of the human condition.
AE: Many characters in The Wild Birds, like Lily, her mother Alice, and her friends, speak with a particular authenticity that really reflects the casual conversations and mannerisms of real people from rural areas. Do you have any advice on how to create great dialogue that feels so real and still does so much work to develop characters and push the story forward?
ES: My first bit of advice is just to listen. Listen to the nuances of greetings between both strangers and family. Listen to the funny little phrases from your region. Put them in your tool kit to use later. I’m just finishing John Byne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies and I think his use of dialogue is unparalleled and brilliant. There are so many lovely Irish turns of phrase, so much humor, and yet it never feels labored or staid. Each conversation is furthering the plot.
Any writer worth their salt knows that dialogue is not simply taken directly from life. That would be dull on the page. I had a favorite writing teacher (who coincidentally is a midwesterner herself) that told me “dialogue is conversation’s greatest hits.” Dialogue should do something, progress the reader’s understanding of the conflict. So I suppose my advice would be to listen and use those moments of dialect, but make sure they are taking the reader deeper into the story.
AE: Your descriptive talents shine through brightly in your settings in The Wild Birds, which contain numerous dynamic living things — from trees slowly overtaken by fungus to a blind bird hunting in the fields. Do you think your talent for outdoors settings is influenced by your work as a naturalist? What can a non-scientist who admires your lively prose do to write setting a bit more like a naturalist?
ES: Absolutely, I am influenced by my time in the field. I’m an avid birder, mycology nerd, and naturalist, so at this point I couldn’t stop noticing the natural world even if I tried. Observing the natural world has become ingrained. Once you have that lens it’s hard to shift your seeing backward. When I go to a place, the events of the natural world—the plants, animals, weather, soil, fungus and insects—all make their way into my experience of that place. In fact, I often find myself more tuned into the landscape than its people.
But landscape shapes people, whether they clock it or not. I have found that the people of a region often mirror the natural idiosynchrocies in their character. For instance, in Michigan, most everyone has a relationship with snow, the return of frog song and birds in spring, the changing leaves, the first fireflies of summer, and thunder storms. People can talk about these natural features of their living landscape in line for groceries, or waiting to see the dentist, and it is acknowledged, often celebrated, as part of the shared midwestern experience.
In terms of how my experiences as a naturalist tie into my descriptions in The Wild Birds, my lifelong love for hunting wild mushrooms played a big part. Not to give away any spoilers, but the presence of a chanterelle patch in the book plays an important role in uniting the narratives beyond the antique egg collection. I don’t think anyone needs to be a scientist or have credentials to observe and record the magnificence of the natural world. As writers, learning the names of things is great and can help a lot in establishing place. Each unique region or biome has its own set of features, so identifying those and braiding them into the story helps set your reader firmly down in the terra of your choosing. Beyond naming things, observing the way different species interact with one another and their landscape is always a good way of establishing the natural world in your writing. Just as someone who prefers to write about city life would describe the way the city hums during the day or night, describing the way the natural community interacts within itself helps bring a landscape alive on the page.
AE: Later in The Wild Birds, we get a taste of Alice’s past, and how she came to have her daughter, Lily. Alice’s relationship with her adolescent best friend Sal perfectly laid bare some personal and emotional roadblocks against which LGBT people have to push just to get a relationship off the ground. Can you tell me a little bit about how you constructed Alice and Sal’s relationship, how you plotted it, and how you hope it speaks to your audience?
ES: I hope their relationship brings hope to my readers. As I was writing I wanted there to be different kinds of love stories represented in the book, not just heteronormative love. Sal and Alice spoke to me and had different iterations of love and friendship in my mind over the years, but in the way that characters come alive and speak for themselves in a writer’s mind, it became clear at some point that the women were destined for love.
I grew up in Oregon in the 90’s, where several explicitly anti-gay ballot measures made it to the ballot. In 1992 in Oregon Ballot Measure 9 was put to vote, supported by a conservative group call Oregon Citizen’s Alliance. They had passed anti-gay regulation in the past with Measure 8, but Measure 9 was their largest and most hateful campaign. The measure would have amended the Oregon constitution to recognize “homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism as abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse.” It would also prevent any “special rights” for homosexuals and bisexuals.
That same year in Salem, Oregon, where I was in school at the time, there were two murders of gay individuals because of a surge of racist and homophobic activity in the area, believed to be inspired by Measure 9. This affected me deeply and it was one of my first early moments of activism, going out and canvassing and talking to people in the community about why the measure needed to be defeated. It was narrowly defeated, with only 56% voting no. I’ll never forget how much of a wake up call that was for me. I saw with young eyes how much hatred existed in the world for LGBT people and I vowed to be part of the change.
It wasn’t until years later when I was part of a strong gay activist community in Seattle that I began to self-identify as bisexual. Even then I felt very tentative and afraid of labeling myself for fear of backlash. Writing The Wild Birds became for me a way of processing all the hatred I had experienced growing up and flushing it from my psyche. So when I say that I hope the story brings hope to people, I hope they experience the narrative with tolerance and appreciation for all the different kinds of love that exist in the world and see that even the largest obstacles can be overcome.
AE: How did you settle upon the structure you gave the novel, and the order of the chapters? Do you think there are any other arrangements that would have worked as well?
ES: I kind of touched on this a bit earlier in the interview, but the development of the plot happened over time as I lived in different areas of the West, so it was born of my own migrations. The timeline expanded as I researched the history of different places I was spending time for work in the field. I used the Oregon Historical Society and California Historical Society for a lot of the primary sources used in the historical sections. I’ve always had an interest in novels told in nonlinear time so I knew from the outset I wanted a nonlinear plot. When I decided on the alternating chapters format it was because that is the kind of book and narrative that I most enjoy reading. I’m a huge fan of puzzles, both literary and of the game variety. I also thought a reader might be able to read a single chapter at a time before bed, and still the story would eventually lock into place.
I enjoy the challenge of braiding timelines and stories together in my mind to create a whole, and I hope that my readers also enjoy that process. There is so much in the book about the interconnectivity of all life forms on the planet, and the alternating chapters speak to that kind of sweeping, broad connectivity. As far as whether there is a better order for the chapters, that’s something I can’t think about now that the book is out there or it would probably drive me to distraction.
AE: What advice would you give a writer who would like to write dynamic, evolving character relationships like yours?
ES: In line with the “listen” advice for the question about dialogue, I’d have to say “watch.” Watch the people around you—your family, friends, co-workers, baristas, doctors, bartenders, strangers, etc. Watch the way they come together and fall apart and learn from their paths and methods. Look below the surface but try not to make assumptions about people’s internal worlds. Instead, look for clues in behavior and speech that point to what lies beneath the surface. I always assume there is a veritable coral reef, a rich tapestry of emotions, below the surface of any person I meet. But like any coral reef, all you can see is waves and vague color forms from the surface. Bringing two characters into discovery of one another’s “reefs,” their discovery of what lurks below the surface, will bring that character relationship to life.
AE: Do you have any advice for people trying to balance writing with another passion (like science), or writing with making a living?
ES: As a mother of two young boys, 2 and 5, balance is something I’m still desperately, flailingly, trying to find. I think my other passions all find their way into my writing and that’s not something I need to change or balance. But time? Time by myself? Time by myself with the energy to write? That is something I struggle to bring into balance. If you, dear reader, can give me advice on that one maybe I can get my next book written before another ten years are up.
AE: Where do you prefer to write and where gives you the most inspiration? Is there anywhere you can’t write?
ES: I love to write in quiet places. I wrote part of The Wild Birds out in wilderness in the bed of my truck, by a campfire, in tents by the light of a headlamp. I also wrote part of it in an urban Portland writing studio overlooking the train tracks surrounded by storage warehouses. The uniting factor in these places was simply quiet. And coffee and tea. Lots and lots of coffee, herbal teas, and La Croix depending on where I’m at in the day. I could probably get a sponsorship from La Croix at this point. And I recommend coming up with new outlandish flavor ideas if you ever get a case of writer’s block.
Oddly, and counter to the stereotype, I simply cannot focus and write in coffee shops. Too many noises and too much action. I am easily distracted, not unlike a small dog. But I’ll admit they are a wonderful place to eavesdrop if you are stuck on piece of dialogue.
AE: What’s next for you?
ES: I’m working on a project that I’m absolutely loving right now, but like so many others, struggle to find time. The novel takes place on three different continents and deals with issues of climate change, immigration, the loss of natural monuments, the defunding of female reproductive medical care, the roadblocks wildlife face as their territories shrink, the legalization of weed, and the magic of the unknown. You know, just tackling the light stuff. But I feel compelled to write about these pressing political and scientific issues because it weighs heavily on so many people’s minds right now, including my own, in our country and beyond. Writing is how I process the trauma and joy of life on earth. Some people say Ride or Die, but I prefer Write or Die.
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Emily Strelow was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley but has lived all over the West and now, the Midwest. For the last decade she combined teaching writing with doing seasonal avian field biology with her husband. While doing field jobs she camped and wrote in remote areas in the desert, mountains and by the ocean. She is a mother to two boys, a naturalist, and writer. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI. The Wild Birds is her first novel.
September 9th, 2018 |
