Keith Lesmeister, whose collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here is forthcoming from MG Press in May, was recently interviewed by FOLIO Lit Journal:
Many of my stories start with an observation or a line of dialogue I’ve observed between unsuspecting couples or groups of people…In terms of research, I try to practice what I mention in my creative writing courses, which is to pay attention to what’s around you–what startles you into some unexpected contemplation? what strikes you as horrifying or beautiful or both? That observation–that closely observed life–is the best kind of research for understanding our environment and human behavior.
Read the full interview here.
Preorder your copy of We Could’ve Been Happy Here here.
March 27th, 2017 |
John McCarthy, whose debut poetry collection Ghost County was published last year, was recently interviewed by Fear No Lit for their “Fail Better” interview series:
I think the stage was a symbol of the urgency and the desire to write something down, write it all down. It wasn’t until later that I realized the more particularly and specifically you write about something, the more universal its appeal will be. It’s easy to say things like “Show, don’t tell…” but I think it’s a much more complex process to actually internalize what that means. It’s important to learn how to parallel those details with an emotion or idea that is significant to someone besides oneself.
Read the full interview here.
Shop for Ghost County here.
March 24th, 2017 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Kristina Perkins talked with author Amit Majmudar about his collection Dothead, the connection between medicine and writing, the purpose of form in poetry and more.
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Kristina Perkins: What is your connection to the Midwest?
Amit Majmudar: I have lived here most of my life. I was born in New York City but we moved to West Union, a small town in Ohio, when I was a few months old. After that, we went north to Cleveland, where my first memories take place. I have also lived in Rootstown, Ohio, and Canton, Ohio, before moving to Columbus. For a brief period (one and a half years) we moved to India, where I did 2nd and 3rd grade.
KP: You grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, but spent time with your parents in India. How does your sense of place — and, with it, your sense of belonging — inform your writing?
AM: Sometimes I don’t know if I really have a sense of place anymore. Or rather my only real place is among books, in a library. Wherever I go, I feel like I exist in a bubble. Last December, I visited India again, and every care was taken to insulate me from the environment. Air conditioning, cars, fancy hotels, plane trips even within India to avoid the rails. So the experience was very much designed to avoid the squalor and heat and poverty and life as Indians actually live it. And truth be told, I kind of preferred it that way.
Here in America, yes, I feel at home in suburban Ohio, but that may be because it impinges so little on my inner life. I have a circuit between work and home (and the internal world, of language and imagination) that could be transplanted anywhere that has a stable civil society, paved roads, decent neighborhoods, and no hurricanes….
Or so I tell myself. As soon as you toss me among lit-clique Manhattanites or frenetically materialist SoCal types, suddenly I realize I am a Midwesterner through and through. There have been times I find my voice taking on a drawl in such company, and I start engaging all sortsa contractions and idiomatic expressions.
KP: A prolific and versatile writer, you’ve published numerous novels, poetry collections, literary essays, and nonfiction works. How do you navigate such an extensive repertoire? Do you find yourself gravitating toward one mode at a time, or do you work with them all simultaneously? What compels you to explore new genres?
AM: I don’t overthink this issue. That is probably the key. I simply think there is an optimized form for any given literary effect. Some of these are obvious, like go to prose fiction for an extended story, or go to poetry for a brief impressionistic piece, or go to essayistic prose to make a point you already have in your head. Then within this, there are endless decisions that can be made, endless decisions of strategy. I mess around with all forms simultaneously, though sometimes I hunker down on one to gain momentum.
KP: You practice diagnostic radiology full-time near your home in Dublin, Ohio. Your newest collection, Dothead, in part explores the relationship between your professions, including poems titled “Radiology,” “Stem Cells,” and “Neuroscience.” While you’ve previously said that you see medicine and writing as connected through their pursuit of pattern, how do you feel these fields influence one another — if at all?
AM: Probably the science influences the writing at the level of meaning. That is, I don’t do well writing (or reading) poetry that doesn’t mean anything. As soon as I get the sense that a writer isn’t trying to communicate with me, that the language is simply there to be admired for its own sake, the poem becomes a mere amuse-bouche, empty verbal calories, and my interest shuts down. I think it’s best that my poetry and fiction don’t influence radiology reports too much. Malpractice lawyers make unforgiving literary critics. Too much use of poetic license can get your medical one revoked.
KP: The poems in Dothead are as diverse in form as they are in subject matter — your collection includes prose poems, free-verse poems, rhyming poems, and a shaped poem. What, for you, is the purpose of form in poetry? How does the form you choose contribute to the meaning of that poem?
AM: I write a lot of prose, so for me, form sets poetry apart from prose. (Though as you mention, I transgress this principle at will; the longest poem in Dothead is a prose poem.) Increasingly I think the ideal poem is one that can be reprinted as prose, and the reader will know exactly where the linebreaks go, because the form and music are so profoundly and structurally inextricable. That IS its nature. This isn’t true of much great poetry, I know. (Shakespeare’s earliest printers sometimes mixed up and printed his verse passages as prose in early folios of Lear and Hamlet). But it’s a nice guiding principle. A lot of times, forms say things implicitly, like the volta of a sonnet, which says, “but then again…” Or a form can add sharpness and point, like with the heroic couplet. Or stripping your verse of punctuation can make things look/feel a little urgently slapdash or breathless. I play a great deal with such effects.
KP: You’re currently in the middle of a two-year term as the first Poet Laureate of Ohio. How has this job differed from your previous professional experiences with writing? What has surprised you the most about the job?
AM: I don’t have any prior professional experiences with writing. What has surprised me most is the level of interest from the press about this post. I would have never imagined that Ohio naming a state poet laureate would be, from a newspaper or magazine’s perspective, “a story.” But it turned out to be that way.
KP: Given your versatility as a writer, do you have a favorite writing form — or, perhaps, genre — to read? How have the books you’ve read influenced what and how you write?
AM: I prefer to read poetry and nonfiction. For some reason fiction bores me when I sit and read it (in most cases), so I mostly audiobook that. I like to audiobook enormous nonfiction tomes I’d never get through on my own. Also Tolstoy; I’ve never actually READ Anna Karenina or War and Peace, only audiobooked them. That holds true of much of the world’s greatest (and longest) fiction; some day I’ll try to audiobook Infinite Jest, so I can hang with the cool kids. I never audiobook poetry.
KP: What’s next for you?
AM: I’m superstitious! I don’t want to jinx myself because I have some large-scale stuff in the offing…You will, hopefully, see for yourself over the next few years!
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Amit Majmudar is Ohio’s first Poet Laureate. His most recent collection is Dothead (Knopf, 2016).
March 23rd, 2017 |
We asked the winners of the 2016 Lake Prize (featured in our
Winter 2017 issue) about their work and the inspiration behind their stories. Read about all of the
fiction finalists and the
poetry finalists.
Poetry runner-up Steve Henn discusses his piece “A Powerful Weapon.”
Steve Henn: My friend Anna was telling me about getting into embroidery. Somehow this turned into a conversation about chucking hankies at people. Which turned into the idea of a gun that shoots hankies embroidered with compliments at people. It’s sort of the polar opposite of “I want to put a hole in your face.” I see you, life is hard, we’re all stressed – but you’re appreciated. I really need to find an engineer to make the thing. Know any?
Purchase a copy of the Winter 2017 issue of Midwestern Gothic.
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Steve Henn is the author of 2 collections from NYQ Books, Unacknowledged Legislations and And God Said: Let there be Evolution! His 3rd, Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year, will be released this school year from Wolfson Press. He wants to acknowledge that the boy in the poem is an actual person, though not someone he knew well, who died by turning his father’s handgun on himself. Steve thinks it’s a bad idea to keep guns in the house, though he knows for many in the Midwest and in his home state of Indiana, this is not a popular opinion. He couldn’t’ve written his poem without slightly misinterpreting a conversation with his friend Anna and thanks her for the inspiration. Links to books and recordings can be found at www.therealstevehenn.com.
March 20th, 2017 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Megan Valley talked with poet Gretchen Marquette about May Day, how being a working writer influences her teaching, the coexistence of grief and beauty and more.
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Megan Valley: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Gretchen Marquette: Well, first and foremost, I’ve lived most of my life here. I grew up in eastern Wisconsin, and slowly moved farther west every few years after I turned eighteen.
I remember the first time I felt like the entire region was “home.” I had lived for a summer in Washington. I’d thought I might stay permanently, but one summer was enough for me – I was eager to get “back east” as people there would say.
On the drive home, there was one night when I stopped in Glendive, Montana and couldn’t find a hotel room (the band Nickelback was in town) so I slept in my car. In the morning, I went to a diner for breakfast, and on the way in, I saw a newspaper box; the front page of the paper announced the 35-W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. I was horrified, and felt, in that moment, so lonely, to be that far from home, where something terrible had happened. What was strange though, was the relief I felt later, when I crossed the border into the Dakotas – it already felt like home, even though I still had so far to go before anything became familiar in the true sense.
I’ve had people from elsewhere lead me to believe they think it’s “cute” to be from the Midwest, but I’m proud of it. I like my accent, and I like some of things I have in common with other Midwesterners. And Minneapolis in particular has such a great literary community; ending up in this city was such a lucky break.
MV: How has becoming an instructor influenced how you view your own writing process?
GM: One thing I like about being an instructor is that I get to keep learning. It’s true to some extent that teachers “take” their own classes, and so I’m always thinking (and reading) as both a student and as a teacher.
I’m an adjunct, so I teach many different classes at several different schools. This means that I have lots of different experiences, not just as a teacher, but as a thinker and writer too. When I’m teaching creative writing in the BFA at Hamline, for example, there is a lot of great discussion about craft and form. Listening to my students talk helps me think about my work (and all creative work), both in terms of how it’s made, and how it works, but also in terms of how it finds an audience.
Other classes have their own benefits. I’m teaching composition this semester at Anoka Ramsey Community College, north of the Twin Cities. I’m also working on a collection of essays. The essay collection is tough, because I’m in the early stages, and my inner critic is convinced I’m taking a great idea and royally screwing it up.
During our first unit, my comp students and I read Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” and talked about the barriers to getting that first draft (the “down” draft) done. During that in-class discussion I realized something I should have realized years ago, which is that the book I imagine in my head always falls short of my expectations, because the first time I see it, it’s in its first draft, and the books that I’m holding it up to, hopefully as peers, have made it through many drafts, and have seen an editor’s attention, etc. It’s such a simple concept, but honestly, it didn’t stick for me until the discussion with my students this fall. They were struggling with writing their personal essays in exactly the same way I was struggling. It’s a good example of how, in a lot of ways, being a working writer makes me a more empathetic writing teacher, and being a writing teacher makes me a more productive writer.
MV: What unites all the poems in May Day, your debut collection?
GM: I think it’s tension. How grief and beauty exist simultaneously, but don’t cancel each other out. They pull on each other, but neither is powerful enough to eliminate the other. It was a very difficult time for me, when I was writing those poems. For a long time, I was alone and disoriented in a hostile psychological forest; it’s not an exaggeration to say that I was literally in danger. But I found my way out, and I also found ways to enjoy certain moments, even when I was lost. I think the path that leads out is visible in the book. I hope so anyway. It’s why the book is May Day and not Mayday. Taken collectively, the poems in May Day understand that grief isn’t strong enough to destroy beauty.
MV: Many of your poems center on two main themes: the end of a relationship and your brother serving in the military. How do your relationships shape your poetry?
GM: I like to spend a lot of time alone, but my relationships are ultimately what give my life meaning. It’s why my book is dedicated to my sister, and to my friends. It’s for all my friends – all those people who helped me find my way during a bad time, people whose lives I got to take part in, and who taught me about unconditional love for the first time.
I take all of my roles seriously – as a teacher, a poet, etc., but I am especially serious about my role as a friend, and as a sister, and when I’m in a relationship, I take my role as a partner seriously too. Whatever we lift up in our daily lives is going to appear in our work – I’m sure that’s why we’re talking about this!
MV: How do you decide which poems make it into a collection and how to organize them?
GM: This is one of the situations when I talk about how lucky I am to have such an amazing editor like Jeff Shotts. Because it’s easy for me to take a huge selection of poems and weed out the ones that can’t do their own heavy lifting, or the ones that are saying the same thing that another poem is already saying, and saying better. But ultimately, there is still culling to be done, and that’s when I struggle. At that point, I really value the opinion of my editor, and of a few close friends who know my work well.
Organizing is different. I look for poems that are talking to each other more directly, and then I think about how they might benefit from sitting together, or how they might be louder if they have to shout at each other across the span of the whole book. I also like to think about each section having its own arc (either emotionally, or thematically). Sometimes I’m at a loss, though, and when that happens, I go back to the people I trust. I step into that role for others too – I love working as an editor, and I value other people’s eyes on my work.
MV: What do you read in between writing projects?
GM: It’s interesting that you phrased the question this way, because I read a lot more when I’m not actively working on something. I tend to go in phases of heavy reading/almost no writing, and then heavy writing/almost no reading. In general it’s non-fiction that inspires me most – articles, essays, etc, on a variety of topics that have nothing to do with poetry, though craft books are always helpful when I don’t feel like reading or writing. I keep track of a lot of what I learn through writing in my reader’s notebook, so that when I’m ready to write, I have a record of it.
When I’m not writing, I read a lot of poetry. All through graduate school, I read almost nothing but poetry. I’m slowly finding my way back to prose, particularly fiction. It’s such a relief to find a good book. While I was travelling this summer, I read The Great House by Nicole Krauss, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, The Meadow by James Galvin, and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and I remembered how grounding and stabilizing it is to be in the middle of a book, and how comforting even its physical presence can be.
MV: How do you know when a poem is done?
GM: I think there’s two kinds of “done.” The first kind is knowing when to stop writing, because the first draft has said everything that needs to be said. I think it’s a gut feeling, and that’s probably the easy part. And then, in revision, you have to know when a poem has become its best. Personally, I know that I have an issue with burying my ending lines in the middle of poems, so sometimes I have to unbury them. Sometimes I have to chip a shorter poem out of a much longer poem, and sometimes I have to find the poem in a block of prose. For the most part, I still think it comes down to a gut feeling. For me, revision is such a pleasure that when it stops being so, I know I’m done. And at that point, if the poem still doesn’t work, I usually put it away. Some of them never resurface, but some do. I’ve figured out over the years that I don’t revise as much as other people do. I like to write fast, and revise while the poem is still warm. It’s a bad sign for me if I have to labor over something, though I know other poets much better than I who spend months working on a piece. There are probably as many ways to revise as there are writers.
MV: What’s next for you?
GM: I did some travelling last summer – it was the first time in my life that I’ve had the opportunity to be on the go, and I loved it. It was the best thing for my work, and for my heart and mind too. So I’m hoping that I’ll have a chance to do some more travelling in the next year.
I’m also working on two new projects. One is another book of poems. I’m starting to understand what its spine is, and I’m happy that many of those poems are already finding homes out in the world. They feel, to me, like sibling poems to the poems in May Day. Hopefully older, wiser siblings. We’ll see.
The other project is the book of essays I mentioned earlier. Last summer, I did an interview with Kaveh Akbar for his website, Divedapper. While he and I were talking, I realized that I was preoccupied with some specific questions. In the days that followed, I saw that I already had a lot of prose writing that orbited around those questions – how do we commit to living our lives when our lives don’t look the way we thought they would? How do we live good lives when even good lives are hard? What role does pleasure play in happiness? I want to write a book that starts to answer some of those questions. I hope that I have the time and energy to get a draft of it done by next year at this time.
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Gretchen Marquette’s work has appeared in places such as Harper’s, Poetry Magazine, Tri-Quarterly, Tin House, and the Paris Review. She is a 2014 recipient of an Emerging Writer’s Grant from the Loft Literary Center, and her first book, May Day, was released from Graywolf Press in 2016. She currently lives in the Powderhorn neighborhood in south Minneapolis.
March 16th, 2017 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Audrey Meyers talked with author John Yohe about music influencing writing, experimenting with storytelling, books that continue to speak to him and more.
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Audrey Meyers: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
John Yohe: I lived most of my remembered childhood there, mostly in Jackson. After college, I escaped for many years and lived out west, but then came back to try teaching, which I liked, and which I felt good at, so I ended up staying for seven more years. Then I escaped again. Narrowly. With my life.
AM: How has teaching at Midwest universities influenced your writing?
JY: I taught at Eastern Michigan University while in grad school, as a GA, but most of my teaching (including now, again) has been at the community college level. I teach mostly “composition” and developmental writing, with some creative writing classes and I think teaching the comp classes has re-influenced me, or my writing, to be simple and accessible, to use accessible language somehow, because most people, those outside the MFA programs and New York and the Language poetry movement, they want stories, language, that they can understand and relate to. A lot of contemporary writing, especially poetry has sequestered itself behind these walls of incomprehensibility, wherein the writers sit smugly satisfied with themselves for being elite, then they wonder why people are reading less.
AM: How did being born in Puerto Rico and then moving to Michigan impact your life?
JY: I can’t say that it did, too much. I am a Michigander. I did feel an obligation to go back and learn Spanish, which has allowed me to travel and live in Spanish-speaking countries, and to read books in the original Spanish. I’ve only ever read Roberto Bolaño in the original Spanish. And I can re-read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in Spanish, which works well. I think all writers should learn at least one other language to near fluency: I didn’t really ‘get’ how English worked, until I started learning another language. For example, I didn’t know, or understand what a direct object or indirect object was. Or, we know, we use language naturally, but having an awareness of the building blocks helps build a certain confidence later. But I’m kind of a language nerd, I’ve been teaching myself Latin lately, just for fun.
AM: How have your various jobs (wildland firefighter, deckhand/oiler, runner/busboy, bike messenger, wilderness ranger) impacted you as a writer?
JY: I’m not sure if they all have at the same level. At first I was going to say that being a bike messenger didn’t at all, but it did in the sense of that time period: I had just moved to New York City to earn my MFA in Poetry Writing from The New School for Social Research, knew I needed some kind of job, but after having worked as a wildland firefighter for years by then, and being outside all the time, I just couldn’t even conceive of working in an office staring at a screen all day. So I was like, what else could I do? And I saw all these cool people zipping around the streets and went, hmmm. So, I think that’s kind of been my thinking process my whole life, for good or bad. I say bad because who knows, everyone else in my program was working in the publishing industry — I may have missed out on all the networking I could have done, all the people I could be contacting now!
I think too that my job ‘choices’ have reflected my writing influences: Gary Snyder and Ed Abby for the firefighting and fire lookouts stuff, and Charles Bukowski for the runner/busboy stuff, all of the jobs that are on the fringes. Being a teacher was the first job I had were I felt serious, and an adult, which was pretty far along in my life!
AM: Your tone of voice is very distinctive and unique. How have you defined your tone as writer?
JY: I’d be curious to know what you meant specifically, some specific examples, but in general I think having a unique and distinctive tone/voice is what every writer strives for, builds towards. For example, you can take random sections of text from most ‘good’ (versus famous) writers and know who they are, in the same way you can hear a piece by Bach or Jimi Hendrix and know immediately it’s Bach or Hendrix. Like, you could give me a paragraph or two from Cormac McCarthy or Marguerite Duras and I’d know it was them. Ditto Kerouac or Ginsberg. I’m not sure people could do that with Stephen King though (and confession: I’ve read a lot of Stephen King — Salem’s Lot scared me so much when I was a teenager that I had to read the whole thing in one night. That’s some kind of powerful writing!)
But I think our tone/voice comes from emulation: We’re a conglomeration of our influences, of the writers we really liked, especially when younger somehow. So I’ve got Hemingway (and all the writers influenced by him, like Duras and Bukowski) and Frank O’Hara and Kurt Vonnegut, et cetera. But I guess I’ve always been drawn to ‘clear’, minimalist writers. And mostly men, I guess, though The Color Purple by Alice Walker is one of my favorite novels of all time.
So, it’s weird, we come from our influences, but we’re somehow drawn to certain styles to begin with?
AM: Your website bio also mentions you’re a bass player. Has music influenced your writing, and if so, how?
JY: It influenced me in work ethic, for sure: When younger, when music was my main thing, I played/practiced bass every day, took lessons, went to a music school, but also put the work in on my own, so when I consciously switched to writing as my main creative outlet (which might be another long story) I knew I needed to do all those things: to study formally in classes, but also to read widely, just as I’d been listening to all kinds of different music, and also to do it every day, and to work on my own. Also to emulate my heroes, and read everything. Like, if you love Hendrix, you listen everything he recorded, even the not so great stuff. Likewise, if you love Bukowski, you read everything, even the not so great stuff. But if it’s someone you love, even the not so great stuff is still somehow great, to you. To me. But it’s stuff most general readers wouldn’t read, or even like, yet it’s part of the study, the emulation. To study what really works in an artist, versus what only works for the hardcore readers.
I’d also say I’ve been influenced by songwriters, starting with the Beatles, up to Leonard Cohen and our most recent Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan. Again, good songwriters who I think have that simple, accessible language. And, say, Cohen’s joining of sexual love and spiritual love. I’ve been experimenting with that in some of my poetry.
AM: Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? What or who inspired you to become one?
JY: I think I did pretty early on. I remember trying to write a mystery novel after reading some Hardy Boys books. I got to, like, two pages, but still. Those were the first novels I’d been reading. Also, I was reading comic books way early on, and I drew my own. I wasn’t a good artist so stopped! But, I was experimenting with storytelling in that way. And I always loved the opportunities I had in early grade school and middle school to write stories. I’m damn lucky I got those. Also, I remember seeking out the poetry in our school books, even though we never talked or read about them in class. Which, back then (and, I suspect even now) meant “The Raven” or “The Charge of The Light Brigade.” But there was something about poetry I was drawn to.
But I did also love music, still do, and playing in a rock band was much more glamorous, more chance that girls would actually like me, so I went with that. And I was immediately experimenting with (very bad) lyrics. And by college, when I was keeping a notebook, the rhyming stuff began to be joined by non-rhyming stuff, lines, images.
I think, too, that growing up in the Midwest influenced all this, or at least growing up in Jackson, which, if only a half hour from Ann Arbor, was a whole ‘nother world, versus even someplace huger like New York City. Jackson is and was a conservative town in all kinds of ways. There just were never any good book stores, the best I had growing up was a Walden Books in the mall, in which I sought out and paid for on my own the only book of poetry I think they had, which was some anthology of British Romantic poetry, or something. But I have wondered what growing up in Ann Arbor might have been like, where the original Border’s was, and where college kids were out in the streets, and poetry was happening, writers visiting, if I would have latched onto writing earlier. Or, who knows, the music scene was bigger there too, maybe I would have gone more into music.
AM: On your website, you provide the books you’ve read at least three times. What do these books represent for you? Why do you like them so much?
JY: I think when you re-read a book that there’s a certain feeling of nostalgia that gets added on, a remembering of what it meant to you back then, but in all the books I list there’s what I call a mythical level, which I got from my teacher, the poet Diane Wakoski. By that I mean, I think, that the characters embody some kind of mythical character, some kind of almost timeless character that ‘speaks’ for us, us Americans or even us humans. For example, in Cormac McCarthy’s cowboys, but also Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road is a Legba/Kokopelli trickster type character, and he and Sal are also a nod back to Don Quixote and Sancho, mythical characters themselves. Though I think all of these mythical characters ‘work’ or resonate because they’re on the verge of a changing world, they show a lost time that’s about to pass? Maybe?
So, writers like that are ‘wrestling with the gods’, wrestling with what being human means. Which I guess all art is doing, but these books seem to resonate, or re-resonate with me after some years. I’ve grown and changed, and they somehow keep speaking to me, in a different way, at a different level, even if – just like in the case of McCarthy – I’m consciously thinking about why they appealed to my younger self. Like I can think, ‘Oh yeah, I liked The Crossing because it’s about a lost boy leaving a home, and I was and am a lost boy leaving home, continually.’ But also after living in the southwest for years, recognizing that landscape (which is the landscape of your heart).
I just re-read McCarthy’s The Crossing again this summer!
AM: How has being a teacher of writing impacted you as writer?
JY: It’s a constant reminder of what I mostly like in writing: story. I place myself in the school of Composition Theory called ‘expressionist,’ which had its heyday back in the 70s and 80s, with Peter Elbow and Wendy Bishop. That kind of got crushed in the 90s by the thinking that students need to learn more practical and logical types of writing that will benefit them in future classes. So for example, the dreaded research paper, and ‘formal’ argument papers. I hate that shit. I can teach it, and when I do, I change it, try to make it fun, incorporate humor and narrative, but I’m really only curious about my students’ stories. And I find that students generally love to share stories about themselves. Not in an ego way, but that they like to think about important times in their lives, that they get into reflection, which is how we grow and learn: we reflect back on our own stories. There are more wild theories, like that we are all only stories, that our interactions with each other are only really us telling each other our stories. Which I totally agree with. So, what I’m curious about in my students’ writing is what I’m curious about in my own life.
AM: What is it like being a Midwesterner on the west coast? What’s the same and what’s different?
JY: There are many of us here! Many economic refugees! The part of Oregon I now live in, Salem, has lots of farms and low rolling hills, and is lush, so at times feels a little like Michigan. Until you get in to the woods and the huge trees. And you can drive out to the ocean in an hour, though the ocean has the same feel as the Great Lakes to me. The Lakes don’t have the salt tang, but that space, to have your bare feet in the sand and hear the waves and wind and stare out at all that space.
Rural Oregon feels like rural Michigan, the people and culture. The winters are mild, which I love. I was never a fan of Michigan winters, though they may be responsible for my reading so much.
I liked living in Portland for a while. It’s book country. Home of Powell’s Books. Living there, I never felt odd about loving to read books, read poetry. Or wearing lots of black. Portland is like a giant Ann Arbor. Unfortunately, I got a little priced out, rent-wise, and couldn’t seem to find a good job. Everyone and her sister has a masters degree in English there. But the love and support of arts is nice. I’ve been living the last two winters (in the summer I go off and be a fire lookout in the southwest) in Salem, the capitol, a smaller college town, which is more my speed.
AM: What’s next for you?
JY: The next big plateau for me as a writer is to get my books published. I have three collections of poetry (including one centered around Michigan called In the Solitary Confinement of My Mind) and a few novels, one of which is about Jackson, called RUST all of which I’ve been shopping, both to literary agents and to smaller presses. I’ve been lucky to have had many poems and short stories (and essays and book reviews) published in the last few years. In that sense Portland has been good for me. I think all any writer wants, or would like, is to make some money, make any kind of living at their art. But, I’ve read that only about 100 writers in American can do that. And I’ll never be Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.
I resist the self-publishing route. I tried it for a book of poetry once, when I was living in Ann Arbor, and though I learned a lot from the process, I didn’t sell any copies at all. I learned that while some writers are good (and/or lucky) at selling their own books, I’m not one of them. Plus, I resist the ego-ness of self-publishing: I need to know that someone, some complete stranger values my writing enough to take a chance on publishing me. Though I doubt enough to wonder if that’s even viable thinking any more.
But, I try not to worry about all that. I’ll put intentions towards it, make time to submit stuff. But I have to remember that I love to write just for itself: it makes me happy. It’s interesting. So the real questions is, how do I live my life? How do I live in voluntary simplicity (i.e. poverty) and still be able to do the things that interest me, like writing, but also traveling. So, I would teach full-time again, if offered, and I put some energy to that as well. But maybe I’ll just be a fire lookout for the rest of my life, and sit on mountains in the summer. Still, I feel there’s something else I should or could be doing. I’m trying to figure out what that is.
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Born in Puerto Rico, John Yohe grew up in Michigan, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He has worked as a wildland firefighter, deckhand/oiler, runner/busboy, bike messenger, wilderness ranger, and fire lookout, as well as a teacher of writing. A complete list of his publications, and poetry, fiction and non-fiction writing samples, can be found at his website: www.johnyohe.com
March 9th, 2017 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Megan Valley talked with author Jung Yun about her novel Shelter, the jarring act of immigration, her novel’s tangled generational and cultural differences, and more.
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Megan Valley: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Jung Yun: My family and I immigrated to the U.S. in the seventies, so I spent my childhood in North Dakota (ages 4-18) and still return regularly to visit. The connection is more than just childhood memories, trips to see family, or marrying a fellow Midwesterner though. Growing up in North Dakota instilled a deep fondness and appreciation for certain qualities in people — kindness, humility, perseverance — which is not to say these qualities are exclusive to the Midwest, but I think there’s certainly a Midwestern brand of them that I recognize and am genuinely happy to see in others.
MV: While you now live in Baltimore, you were born in South Korea and grew up in North Dakota and lived in places like New York City and New England. What has each place taught you about writing?
JY: Living in lots of places over time has given me so many different types of people to observe. And that’s so much of the hard work of writing — the work I happen to enjoy most, which is trying to create characters who live and breathe as real people do. Every move has provided a lot of raw “data” that makes me think about how people can be so similar and different, complex and simple, human and inhumane.
MV: Your first novel, Shelter, follows Kyung, a first-generation Korean immigrant, who alienates himself from his wife and son while trying to come to terms with the physical and emotional abuse his parents inflicted on him. Where did the title come from and how does it tie to the theme of imperfect parenting that runs throughout?
JY: My manuscript had at least three other titles before Shelter, and none of them felt quite right, which my editor at Picador picked up on right away. (When I first spoke to her on the phone — this was before she bought the rights to the manuscript — she asked if I’d be willing to consider changing it, which I was). Shelter was the result of brainstorming with her and my agent over three agonizing weeks — agonizing because it was so odd not knowing what to call the manuscript I’d been working on for 3+ years. We came up with several terrible possibilities before arriving at Shelter, which instantly clicked given its connotations of safety, something that Kyung never had in his home as a child and is desperately trying to create in his adult life, ill-equipped as he is.
MV: You’ve said in a previous interview that while growing up in North Dakota, your family was the only non-white one for “miles.” How did that influence how you viewed your Korean heritage as a child and adolescent?
JY: I was certainly aware that my family and I were different. And of course, there was that awkward adolescent period when I tried to tamp those differences down (think blue eye shadow kits and large-barreled curling irons). I was reasonably quick to recognize how futile those efforts were and my parents were great about letting me figure out how to be different and proud in my own way and on my own timeline. Nowadays, I look back and just have to shake my head when I see some of my old school pictures, with my hair so permed that I looked like a broccoli crown. I wish I could tell my younger self that being Korean-American will one day feel like an absolute gift that grounds my identity in real and meaningful ways.
MV: You began working on Shelter more than ten years ago. What’s the biggest difference between your first thoughts about the premise and the final book?
JY: The original premise — about taking care of one’s elderly parents — is still present in the final novel. But I knew early on that I wanted the conflict to be more complex than simply familial, intergenerational obligation alone. By introducing a history of violence, a violent crime, financial exigency, as well as characters who withhold so much from each other, I tried to make readers put themselves in the main character’s shoes and really question: if this is the information they had at their disposal, what would they do? What would they feel like they “owed”? Kyung is not a likeable character — I knew that early on too — but I hope readers are able to empathize with him and understand why he behaves as he does.
MV: How do the generational and cultural differences between Kyung and his parents in Shelter influence each other? Can they be separated or are they so intertwined that they might as well be the same thing?
JY: I think the strands are very intertwined, and in some cases, inextricably tangled. For example, Kyung’s father, Jin, has a very traditional view of a man’s role, which is to work and provide for his family. This could describe someone of his generation whether they were born in the United States or Korea. But Jin’s ability to fulfill this role with dignity was greatly affected when he left Korea for the United States. And then there’s Kyung, a “1.5 generation” immigrant, who came to the U.S. at a young age and more or less assimilated, but is still deeply influenced by his parents’ ideas of what men should do, what sons should do, how families should behave, why wealth and status matter so much, etc.
MV: What sort of writers inspire you?
JY: I’m a fan of writers like J.M. Coetzee, whose work has continued to feel urgent and vital over many decades, as well as interesting to me across topics, books, and genres. I admire that kind of creative longevity and evolution, the sense that he’s still exploring through his writing and unwilling to be fixed to any one thing. I’m also inspired by new authors whose debuts just knocked me out, people like Mia Alvar, Clay Byars, Nami Mun, and Jade Chang. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
MV: How did exploring the relationship between Kyung and his parents in Shelter make you think about your relationship with your own parents?
JY: Writing this book truly deepened my admiration for my parents, who were brave enough to leave their homeland and settle down somewhere so different from what they knew. Before my husband and I relocated from Massachusetts to Maryland, we debated the pros and cons of that move for a year. Can you imagine immigrating to the United States in the 1970s with very little money, a decent — but not fluent — command of the English language, and two little kids? Immigration, even under the best of circumstances, is a jarring act, and the origins of many of the tensions in Shelter can be traced back to the Cho family’s arrival in the states. I think the process of writing this book made me much more reflective about what my parents did for us and went through for us. I am always aware that our lives could have been very different.
MV: What’s next for you?
JY: I’m working on my second novel, which I know is such a predictable answer, but it’s also the most honest one. I’m in that early stage when it’s not worthwhile to talk about the premise because it’s still evolving, but I do feel comfortable saying that the book is set in the Midwest.
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Jung Yun was born in South Korea, grew up in North Dakota, and educated at Vassar College, the University of Pennsylvania, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her work has appeared in Tin House (the “Emerging Voices” issue); The Best of Tin House: Stories, edited by Dorothy Allison; and The Massachusetts Review; and she is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, she lives in Baltimore with her husband and serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the George Washington University. Shelter is her first novel. Visit her at www.JungYun.info.
March 3rd, 2017 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Kristina Perkins talks with author Rae Meadows about her novel I Will Send Rain, researching agricultural life in the 1930s, working on a mixed-media project and more.
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Kristina Perkins: What is your connection to the Midwest?
Rae Meadows: My parents are from Chicago and I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland. As an adult I lived in Madison and Minneapolis. The Midwest will always feel like home to me — the big seasons, the landscapes, the cultural traits that I connect to the region. I love to be called a Midwestern writer, despite living in Brooklyn, NY. I think of myself that way.
KP: You chose to set your newest novel, I Will Send Rain, in the fictional town of Mulehead, Oklahoma during the height of the 1930s Dust Bowl. While most consider Oklahoma outside the purview of the Midwest, do you see any relationship between life in Mulehead and traditional Midwestern values?
RM: Most definitely. The characters in the book are hard-working, laconic, humble. They are people who do instead of talk about it. I associate those traits with a Midwestern sensibility. Although the Oklahoma Panhandle is a pretty stark and lonely terrain, there is a rootedness to the people who live there that I was attracted to, a trait I might also ascribe to traditional Midwestern culture. I think farm life is something that I have been drawn to as a writer all along, and the iconic nature of the family farm is something that spans the two regions.
KP: In a recent interview with WNYC, you mention that you’re able to write better about a place if you don’t live there. For you, what about this distance lends itself to good writing?
RM: I find that I have to recreate a place in my imagination, even a real place that I have known, to have it work for me as a fictional setting. This was especially true for Salt Lake City in my first novel. It became an almost mythical place for me after I had moved away. For I Will Send Rain, although I did a lot of research about the Panhandle in the 1930s, I chose to visit the town I fictionalized only after finishing the novel. I think I have a fear of being hemmed in by the actual details of a place, not being able to separate the minutiae from telling details.
KP: What draws you to genre of historical fiction? What is the most difficult part of the research process? What do you find most rewarding?
RM: A fear of writing about technology! I think that the immediacy of our world can take away drama in a fictional world. But I also like delving into the past. It’s just fun. I love the research. For this book I read everything I could, including letters written by a woman living on a Dust Bowl farm, farm equipment manuals, Oklahoma state history, and first-hand accounts of life in the Panhandle. But for me by far the most important thing was time spent in the Library of Congress archive of Farm Securities Administration photographs. There are 165,000 photographs documenting agricultural life and its fallout during the thirties. I looked at these photos for hours at a time, particularly the ones of women and children. Probably the most difficult part of research for me is knowing when to stop, and then knowing what to leave out to make a period seem authentic without it feeling like a staged set.
KP: You’ve discussed how you were surprised to learn that the Dust Bowl was largely a manmade phenomenon — a result of over-farming in a region subject to drought and high wind speeds. How has writing about the interpersonal ramifications of environmental tragedy influenced your understanding of current environmental concerns — if at all?
RM: I think people trying to get by and in so doing harming the environment is a complicated interplay, one not easily solved. (Asking industrializing third-world countries to cut their emissions comes to mind.) Writing this book made that more apparent to me than ever. Even if the Dust Bowl farmers understood how they were wrecking the land, what were they supposed to do? It’s not like they could just go out and get a different job. But on the other hand, humans can be stubborn and forgetful and short-sighted. Even now, the Panhandle, which will always have intermittent, serious drought, relies on a heavily depleted aquifer to irrigate its farms. I wish that in writing this book I came to some new understanding, but I think it was more an illumination of how incredibly difficult it is to get people to change behavior.
KP: I Will Send Rain navigates the grim setting of the Dust Bowl through the experiences of the Bell family. When conceiving your plot and characters, how do you find balance — in the form of hope, love, or growth — within a landscape of such overwhelming despair and tension?
RM: This is such a big one for me. I tend to be a dark writer, but I would never want what I write to be bleak. It is essential to me in writing human stories that they don’t come across as hopeless. Take a character like McGuiness, a minor character, who is not by any definition a good guy. I loved writing him because of the glimpses of his humanity that came through. He is not villainous, despite his capacity for doing bad deeds. I believe in allowing for the possibility of hope, love, and growth even if they are not fully realized within the novel. I think the end of I Will Send Rain shows this possibility. If I were to graph it, it would show an uptick. I believe in a window left open.
KP: You’ve spoken about the influence of Dorothea Lange’s famous Dust Bowl photographs in inspiring and grounding your work. As a writer, what are the advantages of having access to visual representations of a given landscape? What, to you, is the relationship between narrative writing and photojournalism?
RM: I love Lange’s photographs precisely for their narrative quality, for their lack of clinical or artistic distance. They allowed me into the Dust Bowl in a different, more visceral way than just reading about it. I think I learned from Lange about showing despair without pity, being unafraid to look at what others were refusing to acknowledge, capturing quiet dignity amidst ruin. One of the reasons I chose not to go to the Panhandle during the writing of the book was because I wanted to use the feeling of those historical images.
After the book was done, I visited the Panhandle with photographer Christina Paige. It was a transformative experience to collaborate on a photo essay — to give a fuller expression of what we wanted to communicate about the people who live in Boise City, the town I fictionalized as Mulehead. Both photographs and narrative writing tell stories, but there’s immediacy to images, and more in-depth analysis allowed in words. I would love to have the opportunity to do a joint project across media again.
KP: What’s one thing you wish you had known when you first began writing?
RM: This is not one thing but these all relate to a lack of confidence: no one has it figured out; no one cares if you write or not so you better write for yourself; trust your gut; it’s not a race; the day your book comes out is the same as the day before; when you finish a book you have to start again and write another one.
KP: What’s next for you?
RM: After spending time in the Oklahoma Panhandle, it became apparent to me that I wasn’t quite finished with it as a setting. I’m working on a novel that takes place in the 21st century, in Mulehead, with Birdie returning as an old woman. Although it will be modern, it’ll flashback to Birdie’s life in the years after the end of I Will Send Rain.
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Rae Meadows is the author of Calling Out, which received the 2006 Utah Book Award for fiction; No One Tells Everything, a Poets & Writers Notable Novel; and Mercy Train, which was translated into multiple languages. I Will Send Rain received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.
March 2nd, 2017 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Allison Reck talked with poet Allison Pitinii Davis about her forthcoming collection, Line Study of a Motel Clerk, working against sentimentality, writing about the intersection of Rust Belt and Jewish cultures and more.
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Allison Reck: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Allison Pitinii Davis: I was born in Youngstown, Ohio and didn’t leave the state much my first 25 years. Four generations of my family lived in the Youngstown area, and I was very lucky to grow up with my extended family. The area is home to the trucking motel and laundry that have been operated by my family for over 50 years.
AR: Your forthcoming collection, Line Study of a Motel Clerk, is focused on your experience with your father’s trucking motel in Ohio. What perspective does your collection bring to the literary depiction of the Midwest? What understanding of the Midwest do you hope your readers gain from your depiction?
APD: The Midwest is wide-ranging — Dust Bowl to Rust Belt, rural to industrial — and has been home to poets as diverse in theme and style as Gwendolyn Brooks and John Berryman. As in any region, lines can be drawn — I think of the theme of labor running through Carl Sandburg, Kenneth Patchen, James Wright, and Philip Levine. Perhaps the one trait that ties Midwesterners together more than anything is a reluctance to be grouped, and at least where I come from, a self-reliance bordering on insularity. I’m not sure Cleveland wants anything to do with Cincinnati, let alone the rest of the Midwest.
I place myself in the tradition of writing about labor. Because my book spans four generations, it follows two small family businesses along the historical trajectory of industrial boom and bust — a timeline beginning with the influx of immigrants to the Steel Belt and ending with their descendants’ reluctant migration to more viable economies.
My book expands the focus of traditional postindustrial narratives by considering the experiences of women and religious minorities and the effects of cultural erasure. I also hope my book contributes to ongoing discussions about post-industrialism, constructions of race and gender, and immigration put forth in other contemporary collections of Midwestern poetry.
While I hope my reader gains insights on these topics, a larger concern is that my ideal reader isn’t reading my work, perhaps isn’t reading poetry in general, and perhaps thinks poetry is elitist. To an extent, I agree with this reader — growing up, I was this reader. In his important 2016 LitHub essay “No One is Writing The Real West Virginia: Why Rural Lives and Literature are in Crisis,” Mathew Neil Null notes that literature is centralized on the coasts:
“The Big Five publishing houses are located within a few subway stops of each other in Manhattan; that rich island which represents 0.000887 percent of our country’s surface. This is not benign. Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?”
When I write, I’m thinking about this. I’m thinking of the local writers back home who are saying things too dangerous to publish. I’m thinking about the reader back home who will read my academic bio and automatically not trust me. I’m thinking about how I can be relevant and true to this reader’s experience. I strive for local accountability. I am lucky to work with a small, decentralized, independent publisher that understands my concerns, that understands small businesses, that understands that I’m not interested in sensationalizing my hometown for better sales. I hope to have my book launch in the parking lot of my family’s trucking motel.
AR: The final stanza in one poem, “The Motel Clerk’s Son Falls in Love While Buildings Fall,” features a poignant description of a midwestern town. You describe, “…a city where everything’s over, / where mothers yell at buildings to fall / already and stop complaining.” How would you analyze the deeper meaning of this stanza and how it connects to your collection overall regarding the Midwest?
APD: The line, as well as the collection, works against sentimentality. And celebrates language and impudence: the woman’s voice challenges gravity itself to hurry it up already.
This poem is from the first section of the book, which spans from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s: the collapse of industry in Youngstown and the years immediately following. My parent’s generation. In the poem, the lovers leave work at the motel and head to a rock show downtown. It’s Saturday night, they’re in love — they can’t be bothered. The generation before them can’t be bothered because many of them are the children of immigrants. The new city they came to is falling apart and they might have to uproot themselves and all they know? What’s new.
Ending a love poem with sarcasm is something I learned from the Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern — in a love poem to his wife, he produces perhaps the most romantic line in all of poetry: “You know precisely the kind of jerk [or schlimazel] I am.”
AR: Describe your ideal environment for writing. Do you have a certain place you write, a preferred medium (i.e. paper and pencil or computer), etc.?
APD: Fifteen years ago, only pencil and paper. Now, almost always on a computer. Mornings. Not at a desk. My work revolves around the seasons — since high school, I’ve saved my work in folders labeled “Spring,” Summer,” “Fall,” and “Winter.”
AR: You have described Line Study of a Motel Clerk as a collection “about losing, but losing in such a way that you end up preserving.” Can you expand a bit more on how you feel such opposite experiences can intertwine, especially in your collection?
APD: I said this in reference to my favorite poet, Charles Reznikoff. I think especially about his poem “Autobiography: Hollywood.” He’s living in California for work, and he notes that he prefers his home back in New York just as his father, no doubt, preferred his native Ukraine over New York. Both miss their homes, but in recalling their losses, Reznikoff commemorates the beloved places and reveals a bond between the generations: they long for place in the same manner, something no doubt influenced by millennia of Jews longing for Jerusalem. Loss is often communal — our families and communities teach us how to lose and how to hold on.
In my collection, I focus on what was lost across four generations of assimilation. One major loss was language — the oldest generation in my book mostly speaks Greek or Yiddish. Their children speak a mix, then my parent’s generation speak English with Greek and Yiddish markers, and then my generation can’t understand either language. I’m writing about the loss of my ancestral languages, but through writing about them, I’m preserving that line. And I’m preserving it in my own idiosyncratic, regional English. After all these years of teaching, I notice that I often use standard grammar and pronunciation even out of the classroom. I don’t recognize myself when I speak sometimes.
A significant portion of the book examines the intersections of Rust Belt culture and Jewish culture, and one thing both cultures have in common is this impulse to, at all costs, remember history and pass it down. I remember when I was about eight, and my class went to a field trip to the just-opened Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor (aka “the steel museum”), and later that week, my wonderful Hebrew school teacher, who had a number on her arm, taught us graphically about the Holocaust. Never forget Youngstown was once great! Never forget what happened to your Jewish ancestors! It was drilled in. Our job was to be receptacles for the loss, a position that, if refused, can result in tremendous guilt. I think contemporary Rust Belt writers and Jewish writers approach our responsibility with a compromise — sure, we’ll remember, but we’ll complicate the remembering with recollection of all of the topics that got swept under the rug.
AR: What draws you to poetry as opposed to other writing styles? Are there any challenges in portraying certain ideas to the reader in the limited (and structured) space of a poem?
APD: I write (and read) fiction and nonfiction as well. I didn’t grow up with much exposure to poetry, but my I come from a family of storytellers and songwriters. And Bob Dylan fanatics! We also went to synagogue — it was very powerful to sing in Hebrew and Aramaic, languages that I didn’t understand. Pure rhythm.
In composing this collection, my biggest challenge was incorporating background history into the space of the poem. I resolved this by having my characters interact with history rather than relegating it to backstory. I also struggled with organization. I ended up roughly organizing the book by generation, but originally, the organization was thematic — labor, place, assimilation, gender. I value character development in poems, and I think my final organization stresses that.
AR: In an earlier essay for The Missouri Review, you mention that you were “raised to prioritize family, labor, and heritage.” To some extent, this seems to be a categorically midwestern set of ideals. How do you feel Line Study of a Motel Clerk reflects these midwestern priorities?
APD: These priorities are reflected from the title onward — the book is about the familial line of a motel worker.
As I discussed in the question regarding literary depictions of the Midwest, I think the Midwest is too wide-ranging to narrow it down to a set of ideals — at least not a set of ideals that is historically exclusive to the Midwest. In the Rust Belt, as with other economically-depressed areas, people naturally glorify the time period when their cities were populated, jobs were plenty, and their families felt secure. Yet glorification is always problematic — one of my favorite contemporary poems is Rochelle Hurt’s “In the Century of Research,” which takes a sardonic look at Youngstown’s regional obsession with family history.
Of “work, family, and heritage,” heritage is the topic I try to complicate the most in the collection. In school, we were always creating posters about our cultural heritage. Northeast Ohio summers are full of nonstop festivals celebrating ethnic heritage. My generation grew up with a strong sense that our families were not originally from America, and I was shocked when I found out many Americans didn’t feel this way. It wasn’t until I read Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown and Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality that I got a historic explanation — in the late-19th -early 20th century Youngstown, immigrants crossed the Atlantic to work in the steel mills and black workers came north during the Great Migration. With this influx of workers, mill owners needed strategies to maintain control. One way they did this was by segregating mill work by ethnicity and race to discourage immigrant workers from learning English. This was important because a common language would encourage the formation of unions across ethnic and racial lines. Groups couldn’t talk to each other and remained suspicious of each other, so neighborhoods also divided down ethnic and racial lines. In addition, generations of a family often lived together out of economic necessity and tradition — for example, my mother grew up sharing a room with her grandmother from Greece. So I think assimilation slowed down because 1) assimilation was discouraged from the top down as a way of controlling workers by divide-and-rule, and 2) new immigrants were poor and stuck together in order to survive. One lasting result of industrial culture is that I was raised to be very Greek American and Jewish.
A political message in my book is directed against Americans who care about their immigrant ancestors but now support anti-immigration policies. A message is also directed against people who don’t support the civil rights of people of color yet bitch about how their own ancestors were discriminated against or not considered “white.” So many people have and are fighting for racial and economic justice in Youngstown — they’re my heroes, and I hope my book contributes to their legacy.
AR: How do you begin your writing process and where do you find inspiration in the event of writer’s block? Do you have any particular advice for aspiring authors?
APD: The best writing advice I ever got was from a Paris Review interview with Philip Levine: “I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able. Don’t kiss anyone’s ass.”
His interview collections Don’t Ask and So Ask are invaluable to me — his outrage and humor. I was introduced to his work by his student and my teacher, Kathy Fagan Grandinetti.
More advice for aspiring authors: don’t feel like the only way to be a writer is to get an MFA. Or enter expensive poetry contests or attend expensive conferences. Getting an MFA is great, but there are so many wonderful, affordable community and online writing groups. Back home, Lit Youngstown, Pig Iron Press, Wick Poetry Center Outreach, and others are giving writers a place to share their work. Affordable, local, accessible, non-academic writing groups and publishers are vital for the health of American writing.
AR: What’s next for you?
APD: I just finished a novella, and I’m working on my second collection of poetry. Both are set in the Youngstown area and focus on women workers. The novella is narrated by a woman who works in a factory in the late 1970s and suddenly has to make a decision that might bring her happiness but hurt her family. I promised my mom I’d try to write a funny book, but this one unfortunately wasn’t it. The poems are about a group of opinionated girls who work at a Dairy Queen and are obsessed with an elusive Youngstown meteorologist. It’s a little sci-fi and way more lyric and voice-driven than the poems in the forthcoming book.
I’ve been warned that if I keep writing about the Youngstown area I’ll become a “regionalist,” but northeast Ohio is a universe. I could write about it my entire life and still not say all there is to say about it.
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Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of the chapbook Poppy Seeds (KSU Press, 2013) and the forthcoming collection Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017). She received an MFA from Ohio State and fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poem “The Heart of It All + A Free Beer” was selected for Best American Poetry 2016.
February 24th, 2017 |
Midwestern Gothic staffer Kristina Perkins talked with author Katie Chase about her collection Man and Wife, the puzzle-like short story, exaggerated realities and more.
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Kristina Perkins: What is your connection to the Midwest?
Katie Chase: It’s home. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and after graduating from the University of Michigan, lived in Chicago for a few years. Then I was in Iowa City, for my MFA and a while after. It wasn’t until the year that I turned thirty that I left for the West coast, which wasn’t exactly specifically selected, though I was interested in having the experience of living elsewhere. My parents are still in my childhood home, and I visit at least once a year and sometimes entertain coming back.
KP: You’ve lived in Portland, Oregon for the past six years. What is it like being a Midwesterner in Oregon? How has your understanding of the Midwest shifted overtime?
KC: I find myself drawn to a lot of other Midwesterners! There are plenty of us out here. Over time my sense of the Midwest as a region has become both more nuanced and more distinct. At the same time that I’m quick to go on the defensive against the common heartland/flyover-state stereotypes when I encounter them, I have become more cognizant of certain underlying shared traits that give me a great deal of comfort to come into contact with. Generally, where I live now feels much softer to me, in a way that the Midwest I knew never seemed and that I am skeptical of and resistant to.
KP: How has your relationship with the Midwest — and, specifically, Detroit — influenced your writing? In what ways do the stories in your debut book, Man and Wife, reflect this relationship?
KC: A lot of what I try to capture in Man and Wife has to do with that childhood experience of opening your eyes to the wider world, that disorientation of realizing that what you have taken for granted as normal is not necessarily so, nor is it all that meets the eye; there is a darker side, and there are other ways. The forces that shaped Detroit and its suburbs tell a complicated story about our country; as a city it’s tremendously unique, and might seem to some strange, yet it’s also in some sense America writ large. I’m absolutely interested in trying to get at that larger story in my work.
KP: What about short story writing do you find most compelling? What does the space of the short story offer that other forms of writing do not? What challenges accompany that space?
KC: Not that I’m into actual puzzles, but what I love about short stories is that they are puzzlelike: I love that moment when the full picture begins to coalesce, I can start to see it whole, and the process becomes one of fitting in all the right-looking pieces within a confined space. With short stories, I can do all the things I love in writing: pursue an idea, develop a voice and an approach, create a mood and a world, and I can then move on; I don’t have to live there. The kind of premises I’ve been drawn to tend to do better in the short story form; in the longer, their impact might become more diluted, and with more space comes more pressure for explanation and backstory, which I’m not necessarily interested in providing. And I’m more interested in targeting those moments that life shifts for a character than in chronicling the fallout. In a short story, everything has to happen faster and more succinctly, which does mean that those twenty or so pages can take much longer to write than some other kind of twenty pages, and that I’m often in between stories, waiting for the next one to be ready.
KP: Your title story, “Man and Wife,” won a Pushcart Prize and was chosen for the Best American Short Stories anthology in 2008. How did this recognition affect your approach in putting together your first full collection — if at all?
KC: That recognition opened some doors and made it seem more possible to even pursue getting a collection published. It actually led first to an earlier collection that was more on the nose in terms of a unifying theme and was not published. Probably, it created some urgency to put one together before my material was really ready. This collection is more cohesive in voice, tone, and approach, but looser in its conceptions. That story is still the heart of the collection and what made the others in it creatively possible, but, ten years later and working with an independent press, I wasn’t really thinking about the commercial aspects and expectations that such recognition can be tied to.
KP: In Man and Wife, you write within a series of distorted, yet eerily familiar, alternative realities. In a recent interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting you discussed your approach to this surrealism, explaining that you purposefully “exaggerate a phenomenon [you] see as already existing” and “make it bigger, louder, and more literal.” Within these exaggerated realities, how do you navigate the relationship between the literal and the symbolic? How does humor inform this relationship?
KC: I try to treat these realities as matter-of-factly as I can, ground them in as much detail as seems necessary, so that they don’t feel merely symbolic or allegorical — though they always will to some extent. Much of my humor, in life and on the page, is conducted with a straight face (sometimes I know no better than someone else when I am being completely sincere and when ironic). I think humor is inherent in exaggeration, though so is horror, and once a premise is in place those effects will happen naturally in attending to the sentence level. To get specific with an example, in “Creation Story,” a struggling, Detroit-like city is being demolished — not just its abandoned buildings, not just to “right-size” it to something denser, but in entirety. I think the conversation of how (or whether) “to save the city” has turned, but anyone who’s followed it will know there was a time when that “solution,” to completely level it and start over, would be casually proposed as a half joke. And taken with the history of clearing “slums” for “revitalization,” taken with the idea that Detroit or any city could ever or should ever be treated by young artists or anyone as a blank slate, without a complex history, that joke, like any joke, is revealed as dealing in some uncomfortable actualities. (*steps off soapbox*)
KP: Who is your favorite contemporary author, and how have they influenced your style?
KC: If I have to pick a single favorite, it would be Alice Munro, but I wouldn’t say she has influenced my style. She has influenced my subject, as she is so unabashedly concerned with the female experience, and a certain type of female at that. I admire that, and her dedication to the short story, and how she seemingly ceaselessly mines to great success the same territory, both in terms of setting and in situation and character. For style, I would point more to people like Kevin Brockmeier, Judy Budnitz, and George Saunders, who work more imaginatively at the intersections of genre.
KP: What’s one thing you wish you had known when you first began writing?
KC: All the things I heard have turned out to be true, that it’s a difficult path requiring grit and discipline and patience and luck as much as talent and passion and won’t make you much, if any, money. I do wish I had taken more seriously the necessity of establishing a concurrent career/more enjoyable, reliable way to make rent, but there’s still time for that and I don’t really regret the focus and experiences that ignoring that necessity has allowed me.
KP: What’s next for you?
KC: I will keep writing! I have hopes that the universe would allow me a second collection of stories and also that I might find myself writing something that turns out to require the longer form. Mostly, because I want to give myself new challenges and not simply repeat what has worked well enough in the past, I’m allowing myself to play around — have flings, rather than too quickly declare a commitment to a specific project.
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Katie Chase is the author of the story collection Man and Wife (A Strange Object). Her fiction has appeared in such publications as the Missouri Review, Narrative, ZYZZYVA, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, and the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was the recipient of a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, a Provost’s Postgraduate Writing Fellowship, and a Michener-Copernicus Award. She has also been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University. Born and raised outside Detroit, Michigan, she lives currently in Portland, Oregon.
February 23rd, 2017 |
