Jennings, Brittany – Page 20 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 58: A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson

Found in Willow Springs 58

April 24, 2006

Sarah Flynn, Thomas King, and Adam O’Connor Rodriguez

A CONVERSATION WITH MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Photo Credit: YouTube

MARILYNNE ROBINSON WAS BORN and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho. After graduating from Brown University in 1966, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Washington. While writing her dissertation, Robinson began work on her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), which received the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Robinson’s essays and book reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review, among other places. An essay published in Harper’s, titled “Bad News from Britain,” formed the basis of her controversial book, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), a finalist for the National Book Award.

In 1998, Robinson published a critically acclaimed collection of essays called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. The New York Times Book Review observed that “one of Robinson’s great merits as an essayist is her refusal to take her opinions secondhand. Her book is a goad to renewed curiosity.”

Her novel, Gilead, an epistolary tale of a dying Iowa preacher writing to his young son, earned her the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award.

To consider Robinson only a creative writer is a mistake. She is a serious thinker, demanding of herself and her audience. During this interview, Robinson commented on a wide range of issues, from Darwinism to current political issues. About fiction’s ability to capture any meaningful truth, Robinson said, “I feel there is a great deal of highly conventional thinking in almost every area of life that must be discarded in order for a writer to make something with integrity in terms of that writer’s understanding.”

Robinson was interviewed in front of an audience at Eastern Washington University in Spokane.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

During your talk at The Met the other night, you said that all your characters within a book are actually part of one character. Can you expand on that statement?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

It seems that fiction rarely achieves a sense of anything approximating, anything suggesting, the actual complexity or dimensionality of the human being. That was a problem when I was writing Housekeeping. I felt inadequate. I felt flatness. So my solution was to create what felt like one personality arrayed across a range of possible expressions of that personality. It seemed true from my own observations that a great deal of anyone’s character, of the experience anyone is formed by, their interior, is made up of things chosen against, things that do not fade, things one is attracted to but does not pursue—hopes or expectations or fears that are never realized but are nevertheless an important part of the interior weather any human being lives with.

Behavior you see in other people is the lingua franca behavior through which, normally speaking, we can be adequately intelligible to one another. We cannot alarm or puzzle one another excessively. And this is something that you learn, sort of like manners or the shorthand language of please and thank you. It is not intended to be a revelation of one’s character; it’s intended to allow you to pass through the world without exposing yourself, without damaging other people in ways you don’t want to. There’s inevitable role-playing that is a huge part of anybody’s behavior in life. This is not a negative statement. This is just the way we create a sort of uniform currency to make ourselves understandable, to be able to be adequate in circumstances that are perhaps casual, perhaps formal, perhaps very brief, and so on. If that level of anyone’s personality or character is taken to be a sufficient description of them, then obviously you’ve missed the whole human mystery, as far as that person is concerned. Being accepted at that level of self-revelation trivializes people.

And though it’s rare to see behind conventionalized behavior, you know as a matter of simply being able to extrapolate from experiencing yourself, that in every individual case, there’s infinitely more in the experience of another person. So my solution for the problem was to array characters in ways to show the impulses that might be particularly powerful, for example, and therefore least visible. I used to think of quantum physics, the idea that all possibilities remain until one is observed. I think that established a principle for me I’ve always clung to, which is that apparent oppositions are always oversimplifications. And to set up conflict, especially conflict of values, is something that very much simplifies the actual way experience and value exist in the world. For example, in Gilead, John Ames is not Edward because he has chosen not to be Edward; but nevertheless, because he defines himself against that impulse, he in a certain sense gets suﬀused with the impulse. He knows all the arguments, he knows his brother’s mind and understands the impulse away from the life he has chosen. And no doubt, if one were to think of Edward, one would think exactly the same way, that he has chosen against John, but in the fact of knowing everything about John, there is self-denial in self-definition of that kind.

THOMAS KING

The opening chapter of Housekeeping is written in Ruth’s point of view, yet it covers events for which she was not present. Can you tell us about the challenges of using an omniscient first-person as an entry point for the novel?

ROBINSON

I always tell my students you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you’re doing, you’re not doing it well enough. You have to circumvent plausibility sometimes, the normal ways people have of understanding or documenting things in a journalistic model that supposedly applies. I think—and this is relevant to my family and their settling in the Paciﬁc Northwest—that a lot of what I knew and a lot of what seemed important in my early life were descriptions of things I had not seen that had a profound reality in my imagination, because they were told among people whose importance to me is mythic, in the way that grandparents and aunts and uncles are to children. So I think there’s a huge psychological latitude with the first-person because we have a much greater store of experience than what we actually witness. The sort of I-am-the-camera approach to point of view is not psychologically rich enough to be adequate in any circumstance. In any case, the description of things one has not seen is something most people are capable of, partly because their minds can’t help embroidering and enriching whatever they’ve been told to attach importance to.

SARAH FLYNN

In your essay, “Facing Reality,” you wrote that the art of writing fiction lies outside the collective fiction we call “reality.” How do you grapple with our society’s collective fiction in your novels?

ROBINSON

I don’t grapple when I can avoid it, but I do feel that there is a great deal of highly conventional thinking in almost every area of life that must be discarded in order for a writer to make something with integrity in terms of that writer’s understanding. We’re in a very special period of time now—I suppose we have been for the last fifty or one hundred years, maybe since the telegraph—where there’s an enormous amount of rapid-ﬁre information. There are huge, groaning burdens of what looks like scholarship lying around. These are things that people typically don’t have time to be skeptical of. But the accumulation of misinformation addles the mind, restricts the imagination. It makes it terribly difficult to think with the necessary degree of rigor. I have spent a great part of my life going to the sources, reading the original material. I learned this in graduate school, when I found out the great and revered scholars did not do that. And it makes many things fall apart, as you realize that things you’ve been told are true are not true. I think people can feel the falseness in the narrative they’re being given, but they don’t know where to begin doubting. My advice is to begin wherever you find a loose thread. The more you pull, the more you will find to pull.

Inside a recent Harper’s magazine, there was an article in which the writer asked, Why do Americans talk about the mentality of the country, the spirit of the country, being anything other than capitalist? He claimed that it was never anything but capitalist. And that’s not true. Capitalism was a bad word in this country for a long time. Banks were illegal in Iowa because they caused accumulations of capital. This writer said that, you know, The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. Well, yes it was, but the book by Adam Smith that influenced the founding fathers was actually another book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a series of ethical lectures that he delivered to classes of Presbyterian ministers in preparation. The Wealth of Nations is about corn laws and how it should not be possible to constrict the ﬂow of products, which caused starvation in England and Ireland. This is the basis of his theory, that there has to be a human economic order that does not starve the working class. The man writing this article, who was being so blustering, so authoritative, in Harper’s, had all kinds of information wrong. He probably learned it when he was a sophomore in college and never checked it or thought about it. The fact that somebody publishes something in Scotland in 1776 doesn’t mean it has any influence on something written in America in 1776. Probably not.

KING

What can be done about the wealth of misinformation people ingest? How does this misinformation affect society at large?

ROBINSON

A lot of people would have to make an epic of criticism, by which I do not mean theory. I mean criticism. I’ve done a lot of difficult study; that’s probably not my best-kept secret. And there is so much junk scholarship around. In the airport, I picked up this little book by Karen Armstrong called A Short History of Myth. It’s a terrible book. The two sources she uses over and over are Mircea Eliade, who was a disaster, and Ibid., which is another name for Mircea Eliade. I pretend it’s one of those medieval Islamic scholars.

I don’t know if any of you know anything about how biblical scholarship is done, but if you take some introductory course, you will discover there’s J, P, E, and D. These are the names for the major traditions that contribute to the Old Testament, supposedly. Now, I gave a lecture at a symposium of biblical scholars—serious people, right? And I said this is a completely ridiculous idea—that you can break these traditions down into these streams. And I made my case. And of course it threatened everybody in the room. There was a kind of silence until one venerable man raised his hand and said, “What does it matter what we write? Nobody reads it anyway.”

It matters. It matters. It matters. It matters. Add the fact that this was what you would call a conservative theological setting; these people were not Karen Armstrong. How in the world can you toil your life away, saying, What does it matter? How can you do that? People trust each other. That’s the whole thing, the reason why people have engulfed themselves in false models of learning about all kinds of things; it’s because they trust. They think if this is in print and this person has an M.Div., this means something. The cynicism of saying, What does it matter? is just unbelievable to me, and I don’t think that this is by any means a problem isolated in theology departments. It’s everywhere.

Indifference has done nothing but drain content out of the collective experience. We have these huge libraries. There’s nothing in the world like the American library system, nothing to compare. You can go to a library or get on your computer and find amazing stuff. I’ve done research on English Renaissance writers, books that were printed in the 17th century, and I had to cut the pages, because no one had read them since the 17th century, in that library, at any rate. But there it was. I could find what I needed.

We have this huge brain sitting there, waiting to be used. The way out of the problem, for most people, is to head down the street, if it’s not in their laptops. The amount of early literature you can call up online from universities is astonishing. But in many, many instances, it might as well have uncut pages.

FLYNN

Why don’t people utilize those resources?

ROBINSON

The idea of individual learning has been subordinated to the idea of getting degrees. Most people are anxious about employment, and the culture continuously reinforces the fact that you go to college to get the diploma because that’s your ticket to economic life. The idea that built the universities, which is that simply knowing is wonderful, seems to have all but disappeared. I visited a university that particularly emphasized theory. The graduate students said, We take theory because we can’t get hired without taking theory because universities need people to teach theory. So there’s this perpetual motion machine. Whether or not you think this is a fruitful way to approach literature is put to one side, because it’s like a driver’s license—you simply have to have it. This is not the life of the mind. This is not what Thomas Jefferson hoped for.

FLYNN

At times, you express doubts about the likelihood that your essays will change public discourse in a significant way. What motivates you to write nonfiction?

ROBINSON

I would worry about myself if I had serious expectations of changing public discourse. That is a large and rather immobile thing: public discourse. Nevertheless, some things strike me as important in a way that makes me have to work through them myself. I have always found that people were interested in these essays. I’ve never had any trouble publishing them. I’ve never had any significant rebuttal to what I write. I got sued by Greenpeace once, but I don’t count that as a rebuttal. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine people will actually read what you write when you’re writing about the French Reformation or something. On the other hand, the impulse is certainly there, and there are people who read these things and to whom what I say is important. And God help us if everybody stopped trying to at least participate in public discourse. You have to try to say what you think is true.

KING

I’ve read that you believe society moves both forward and backward. What gains have we won in our nation’s or our planet’s history that are currently at risk?

ROBINSON

Well, there is the planet. There are obvious sorts of tradeoffs that I worry about. Many people in this country are quite scrupulous about environmental things. There are many laws and customs, national or local, that to some extent control what we do to our own immediate environment, but that has meant that what can’t be done within the limit of those norms here is done elsewhere, so that you get a relatively clean America and a completely poisoned China. I don’t consider that to be a desirable tradeoff. If your loyalty is to the human species, there are more Chinese than there are Americans, and on the most simple utilitarian basis, we have to worry about what happens to the Chinese and the Indians and so on.

The way the world economy has developed, every population has a certain percentage of bright, highly motivated people. The countries that have been slower in developing have huge, avid populations of people thrilled to be part of this cool, global economy, and at the same time, they have governments perfectly willing to make economic hay out of impoverished workers with low expectations. So we have children picking over dumps of discarded computers, pulling out both valuable and toxic things. If you read about China at the present time, they have riots in the countryside because of this hideous, no-holds-barred economic development they have gotten into, if economic development is the right word. There is, for example, a factory that makes a cancer treatment with byproducts so toxic that everybody around the plant for a good distance is sick. And, of course, the drugs are shipped to Europe and the United States.

This is one of those things where you can say, “Yes, we wouldn’t let that happen here,” but that only makes it worse where it does happen. There are tradeoffs as far as progress goes that are very vivid indeed. When people don’t have any control in a country like China or India because they are so poor that anything seems better than nothing, then the constraints that might make a moderate disaster of something that happened in Minnesota, make it an absolute disaster by their absence in China. It’s not something we want to talk or think about. A lot of the warfare in Africa is apparently about a mineral necessary for cell phones. We all have our nifty cell phones and we do not look into the economic consequences, which become warfare and starvation in another setting. I wish it were harder to come up with examples, but that’s just technology. And there’s also war.

One of the things most interesting to me about doing research into the history of the Middle West was learning about colleges created there before the Civil War, in the 1830s and 1840s. They were already racially integrated, gender-integrated. They created a system for making everybody at a college work, including the faculty, so there would be no economic barriers to education, and, they said, to make a more useful educated class. These are things I think we would consider very advanced. A lot of schools, like Mount Holyoke, Grinnell, Oberlin, Amherst, that are now elite institutions, were intended as places where no economic barrier to education existed, where it wouldn’t cost you anything to attend. There’s been a huge sort of turning over, like an iceberg. There has been not only the loss of the ideals that went into the creation of the colleges and the society they influence, but also a complete and absolute amnesia that these things were ever done or intended. And if it can happen once, it can happen again, which is something we must be aware of.

FLYNN

In “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion,” you wrote that, as a liberal, you were disappointed with liberalism as a movement. Have your views intensified or changed over recent years?

ROBINSON

I have certain vivid touch points. When major issues come up like whether we should invade Iraq, I’m very sympathetic to the side that says no, because that seems really smart, and it was smart before the whole enterprise ever began. If questions arise about whether resources should be spent on creating the kind of social equality that will prevent us from stigmatizing or disabling subsequent generations because their parents happen to have been poor, I’m very much in favor of people who support such an idea. Now, these kinds of convictions make me a completely committed liberal. At the same time, there is so much nonsense and flaccidity and uncritical thought on the side of liberalism that it is not a good servant of its own cause.

And my idea of patriotism, given the completely arbitrary nature of our national identity, is that patriotism matters. I consider myself patriotic because I don’t want American people to go hungry. I don’t want American people to spend their lives unemployed when they want to make a creative contribution to the culture. I don’t want women to be forced into abortion because they can’t possibly stop working, supporting their families on a minimum wage that is not adequate to support their family. As far as I’m concerned, patriotism is, first of all, an obligation to create humane circumstances within our country. I don’t think that should be a hard case to make, but I think that when people on the other side say, “We’re the patriotic people,” the impulse of liberals is to say, “Well, we don’t think patriotism is such a terrifically good idea.” They give up their vocabulary. They give up the concepts. They allow people to define patriotism as putting the army, without proper equipment or support, in a circumstance it should never have been in. This is supposedly patriotism. The surrender of the major categories, like family values: I think the minimum wage is probably the greatest family value anybody could articulate, because it allows people to provide for their families. What more, you know? So there are clear liberal issues being very badly articulated.

FLYNN

Why do you think we fail in those areas?

ROBINSON

I just cannot imagine. In my cynical moments, I think it’s because a lot of the leading members of the liberal population actually flourish under administrations like the present one, partially because a lot of them are highly educated people whose income is high enough that tax cuts beneﬁt them. Some people are pretty glad that the government can recruit troops from an economically disadvantaged class disproportionately so as to not draft their children. I’m afraid it’s true, to a certain extent, that unacknowledged self-interest makes them hesitant to actually champion what ought to be their cause.

FLYNN

You’ve said that obsessions drive you and that those obsessions are not often fiction. What are some of your present obsessions, and do they develop into nonfiction more often than fiction?

ROBINSON

Well, my current obsession is with literature of the ancient Near East. I’ve been reading Hittites and Canaanites and Babylonians and Greeks and Egyptians. I’m going to be teaching a course in the fall on Greek tragedy, and I was thinking about the importance of scene and dialogue, then the next thing I knew, it was Euripides, Sophocles. But it seems to me that there’s a narrow view of what Greek tragedy was or what the settings of Greek ancient writing were, so I’m reading all this stuff that would have been culturally contiguous, that they probably would have had some acquaintance with. I want to have a fuller ancient sense of what I’m looking at when I look at these plays, which tend, today, to be read through Nietzsche or somebody. That’s also working its way into my nonfiction, but I don’t want to talk about that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Running through both your work and published interviews is a sense of your romance with the simplicity—and even adversity—of the past. How does that romance affect your view of contemporary life?

ROBINSON

I don’t know if I believe in a simplicity of the past. Actually, I don’t like the idea of nostalgia. I don’t like the idea that once everything made sense and now it doesn’t, and once everything was easy and now it isn’t. You know, Oh, to have lived before the age of the antibiotic! What are we talking about? But I think that prejudice against the modern period has actually created a lot of trouble in the modern world, the idea that somehow or another we’ve stepped oﬀ a cliﬀ and it used to be better and we have to hack our way back to a more meaningful, primal life. That’s basically fascism, which I think we should avoid.

KING

You’ve also said that though your reading informs your writing, you almost never read for that specific purpose. What motivates your study, and how does it develop into a writing project?

ROBINSON

That is so mysterious. I get something on my mind or I pick up a book that seems to call my name, and I read something I didn’t know before or something that makes a better text, a better fabric of something I had known for some other reason. And it just feels good. It’s an enormous pleasure to me. If I could, I would just read and read and read. All kinds of strange things. Diﬃcult things that make me feel that my perspective is richer than it was before. As far as writing goes, every once in a while I feel like I have to write something. I am the driven slave of these two impulses. It’s a nice life.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Your laughing at your own work while reading aloud the other night fascinated me. Why did you laugh—do you see the worlds you create in your novels as real?

ROBINSON

It’s like remembering a dream; because when you write, you visualize, then when you read, the visualization returns. Also, I remembered what I was doing when I wrote that scene. I had modeled Gilead on a town in southwest Iowa called Tabor, which was founded by people from Oberlin College. They had founded a college, and they had a station on the Underground Railroad. There was a Congregational minister there who had 200 rifles in his cellar and a cannon in his barn. But, in any case, there were tunnels under the green in Tabor. Apparently, you can still see where they were. But I was thinking, If New Englanders were on the frontier of Iowa, how would they get in trouble? I wanted people to have some idea of what they were doing, but not to idealize them, not make them feel like stuffed wax museum figures or something. So I thought, Well, they would dig a tunnel. Tabor is in the sand hills; there’s nothing there but dunes, so even as you drive there’s sand blowing across the road. Obviously they would be delighted that it was so easy to dig in the soil. I started writing this scene and more and more kept happening. I remember thinking, Where did that come from? You create the occasion for your imagination, then all kinds of things come into play and surprise you. The best part of writing.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The few negative reviews of Gilead imply that John Ames is a one-dimensional character, with faith being his only noticeable trait. How do you see John Ames?

ROBINSON

I get all my reviews from my publisher, and my publisher clearly censors them, so I’ve never heard that criticism. I have a very strong imagination of John Ames that was generated by the fact that I thought of him as a voice in my head. I was surprised to have a male narrator. I trusted this voice. I felt as if someone were speaking. I’ve been very kindly treated by the reviewers. I have no complaints, but there are hordes of millions of readers, and it’s just unbelievable to imagine you could please them all. And, especially at this particular moment in time, there are a lot of people that find a lot of religious thought, and so on, irritating, which only makes it clearer to me how kindly I have been treated, because that is not the most universally acceptable subject at the moment. But, in any case, whoever the reviewer was, bless his heart. I hope he finds books he likes better.

FLYNN

Do people make judgments about you because of how open you are about your religious beliefs?

ROBINSON

I’ve had people say, “Aren’t you afraid to be identified with religion?” and so on. If people said to me, “Marilynne, go home. We don’t want to hear from you anymore,” I would think, Whew! It’s not like I have a big stake in this, and if people reject what I say on the basis of its having a strong religious cast, that wouldn’t surprise me and it wouldn’t be an issue for me. I’m not writing for anyone. From what I see, from what I read, I wouldn’t be surprised if I encountered friction, but I can’t report any. So here I am.

FLYNN

In The Death of Adam, you said that belief in Darwinism is like belief in the existence of God, and that it’s based on faith. And you deﬁned faith as “a loyalty to a vision of nature, of the nature of things despite its inaccessibility to demonstration.” Do you believe that all of science is ultimately based on faith?

ROBINSON

No. And, also in that essay, and in general, a sharp distinction needs to be drawn between evolution and Darwinism. Darwinism has its specific history, and a specific ethos; the idea behind Darwinism is that there is a continuous sort of attrition among the varieties of organisms that is the consequence of competition for survival. If you read the 19th century literature that surrounds the popularization of Darwinism, it leads directly to eugenics; it makes people regret that anyone ever invented the smallpox vaccination. And even before Darwin wrote, when it was Malthus and earlier people, Townsend and so on, who were writing in these terms, it rationalized the death by starvation of the lower classes of European civilization. So it was the you-have- to-be-cruel-to-be-kind thing where the human species became better and better by the fact of the deaths of people unworthy to survive.

This had enormous practical consequences in European and American society and history from before Darwin. “The survival of the fittest” was not his phrase. He got it from the British, Herbert Spencer, whose idea of this was of the progressive attrition of the unworthy or the unﬁt. And so with Malthus. It goes way, way back into British thought. But what Darwin did was interpret it into a scientific theory that explains, as it were, the origin of species, although he himself said he never did explain the origin of species. Because there are all sorts of things about the phenomenon of speciation that his theory couldn’t address. But, in any case, I believe that it is still true that Darwinism is contaminated with racial theory, eugenic theory, and all kinds of other things. It had a huge surge in Britain while I was living there under the reign of Mrs. Thatcher, who famously said, “God prefers the rich to the poor and nature proves it.”

People have known since antiquity that there were fossils of creatures that no longer existed, so the idea that life forms have changed over time is not a novel idea. If evolution means the change of life forms over time, then I think that it’s not difficult to aﬃrm the plausibility of evolution, but if it means that the changes in life forms over time were the result of an inevitable competition in which the strong destroy the weak or whatever, this is something that is not describable, because we know that, for example, species go right along until they disappear. So if that were true, you would have the continuous modiﬁcation of a species that would continuously enhance its survival virtues, but instead you have a much more disrupted evolutionary history. In other words, Darwinism ought to be considered as a moment in the scientific-social-military history of the West that does not conclusively, for all time, define the idea of evolution, and the defense of evolution as a theory ought to be disentangled from the defense of Darwin or the ideas attributed to Darwin.

If you read the literature around the First World War, there were all sorts of people in favor of it. If you read a book of Tolstoy’s written just at the turn of the century—The Kingdom of God Is Within You—you’ll notice that he was a pacifist, and he got letters from every significant person in Europe about why he shouldn’t be a pacifist, and many of them made arguments that war clears out the undesirables from society. It is genocide directed against one’s own population. I guess that’s not uncommon, but it’s absolutely horrendous, and it accounts for a great deal of what was horrible about the First World War, which is that nobody really seemed to want it to end. This is the kind of thing where you have to go back and read what people were saying about these things. If you just take it that Darwin is the force of light and William Jennings Bryan is the source of darkness, you have no idea what the issues are. Jennings Bryan himself was a pacifist when there was a huge issue of war addressed precisely in terms of its alleged Darwinist merit.

FLYNN

How do we disentangle abhorrent forms of faith from forms that have value to us as a culture?

ROBINSON

A lot of things can’t be dealt with on a cultural level. One thing interesting about being human is that you are responsible to a great degree for your own sanity, your own ethicalism, your own moral solvency, your own intellectual seriousness. It would be nice if these things could be dealt with at a social level, but whenever human behavior is controlled at a social level, even with the most benign intentions, it goes wrong. I think there is no point in history where people have not used valuable things for destructive purposes. Perhaps what we have to do is make people feel more deeply that they are responsible as individuals for their moral consequences. For example, I think a lot of religious excesses don’t come from religions themselves; they come from passionate identiﬁcation, the eagerness to say I am X and not Y, and those Y people have always irritated me and it would be much better if the world were entirely X. We’ve gone through this little dance over and over. If we could think beyond those categories, it would be great, but that’s something people are individually responsible for doing.

FLYNN

In your essay on the family, you say that the attempt to impose definition on indeterminacy is about the straightest road to mischief that you know of, yet you define the word “family” in the next sentence—

ROBINSON

I think that my definition is very broad indeed. It has to do with loyalty and affection more than anything else. I think that you know who your family is, in that sense, because you know where your loyalties are and what your fondnesses are, or you probably are in the course of learning. That’s something that you know because it’s created out of your own circumstance, out of your own emotional life. So it’s accessible to definition in that sense, but whether that means there’s a sociological definition that could apply, I don’t think that’s true. I think what I’m saying is that we have to respect the fact that people’s lives constellate themselves in terms of loyalty and in terms of love and that this is something that other people should be sensitive to and acknowledge rather than trying to enforce a definition.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You said at your reading that you wrote the sinking horse episode in Gilead in one sitting. That section works as a story. Do you often write short fiction?

ROBINSON

No, never. When I was in college, I tried, because I took two workshops, and it’s so nice to workshop a short story. So I would hack and hew at something that always had ﬁfteen characters and three generations. I just cannot think at that scale. I wish I could, but I can’t.

KING

You work a great deal with young writers; are there any emerging voices that challenge your concept of what a poem, novel, or short story can be?

ROBINSON

I don’t know that I have particularly settled notions. I hope not. What you’re always trying to do is help somebody write in a way that is distinctive for their purposes. The idea of trying to conform anybody to pre-existing notions of what should happen—that would curtail their potential, which is not what we want to do. You always hope to be surprised. When I’m teaching a workshop, I ask people to name the best paragraphs in a story, and the degree of unanimity is impressive, which is something that helps break you out of the constraints of subjectivism. Because we all know some writing is better than other writing. Still, it’s hard to make people accept the legitimacy of the distinctions. The most important thing, as far as the teaching of writing is concerned, is to sensitize the writer to what he or she does well. There’s a certain sense of experience or concentration, something that goes into writing well that you learn how to return to. You begin to be a good reader of your own writing because you know what part of your consciousness it’s coming from.

KING

You’ve mentioned a thinness or flatness in contemporary fiction. What do you consider the root causes of that?

ROBINSON

I think there’s thinness in all literature that is not of the highest order of successfulness. I’m not saying there’s anything about this particular moment, or people writing now—I wouldn’t want to generalize by saying it’s more true now than it has been historically. If you go down the wrong row in a library, you find a lot of bad old novels. But I think it’s a major problem of the art, because it is about, as much as anything, human inwardness and how someone who has a profound experience of the self also interacts with other people. That’s where human complexity lies. That’s a hard thing to accomplish in fiction.

KING

Is that part of the reason your two novels are narrated in first-person?

ROBINSON

In both cases, I felt as if I knew a voice. I don’t know where the voice comes from. I don’t know why. I don’t know if I will ever write other than in first-person. But I feel like I’m being faithful to a voice that is not mine and that’s where the first-person comes in.

KING

How can a third-person narrator be handled successfully?

ROBINSON

The most successful third-person writers break all the rules. When you read Dickens, he just plunges in. You get these great panoramic scenes of London or something, and then, zoom, you’re so close in a consciousness. And if you read The Brothers Karamazov, you think, How did I get here? Chekhov does it all the time. The idea that there are these chaste, objective third-person narratives is really a cross that writers ought not to bear. Basically, you can do what you can get away with, and if you look at the great classic third-person narratives, they’re all over the place and they just make it so you don’t care.

KING

You have a lot of stories within stories, encapsulated episodes within your novels. Do you access your own life for that material or is most of it pure imagination?

ROBINSON

They are mostly imaginations. There are things in Housekeeping, because it was set in a very stylized version of the town I spent a lot of my childhood in, that reflect my own life, like the layout of the house with the bedroom that opens into an orchard—that was my grandparents’ house. All these crazy details like that. But when I wrote Housekeeping, I thought it would never be published. I knew my mother and my brother would read this book and would get all these little allusions, so that was part of the fun of it. But I was very struck by hearing stories in my family, little parables in a certain sense. And I think that way of putting a coherent sense of things together probably influenced the fact that I do receive imagined anecdotes for those purposes.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Speaking of place, what you said the other night about how people love the place they live and think everywhere else is going to hell—do you think that statement is true globally as well as nationally?

ROBINSON

I think that’s fair to say. There are strange things, like that our press covers every crime and that sort of thing. I lived in France for a while, and they have a good handful of newspapers that don’t really cover crime or anything like that. If they do cover crime, it tends to be something that happened in California. And it’s strange, because whenever something bad happened locally, they’d say, “The Arabs.” Because all the sociopathic stuff that happened was passed around by word of mouth and that leaves no public reality for it ninety-nine percent of the time. So they have this really sinister attitude toward whoever are the disfavored people, typically the Arabs, and then they also get this stuff that comes from the American press, which looks incredibly weird and gothic if you’re not used to having that type of information about yourself. There’s a way in which, by virtue of our beloved and forever-to-be-revered First Amendment, we strike most of the world as being a completely crazy place.

When I was leaving France, a little delegation of my neighbors came over and said, “You do not have to go back.” And I said, “Well, actually, I’m happy to go back.” And they said, “It is her country, all the same.” So we’re the dumping grounds for the darker part of world opinion, in many cases, as a sort of accident of cultural history. At the same time, I think it is true that people typically love the place they are and fear the world they don’t know. And, especially at this moment in this country, when there’s such regional polarization, people have categorical hostilities against people because of the color their state turned on election day, and that really fuels this very unhappy habit we have of imagining that if we step outside our own county or our own state, we are in some wasteland.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What value do you think writing or art has in transcending that regionalism?

ROBINSON

I think anything that transcends it has value by virtue of transcending it. I’m very glad that dear old Gilead has been warmly received in disparate places, and I’m traveling around partly because I think it would be nice if we were all talking to each other. I wrote an essay that got printed in The American Scholar, and it’s actually kind of an attack on religious fundamentalism from the perspective of a religious liberal, and I startled certain of my fans, who thought I was a different person. They say things like, “It’s so nice of you to write something that puts a fundamentalist minister in a positive light.” And then I say, “He’s not a fundamentalist.” And they say, “Well, he quotes the Bible.” But, in any case, I certainly wish we could all talk to each other. The country needs to have a deliberating population at this time and not just a lot of line drawing.

KING

What gives you hope, if you believe hope is possible?

ROBINSON

I have hope. That’s part of the reason I sometimes think I do a lot more traveling than I ought to. You know, you come to Spokane, which I happen to know from my childhood, but most of the country has no conception of Spokane—and believe me, they do not even pronounce the name right. And I come here. People are happy to be here. They have this beautiful park. They have a nice literary series. There’s a great deal in the city that obviously has been assigned an appropriate value, restored, enjoyed. I went to North Dakota in March for a literary festival and, from an outsider’s point of view, North Dakota in March is a pretty forbidding landscape, but the people there love it and they think, How can I possibly eke out a livelihood that will allow me to stay in North Dakota? Otherwise I might end up in South Dakota! But they have their literature, they have their painters, they have folklore that goes with the Native American population there, and so on. Even though I’d have to train my eye for a while to see what they loved so much about that environment, there is no question that they do and that in the fact of loving it, they are creating value in and around it all the time. And, again, this is not just North Dakota. It’s a phenomenon you find over and over again.

Issue 73: A Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates

Found in Willow Springs 73

April 13, 2013

Melissa Huggins, Katrina Stubson, Ben Werner

A CONVERSATION WITH JOYCE CAROL OATES

Photo Credit: Today Birthday

"I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit,” Joyce Carol Oates declares in The Faith of a Writer, “I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called ‘culture.’”

Oates has dedicated herself to life as an artist. She’s produced over a hundred published works, including novels, short stories, essays, poetry, plays, and book reviews. But more impressive than the sheer volume of her work is the empathy required to bring to life such an array of characters. She has inhabited the minds of serial killers and politicians, young mothers and abusive fathers, starlets, famous writers, prisoners, and more. Often her fiction centers on the aftermath of a moment of violence, circling back to that moment repeatedly over the course of a character’s life, delving into the damage, and usually moving toward a kind of redemption—but not always.

Oates grew up in Lockport, New York, and attended a one-room schoolhouse, where she pursued an interest in writing, drawing, and other artistic endeavors from a young age. Upon receiving her first typewriter as a gift from her grandmother at age fourteen, Oates began contributing to her high school newspaper, and wrote stories and novels throughout high school and college.

Her novels include them, which won the National Book Award; Blonde, a Pulitzer Prize finalist that imagines the inner life of Marilyn Monroe; The Gravedigger’s Daughter, loosely based on part of her own family history; New York Times bestseller The Falls; and We Were the Mulvaneys, which details the disintegration of a seemingly perfect family. Her nonfiction includes the essay collection On Boxing and a memoir, A Widow’s Story. Noted for being prolific, Oates publishes an average of one to two books per year, in addition to her teaching, reviewing, editing, and other pursuits. “It is sobering to be asked—so often—‘How are you so prolific?’ When I feel so earnestly that I am always behind, and never caught up,” she writes. While she recently announced that she will retire from Princeton after teaching there for over thirty-five years, she plans to continue teaching elsewhere, and 2014 will see the publication of a novel, Carthage, and a story collection, High-Crime Area.

Since 1963, over forty books by Oates have been included on the New York Times list of notable books of the year. Among her many honors are two O. Henry Prizes, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and an M. L. Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Oates the National Humanities Medal, and in 2012, she was awarded both the Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement and the PEN Center USA Award for Lifetime Achievement. We spoke with Ms. Oates during the Get Lit! Festival in Spokane, shortly after the publication of her Gothic novel The Accursed. We discussed, among many topics, the “fantastic risk” of being a writer, feminism in the age of Twitter, and the transcendent nature of art.

Melissa Huggins

Edmund White once said that you seem to dream your way into your fiction, as if you were in a waking trance, and that you imagine other lives so vividly that they must leave you exhausted. Does that seem accurate?

Joyce Carol Oates

While that might be true for some of my writing process, I’ve been writing so long, and with so many different projects, that it’s probably only applicable to some aspects. I’m a professor, I teach literature, and I’ve written a lot of literary criticism and reviews, so there’s a side of me that’s extremely conscious. I was talking about postmodernism last night, and postmodernism is really an attitude, a way of looking at life and literature, where you’re drawing upon different traditions very consciously and choosing to present things in a form, so you’re also a formalist. And that’s different than being in a trance or dreaming. The two might fit together in some way, but in my deepest heart, I’m probably a formalist. I’d love to be given a certain structure for a work of fiction, to see if I could put content in it. There’s something about form and structure that excites me—maybe the way the sonneteers were in the Renaissance, writing sonnets, writing them brilliantly, and competing with one another. They were writing works of great art, yet within a form.

Huggins

Was that part of your goal in writing The Accursed? You had a structure, and you wanted to fill it in?

Oates

No, I didn’t have a structure in mind; it was more like an idea, writing in a certain genre or a certain place. I wanted to write a number of long, quasi-historical novels, and for that you need a broad canvas. It’s not the kind of intense insular writing you find in Henry James, narrow and deep, with maybe two or three characters. With this kind of writing, you want characters who are somewhat contrasting, maybe of different social levels, different personality types, and when they come together, narratives derive from these characters meeting.

With a novel like The Accursed there are many quasi-historical characters. So if I’m writing about Woodrow Wilson, I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to see him in 1905 and not be overwhelmed by his fame or authority, but to see him from the perspective of somebody who might not think he was extraordinary—because they were both living at that time. What would a contemporary think? Some didn’t think much of him, so the novel accommodates that. The novel’s character driven, but the form is gothic horror. I knew there would be a curse and manifestations of the curse, which increase in horror, and then there’s the pursuit of the mystery, and hints to the reader about what the mystery is—but not too openly. It’s not exactly a structure, but more an intuitive sense of what you’re doing, and you know the last chapter will explain it, because it’s a genre novel. It’s not a literary novel in the sense that it’s irresolute, ambiguous. With a genre novel, the ending is like a light thrown back on everything, and if you read it a second time, you see how it fits together. That’s a classic mystery form. When a mystery is done correctly, you read it a second time and it all makes sense. But the first time, you’re mystified.

Sometimes with a novel, people say, “Oh, this is predictable,” because they’ve seen it before. Or you sit down to a movie and after twenty minutes you see where it’s going, and you’re not surprised, because the form has become formulaic. But you can also make a form feel new—you can have surprises, and you can do reverse things. For instance, I like to have a character who you see from the outside as superficial, but who gets deeper as the novel goes on, maybe veering in a new direction and meeting somebody, and because of meeting somebody, changing.

Katrina Stubson

Is your research process for historically based fiction different from your research process for nonfiction?

Oates

I’m not a historian, and I don’t really write historical novels. The Accursed was more of an experiment. I did write a novel you could call historical, Blonde, about Norma Jean Baker, who became Marilyn Monroe. I saw a picture of her when she was about sixteen, a high school girl, and she didn’t have blond hair and she didn’t look much like Marilyn Monroe, just a tiny bit, and I thought, How interesting to go back to whenever that was, and to write about her as that girl. I went back further—to write about her when she was just a child with her mother. I did a little research into the Hollywood of that time, because they were living in Los Angeles and her mother worked in one of the studios, and I did some research into what movies they were seeing and what the studios were making and where they lived, which was Venice Beach. I was going to end the novel when she becomes a starlet and gets her name, Marilyn Monroe. But when I got to that point in the novel, about 180 pages or so, I thought, Well, I can’t stop now.

I started doing more research. I saw all of her movies, ending with The Misfits, which came out when she was about thirty-five. I could see this young actress maturing—she was an excellent actress—and I could see her getting older and becoming more like a cliché. In The Misfits, her last movie, she’d become the Marilyn Monroe stereotype. She’d started out as an individual, and then she got deeper and deeper, until finally she would have to live out the stereotype—that they’d made her up, that she was so into her clothing—and I think she probably felt, perhaps unconsciously, that there was no more life for her, that she would have to keep doing that Kewpie doll thing for the rest of her life, and so she committed suicide.

That was a different kind of research, generated during the writing process, not before. It was research generated by the act of writing. With The Accursed, I had fun looking for ironies and surprises and comical things in the lives of people like Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt, because they’re always presented as these males who’ve achieved so much as presidents. But we can also present them differently, as human beings. Woodrow Wilson was a man who rode a bicycle around his town because he couldn’t afford a car, and the well-to-do ladies were kind of snobbish, like, “Oh, he’s riding a bicycle.” That’s a whole attitude toward a president that most people don’t have, seeing him from the point of view of the townspeople.

Ben Werner

When you’re fictionalizing historical characters, is the approach different than when you’re writing purely fictional characters?

Oates

Woodrow Wilson had many, many letters and a lot of words he wrote that I could copy down, especially the foolish things he said, and some of them lofty things, but everything he said kind of annoyed me. For example, this famous speech he made, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” was about how Princeton is great, and because it’s so great everybody has to be great, even the students have to be great. There’s so much pride and vanity. What about other universities? Maybe they’re great, too. It was this tiny vision he had, and there was something about him I found annoying. So I guess I would look at those things, whereas if I were writing him as purely fictional, I wouldn’t put so many of those details in, because people would say, “Oh, you’re exaggerating.” But when you go to history, and see the insane things that, say, Hitler said, you probably wouldn’t make them up, because they’d seem over the top. White supremacists provide us with wonderful copy because they say the most asinine things. You couldn’t write poetry as bad as the poetry they loved.

Stubson

You write that you were in love with boxing from the moment you went to fights with your dad. Was On Boxing a book you’d thought about doing for a long time?

Oates

When I was a girl, my father did take me to fights, and I was interested at a young age in this very masculine sport. I wouldn’t say I was in love with it. I was a girl at ten or eleven with my father in a masculine environment, but I didn’t have any thoughts about it. I wasn’t a feminist yet. We would watch boxing matches on television, which were on every week, and there were great boxers at that time. I was aware of them, but I wasn’t a student of them. Many years later, I was writing a quasi-historical novel called You Must Remember This, in which the character’s a boxer in the 1950's, a great era for boxing. I was writing about the Red Scare, Senator McCarthy, people informing on each other, loyalty oaths, stuff like that. I did some research, looking at films of boxing in the 50's. One day the phone rang and it was the editor of The New York Times Magazine, Harvey Shapiro, who was always asking me to write something, and he said, “What are you working on?”

I said, “Well, I’m working on a novel, so I don’t think it would be of interest to you,” and he said, “What’s the novel about?” and I told him. He said, “You know, Father’s Day is coming up. Why don’t you write an essay about going to the fights with your father?” “Oh, I can’t possibly do that,” I said, and I hung up. Then I thought, Well, if I’m a feminist I better say yes, because a feminist is supposed to take challenges. So I called back and said, “Okay, I’ll try. I’ll send you something.” I started writing this essay, and it got long and complicated. I was going back to the ancient Greek warriors and all this history and it was this and that, and I was kind of devastated by how hard it was to do because it was for The New York Times Magazine. I knew about a million people would read it, and I was self-conscious. There’s a certain solace in writing fiction—you almost think nobody’s going to read it. You feel protected. But when you do this kind of journalism, especially in the New York Times, everybody’s going to read it, and a lot of the people who are going to read it are people who don’t know you, they don’t like you, they could be contemptuous.

I got paralyzed. I was anxious and depressed and writing more and more, and none of it was very good. I told my husband, “Well, I completely failed, I’m giving up.” And I was devastated. But the next morning I thought, I’ll write about failure. Because most boxers fail, and that’s the secret of boxing, to take this terrible punishment. Even the champions fail eventually. So the first thing I wrote was about a terrible boxing match I’d gone to at Madison Square Garden, and that’s the beginning of the book.

If I hadn’t had the call from Harvey Shapiro, I would never have written any of this. I couldn’t get it together until I felt that it completely failed. But that’s the secret of boxing and maybe a lot of sports: athletes have to endure failure. People look at the champions and think, Oh, look at this wonderful champion, with no idea of what the pyramid is like, and how at the bottom of the pyramid are broken, defeated, injured people, whose lives have been devastated by the sport, especially in the past. Now there are doctors who are more vigilant. But in the past, a young man could sustain an injury in the ring, very young, twenty-two years old or so, hemorrhage a week later and die, and nobody would care. My father had a boxer friend who committed suicide—he had been badly over-matched and defeated in the ring. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but as an adult looking back, I thought, Of course he committed suicide.

And so I saw that line there. That’s the secret of the book. If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have written On Boxing. The essay came out in the New York Times on Father’s Day, and it was successful as an essay— I started getting telephone calls, including from boxers. A photographer wrote to me and said, “I’d like to do a book on boxing. I’ll do the photographs and you can do the text.” That was John Reiner, who became a friend, and they were just wonderful photographs. I thought it would be a book with big photographs and I would do the text. Then, as time went on, the editor wanted me to write more, and the photographs got smaller, which I was sorry about because they’re so good. The book has been reprinted a number of times, and each time I’ve added more. I have a lot about Ali and Tyson, and I have some book reviews. I could maybe add something about women’s boxing some time.

The original text came out when Mike Tyson was just ascending—he may have already had his title. I got a call from Life magazine, saying, “Will you cover Trevor Berbick defending his title against this young boxer?” I said, “I don’t think I could do that,” because I’d never covered anything like a sports event—that’s a whole other kind of writing. But I called back and said, “Okay, I’ll try it,” and they sent me to Las Vegas. I was sitting next to Bert Sugar, who’s this legendary boxing writer, and I’m surrounded by these guys with their cigars, and I’m sitting there like I don’t know what I’m doing—because you can read about boxing and see pictures and films, but when you’re right there, you can’t even see their hands, they’re so fast. So Bert Sugar, this guy with his cigar and his fedora, he took pity on me—there’s smoke all around—and he said, “Ah, well, I could tell you some hints,” and I said, “I would really appreciate it, Bert; I don’t know what I’m doing.” He said, “Well, the first thing you gotta do is, you get a tape of the fight. And after the fight, up in your room, you watch the tape. And you watch it and watch it and see what really happened.” That’s the most important thing they told me. That’s what sports writers do if they can, because otherwise you hardly know what you’re seeing. So that’s what I did. I wrote a long piece on Tyson for Life magazine, which got a lot of attention, and then I did a few other pieces. That’s the long story about On Boxing. It was a lot of fun and I wish I could find another subject that would be so exciting and interesting to me.

Huggins

You light up when you talk about it.

Oates

It’s because of the boxers. Their characters and their personalities are amazing. Each boxer is an interesting person, plus their trainers, sometimes their managers. Each fight, each classic fight is kind of astonishing. Some of them seem almost like fairy tales. The classic fights are extraordinary. You have the great Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, and he’s almost like a dancer, so mercurial and fantastic. He transformed the sport. The other boxers who come afterward are probably all in some relationship to him—there’s no boxer that’s not aware of him, and whether they know it or not, they exist in relation to him, especially heavyweights. Tyson was quite a good boxer, as well as a good fighter. People wonder how he would have done against Muhammad Ali. It’s these personalities.

Stubson

In On Boxing, you relate boxing to writing in various ways. In particular, you wrote about Rocky Marciano and his monastic rituals leading up to a fight. I’ve read that you relate to those rituals as a writer. Could you talk about how important ritual is to you?

Oates

People do make analogs between boxing and writing. I don’t think the boxers share in it as much as writers imagine. But boxing is collaborative. When you see a boxer, invisibly around him are his trainer and a lot of other people. There almost isn’t a boxer by himself. Ali had a great trainer, Angelo Dundee. Without Dundee, we wouldn’t have Muhammad Ali. Cassius Clay nearly lost his first fight against Sonny Liston. He was going to quit. He was actually made to go back up and finish the fight. Without that trainer, you never would have heard of Ali. With a writer, it might be true sometimes that there’s a mentor or somebody helping, but I think writers are often much more alone. Boxers are more like actors. People see an actor onstage or in a movie, and he’s not alone. There’s a director who’s telling him everything. Basically, they’re sort of material that directors are using. But I think writers are much more alone, and adrift, and unmoored. Imagination is like a river going along. The gifted athlete is someone that somebody has taken and invested money in, given him a regimen, even a diet, controlled his career, set him up with competition. He’s much more guided than a writer. There’s also the idea of taking punishment, and delaying gratification. If you’re a young boxer, you have to know how to take pain, and if you’re a young writer, I guess it helps if you know how to take pain. You can work on something for months or even years, not being sure it will ever be published. That’s a big risk. That’s a fantastic risk. To think that you can invest months of your life in something and it might come to nothing? The same is true of a boxer. You can invest so much effort, and the first important fight he could lose. Somebody’s going to lose that fight.

Huggins

As you said earlier, it’s a constant cycle of failure for boxers. You’re going to continue to keep failing, and that seems like somewhat of a parallel with writing. Not in terms of submissions or publications, but the writing itself.

Oates

Writers tend to set their own levels of achievement. We’re all different. Some feel that if you write all through the morning and have two or three pages, that’s all you really need to keep going, and then in the afternoon you can go for a bicycle ride, and the next morning you do the same thing. That’s a nice schedule. But then there are writers who are fanatic, who get neurotic and obsessed with their work. Maybe they would think that wasn’t enough, or they would rip it all up or get drunk. The schedule is not a solace to some people. I know Robert Stone. He’s taken a lot of drugs—this is not a secret, he writes about it. He’s a very gifted writer, but I know there’s a dark, deep, obsessional personality inside him. I can’t imagine what’s going on. David Foster Wallace is a more contemporary example. You know from his writing that his mind is convoluted, sometimes playful. You have to extract from that what it was like to be him. Maybe he could work for eighteen hours and not be happy with anything he did. Maybe he could have a whole manuscript and hate it, and become so trapped that he would commit suicide. Whereas the boxer is more like somebody’s son. The trainers are usually a bit older, sometimes they’re quite elderly, so the boxer is like a grandson. Say you feel depressed: your trainer talks to you, he’s nice to you, he buoys your spirits. I don’t think writers have anything like that. If someone tries to cheer a writer up, they’re just ironic. Writers are somehow so defensive, or too self-conscious.

Stubson

In the fall of 2012, you wrote on Twitter, “Last night at the Norman Mailer Center awards ceremony in New York City, Oliver Stone said beautifully, ‘A serious writer is a rebel.’” Could you elaborate?

Oates

A serious writer is transgressive. A serious writer sets out to write something that maybe disturbs and annoys some people. You’re not going to set out to write a novel that’s bland and makes everyone say, “Oh, yeah, I agree with that.” Nobody wants that response. You want to turn people’s expectations a bit. I know that some people are annoyed or offended because I wrote about Woodrow Wilson in this way that was not acquiescent or admiring, the way you’re supposed to be. It’s like writing about Abraham Lincoln, whom I do actually revere, or George Washington. Why should we revere these men just because we’re told to? Obviously that’s a little bit of a transgressive act. Oliver Stone is in that tradition—many of his movies are controversial—and Norman Mailer was in that tradition, too.

Stubson

I know you’re interested in Twitter. What appeals to you about it? Who do you follow?

Oates

Twitter is interesting because it’s so short. I find that I spend a lot of time reworking a sentence, throwing out punctuation, changing it around so I don’t need a comma. It’s actually very satisfying. I’ve not been involved in Facebook at all. Twitter is so much more verbal, and it’s somewhat more intellectual. I follow some writers, Daniel Mendelsohn, Ayelet Waldman, Dexter Palmer—writers who are friends of mine. Daniel Mendelsohn sometimes tweets in foreign languages, Latin, German, French. It’s a new art form, I think.

I follow Steve Martin, who’s a friend of mine. Steve will tweet infrequently, but then he might tweet eight times in a row. He’s very surreal, smart and funny. Then I follow the Tweet of God. He tweets about five times a day, and he’s always good. He’s so irreverent, but actually really smart—sort of a wise guy, almost like Mark Twain. He’s a former comedy writer for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The person who does Twitter, line by line, is Emily Dickinson. Her little observations, some of her poems, her letters, they’re all very elliptical and short. You have to read them several times to get any meaning out of them. Then there are people, like, say, William Faulkner, who could never do Twitter. Hemingway could do Twitter.

There’s also a lot of stuff about women, a whole women’s community. There are usually two or three articles that are being read and discussed, like the one from The Nation, about a woman being treated so badly as a writer. Post-feminist, post-something. When I read it, I thought it was very powerful. Then I read critiques of it. She was sort of fabricating it. So there’s a whole issue, and they come and go maybe once a week, these articles. But the big conversation on Twitter is, Are women treated differently as writers, like second-class citizens? There’s a lot of evidence that they are, that they’re not reviewed and so forth. That’s one of the things about Twitter that’s kind of exciting.

Huggins

In terms of Twitter being a breeding ground for conversations about women writers, there is always discussion when the annual VIDA statistics come out. Could you talk about that discussion and to what degree it interests you?

Oates

I think it’s an important discussion to keep roiling and bubbling, sort of like women’s rights, generally. With abortion rights, people think a battle’s been won, but actually it hasn’t. It’s a ceaseless struggle even to having voting rights for people; in the South they’re trying to take them away again. Nobody would believe that’s happening. So too with women and literature.

Women buy most of the books and do much of the writing, but not all of them are literary writers. With literary writers, it’s more of a rarified and controversial arena, kind of pitiless. People are really mean to one another. I was talking with students yesterday about young adult fiction. That’s an arena of writing where people are made to feel welcome: the reviews aren’t nasty, people are given two or three book contracts. They’re treated differently from literary fiction, which is like a battlefield. People are fighting for review space, and they’re bitter. If they get a bad review, they’re angry. If they don’t get any review, they’re angry. It goes on and on. I feel sort of hypocritical if I say anything, because I’m often asked to review, and I turn down most of the invitations. So I can’t go around saying, “Women don’t review enough,” because people can say, “Well, Joyce, we’ve invited you, but you turned us down.”

I probably should do more reviewing. I review for The New York Review of Books, I did something for The Times Literary Supplement recently, and sometimes for The New Yorker. I am a woman writer who is invited to review. At the same time, often I’m given a woman to review. But if I ask for a man, they’ll give me a man. Just left to themselves, I don’t think they’re thinking about it. Four books by women come in: “Oh, send them to Joyce.” A new book by Michael Chabon comes in, they send it to a male reviewer. It’s like a default. I think that debate you mention makes editors think a little more. They think, Well, have I been doing that? And now The New York Times Book Review editor is a woman, but no one remembers that twenty years ago there was a woman book review editor. Nobody seems to know that.

Huggins

It seems shocking that editors would automatically send someone of your stature only female writers to review.

Oates

You never exactly know with reviewing, whether someone has already been approached and declined it. I know at The New York Times Book Review I’ve been asked to review several times, and I’ve had to say no for different reasons. So they go to somebody else, and maybe before me they went to somebody else. You can’t make judgments. I’ve edited some books and special issues of magazines, and I know what it’s like to get work out of people, to have a fair distribution with all kinds of people, and there are some people who just won’t do it. You try getting various people, and they say, “Well, I’ll send you something,” and they never do. So I’m not as quick to criticize editors as people who don’t know what it’s like to be an editor.

Huggins

One result of the discussion following the release of the VIDA statistics was that it motivated some editors to consider the implications of those numbers. For example, the editor of Tin House, Rob Spillman, said that when they started to dig into their own numbers, the slush pile submissions were approximately 50/50 in terms of gender, but when they looked at whether each writer had been rejected before by the magazine, the men were five times more likely to resubmit than the women.

Oates

Oh, they gave up. That’s interesting. I’ve had a number of students at Princeton who were gifted, both men and women. But predominantly it’s the young men who went on to be published. You’ve heard of Jonathan Safran Foer? He had a novel based on his senior thesis. I’ve had quite a few other writers, but most of the ones you’ve heard of are men. Jonathan Ames has been around quite a while; he’s another one who did a senior thesis with me. He worked really hard. After he graduated he wrote to me and said, “I’m lying on the floor of my apartment and I can’t move, and I need for you to help me. I’ve completely broken and I need some help.” I wrote back to him and said, “Jonathan, you’ve graduated. You’ve got to be independent now. I’m not your professor anymore.” Evidently he got up—he’s got a real career—but there were young women in those workshops who were just as good, and I don’t know what happened to them. You can’t really make somebody revise a novel and keep working. I don’t know where they went.

When I had a literary magazine with my husband, Raymond Smith, we published a woman who was about sixty, and she was so happy we’d published her. I said, “You’re such a good writer; where did you come from?” She said, “Well, I had a story in Mademoiselle when I was nineteen, and then I sent them another story and they rejected me, and then I stopped writing for forty years.”

Can you believe it? She said, “Well, I just felt so bad, I didn’t write anymore.” Whereas a man would say, “Okay, I’ll send them another story, or I’ll send it to Esquire.” It’s a lot different. I try not to be easily wounded. When I was a young writer, I would have seventeen stories out to the magazines. It was like fishing with seventeen lines: you don’t expect anything much, maybe you get a nibble. If you have one line out that’s too much depending on it, but if you have seventeen. . .

Werner

How has your writing changed over the years?

Oates

Generally speaking, my writing is more driven now by voice than it used to be. When I started writing it was only one voice, and that was my voice, because I didn’t know how to write any other way. Now if I’m going to write a novel—say I write about some young black people in Newark in 1981, which is one of my new fiction pieces I’m working on—I make it driven by their voices and their personalities. It’s more mediated by the subject, whereas in the past the narrative voice was the author’s voice. That’s the biggest change. I really like writing with voices. That, to me, is exciting.

With any work of fiction, the prism is the character. If you’re writing an intellectual character, your tone is intellectual, your sentences are a little longer and more subtle. If you’re writing about a young person, the sentences might be more impressionistic and shorter. It’s always exciting to find that voice, which is not a literal voice; it’s sort of poetic, but mediated. To me, that’s the exciting part of writing.

Huggins

That sense of discovery?

Oates

Yeah, you have to work a while to find the ideal voice—not too elevated, not too plain—and adjust it. I was saying yesterday that there are certain ways of writing that are gone now, that people don’t do anymore. Once there was an elevated voice that was for everybody to read; Milton had that voice, and was widely read. Now, nobody really writes in that voice. They’re much more likely to write in a vernacular voice. You know Junot Díaz? He’s completely in the vernacular, but poetic. I’ve taught his stories, and he’s deceptive; you think he’s just talking, but you find metaphors, maybe two or three in a story, and they’re really sharp. It’s an American vernacular idiomatic voice but it’s poetic, and that’s a nice voice; that’s something we really like. Whereas a complicated voice, like David Foster Wallace, I personally didn’t find as engaging as some of his contemporaries. To me, it was too much of a wrought voice, too worked over, with his footnotes and so forth. Too writerly, like he was sculpting or carving out of stone rather than the fluidity of Díaz, which is almost like water running along.

Stubson

I’m curious how you determine your persona or your voice in terms of writing essays or reviews. Was finding your voice outside fiction difficult?

Oates

I’ve been writing a lot of reviews since my early twenties, so you find a writerly voice that’s communicative and not too dense. And if you write for The New York Review of Books, you have a sense of audience, which would be different than a newspaper.

Werner

Do you consider audience in your writing? It sounds like you did when you were starting to write On Boxing.

Oates

Only regarding these journalistic things, not with fiction. You can’t imagine any audience with fiction. But with The New York Review of Books, the essays are always well written, by distinguished people who are experts in their field. They write carefully, and the first paragraphs are always so good. I love the New York Review; I just love to read it. Sometimes I sit and underline the prose of these wonderful writers. So when you’re going to write for them, you take a lot of time and care. But basically it’s not voice, it’s just a little more worked over than it would be for some other magazine.

Huggins

You’ve written and spoken about the transcendent nature of art, and you’ve been quoted as saying, “Life without art to enhance it is just too long.” How does art make life bearable?

Oates

Did I say life is too long? You know, I’ve said many, many things. Sometimes I think I might just be joking. I think for most people life is not too long as it nears the end. When you’re thirteen and there’s a long summer, that’s different than when you’re eighty-three.

But in the beginning, I think art was identification with religion. Religion and art spring from the same sources. The earliest kinds of art were probably conjoined with religious symbols. Both of them are ways of transcending, so that individuals are unified through a myth—that they’re all created by the elephant god or the turtle god or something. Then the turtle gets illustrated, so it turns into art, and the two come together, a way of making people feel they’re connected. Which is true—we are all connected, so the myth corroborates that.

I’ll give another example of transcendence in art. Most of us, if we live long enough, will encounter people—maybe ourselves—who suffer from dementia and grandiosity and irrational behavior as they get older. It’s common and it’s mundane and demeaning and probably kind of awful. But the great play, the great work of art on that subject is King Lear. Shakespeare takes a universal experience and elevates it in this extraordinary play. That’s one of the great works of humankind, King Lear. If you contrast that with the experience of, say, going to an Alzheimer’s ward, seeing the difference between King Lear and these people: that’s what we mean by the transcendence of art. Shakespeare takes something horrible and transforms it into an occasion for extraordinary insight. Lear is blundering and irrational and almost collapsing but he rises to these insights about love and the meaning of life. When he dies at the end, there’s a new order as the young people come in. Tragedies have that form, where at the end there’s a new generation, so it’s like the death of the old way, as in Macbeth or Othello. It’s a quintessentially great work of art that takes human anxieties and tragedy and transmogrifies them into something like a new beginning. It’s very hopeful.

Issue 61: A Conversation with Stuart Dybek

Found in Willow Springs 61

May 18, 2007

Samuel Ligon, Adam O'Connor Rodriguez, Dan J. Vice, & Zachary Vineyard

A CONVERSATION WITH SYUART DYBEK

Photo Credit: poetryfoundation.org

On September 25, 2007, the MacArthur Foundation named Stuart Dybek a 2007 fellow, noting that his work “dramatizes how a new storytelling tradition takes shape; his writing borrows from the literature and iconography of the Old World yet emerges from the New World—from the speech and streets and music and movies that feed the imaginations of contemporary American communities.” The very next day, he received the Rea Award for the Short Story. “The beauty of these two awards,” said Andre Dubus III, who served on the Rea Award jury, “is that it gives Stuart well-deserved time to create. And that benefits all of us.”

In his work, Dybek explores the memories and legends of his upbringing in the Polish neighborhoods of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s. He grounds the reader in the physicality of those places, while at the same time daring to blur the boundary between the real and the dream-like. Time does not often move in a straight line, but seems to spiral outward, and to double-back on itself, in ways that feel fluid and organic rather than planned. “The state you want to get to,” he says, “is surrender. When you’re controlling … you’re never going to find the accidents, which is what art is all about.”

He is the author of three books of fiction: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980) The Coast of Chicago (1990), and I Sailed with Magellan (2003), and two collections of poetry, Brass Knuckles (1979) and Streets in Their Own Ink (2004). His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Poetry, among many others. In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship and the Rea Award, Dybek has received honors including a PEN/Malamud Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Stuart Dybek holds a B.S. and an M.A. from Loyola University, and received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. In 2006, after over 30 years teaching at Western Michigan University, he had a homecoming of sorts, becoming Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He spoke with us over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.

Adam O’Connor Rodriguez

I Sailed with Magellan, while considered a novel in stories, seems linked less by narrative than by something else. How do you see these stories as connected?

Stuart Dybek

One reason to work with linked stories or a novel in stories is to escape a certain tyranny of chronology, without losing the power of narrative in the process. Each story, of course, has its own narrative design, and each story, with the exception of something like “Qué Quieres” and maybe “Blue Boy” is chronological enough. But the arrangement of the stories departs some from linear narrative. Still, there’s a kind of chronology. That is, the stories begin with the narrator as a child and end with a funeral. But the reader participates in constructing a timeline.

I always look for something to counterpoint narrative with: image, mood, thematic motifs, etc. And that counterpoint is often as important to linking the stories as a narrative line can be. The metaphorical dimension of a book can be as powerful a unifying force as story or characterization. What one is ideally trying to do is to generate a dynamic interaction between the various elements.

Of course novels that put their pieces together in ways other than straight linear narrative can accomplish the same reassembling of fragmented reality.

In Magellan, besides the centrality of place around which the stories gravitate, there are other connections, such as the repeated motif of music. Music figures heavily in the characterizations and I wanted each character to have his or her own song. And place is, for me, one gigantic, infinitely complicated image. So when somebody says that Eudora Welty is a writer of place, Joyce is a writer of place, or, as they should say, Kafka is a writer of place—you can talk about geography and so on and so forth, but really, for me, what each of these writers has created is this infinitely multi-layered, gigantic image that encompasses character. Place is metaphorical context.

Samuel Ligon

Can you talk more about the tyranny of chronology?

Dybek

In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust talks about the tyranny of rhyme forcing writers into their greatest lines. But I think the tyranny of chronology is not as benevolent a tyranny as poetic musical patterns that lead to the invention of form, which is what Proust is talking about. One can fall into a forced singsong pattern with rhyme—that’s a danger. And chronology too can invite you to fall into this numbing pattern of first this happened, then next this happened, then next that happened. When I taught sixth grade and asked the kids to write a story, many of the stories would begin with, “Briiiiiinnggg! The alarm clock rang.” They wanted to start a story at the beginning, waking up—then next you brush your teeth and eat your Wheaties, and by the time you get to the part about how you killed your brother, you’ve got five pages invested in just doing your toilette. Obviously there’s a valence that is necessary as to what moments in our lives or imaginations are important enough to get written about that has nothing to do with chronology.

At the same time, fiction is a temporal art. Its main subject is time. Its great power is chronology, because chronology has an inescapable way of translating into cause and effect. It’s deceptive and illusory, but that’s the power of linear narrative. If we write that such and such happened at ten and such and such happened at eleven, we assume they are connected and that what happened at ten caused what happened at eleven. It’s how fiction makes the chaotic world understandable. That’s why people require stories—one great reason, anyway. Stories make the chaos understandable by arranging it along a timeline. But linear narration is only one way to perceive reality, and one of the things I like about a novel in stories is that it offers other ways to look at reality. Stories can be beads on a string but the form of linked stories can also offer a more crystalline, gemlike, faceted form.

Ligon

Are you consciously trying to break chronology? In I Sailed with Magellan, it seems that “We Didn’t” comes chronologically before “Lunch at the Loyola Arms.”

Dybek

Yeah, it does. Jerzy Kosinski, when he was at his best as a writer, wrote a book called Steps, which was called a novel, but is a novel in stories. It works on that counterpoint principle—it counterpoints unidentified dialogues, which I love, with narrative sections. Kosinski called such counterpoint “anti-rhythms.” They break up the pattern of “first this happened and then that happened;” the writer has established another pattern. First a narrative passage, then a more dramatic dialogue, then back to narration, etcetera. If you disrupt linear narrative, you have to replace it with some other form. That arrangement of fictional elements into form can also include a rearrangement of time, so that one isn’t breaking chronology so much as allowing fictional form precedence over it.

Ligon

On my first read of I Sailed with Magellan, I read “Breasts” out of order. And because I read it out of order, when I got to the end, I didn’t understand the shift in point of view—

Dybek

When “Breasts” was published in Tin House and later in Best American, the departure the ending takes was lopped off; the story ends with the guys arm wrestling in the bar. And I like that freeze frame ending, too. But I always knew that in the book the story was going to make a leap and circle back to what actually happened to my brother—which seems outside the frame of the story.

The murder in “Breasts” is based on something that happened in my neighborhood. A small time hood was found with his balls blown off. In writing the story, I tried to research the actual murder in newspaper files, but I couldn’t find any record of it. After a while, I began to think I’d made the whole thing up. Not only that, but my brother, Tom, told me two different versions of the ending. The first version is the one I used in the story. I asked him to tell me his version of the story again, years later. I said, “Hey, tell me again what happened about sticking that rifle through the curtain and everything.” He said, “Oh, no, I never did that.” I said, “You told me you stuck a gun in the curtain.” “No, I couldn’t have done a thing like that.” Damn, I thought, maybe I made everything up.

The story is a composite. Grafted to the story of the mob guy’s murder was an unrelated image I saw once as I walked by a bar in my old neighborhood: two guys sitting there. One guy was in an undershirt and clearly had a case of—what’s that called—you know, when men get breasts? It’s a hormone problem. Anyway, the other guy was feeling him up.

And the image stuck in my mind. Then I was with Paul D’Amato—the photographer whose lovely photo is also the cover photo for I Sailed with Magellan—in Chicago on Cinco de Mayo, and we saw these masked wrestlers in wrestling matches in the middle of the street. They had a ring set up. And it suddenly came to me that one of those guys in the bar was a Luchador, a Mexican masked wrestler. Part of what was pleasurable about the process of writing that story was that once I failed in researching it, I never knew exactly what departures it might take

O’Connor Rodriguez

Do you usually know where you’re going, or what’s going to happen in a story?

Dybek

A lot start out that way; I think I know what they are. But then a digression occurs, and I’ll think, Oh shit, if I do this, I’ve just ruined a perfectly straightforward story and doomed myself to three more months of writing something I could have finished in a week. Because I had it all nice and thought out, and now what am I doing? And those are real risks. It’d be nice to say that every time you make a digression you get a good story out of it, but, in fact, I’ve ruined any number of stories that I think would have been pretty nice stories by chasing after digressions I could never find my way back out of.

Dan J. Vice

The story “Blue Boy” digresses a lot, but the timeline is really tight, like you know exactly what the chronology is and then you can play with it. Is that still a result of muddling around?

Dybek

Yeah, it was a mess. I never knew if that story was going to come together. The other thing is, I didn’t know if it was a story or a memoir. When I decided finally to call it a story, that’s when I knew I had the Magellan book. That was the pivotal story. I realized the characters in it and the place, Little Village, were at one with several other stories I had already written, but now, with Blue Boy, I saw how they were all related, fragments of the same whole.

Ligon

What’s the difference between memoir and fiction?

Dybek

For me the difference is what your allegiance is to. In fiction, my allegiance is always to imagination. And in memoir, it’s to memory. Which isn’t to say that memory isn’t hugely imagined. But it means in fiction that it’s any crazy thing that occurs to you that’s going to make the story better. The more lies, the more you can invent, the better the story. I think even the mechanism is different.

Mary Karr has a wonderful essay she wrote about the James Frey flap, when he admitted to faking his memoir—I’m not going to quote her as elegantly as she said it, unfortunately—but Mary said that because your allegiance is to memory in memoir, you have to stick to that. It drives you to do research that you might not have done if you didn’t feel about it so strongly. And again and again that research leads you to surprises, things you would have never, with your own imaginative powers, concocted. And I think she’s right, that that’s one of the ways memoir works. Now, that doesn’t mean a fiction writer can’t do that; fiction writers do it all the time. But it’s a choice in fiction, whereas in memoir, according to Mary, it’s obligation.

Zachary Vineyard

How do these ideas of allegiance apply to poetry?

Dybek

Nancy Eimers, a poet whose work I admire, was talking to a group of students who asked if she ever wrote fiction, and Nancy, who’s very modest, said something like, “No, I don’t have the imagination to do it. I need to stick closer to my own life. I couldn’t make up stories.” And it suddenly occurred to me that when the whole creative nonfiction and memoir publishing blitz came along, many poets—Li-Young Lee, Garrett Hongo, Michael Ryan, Debra Diggs, Mark Doty, etcetera—wrote memoirs. It seems poets saw the memoir as a form carried over from poetry. Perhaps it was a post-confessional evolution. Yet I think of poetry as a grand fiction. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong vision of it, it’s just how you’re wired.

Ligon

What do you mean by a grand fiction?

Dybek

I mean, to my mind, Eliot and Pound would both be grand fiction writers. Wallace Stevens, as well.
Vineyard. When you mention Wallace Stevens, I think of the “supreme fiction.” He was kind of under this influence that everything was imagined, even the reality that we have, this place, this world, that anything physical is just this imaginative power—

Dybek

Yet you have poets moving naturally into memoir. There’s a connection there, an implicit notion that poetry is autobiography. For me, even though I often work with autobiographical material, whether I’m working with poetry or fiction, I’m thinking of it as invention—an invented reality. I don’t feel Mary’s obligation to root memory in fact.

I remember Toby Wolff saying something along the lines that the subject of a memoir, as he saw it, was memory itself, including memory’s fallibility. Memory’s subjective truth. So there’ differing emphasis, different degrees of objective or factual reality. Rather than walled cells there’s a kind of fluid continuum along which different writers locate themselves. The same writer within the same book can locate him or herself at different places on the continuum in different chapters and sentences, so long as signals to the reader are clear.

And then there are hybrids, the nonfiction novel, or, in the novel itself, you have the roman à clef, a form that predates the whole current fascination with memoir—The Sun Also Rises is one of many examples. Supposedly, people who knew that exile crowd were able to identify exactly who those characters were despite the fictional disclaimer. And that notion of hybrids makes me think of your earlier question about the novel in stories, as that’s a hybrid form too. It shocks me when I think back to the lists that appeared when the century turned—lists like “The Hundred Best Books of the 20th Century” —and left off those lists was Winesburg, Ohio. Such a seminal book. It gives you some notion of this unexamined allegiance to the novel. There are so many novels on those lists that are inferior to that brilliant, still haunting, ever-haunting book by Sherwood Anderson. Or Hemingway’s In Our Time, or Cane by Jean Toomer, which is way underrated. Dos Passos pissed old supporters off later in life when he turned into a conservative, and his writing went to crap too, I guess. But if you look at some of his early books, like Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A., that great trilogy—those are really novels in stories. Mosaics. Crazy quilts.

A novel in stories is a hybrid form. One of the problems with hybrid forms is that they lack good names. The prose poem—what the hell is that? I mean, creative nonfiction—that is such a lame term. You know what Grace Paley said to me about the short-short once? She said, “Stuart, that sounds like a stutter.” No—stammer. She said, “It sounds like a stammer.”

But the novel in stories equates with the most fertile period in American literature, which to me is the 1920s, when everybody was experimenting like crazy and great works were coming out of it. The Waste Land has about it the scale of a novel. Its fragmentation makes one think of a novel in stories.

Vineyard

How do you see place applying to poetry?

Dybek

I wrote an essay on that subject, in which I argued for place being an underrated element in poetry for several reasons. It’s fashionable right now to flee from narrative elements in poetry—and that’s not limited to poetry; that’s through all the arts. Artists don’t want to paint decorative paintings and they don’t want to paint paintings that have narrative. And classical music, which at one time was programmatic, no longer wants to suggest narrative elements. So it’s not strictly poetry that takes that stance.

But if you look at a poet like Frost or a minor poet like Masters—when you start getting into that notion of place, narrative isn’t far behind. And then major/minor gets thrown around quite a lot. Place gets confused with local color. A fine poet like John Haines, for instance, is assigned by some critics a local color, or minor status, because Alaska figures so repeatedly in all his work, whereas that’s not true of fiction. In fiction, being a writer of place is joining a grand tradition, whether it’s Bellow, Farrell, Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner.

No matter what genre, place is image and also a formative element for me, and in that it transcends genre. And I’m interested in what transcends genre. Different genres all have their signature modes. The narrative mode would be the signature mode of fiction. But if you look at Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, Babel, these are great lyricists. In the 20th Century, certainly the signature mode, at least of American poetry—probably Western poetry—would be the lyrical mode. And yet Phil Levine is a great storyteller on the page, and so was James Welch, as was Hugo, who I also admire. That whole Montana bunch liked story.

Vice

We hear about the death of the story, that no one reads stories, and yet every few years we hear that the story is back. Why do you think that cycle occurs?

Dybek

I’m hoping that it is a cycle—that stories will come back. I’m not so optimistic they’ll return as a commercial form. John Cheever was one of my teachers at Iowa and he actually made a living writing stories, but today it’s nearly unthinkable for any writer, with the possible exception of Alice Munro, to support themselves writing stories. And yet overlapping my life are writers who actually did that. I don’t see that happening again. A novel is just a much more commercially viable form. One thing the novel really offers is getting to know a character that you can identify with, and it’s hard to do that kind of characterization in a single story. We have great short story characters, but you don’t get to spend the face time with them as in a novel.

Ligon

Your books of fiction have a similar shape, yet they don’t feel redundant. Do you look back on them and think—

Dybek

If I think about them at all, I think of the accidents that happened.

O’Connor Rodriguez

What’s a good example of that?

Dybek

Once at Case Western Reserve before I read we went out and really drank. Instead of reading, I self-indulgently and drunkenly started telling stories onstage. I felt ashamed as I began to sober up. And the guy who invited me said, “You know, you did go on a bit, but those were really great stories. You ought to write them.” At that time, I was going to tons of comedy clubs and listening to people like Lenny Bruce. I thought, What a neat trick it would be to try to write a poem like a comic monologue—I was never able to pull this off—but poets are doing it now, you know, Billy Collins does it. So I tried to do that with these stories I told on stage, and the piece turned into the story “Blight.” That story was so digressive I needed a principle by which I could digress and come back to the linear narrative that’s kind of threaded through the story. So an accident of sorts generated a literary strategy.

Vice

That style of digression comes up in Magellan, too; it seems like the kind of thing a writing workshop would immediately tell you to remove.

Dybek

Bad advice sometimes, especially when one’s voice is in a formative stage.

Vice

How do you decide when to leave something in, even though it’s unlikely to please a committee?

Dybek

What the workshop’s trying to teach you—and what you’re trying to learn—is control. And I think it’s right that you have to be able to control a story before you can surrender. But control is only a temporary state. The state you want to get to is surrender. When you’re controlling something like that, you’re never going to find the accidents, which is what art is all about. And when you begin to digress, then you’ve opened yourself up to accidents. I was just talking about “Blight,” and one of the accidents that I found in “Blight” was the line, “Back to blight.” As soon as I had that neighborhood phrase—the kids always said “Back to blight”—I had this mechanism in the story from which I could digress and always come back, a transition, and for me the art of the short story is the art of transition. Also a little chorus. And I thought, This is a move I’d like to repeat in another story.

I love Latin American music, how they get into these ecstatic choruses that are totally different than the chorus that appears in a pop song. And they’ll just riff on the same chorus. So, when it came to “Qué Quieres,” I had that chorus/transition again. It was a different version of “Back to blight,” and once I had that chorus, I could keep digressing and coming back. The thing is, the chorus has to be interesting. I couldn’t sit down and make one up. They have to come to you out of the material.

O’Connor Rodriguez

In “Qué Quieres,” you change modes in the end in a different way. Did something intuitive bring you to that?

Dybek

Yes and no. When I listen to Latin music, it’s all based on riffs that are rooted in chant; it’s like rock and roll and the blues—if you go way back, you’re back in church. Those Hispanic singers go back to Santeria, Voodoo, West African forms that became hybrid religions. And Conga players, you know Conga is all about chant. As a kid watching I Love Lucy, Ricky Ricardo would beat this conga drum like a clown, running around yelling. “Babaloo.” We just thought it was a funny word, “Babaloo,” but he was actually chanting the name of a great god.

And so when you’re trying to set up this chorus, behind it all is a kind of chant, and at the end of the story what I wanted to happen was that suddenly you break into this kind of prayer, this litany intended to have that chant quality.

Vice

Growing up in a tradition like Catholicism, do you find that it’s impossible to get away from it?

Dybek

Well, I think it depends on the writer. And even if you define yourself against it, you’re not getting away from it.

Vice

What you’re describing, and the way it seems to function in your stories, is more cultural than spiritual.

Dybek

It is, I think. However, it puts the possibility of the spiritual in the story, and a lot of the vocabulary—I mean, we all do this for whatever reason—the vocabulary of awe and mystery, the lexicon of all that stuff, the religions kind of own it. And so, even when you’re writing about the profane, a lot of times you’re borrowing from religion the vocabulary to express profane moments of mystery and awe. Just as our government reaches into pro football and football reaches into war. I bring it up only because—where do you go to get your metaphors, your figurative languages?

In a lot of cases, these stories that explore the cultural side of religion are about perception—perception changed through intense, sometimes ecstatic moments. There are a variety of rabbit holes through which you can fall down into another dimension. Once you’ve done that, you might not reemerge as a believer, but you come out with your perception changed. And religion is just one of them. So you enter that church, and you’re in medieval times suddenly, and there are all these suffering icons and so on. Or you enter a bar, and everything changes. Or you get on a motorcycle and go a zillion miles an hour. Or you have an intense sexual experience, or you play music and it changes your life. In all those cases, there’s some emotional experience that’s changed your perception.

Vineyard

Are you influenced by the surrealists at all?

Dybek

I’m interested in most all categories of the fantastical, for lack of a better word. I taught a course once that tried to involve it all. Speculative fiction, ghost stories, the grotesque, surrealism. It was an anti-realism class. I know that a real, bona fide surrealist would insist he had a political agenda as well. I’m interested in people who have harnessed dreams—Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Yeats, when he worked with folkloric material later in his career. It’s all one broad category to me. Borges and speculative fiction writers, Calvino.

Ligon

In “Pet Milk,” you’re able to move in many directions with time, and the story seems to be about time and memory. But echoing Dan’s earlier point, a workshop might say about that story, “What does Pet milk have to do with anything? What does the grandmother have to do with anything? We need to get to that train.” Why does that story begin with the coffee and then move to the grandmother?

Dybek

When I wrote it, it started as a poem, and all I was trying to do was write a still life. I love still life's. And of course, you know, so many poets are influenced by paintings. But I couldn’t bring the objects I placed on the table alive. I don’t know why my still life was a can of Pet milk but it was. Actually, I finally asked myself that question and I had the association with my grandmother. The story is based on an image. You have to create the image, and then the narrative is a way of exploring the image. And so it opens with the can of Pet milk—you begin creating the image and layering emotion through anecdote.

There’s this line in Cole Porter’s “Every time We Say Goodbye”—“Ain’t no love song finer but how strange the change from major to minor.” And he’s right. That change from major to minor, which is at the heart of Gershwin and at the heart of Cole Porter, you can’t wear it out. There’s a move like that in writing when an image opens into narrative, or conversely, when narrative closes into image, it’s like the change from major to minor. It’s so beautiful to watch that little motion.

I mentioned transitions earlier and the most important line in “Pet Milk,” is the line in which he looks from the milky coffee and sees the sky doing the same swirls above the railroad yard across the street. Because that’s the central transition in the story. Once you’ve established for the reader that you can make a transition like that, then you can do anything. You have permission to use the image to go anywhere you want. Total major to minor freedom.

“When Hamburger Station is Busy” by Andrew Farkas

Found in Willow Springs 88

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When Hamburger Station is Busy

THOUGHT PROBLEM

Whenever I go to Hamburger Station for lunch with my dad and I point out there’s nobody there, he says, “It’s busier at dinnertime.”

Whenever I go to Hamburger Station for dinner with my dad and I point out there’s nobody there, he says, “It’s busier at lunchtime.”

So, when is Hamburger Station busy?

Solution #1

Hamburger Station is never busy.

When I think about Hamburger Station, what comes to mind is the eight-foot fiberglass horse (named American Red), the covered wagon, the font on the sign that could be called Clapboard Bold, the interior that looks like a combination of a Wild West saloon and a 1950s’ diner: some of the linoleum counter’s stools are actually saddles, there are burlap sacks of potatoes, burlap sacks of onions, a rough wooden floor, inconceivably no one’s ever been thrown through the front window at the end of a brawl (a fact that’s always bothered me), a stainless steel flattop grill covered in mouth-watering grease, deep fryers for the fresh-cut fries, a wall menu with those plastic letters and numbers, employees in white T-shirts, an old cash register, booths, the malt vinegar for the fresh-cut fries, and the burgers. The burgers. These aren’t those lousy meatloaf-tasting sliders from White Castle or Krystal. No way. White Castle and Krystal are the elementary school cafeteria version. Hamburger Station burgers. They’re two-and-a-half inch squares. Piled high with onions, pickles, mustard. Dinner roll for a bun. Get yourself a Speed Pack (two burgers, fries, lemonade). Yeah. That right there. That right there . . .

That’s what I think about.

But, uh, right. Not much in the way of other patrons, I mention to my dad.

He takes a sip of lemonade.

He responds in an unconcerned deadpan.

Solution #2

Hamburger Station is only busy when I’m not there.

Although the Menches Brothers, Frank and Charles, invented the hamburger (which is what Northeast Ohioans actually believe, even if the Akron Hamburger Hearings of 2006 graciously awarded that honor to Charles Nagreen of Seymour, Wisconsin), others perfected what no one calls a plain old sandwich anymore. In other words, the Menches were like the Titans in Greek mythology. Interesting, sure. But what we really want are the Olympians. The line of succession, then, goes like this: the fabled Peppy Service Lunch begat Marvin “Pop” Thacker, who went on to create the exalted Thacker’s Hamburgs; Thacker’s Hamburgs begat Jim Lowe, who went on to found the renowned Hamburger Station.

With such an illustrious history, you can imagine that Jim Lowe, in his incongruous cowboy hat of immeasurable gallons, his inexplicable shitkicker boots (having spent most of his life in burger joints in the Buckeye State, not pastures in Texas), his large glasses that helped him see more than the normal human, well, you can imagine that Jim Lowe had the power of prophesy. And it could be that when, as a little kid, I met him, a meeting I do not remember, a meeting only related to me by my dad, a man who once said, “When I told you honesty was the best policy, I was lying,” during this supposed meeting, the legendary founder of Hamburger Station perhaps had this to say to me:

“Son, don’t be skeered, but I can see the future. Yessiree Bob. And what I see off there in the heretofore, and this is the Simon pure, is twenty Hamburger Stations, son, twenty Hamburger Stations spanning Northeast Ohio. A purty thought. Yet somehow, and now, I don’t rightly know why, somehow, and I don’t mind jawin’ at you like this on account of no-way will you recollect what I’m clapping down, somehow, anytime you come in, ya little varmint, a fandango it will not be. Fact a business, it’ll be a ghost town. Me, I won’t be afeared. When all you can hear are the winds a-howlin’, the sand a-blowin’, the tumbleweeds a-rollin’, whereas my friendly fellers will be full of flusteration, I won’t be because I’ll know what’s a-comin’—you. It’ll be you. Maybe you and yer paw. Maybe you and one of them scalawags in yer posse. But that’s all. Hain’t no one else will be here. And for the rest of yer dadgummed life, you’ll wonder how this could be. Hamburger Stations far as the eye can see; nobody inside. Whipper-snapper, that there’s yer fate. Why’s for the folks up the doxology works to know.”

I tell Scott Schulman, a friend of mine, about me and my dad’s routine.

He says that can’t be. It can’t just be the fate of Farkas. Because him and his dad, they have the same routine.

Solution #3

Hamburger Station is busy at an undisclosed, perhaps undisclosable time.

The grease on the flattop grill sizzles and I am enthralled not only by the savory smell, but by the mystery. . . .

In this hipster-dominated era, when people try to one-up each other by being the first to adopt that which will become a trend, either by finding something brand new or by reviving something old (thus the reason for Pabst Blue Ribbon’s re-ascendancy once upon a time), you might think my dad and I fit right in, that we’re trailblazers, that we’re tastemakers. The grease, oh that smell making my mouth water, does not agree. To explain, some Hamburger Station lore:

For years, Hamburger Station didn’t carry ketchup. The burgers were served “neat,” which meant pickles and (lots of) onions, with squeeze bottles of mustard throughout the restaurant and malt vinegar for the fresh-cut fries. But no ketchup. Jim Lowe liked to tell a story about a customer who would come in always asking for that red garbage. Finally, Lowe put it on a burger, and supposedly the man said he’d never ask for ketchup again. According to Lowe, ketchup and the grease Hamburger Station uses on the burgers do not mix well because the tomato product screws up the pH balance making the whole thing taste bad. Being so important, it’s probably no surprise then that the grease recipe is a closely guarded secret.

In fact, during his lifetime, Lowe was the only one who knew how to make it.

(But who knows how to make it now . . . ?)

And so, the reason my dad and I can’t claim membership in an exclusive club is because a place like Hamburger Station, that bases the taste of its primary product on a secret recipe grease, that refuses to change how the burgers are dressed even once they started carrying ketchup and mayonnaise (treating the bottles like they’re full of some infectious disease), meaning Hamburger Station has willfully accepted losing customers in order to adhere to their ideal of what a burger ought to be, well a place like that isn’t interested in being busy, and asking when Hamburger Station is immediately proves I just don’t get it. Likely, then, the people who do get it are initiated into the secret society, the real Hamburger Station, where the mysteries are revealed (obviously one of which is the recipe for the grease), the adepts later entering their perhaps underground chapter room, full to capacity (a capacity that won’t be giving McDonald’s a run for its money, but who would want to, you?! then what in the world are you doing here?!), where they gawk at flatscreens depicting these lunkheads (Farkas? What kind of name is that anyway?!) who think they know what it means to be dedicated to Hamburger Station.

But if this is the case, if Hamburger Station is merely a front for the Ancient Western Order of the Buckeroos of the Mystic Grease, then my family is a splinter faction that hides in plain sight. After all, my mom, dad, sister, and yours truly all hate ketchup, and since, when we’re there, no one else ever appears to be, that means the restaurant itself serves as our own private (one might even say secret) chapter room, and perhaps, when we have quorum, that’s when Hamburger Station is busy.

Solution #4

Hamburger Station is only “busy” relative to other times.

My dad holds up an onion ring and comments on the fact that it’s bigger than one of the hamburgers. This comparison seems important to him, so important he often brings it up. But me, I’m thinking of another comparison, a comparison that focuses on the word “busier.”

It could be that my question, “When is Hamburger Station busy?” is the wrong one. After all, when my dad says, “It’s busier at [lunchtime/dinnertime],” he might just be speaking comparatively. For instance, if I go to Hamburger Station with my dad for lunch one day, and then go there with my friends John Schloman and Scott Schulman for dinner the next day, then technically my dad is right: it’s busier (though not necessarily “busy”).

But a different problem rears its head here. As teenagers, John, Scott, and I often ate with our families, met up later on, and then ate again. Contrarily, we sometimes knew that we’d be eating with our families later and that there wouldn’t be time afterwards, so we went before we were to rendezvous with our families. In each instance, what meal were John, Scott, and I having? If it was neither lunch, nor dinner, then could we justifiably call when we were eating lunchtime or dinnertime?

This confusion reminds me of a story. One day, at school, John was asked how his brother was doing. Since John’s brother, Bill, is considerably older than John, and since the person who had inquired about his brother was younger than John, John wondered how this person knew his brother. Anyway, John said that Bill was fine. “No, not Bill. The other one.” Having no other brother, John was confused. “What’s his name? With the sideburns. Scott! How’s Scott?” It was then that he realized what’d happened. John’s last name being Schloman, Scott’s last name being Schulman, both names being a collision of “shhh” and “el” and “man” sounds, they must be the same: Schuloman. Yeah, that’s right. Or, anyway, close enough.

But close enough isn’t good enough here. So much as John and Scott aren’t brothers, the meals we were eating were neither lunch, nor dinner, meaning for us the times weren’t lunchtime or dinnertime.

Of course, the fact that teenage boys eat a lot isn’t news. So, maybe it doesn’t matter what meal we happened to be having. Instead, what matters is the time. And whereas those times, lunch and dinner, may be variable (in my adult years, I’ve lived and continue to live on a much different schedule than others), we have a general idea of when they are.

I don’t think my dad’s thought problem is semantic, however. If it were, he probably wouldn’t care when Hamburger Station was busy, or if it were ever busy at all. Seeing as how Jim Lowe’s legacy is one of my dad’s favorite restaurants, though, he does care. Since he cares, his fun can’t be nihilistic, ultimately auguring Hamburger Station’s doom. Yeah, I’ve let myself get bogged down in meals and times, when something else is at work. . . .

Again, my dad holds up an onion ring and I finally understand that his constant observation is connected to his thought problem. The reason my dad always references the other time, the time when we’re not there, is to create a kind of circular logic, as round as the onion ring, the onion ring that isn’t just physically bigger than the burgers (which are square), but also figuratively, since within that ring, though we will never truly learn when Hamburger Station is busy, Jim Lowe’s restaurant will go on forever.

Solution #5

Hamburger Station is simultaneously always busy and never busy.

Whereas I do not recall meeting Jim Lowe, I do remember, when I was a little kid, meeting and befriending a different employee, someone I always looked forward to talking to whenever we went to Hamburger Station, a really, really great guy, you could just tell by his name. His name was Andy. Later, of course, Andy would go on to collect college degrees at Kent State University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Alabama, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and become a creative writing professor at Washburn University. Later, of course, Andy would go on to move up in the ranks at Hamburger Station, from order taker to cook to trainer to assistant manager to manager to general manager, before retiring. Whenever they met, the two Andys got along wonderfully, each time happy to engage in their favorite activity: comparing burger bellies. Who could eat more Hamburger Station burgers? They didn’t know, but they were going to find out.

This unadulterated love for Hamburger Station leads me to the fact that just about everyone I know loves the place. And, often, just about everyone they know loves the place. Even the famous rock band The Black Keys, who hail from Akron, when loading the cover of their third studio album, Rubber Factory (2004), with as many hometown landmarks as they could, included Hamburger Station. Not Swenson’s or Skyway or Bob’s Hamburg or Mr. Hero (home of the Romanburger, which comes on a sub roll, has two patties next to each other, both atop slices of salami) or any of the root beer stands or any of the historic joints like Manner’s Big Boy, Lujan’s, Pogo, The Varsity, Dilly’s, The Flame, or Kamper’s, no, The Black Keys chose Hamburger Station (well, they also chose The Corral, home of the NiteMare, a burger that includes a thick slice of chipped chopped ham, but still).

And yet, every time my dad and I go, we have no problem running through our routine. Hamburger Station appears to have taken Yogi Berra’s absurdity and turned it into reality: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

From the world of physics, then, I offer two possibilities. First, Erwin Schrödinger famously used a box, a cat, and a poison trap that has a fifty percent chance of triggering in order to explain the problem of measuring a photon. With the box closed, you’re not sure if the cat is alive or dead and therefore it is simultaneously alive and dead, though that is impossible. What is the point of this thought experiment? The point is that the same is the case for photons: without measuring them (the metaphorical opening of the box), they act like both particles and waves, even though that is as impossible as a cat being both alive and dead. But when you measure photons as if they were particles, they act like particles; when you measure photons as if they were waves, they act like waves. I argue, then, that Hamburger Station, with its many confessed fans, is constantly simultaneously busy and not busy. My own experience, being a drop in the bucket, is irrelevant.

Much as I find that previous argument unsatisfying, Hugh Everett III found the Copenhagen interpretation of physics unsatisfying, since it’s impossible for light to be both a particle and a wave simultaneously. And so, my second argument comes from Dr. Everett: the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of physics. In the MWI, every time a particular action could have multiple outcomes, all of those outcomes take place in separate universes. For instance, anytime my dad and I go to Hamburger Station, it could either be busy or not busy, and therefore it is both, though in separate, unbridgeable realities. When my dad says that Hamburger Station is busier at lunchtime, or that it’s busier at dinnertime, since I cannot access those times in the moment, what he is actually telling me is that in some other reality, Hamburger Station is, indeed, busy, but neither of us can experience that universe. Maybe that’s for the better. Here, we get our Speed Packs quicker.

Back in a less theoretical version of Jim Lowe’s legacy, after eating many, many hamburgers, Andy and Andy, to determine who indeed has the bigger burger belly, turn to an outside judge: my dad. My dad, accepting this solemn duty, rules that both Andys have won. The prize, of course, is a hamburger.

Solution #6

Hamburger Station is always busy.

At the writing of this essay, I admit, I’m afraid Hamburger Station isn’t long for this world. Whereas I knew of six locations, there may have been as many as ten at one point (Jim Lowe never reaching the twenty he predicted). But now there are two. The ones my dad and I went to the most, near Midway Plaza on Britain Road in East Akron and on State Road in Cuyahoga Falls, are both gone. Whenever I’m back in town, we head to Ellet, a neighborhood in Southeast Akron, for our Hamburger Station fix. It doesn’t have a counter to sit at, just booths, like any other fast food joint (the building possibly being a defunct Wendy’s franchise). It does have one saddle stool probably to remind people like me about the excitement we felt sitting on them as kids. But none of the other accouterments are to be found.

Of course, after getting our Speed Packs, my dad and I go through our routine.

Honestly, I wish, on occasion at least, we weren’t able to. Then I wouldn’t have to feat the end of Hamburger Station.

But perhaps I don’t have to worry after all. Perhaps the problem isn’t that there are fewer Hamburger Stations now, or that there are fewer customers. Instead, the problem is that I’m approaching time the wrong way. According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark, time is an illusion brought on by perception, not something fundamental to the universe:

“We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time, or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens – and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there’s nothing that’s changing; it’s all just there – past, present, future.

“So life is like a movie, and space-time is like the DVD [. . .] There’s nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there’s all this drama unfolding in the movie.”

If Professor Tegmark is right, then we have found the solution to the thought problem. To celebrate I propose a shindig that will require almost nothing of the partiers, because, having been there before, my attendance is already guaranteed – and my dad will be there, and my mom will be there, and my sister, Stefanie, will be there, and the not-brothers John Schloman and Scott Schulman, will be there, and Jim Lowe will definitely be there, as will the other Andy, and even if you’ve never been, as long as you plan to go sometime in the future, then you will be there, too. And when we meet, finally, we will meet at the time when Hamburger Station is busy.

Issue 10: Faiz Ahmed Faiz

About Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born at Sialkot in 1910. Educated at Government College in Lahore and at Punjab University Oriental College, he began his career as a lecturer but gave this up to work with illiterate people, teaching them to read. After the Second World War he worked as a journalist and was editor of The Pakistan Times for many years. He has many critical essays and poems published, and is considered the most significant poet in Urdu after Iqbal. He died in Lahore in 1984, shortly after receiving a nomination for the Nobel Prize.

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985.

Ali received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.

A Profile of the Author

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Issue 76: Ed Skoog

About Ed Skoog

Ed Skoog is the author of Mister Skylight, Rough Day (Winner of the 2014 Washington Book Award), and the forthcoming Run the Red Lights, all from Copper Canyon Press. He is the poetry editor of Okey-Panky and co-hosts the Lunch Box Podcast with novelist J. Robert Lennon.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “1978 Buick Station Wagon”

I walked down the gravel driveway in my bare feet to the swimming pool and asked Gary Stearns, a friend of my dad’s, who had sold us the station wagon of the poem “1978 Buick Estate Wagon,” what its name was, because it seemed to me that cars had names, and he said “Beulah.” He always had plaid slacks and sideburns and maybe a Coors. In gospel songs, Beulahland is somewhere between Heaven and Earth. When I started driving, at 14, that was my car. I drove it between Heaven and Earth all the time. At the end of high school my friends Mike and Cooper went with me to the salvage yard and sold it for twenty dollars, and we rode back in Mike’s Honda or Cooper’s Mustang, can’t remember which. There was an ostrich in a pen by the salvage yard. About that time I bought my first banjo from Capitol City Pawn, maybe with the cash from the car. I eventually learned to play it. I’ve had the same banjo since 1993, a Deering Deluxe. I intended to trade it for a Gibson archtop but never have.

Notes on Reading

I have mostly been reading what literature is appealing or diverting to a toddler, mostly aloud, though sometimes, on rereading, I just point to the pictures, or tell an abbreviated version. I have been reading fiction otherwise: The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati; For Rouenna, by Sigrid Nunez; Regeneration, by Pat Barker. But I am always reading poems, especially new books from Tavern Books, Wave Books, and Copper Canyon. Three poets whose work everybody should know, and will, are Matthew Lippman, Carl Adamshick, and Catherine Barnett. The Greg Pardlo book, Digest, which won the Pulitzer this year, is extremely good. I pay attention to whatever Ben Lerner and Kevin Young are doing. I try to keep up with whatever people are reading in Seattle, Portland, Spokane, and Missoula. I spend a lot of time with the poems of Jean Follain and Roque Dalton. This year is the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina; I will be reading what smart people from New Orleans and Mississippi will have to say about that. I recommend one ebook in particular about the Katrina aftermath: Lee Mullikin’s Hardcscrabble Days, Milky Way Nights.

“1978 Buick Station Wagon” by Ed Skoog

Found in Willow Springs 76 Back to Author Profile Like a diplomat with an assassin closing in, I never take the same way home twice through Topeka streets, making string figure, … Read more

Found in Willow Springs 85

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When my Aunty Sue arrived in Chicago in 1968—the summer hot and familiar like Thailand—she didn’t know how to cook. This seemed ludicrous. To me, Aunty Sue was born with a pan in her hand. I knew her only as Aunty Sue, not Sumon Intudom, a girl who graduated from Chulalongkorn University’s nursing school, a girl who dreamed of a land far away from her humble roots in the town of Phrae, a girl who didn’t know how to boil an egg.

Aunty Sue recognized she had to learn to cook if she were to survive in this cold land. Nothing tasted right. The burgers were too greasy and made her skin break out. Pizzas overflowed with cheese; Thais weren’t accustomed to dairy. And desserts were too lip-puckeringly sweet.

So she studied the art of cooking by watching her peers in the nurses’ dorm kitchen on the seedy side of the city. She jotted down recipes. She tasted things her Thai tongue had never experienced, like ham. Like mayonnaise. Like a beef tongue taco with spicy salsa. Like salsa. At night, when the dorm was quiet, she tested out recipes. Some were disastrous, like Italian meatballs that always came out flat. She needed tasters and found other Thai nurses willing to try her cooking. My mother, one of them.

My son, Bodhi, doesn’t eat well. He is two. He eats rice—especially Daddy’s fried rice (sometimes); mac and cheese, the powdered yellow kind (sometimes); noodles, the Asian variety, like lo mein or chow fun (sometimes). He devours grapes (always).

I say sometimes because Bodhi has the habit of saying, “I don’t like fried rice anymore,” and then, within minutes, “Daddy, fried rice is my favorite.”

His eating habits make me think he is not my child but one that happened into my world, this found boy, this challenge I am supposed to conquer. How do I make this boy eat a pea? How do I make him try new things? How do I make him love food?

I say to my wife: “He gets this from your white side.”

This past summer I brought Bodhi and my wife, Deedra, to Thailand. Aunty Sue cooked for us every day. Each meal was a feast. I told Aunty that Deedra’s favorite Thai dish was massamun, a southern Thai curry dish that has meat, potatoes, and peanuts. Aunty Sue spent two days making massamun, stewing the beef until it was fork tender, bringing the curry and coconut milk to a slow simmer. When she wasn’t cooking, she was on the floor playing with Bodhi, who clung to her the way I had, who always wanted to be with her, who cried when she left the room.

“I tried my best,” Aunty Sue said. She came in from the outdoor kitchen, her face streaked with sweat. “I’m not sure it’s good.” She always said this when she cooked, always humble, always in doubt of her artistry. Most great artists possess this insecurity.

After one bite, Deedra closed her eyes, and I knew she was elsewhere, the way we were elsewhere on those long days in Chicago, my family missing home, me imagining what their home might be like.

“This is the best,” Deedra said. “It can’t get better than this.”

There are days I find myself searching. Not with eyes or hands. With the mouth. I am trying to locate taste. I cannot name the taste, but it is what sends my mind into overdrive. It is this taste that has halted my daily routine and put me into a state of pondering. What am I looking for? What is it I’m wanting? What is this I’m feeling?

A taste is not an image. It is not animate. The remembered taste is even more illusory. It can only be made real in the mouth.

My mouth is empty.

It is torturous, this feeling.

To want something so badly but not have a name for that want. It is like holding a loved one only to find they have vanished.

The anthropologist John S. Allen writes in The Omnivorous Mind, “We all have our food memories, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back memories not just of eating food itself but also of place and setting. Food is an effective trigger of deeper memories of feelings and emotions, internal states of the mind and body.”

Aunty Sue closed her eyes to taste whatever she was concocting. I wanted to crawl into her brain to witness what memory she recalled so she could recreate. A time when I was not yet there. Before she even met my mother. Before transplanting herself. Did she become the girl tasting tom yum, spicy soup, at a noodle cart, the one outside her house in Phrae, under the shadow of a mango tree? Or the sister among four other siblings, relishing her mother’s green curry that was sweet on the tongue with a spice that hugged the back of the throat? Or the nursing student, on a break between classes, savoring coconut ice cream scooped from a large silver barrel cart to stave off the Bangkok heat?

Sometimes when tasting, my aunt shook her head. Sometimes she nodded.

Every time she cooked was a form of remembering.

My mother used to tell me this story:

“We found you in the dumpster in Chinatown, Aunty and me. We heard rustling and crying, so we checked, thinking it was a raccoon or rat. Chicago rats are like dogs. But it wasn’t rat or raccoon. It was you. Eating something. You were always eating something. I said to your Aunty, Should we keep him? She smiled—you know how she is—she smiled and said, Only if we can afford him. He will eat a lot. He will cost a lot of money. He must belong to the restaurant owner. You know the restaurant, don’t you? We used to go there every Sunday. They had the best crab curry. The best black bean spare ribs. You know the restaurant, don’t you? The owner was Chinese but could speak Thai. He had Tourette’s. He would scream. Out of nowhere. It scared you. So yeah, we believed you to be his son. That’s why we went there all the time. So you could visit your Tourette’s father. Aunty said the owner must’ve threw you out because you were eating too much of his food, and he feared the restaurant would go under. We liked the restaurant. You liked the restaurant. You ate all of their fried rice and seafood chow fun, even though you always startled when the owner screamed out of the blue. You hid in Aunty’s arms. Remember? Your Aunty said we should take you. She had a weakness for chubby babies. You were the chubbiest. Look at you now. Still chubby. So we took you in. From that dumpster in Chinatown. From the Chinese man with Tourette’s. Thank your Aunty for saving you.”

I liked this story because I knew it was a story. I liked this story because my mother told it in a way that made me laugh. I liked this story because Aunty never said anything. She just smiled.

I’ve been to too many social gatherings where you stand with a drink in hand among a bunch of strangers and then one of those long awkward silences happens. Often times, I excuse myself to go hide in the bathroom. I find myself in a lot of bathrooms.

Aunty Sue, however, taught me a trick. Simply ask, “So what’s the last great meal you had?” and notice the change that comes over people. Notice the release of tension in the shoulders. Notice the smile that comes on us when we relive a good memory. Notice the emergence of story.

“Food, glorious food!” In high school, I was cast as every main chorus person in the musical Oliver. I was the Long Song Seller (Southside toughies called me the Long Dong Seller), the Drunkard Who Opened Act 2, the Policeman Who Shot Bill Sykes with a Starting Pistol, and the Policeman Who Carried the Dead Body of Nancy Which Was Unexpectedly Heavy and So Was Dropped on Opening Night. Aunty Sue came to every performance. I found her in the same place—house left, top row, against a sidewall. Whenever I looked up, the lights blinding, I would find the silhouette of her. Patting her heart. A sign that she saw me. That she was there.

Every meal is a big deal in Thailand. There are three breakfasts. Two lunches. Maybe an early dinner and a late-night one. That’s what Thais do. They eat. That is why a common greeting in Thailand is Have you eaten?

Every meal is a feast. Every feast full of food and family. This is food, too, this gathering of people. In Thailand, the worst thing to do is eat alone. It is bad luck.

In our Chicago home, Aunty Sue crafted meals that brought Thailand to life, or a version of Thailand. That was what my immigrant family missed most, even beyond the family they left behind. Food and the familiarities of food.

Our home was on the south side of Chicago, in a white bi-level with a detached garage. In a neighborhood of tough Polish and Irish. Aunty Sue did not have the ingredients she needed. Where was she to find kaffir lime leaves? Or holy basil? How do you satiate fruit cravings for mangosteens or durians or rambutans? Nowhere was unripe green papaya. She did not know how to ask for pork neck at the butcher’s shop. She could not find fish heads for stock. How do you cook Thai food without a mortar and pestle? That would come years later.

The ingredients of home were not available to her. At least not yet, not in the ’70s, the beginning of the influx of Southeast Asian immigrants. The first Thai grocery store in Chicago would open sometime in the early ’80s, and even then, the produce arrived withered, the fruit browned.

So Aunty Sue improvised. She re-imagined. She couldn’t give us Thailand, but she could give us something that was like Thailand.

Spicy Oscar Meyer Hot Dog Salad, with slivers of raw onion and jalapeño peppers. Ground pork and shrimp burgers, slathered in hot sauce and dilled cucumbers. Phad Thai with ketchup instead of tamarind paste. Thick brown gravy from a McCormick packet over ramen noodles. Shredded carrot spicy salad.

This was Thai food—our version of Thai food—and it was home.

“I went to Thai restaurants all over Chicago,” Aunty Sue said, “and the food didn’t taste like home. It tasted like America.”

I spend a lot of time talking about food. I am dramatic about it. It’s my favorite subject. Because I teach, many of my lessons involve food in one way or another. At the start of every semester, I ask my students about their last great meal, and at the end of every class, I tell my students: “Now go eat something delicious.”

In terms of food, we are experts. Many times, when we describe food, we stop and swallow, our imaginations taking us to the point of salivating. Sometimes, we qualify our food. It isn’t just lasagna—it’s Grandma’s lasagna. It isn’t just ribs—it’s Father’s applewood smoked ribs. It’s not just a grilled cheese—it’s Aunty Sue’s grilled cheese.

I would see Aunty Sue pat her chest at other places, too. When I competed in tennis and golf tournaments. At Thai temple events, like Halloween costume contests. We left Thailand this past year—Deedra, Bodhi, and I going through security—and when we looked back, Aunty was patting her chest.

Food says a lot about who we are. Look at the divisions of BBQ in our country—Memphis, Texas, Kansas City, Carolina, Alabama. Look at the war between NYC and Chicago about which city has the superior pizza. (FYI: Chicago pizza. Southsider 4 life.) Name a region and there emerges a food. Rochester’s Garbage Plate, Hawaii’s obsession with Spam. Fast food corporations like McDonald’s understand this. In Thailand, McDonald’s has on their menu the Pork Samurai Burger because beef is considered a luxury. In Maine, the McLobster roll. In Japan the Ebi Filet-O shrimp burger. Food is a reflection of the priorities of a culture. What is Texas without beef? Or Iowa without corn? Or Thailand if not for jasmine rice and fish sauce? Food is an announcement of place, a connection to home.

Another story, one Aunty Sue liked to tell:

“Your mother’s milk had gone dry, so we started you on formula. You couldn’t tolerate it. You would drink a couple of mouthfuls and spit it out. You weren’t eating at all and cried non-stop, which set your mother on edge. For weeks you didn’t stop crying. You barely ate, which is hard to believe now. Because you eat all the time. My fault, I’m sure. Then in a moment of desperateness, I spooned a bit of rice and fish sauce into your mouth. You quieted. You smiled. A miracle! Then you reached into my mouth and ate what I ate. For rice. For noodles. For my grilled cheese. And I knew. I knew I created a boy who loved food. I knew you were mine.”

This semester, a student: “My grandmother used to make these homemade pierogis. She only made them once a year. On my birthday. It was a major production. Rolling out the dough. Perfecting the filling. When I bit into her pierogi, butter salted the lips, and there would be this crunch and chew. Not like a chip. Not like the snap of a carrot. But like the break of leather left too long in the sun. That’s the sound. Or something like that. I would eat and eat and eat until I was sick. No pierogi left behind, she said. She said weird things like that.”

“When’s your birthday?” I said.

“In a couple of months.”

“Will she make those pierogis?”

“No,” he said. “She passed away.”

This summer: Aunty Sue passed away.

Deedra had massamun at a Thai restaurant on her birthday, the first time since my aunt’s passing. “It’s not good. It’s not fair.”

This is not about food.

Let me tell you about Aunty Sue’s grilled cheese. There is nothing particularly special about the sandwich. She made it the way others made it. Butter. Cheap white Wonder bread. Kraft American cheese. Sometimes some garlic powder on the bread. Only if I asked. Sometimes she put in slices of tomatoes from her garden. Sometimes ham. But that grilled cheese. That taste of it. It has followed me for years. I’ve eaten many grilled cheeses in my lifetime. Some with fancy cheeses. Some with fancy bread. Some with mayonnaise instead of butter. But none like Aunty Sue’s.

Aunty Sue’s grilled cheese became part of the family menu, and because it became part of the family menu, it became Thai. That’s what I want.

There are pictures of Bodhi and Aunty Sue together, and most of them are in the kitchen. In all the pictures, joy paints her face, a laugh frozen, a wide-open mouth of elation. And my son, too, smiling and doing what one-year-olds do. This is his Grandma Sue—this white-haired woman he clings to, who makes five versions of fried rice to appease his finicky taste buds, this woman he met only once in a stretch of two weeks one summer. A year after that visit, he will discover these photos, and his father will ask, “Do you remember her? Do you remember Grandma Sue? She loved you so much. Greatest cook on earth. Do you remember her?”

He will shake his head. He will say no.

Something inside the father breaks.

I keep searching for that taste, that grilled cheese. I search for other tastes, too—Aunty Sue’s Phad Thai, her macaroni stir-fry, her coconut milk soup.

What I am really searching for is her.

When he was not yet a year old, Bodhi reached into my mouth and ate the fried rice I was eating. He couldn’t form words, but my wife and I taught him the sign for “more,” putting his fingers together in both hands then repeatedly touching them against each other. With that first taste of fried rice, he signed for more. He signed for more after every bite. When I was too slow to feed, he put his little fingers into my mouth, searching.

We wish. We yearn. We search. Whatever memory that tickles the tongue is only memory, which means it is loss. We are losing every second. That grilled cheese is a memory. That massamun, a memory. Aunty Sue, a memory. This is what we face. And yet we keep recalling. We keep searching for that elusive taste. What was your last great meal? And we are off, losing ourselves in sensorial ecstasy, and at times, in a bubble of memory that contains not so much the food but the people the food comes to represent, the people who have become memory, too. And we hold on. We keep looking. We keep hoping. A hand touching the heart.

“Three Finnish Scenes” by Eric Altemus

Found in Willow Springs 85

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KOTIPIZZA

Yes! We put strips of all-natural reindeer meat on the Berlusconi. Thank God you asked. It’s named after the Italian Prime Minister. You know, the same one who believed Finland would lose at the Pizza Olympics. Now look at him: A shell of his former self. Expelled from politics. A tax criminal reduced to mere billions.

Our best-selling product.

Imagine a farm somewhere up north. Lapland. The more remote, the better. Winters are harsh, but our reindeer are well fed and properly sheltered, thanks to the efforts of our Reindeer Maintenance Team. State-of-the-art technology, too: they can’t even feel the temperature falling through the triple-glazed windows at night. Go ahead, peer into their eyes, black and glistening. Look at those antlers, so gracefully manicured. Squint hard. See how happy they are? You can touch them if you want. Stroke their fur.

As if there were any doubt that we only use the finest reindeer on our pizza.

I cannot actually tell you where we acquire our animals, however. That is a company secret. I could lose my job. And then what? Ask the government to pay my rent so I could sit here telling reindeer stories all afternoon for free? No. I have a family to feed.

The reverse applies for how we process the meat, though. We refer to it as “initiation.”

Again, think of all our happy reindeer. Select one from the stable and lead it outside, into the darkness. If it cries out, shush it. Normally, they comply. But sometimes they don’t. In that case, you have to act fast. Nobody wants a hysterical reindeer on their hands. So do something. Sing a song. Tell a story from your childhood. Put a knife to the reindeer’s throat and threaten to sell it to Russia. Anything you want. Just make sure the fucking thing dies.

HESBURGER

I Yes! We put strips of all-natural reindeer meat on the Berlusconi. Thank God you asked. It’s named after the Italian Prime Minister. You know, the same one who believed Finland would lose at the Pizza Olympics. Now look at him: A shell of his former self. Expelled from politics. A tax criminal reduced to mere billions.
Our best-selling product.
Imagine a farm somewhere up north. Lapland. The more remote, the better. Winters are harsh, but our reindeer are well fed and properly sheltered, thanks to the efforts of our Reindeer Maintenance Team. State-of-the-art technology, too: they can’t even feel the temperature falling through the triple-glazed windows at night. Go ahead, peer into their eyes, black and glistening. Look at those antlers, so gracefully manicured. Squint hard. See how happy they are? You can touch them if you want. Stroke their fur.
As if there were any doubt that we only use the finest reindeer on our pizza.
I cannot actually tell you where we acquire our animals, however. That is a company secret. I could lose my job. And then what? Ask the government to pay my rent so I could sit here telling reindeer stories all afternoon for free? No. I have a family to feed.
The reverse applies for how we process the meat, though. We refer to it as “initiation.”
Again, think of all our happy reindeer. Select one from the stable and lead it outside, into the darkness. If it cries out, shush it. Normally, they comply. But sometimes they don’t. In that case, you have to act fast. Nobody wants a hysterical reindeer on their hands. So do something. Sing a song. Tell a story from your childhood. Put a knife to the reindeer’s throat and threaten to sell it to Russia. Anything you want. Just make sure the fucking thing dies.

FESTIVAALI

Dead. That’s Vaasa in the middle of July, except for a bunch of metalheads who think they run the place for the week the music festival’s in town. They’re not hard to miss: filthy kids pounding Lapin Kulta, reeking of pot, and throwing rocks at the cars crossing the gulf bridge in between sets. Last night, they tipped over all the portable toilets, and someone finally called the cops. When they arrived, they lined the length of the island road, lights flashing across the water. I was watching from a friend’s apartment balcony, waiting for a riot to break out. But then the bands started back up again.
We watched the police drive away from the island. Everyone left it at that.
All my friends think Vaasa’s the best town in Finland. Nothing happens here, they say. Everyone’s all talk. Pohjalainen runs the same thing in the paper: stocks, weather, the non-issue news about Sauli Niinistö, five hours away.
Summers here never seem to end. Most businesses close for the month, so I wandered aimlessly through the city streets, looking for signs of life: a lone ice cream stand parked in front of the H&M; fresh seagull shit on the statue of a tsar. I started staying up most nights, just to hear the street noise, the same cars racing down deserted streets, past my apartment window, chirping tires and mufflers coughing in the endless light.
I was smoking outside the rokkibaari the night the festival ended when a fight spilled into the street. Some intern at YLE started it. The metalheads beat him so badly, he started snoring on the pavement. He survived but walked with a limp for a while. People started avoiding him in the supermarket or in the square after that. In the morning, Pohjalainen reported on the festival: the record attendance, the cleanup efforts well in hand. Everything went without a hitch.

“Mushroom Boys” by Bridget Adams

Found in Willow Springs 85

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Lydia and Jools and RJ were very drunk and walking home, and the streetlamps made the sidewalk, the apartment buildings sprouting up, fuzzy and golden. Fat snowflakes drifted and found their lazy way onto the girls’ cheeks, their eyelashes, into the necks of their coats and onto the exposed skin of their feet in their high heels. It was fifteen degrees, finally warm enough to snow, after almost a week of frigid nights in their withering Rust Belt city.
“Remember baby ducks?” said Lydia, “Taking care of them in kindergarten?” The soft round penumbras of the streetlamps reminded her of them.

“Baby animals are so cute,” said Jools, weaving as she walked, her face glued to her cell phone screen.

“Why don’t we get a dog!” She thought of puppies filling up her bedroom, too many, she could sleep in a pile of them.

The building that the girls lived in had two apartments on the first floor, facing the street. The one to the right of the door was dark, with the blinds drawn. The one to the left had its blinds up. The girls walked up the stairs and saw that the window was wide open to the cold air. The lights were on, and music with a deep, crushing bass played. It made the hearts of the girls hurt, each muscle aching as it tried to keep its own rhythm. There was a couch facing the window, and three boys, about their age, sat in it. Their heads were down.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” RJ said. It seemed like a good idea. It seemed like maybe they should meet the three boys. All of the girls’ boyfriends were kind of like dads, the way they took the check at dinner and paid it without even showing the girls, wore collared shirts to work, disappeared mysteriously into rooms together and on trips and to the golf club, had a baby they saw on weekends or more than one dog. All of the boyfriends were on a trip now, a bachelor weekend in Cabo. The girls said things like this: “Why don’t you ever take me to Cabo?” and, “Who is even getting married?” and, “How can you afford this?” And the boyfriends sighed and smiled and kissed them on their cheeks and left. RJ and Jools and Lydia had gotten very drunk, in a retaliatory way. They were so bored when the first bartender told them about his house party, when a lost-looking punk with a ketamine drawl told them about his show that night, when they danced in a circle in a dark club and hands attached to unseen bodies crawled up their stomachs, their thighs. Being bored was worse than anything. It was worse than being sad, than being angry, than puking. “Being bored is the worst,” Jools said as they left the club. RJ and Lydia nodded. Lydia worked nights as a receptionist at a hotel, so she knew a lot about being bored.

Now, the girls looked through their neighbors’ window and wondered what it would be like to hang out with boys again, their own age, boys who talked about video games and didn’t pay child support. They couldn’t see the boys’ faces, because they were all sitting upright, their elbows on their knees, their heads down. They looked like they were thinking very deeply. You could see their shoulders, their biceps; six big arms, good manly arms.

“Hey boys!” Jools said, then started laughing so hard, through hiccups.

“Boys!” Lydia said. “Boys!” Lydia started yelling louder, but even though she pushed her face against the window screen, they didn't stir. Lydia started to feel queasy. “Boys! Boys! Boys!”

The fan swung in a wild white buzz above their heads. They were like mushroom boys, growing from the couch, swaying wordlessly.

“They’re on drugs they don’t know how to do,” RJ said. “They’re fucking losers.” Jools was back on her phone, her face pinched into a worried shape, blue in the glow. She was swiping through possible new boyfriends on an app, her cheeks a little damp. She had cried off and on all night, and no one had asked her about it.

Lydia was scared and she didn’t know why. “Let’s go home,” she said, and opened the door, and ran up the stairs. Once a cat had followed her up the stairs from the street. He was hugely fat, and his collar said, “Hello! I’m Leonard! I’m an outdoor cat!” He had climbed in her bed and slept voluptuously next to Lydia all night—sprawled like a king, purring, low and indecent, when she scratched the striped balloon of his belly. He left in the morning when she went for a run. Lydia wondered where he was now. It was too cold now to be an outdoor cat. RJ stomped each step behind her, purposeful, hard, like she was trying to punch her foot through the worn, shabby carpet, through the wood, all the way into the boys’ apartment. “Wake. Up. Boys.”
The girls flopped on the twin bed they pretended was a couch in the living room. Everyone had had sex with their boyfriends on the bed, because sometimes they just wanted to do it somewhere other than their rooms. Friends from all over had slept there, and the girls had never washed the sheets. They actually didn’t clean much at all, except for when Jools became possessed like a demon three days before her erratic period and scrubbed the bathroom, collecting hair and dirt and dead silverfish and mold. “It’s like an owl pellet, but for girls,” she said the last time, dangling it in Lydia’s face.

The girls put Celine Dion on the music channel on the TV. They screamed the lyrics and laughed halfway through. The apartment building was three stories high and built in 1929 and so quiet, and they almost never saw anyone, anywhere, no matter how loud they screamed—at Celine Dion, at a joke, at the boyfriends. Sometimes figures appeared in the dark hallway, round and bulky in hats, scarves, puffy coats, but they swept quickly into their own rooms, swinging the doors shut.

The sheets beneath the girls were hot pink and stained. RJ had been the last to start dating one of the boyfriends—the chain went Lydia with her boyfriend, then Lydia introduced Jools to one of his friends and they started dating, and then RJ hung around enough to meet their other friend. RJ’s boyfriend was an attorney and a famous local drunk and when he fucked RJ on the twin bed, he said he felt like he was back in college and RJ said that made sense because she graduated last year. Before him, RJ was having sex with the woman who managed the 7-Eleven a block away but she never told anyone that, and she never laid out the manager of the 7-Eleven on the hot pink sheets, and actually she still had sex with her sometimes but she didn’t tell anyone that either.

Red lights flashed outside the window. A siren in the distance came closer. The girls ignored it. RJ knew about things that Jools and Lydia had never heard of, and so she found a YouTube video of a performance artist who sat behind glass like she was a prisoner meeting family, and people would come and sit in the chair on the other side of the glass. The performance artist begged each person to touch her, and she would lie and tell them that if they tried hard enough it was possible to get through the glass, so people would try to touch her, but of course they couldn’t. They’d just press their hands against hers with the strip of glass between them, and sometimes the performance artist would kiss her side of the glass and the person viewing her would kiss the other side and their mouths would be open, like the sucker fish at the bottom of the aquarium. The video showed stranger after stranger, and sometimes they cried and one lady started calling for her mother. At the end of the video, the glass was covered in snot and fingerprints and spit and tears. The glass ended up being preserved and displayed in the museum after the installation was over.

“Oh Lyddy, Lyddy don’t cry,” Jools said. She hugged her with one arm; she looked at her phone over her shoulder, crying a little herself. Everyone was so ugly in the app.

RJ stopped the video. “Are you sad?” RJ asked, a nail file appearing. She sawed at her fingernails, bright red and shaped into points. Each girl had a tumbler of whiskey but couldn’t remember when she’d gotten it. They all liked looking at RJ’s nails when she held a glass of liquor or wine, at the sharpness and the shine of the ice and the nails. It was sexy and grown up. RJ had to have nice nails because she was a receptionist at a car dealership and she had to point at things all day. People looked at her nails constantly.

“Yes,” Lydia said. “I’m kind of sad. I liked that guy at the bar tonight.” Lydia had found herself on the porch smoking a cigarette with a stranger.

“What about your boyfriend.”

“He was obese.”

“He wore a fedora.”

“He had a goatee.”

“He was a tollbooth operator.”

He also had deep gray fillings lining all of his back teeth. He had a little lisp too and when Lydia said she had never left the US except to go to Canada, of course, which was only ten miles away, he told her she was fascinating, like a newborn or an alien. He put a Camel Menthol in between her fingers and said, “There are three types of kisses; I learned that in Vienna. I’ll show you one here and two back at your place.” Lydia wanted to learn something. She wanted someone to want to teach her something new. RJ had come outside. “JESUS,” she said, and grabbed Lydia’s hand, spinning her from him. She had looked deep into Lydia’s eyes and held both her hands. “If you fuck him you will hate yourself in the morning.” RJ knew this because she would hate herself in the morning if she fucked him.

On the couch now, RJ and Jools knew they were right to tear her away. Lydia blew her nose. Lights flashed in a rhythm across RJ and Jools’ faces. Lydia’s father always used to say that her mother’s ancestors ate the soup. What he meant was that even though all of her ancestors were Irish immigrants, her father’s parents came from Catholic people who refused to convert, even though it meant starvation and displacement, and her mother came from people who converted when the British came over and got to keep their land, their food, their animals. Even though this story was not true, a fabrication made to enhance an already quite vivid history of degradation and oppression, Lydia knew that what her father meant was that she was from a long line of craven women, operators, people who choose to feed, feed, feed, and always choose to live, their principles shuffled like dice every day, hour, at every decision. That was how she felt when her boyfriend gave her some money for rent, and when she wanted to learn the tollbooth operator’s kisses; instead of feeling ashamed, she felt excited, alive.

A silverfish darted across the floor. The girls screamed. They all had nightmares about silverfish. In Lydia’s nightmare, the silverfish live in a nest like birds, and the nest is under the bed. One morning, Lydia told Jools about her nightmare, and Jools said that all the girls in the whole world have horrible dreams about bugs, even if they don’t remember in the morning, because of evolution. The silverfish were biological but somehow robotic, and that’s how you know they might have a disease. RJ moved so quickly and smacked it with her shoe. A thick soupy gunk stuck to the shoe, to the floor. The girls knew that this was the price of murdering something that needed to die. The girls felt an absurd urge to pray, and they stared silently at the goop. A single leg stuck in the air. They noticed because they were staring really hard. It was late. They had been home for hours, they realized.

RJ didn’t like the sound of the sirens which suddenly sounded so loud. She got up to close the door to the porch—it had been swinging open. None of the girls noticed how cold the apartment was with the door open because they were all so warm after dancing, and with more whiskey slithering into their bellies. They never remembered to lock anything, and Jools didn’t know this yet but one of the neighbors had snuck in one day, a woman, and stolen her grandmother’s emerald ring, a small part of her inheritance, from the bottom of her jewelry box. Everything else in the apartment was worthless. The neighbor sold it and used the money to fill her veins up with heroin, just a few feet away, sighing and relaxing and feeling so fucking good and thanking God that she lived next to careless girls.

“Oh, fuck,” RJ said. Lydia came to the door and Jools followed. Beneath the porch they could see the ambulance, with its lights going. A silent police car. A firetruck. RJ had a secret history, of cousins and aunts and neighbors and grandparents dying in the neighborhood where she grew up, of hoping that people always moved quickly, urgently, of believing with a superstitious fervor that it meant something if the lights were on or off.

The girls watched people file into the boys’ apartment below them. They didn’t come out for a long time. The girls breathed in the cold air and their lungs hurt and the tendrils of hangover headaches crept up from the cervical curve of their spines to the crowns of their heads. “I’m going to bed,” Jools said. All of the girls yawned. “We should all go to bed,” they said to each other. They shut the door to the porch behind them, and this time they locked it.
RJ fell asleep as soon as her head hit her pillow, because she had the superpower of sleeping when she didn’t want to think. Jools stayed awake. She was talking to the men she had swiped yes on, telling one that she was an astronaut, another that she was a spy, another that she was a dominatrix. She deleted the app before she went to sleep, because then it was like it didn’t happen.

Only Lydia couldn’t sleep. She wondered if the boys had heard them calling out to them tonight, before they stopped hearing anything. One night her boyfriend slept on the couch bed. A few nights. She remembered yelling, so angry at him, to get the fuck out, get the fuck out right now. The night before her birthday. Why had she felt that way? It was impossible to remember. Had the boys downstairs heard? Had they wondered about her then, like she wondered about them now?

The window downstairs was never open again. When the girls walked by, every day, they shivered, even when the snow melted and it was warm and the piles of dog shit revealed themselves, sprinkled on lawns. They shivered even when they were older, and walked their children in strollers past their old apartment, when they got matching divorces from different former boyfriends and drove by trying to access the feeling of being in their twenties, when they were much older and Jools died and RJ and Lydia went to see what that old dump looked like, and cried at the stupid brilliant beauty of the young girls in yoga pants and long ponytails walking in and out. Sometimes they imagined the boys still there, never moving, their bones and muscle and skin growing, becoming roots that burst through the floor of the apartment. Their bodies became part of the dirt; their arms, those nice, muscly arms grew and grew and twisted up into the corners of the room, split into many fingers, cracking the ceiling, and someday they would crack the floors of the places the girls lived, and then they wouldn’t be able to ignore the girls anymore.

Three Poems by Andrea Jurjević

Found in Willow Springs 85

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"Nastic Movements"

Sweetness, back home

the Adriatic tightens around the shore

like a snake around a hot rock.

in each house on the island

there’s a table. on every table,

a loaf, round like a Slavic face.

ashes in the oven.

ashes on the domes of the bread.

ashes on the roof of one’s mouth.

last year my cousin died

alone in his house. our family—

scattered around the world—

got caught in a phone web,

catching up with each other,

and we forgot his body.

but things were funny: phone in hand,

someone picked her nose,

and pulled out a bloody fingernail.

another drew a hair—tough, tar-black—

from between her teeth, a pubic curl,

and wondered whose it was.

and, listen, in Sarajevo,

the fit ones ran through the Sniper Alley.

the rest took up dying.

longing is a trick, baby.

go inside a rock, a ringtone, the red coal of my tongue,

and you’ll only taste yourself.

babe. keep the curtains parted.

see the moon tossing her long white hair

across the ocean.

hear its steady, back-arching roar.

look at the chenilled strip of black sand,

that fool walking with a flashlight.

listen to the ocean and come apart

like a letter in rain. babe. even dandelions

lose their faces at night.

"Department Of Dream Justice"

I return home, sit on the pier and listen to rocks suck the sea like Frank Booth on blue velvet.

At dawn my sister yanks me awake, and the oval shell of the world cracks open. Boats gape like a line of polished funeral shoes.

A cortège of animals gallops fluently by our house, their muscular architecture covered with lush white wool.

The garden beds are dry, laundry lines bare.

Sister says, Come back soon.

We close our eyes, wish for rain

and wake in another dream: on streets of distant towns, each of us, alone, carries keys from our old house, looks to unlock a door

that fits the key.

Your palms close around the book of my hips. The minor tongue my hips are inscribed in.

Your palms, two walls within which I sing.

III

For years I spent nights drifting over wheat fields and vacant parking decks, and the wind whistled, whistled, whistled a long narcotic tune.

On the sandbank tonight shards of broken glass,

the river licking its shore clean, like a dog nursing its wound, and the moon, translucent, is a soap bubble on your glistening back.

My bones are hollow. There’s a quick flutter of wingbeats.

You turn, holding back the curtain of the night, and say, Baby. Don’t you see you’re home.

For eternity we’re a house on fire.

The man with a boat on a leash. The bailaor dancing naked in my living room.

The man eating sea urchins in his bathtub, spray-painting eels into silver bedroom whips, singing of hollow canyons.

The man with two pistols against his skinny waist. The man rapping about white knuckles.

My father eating goulash his mother fixed from his pet pigeons. How he sobbed in our sea-splashed house after she died.

The man with a horse torso digging a trench of doubt. American outage.

I have a fondness for tight spaces. I tell you about each one I tucked myself into.

The addict on the waterfront who always almost returned. The man who smelled of autumn. The man tearing along on his guitar like an overnight train, singing El dolor que tengo yo, el dolor que tengo yo.

The swallows didn’t return this year, Sister writes. Their nests still line the eaves of the roof.

VII

Baby. I want to be a swallow. Smallest, bluest of them. Skim the surface of the sea at sunset. Feed in flight. Build a cup of warm mud in the cover of someone’s large house, wake up in the mornings, and while my children still sleep, feel like it is me who keeps them safe.

"Nevada Augury"

Because the desert renders everything boundless and bare,

undeserving of existence—like the self-loathing types you fall for—

you delight in it. The lone, sun-drowned shack doubling as Goldfield’s Radio Museum, its toilet planters, and P. K. yapping about spy transmitters.

Oasis Avenue. Car Forest. The Dinky Diner.

Chip driving by in a giant truck, just off the testing site.

Wild Cat Ranch! Someone whispering, What can I do for you, sweetie, 100s of miles from anyone’s ears. Isn’t that what all of us want?

You adore what remains of Mina’s homes, its padlocks and boarded-up windows, bars across doors, No Trespassing signs.

And the mines, also abandoned, also disused, yet somehow like homecoming.

The Death Valley. Oh, the Death Valley. Its hot grip, its erotic grandeur, its golden skin, and—

Look! In all that flax and rust, the two of us, sipping gas station coffee, small as two fools of Breughel’s, turning into desert sand.