The Short Review is running a review on Now Playing and an interview with Shellie Zacharia:

Review: http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/ShellieZachariaNowPlaying.htm
Interview: http://www.theshortreview.com/authors/ShellieZacharia.htm

William Walsh's Questionstruck is also available for $4.99, via Smashwords, which offers formats for various e-reading devices. You can buy it here. You can buy for the Kindle by downloading the HTML file and emailing it to your Kindle, and it will also be available in the Amazon store soon.

1.
Scorch Atlas

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Blake. Thanks for doing this. What would you like to say, right off the bat, about Scorch Atlas?

BLAKE BUTLER: I would like to say that the first thing I wanted to do when I had the book in my hands is eat it. So I am going to. My plan is to eat one page of the book every day or thereabouts until it is all gone. Page by page, with sauces, maybe some candles. A bubble bath. When I am done maybe I will start with a second copy, if I'm still hungry. I am always very hungry. This book had been a long time coming in a way, and so now that it is here I just want it back inside me. I mean that in the best way.

MG: What would it mean to be "back inside" you, not literally?

BB: It would mean that now that it is an object and having removed itself from me it is a picture of my brain and shit and mindstate of that period, if not fully even back then controlled by me. It would mean that having seen the thing come out of me I would have as just as much relationship with it existing if I were (and am) to eat it and have it come through in my flesh, but even then it would shit right back out of me again if not quite resembling what it did the first time. At least then it would be a thing I could fully wipe away. All of this said I am very happy with the object as an object and my relationship with it is the same as it would be with my bed, which is equally to me known and unknown, ruined and not ruined, soft and full of bugs.

MG: There are some videos of you actually eating your book; the first page you eat raw, and the second you drowned in ketchup. I believe you've eaten a few more, though the videos aren't up yet. So far, which pages have been the tastiest? Do you have ideas for future recipes?
BB: The tastiest was the most difficult one, which was the first. The very first page in the book is pure black on both sides, all ink. I didn't think about it when I started with that one. I didn't think about water making it easier either, so choking was involved. It was pretty good to taste that way. Since then I've gotten lazy. I've done some more but yeah, none have made it matching with that first black mass. I'd like to make one with a fruit cocktail and a tube of icing. I'd like to wrap some inside veal saltimboca and maybe one with human flesh fritters (I really do want to try human). When I get serious I'll just take a straight up bite out of the book and break my teeth.

MG: Tell us about the design. It is a beautiful book--perhaps what I consider the most beautiful book on my shelf. Usually, one wouldn't think that things of beauty should be destroyed, but in this case it makes perfect sense. Why?

BB: That's all Zach Dodson. I'm still amazed by what he did. I had high hopes for the way this object would appear when it was finished, and he far exceeded those hopes. I've really never seen another book that looks like this one, and that is a blessing I can only continue to be thankful for. Each page in the book has a unique texture to it, handmade and scanned in. I feel grateful that even if the words in the book were shit, one could still sit and stare at this book and see something in it. It's like batting with a quadrupled sized bat.

We wanted to destroy these books because they were designed to look as if they'd suffered through their contents, the rains and bugs and bloated babies and weird fire. It seems interesting that the books themselves appear destroyed in their freshly-printed state, and in going on and destroying them physically, they really take on that aura in full. If bookstores would stock books that were bloated triple sized with slick water and covered in dust and burned some and smelling of rot, they would all be like that, I imagine. I like the feeling of something that's been beat. Some of the books I most remember in my life are ones I snuck wet out of ruined houses. One year when my friend's neighbor's house burned down, there was a bag of books out on the lawn. I fished a picture book out of the pile that had a shot of a nude woman on it. I had never owned a picture of a naked body. The book was covered in bugs and mottled and made mushy. I took it home. I think I hid it underneath some junk deep in my closet, and I would take it out and look at the woman's hair and I would sweat.

MG: Without giving too much away, I love how your DIAGRAM piece functions, spatially, in this collection. This is an odd comparison, but I was reminded of the intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. I'm not sure I've encountered the structuring device in many other books. What led to that decision? Or, which came first: the DIAGRAM piece or the idea for Scorch Atlas?

BB: The layering of the storms from the DIAGRAM piece actually came about as a design element, thought up by Zach. His idea was to put one of the storms before each story so that the story itself could then be designed to look as if it had suffered through that storm. Though we ended up keeping that idea contained to the paper that the storms appear on, rather than throughout the book, but the effect I think was even more provocative in how it played out as an intermediary for the mood of the whole book. Because of the nature of that piece, as a series of storms that continually worsen in breadth and horror, it really for me added a sense of continuity and gradation that brought the book together that much more as an object than if the storms had appeared as the singular story, as it was in my original manuscript. I am really lucky that I had Zach and Jonathan on this project, as it was ideas like that that really took the book as a whole to a whole new level, beyond what I'd even imagined for it during its becoming.

As for which came first, I didn't really intended to write Scorch Atlas as a book as it was going on. I simply was pounding out these stories, one after another, and only after I'd finished them all, the DIAGRAM one included, did I realize I had a full on manuscript. I think the only story written after I had assembled the book is 'Want for Wish for Nowhere,' which oddly might be my favorite in the book.

MG: I often ask writers to name their own favorite pieces, and many kindly refuse. Why is "Want for Wish for Nowhere" your favorite? And why did you write "oddly"?

BB: Yeah, having a favorite seems hard, and kind of stodgy. I probably change my opinions on how I feel about certain bits regularly, based on the way the mind changes and like if I happen to open the book and be in a bad mood and see it shitty, or find some error in how I'd phrased it, how I'd do it differently now. I kind of don't like reading things in print I've made as I always want to edit them some more, which is less a result of not having edited it fully in the first place, and more of how flesh morphs the more you eat and listen. Then there's the problem of going back and editing something you made a while back and then coming back even later and finding the edits you made ruined the original voice. I like concentrated phases of writing, concise eras: it's got more value to me than the constantly affirmed 'love labor' of writing something over years and years. Why not get a picture of yourself in a moment? You have a lot more time to get old.

I realize none of that answered your question, which points to that favorites are fucked.

MG: Do you have a least favorite from the collection? Why or why not?

BB: Everything I write is my favorite and least favorite. I don't think about it past that. Thinking too hard about one's own writing as a mantle is asking to be shit on in the hair.

MG: I think Matt Bell and I are agreed that "The Gown from Mother's Stomach" is our favorite. Have you received much feedback on this story? I'd be interested to hear some of it, if you'll share.

BB: That tends to be the one I hear the most about, which kind of confuses me, honestly. I shat that story out in a few hours. Actually, I wrote the first sentence down on a scrap while I was asleep once, and found it, and sat down and wrote the first half of the story from it in about 45 minutes. Then that sat on my hard drive for about 4 months, and I came back and added the bit about the bear, then added the second half, about another 45 minutes. Then I edited it a few times. I think people like it because it seems to me the most contained. I'm not sure what else it is about the story that people respond to any more than the others, but I am glad people like it. Maybe it also kind of comments on how sometimes the least amount of work you put into something, the quicker it comes out as it is supposed to be, the more aura it has about it, and the more immediate light, maybe. I don't hate the story, but if I had to go back to the above question, it might be my least favorite now simply because I am a contrarian.

MG: I feel compelled to share with you that I'm teaching Scorch Atlas in a sophomore-level Introduction to Literature course. I've learned that in this setting, as opposed to a creative writing workshop, it is absolutely necessary to facilitate the students' discussion. To this end, I've given them handouts on plot, character, setting, tone, style, etc., and I was really pleased to discover that your book really works alongside these sort of generic questions (e.g. Who is the protagonist? What does s/he want? How does this complicate the plot?). How do you respond to this--the idea that your writing, which I think is so stylistically brilliant, also satisfies, or fits into, these rather traditional constraints? (If the stories didn't do so, I think my students would be absolutely lost. I, and they, are grateful!)

BB: That is nice, that they respond well. I think everything has these elements. Even the most obscurist, language-oriented, symbol-laden text you could conjure would have these things in them, particularly if you are scrounging for them. Story architects itself. This is why I find it amusing when people, as authors, are so concerned about roadmapping these kinds of elements during the creation period, as if it has to be something they set up and intone, like some kind of wizard, instead of just letting it generate itself naturally, out of ideas, the way most days do, in life. I don't understand, or rather, don't buy, the notion that any one person can be so in tune and ahead of every reader that he or she must design and present these elements, however covertly, to their audience. It cheapens the fun, and you can smell it usually a hundred pages away, this kind of furtive bending, implanting. "This story has fake tits!" There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, I'm sure, but I'd rather not know about them. Let the magic be the magic.

MG: One of my academic interests is ecocriticism: the study of literature and the environment. Do you consider Scorch Atlas to have an investment in fate of the natural world? To what extent are the characters responsible for the downfall of their habitat?

BB: Honestly I've never been much of a nature person. I hide inside a lot. The dirt and air confuse me. Maybe I'm a bitch. I like clean pants. More than that, I think I am afraid of water and of mud. I am afraid of being ripped up into something. At the same time, I am fascinated by it. A lot of my natural interaction comes from dreaming: the way that water and mud is embedded in my blood.

I wouldn't say particularly that the characters in Scorch Atlas are 'responsible' for the destruction of their surroundings any more than they are responsible for the destruction of any other element in air. Rot is natural. People are rotting. It breeds itself. It's what comes. You can be as clean and progressive and protective as you want. Still. It does.

2.
The Internet and Year of the Liquidator

MG: What is your relationship to the Internet and what was your introduction to online writing?

BB: My relationship to the internet is when my house's computer started being able to talk to buildings outside of our building I began to masturbate using information that those other places would sent to our house's computer. I am from the BBS land where I would use dial up to make my mother's phoneline interact with adult servers so I could see women remove their clothes. Now the nudity on the internet is so clear you don't need to look at it anymore.

My introduction to online writing was with what I think of as the first wave of strong independent publishing personas, including Eyeshot, Pindeldyboz, Haypenny, the Glut, McSweeney's, and some other places. Part of me misses the days when that community was very small like that and yet seemed larger than it is now, as large as it is now. Without finding that, I might be still using computers to talk to other computers but they would talk about machine languages and databases. Jesus christ.

MG: Do you believe in Internet personas? Or do you think people are as they really are? Who are some of your favorite Internet presences?

BB: I do not believe in internet personas, I believe in personas. I don't think people are what they really are. I do not believe people believe in their personas. I do not believe people are personas. I believe people are a mash of things mostly shit and a little bit of tickle and some candy if they are good people and I guess a little light. My favorite internet presence is Lorf Ben Undwadsensen who lives inside a subnet of Google and delivers the mail with his teeth.

MG: From personal experience I can say that you are very generous with your time. I had stumbled upon an issue of Ninth Letter, read your story "The Gown from Mother's Stomach," loved it, pulled up your blog, sent you fan mail, and you responded! And it was your blog that introduced me to online journals. I read your stories, I stayed at those sites, I read others' stories. A world unfolded. I've always wanted to thank you for that. If not for you, there wouldn't be me. Such a strange thing to say, but I know it's true. Do you feel an obligation toward other writers? Or, why are you so nice?

BB: It's not that I am nice. I am not nice really. I just really do enjoy words, and I get such pleasure out of words that I want to see more words and I want to do what I can to extend the pleasure I receive in the form of words to other people who also have the receptors for that pleasure and who have the same want in them to make words that I do. I get a bigger kick I think out of publishing and hyping other people's work than I do spreading my own. Ultimately though it is about the reflex and the condition and I exist inside that condition more than I exist anywhere else, and so it is very natural for me to breathe and eat inside and around it, it is a thing I could not change if I wanted to. Not nice, a blood obligation. It is nice though maybe that it seems nice because that maybe means that it feels true what I am saying and I am not just a mouth.

MG: Tell us about Year of the Liquidator. I think we're all interested in the long version.

BB: I'd always wanted to start a small book press. It was a matter of inevitablility. I think I get more pleasure out of working with other people's ends than my own, outside the hemisphere of just writing. I was just waiting for the right time. When I found Kristina, I knew immediately her book had to be the beginning. Shane and I had thrown the idea of working together around for a long while, and when I sent him K's manuscript, he had the same reaction: this is the one. So we committed to it, and the commitment pressed the birth. I am really excited about the prospect, and hope that things go smoothly enough that we can do a couple of titles a year. We are approaching it very calmly, and yet with great excitement, as we want it to go exactly right, to be a small, good thing that has an aura, and in the tradition of my favorite small presses: making book objects that might not appear anywhere else.

Not sure yet what we will do after the first book is finished. We're kind of waiting to see how things go, and moving from there. Hopefully one day we can read submissions openly, but for now we're moving one nidge at a time, and there's already so much I want to do. Time is hard.

3.
The Book Deals

MG: It's no secret by now that you've landed yourself a two-book deal with Harper Perennial. How far along are you in these two manuscripts? And do publishing companies often sign deals for unfinished books?

BB: The novel is finished, other than minor tinkering and copy edits, and has been for some time. The deal was initiated around the novel, and the addition of the second book, which came up in discussing the contracts, was sold on a proposal for the idea of the book. I think
that's pretty standard, actually. I've heard of many deals where the second book was on spec. And especially for nonfiction, which is often I think sold on proposal. As for how far along the nonfiction is, I started work on it a couple of weeks ago, and it is coming very fluidly. It's a book I've had in me for a long time. I feel excited for it.

MG: You now have an agent and a major publishing company behind you, which I'm sure includes a publicity department and such--possibly even eventual tour money. Does this relieve you of any burdens? Do you feel you have more time to write?

BB: I haven't gotten too deep into feeling how it feels to be with a major house. So far it's been as good as I could ask. My editor, Cal Morgan, is wicked smart and knows what he's doing. I've felt nothing but encouraged in my vision, as surprising as it might be for such an odd book at a big house. I think Harper Perennial is really interested in pushing boundaries and getting new, interesting books out there. I feel blessed and excited to be a part of that. Still not sure about publicity matters, or touring support, etc., but that's always been a backseat concern for me. I'm just happy to have a wonderful publisher for the books, one that will surely help me get my work to a larger audience, I believe, without compromising its essence in the slightest.

As for having more time to write, I've always had a lot of time. I make it my priority, and my freelance jobs have allowed me a great deal of fluidity. I'm lucky in that regard, that I've been able to maintain such a loose schedule for moneymaking around what I really love. Everyone should look into freelance writing online: there's just so many ways to make a moderate amount of money that clears your work week enough that you can write from home. It's much easier than it seems.

MG: What, if anything, is different?

BB: Well, for one, writing a book that has been already sold feels interesting. I've certainly never done something like that before, and while at first I was afraid it might feel weird having that looming, it's actually been very freeing. I've always worked best with deadlines and schedules, and if anything it really is motivating me even more to be focused and rigorous and push myself to make something wild and good. It's been especially nice in that up until a few months ago I felt like I'd wasted a lot of this year spinning wheels and slightly off-focused. I'm getting more done on the actual work than I have all year. Things feel strong.

MG: Your non-fiction is about insomnia. Is it about your insomnia?

BB: It is about my insomnia, and insomnia in general, and also about obsession, and obsessing, which I believe has been the cause of a lot of my sleep trouble since I was very young. It is also about tunnels and masturbating and weird light and encryption and video games and film and fear.

MG: When did your insomnia begin? Is it constant or does it come and go? Any relationship to your creative output?

BB: It is a thing that has been inside me since before I was born and is still inside me now even though I sleep rather well most nights, this year. It had been unrelenting in the insomaniac form through various periods of my early childhood and especially in my midteens to late twenties, if studded in different places by errors in speech or moving or other brainwaves. It has an influence on creative output in that it is all through me at every moment and when I can control it best I am at my best, and when I can not control it it makes me feeble, but it is always in my flesh and I am always breathing it and without it I would not exist. In all of this I mean insomnia as an understanding more than simply the medical condition of not being able to sleep. I'm pretty deep in the midst of all this thinking right now as I am writing a full length text about the condition.

MG: What can you share about the fiction manuscript?

BB: It's a full length novel in segmented scenes about a family who comes to live inside a new house and finds copies of themselves already there. There is also a black box on their new neighbors' lawn that continues to grow in size. There are strangers who come to the house to visit wearing gloves. I think I thought of it as a novel in a David Lynch kind of mind while I was writing it, though it might feel totally different than that overall. It is also about consumption, young death, sleep action, tunnels, creation, weird light, haunting, disease, and death. It is a book I have been trying to get out of me for years and years now, and feels like the best thing I've ever written. I hope people like it.

4.
Who is Blake Butler?

MG: Take a look around. Describe something about where you are, right now, that you haven't really noticed before.

BB: There are patches of weird sparse hair on the skin below the knuckle of my pointer and middle fingers of both hands, but not on the other fingers or the thumbs. As much as I see my hands, I'd never seen that until you asked. I can almost count the follicles. Is it true that each hair is held into your body by little microscopic insects? Did I make that up or is that common knowledge? Those four fingers are the fingers I type most with. Maybe those insects wrote this book. If not, they should have. I'll say they did.

MG: Tell us about Blake Butler as a kid. And as an adolescent? A high schooler? College boy? And now?

BB: I think I've always been the same person. People too highly rate the idea of mental change. I feel like the melding of an 8 year old and and an 80 year old, in a body of whatever age I am at any time. If I could have changed I probably would have done so by now. I will probably spend the rest of my life saying the same thing. I will get older. I will eat more. Hopefully I will go deaf.

MG: That seems an odd thing to say. You tend to be full of odd things to say. What are some of the oddest things you've ever said? (Maybe not odd to you, but odd to anyone listening in.)

BB: What's the oddest thing I've said. I durno, man. Send me a tape recorder, I'll give you hours of what I say inside my sleep.

MG: Where do you see yourself a year from now? Five years? Twenty-five?

BB: Hopefully I will go deaf. Other than that, I don't see myself anywhere, even tomorrow. I don't mean that morbidly, I mean that I don't know and I don't want to know. If I knew where I was going to be, even if I loved where that was, I would probably do everything I could to make that not occur. Again, I am a contrarian by nature, and yet when mostly around strangers I give in to others' wills. The more I love a person the more mean I am to them often, I fear. A lot of the time I just want every day to be even more exactly the same as every other day than it already feels they are. What am I talking about? I have no idea.

MG: What are you talking about? I have no idea.

BB: Glorbbenbit pu-sis londum difdong, queebibbit andit ressmonblerrib.

MG: Do you have any pets? If not, why not? If so, what do you call them/it?

BB: I'm not good at pets, I get bored, impatient. The same reason I'll likely never have kids. My one true love as a pet is my Margot, a chihuahua, who now lives with my ex-girlfriend who gifted her to me. I miss my Margot.

MG: How about some more favorites? Favorite liquid?

BB: Urine while it's coming out. Coffee in my mouth.

MG: Favorite vowel?

BB: o

MG: Favorite consonant?

BB: b

MG: Favorite air?

BB: Whatever air is inside my mother at any minute.

MG: Favorite human shape?

BB: Pleased

MG: Favorite sound?

BB: No sound

MG: Favorite hue?

BB: Black or fire engine red

MG: Favorite digestable?

BB: Money

MG: Favorite texture?

BB: Beckett

MG: Favorite shelter?

BB: No sound

MG: Favorite "recipe" of "ingredients" [that make up anything]?

BB: Masturbate in the shower until you are about to come then stop. Go wet into the bedroom
and wrap yourself in a bedsheet, constricting just your arms and head. Lay down in the floor for 45 minutes.

MG: Is there a single book you've read more than any other?

BB: I used to read Donald Barthelme's Snow White once a year. So like 8 times of that, but I haven't read it the past couple years. In terms of quantitative time spent with one book in hand it might be Infinite Jest, the book that made me want to work. I have read that book through fully twice and in bits and pieces many times and certain sections of it more times than I have read Snow White in full. In my mind I've been reading the same sentence in the same book for my entire life but it's been a whole life figuring out what that sentence is and I still haven't got it right.

MG: If you could have any combination of three superpowers, what would they be, and why that particular combination?

BB: I would like to cry money; I would like to be able to turn off sound and turn on sound, and make the sound into what I want the sound to be; I would like to be able to shrink people and grow people and throw people in the air largely and touch them and make them laugh. That particularly combination because it's the sounds that just came out of my hands when I did not think at all about the question, which is my greatest respect for the question.

________________

~

We made a game out of telling each other stories and the only way to win the game was to end it by saying: …then you realized you were on another planet. I like games like that. I just wish I could have been more clear about the shape of us reflected in the black of the TV that wasn’t on. I just wanted you to know how slow everything moved in there. Like tar all over you. Like what you only kind of hear when you sleep outside.

~

Bitch, they say, is a good word for the dog-red gums of the sky. I say bitch when there is some static in the air. We go whirling in it. And I just feel so bad like sinking my teeth into something really soft but hard enough to take it.

~

I hear it most in the getting-up. My life talking on the other end of sleep. How it boils over into a slow mess in the window’s sun. How the sun coming in here is coming in different than it would anywhere else in the world. Its bubbling up in front of me. Rising like I don’t know what. And the worst of it being the I don’t know what of it. Because I just really don’t know.

~

So you’re driving and driving and driving. And it’s a long road. And there’s no one on it. And it’s the middle of the night. And you’re driving and driving and driving. And then, all of a sudden…

~

And I just want to say that my morning song is better than yours. I want you to hear it buzzing in me like an old radiator. I want you to do what you’ve done before. To press your ear against the skin and listen for the static.

~

I go. Gone being accounted for. Because even as I sit here I am gone. But going is here. I see it across the room like a shadow I haven’t made yet. One that stretches like yet. Yet like a mouth inside a mouth that runs its teeth against its teeth. I grind my teeth on their other set. Which means there must be a word behind my every word. Because a mouth with two sets of teeth must have two tongues.

~

What I mean is that the closer you get the harder it is to see. And its so hard to see when you draw me near.

~

I had a toy. He was an action figure with a red beard. I liked him so much that my mom bought me two of him. So how can I account for the fact that one of them is missing both his legs and the other is fine? Why is it I lost the one with legs but the one without is still in my dresser drawer?

~

All quantification is justification. Just wait and see when it adds up.

~

There was a picture of you and that picture hurt me more than anything can say. Even though the picture didn’t do anything. It didn’t move. It was just standing all in lipstick in an apartment but it hurt me. It hurt me because it was young. It hurt me because it had never even thought to think of me.

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Amelia, thanks for agreeing to be a part of the Writers Respond family. You might notice that instead of "interview" up there in the title, we have "conversation" instead. Essentially, the Writers Respond interviews and the Writers Respond conversations aim to serve the same purpose: to give writers a chance to talk a bit about their work. But not long ago I realized I preferred the interviews that got a little goofy, the ones that took risks in terms of what "should" or "should not" go into an interview. For instance, Shane Jones shared his favorite sexual position in his interview, and Kyle Beachy, in his interview, admitted he doesn't understand the difference between cupcakes and muffins. To differentiate the serious from the fun, I decided to start an offshoot--a conversation series. The first of the conversations was with Lily Hoang, who, like you, has ties to FC2, and we'll certainly get to that in just second. First, I want to ask you if you would define "interview" and "conversation" differently? And if so, would you rather this be an interview or a conversation?

AMELIA GRAY: Let's get silly as quickly as we can, Molly. Do you remember when you tried to pick a single flower at that gas station in Philadelphia, but you pulled out the whole plant? That was silly. I treasured that. Anyway, they say the best interviews are like conversations. I think we should aspire to do the best we can.

MG: I like how you ask if I remember--as if to imply I might have been so intoxicated (by your presence in Philly, of course) that I could have forgotten. Well, in fact, I had forgotten. Until slowly the details all began to trickle back, many with the help of the photographs in my cell, and those that popped up on the Dollar $tore Reading Tour Twitter page!

AG: The Twitter page that launched a thousand ships. Best to make a scene among friends, I think. That long walk to the cheesesteak place was good for all of us. Don't ever show me on a map how far we actually walked--I want to keep the memory that we were going for forty days and forty nights.

MG: It was more than three miles, I can tell you that much. So, tell us about the tour. What did the tour van smell like?

AG: I will tell a story from the Featherproof tour. We were in New York City, and mostly everyone had gone out to drink more after the reading. Jac and I stayed behind and slept, and I woke up at about six in the morning. Our host was house-sitting and had kindly opted for the couch, so I found myself in this bed in a very bright room with the windows open, and the entire city of New York doing construction below. I got up and stepped over everyone sleeping on the floor and went downstairs. I walked a long way and got lost. I found myself at a scary little nail salon, where I paid a man five dollars to wax my eyebrows while yelling at his wife. I walked back and everyone was still asleep. I had to wake Mary up to let me in. I felt bad about that, but the truth was I wanted to wake everyone up to tell them about the hooked plastic fingers with fake nails at the salon, the back room with a wet vac where I sat on a folding chair and put my face in the man's hands. I wanted to bring my friends coffee and pastries and do their laundry while I told them about how the man's wife showed me the open sores on her arms. Anyway, that van straight up smelled like a butt.

MG: Ha ha. A butt! Wow. (Wait a sec: your host was housesitting? So some poor people left their home in the care of someone who decided to let a bunch of butt-van travelers in?

AG: It's true. By then, though, we were so used to traveling that we didn't leave a trace. There's an efficiency involved when your home is the half-foot radius around your sleeping bag. Ask Shane Jones how fast we got up and left in Albany. It was five in the morning and we did it all in our sleep. The man barely had time to make a pot of coffee.)

MG: Tell me about the eyebrow waxing? Aren't you afraid to have that done? That some weird man will rip off your entire eyebrow?

AG: I usually do it myself, so I know how easy it is, but I ought to have been more afraid of that man. I often find myself in situations like that, where I should have apologized, said I thought that this was a public restroom, wished them a good day on my way out. I'm too stubborn. Plus I figured I'd get a good story.

MG: I love how your answers are perfect little stories within themselves. In fact, your brief recap of that experience is representative of much of your writing--you are a storyteller, and the stories you tell do not need a gazillion words to get the emotion across. I especially like the line (can I call it a line?): "I felt bad about that, but the truth was I wanted to wake everyone up to tell them about the hooked plastic fingers with fake nails at the salon, the back room with a wet vac where I sat on a folding chair and put my face in the man's hands." It's just gorgeous. It's "Amelia Gray" all over. Let me ask: Do you ever pull from real-life events and craft fictions?

AG: Sometimes little elements of real life get into the fiction, but in funny ways. There was a girl covered in seeds in AM/PM, which came from the morning my little eye pillow broke and put a couple of sesame seeds on the bed and I wondered, half-asleep, what would it be like to sleep in a vat of sesame seeds? Would that be nice? Probably it would be slippery.

MG: You know those stress relievers? One of my profs had one and one day it broke, and these tiny little silicon beads (the size of sesame seeds) exploded all over the room. They were soooo slippery. And because they were so slippery we couldn't sweep them up. Basically, for a long time we just had to be really careful how we walked in that room.

AG: How stressful!

MG: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to dive into a swimming pool filled with Jell-O? If so, what flavor?

AG: I've never wondered that. Christ, wouldn't you just sink down to the bottom, helpless? Would it be like quicksand? Maybe I'm thinking of pudding. I'd try it in cherry Jell-O but only if you tried it with me, Molly. And only if we had a crew of emergency medical technicians and lifeguards to haul us out and flush the gelatin from our lungs.

MG: One day, when we have the means to arrange such an idiotic experiment, yes, we will do this. But let's go back just a second: perhaps a few details will make their way into future fictions, but would you ever try and write your New York eyebrow-waxing adventure as a non-fiction? Or is it better to let it exist just as it was--a strange morning in a strange city populated with strange people?

AG: I made a piece of toast while I thought about this: I think I'd have a hard time writing a non-fiction that involved people I know or care about. It occurs to me that I picked one of the few tour stories where I'm walking around by myself. It seems that people like to be thought about and written about, but they don't like to seem strange or uncomfortable, and that's sort of my bread and butter. No pun intended, breakfast.

2.

AM/PM

MG: I just realized we have the same last initial. Looking at "AG" and "MG," I thought, "Aggie and Maggie," and then "Harold and Maude," and then "Benny and Joon." What is your favorite "______ and ______" pairing?

AG: Bonnie and Clyde. I've been getting the facts on Bonnie and Clyde this week.

MG: Good answer. Can you share why you're fact-gathering?

AG: There's no purpose at the moment. I get into fact-gathering. I made the mistake of watching Warren Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde on my computer. I couldn't get through it without researching every little question I had: Is that guy in the background drawn from real life? Did this scene really happen? Where are they buried? What book is Beyoncé reading in the empty swimming pool in the video for 'Bonnie and Clyde '03'? I can really take all the magic out of watching a movie.

MG: Tell us about the John Mayer concert T-shirt. Do you have one? (For those who do not understand this reference, would you provide a little recap?)

AG: I had an Alan Jackson concert T-shirt, which I bought at Goodwill because it looked like his head was floating on the front, and on the back it read DON'T ROCK THE JUKEBOX. It was cool. I don't know where it is now. I might have given it to my sister. It ended up becoming a John Mayer Concert Tee in AM/PM because I have more complicated feelings towards John Mayer and his merchandise: in my mind, the John Mayer Concert Tee looks like one of those Phantom of the Opera shirts kids wear at a performing arts middle school, but instead of the mask, it's John Mayer's face.

MG: What are five things (other than the T) in AM/PM that have some real-life significance for you? Or, hell, fantasy-life significance? Whichever you prefer.

AG: While writing AM/PM, 1) I was drinking a lot of flaxseed oil, 2) I went on a date with a guy whose parents had just survived a plane crash, 3) I had just moved into a place with serious squirrel nesting troubles, 4) My cats had worms, and 5) I observed a gas station setting on fire while I was waiting in line for the pump.

MG: Is there a particular character from AM/PM that you feel most connected to? If yes, who and why? If no, why not?

AG: Not really. One of my goals in writing the book was to create characters that, good or bad, were each an accurate depiction of some believable element of person-hood. In the first draft, nobody had a name. Later I decided to tie them all together under different characters.

MG: How long did it take to write AM/PM, from start to finish?

AG: The generation period was one story in the morning and one at night for two months. Then I spent about a year on and off editing it.

MG: How or why did you decide to publish it with Featherproof?

AG: I was going from of the experience of looking at their books at an AWP three or four years ago. When most of the other tables were offering peppermints and pens, the Featherproof table was giving away their mini-books, and I liked what that meant. Otherwise, I knew precious little about the publishing world when I found them. I got lucky.

MG: Can you tell us about your experience with Featherproof?

AG: Featherproof has this perfect combination of design and story interest. There's nothing finer than working with a couple of people who are sharp at what they do and care a ton about the final product. The stories I hear from people at bigger publishing houses involve editors jumping ship, a total lack of control over design, contract wars. I don't know why anyone would actively wish for something like that to happen for their first book.

MG: Here's a funny (or maybe not) story from last year's AWP: you and I crossed paths in a bar, we were both a bit tanked, we recognized one another, you said you would be at the Featherproof table the next day, and the next day I searched far and wide to find it. Finally, I gave up, returned to the Keyhole table, and asked some folks at nearby tables where in the heck that dang Featherproof table was. Someone pointed, I turned, and there you were, behind me, sitting on the floor. These many months later, was it [AWP] as good for you as it was for me?

AG: Oh, Molly! AWP was good. I got to meet all the people I've worked with for a while. One night I walked alone to the Quickies reading and sat by myself at the bar and just felt excited to be there. This is a good damn time for readers and writers in America. I'm looking forward to Denver.

MG: Tell us about Five Things.

AG: Five Things is a once every-other-monthly reading and music show I put on in Austin with my co-host Stacy Muszynski. We take five objects, images, or ideas, and task five writers with creating a five-minute piece. The idea comes from the Dollar Store Show and Quickies. We just celebrated our first anniversary with a 'Best of Austin' nod. We're thinking of doing a party around the Texas Book Festival, and a writing contest after that.

3.

Museum of the Weird

MG: Let's discuss your forthcoming collection,Museum of the Weird. How long had you been working on the manuscript? Why did you choose to submit it to FC2? What did you do when you learned you won? Details, woman, details!

AG: The oldest story in the collection is about four years old, but I had been fussing with the more-or-less finished manuscript for about a year before I submitted it to the contest. A friend of mine who works in the FC2 office encouraged me to submit. Obviously, the submissions were all anonymous, and my friend didn't know I had even entered until she connected the winning manuscript's assigned number to my name after she got them back from the judge. So, once she found out that I had entered and also had won, she called me and left a cryptic message. I was on a flight from Tucson to Austin and got the voicemail when the plane touched down. I wasn't sure if the good news was that she was pregnant or that the manuscript had won.

MG: Oh wow, we are so at the age where all of our girlfriends call to say they're either getting married or pregnant. Oof. What say you?

AG: God bless girlfriends with babies! There's a special place in heaven reserved for girlfriends that let us say hello to the babies when they're cute and then take them away when they mess themselves. I think of having a baby from a practical standpoint and wonder at the women who write and work and do the motherhood thing at the same time. I can barely keep the litter box clean some days, you know?

MG: Why is it that caring for other living things, people included, and taking care of their excrement is so often synonymous? Anyway, back to Museum of the Weird. If you had to provide the back cover synopsis, how (or what) would it read?

AG: Oh no, I'm horrible at this, I'm an awful pitchman. Here's part of what the FC2 marketing people wrote for me: "A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—-a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning" etc.

MG: Do you have a middle name? Why not use it?

AG: Morgan. It's a good one, but if I used it I'd have to write Garden of English Roses or similar.

MG: Amelia Morgan Gray.

AG: Author of The Forbidden Locket.

MG: Okay, I won't ask what would be on the cover of the book. But if it were made into a movie, what would the be on the cover of the DVD case?

AG: Maybe a large birdcage with a man crouched inside. Should it be Adrien Brody crouched inside? Should he be naked? None of this is in the book.

MG: I just totally thought of this cover. Yes? No?

AG:This is exactly what I was thinking of, except the cage must be more ill-fitting. I want the DVD audience to say, "How did naked Adrien Brody get into that cage? He looks uncomfortable." I've got Bender on the brain. She's doing a cool thing with Madras Press.

MG: Goddamn, it seems like every time I turn around someone somewhere is doing something awesome with some press. Thanks for pointing that out! So are you done with the edits for Museum of the Weird? Are you working on anything new?

AG: I'm done! It's weird to have to let it go for a year before it's out. I'm working on a couple new things and mostly returning to old habits, which means starting small, writing a lot of handwritten notes that go nowhere, paragraphs in voice, violent little short-short stories, empty threats, and sprawling openings to novels that are immediately shelved. Nothing has emerged quite yet. I've been lucky to have some little projects, thanks to Drew Burk at Spork and others.

MG: I think this is interesting--your process of getting started. Best-case scenario, what will happen (and how) as a result of these notes and paragraphs?

AG: I'd like very much to write a novel. It is going to take a while and I'll probably end up with eight little chapbooks or a book of sonnets. We can't always get what we want! But if we try sometimes, you know, we get what we need.

4.

Day Jobs, The Golden Girls, and Texas

MG: Do you have a day job?

AG: A couple: one writing job, mostly articles about career training; another writing job, a reading comprehension study guide for fifth graders; and a teaching job, a once-a-week comp class at a community college. None of it offers health insurance, but It's nice, because I don't have to clock in, which means I don't stress out too much when I can't sleep because the theme song to The Golden Girls is stuck in my head and every time I close my eyes it's all, "Thank you for being a friend," on loop, and I want to drive to a retirement home and drop my brain off there. Just say to it, Go, brain. Go find your personal Bea Arthur.

MG: I always thought The Golden Girls would be best watched in the company of a gay man. Not sure why I think this. Is that a weird thing to think? Go ahead, you can say.

AG: Everything's a weird thing to think when it comes to The Golden Girls. For the record, I can imagine you and a man with a nice crew cut sitting on a couch in a dark living room, watching The Golden Girls and eating cheesesteaks. During the opening credits your each reach over and clasp hands. Everyone's sexuality is unclear. Your eyes are brimming with tears. I mean, it's hard not to cry during the opening credits of The Golden Girls, if you're really listening to the lyrics. Who writes "Thank you for being a friend" on a birthday card?

MG: What's Texas like?

AG: You can buy a lot of things crafted in the shape of Texas here. Cheese shaped like Texas, cookies, little iron brands you keep near the grill so when you're grilling meat, you can brand it with the shape of Texas. We drink a beer called Lone Star. Still, I'm not from here, and sometimes I wake up and I have to convince myself I'm really in Texas. It seems like everyone should need a passport to enter or leave the state. Rick Perry is probably working on this. But the weather has been lovely this week; I've had my windows open.

MG: We're just about done with summer here on the east coast. Is it always summer in Texas? Do you have any bad summertime habits that you'll put a stop to? (Me, I'll give up paperback romance novels from the grocery store until next summer.)

AG: Oh man, paperback romance novels are old-school vice. I can't even keep those in the house anymore. It gets chilly here, but never too bad for too long. We had an ice storm in '07 that shut the city down, but that was mostly because nobody had chains for their truck tires. I don't pay for heating, so I'm snug as a bug regardless. I have a bad summertime habit of getting up at noon--that's going to need to come to an end this winter. I want to be back in early mode for spring. There's nothing finer than a spring morning.

5.

Amelia's Picks

MG: Okay, let's have some pick-and-choose fun. Feel free to elaborate, if you like. Thongs or boy shorts?

AG: Tough economic times force honest Americans to scale back on fabric. Patriotism dictates thongs.

MG: Thongs (butt) or thongs (toes)?

AG: Toes toes toes. You can get married in flip-flops out here.

MG: Coffee or tea?

AG: Coffee these days. I've got my eye on those tea packets that bloom
underwater, though.

MG: I love those. They are really pretty to watch bloom. Okay, lattes or cappuccinos?

AG: I'm embarrassed to not know the difference. One has more milk, right? I like a good americano.

MG: Cats or dogs?

AG: Either a dog that is in every way like a cat (lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency) or a cat.

MG: Wow.

AG: This is how I feel.

MG: Hardcover or paperback?

AG: Paperback! Better for the bath.

MG: Goodwill or upscale consignment shops?

AG: I'm taking a bag of stuff to Buffalo Exchange today, actually. So, downscale consignment?

MG: Scissors or shears?

AG: Scissors, unless you are pinking.

MG: Saran wrap or tinfoil?

AG: It depends where you're wearing the hat.

MG: [I think I snorted when I read your answer.] Apple juice or tomato juice?

AG: Tomato on an airplane, apple if I'm giving blood.

MG: Favorite freshly juiced-in-a-juicer juice combination? (I like apple and carrot, but the barista where I go likes to make me orange, beet, and ginger, which I guess is supposed to be good for me.)

AG: Those all sound good. I like a nice hibiscus lemonade.

MG: Bottled water or tap water?

AG: Tap, unless you live in Charleston.

MG: So You Think You Can Dance or American Idol?

AG: Ryan Seacrest eats six egg whites a day. He adds one yolk on Fridays.

MG: '80s or '90s?

AG: We went to the work of fixing the time travel machine and this is the best we can do? Let's go farther back and find out what it was like to be primordial sludge.

MG: I bet diving into a Jell-O pool would be something like that. Push pins or staples?

AG: I once knelt on the floor of a cabin during summer camp and a push pin went into my kneecap. What's weird is it didn't hurt. I stapled my finger once and that did hurt. So, pins.

MG: That is weird. I hope that push pin made it into your writing somehow. Pocket folders or manila folders?

AG: LISA FRANK TRAPPER KEEPER

MG: Wide rule or college rule?

AG: I wrote a secret admirer letter to a boy when I was in the fourth grade. Sadly, I was the only nerd who used recycled wide-rule. This was back when recycled paper looked like dirty newsprint. I was discovered.

MG: Wallpaper or paint?

AG: Paint, unless you're outfitting a cozy bar. Then, heirloom damask burgundy velvet on red flocked wallpaper.

MG: Copper or cast iron?

AG: Cast iron. Seasoned cookware is useful and charming.

MG: Cheesecake or quiche?

AG: A good quiche is better and more rare than a good cheesecake. I wonder, should the ideal form be the avatar of the object?

MG: And my favorite, cupcakes or muffins?

AG: Scones, for real. But cupcakes are a
tantalizingly close second.

MG: This is why you're fat or Look at this fucking hipster?

AG: Passive-aggressive notes.

6.

Questions from our Facebook Friends

MG: And let's wrap things up with a few questions from our Facebook friends. (Do we need a backstory? Backstory: I updated my status to read something like, "What would you ask Amelia Gray if you could ask her anything in the whole wide world?" There were immediate responses. John Domini asks: "Based on recent experience, which would you say is cooler: Portland, OR, or Austin, TX?"

AG: It's easier to find a margarita in Austin and easier to find dessert in Portland. Otherwise, besides soil composition, the cities are exactly the same.

MG: Erika Moya wants to know: "What will you be this year for Halloween, or is that a surprise?"

AG: Zombie Vanna White? Sexy James Joyce? The possibilities are limited.

MG: Tim Kerlin says, "Remember when we were swimming at my apartment and those teenagers were making out on the picnic table? Wasn't that funny? Then you and me and Michael did synchronized swimming. That wasn't a question, I guess."

AG: This interview is over!

MG: Randy Cauthen wonders: "What's the fastest land animal?"

AG: A cheetah running inside the third car of the Shanghai Maglev train.

MG: Matt Walker wants to know: "Which room in a house is most conducive to a successful seance?"

AG: The loudest.

MG: John Domini asks another: "Italo Calvino, his SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency. Did he leave out anything? Or, is there one on which you'd care to expound?"

AG: Timeliness. Timelessness.

Amelia Gray is a writer living in Austin, TX. She is the author of AM/PM, published by Featherproof Books, and Museum of the Weird, due Fall 2010 through Fiction Collective 2. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, and Caketrain,among many others. She blogs at ameliagray.com.

Micah Ling's first full-length collection of poetry was released by Buffalo small press sunnyoutside on September 10. The title, Three Islands (ISBN 978-1-934513-18-7), retails for $15 and follows the chapbook Thoughts on Myself (Finishing Line Press, 2009).

Three Islands brings together the three colossal figures of Amelia Earhart, Robert Stroud (the Birdman of Alcatraz), and Fletcher Christian to examine the solitude and madness that comprises their slight degrees of separation. Existing in the channel between fact and fiction, these poems swim among the slight nuances that divide captivity, isolation, and escape.

Ling earned her MFA (poetry) and MA (American literature) from Indiana University after a BA from DePauw University. Prior to her current position at Indiana University, she held positions at Butler University, Belmont University, Middle Tennessee State University, and DePauw University, and is an editor for Keyhole Press.

Author Kevin Young (Dear Darkness and Jelly Roll) wrote of the collection: “In Three Islands, Micah Ling reaches a poetry pinnacle: a triad of poems which enacts rather than merely describes, journeys far rather than merely travels. Her poems are musical and filled with meaning, islands only in name. Hers is an archipelago of excellence.” Author Maura Stanton (Immortal Sofa and Snow on Snow) added: “Ling’s three unique but harmonious voices brilliantly portray human longing under the pressure of isolation.”

Readings in support of the release have been scheduled in Cincinnati (10/8); Louisville (10/9); Indianapolis (10/12); Bloomington, IN (10/14); Madison, Wisconsin (10/15); Milwaukee (10/16); and Chicago (10/17 and 10/18).

About sunnyoutside

Sunnyoutside, an independent press, is located in Buffalo, New York and is a member of The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, the Fine Press Book Association, the Letterpress Guild of New England, and the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative, for which publisher McNamara serves on the advisory board. Sunnyoutside is also a proud sponsor of the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair. For more information and a complete list of available titles, visit www.sunnyoutside.com.

1.

In Memory of the
Nearness of You

I use the heels of my palms to thrust

open a stubborn window,

causing a book to plop on its side,

slide off the shelf—washed over

by a wave of other books,

then crash into a rose-filled vase

before smacking down on the hardwood

floor. What follows is silence,

like the split second after a mother slaps

her child. But no wailing or pleading here.

We’re given only the quiet, and that inherited

fear that turns the heart to sand

slipping through an hourglass.

We watch the water search with its fingers

the valleys of the room, and allow

our eyes to blur, shards of prisms

gleaming in late afternoon.

I say we the whole time meaning I,

and I look up: eggshell walls

that give and give until I give way

to the revelation that you will not

lean in the doorway smelling of strawberries

and righteousness. The last grains

will trickle out. Pain will not enter this house.

I have all the time in the world

and my heart is a rose is a rose is a rose.

MOLLY GAUDRY: Tell me about this poem—the title, the roses, Stein’s influence, the speaker, and the “you.”

JOSHUA MICHAEL STEWART: As with many of my poems, it started out with a simple image that sets things in motion, allowing the poem to spiral out to whatever the poem wants to become. You know the old saying: the poem writes itself. Which is one of the joys of writing poetry, I’m just as surprised as the reader is. If I sat down and said, “I’m going to write about such and such,” I’d completely go blank. Many influences run through this poem, nods to Bob Hicok and folk singer Dar Williams. The title of course, is taken from the Hoagy Carmichael song, “The Nearness of You.” I often use the titles of Jazz standards for titles of my poems, again, giving a nod to those great composers while also acknowledging William Matthews, who would title many of his poems the same way. I wish I could say this poem isn’t autobiographic, but that would be like when John Berryman claimed he and Henry weren’t the same person. Essentially this poem is about my relationship with my mother, or to be fair, one aspect of it. However, I use “you” in a number of other poems in which it’s not clear who the “you” is. I love that. Depending on how the reader approaches the “you” may lead to many interpretations of the poem. In Jazz there’s this thing called “echoing,” which is when a musician is blowing through an improvised solo he’ll play a few bars of a familiar tune then jump right back into improvising. That is pretty much what I’m doing with the Stein quote, but I guess I’m also saying that despite whatever hardships I may have gone through, the beauty of art has always been something I could count on. Death doesn’t bother me, but the idea of never hearing Sinatra sing “Come Fly with Me” ever again does.

MG: What is the significance of “Come Fly with Me”? I mean, why this particular song and not some other?

JMS: It makes me smile. That song says, “Everything’s gonna be alright, Jack.” But it’s not just that song. It’s that song and every other song Sinatra sang, it’s the duets of Ella and Satchmo, Hitchcock films and the paintings of Edward Hopper. People will come and go, that’s life, but as long as I have art in my life it’s okay.

MG: In this poem, what was the image that set things in motion?

JMS: The first one with the narrator trying to open the stuck window, It’s usually a simple mundane image like that. However, it’s not always the first line. I also have a thing with objects. I’ll pick an object such as an oak leaf or an answering machine and try to see those objects in a new light. I’m a firm believer that poetry is everywhere and in everything.

MG: I’m intrigued by this idea “that poetry is everywhere and in everything.” Do you ever experience writer’s block? Can you pick up any random object and find inspiration?

JMS: I’m plagued with writer’s block. I often go months without writing anything or at least anything good. This is how my typical writing schedule works: stare at blank page. Doodle. Do this for three to five hours, four days a week, for a month. Then out of nowhere, an image or a phrase bleeds out of the pen, and once it hits the page the poem flows out almost whole. Before you ask, yes, I always start my poems with pen and paper. It needs to be organic. I need to feel it in my arm, neck and back muscles. Then once I get it rolling, first stanza, or so, I’ll switch to the computer. I do believe poetry is everywhere, but the drudgery of everyday life makes it hard to see sometimes. It takes effort, but I’m determined to put in the work.

MG: It’s interesting—I read the “you” not as mother but as girlfriend, or wife. Mother changes everything! How do you respond to “girlfriend, or wife”?

JMS: Whatever gets you to connect with the poem and gives you the desire to turn the page to read the next one works for me. Again, that’s why I love using “you” in a poem. Another example of this is my poem “When the Surrealist No Longer Remembers His Dreams.” In this poem, the narrator is walking down a country road with a corpse who is addressed as “you.” The reader may think that the corpse is a former lover or deceased relative, and will read the poem in one way, which is fine with me, but when I tell you that when I wrote it I was thinking that the narrator and corpse, the “I” and “you” were all one person, it totally means something else.

MG: That would seriously alter any person’s reading. Clearly, you enjoy the multiplicity of interpretations. Is this why you write poems and not stories? I think, maybe, that stories leave less room for interpretation—traditionally narrated stories, anyway.

JMS: Well I don’t write stories because I haven’t found the right story to write. I’ve been trying my hand at flash fiction with limited success. It’s far more challenging for me. It’s funny because I love Flash and read it almost more than straight poetry, but I just haven’t been able to break through that wall yet.

MG: Where did the tagline “Where Prose Poems Go To Do Naughty Things” come from?

JMS: My friend and artist Bret Herholz suggested that I add an online store to the site and that the store should be called The Foot Fetish. I think it came from that. I guess this would be a good time to mention that Bret and I are working on a book together. We’re planning on a graphic novel based on a few of my poems. It’s still in the early stages.

2.

Over the River and
Through the Woods

My grandfather threw her out

of a moving car on Route 4

after a Tracy Hepburn movie.

She said this as I sat on her lap,

giddy at the wheel of the blue Nova

while she worked the pedals to K-mart.

*

All she wanted was a baby.

She’d cradle me, watching

her soaps. I sucked her nicotine

fingers until sleep took me.

She wanted a girl, dressed me

in a red dress, ribbons in my hair,

and snapped Polaroids my brother

dangled over my head for years.

*

She took in a pregnant runaway:

free room and board, medical

bills, in exchange for your baby.

The police steered the girl

to the squad car. She clamped

the baby to her chest, inhaling

the smell of his scalp. Grandma

sobbed as Bert and Ernie chirped away.

*

Grandma’s dying, says
the answering

machine, Emphysema.

She wants you to write her eulogy.

She showed me how to cut out snowflakes,

made the best bologna sandwiches,

could skin a squirrel in ten seconds flat.

MG: This poem is so heartfelt. I’ve loved it since I first read it, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reread it. I even taught it in a GED class this past spring. After explaining how this poem functions as the eulogy for the grandmother, that each section is a memory of her, my students began to understand. We spent about an hour on this poem, but by the end of that class I felt that they actually began to appreciate poetry—the deliberate choice of words, lines, images. What would you like to share about this poem? Is it autobiographical?

JMS: Knowing that you taught it in a class fills me with joy, and I have to say I’m honored more to have it taught in a GED class, than let’s say at a university setting. It seems to matter more. This is another autobiographical poem. For years it was my mantra to never to write anything autobiographical. The reason being is that everyone assumes all poems are autobiographical, and that assumption annoys me. It has only been the last few years that I’ve been writing from my own “experience,” which is another concept that I have issues with. What is “experience,” and how is it valued? I’m far more interested in the life of the factory worker or, more importantly, the life lived within the imagination than that of someone who swam with sharks and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro or what have you. What I like about this poem is that every word of it is true. It’s a perfect example of where truth is stranger than fiction.

MG: It wasn’t easy at first, helping them to understand how the words, the lines, were working to tell a story. It was a very literal bunch, and we spent quite a bit of time on each section. “worked the pedals” and “nicotine / fingers” posed particular problems, and trying to figure out who “Bert and Ernie” were was an experience. It was a humbling day for me, realizing that the joy I get from reading isn’t a universal experience. Did this poem actually function, then, as the eulogy? Or did you write this much later? How much distance from an event do you need to be able to write about it?

JMS: I wrote it much later. The actual eulogy was horrible and I guess I wrote this to make up for it. The problem was that I was very close to my grandmother in the first ten years of my life, but then I didn’t see or speak to her for well over ten years. Then one day I receive a phone call saying she passed away and that she requested that I write her eulogy, and oh by the way, can you have it done by tomorrow. I felt like I was writing a eulogy for a complete stranger. In general when writing about my own life, I tend to need quite a bit of distance from the event. Recently I wrote a poem about chasing a ball on a playground. That happened when I was in the second grade. With that said, I’ve been noticing that writing about the present is occurring more often.

MG: You have two chapbooks already published and a full-length on its way. When you look at each of those manuscripts, do you categorize them in terms of where you were when you wrote them, artistically speaking? Maybe another way of putting this is: What are the differences and similarities between the three books?

JMS: They’re similar because many of the poems in the chapbooks are of course in the full-length. Chapbooks are like the singles to the LP. When I sit down to write a poem I have no idea what I’m going to write. Thus, I have no idea of what the feel of my books will be until I put them together. I have a few concepts for books floating around in my head but they
haven’t made it to the page yet.

3.

Watercolor on
Canvas

“It’s a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.”

—D.W. Winnicott

My brother painted it back in high school:

a bottle washed up on a beach. It won

a Governor’s Prize, hung in the statehouse,

all that talk of a scholarship. Everyone

assumes ocean, a crab’s view—the bottle close.

But the shore’s made up of the flat stones

we’d skip across Lake Erie. Dad taught him

how to paint the sky, but it was the shadows

Frank loved. After he lost another job,

during each stint in jail, he’d give the painting

to an uncle or a sober friend for safekeeping,

so he couldn’t hawk it for a fix. A week after

his funeral we found it in his closet. Inside

the bottle there’s a letter. If you squint

you can make out the ghost-lines of script

done in pencil, then erased.

MG: I mentioned in the intro that the speakers in your poems ache for human connection, post-abandonment. In all three of these poems, I’d say this is accurate. Do you agree?

JMS: I do agree, though I never thought of it that way, especially the post-abandonment part, but now that it’s mentioned I can recognize it in so many of my other poems. This proves that the poem knows more of what the poet want to say than the poet does. It’s that sense of discovery, for the writer as well as for the reader that makes poetry so delightful.

MG: What does the letter read?

JMS: Oh, I don’t remember. He must have painted it back in 1984, so I was only nine years old at the time. I think it was suppose to be one of those message-in-a-bottle type things, but in the end, he chose against it. After he died, it was the only thing I took. It hangs above my bed and in the back is still the tag from when it hung at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio.

4.

O Come All Ye Faithful

Midnight Mass:

Give peace to your neighbors, commanded the priest, so I dodged down under the pew. I always ended up shaking hands with the guy who was picking his nose moments before. No one seemed to notice I was missing, but then I saw I wasn’t alone. Two pews down an old couple slithered on their bellies heading my way. We’re trying to cheat death, said the old man, who smelled of cabbage. What are you hiding from?

Snotty fingers, I replied.

Ah yes, we’ve seen a few of those in our day, said the man’s wife.

To kill time we played a few hands of poker, and by the third round I looked up from my crummy cards to see half the congregation under the pews, each with their own reason. I hope those choir ladies haven’t quit their day jobs, on man muttered. I caught an altar boy staring at my breasts, whispered a woman in a low-cut V-neck. Just then, a guy tanked up on too much eggnog began belting out Christmas carols. Soon we were all singing, face down on the floor, patting each other on the back. I didn’t even care what was on their hands, because I felt like we belonged to one big, happy family.

MG: What’s going on in this poem? When I read it, I immediately circled “slithered” and thought “snakes, sneaky, devil?” But I’m not sure that reading holds up . . .

JMS: Why wouldn’t it hold up? It’s word association at work here. On a subconscious level, did I pick that word for its associations with the things you’ve mentioned? Maybe. Honestly, when I wrote it I just picked that word because I like the word, and it best described the physical actions of the characters.

MG: Do you prefer linear or prose poems? Do you think they should function differently?

JMS: I do have a deep attraction toward the prose poem. It was love at first sight for me. With that said, I tend to write more linear poems. Same with form as with subject matter, the poem will let you know what form it wishes to take. As for functioning differently…I’m not sure. I know I approach them differently. Linear poems have an urgent, serious aura about them, while prose poems say “We’re about to have some fun here.” Now of course I’ve read serious prose poems and lighthearted linear poems, but at first glance those are my expectations.

MG: What makes an effective line break? How would you explain the difference between an excellent line break and a questionable one?

JMS: For me it’s organic. It’s important to have your lines end on the most interesting words possible. Ending on a strong verb or noun is a good rule of thumb and never ending a line with a preposition or conjunction is another good rule to follow. Of course when deciding on which word to end on you have to consider the rhythm and length of the line. Normally, it’s not a good idea to have one line stretching a mile out from your other lines just so you can end on that verb.

MG: Tell us a bit about the surrealism present here, if you would call it that?

JMS: The surrealism often found in prose poems is what made me fall in love with the form. As I stated earlier, the life lived within the imagination, subconscious, dream, or daydream is of deep interest to me.

MG: Who are some of your favorite poets?

JMS: Charles Simic and Russell Edson of course, and then there’s James Tate, Billy Collins, and William Matthews. I guess William Carlos Williams would be the patriarch of the poets I enjoy. I really love the prose poems of Louis Jenkins and Bob Hicok is just amazing. Lately, I’ve been reading many women poets: Dorianne Laux, Kim Chinquee, and Rachel Contreni Flynn.

MG: How do you feel about the man (or woman) behind the work? Do you believe the writing should stand on its own, that it should be read while keeping the writer’s life-story in mind, or do you think the writer is more interesting sometimes than the work? I ask this because, as you said earlier, most poems are assumed to be autobiographical. I wonder, then, about how surreal poems fit into this assumption . . .

JMS: The work should always stand on its own. One day my father confessed that he didn’t really care for Sinatra, and instead of expressing a disappointment in his performance, delivery, or craft, his opinion on the man’s music was based entirely on his judgment call of the man himself. Meaning he didn’t like the fact that Sinatra had Mob connections, or was a womanizer, therefore he didn’t like his music as if the two have anything to do with the other. Moral standing has nothing to do with talent, skill, or intellect, to which should be the only things used in judging a piece of art.

MG: Before, you said you haven’t had much success with flash fiction. This one reads like a flash to me. A little fleshing out, and it could be a very short story. Yes? No? What’s missing here that keeps you from calling it a fiction?

JMS: It could be called a flash piece, though I’d say it would lean more toward a prose poem. It’s not that I haven’t written any flash, just not as much as straight linear poems. One piece I’m particularly proud of is titled Squeak, which I’d say is a flash fiction story.

MG: Is there a difference between prose poetry and flash fiction?

JMS: To give it a modern analogy, the prose poem is the profile photo you post on your Facebook page, while the flash fiction is your YouTube video. Of course, there are many examples that blur the line which make this debate old and tiring. It has more to do with our excessive need to categorize the shit out of everything than anything else. As far as I’m concern, the only question that should be asked is, did you enjoy reading it?

5.

Caring For the Dead

A woman lived in a house of tombstones

and baby doll limbs, married a young etymologist

and gave birth to thirteen dead languages.

She couldn’t pronounce their names, nor understand

their Tiki god appearances. When swatted on their back-ends

their mouths stretched the length of their bodies

and exuded a black volcanic ooze. They were happy,

docile little tikes, but they were born dead

and didn’t live for very long. They’d lie in their cribs,

mouths gaping as always, then turn to dust,

black smudges on their small pillows.

The father performed the autopsies, grinning

with the excitement of discovery, then demand more children.

His wife would nod, then turn to face the wall,

praying every word she uttered was heard, and special
attention

given to all the words she’d leave out.

MG: Here’s another example of a not-quite-realist poem. Tell us what this one is about, and what the initial image was.

JMS: I’m quite interested in etymology, and it was thinking of etymology that gave birth to this poem. I can’t tell you what this poem is about because I have no idea. This is another example of word association at work. I write one line that leads to the next, and then to the next, not having any more of an idea of where it’s going then you do. It’s that sense of exploration that I love about poetry.

MG: Do you ever use prompts? One of my favorite poems, Richard Garcia’s “My Grandmother’s Laughter” (available online in Ploughshares) was inspired by Jim Simmerman’s Twenty Little Poetry Projects (also online). Have you ever tried anything like this, with success?

JMS: Oh, I try. I have at least fifteen of those writing-prompt books. My success with those tends to be limited. The bottom line is if it doesn’t inspire me then it’s not going to work. I wish it did.

MG: How does (or doesn’t) this fit in with the rest of your work?

JMS: Charles Simic and Russell Edson heavily influenced most of my earlier work, and this is an older poem. I’ve been moving away from the surreal as time has gone by but I think you’ll still see it here and there in my work. It fits in with the rest of my work via that sense of exploration and surprise. I have those “image” poems, those “object,” and “autobiographical” poems; and this poem would fall in the category of poems that I would call “fun” poems, poems that are strictly for entertainment. Unfortunately, this poem didn’t make it into the full-length collection.

MG: Whose call was that? Am I allowed to ask this question? Oh, I’m going for it. Was it your decision or your publisher’s? And why not include the “fun” poems?

JMS: Some of the fun poems are included in the book, many of them. O Come All Ye Faithful, which I consider a fun poem is in there as well as a poem called Saint Francis Back from Paradise. It was my mentor Ellen Doré Watson, who suggested taking it out. It simply had to do with the flow of the book and not having too many poems with the same color stuck together.

6.

Snow Angels

Each night they stare into the sky

and wonder why even with wings

they can never get off the ground.

Good reason for their creator

to take three steps, cock his head

and disown his gift to the world.

Abandonment: a likely origin of anyone’s

lack of faith. And faith: precisely what’s needed

to soar in the deep purple abyss of winter.

We step out into our lives like sun slicing

between buildings and perform this one angelic

act that melts from our consciousness.

We go back into our houses and accomplish

something important, leaving behind

the ones that don’t know any better,

the few who see the wings as open arms,

snow as flesh, and are willing to lie back down.

MG: Well, when it comes down to personal preference, I’ve saved the best for last. This one gets me every single time. I’m sure this is where I got “abandonment” from, in fact. So tell me, what is faith?

JMS: Ah, another central theme that runs through many of my poems. I’m fascinated with “faith,” and “hope,” interchangeable as far as I’m concerned, and how much they drive us. It’s amazing how faith/hope latches on to us. No matter how defeated we become, no matter how many times life kicks us in the teeth there is always that ember of hope/faith burning inside of us. I mean if you think about it, even if you’ve come to the point where you wish your life would end, you’re still hoping for an end of suffering. So what is that thing that drives us forward? It’s far too powerful and gripping to be only a flimsy thing such as desire.

MG: I find this poem so powerful—the image, or the idea of, grounded angels, angels unable to fly, useless manmade wings just makes my heart ache. Where did this poem come from? What should we know about it?

JMS: This poem falls in the “object/image” category. I simply meditated on the image of a snow angel for a long time and in one swoop (with much revision afterwards,) the poem flowed out from somewhere deep inside. There’s that exploration thing again. Someone once stated, and I wish I could remember who, that “At some point as a writer, you finally become humbled to the fact that the poem is smarter than you are.”

MG: Will you close this interview with a particular favorite of your own?

JMS: Well since I mentioned it earlier in this interview, it only makes sense that I share the following poem:

WHEN THE SURREALIST NO LONGER REMEMBERS HIS DREAMS

Summer. We were walking

a country road before dawn,

and you were dead.

I don’t remember your dying,

but there you were, dragging your feet,

your eyes like the bottoms of glass ashtrays.

Your breath.

I said it smelled of death,

and you just groaned.

I felt like an idiot.

I never wanted this.

I never wanted it to rain.

Do you have any idea

what a soggy corpse is like

so early in the morning?

I tried to pick up the pace,

but all you could do was slosh across the road.

Eventually we came to a barn,

and hobbled inside to get dry.

Soon the sun was up. The rain had stopped,

and the insects were getting jiggy in the fields.

You slumped into an empty stall.

Sunlight beamed through slits in the boards

and the dust of your body mingled

with the dust of the barn, the outside world

and possibly me. Despite the decay,

you looked lovely disappearing like that.

And I confessed if I wasn’t such a fool

I’d love you right down to the bone.

Vultures usually do.

It was the first thing you'd said all morning.

To check out Joshua’s Chapbooks and updates for his Full-length collection, Son of a Minor Key, not to mention on where to find some of his poems online, visit him at www.joshuamichaelstewart.yolasite.com. Also, be sure to check out the online literary journal www.bigtoereview.com.

[Editor's Note: Thank you to the following journals in which these poems first appeared: "In Memory of the Nearness of You" in Mannequin Envy, "Over the River and Through the Woods" in Stickman Review, "Watercolor on Canvas," in Connecticut River Review, "O Come All Ye Faithful" in South Boston Literary Gazette, "Caring for the Dead" in Diner, "Snow Angels" in Heat City, and "When the Surrealist No Longer Remembers His Dreams" in Worcester Review.]

Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast

Chapter 9 is at DOGZPLOT

The street was no longer than ten or eleven blocks; it ran parallel to the highway before ending in an onramp. Helen merged into traffic and the car windows tinted to protect her from the unapologetic perversion of light that bore down from overhead, exposing each credible surface of the strip. The sidewalks, parking lots, walls and windows were all home to incredibly important messages concerning Helen’s skin, hair, her cracked and peeling hands, her sore throat, and any number of other ailments right at that very moment preventing her from enjoying life to its fullest.

“Do I smell funny to you?” she heard Rocket ask. She could hear him sniffing himself, quick little startled breaths, and felt sorry for the simple animal.

“Don’t listen to them, Rocket,” she assured him, feeling almost tender. “You smell like a dog.” She watched people getting in and out of their cars, driving through drive-throughs, and milling about in parking lots, stretching their legs. It was a comfort, somehow, seeing people doing normal things. She’d been spending so much time in her Neighborhood™, where public behavior was rather strictly defined, that the sight of people, here, the sight of them being openly hungry, being tired, all of this was refreshing. She couldn’t help but wonder how they produced enough Buzz with this much on display, but this thought was easily overcome by her own pangs of hunger, which were growing, and her attention found its way back to food, and the fact that she was passing it by.

They were almost to the end of the 1st block.

“Tell me if you see something,” she said, and changed lanes.

Each restaurant along the way boasted better deals than the last, and Helen watched the numbers go down, the “value” go up, and special coupons for unrelated consumer items appear on her dashboard, broadcast by restaurants still blocks away. She was urged to pass by the choicer real estate and take her chances with something closer to the end of the street, but traffic was moving so ponderously that the dashboard bargains seemed desperate. They were giving away free staplers at the Tempeh Teepee©. Competition was fierce.

She eyed her options with suspicion, waiting for the right offer to guide them in, steer Joan’s car off the slow moving street.

“Really, Helen, any one of these places will do,” said Rocket impatiently, and she knew he was right. It didn’t matter. But she was caught in a kid-in-the-candy-store frame of mind—she only had a dime, and she wanted to get the most for it. She toyed with the shiny disc, flipping it across her knuckles. She salivated and sucked her tongue, walking up and down the aisle, her ears burning from the old clerk’s hard stare. But she wasn’t stealing anything. She had a right to be there. She was determined to scout it out.

“You gonna buy anything or what?” he asked in a gruff, throaty voice. Stupid old man. She avoided his eyes.

“I’ve got a dime,” she said, holding it up for him to see. This seemed to satisfy him, for the moment, and she heard the ruffle of his newspaper as he went back to reading.

“Whatever you say, kid,” he huffed.

When it came down to it, the content of the packages mattered less to Helen than the packaging itself. She ogled the ostentatious wrappers, read and reread each promise declaring gooey delight, but not without a degree of humor. She took exactly none of it seriously. She liked to consider what the manufacturer was shooting for, put herself in the mindset of its target market, and judge from there the relative success of each campaign. It was a game. Of course, there was an underlying sweet-tooth, but she liked to tickle that tooth, feel it squirm before giving in and coating it with caramel.

Then she saw it. Among the ads for stopwatches and switchblades, crockpots and dish-racks, wholesale merchandise bought on the cheap and turned over to drive-by customers under the rubric of added value, an ad popped up on her dashboard for something she knew she liked. Something familiar. Something with guts and grease and everything she wanted rolled into a perfectly bullshit-free package she knew she could trust.

“Looks like ol’ Knuckle made it big,” she said, almost under her breath. She felt like she was telling a secret. She was giddy. She’d take Rocket out for his first Dirty Dog and watch as he happily grunted through the gastrointestinal nightmare following their splurge. She accelerated out of their lane, moving into a spot beside them that seemed to be moving more quickly. She passed by the colorful wrappers, the Sugar Bombs©, the Gooey Gobblers©, all the hard candy camped out, row after row, and felt the hard eyes again on her back as she left the store.

“Hey kid, where do you think you’re going?” he called after her. But she was gone.

Knuckle’s was only a few blocks ahead, according to the ad. Helen was excited, gearing up to tell a story, an anecdote about one of her early Dirty Dog experiences, but before she could she was startled by a moan from the backseat. Could it be a complaint? She was aghast. And that wasn’t even the end of it. Before she could protest his protestation, Rocket launched into a tirade, obviously upset. Much to Helen’s surprise, the dog knew all about Knuckle’s.

“Word is they use dog meat,” he began. “And don’t try to tell me any different, Helen. I have it on good faith from a basset hound I know—honest dog—who told me his uncle’s best friend was picked up on the street by a Knuckle’s van. Poor dog howled like a siren for a couple blocks and then nothing.” Rocket was showing some emotion. “Happened right in front of his bitch.” He paused, and Helen imagined him staring out the window, looking forlorn. She still hadn’t met his eyes. “And don’t even get me started on that freak Junior! The bastard has no soul!”

But Helen didn’t have to get the dog started. Rocket shot off on his own steam about the Knuckle’s empire, its climb from a scummy hole in south-central Seattle to the chain they were about to patronize. He explained how it boasted a franchise at every rest-stop along every interstate in America, Knuckle’s dragging down both coasts like fingernails down a chalkboard, and he described the old man’s son, Junior, his voice cramping up in what Helen took as the deep, downward whine of a dog’s abject fear.

In many ways, it was a familiar story. When Helen was neck deep in her new life, pursuing a near perfect anonymity, I watched it unfold with some astonishment, the way you watch an oversees war on TV: little spotty images filled in with loads of conjecture, a touch of scandal, and then you wait for the real story to emerge so they can make a movie.

But it was simple. Knuckle was a pawn. He was one of the lucky ones in the beginning, one of those people whose emotional energy output was high enough to earn him a hefty reputation. As soon as word reached the Feds they were on him. They collected these people like pets in the early days, gave them what they wanted, thought they’d be useful later on. But with Knuckle it was more than that. Emotional energy spread power pretty thin, and there was a big movement on the Federal level to keep pace with the rise of “emotionally productive” entrepreneurs. I think they reasoned that if they could keep a few of the right people happy, they could secure their input once the New Economy was up and running. Which happened basically overnight.

Having taken Knuckle under their tutelage, teaching him business strategy, subsidizing his investment in high-profile storage facilities for the energy he was producing, the Feds maintained a direct route to a private business world that found them, in a word, irrelevant. They also got to pose for great promo shots.

But then, the story goes, Knuckle began to get unruly. As much training as he’d received, they’d still only managed to give a small man big power, and as the Knuckle’s empire got underway, franchises popping up everywhere, that awful and undeniably catchy jingle about Gettin’Dirty™ ringing in everyone’s ear, they began to sense a small defiance from the man. Poor guy. Not to excuse his insolence, but I can just imagine what kind of a laughing stock he must have been at those board meetings. “Busted Knuckle”, they called him. Spoon-fed by Uncle Sam.

He finally flipped out entirely. He began openly challenging the government, telling the press that they’d never helped him at all, that they were just scavengers wanting a piece of what he’d made for himself. And the press ate it up. They knew it was arrogant, misguided if not patently erroneous, but they broadcast Knuckle’s taunts in bold type until the government had no other option but to withdraw its support, and play dirty. They took him to court.

Helen’s eyes were glazed over in hunger. Rocket’s lispy voice slithered into her ears and slid around in her brain, looking for purchase and finding none. She stared at the traffic, now glacially moving along the strip, and she thought of the lovely candy shop she’d run out of, the old clerk who, while initially seeming gruff and mean-spirited, in hindsight was probably just concerned for Helen’s well-being, not wanting her to miss out on what he surely knew was to be her only chance to eat something, ever. The weather was kept relatively constant by enormous weather controls surrounding the rest-strip, but flakes of slice and loops of slerm were visible now and then. Helen watched for them, counting. Rocket continued.

“But that wasn’t the end of it,” he explained, tail anxiously thumping the seat. And it wasn’t. He still hadn’t told her about Junior. And this is where it gets scary for dogs.

With Knuckle tied up in a court battle that would soon become his obsession, the ersatz chief of the hotdog chain began to garner public attention as a spiffy, well-dressed and savvy substitute for Busted Knuckle. His name was Junior. Junior was Knuckle’s son. That Knuckle even had a son was a well-kept secret until the trial was well underway, and many saw it as the most shrewd business maneuver of Knuckle’s career, though it was probably just complete emotional abandonment. But Junior didn’t let that stop him. He hit the ground running with a series of what seemed at the time to be highly astute marketing decisions in a context where the franchise was getting slammed daily by a government run media still not conceding to the “post-national emergency landscape” of the New Economy. He gave away free food. He made enormous charitable donations to organizations fighting to end the scourge of obesity plaguing the nation. He championed the largest recycling campaign the world had ever seen.

Then he appeared on national TV and ate a live chicken. He didn’t even pluck it.

The press, for obvious reasons, loved it. Completely fictional accounts of his early childhood began to appear in otherwise respectable magazines. Psychologists appeared on talk shows explaining the term “psychotic break.” But before the young man could be helped, Junior disappeared.

“And that’s when dogs began to go missing,” Rocket concluded. His voice had finally steadied, as if he’d gained some control over the issue by relating it out loud.

Helen jerked out of her daydream, where she was leaning over the glass countertop of a candy store, watching the large, sweaty clerk behind it massage himself through his pants, and said, “So, what, are you saying you don’t want to eat there?”

“Of course not,” the dog replied. “I just thought you’d want to make an informed decision.”

And with that, Helen took the car into a miraculously fast moving lane and turned on her blinker. Knuckle’s Dirty Dogs, she thought, dreamily, that sure brings back memories.

1.
Writing and Writing Programs

MOLLY GAUDRY: When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

DARRIN DOYLE:  Honestly, I never gave much thought to writing until I was probably 25 years old.  I was working at Kinko’s, playing in a band, and wondering what to do with myself.  I loved playing music, but that life is exhausting, and it’s a terribly tough field to find consistent success in.  I decided to go back to college (I’d dropped out three years prior) and complete my English degree.  I took a poetry workshop.  My teacher, the great William Olsen, suggested applying to the MFA program.  I thought, “Sure, OK.”  From a young age, I’d always enjoyed writing and reading.  I’d read a lot of so-called “serious” literature on my own in junior high and high school (Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Woolf, Poe), but I never committed myself to writing until graduate school. Even after I finished the MFA, I don’t know if I ever thought, “I want to be a writer.”  I just enjoyed doing it.  I enjoyed talking about fiction and poetry.  I loved reading other peoples’ stories.  I loved waking up every morning and discovering a new thing I’d written the night before.  New words on a page to play with.  A character, a situation.  A funny phrase.  A phrase I couldn’t wait to delete.  And so on.      

MG: Where did you get your MFA? And what made you decide to go for the PhD? Any fun anecdotes? Workshop nightmares? Favorite moments?

DD: I got my MFA from Western Michigan University, and I studied primarily with Stuart Dybek and Jaimy Gordon, but also with poets Bill Olsen, Nancy Eimers, and Mark Halliday.  It was a formative experience, I must say.  There were some definitely odd and funny workshop moments, but not wanting to embarrass anyone, I’ll wait until you buy me a strong drink and my inhibitions splash to the floor in a puddle. 

After the MFA, my wife and I moved to Osaka, Japan.  We lived there for a year, teaching English, less for career purposes than because teaching was simply a good vehicle for living abroad.  Japan was wonderful, after which we backpacked through Southeast Asia and New Zealand for three months.  Then it was back to reality, back to Kalamazoo, MI.  I had no job, no plan.  I’d continued to write stories and had even gotten three or four published, which was cool, but I wasn’t on the academic job market or anything like that.  I found a job supervising two high school kids as they serviced computers for a local school district.  I did freelance writing for the Kalamazoo Gazette.  I worked as a technical writer for Pharmacia-Upjohn, a huge pharmaceutical company.  All of this occurred over a year’s time.  The tech writing job pushed me over the edge.  I missed being around other creative writers, and I certainly knew I couldn’t bear working in a cubicle for the rest of my life.  I applied to PhD programs and got into the University of Cincinnati, and this will go down as one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

MG: Let's go back and talk about teaching in Japan. I find that so romantic. What were your experiences? Would you recommend it?

DD:  I’d highly recommend it.  Japan is a beautiful, safe country with a long and compelling history, friendly people, amazing food, and enough quirks and contradictions to keep things interesting and inspirational.  In many ways, it reminded me of what the 1950s probably were like in the USA.  Smoking is allowed everywhere.  Job applicants are openly asked about their marital status, age, religion, etc, and there’s no law prohibiting employers from discriminating on these grounds.  Women are expected to get married and raise a family, while men are expected to devote themselves entirely to their job.  The man’s boss even delivers the toast at the wedding. 

Having said that, you won’t find friendlier, more generous people than the Japanese.  They are genuine, helpful, and very welcoming to visitors.  The sushi is cheap and abundant.  Plus there are all the surprises, like when a Sumo wrestler stands next to you on a train, or when a guy on a fishing show eats a live squid right out of the ocean, or when you can buy beer from a vending machine on your way home from work.  

MG: The University of Cincinnati is my old stomping ground, too. Why do you say it was "one of the best decisions" you ever made?

DD:  Brock Clarke and Michael Griffith, as you know, are terrific writers and teachers.  They helped me in lots of ways, not only in the workshops and with my novel, but because they helped bring so many fantastic writers to UC—Judy Budnitz, Aimee Bender, George Saunders, Sam Lipsyte, Percival Everett, and Heidi Julavits, to name a few. 

The other graduate students, too, were a great source of camaraderie and inspiration.  There’s something very special about the bond that forms when you’re going through the experiences of a grad program—it’s intensely stressful but very stimulating. 

The PhD isn’t for everyone, and I know many creative writers who still insist that the MFA is (and should be) the terminal degree.  But for me, I truly feel that the PhD “completed” my education.  It provided me the opportunity to explore areas of literature much more expansively and rigorously, and to be more exacting and rigorous with my own writing as well.

2.
Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet

MG: Who is your favorite character from Revenge of the Teacher's Pet?

DD: God, that’s like choosing a favorite eye.  I can’t do it.  Maybe Mr. Portwit.  I can go into detail as to why, but I’ll need more time.  He’s a complicated son-of-a-bitch. 

MG: Very true. Why, in your mind, is he the kind of guy who wants (or needs) to be referred to as Mr. Portwit. I mean, even his wife, Mary Ann, has to refer to him as Mr. Portwit. It's a strange character quirk.

DD:  That’s exactly what it is: a quirk.  To me, that’s what building a character is—giving them quirks (you might also just call them “traits”) and seeing what sticks.  I don’t mean to imply that any old quirk will do, or that writers should gratuitously and randomly pile on quirks for shock value or humor or what-have-you.  Ideally, the quirks will reside right alongside the character’s perceptions, ideologies, personal history, and so on, and all of these factors will operate in unison to create a whole person, and the reader will be able to put together (even unconsciously) how and why the quirks are organic to the character’s makeup.
 
In Portwit’s case, he has a disdain for language because he believes words are fundamentally untrustworthy due to their dependence on subjectivity.  In his mind, scientific evidence is the only way to prove truth.  But hovering over his head is the pesky notion that scientific knowledge is itself dependent upon language.  He can’t get around it.  So the only thing left to do is master language, or attempt to do so.  This is why he despises adjectives while simultaneously embracing them.  It’s why he takes apart his own name, figures out all of its possible meanings, and dictates precisely how he should be addressed.  Who he “is” is not going to be subject to the whims of some random observer!  

Of course, the joke on Portwit is that science is no more reliable than words for describing or, more accurately, ascribing causality to events, to human relationships.  There’s always the X, the unknown of human motivation, to contend with, and no matter what we do, certain momentous episodes in our lives are out of our control and their causations impossible to know.  This is why Portwit ultimately realizes his desperate gestures of control are “another sprig of parsley on his plate of steamed bullshit.” 

MG: I fell in love with Mary Ann—her outlook, her ways of relating to those around her. Why does she write lists? Where did you get that idea?

DD:  I’m glad to hear that you connected to her.  I loved writing in Mary Ann’s POV.  In talking to other people about the book, she seems to be the emotional center, and people are rooting for her in ways they aren’t rooting for Mr. Portwit.  Still, she has flaws, which is what makes a character likeable (right?).  I see the lists as one of her flaws.  Over the years, she has turned a routine of documenting and ordering her life into a straitjacket, of sorts.  I’ve never thought about it in this way before, but I am now, so I’m sticking with it.  The list-writing begins as a response to her father’s untimely death, and it proceeds in this fashion—as a way for Mary Ann to feel some semblance of control over her daily life, to vent her frustrations, to compartmentalize the people she likes or dislikes, and so on.  Unfortunately, it also freezes her into a routine and makes it so she is only thinking and not doing.  Dwelling in the moment and not looking to the future, maybe.  So the lists are a security blanket, too.  Ultimately, I don’t think Mary Ann is fundamentally different from Mr. Portwit—they both are seeking to understand the why and how of their lives.  For Mr. Portwit, it’s through the scientific method; for Mary Ann, it’s through meticulous documentation of her inner life. 

Not that the lists aren’t a positive thing.  She has this incredible record tracing back to her teenage years.  Like a diary, but much more fun to read! As for where I got the idea?  I don’t know.  I make To-Do lists now and then.  When I was a kid I went through a phase and wrote “Five Best Albums of All-Time” and “Five Best Jack Nicholson Movies” and things of that nature that would be embarrassing to run across.  Now we have Facebook for that kind of thing.

MG: One year after the novel ends, what will Mary Ann's Facebook status be?

DD:  Funny you should ask.  When I was going through the process of finding a publisher, one editor (who was going to pitch Revenge to his colleagues) suggested I come up with a Top Ten list to “hook” the reader and give some indication of the “type” of novel they were in for—a foreshadowing, of sorts.  The following list was written by Mary Ann some eight months after the novel ends:

Excerpted from Mary Ann Portwit’s Lists: Volume 2—For a Happier New Year
 
Ten Things I’ve Learned Since Marrying Dale (current mood:  sarcastic)

10.    Fish deserve my profound respect
9.    Hospitals are terrible
8.    Adjectives are even worse
7.    The wordsmiths were wise when they used the root “man” to create “manic” and “maniac”
6.    A human leg may way as much as 39 lbs., 10oz
5.    Sex is a messy, delicious business    
4.    Absence makes the heart choose less fatty foods   
3.    Crutches are overrated      
2.    Top Ten Lists—who needs ‘em?            
1.    Sometimes a mercy killing is the best thing for a marriage    

                  
MG: Without giving too much away, do you consider the ending a happy ending?

DD:  Absolutely.  I don’t know what this view says about me vis-à-vis the possibility of happiness between two people.  I think I’m terrified by, or at least nagged by, the notion that when it gets down to it, nobody can ever really know anybody else.  No matter how connected we feel in fleeting moments—of love, of chemicals, of symbiosis—we’re ultimately prisoners in our own worlds, and we can never truly inhabit another person.  Flannery O’Connor was comfortable with this idea—the wonder of mystery, the impossibility of comprehending human motivation—and she transformed it into an eerie sort of hope in her fiction.  The Christian faith—any faith—requires the embracing of mystery, and I guess I lack such faith.  I’m more like that guy in Camus’s The Stranger.  OK, maybe not that bad.  But in my fiction, I’ve probably unconsciously portrayed solitude and separation as positive traits as a result of this fear.  In other words, I want to make myself feel better by asserting that even though I can’t ever connect with someone, I can still be content.

But I’m happy to report that many people have said the ending of Revenge is very satisfying.  I’ve even heard the word “perfect” applied to it, so that makes me feel less alone.

MG: The novel's complete title is Revenge of the Teacher's Pet: A Love Story. What kind of love story is this?

DD:  Hopefully an honest one.  I don’t mean “real” or God-forbid, “realistic,” but honest with regard to the human experience of love in all its awkwardness and inflation, as well as its potential for giving meaning to our lives.  Also, it’s a funny love story, I hope.  A perverse and sexually charged one, too, though not in a conventional fashion.  I’m a huge fan of pre-Cry Baby John Waters movies (the filthy ones like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble), and my novel was definitely reaching for those heights, although ultimately I restrained myself in this department for fear of never finding a publisher.   

MG: Would you say you compromised any of your creative interests in the interest of "finding a publisher"?

DD:  Thankfully, no.  All of the impulses I reined in were reined in because they were misplaced and/or gratuitous.  I learned through the process that “less is more” with regard to things like sex, bodily fluids, and profanity. 

MG: This book reminds me of Jane Shapiro's The Dangerous Husband. Have you read? Would you agree or disagree?

DD:  It’s amazing that you made that connection, because yes, I’ve read it.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I read it as I was writing the first draft of Revenge!  I loved Dangerous Husband and felt inspired by the notion that a darkly comic domestic story had been published.  That book is funny as hell, and I need to read it again.

Another influence on Revenge was Joyce’s Ulysses.  The wordplay, the close 3rd POV, the two alternating perspectives (not counting Molly Bloom’s), and so on.  The opening line of Revenge actually mirrors (steals?) the opening sentence structure of Ulysses.  Obviously, my dinky book is nowhere near the divine logorrhea of Joyce, but I was able to light a match off of his brilliant star.  Ha ha, that just made me laugh.  Anyway, I’ve always admired Ulysses and have almost finished it three times.

3.
The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo

MG: You have another book coming out soon, right? Can you tell us about that?

DD:  It’s titled The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo, and it comes out from St. Martin’s Press in early 2010.  What else would you like to know?  Seriously, I need a prompt. 

MG: Does she literally eat Kalamazoo? Sorry, that's the best I've got. Um, is it a novel or stories? Did you have second-book anxiety? Is there a third book in the works? Feel free to answer any or all . . .

DD:  The titular girl’s name is Audrey Mapes, and she does indeed eat the city.  It may surprise you, but very few people nowadays even remember the 1999-2000 devouring of Kalamazoo, MI.  How quickly we forget in this day-and-age of rapid-fire news! 

My book, though, is different from the numerous others that have been published about Audrey and her family.  The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo is actually compiled from the personal journals of Audrey’s older sister, McKenna.  As you probably know, the Mapeses have been notoriously private for the past ten years—not granting a single interview, being seen only rarely in public—but at long last we get to step inside the mysterious Mapes home and witness what went on behind those doors that might have motivated Audrey to transform herself into the “world’s most gifted eatist.” 

I would categorize the book as dark, humorous, tragic, and scary.  It’s quite shocking, really, to see how Audrey evolved from munching crayons as a baby to devouring refrigerators and stop signs as a young woman.  But I think readers will find the Mapes family to be endearing in their peculiarity.  I certainly did.

* * *

For more, including a full list of reviews, please visit Darrin’s website, http://www.darrindoyle.com

1.

MOLLY GAUDRY: What can you tell us about the voice of this narrator? How did you find it, craft it, develop it?

LYDIA MILLET: I wanted to write in a first-person voice utterly unlike myself, so I wrote away from me. In the direction of a utopian and also half-blind personality and one I could love.

2.

MG: Is the torture instrument real? What is it?

LM: There were various instruments, as I recall, modeled on old-fashioned torture devices and also sex toys. If you can quote me the one you mean maybe I can be more specific. Memory fades.

MG: p.61, "And soon [Mr. D.] brought a tool into the room. It was of old and strange design, sharp in places and black and very heavy. He said it was authentic and historical, and could be in a very fine museum indeed." And on p.77, "And I would gaze absently at the chair in the corner with sailboats and tillers on the upholstery where, if you looked closely at the backs of the wooden legs a few inches from the floor, you would be able to see thin, deep lines etched horizontally. These were places where wires had rubbed and dug into the wood while they were looped around my ankles."

LM: I think I pictured the tool on p.61 as a kind of mace, although I also recollect a kind of iron maiden type deal, possibly elsewhere in the book. As to p.77, unrelated tool use, I believe.

3.

MG: In your mind, what happens to this narrator in the time and space after the novel ends?

LM: She doesn't live in my mind after the novel ends. She's the last page forever. Though I do wish I could believe in an afterlife.

For more information, please visit Lydia Millet's website. For an excerpt from My Happy Life, click here.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, has been officially released and is now shipping. Twenty-one stories, 178 pages, and it will only cost you $13.95. Shipping is free!

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For only $5 more, get an issue of Keyhole with One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.
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Phantasmagoria & One of These Things $17.95 Keyhole 7 & One of These Things $18.95 Keyhole 6 & One of These Things $18.95 Keyhole 5 & One of These Things $18.95

Live e-Readings

Reading Schedule:

Tuesday, July 28 - 8pm central
Wednesday, July 29 - 8pm central
Thursday, July 30 - 8pm central

The readings are free and available online here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/one-of-these-things

Praise for One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

“There is, in Stephanie Johnson’s stories, a profound, unflashy magic of seeing. She puts you right up to the beating hearts of her people—from which vantage, you see how they miss one another, and you understand as odd, perfect miracles their moments of connection and knowledge.”
—Scott Garson, author of American Gymnopédies

“Stephanie Johnson is a great writer, and I'm consistently impressed by how her quiet, unassuming characters manage to sneak past my defenses to blow me away, story after story.
—Matt Bell, author of The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind

“Stephanie Johnson’s fiction—like Raymond Carver’s—celebrates the idea that less, on the page, can be more: her stories are at once lean and rich, poignant and wry, insightful and evocative. An impressive debut.”
—Jessica Treadway, author of And Give You Peace and Absent Without Leave

“Stephanie Johnson can accomplish in five hundred words what some writers can only do in five thousand: a complete arc of narrative with compelling characters struggling through the web of human frailties, entangled in passion and dependancy, love and betrayal, insight and ignorance.”
—Jeff McMahon, Editor of Contrary

Little Mother is about youth, or rather the loss of it, along with a couple of meals and the control of some hormones. Hormones can be hell when you're young and so can long car rides in the afternoon. So can mothers, for that matter, and so can conversations from the passenger seat. But silence is easy and sometimes necessary to hold on to youth a little longer. Childhood is fleeting. For the lucky, it dies slowly. For those who aren't, it ends suddenly and that's pretty much what it's all about; youth or the death thereof.

I'm pretty familiar with the subject. Four years ago, plus or minus a few months and credits, I finished high school. In those four years, like every twenty something in history, I've done quite a bit. Also typical for the age, most of it isn't important and the rest probably shouldn't be mentioned for civility's sake. But that doesn't matter. That's youth and it's littered with bad decisions. What does matter is that among the late night visits to tattoo shops, impromptu flights to Key West and two p.m. mornings, some good decisions are made. Sitting down and making a serious attempt at writing was my good decision and Little Mother was my first venture into online publishing, thanks to the editors at Toasted Cheese. It was my first real success at publishing period. Getting your work out there isn't easy. That's a given. Granted, it seems easy at first - crank out a short story or two and send them off to as many big name or smaller literary magazines as possible. Five or ten rejection letters later (or a few hundred, depending on your level of patience), the brick hits the head. Or the computer screen; depends on your level of patience.

The road to publication can be hard—very hard. Traditional print journals can be tougher to breach than a military installation. Rejection letters can be plentiful. Frustration can be unbelievable. That's where online publishing steps in to bridge the gap. It's an outlet for free expression, experimentation and it's the perfect place for young or simply new writers to get started. The whole world is going virtual. Everything and everybody have a place on the web and now literature does too. There's something out there for everybody, whether deep and insightful, lust and champagne or cross-bred aliens is your thing. The web allows literature to evolve in a way that hasn't been possible until now and it makes it accessible, which is even better. All in all, technology is a pretty awesome thing. Well, mostly. If I could just learn to work a fax machine without my fists, life would be good.

KYLE BEACHY: I'm happy to talk with you, Molly. You're interesting and friendly.

MG: Well, thank you. I feel the same about you, obviously, and am grateful for your time and willingness to take part in this Writers Respond interview.

1. Divorce, Sadness, and Autobiography

MG: I'd like to begin by asking you about the parents' divorce in The Slide. It seems to me that their split is one of the final sadnesses in your novel. I know this book is sort of loosely autobiographical, but I'm interested in the fictional element of creating this character, Potter Mays, having him return home after graduating from college, and then having him witness (among other perhaps less-personal tragedies) the end of his parents' marriage. I wonder, how does their divorce work on a larger, more symbolic level for the novel as a whole? Or does it?

KB: I always thought of the divorce as one of several rifts. I see the book sort of like a network of arrows of forces and different colors that all operate at the same time. Like that Faulkner line, what he calls trying to move your arms and legs with strings when the same strings are hitched to everyone else's arms and legs. But I see rifts over strings and I wanted big rifts and little rifts, and I also wanted collisions, forces working in opposition and concurrence. I would hope the divorce connects somehow to the other sadnesses.

MG: Why sadness?

KB: It's not too removed from that great notion of I am trying to break your heart—here we all are, post-millenial and cool, yes yes we're terminally evolved and disaffected and far too enlightened to be touched, sentimentality has been written off, we all sigh in unison and say, of course. But if you can succeed at sadness you've at least reached into the reader somehow and twisted something or other. It's not the only way, but it was the way I thought to try. Now I can try something else.

MG: And what can you share with us about the autobiographical elements in The Slide? From other interviews I've read, I gather you're pretty open to the novel being read as loosely autobiographical.

KB: I'm open to the book being read however people choose to read it. There is overlap between Potter's life and my life at age twenty-two, but it stops the moment the book becomes interesting. Writing this was a process moving further and further away from what I had experienced, and as this happened the writing became easier. But yes I drove a water delivery van briefly, yes. I have had troubles with love and jealousy and betrayal, yes. I have found myself unable to decide what's right and wrong given the circumstances, definitely. And I do truly love the St. Louis Cardinals.

2. Character, Mystery, and Fucked-Up Gifts

MG: Who is your favorite character in The Slide and why?

KB: Audrey, absolutely. I spent so much time with everyone else. She is still a ghost.

MG: Oh, that's a good answer. She's something of a mystery to me, too, and probably to other readers as well. One reason for this might be that she enters the novel mysteriously, by sending Potter a starfish with two broken legs. Why, in your mind, does she send Potter the starfish? And is there any particular reason it winds up where it does?

KB: It's a confusing gift. Maybe she wants to confuse him. Probably she sends it for a lot of different reasons, and definitely not for other reasons. I would guess it's a complicated mixture she doesn't totally understand. Vengeance and cowardice, at least. Justice. And I'm not
totally sure where it does end up. Have you ever sent fucked up gifts to someone you're not sure if you love?

MG: I don't think I've ever sent anyone a fucked-up gift. I don't think I've ever been unsure about those I've loved. It's backfired, certainly, but anyway. So I think the next question is: What fucked-up gifts have you sent in the past?

KB: No bad gifts since elementary school, which was a dog bone I handed to a pretty girl to make a point and look funny in front of other kids. It was mean and fucked-up. Generally I try to give good gifts.

MG: That is so mean! I did something terrible like that, too, but to a friend who, for some reason, I arbitrarily decided I didn't need or want as a friend anymore. I was a piece of shit back in my junior high days, definitely. Mostly because I was unhappy and tired all the time.
The last gift I gave someone that really went over well was maybe two or three years back: a steamroller. That went over better than I'd expected. I have no idea how or where that person is now. Alas. And you? The last good gift you gave someone?

KB: I gave my nephew this super rad bulldozer toy with working parts everywhere, rubber plastic metal and big and strong and sharp and pointy and probably unsafe. I really enjoying giving books to my mother because it's so easy. The big secret is this: my mother will like
almost any book I choose simply by virtue of me thinking she will like it. It is almost like throwing a ball and trying to hit the ground.

3. Character, the Seven-Year Novel, and Popularity

MG: Hands down, my favorite character is Ian. Would you mind telling us about the genesis of his role in this novel?

KB: The book originally included a number of these divergent vignettes that started with Potter's water deliveries. He'd deliver somewhere and the narrative would flop over to this other character from the delivery, then it would catch back up to Potter. I liked Ian and started making his story bigger. I wanted a kid who wasn't precocious, and I wanted certain reflections of Potter's life, certain concavities in the mirror. There's a line in there about
a dog staring at a horse. Like that.

MG: Here it is (as if by magic): "I felt like a dog might feel, staring at a horse. We were the same shape, roughly, but the difference in scale and skills were immense." It is lovely. It is moments, lines, like these that make The Slide such a touching novel. Well done. So I think I read somewhere that it took seven years for you to complete this novel. If the original format was a series of vignettes, then I'm curious to know if there were other formats and how you ended up with the traditionally narrated sort of novel that you did.

KB: It was like shaking one of those archeology screens, how they dump dirt onto it and shake and the fossil or gold nugget is either there or it's not there. I just had to shake for a long long time because the dirt I put onto the screen didn't know what the hell it was doing. Did you watch Voyage of the Mimi at any point in school? It was about discovering things and I think also about whales. As for the traditional narrative, I wanted propulsion, things moving quickly and cohesively. Plus I don't fall into this camp that treats this word traditional as derogatory.

MG: What is Voyage of the Mimi? Oh god, I feel unpopular again. Like, is this something I was supposed to have been watching? Is this what all the cool kids were watching?
Were you a cool kid? And popularity—overrated or a necessary thing?

KB:
It's what seventh graders watched in Social Studies class, a PBS mini-series starring a tiny Ben Affleck. I am 95% sure that I was cool. I played sports and felt up girls and rode a skateboard and smoked cigarettes at the mall. I think of popularity as an artificial value system, like Beanie Babies. I'm also curious of longer-view popularity narratives, like e.g. people today who were nerds growing up and now find themselves at the center of attention because they're talented, because adult nerds are talented and valuable and smart, but when
they're popular suddenly they turn into vengeful smug assholes. It's like Fortune's wheel. Here's an unglamorous thing I believe wholeheartedly: people should just be nice. Forget who is writing what and who is reading where and with whom and why aren't I reading, why isn't this my show, and just be a friendly motherfucker. It's so much easier. Make pleasantness the only factor for popularity and I'll get on board.

4. Blogs, Websites, and the Internet

MG: You have a blog. Will you tell us about why you began blogging? And will you direct us to your favorite blog post and tell us about it?

KB: I'm not good at blogging. I come and go in waves. I tried to be a baseball blogger and write something about every Cardinals game this season, then after one game I realized it was going to be hard. I retired. My favorite post is so totally obviously this one here, in which I address a beautiful photograph of a squirrel that died
marvelously outside my home. I read the thing you wrote about impermanence and love and the challenges. That strikes me as a personal thing to throw out there; do you ever overstep and say too much?

MG: I didn't know you read my blog! Aw, thanks, Kyle! So yeah, that squirrel picture is crazy. What a good neighbor you have! Oh man, I don't know. I mean, the truth is I don't feel I put anything personal on my blog. It's a very tricky, very fine line. For instance, my friends and family rarely make appearances. Even so, they have on more than one occasion requested I not blog things they share in confidence . . . um, despite the fact I never have before. Still, I know what you (and they) mean: I can really emo it up sometimes. But if you notice, those are the posts that generate the most comments, and I think people connect to those posts, the things I share, and then feel compelled to respond. And this is why I began blogging in the first place: to connect with others. I also do my fair share of commenting on others' blogs. And it's true: I always respond to posts that detail someone's personal struggles. If it seems someone needs encouragement or a pat on the back, I like to provide that, if I can. What about you? Are you much of a commenter? And what, if any, blogs or websites do you visit every day?

KB: My instinct has been to go without comments on the site. My thought is: toss the thing into the void and let it live or die, then move on to the next thing. Comments complicate this arrangement, and it becomes a question of who's listening. But I like your point about connection, like a conversation. I don't often comment, and everyday blogs and websites of mine are sort of embarrassing. Certain gossip sites and Drudgereport to see how other people think. Gauge public interest, like palpating. I come to yours rather often because there's always something. There's drama there, a lot of moments leading up to what feel like important
decisions. How much do you see your blog as its own narrative?

MG: I do see it as a narrative, though I've never thought about it in this way. It is, though, definitely. I mean, so far it's seen me in four different cities, through four different jobs, has been, incredibly, perhaps the only constant throughout. Weird. And yes, regarding drama, I certainly blog about sadness and confusion and angst fairly regularly. But while the sadness and confusion and angst are true and real, I feel the blogging about them, the public sharing of them, is writing, and that the language embellishes, perhaps. As a writer, though, I like having an outlet to share that kind of emotion-heavy language, which I probably couldn't get away with in fiction—probably not even in non-fiction. That those emotions are real and true is an added bonus: that others respond is the only reason I've kept it up.

5. Teaching and the MFA

MG: Although this interview is a living document, currently, that won't resemble the final product exactly, I'll share with readers that you're in Iowa City right now (at the end of June), teaching (I think). What are you teaching and what can you share with us about the experience?

KB: I taught three classes for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival: a weekend class on a-realism or anti-realism or whatever you want to call that which isn't strictly governed by reality; then two weeklong sessions, one on first chapters and one on scene-building. The whole thing was impressive as hell. I always had this fanciful notion of Iowa City as a competitive warzone of some sort, with aspiring short story writers offing one another in back alleyways. And maybe it's a different place during the school year, but my experience was just peaceful and inspirational and nothing but great. I met outrageously interesting people. The other faculty especially because they'd all found a way to make writing into a sustainable practice and career, each unique in their task, and it's rad when people reach a point where competition is moot, everyone is doing their own thing and curious, even respectful of everyone else. And whiskey in that town flows as if downhill.

MG: I'm so jealous! I wish I could have been there. Did you meet any awesome (famous) people?

KB: I kept trying to get Nick Dybeck into a my dad's smarter than your dad argument, but he wouldn't bite. Man, I don't know, a lot of really damn talented people. It's just a hub of terribly interesting people who value stories and wordplay and imagery and technique, and moving among these people, socializing with them and sharing ideas, is a hell of a thing.

MG: How did your anti-realism class go over? What were your students like?

KB: Enthusiastic, varied, curious. I was pleased as hell with the class. Ghosts and talking frogs and mysterious doors in bedroom floors.

MG: And on the subject of Iowa, what are your thoughts on the whole MFA debate? You have one from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, right? Why did you choose that program? Why not shoot for a fully funded program?

KB: The debate, as I understand it, seems to miss the real point of an MFA, which is basically a gift, to yourself, of two years dedicated to writing. Certainly I have opinions about the benefit of the workshop method and the risks of homogeneity, but I really think people will get out of an MFA program exactly what they put into it. It is not a magic gateway to publishing. Nor is it a complete waste of money. SAIC is non-traditional in that they don't divvy up their poets into this corner, prose writers over here. There you're first and foremost an artist, and a writer next. That's it. You're a writer—write whatever the hell you please. At SAIC I was boring whereas at other programs I would have been the weirdo.

6. Travel and Vacations

MG: Soon you're off to Denmark. Why Denmark? What will you do there?

KB: It's a month-long residency at Hald Hovedgaard, where I'll be one of four international authors who will work and live at this 18th century villa on a lake in the countryside, not far from the town of Viborg. There are four of us and I think eight or so Danish writers, and the point is to mingle and inspire while also staying out of one another's way, since we're all going to be solitary and productive and probably batshit crazy by the end of week one.

MG: Do you have any favorite vacation destinations? A favorite vacation memory?

KB: My mother's side is all English, from the Bristol and Bath areas. I try to make it there whenever I can. Last time I drove up through the Lake District and into Scotland, over to the Isle of Skye, the single most beautiful location I've seen. Plus the Talisker Distillery is there. I was also lucky enough to travel with my father when I was a kid, he'd drag me along to his lectures and meetings in China or Europe and elsewhere. We got conned once outside of The Vatican, just an old-fashioned gaffling, and the mutual embarrassment we felt afterward was and is a key reason we're so close.

MG: Everything you just wrote there is amazing. I was going to make a Lady of Bath joke, but then I realized what an asshole thing that would be. In any case, it all sounds so wonderful.

KB: You were going to make a Chaucer joke? Shit, man. We had two rules going into this, and one was no Chaucer jokes.

MG: Okay, a picture then, which has nothing to do with anything.

7. Interviews and Run-Ins with Famous Authors

MG: What question have you always wanted to answer but never been asked in an interview? And the answer?

KB: I keep waiting for someone to ask about run-ins with famous authors. Like: Kyle, what famous author might have death-stared you in a particular Vermont barn because you might have been dancing with someone he wanted to get his lecherous fingers around? And I'll say I have no idea what you're talking about. Hey lemme ask you this...do you ever write with a partner? I'm thinking of writing something with a friend and I always like to survey people before I do anything at all.

MG: I have and do. I have a thing about weeping and growing in decomP, which Blythe Winslow and I co-wrote. At the end of our session, she gave it to me, washed her hands of it. Thanks, Blythe! And for some time now, Donora Hillard and I have been exchanging couplets, working our way toward a longer poem. And a friend of mine here in Philadelphia sent me the first paragraph of a romance novel that I'm to add to one of these days; our aim is to make some money, get famous under a terrible pseudonym. Wish us luck. Anyway, what are you thinking of, specifically? Sounds intriguing, definitely.

KB: I have these friends who are stupidly talented. But I've always clutched onto a hallowed notion of solitude for writing, and part of me fears losing control of where a thing goes. But certain projects would almost seem to demand teamwork, like comedy. I suppose the big fear is schizophrenia or some lack of cohesion. What about arguments? I'm a stubborn person sometimes. Will we stop loving each other? Will our friendship fall to pieces?

MG: Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. I just had a creative G-chat exchange with a Philly / soon-to-be NY writer in which we didn't chat but collaborated on a sort of poem-type thing. He can do whatever he wants with it, and I'm going to take select lines and fashion some sort of
story, perhaps. Maybe when it comes to collaboration the best thing is to remember it's a collaboration, with no pressure on the final product? I don't know.

KB: This guy is a genius, who I'm going to work with. So mainly I'm just excited to see what comes of it.

MG: Oh yeah, hey, why aren't you allowed to answer questions on Franzen?

KB: I appreciate what you're doing here. I really do.

8. Second Book Struggles and Online v. Print

MG: You and I are sort of in the same boat right now: we both have first books available for purchase. The differences, though, are huge. First, you got a five-figure advance for yours; and second, you have an agent who sold yours to Dial Press, an imprint of Random House. The question is why? Why the big house and not a small press?

KB: While I was writing the goal was to get my book into the hands of readers. And like any hungry young person, I wanted to be paid for my work. My plan was to exhaust all the chances for big houses and when that didn't pan out, work my way through the independents. So it wasn't
an issue of choice as much as opportunity, for me. And Dial is wonderful because it's a small, dedicated imprint beneath the great sprawling Random House umbrella. And I'm honored to be associated with the other Dial authors. Nor is this any kind of knock on the indie presses, which I support fully and am grateful to for all the authors I get to read who don't, for whatever reason, fit into the plans of the big houses. Brian Evenson and Amelia Gray...but I didn't write the same sort of book they wrote.

MG: That's a good point: that yours isn't like theirs. I think that says it all. So how about this: is there a second book in the works? If so, how's it coming?

KB: It's coming slowly, but yes. I painted myself into a lot of corners with this first one, and I worked a lot to undo things I'd worked a lot to do in the first place. So I'm planning more now, drawing graphs and charts. It's about fun, the new book. And bones. And safety.

MG: Since The Slide came out, you've been publishing short pieces in some of the online journals. Hobart and decomP, to name two. What other journals do you like and what are your thoughts on online journals versus print journals?

KB: When a thing appears online it is there, for better or for worse, for all to see, always. Barring some meltdown, you'll always have that address to refer readers to. Print journals appear in relatively small numbers in a relative few stores and are consumed by a small group of very avid readers. I want my work to be available—that's sort of the bottom line.

9. The Million Dollar Questions

MG: Do you ever think "Fuck it all" and wonder why you're not doing something else with your life? If you weren't a writer, what would you be?

KB: I don't really think writing precludes being other things. I teach college students, currently. Maybe someday I'll learn to fix a muffler. I'd like to be more of a gypsy.

MG: Someday I'd like to learn to change my oil. $40 seems like a lot; the bastards. Okay, so what's your biggest pet-peeve?

KB: Assholery by default. A close second is assholery by entitlement.

MG: Hardback or paperback?

KB: Paper, rolled into back pocket, underlined and marked to hell and back.

MG: I like books so old you can't dog-ear them because the corner breaks off. Blondes or brunettes?

KB: Brunettes. With brown eyes.

MG: Coffee or tea?

KB: Coffee all day long.

MG: Backpack or fanny pack?

KB:
Really backing my friend Dave's purse, which he swears is a camera bag converted into what he calls a "smoking carrier." For his tobacco tin and things. But it's so totally a purse.

MG: Ha! Cats or dogs?

KB: Dogs, especially mine, the most beautiful dog alive, Lolita the mutt.

MG: Why Lolita?

KB: You'd have to meet her.

MG: East coast or west coast?

KB: Mid. West. Holler.

MG: Cupcakes or muffins?

KB: I swear I still don't fully know the difference. It's like the difference between seeds and nuts.

MG: Hmmm, let's try again. Cupcakes or muffins?

KB: So what if I put icing onto a muffin? What's the score then?

MG: I'm not sure icing on a muffin would work. They're totally different things! Getting tired of these yet?

KB: I love these.

MG: Okay, your turn.

KB: Brooklyn or Brooklyn?

MG: Um, I don't know. Brooklyn, maybe.

KB: Alright. Chicago or Philly?

MG: Philly's not so bad, but find me a job and somewhere to live in Chicago and I'm there. (Do it fast: I'm about to sign a year lease and submit syllabi to my dept. head for approval.) Chicago's lit scene, whew. Just thinking about it . . .

KB: Chicago is full of unused condos—they saturated the market during the bubble. You could squat! Shane Jones or Blake Butler? You must pick one.

MG: I'm not much of a squatter. And Shane. Such a nice boy.

KB: Single or married?

MG: Shane? He's getting married this summer.

KB: Harry Nilsson or Jim Croce? There is no wrong answer.

MG: This one was tough. I had to sleep on it, but in the end: Nilsson.

KB: Kindle or pee in your eye?

MG: Kyle Beachy, folks. For more, visit him here.

The telephone rings in the man's apartment. It is the man's best friend from 3rd grade whom he has not seen in fifty years. They talk about the past, the present. They talk about how their lives turned out. Each compares the other's life with his own. It turns out they live only a few miles from each other.

The heroin addict works in the coffee shop. He's okay in the morning because he is high. He sets things up. He opens. He organizes the tables and chairs in the patio area. He breathes. He appreciates the sun and the earth. He uses the coffee shop bathroom to shoot up when he needs to. His boss knows he is a heroin addict but doesn't do or say anything because he is also a competent employee and they are hard to find these days.

The fifteen-year-old boy and the fourteen-year-old girl are going out. It is the first time either of them have gone out with someone. They have been together for a week. They know they are supposed to hold hands often, so they do, even though it is a little awkward when they are around their friends. The girl wonders when the boy will give her her first kiss.

The two men meet halfway at the coffee shop. They sit outside because it's a nice day. They continue the process of telling each other about their lives for the rest of the morning. They discover some interesting coincidences. They learn things they never would have thought the other person would have done.

The heroin addict needs to use the bathroom but it's occupied. He is almost losing it. He sits outside in the sun. Two men are talking at a nearby table and it is driving him a little crazy. Finally, a boy and a girl emerge from the bathroom holding hands. He gets up and goes to the bathroom.

The two men talk outside the coffee shop for the rest of the day. In the afternoon, a green woman rides by on a bicycle. They both stop talking as she rides past them.

The boy and the girl stop walking outside the girl's house. Other people may be watching them from other houses but they feel like they are alone. The girl thought the boy might kiss her when they went into the bathroom. The girl thinks he might kiss her now. She wonders if she is supposed to do something to make him kiss her. The boy seems like he wants to do something.

The boss decides to have a talk with the heroin addict. He knows his competence is only temporary. Soon the heroin will eat him and he will be useless. He gives the heroin addict an ultimatum.

The sun is going down. The two men decide to leave the coffee shop and go to a nearby pub. They have a few beers and continue the process.

The heroin addict goes to the pub and sits next to the two men and orders a beer. He has a lot of thinking to do.

The boy's cell phone rings. It is his mother. She wants him home for dinner. He says goodbye to the girl. He says he will come over tomorrow. The girl says goodbye and goes inside and plops onto her bed and thinks about texting him something but she doesn't know what.

One of the two men says hi to the heroin addict and the heroin addict says hi back. They remember him from the coffee shop. The three of them talk about various things. They move to a table and order a pitcher of a kind of beer they all coincidentally like.

The green woman parks her bicycle on the side of her house and takes the bread and milk inside to the kitchen. In the living room, she logs onto the internet. She turns on her web cam. She takes her clothes off.

The heroin addict's head falls, slams onto the table. He is unconscious. The two men tell people to call an ambulance.

The boss finishes closing up the coffee shop and walks by the pub. An ambulance is parked outside. He sees the heroin addict being wheeled out. Two men are with him. They look familiar.

In his bedroom, the boy logs on to the internet and goes to http://www.greengirl.com. Her web cam is on. He captures a still frame of her breasts and blows the picture up so it takes up the entire screen. He masturbates. The cell phone on the bed behind him vibrates.

The two men follow the ambulance to the hospital. In the waiting room of the hospital, they continue the process.

The girl falls asleep and dreams that she is pregnant. She goes into labor and screams. She wakes up. Her mother comes into the room to see if she is okay.

The green woman goes to the bathroom mirror. She admires her perfect body, her inhuman color. Later, she falls asleep on the couch with the television on.

In the morning, the heroin          addict's
mother comes into the hospital room. Her son is up and drinking a glass of milk. A half finished piece of toast is on the tray in front of him.

In the morning, the green woman makes some toast and pours herself a glass of milk.

The

boy's

mother

makes

toast for

breakfast.

http://www.spfpittsburgh.com

SPF - PITTSBURGH'S SMALL PRESS FESTIVAL
Region's Small Presses, Writers, and Artists Unite for a Month of Literary Events and a Weekend Expo

PITTSBURGH, PA - Pittsburgh-based arts organization Open Thread will hold its first-ever installment of SPF, a new small press festival for Pittsburgh, this July. The festival will feature a month-long calendar filled with readings, releases, screenings, and a weekend-long expo. The festival is supported in part by a Seed Award from the Sprout Fund.

The SPF Expo will be the most significant feature of the festival. There, presses and authors will sell their books and hold a series of panels and workshops. The expo will be held on Saturday July 18th and Sunday July 19th, from 12pm to 6pm, at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. Participating presses include Caketrain, Encyclopedia Destructica, The New Yinzer, Open Thread, The Pittsburgh Signs Project, and more!

Other events throughout the month will include the launch of a Pittsburgh edition of Is Reads: The Journal Outdoors, a collaboration with Keyhole Magazine and the Gist Street Reading Series; the launch of new publications such as the Tri-State Chapbooks from Open Thread and Encyclopedia Destructica, and the newest issues of INCITE! and Pear Noir!; and plenty more that's still in the works!

Interested parties should visit www.spfpittsburgh.com, where they can register for a table at the expo or express their interest in holding an event or sitting on a panel. Expo registration costs only $25 and includes a table, two chairs, and a small sign. Admission to the expo is free, but a full weekend pass to the concurrent panels and workshops will be available for purchase online soon!

Open Thread created SPF to give authors, bookmakers, editors, and publishers an opportunity to sell their books-and provide Pittsburghers with a chance to more fully experience the region's small press community. Open Thread's mission is to establish frameworks for artistic discovery in Pittsburgh and the surrounding tri-state area.

Saturday afternoon & I am at my field, a field of colors. I tell the girls OKAY, & they sprint down the slope. The ribbons tied to their hair wave back to me & say HELLO, or GOODBYE. They are my girls for the week & they spread the field, collecting rainbow shards off the ground into baskets normally reserved for easter egg hunts. My youngest finds a rainbow stick & sucks on it like a candy cane & says to me later in the truck that rainbows taste just like pancake syrup & can she have some more before bed.

I tell her YES. YOU CAN.

II.

I am back at my field, a field of dismembered bodies. There are human parts & there are animal parts strewn about. There are flecks of rainbow in the grass, the colors of yesterday. My girls sit in a circle & construct a new species of animal. Part monkey tail & zebra head & baby elephant body. Killer whale teeth in their ladle cupped palms. They name their pet in the making Australia & when they are done they will ride Australia & conquer mountains & stomp out desperate tigers. They will rope in lovers & bound them tight & never let go. They say WE WILL DO THIS. Then challenge my eyes to disagree.

III.

My girls sleep in their beds & I return to my field. I park on a hill & stay in the cab. Windows rolled down. Radio friendly murmurs. Darkness taking on different shapes. I remember driving Aimee here most nights. When we were younger & cared less. We listened as my field shifted. We made guesses & wrote them on the back of our hands. She was the winner, once. A field of singing sunflowers at daybreak.

I come but no longer play the game.

IV.

They say BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FIELD? WHAT WILL WE MISS WHILE WE ARE AWAY?

I tell my girls ONE DAY THERE WILL BE A FIELD OF RABBITS. RABBITS THE SIZE OF HOUSES. THEY WILL RACE EACH OTHER IN ZIGZAGS & BARREL THROUGH FORESTS. THE NEXT DAY THERE WILL BE A FIELD OF VEGETABLES. TO FEED THE RABBITS.

They say WE DO NOT LIKE RABBITS. WE HATE IT WHEN MOMMY FORCES US TO FINISH OUR VEGETABLES.

V.

The days pass. A change in the weather. My field is unattended. I do not know what goes on there.

VI.

I tell my girls KEEP WATCH FOR CUTTING EDGES & CORNERS. We are at my field, a field of blank white paper. My youngest wants to color but I have no crayons for her. My eldest calls everyone together & teaches origami. She says THIS IS HOW YOU FOLD A CRANE. THIS IS HOW YOU FOLD A ROSE. NO, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

My girls grow in front of me. Their voices carry loads. I fold paper planes that will never know flight. They sit in a line, waiting for takeoff. My girls come to me & say THIS FIELD IS BORING. CAN WE GO BACK HOME NOW? When we reach the truck they say NO. OUR OTHER HOME.

VII.

My girls live with Aimee for the week & I am alone. At my field. A field of chairs. I sit in every one.

VIII.

It is early morning & no one yet exists. I am at my field, a field of heavenly things. Only my youngest visits with me. She plays the angel & wears five halos over her head & they do not fall out of place, even when she goes tumbling on elbows & knees. The halos are unlit & metallic-looking & I wish I could somehow reignite them with fire. I would use them for headlights & banish the night. My youngest adds a sixth halo & tells me not to worry because there’s no weight & that wearing them makes her head feel empty inside. She says EMPTY BUT IN A GOOD WAY. Then touches my face.

J. C. has been kind enough to take time out from his busy schedule to answer a few questions.

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi J. C., thanks for agreeing to this interview. I'd like to begin by asking about "Ethan: A Love Story," which is my favorite story in The Hospital for Bad Poets. The emotional core of this piece centers around the narrator and his six-year-old nephew. Their relationship begins when, home for the holidays, the narrator accidentally shrinks a sweater in the dryer and gives it to Ethan: "I tugged the collar over his head and told him the sweater had come from a lovely girl. The boy's eyes tested this, and he decided to take a chance. 'I like pretty girls,' he said. 'They make my eyes turn to hearts.' Ethan and I fell in love." My question, then, is this: How does this story define, or redefine, the love story?

J.C. HALLMAN: Well, traditionally, we probably think of the "love story" as being limited to those stories among people—among adults—in which there is at least the possibility of romantic/intimate/sexual love. This story plays off that, but I hope that play enables it to get at other things. The backdrop of the story is the buildup to our invasion of Iraq, and something I wanted to depict was the way in which families suffered as a result of the war—not always because someone went off to fight, but because the fight was right there in the living room as the debate over the wisdom of the war waged here. To some extent, the love of a family can fall casualty to that, and that, I think, can be a love story too, a sad one.

MG: There is so much more going on in this story: it comments on the isolation one feels when home for a family gathering, surrounded by relatives who do not share his political beliefs; and by exploring the violence of children's video games asks us to rethink the violence in our adult worlds, both abroad and domestic. What is this story about, to you, and what can you tell us about its genesis?

JCH: This is a pretty autobiographical story—a lot of it actually happened, except for a fairly fabulist turn the piece takes toward the end (and even then the action describes feelings I actually had). It would probably be easier to go through the story and pull out the invented bits than it would be to document the fictionalizations . . . but all that, I think, is neither here nor there: stories must prove their worth not because they've actually happened, but because they matter regardless of whether they happened. As to what it means—well, for me, it's an attempt to understand how our society could have made such a profound mistake, operating off such fundamental hypocrisy. That meant using this family situation to demonstrate that everything from video games to a media without a fairness doctrine helped to create a climate where something very bad was capable of happening. At the same time, love is inside there, trying to survive, trying to weather it all.

MG: Wow, that is lovely. Which is your favorite from the collection and why?

JCH: I don't think I have a favorite. I don't think that one can think about one's own work the way readers do. That is, as readers, we are discriminating, choosy—maybe even kind of provincial. As writers, though, you have to sign on wholeheartedly to everything you do. Some stories, you might be able to acknowledge, are more successful than others, but you can't really disown them. They are as important to the creation of the ongoing collage of yourself as any of the others. That said, I think the more recent stories in the collection are probably stronger . . . but even that has been shot down by some readers who have felt the best work was material that is quite old. Who knows? Robert Hass once said that the whole business of favorite poems was impossible—and he was speaking as a reader. As a writer, it's even more difficult.

MG: Do you consider yourself a short story writer?

JCH: Sure. And a nonfiction writer. The line between those things blurs sometimes, obviously. It's all just writing in the end—the medium, or the genre, or whatever, doesn't matter as long as you're engaged in literary endeavors. The only thing I don't consider myself is a poet—which is a compliment to poetry.

MG: Well, now that is very interesting, considering the collection's title: The Hospital for Bad Poets . . .

JCH: Yeah, I guess it's possible for poets to bristle at the title. It's not meant that way. The secret of that story is that I was dating a poet and taking an EMT-Basic class at the same time—I finished the class, but not the poet. The phrase itself comes from Nietzsche, which the poet had recommended to me, and when the relationship fell apart, it occurred to me to take Nietzsche more literally than he surely intended, and write the story as I did. That said, I feel like the story itself is a defense of poetry—a defense of the literary, in general. One wants, I think, to set out to be ambitious, even intellectual, but if you simply indulge in the obscure you launch literature on a trajectory toward silence.

MG: What advice do you have for younger writers?

JCH: Aspire to truth. Indulge in detail. Trust your curiosity. Invest in yourself.

MG: What question have you always wanted to answer but never been asked in an interview? And the answer?

JCH: Q: Why write? A: I think this is actually answerable—at least for me. Because the world, or civilization, as it stands, creates a pressure of deceit and propaganda, fools itself into a cycle of tepid progress punctuated with horrific cataclysm and backsliding, and people of good conscience, in viewing this, step back and respond to it, offer up some kind of observation and critique, and thereby serve as a sort of correction, a conscience, that makes the world a little less bad and sustains at least the possibility of the good.

Please check out this favorable NYT Book Review of The Hospital for Bad Poets, and visit J. C. Hallman's website for more.

To join the club, initiates need to pass a test and the test is simple—release a juicy tidbit to the press about their better siblings—the more salacious the secret, the higher their position within the gang. The lesser Baldwins wormed their way in by letting it slip that Alec had unkind things to say about his daughter though they would never admit their indiscretion in mixed company. For Solange, it was by no means an accident that the paparazzi knew when and where her sister was married.  All the gang members understand that gossip is power. They know where most of the dirty laundry hangs. It is a comfort.

Each member of the girl gang has her (or his) personal (public) demons. Ashlee spends most of her time sitting in her corner rocking back and forth like she’s davening with a rabbi, cursing the day she ever agreed to appear on Saturday Night Live. She is haunted, at night, by the memory of the awkward little jig she did as she exited stage left. Looking upward, looking for answers, she often grabs her hair, careful not to damage the extensions, and cries, “Why isn’t Papa Joe obsessed with my breasts? Why does my husband wear more makeup than me? Why wasn’t my nose job enough?” I’m the skinny one, she often reminds herself, when she’s feeling particularly low. Ashlee’s fellow gang members listen to her cries sympathetically but have little to offer in the way of comfort. They have their own crosses to bear.

Ali likes to comfort herself with reruns of Living Lohan and listening to her favorite tracks of her Christmas album though when she stares at herself in the mirror… when she takes a good hard look at herself, she’s forced to admit that the whole thing is awkward. Her mother is a bit much and she needs to do an Ashlee Simpson on her own nose if only her drug-addled father would sign the consent form and then there’s her sister everywhere Ali looks and always getting everyone’s attention. Lindsey, Lindsey, Lindsey. It makes her sick to her stomach.

Ali comforts herself with artificial skin pigmentation. There’s something soothing about the cool mist of toxic chemicals. When she’s being sprayed down, Ali exhales deeply and thinks, I am ever more beautiful. I have not yet peaked. Ali’s fellow gang members have devised a warning system. They worry. When her skin takes on the appearance of rotting aged leather after a particularly vigorous spray tan session, they stage mini-interventions reminding Ali to embrace her pale skin, to just say no. She knows they’re trying to help but she ignores their warnings. She believes in better living through bronzer. That’s the secret to living Lohan.

She always wanted to be one of destiny’s children, but much to Solange’s chagrin, such was not her fate. She stomps around the clubhouse in impossibly high heels and the hand-me-downs designed by her mother that her sister doesn’t want, occasionally glaring at her toddler and wishing that she had been given a chance to be a Survivor so she could pay her Bills, Bills, Bills. She keeps a notebook, and in it she writes, over and over, May the House of Dereon Burn. The more she writes these words, the more euphoric she feels and when she’s done, she often finds herself flush and sweaty. Feeling good, she runs through Destiny’s Child routines for her friends who enjoy the free entertainment and plots her seduction of her sister’s husband. He’s a man, she’s a woman, and she’s willing to do things her sister won’t. That is a comfort too.

Haylie knows she had a bright and glorious moment with her work in Material Girls. She carries the DVD wherever she goes because it comforts her and reminds her that she has a career. She is fabulous. She is. She is. Haylie tells her fellow gang members that she is different. She loves her sister. They’re BFFs. Her friends know she’s lying. She knows they know she’s lying. Once in a while, someone mistakes her for her sister until they take a second look—notice the longer face, the straighter line of the nose, a hint of wrinkle at the temples. To face their disappointment as they realize Haylie is the sort of next best thing eats at her like a cancer. There are days when it is more than she can bear. She’s the older sister. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. At their daily meetings when the gang congregates to commiserate, Haylie is known to lament, “Where is my Disney deal? I have fucking family values.” She’ll look plaintively at her friends, want them to nod in agreement, and they’ll do so because when you’re in a gang, you have each other’s backs.

Reality television. That is how the lesser Baldwin brothers console themselves. So long as reality television exists, they will be fine. As long as they have reality television, they won’t have to think about Alec and 30 Rock and his Teflon reputation that nearly cost them their membership in the gang because their news leak didn’t ruin him. The lesser Baldwins like to think of themselves as royalty—perhaps diminished in bloodline, but royal nonetheless. Daniel enjoys a solid working relationship with VH-1. For once, his addiction issues are a blessing, Daniel will say to anyone who will listen. Billy has to face every day knowing he made the movie Fair Game. He wears his shame nakedly and in doing so, spends much of his time mutely trying to muster the strength to make it from one moment to the next. Stephen has found God. He has found God and he loves God. He prays a lot, pacing the clubhouse clutching his designer bible. He has tasked himself with the gang’s salvation, has deemed himself their chaplain. The gang members mostly ignore him.  They’re from Hollywood. They know there is no God.

On their good days, of which there are few, The Lesser-Known Siblings Girl Gang (that let in a few boys), will get dressed up in their best hand-me-downs and loiter in downtown Hollywood, just beyond the periphery of the hotspots their better known and more deeply loved siblings frequent. They’ll often be followed by one or two sad, frightening paparazzi, halfheartedly snapping away in the hopes that one of the better-known siblings might breach the awkward constellation of failure that follows the gang. On their good days, it is enough.

On the fridge, a new note read “Milk’s off. Don’t toss. I’ll use for my tea.” The note below it read “Turkey’s good. Not sure about chicken, your call.” On the stove the note in red marker read “Don’t touch.” He sat at the kitchen table, lining-up crackers and the jar of peanut-butter, and moving aside the note that read “After snack, homework.”

In the living room, the yellow Post-It on the TV screen read: “Don’t you dare.” In his bedroom, on his desk, she’d written on a ruled-sheet of yellow paper: “Check your homework twice.” On his DS: “Only if you’ve done everything else.” In the bathroom, on the toilet lid her faded scribbles read “Flush. Wash Hands.” Stuck to the front of the soap dish: “Count to 25 50. Slowly!”

On her bedroom door: “Stay Out.” His father had walked-out on his mother when she was pregnant, hadn’t even waited to see what she’d give him. Lately, she’d taken to calling the boy “The Man of the House.” Under his bedcovers, pinned to his flattened Paddington Bear that he’d had since he was a baby another new note read: “Time to toss this.”

He returned to his mother’s bedroom door, sniffing from between its cracks her face powder and spicy perfume, taking it in. At six o'clock, when he heard her car pulling into the driveway, he reached for the pile of Post-Its on the kitchen counter, choosing one from the orange stack.

When she stepped through the front door, he stood waiting, Paddington Bear clutched to his stomach. She stopped short. On the Post-It pressed to the boy’s forehead he’d written “Free–Please Take.” He pushed out past her, trembling, and took-up position on the street.