Interviews

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Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, to logger parents—her mother was a choker-setter and her father was a spar-tree rigger. The fact that she lives in Port Angeles now could make her life seem deceptively simple. Gallagher has lived and traveled all over the world. She has graduate degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Washington, where she studied with Theodore Roethke in his last poetry workshop. She has taught at the University of Montana, Syracuse University, the University of Arizona at Tucson, and St. Lawrence University in New York, among other places, and has made regular trips to Ireland since 1968. It was through friends in Ireland that she met Josie Gray, her “Irish companion,” with whom she has co-authored Barnacle Soup, a collaboration of stories Gray has crafted through years of their telling, which Gallagher has captured and preserved on the page.

Gallagher has participated in other collaborative efforts including translating the work of Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, and writing plays and screenplays with her late husband Raymond Carver. She has published eight books of poetry: Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, Willingly, Amplitude, Moon Crossing Bridge, Portable Kisses, My Black Horse, and Dear Ghosts; two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses and Soul Barnacles; two collections of short stories, The Lover of Horses and At the Owl Woman Saloon; and a book-length interview with Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi, Distant Rain.

Gallagher’s work is “substantial yet lambent, earthy and spiritual,” writes Donna Seaman of Booklist, and “evokes the power of the unseen as well as the seen with breathtaking clarity, creating metaphors so surprising, radiant, and apt that the world seems to expand in their wake.” In a way not unlike Wordsworth, Gallagher manages to enshrine not only the mundane, but the tragic, by seeing the world as her holy place. She was generous enough to invite us to her home where she served us homemade date-bran muffins and raspberries that she had picked the day before. We ate and talked over coffee in a room with walls of windows, surrounded by trees.

MAYA ZELLER

Your connection to the land is apparent in your work. Do you think this connection is amplified because of your roots in Port Angeles?

TESS GALLAGHER

Two things were very important. One was that my mother was actually from farm people in the Missouri Ozarks. They had a thousand acres, and I had access to that land when I was a child and I could range over that acreage—walking and on horseback—and explore. I don’t know how many children really get to explore vast amounts of territory like that; it builds something else in you. I went into caves where the Indians had lived and I was out in the fields planting the grain crops and taking hay to the cattle and helping my uncle deliver calves, and was there for the sheep shearing. My father came from itinerant farmers. They were poor and they rented land and farmed it and made gardens. My mother made her own garden as long as she possibly could and I used to garden with her.

My parents decided they wanted to give us something nobody else would give us and that was the experience of farming. So when I was about ten, they bought a little piece of land, out west of town at a place called Dry Creek, about fourteen acres. We learned milking cows. We had chickens, pigs, and raised calves we fed on the bucket, and we also did planting.

Those two things are important, my grandfather’s land and the acreage my parents bought, and maybe a third thing would be that my mother and I ended up being widows together here in Port Angeles. She had that farming gene deep in her—that need to dig and make outdoor spaces. So she and I gardened together. When I was having trouble with my garden, she would come over and in ten minutes she could make things right. She had a real knack for using tools and improving, and she was strong.

One time we were planting a rose over here on this side of the house before the trees got so tall and we hit a boulder. I said, “Oh Mother, let’s not plant it here. This is a boulder. Let’s just choose another place.” “No,” she said. “The boulder is coming out.” For two hours we dug this boulder. When we got it all dug around, I said, “Well, how in the world are we going to get it out?” She said, “Get a plank,” so I went and found an old board. We stuck this down in under the edge of the boulder. I mean, it was the size of—I don’t know if there’s anything in this room that I could tell you. About two of those dog beds. Huge. She says, “Push down on the plank and we’ll see if you can budge it.” I couldn’t budge it much so the two of us got on the end of that board and we rolled that stone up out of that hole. We got another plank, so the two of us were on two different planks and we managed to pry it out.

It was really an incredible feat, but when I go back to that, I ask, What was happening there? Okay, we moved that stone, but there was something about her will that was aptly demonstrated. I hope if I got anything from her, and I know I did, that one of the things I got is, Just don’t give up. Find a way. She could always find a way, and she was often proving that the way is close at hand.

SHIRA RICHMAN

How does gardening fit into your creative process?

GALLAGHER

Well you know, you have the body—the whole body. You cannot be there writing the poem hour and hour and day and day. You’re not just this walking head. So you have to figure out some things to do with the rest of the body, things that make your body a whole thing instead of just a head running everything.
Gardening integrates my intelligence without my having to think about it. I love digging. I like to plant flowers. I like to water them. I like to feel the sustenance of the water going onto the plant. I like to come over to Mother’s land, which I purchased after her death. I can see where the deer have been sleeping. I like to notice that this plant grew or that the deer snacked on it—all those little things of having a garden.

I like to worry about something that’s not making it, and to think what I could do to help. I like lifting fifty-pound sacks of mulch, slamming them down, and figuring out how to do the hard thing of getting it spread. I like digging weeds, which I was doing over at my cottage in town yesterday, the place you stayed, and not using—as much as I can manage—any chemicals, because you don’t want your baby playing in it, don’t want it going into the aquifer. When my workman says, “Let’s put weed killer around these apple trees—Roundup,” I say no, because I’m going to eat those apples.

I fell in love with an orchard over at my mother’s. People can fall in love with other people and they can fall in love with towns, and cities, and other countries, and languages, and poets—but can they fall in love with an orchard? My lawyers were very curious after my mother died, and her land and house were going to just be sold, and I said, “No, I don’t think so. I’ll try to buy it. I will take the money I had coming from the estate and put some more with it and try to buy it.” The lawyers said, “But you already have enough property.” I said, “Yes, but, I’m in love with the orchard.”

I prune it every February with a young man named Josh Gloor, who comes from Sequim, and we have three glorious days where we’re pruning those apple trees and chatting. I love that time. The sun will be shining, or it might be raining. We might have to take shelter at intervals. I will pick up all the limbs so he doesn’t have to bend over, ’cause I’m close to the ground, a nice way of saying “short.”

One of the things I like doing is to get my body real tired. I want to go to bed with a tired body and I sleep really well when I do that. I used to suffer from insomnia—when I couldn’t get that physical exhaustion from working in the garden. I’m now taking care of three gardens, so I sleep fine.

At Sky House there is no garden because I arranged it that way. I didn’t want a garden there. I wanted a place where I didn’t have to worry about anything, and at Sky I don’t garden. There are ferns and salal there. Things that grow naturally. But I’m glad I have Mother’s now. I can dig there and make spaces. I’m in the process of reclaiming her garden because it got out of control when she was sick and when I had to take care of her, so I couldn’t work on the garden at the same time. She was my garden.

So, now I’m picking out blackberry bramble and other invasive plants that come into the garden. At the cottage in town that I got for Rijl and Tiernan to live in, there’s a very beautiful garden because it’s compact and you can see the difference you make. At Mother’s, it’s hard to see the difference you make because it’s too big really to be a display garden. It does have the delight of encouraging you to wander, which lets you meditate.

RICHMAN

Do you have writing rituals or habits?

GALLAGHER

Really, if a poem is coming to you, you will find a way to get it. When I’m writing I don’t have any appointments that day. It is hard to keep people out of that morning space. You’d think—I have no husband here, I have no children—that I could arrange that time, but there are many other things that can want to come in. Especially workmen. They always want to come in the morning. They are great despoilers of the day. So I try to make all the appointments at what I call the teatime hour, which is three or four o’clock. That allows me my day.

I like to be at Sky House when I’m writing, because people don’t call me there. That telephone is a monster and unless you take it off the hook, you’re going to get calls. Somebody is going to think they need you. They’ll want to ask you something. The computer is a terrible villain, too. I try to save those morning hours. And if I have anything that I should take care of, any business, I get it done the day before.

RICHMAN

Then you don’t necessarily expect to write every morning?

GALLAGHER

Right. I make that time. If you get into a run of poems, that is the most anguishing time because you’re going to run into these impediments. I can remember being really angry at certain people during the time I was writing Moon Crossing Bridge. They were interrupting and bringing fractious things into my life. But that marvelous rippling of poems, you don’t get into that often, so you can’t depend on it. You have to really work most of the time and just hope and expect that something will come. The expectation helps. If you sit down and you don’t expect anything, you might not get much. I know that that’s away from what William Stafford said—to have low expectations, but I am of an opposite view. I think something wonderful is going to come and I’m going to put pressure there. I’m going to ask for that something special to come.

ZELLER

Kind of like meditation or prayer?

GALLAGHER

Yes, I really get out of the world when I’m intending to write. I also assume that all the spirits of the writers I have loved and have read and been with are available to me, that I have access to those energies. Just like invisible apples, I can reach and pick, can bring the images down to me. I might fail, but the expectation is, to me, helpful.

ZELLER

Do you read while you’re waiting for the poem to come?

GALLAGHER

I try not to watch myself very much at the beginning of this process. I’m very casual with myself at the same time I’m expecting. Now, how you can do the two things, I don’t know. As I’m expecting and hoping, I’m also very sideways with myself. These things are coexisting, because if I look too directly in it—at it—I will jinx myself. Isn’t this a crazy way to think? But in fact, this is how it is.

So I will have a lot of little distractions. I might light some incense. I might drink some coffee. I might take Peggy, my dog, out for a quick walk. There will be books lying around, and these will be all manner of books—nonfiction, fiction, poetry. I might pick up any of those and read, just to get some language, to kind of prime the pump.

Right now I’ve got an assignment from Ciaran Carson, who was my old friend from Belfast and we exchange work. I read all of his novels and his poetry and he reads mine. In fact, he’s very much responsible for helping to find a press in Belfast for Josie’s and my book, Barnacle Soup, the book of Irish stories. When I was reading recently at the Seamus Heaney Center in Belfast—that’s where I used to live for a short time, Belfast, in 1976—he suggested that I was such a wild child, why didn’t I try writing in some kind of form? And I said, “Well suggest something.” He said, “Why don’t you write fourteen fourteen-line poems with half rhymes.” So I’ve started to write those. And it’s really hard.

I did write a lot of stuff in form when I was a student of Theodore Roethke. And Nelson Bentley, also at the University of Washington, had us writing in form. I did some things in form even for David Wagoner, but I never really liked writing in form. I didn’t feel like I got from form what I needed to get in writing poems. I hadn’t revisited it, so I thought, Well, okay, I’ll go back there. My Belfast poet friends are very much deeper into form and using form, in the belief that you will get some things using form you might not get otherwise.

RICHMAN

Are you finding that to be true for yourself?

GALLAGHER

I find it very awkward. I think it’s all a failure so far—but I’m not going back to look at it. This is another thing that is different for me this time. Usually, I will bulldog the poem right down and I will be very intense with it for however long it takes to get it right, but this time I’m just writing and not judging. I’m going to accumulate these poems and then I’ll go back. I’m not too sure they’re going to amount to much—but maybe I can bring them around later. I’m going to reserve my judgment about them. I have a sense that I don’t know what I’ve got there.

RICHMAN

How soon after starting a poem do you usually begin revising?

GALLAGHER

I would continue to write that entire day. And then I would work the next day and the next day until I got it just right. The poems are coming with such surety now. It’s like being a tightrope walker—you have your balance after a while. I don’t have as much revision as I had at the beginning of my writing. Maybe I’m a less good writer, I don’t know, but I feel that somehow I have gotten into my way and that it is very helpful to me. I can trust it a lot more.

RICHMAN

If we were to go to Sky House and look at your writing area, which books might we find lying around?

GALLAGHER

I just got Michael Burkard’s last two books from Sarabande. I had not kept up as well with him since I taught him last, at Bucknell University. Of course, he was my husband for four years and we were at Iowa together. During that time we exchanged poems and we had a relationship that really lived poetry. It became kind of the pattern for what I wanted and which I finally got, in a comfortable reciprocal way, with Raymond Carver.

It was a great pity that our timing—Michael’s and my timing, for our relationship—was a bit off because you really need your life well in hand for that whole thing of two writers together to work. We were both trying to find ourselves during that time. It was a very confusing time, early in our poetry lives. We had just come directly from Iowa to our first job at St. Lawrence University.

An unfortunate part of the public life of the poet is that some poets reach the public in magazines that are more national, and others will be publishing more in the poetry venues that poets read, and Michael became the latter kind of poet. A poet’s poet. I so admired the courage in his work, to choose that path, but I don’t know if it was really a choice or just how he was, really. Probably that’s how he is. He was always going to write that way. He has become a bit more accessible, at least in these newer poems, I feel.

ZELLER

Did you choose a different path?

GALLAGHER

I don’t know if the word “choice” is correct, because what one does is governed by talents, by necessities—in the language. I wanted a wide readership, so maybe that determined the way I moved in a poem. Michael would allow a lot more ambiguity and unknowns in his poems, things that would be unresolved. I loved to read that and, as I said, I find his poems now much more accessible than the early poetry he was writing. I love to get close to them again. We’re in contact, which we hadn’t been for quite a while—for no reason, just that I moved off the East Coast and we didn’t meet anymore. It’s such a big country.

We used to meet occasionally, and I, in fact, had wanted Michael to have a job at Syracuse—which is so ironic. I argued hard for him to be able to teach with us because he was friends with Ray and me after Ray and I were together at Syracuse. Ray was instrumental in helping Michael to get sober. Michael has written about his sobriety battle so it’s okay to mention that. He talked with Ray about this. I couldn’t get him in to teach there at the time. Conditions weren’t right with the people he would be working with, but now he’s teaching there and I’m so happy about that. The students were wonderful. One of my first students was Alice Sebold. She took about three classes with me and also took fiction writing from Ray. Lucia Perillo was one of my students there and Jane Mead. Both wonderful poets.

ZELLER

Might you talk a little about your relationship with Lucia Perillo?

GALLAGHER

Lucia came out west and she worked at Mt. Rainier as a guide. She had studied biology in California, but she had also written poetry there with Robert Hass, and then she returned to Syracuse. Her parents were from New York. She became my student and got her MFA from Syracuse. I used to have all my classes in my living room, so it was very cozy. We got to be friends, and Jane Mead was in that class and Lucia and Jane got to be friends. So when Lucia came out West, Jane would come from Iowa or California and the three of us would have girls’ night over at Sky House. It remained a wonderful thing that the three of us could stay close.

When Lucia got this diagnosis of the MS, it happened the year that Ray died. I was, of course, devastated by that loss and she was devastated by her news. I remember us going out to Cape Alava with my sister and her family and we hiked out to the beach across those plank boardwalks through the forest and sword ferns. We made a campfire and I remember staying up the night with her talking about going on despite really difficult and soul-wrenching circumstances.

It was, for me, a very helpful conversation that night, to see what she had to struggle with and to get her also to understand that I had really made the choice to go on in the best form possible—that if I could go on, maybe she could go on. We actually had that conversation. I don’t know if she remembers it, but I felt it was a very special conversation, both of us talking like disembodied souls under the stars.

ZELLER

Does a person have to experience pain or adversity to write purely?

GALLAGHER

I don’t know about the word “purely,” what that is, because everything is so mixed—your pain with your sorrow with your joys. I don’t think you can even experience your happiest times without some dimensionality, and how are you going to get that if you’re not open to really going down with the difficult things? You can’t just be Miss Bubbly all the time. You have to let the hard things come into you and be with them and understand their dimensions and live through them, fully. For me the way to live them fully is my writing. That’s a very big help to me. You can’t escape sorrow. It’s here for us and anyone who thinks they’re going to get out of this life without pain or sorrow—you will be avoiding so many things that could be cherished and interesting and soul-building, so we say. I like to be with my friends when they are in trouble. And I want them to be with me.

I had this experience of breast cancer, which began in August of 2002 and it was instructive—how my friends came to me like I was the little bird that had fallen out of the next tree and they were all around me calling, saying, We’re with you. We’re with you. You can do it, and that really helped me. They came from as far away as Japan. My Japanese translator, Hiromi Hashimoto, flew all that way. Haruki Murakami flew from Tokyo—he and his wife, Yoko. They came to Seattle where I was going into my chemo. I was already bald as an onion. I had put a water-based hummingbird tattoo on my bald head and Yoko was photographing it. It was just one of those rub-off kinds of tattoo. We giggled together over it.

The companioning of your friends can do so many things medicine can’t. Medicine is not going to be able to save you at some point and while it is not saving you, you have to have something else. The reason my kitchen is so full of photographs is that I’m keeping all these people with me. I consult their images in the morning when I’m looking around, at the beginning of the day, thinking, Where are you now? How are you doing? I will, at intervals, be in touch consciously and unconsciously by glancing at their photos with a lot of those people. But yes, you are going to write out of those hardships. Ray used to say, “If there’s nothing going wrong, there’s no story.”

But that doesn’t mean that in your poems you won’t find the joys and you won’t find the light. But sometimes you’re just going in darkness, and you think, Oh, I never will get there. You have to be very patient with yourself and with the poems, to hope they will bring you back round.

RICHMAN

In an interview with Daniel Bourne, you mentioned the “intuitive magician-mind” that allows us to create the “leaping of poetry.” How do you keep that intuitive magician-mind alive, active, and accessible?

GALLAGHER

It’s been different at different points of my life, but Tiernan, my grandnephew, has been a big part of that during this phase of my life. He is so bright and so wonderful—just the exuberance of him—it teaches you what you could have. I surf on him like he is a great rolling ocean. I love to see what he’s going to think of next and to bask in that and try to be in some kind of lively dimension with it that’s not an Old Fogey Girl thing.

When I was nursing Mother in the last year of her life here at Ridge House, where we are, I was at that far end of the life skein in tending to her. She had congestive heart failure and she had Alzheimer’s dementia. I would have the day here and then I would go over to Rijl’s—my niece’s—and see Tiernan and the whole day would be so refreshed. I’m glad, looking back, that I could allow myself that. That I could say, Where can I get refreshed? and to realize that I could go there to be a child with Tiernan.

RICHMAN

How do you know if an idea will be a poem or a story?

GALLAGHER

In a poem, you may have some characters, but if you get too many you’ll write a huge, rollicking book of one narrative strain. Then you need to go to fiction or you’ll lose concentration of energy in the poem, make it scatter and fragment. I find myself cutting out characters in poems in order to preserve that concentration. I think of poetry as having a higher emotional density than prose. I want that in my poems, anyhow.

In prose, you have to be willing to put up with details that are not poetic; they don’t have that strength. These go into writing the kind of fiction I write, which is a kind of realistically based fiction, and these details help establish the grounding for the lives you are going to tell that make up the story. That’s the fabric, the warp and weft of the weave.

If I want a story, I start collecting a lot of details and listening very carefully to what people are telling me and making notes. I’ll usually be working from the template of somebody’s story. I feel like prose comes much more from outside me than poetry does. Poetry is intimate and more generated in my own theater, shall we say. But in prose I have to be responsive to that story that’s coming to me and there has to be some part of me that goes out to meet it.

In my poems I’ll have little snippets of stories that all of a sudden zoom in like a mad hummingbird into the poem. For instance, in the poem, “Sah Sin,” the hummingbird poem, the detail about the mother who has her dead child with her on the bus—I had no idea that detail was going to come into that poem. I had stored it away when someone told me that story, years before, and here it came like a comet falling into the poem.

It’s very helpful in either process to maintain a great openness and freedom to admit whatever wants to come in. That’s what I do and one of my students gave me the best compliment I’ve ever had. He said, “Tess, you taught me how to be free.” What he meant was probably that openness to be receptive to anything. Even your old working methods—throw them out—and allow yourself to have access to all those things that may come to you.

ZELLER

Have you considered writing a memoir?

GALLAGHER

Well, I kind of feel maybe like Ray did about this. He didn’t write a memoir either. Of course, he died at age fifty, but he felt, I think, that his life was very well contained within his fiction and his poetry. His poetry was more alive to his life than the stories. He said that his work was all he had, also, of religion. I kind of feel that way, too, that to come straight on to my life I might drive out the mysteries of it. I love what Emily Dickinson said: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” The memoir—it can ask you not to tell it slant. That is worrisome for me. I like to tell it slant. I like to be cloaked and a bit hidden.

Even as open as you may feel my poems are, they also are mysterious in some elements. Some books more so than others. I think that Moon Crossing Bridge is quite an oblique book in some ways, although one can have deep access to it emotionally. You may not know line to line exactly what I’m saying, but you will have emotional access and that is something I love—to give a person the ability to understand with their emotions what they can’t understand with their heads, their reasoning. To be able to do that in language—because music can do that and painting can do that—this is the attempt I make in poetry.

ZELLER

We talked earlier about your birth name, Theresa. I wonder, because you use Tess for your publishing name, how much of your identity is a self-construct and how much is imposed from without?

GALLAGHER

It’s a combination. Within your family and your private life maybe, more of that birth identity is still available. I remember my mother in the last years calling me Tess and really disliking that, but she began to take on the terms of my life away from the family at some point because no one around her knew me as Theresa—the name she had given me. They all knew me as Tess so they were all calling me Tess—the people helping me with her care. That was kind of an annoyance, frankly. Some of my nieces call me Tess and I don’t like it much, but I don’t correct them. They have to do what they want.

Tess was a name that I took on at the very beginning of my writing and it was a curious event where an actor from Durbin, South Africa, said to me, “Theresa Gallagher—no, it doesn’t sound like a writer.” He was very aware of image, because he had acted with Sir John Gielgud. He had a folder with his own picture, looking gorgeous, that he had to show when he went to get an acting job. He said, “You should be called Tess—Tess Gallagher, now that’s a name.” I was beginning to send out my poems and I sent some under that name and, magically, all the poems were taken. So I thought, He’s right.

At that time, of course, I was in the military zone. My first husband was in the Vietnam War preparation. He was a pilot and the people around me didn’t know me. When I went to them, they asked my name. I said, “Tess Gallagher,” so that began to be what I was called. Theresa Gallagher is still very much alive though. When I write my poems, I draw on that persona, too. Over the years it’s gained its own veracity, its own powers.

ZELLER

Your father called you Threasie.

GALLAGHER

That’s a very dear name. I like that a lot. Josie Gray, my Irish companion, has great names for me. He calls me Scut, which means the tail on a rabbit. I call him Master and he calls me Slave sometimes. I like that Slave because we are making this book, and I have to do so much of the drudgework of it. I must have read this manuscript for Barnacle Soup 150,000 times to get it all right. Josie has no idea of all that is involved in getting a book ready for publication.

He’ll call me Miss American Pie or just Pie. We’re always renaming each other. It’s a bit of fun in the day. I call him Buddha-lugs because he has these lovely big earlobes like a Buddha. Lugs is Irish for ears. He was sixty-nine when I met him, but he was very young in his spirit and he’s still very young. He’s eighty-two but he’s still one of the youngest people I know. Because he’s ready for anything. Any wild notion I have, why, he doesn’t make fun of me. He tries to come on board.

I became a vegetarian in 2000, and he’s a man who loves meat and potatoes, but he makes room for this. He’s concerned about me getting my protein and he starts to read about how I can get it. When I want to save the sheep in Ireland out of his herd, he humors me. He let me have this sheep and the sheep’s baby lamb. Now I have four sheep and lambs in Ireland. Josie saves the wool for me and I’ve been able to get this made into raw roving, cleaned and ready to weave with. He’s an adventurer and that’s why he became a painter, and his storytelling is coming into written form in our book, Barnacle Soup, from Blackstaff Press in Belfast, and eventually, in 2008, by Eastern Washington University Press.

RICHMAN

What else are you working on now?

GALLAGHER

I talked about these fourteen-line poems. Of course, I’m always carrying Ray and different things have come to the surface there— Jindabyne just came out. That was the film made by Ray Lawrence, based on Ray’s story, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and it’s filmed in Australia in Aboriginal country. I’ve followed that along as it was being proposed and as it was being made. I kind of became friends with Ray Lawrence on e-mail. He was so nice to keep me involved.

I’m reading—I forgot to say earlier, when we spoke of her—Lucia Perillo’s nonfiction book, which is fantastic: I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing. It’s about her MS and what that has brought to bear on her art and her apprehension of life and the ways she has steadied herself with her poetry, with her own writing. It’s a powerful book.

ZELLER

You’ve been a mentor for her and she’s become a mentor to you?

GALLAGHER

If you’re lucky, a wonderful thing happens in that your student becomes your friend and they’re working in ways that inspire you. She has always been that way for me. Lucia always gave as much as she got, I have to say. The same with Katie Ford, who was another of my students. Katie was just here at Ridge House before she moved back East. She brought her manuscript, Coliseum, about Hurricane Katrina and we looked at that together. You get to participate later with those writers that you’ve nurtured—that’s a big gift that teaching gives you, that you just don’t get, I don’t think, anywhere else.
I can’t believe I fell into this life where I get to be around so many intelligent, wonderful people—really just interesting and vigorous and searching and courageous people. It’s amazing.

ZELLER

In your essay, “My Father’s Love Letters,” you write, “I began to see poems as a way of settling scores with the self.” What scores do you have left to settle?

GALLAGHER

You don’t know them really until the poems start to reveal them. If I ever lose my curiosity, I won’t be a writer. Poetry is like a witching stick. It’s telling you what’s there, where the water is. That’s how I use it, anyway.

I didn’t know when I wrote “Apparition” how strongly those stories that my uncle had told me had affected me, or what they meant. The poem tries to give the moment its full due, give that story its full due. I couldn’t work it out in life—I couldn’t say to the uncle, I believe you, what you’re telling me. I believe you saw or somehow encountered the spirit of your dead brother. I couldn’t tell him that directly, and again it’s that slant thing, that if I spoke this in the moment, then I would somehow invade the mystery and there is this curious decorum that we maintain with the mysteries. In writing the poem, though, I can come closer to it than I could in life—in my actual, walking-around life. But unless your inner and outer life is very vigorous, your poetry is not going to be very vigorous.

I love not knowing things and that is at the heart of being a poet, that I don’t feel in a place of judgment a lot of my day, although I know very well how I feel about things. I was out visiting an old childhood friend of mine, who actually was with me when Ray was very ill and in fact the night that Ray died. He was my childhood badminton partner, Jack Estes. We read a kind of Zen poem that said something to the effect of how wonderful life is if you don’t read the newspapers. We were laughing about this poem and then I thought, I should have corrected myself and really let him know how politically engaged I am—that I am looking to see what’s going on in this country. I’m dipping in all the time to find out.

I don’t think it’s great to be oblivious in times like this. We all need to be doing whatever we can about the huge trespasses upon our Constitution that this Bush administration has brought down upon us. We ought to be enraged and fighting in every molecule. At the same time, we can’t drink poison all day from it. You have to take in the amount you need to know to inform yourself, but don’t drink the poison. The Buddhists say something like what I was saying in Instructions to the Double so long ago. Ages ago! They say, “Don’t drink poison at the poison temple. Go to the golden temple.”

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The voice in a Steve Almond story or essay or blog post is unmistakable, shaped by a tone typically anchored in dry wit, and a sharp, hungry intelligence that seems capable of taking us anywhere. The world, as Almond observes it, is at once hilarious and pathetic, sad and intensely beautiful. And it’s his willingness to engage the world that demands our attention. We follow him as he navigates his or his characters’ movement through anger and passion, sex and song, confusion and clarity and political rage, sometimes as a call to action or a commentary on our culture, sometimes as a portrait of the individual in crisis or struggling with the risks and dangers of being alive, and often from a depth of obsession—about music or politics or candy or sex or whatever else engages his curiosity.

“What people are really reading for is some quality of obsession,” Almond says. “They have this instinctual sense that the person who’s writing can’t stop talking about this, is super into it—scarily into it. Because everybody has what they’re obsessed with, but you’re sort of taught not to get into it because it seems crazy and makes you weird, and you should be able to get past that and stop collecting Cabbage Patch Kids or whatever your obsession is… But we are all, inside, obsessed.”

Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, three of which he published himself. In 2004 his second book, Candyfreak, was a New York Times bestseller and won the American Library Association Alex Award. In 2005, it was named the Booksense Adult Nonfiction Book of The Year. His Story, “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched” from his latest collection, God Bless America, was selected for Best American Short Stories 2010. He is a regular contributor to the New York Time’s Riff section and writes regularly for the literary website, The Rumpus. Two of his stories have been awarded the Pushcart Prize.

We met with Mr. Almond at the Brooklyn Deli in Spokane, where we discussed small publishers and big publishers, politics in fiction and nonfiction, obsession and more obsession, what makes a good editor, and how, “in the most emotional moments of a story, writers are trying to sing.”

KATRINA STUBSON

You’ve published books with different houses, and you’ve recently put out chapbooks yourself. What has your experience been like working with different publishers, large and small?

STEVE ALMOND

When you write something accomplished enough that somebody will buy it, that’s an important and amazing accomplishment. But in the euphoria of that—what I tended to overlook, anyway—is this unnatural arrangement, the artist in partnership with the corporation. It’s strange and unsettling for the weird, little freaky things that I have to say—whether in fiction or nonfiction or letters from people who hate me—to be turned into a commodity. What I want is just to reach people emotionally. I don’t want to feel that there’s a price tag on that, though I do charge for those DIY books I make, because they cost money to print and I’ve got a designer I want to pay and I also want to get a little bit for the energy and time I put into them.

I think it’s fair for artists to get paid. And I will say to people now—though I wouldn’t say it earlier in my career—I will not work for free. If you’re getting some money out of it, I’d like some money too. Doesn’t have to be a ton, but if you’re getting dough out of it—if it’s a nonprofit thing, a charity thing, okay. I’m thinking about this agent who sent me a note saying, “Would you be willing to contribute to this anthology?” And I was like, “Sure, just tell me who’s getting paid what and we can decide what seems fair for me.” And he just kept ducking the question. Turned out he was getting a fifty-thousand dollar advance. I was eventually like, “Yeah, I’m not cool with that. If you’re getting money, then all your contributors should be getting some money too.” I’m not naïve enough to be saying, “Oh, we’re just artists, everything should be free and open.” No. You work hard, you should get paid. We should have enough esteem for people who make art to acknowledge it’s worth paying for, worth supporting them in their endeavor. But working with a big company—I knew that they liked my art, but they were mainly trying to figure out a way to make money. They saw Candyfreak and thought, Oh, with our platform and marketing, maybe we can get this guy to write a bestseller. I understand that most editors are interested in good books. But most editors aren’t the ones who acquire books.

There’s a whole marketing team and committee and they have to decide if this thing’s going to make money or not. That’s a calculus that can start to infect your process if you think about it too much. You think, Well, maybe I should do this or that, and then you’re not really following your own preoccupations and obsessions. You’re worrying about what the market wants, what the marketing people want in a particular book.

In Candyfreak, the publisher begged me to take out a line at the beginning of the book that had the word “dick” in it: “You give a teenage boy a candy bar with a ruler on the back of it, he will measure his dick.” She was like, “Can’t we please take that out so we can broaden the audience of this book.” I understood what she was saying. That was a corporation speaking directly to the artist, saying that even though that’s the right word, and even though you want to write a book with a profane edge to it, we could really broaden our audience here. This could be a young adult book that could be marketed in a whole new way, be happily and safely given to kids, and so forth. I’m not blaming this woman for saying it—it’s just the voice of the corporation—but I had to say, “No. Sorry you’re pissed off at me.”

As far as those chapbooks go, I think if you’ve spent long enough making decisions at the keyboard, and if you feel like you have a book or books that you’re ready to move out into the world, books that don’t seem to need an editor—I mean, I had my friends edit those little books—then why not? The technology exists, the means of production for literary art has been democratized to the point that all of us can make a book tomorrow if we want to. Why bother to get a corporation involved when the project is a smaller, more idiosyncratic book? Why not put it out in a smaller, more organic, personal way? To the extent that your patience and talent allows, you can choose your publishing experience now.

I’m happy to have books published with big publishers. I’m happy to have anybody help me out with this stuff. I don’t like schlepping books around and having to do all that stuff. It’s sort of low-level humiliating and kind of a drag. I’d rather have somebody else do it all for me and I could just be the artist, with my little artist wings saying, Yes, I’ll sign your book. Now let me go off and write some more. But that’s not really how my career works. The culture doesn’t have that kind of passion for the work I do. But as long as the means of production exists and I have these little weird projects I want to do, why not try to do them in a way that feels more natural? It’s a smaller thing. I like the feeling of making a book with another artist, putting exactly what I want into it, sometimes in consultation with readers early in the process. There’s no marketing team, no publisher, no editor to mess with you about that—it’s liberating. And even though I charge money for the books, they feel more like an artifact that commemorates a particular night, a reading or some other interaction, rather than a commodity you could get anywhere, not that there’s anything wrong with buying books in stores. But I don’t think a lot of people walk into a bookstore and say, “What do you have by Steve Almond?” Nobody does. Or very few people. My mom does. I realized at a certain point that people find my stuff because I do a reading or give a class, and they think they might like more. You sort of have to recognize where you’re at, and for me, these DIY books make a lot of sense.

I’m delighted God Bless America came out with a small press. I’m glad I didn’t try to put that book out myself. It really only works economically when they’re little books. And Ben George at Lookout Books was a phenomenal editor, and helped make all the stories in God Bless America way better than they were before, even if they’d been published in the Pushcart or Best American. That’s the thing that matters—finding a great editor. Stephen Elliott says there’s no point in putting out twenty thousand copies of a mediocre book. You only have enough time in life to put out so many books, and you invest all this energy, so you’ve got to find the editor who’s going to help you make it the best book possible.

STUBSON

What makes a good editor?

ALMOND

A good editor pays attention. They get what you’re trying to do, they see the places where you’re falling short, and they can explain the problems in precise, concrete terms. Ben George would go through these stories and say, “You have this character shrugging here and I just don’t think it’s doing any work.” A good editor targets what’s inessential in your work, every moment you’ve raced through when you should have slowed down, every place where the narrative isn’t really grounded in the physical world and you’ve missed an opportunity. It’s a revelation to get that kind of editing, and it has everything to do with the quality of attention they’re paying to your work. It can be oppressive when it’s somebody like Ben, who’s so compulsive about it, though it’s also an incredible gift to have somebody who understands your intention so clearly that he can zero in on places where nobody else—great magazine editors, editors of anthologies—has said anything. He zips right in and says, “You don’t need this line. That word is a repetition. You need to show me the airport right now because I cannot see it.”

That hasn’t always happened for me. My editor at Algonquin was great, and my editors at Random House—I had two—did the best they could. But I think they were under certain constraints, and they weren’t line editors. They were essentially trying to figure out how to get a return for Random House on an investment they’d made. Their job wasn’t to make every essay shine and every line perfect and every word essential. I don’t think that makes them bad editors, in terms of how their jobs were defined, but it didn’t help me make the books better.

That’s not as true of Rock N Roll Will Save Your Life. My editor on that book was sharp about saying, “You cannot write ten thousand words about Ike Reilly. Nobody’s interested. You’re going to make the book worse and less accessible to the reader.” That’s a lot of what a good editor does—tells you when you might be confusing the reader, boring them, or writing in a way that isn’t compelling. Not because they want to sell tons of copies, but because they’re sensitive to the places where you haven’t made the arc matter enough to the reader.

ERICKA TAYLOR

How do you distinguish between being a political writer and a moral writer?

ALMOND

I do write about politics, and I get that people want to put whatever label on that, which is fine. I’m interested in cutting beneath the version of politics that’s happening on cable TV, though, and getting to the fact that it’s really all about policies and how people behave toward one another. In American politics, the big argument happening on cable has obscured the fact that we have elected representatives who decide how kind and compassionate and generous we’re going to be as a country or if it’s a moral duty for extraordinarily wealthy or even comfortable people to help out those who have less. There are moral implications to these decisions, and they’re almost entirely obscured in our political arena.

So when I’m writing political pieces, I’m trying to remind people that real moral decisions are being made about how your kids are going to be educated, or whether people in our culture are going to have the opportunity we say America offers. I want to remind people that we have great ideals in the abstract, but we almost never live up to them. America has the best ideals of any country on earth, and yet we’re the worst at living those values and enacting them. We’ve gotten completely distracted by this circus sideshow. But as I say that, I also recognize that I’m up on a soapbox, and that people don’t want to hear that. There are tons of people shouting from the soapbox, saying, “Here’s who you should be pissed off at, here’s what you should do.” You can become a kind of mirror version of what’s happening on talk radio. So I try to write in a way that forces people to realize that I’m talking about what it means to be a human rather than how they should behave morally. I don’t always succeed. I’m not sure my writing is always moral writing. Sometimes, when it’s not quite as good, it feels political and pedantic. I’m not sure that’s worthwhile.

MICHAEL BELL

How did you handle that in “How to Love a Republican” versus God Bless America?

ALMOND

“How to Love a Republican” started as a story based around the 2000 election and its aftermath. A liberal guy falls in love with a conservative. They’re both idealistic, political people working on campaigns, and when I originally wrote that story it was like 15,000 words, and 8,000 of them were me saying, “How can we have an election that’s so unfair?” and, “Dick Cheney’s such an asshole,” and, “The Supreme Court totally sold us out,” and blah blah blah. I had to look at those 15,000 words and see that they were a polemic, not a story. What’s more interesting is this human question: Can you love somebody when you don’t respect their basic sense of fairness and morality? How much do you have to agree with someone’s values in order to conduct an enduring romantic relationship? That’s the real question. And so the political polemical stuff got cut out of the story and what remained was this question of what you do when you love somebody and respect their ambition but run into this historical moment in which you can’t agree and you can’t let it go. Many relationships reach this point. It’s not necessarily about the 2000 election; it’s about some other thing—I cannot deal with the way you treat my family, or whatever it is. That to me is a much more universal idea to pursue.

The stories in God Bless America are reflective of the next ten years, the Bush years, and also since Obama’s been president. Our culture’s become meaner, more paranoid, angrier, more self-victimized. I think a lot of that comes out of how we processed 9/11. That was not a tragedy that caused us to do any reflecting. We just went into a crazy, bullying, narcissistic, jingoistic, proto-fascist psychosis. And of course 9/11 was a terrible thing. It’s not something I am going to try to appropriate—the grief of 9/11. That’s the crazy thing that happened on TV, because it’s a good story, and it became like every other story the media puts out: meant to press our buttons, not to really make us think about our duty as citizens or why we might have been attacked or what our empire’s up to. When I think about how we reacted to that, I feel like it’s cowboys and Indians. It’s this narrative of America as a heroic country that’s actually so empty inside that we have to regenerate ourselves through violence, make up a story about those nasty Indians attacking our forts we built on their land.

The stories in God Bless America are morally distressed stories, and they’re pretty depressing, and I feel bad about that because I like to write stories that have some humor— which is how I try to cut that moralizing I do. But that’s how I felt the last ten years. I walk around my house renting my garments and tearing my hair out, driving my wife crazy, saying, “What is this country doing? When are we going to grow up? It’s got to stop.” When I’m able to deal with that most effectively is when I’m able to imagine my way into a character contending with that world, a character who’s not me, who’s not an ideologue or a demagogue, but is just a person struggling with the first day back from war, having witnessed the kind of violence and chaos that young men are witness to in these wars, and coming back and somehow trying to deal with it. And he can’t. He’s broken and he’s going to take it out on someone.

The amount of that stuff going on—you don’t hear a lot about it. We’ve developed a narrative that the veterans are noble, wounded warriors. But when he comes back, we don’t listen to what he has to say. Maybe somebody’s paid to listen, but as a culture, we just clap in the air and say, “Thank you for your service,” and put a ribbon on our car and think we’re somehow dealing with somebody who got his legs blown off or had to kill someone or had his best friend killed or was shocked and freaked out by the kind of extreme violence he was exposed to. That strikes me as a fraudulent and immoral way to contend with that. So those stories with veterans in God Bless America are my effort to acknowledge that this is what happens. Like most people, I’m a civilian; I’m just trying to imagine my way into it. Maybe I’m doing a bad job, but I’m making an effort to ask what it would really be like to be nineteen or twenty and to be in that kind of moral chaos. To be in that violent chaos. What would it do to you? Who might it turn you into?

TAYLOR

We were talking earlier today about putting characters in danger. Since you were writing Candyfreak while you were depressed, were you conscious of the same M.O., and thinking, This book is manifesting me as a protagonist in danger?

ALMOND

It’s interesting that I was in the Idaho Candy Company factory and there’s Dave Wagers showing me around, and he’s such a nice guy, and I’m trying to distract myself. But then I have to go back to my hotel room and the reportage is over. If I were a journalist, I’d say, “The factory is so wonderful,” and it’s not really about me. It’s about how wonderful their chocolate pretzels are. And that’s fine for a piece of journalism. But with Candyfreak, part of my job was to turn the camera inward and be like, Also, I’m super depressed and fucked up, and that’s part of the story, too. It’s not the only part, but it’s a part. Maybe for some people it’s an indulgent or uninteresting part. But if I’m going to write about that experience, flying around to these places. I’m not going to ignore the fact that I was in a depression and doing everything I could to try to avoid it. To me, that’s what’s interesting.

And when I talk to the guy who makes Valomilks, of course I’m picking up on the fact that he’s this sort of desperate character who, on the one hand, has this story about how we’re bringing back old time candy and isn’t that awesome and wonderful? But it’s also a pitch he’s making, which he makes to all the journalists who talk to him. And that might be interesting as far as it goes, but it’s not literary. Literary is the sudden moment when a mirror is held up and somebody goes, “Oh, my god.” It’s the reason I left journalism, because the questions weren’t interesting. Who, what, where, when, why—not, Why did this guy fuck up his life? Why did this person have an affair? Why did this person make such bad decisions? What part of him got distorted into this particular evil? Those are the interesting questions, the literary questions.

With Candyfreak, my editor said to start right when we get to the factories. And she was pretty convincing and a good editor; she’s paying attention to the text. But I was like, I need people to know that I’m the person to write this book. And maybe what I was really saying was, “Maybe the book’s partly about me.” That sounded too indulgent to say directly, but I needed people to know that I have this especially pathological relationship to candy. And if they’re going to follow me on this, I want them to know they’re going to be following the craziest person about candy they’ve ever met. That happens to be the truth. I’m not some random reporter. With Candyfreak I wasn’t going to ignore the fact that it was me as a person who was obsessed with this one particular thing. The rock and roll book was the same way. I write out of my obsession. I think that’s the engine of literature. What people are really reading for is some quality of obsession. They have this instinctual sense that the person who’s writing can’t stop talking about this, is super into it—scarily into it. Because everybody has what they’re obsessed with, but you’re sort of taught not to get into it because it seems crazy and makes you weird, and you should be able to get past that and stop collecting Cabbage Patch Kids or whatever your obsession is. But kids are obsessive by nature, and they are the most voracious readers of all. They’ll read a book over and over again. They’re naturally obsessive, and we’re only trained out of it. But we are all, inside, obsessed. It’s just polite society that says, “Stop talking about that band so much. Stop talking about that TV show or website or painting or whatever it is.” I think most great books are obsessive either in their manner of composition or their plot, sometimes both.

STUBSON

We’re all obsessive by nature, but it’s okay because someone else is expressing it?

ALMOND

Right. People find stories or essays pleasing because they realize they’re not the only person who’s crazy, who’s that ruined or stuck in some way, or that joyful about something. I feel like everywhere outside of art, in the world of marketing and the day-to-day, nobody’s really telling the truth, nobody’s really going into any dark, deep, true shit. Everybody’s faking it. But a certain kind of person actually wants to get into that other stuff. It’s more painful to live with that kind of awareness, to be honest with yourself and other people, but I’d rather spend my time on earth that way, even though I’m now going to be poverty stricken and choked by doubt and all the rest of it. I think this is why so many people are getting MFAs and trying to do creative writing, or whatever art they’re trying to do. Because they’re deprived of the capacity to feel that deeply by the culture at large and, significantly, by their families of origin.

I grew up in a family where there was a lot of deep feeling and not much of it ever got expressed. It got expressed mostly through antagonism and neglect and a kind of avoidance of what was really happening. I think that stuff gets into the ground water of most writers. I write about it in This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey. That’s where it comes from, that unrequited desire to say, “No, I’m gonna talk about this shit.” A lot of that is reaction to the fact that you come from a family where that stuff isn’t talked about. Your parents are like, “Are you depressed?” Their take is, Wow, it really would be easier and more efficient if you would just get a business card and a healthcare plan and have a more conventional lifestyle. I’m lucky that my folks are psychoanalysts, because they’re interested in the insides of people. But a lot of the people I encounter don’t have that advantage. And it’s not because their family is trying to silence them. Parents want their kids to have a happy life, and they see the life of an artist as an intense engagement with feelings—oftentimes painful feelings—and the struggle to make ends meet and to be heard in the world, and maybe a lot of disappointment along the way.

BELL

You talk about questions you’re interested in, for example the questions journalism asks as opposed to literary nonfiction. Are those nonfiction questions the same as the ones you approach in your stories, or are those central questions different?

ALMOND

Stories allow you to construct a world that’s completely aimed at exposing those questions. With nonfiction you have to choose your topic and root around through the past to find the moments that really mattered, and then you try to unpack them. But with fiction, my sense of plot is extraordinarily primitive: Find character. What is character afraid of? What does character want? Push character to scary cave or happy cave. When you know you have a character who’s a closet gambling addict and a shrink, then you know how the rest of the story has to go. Of course a famous gambler has to walk into his office, and of course they have to wind up across the poker table at the end of the story. As soon as you know what your character desires and fears, you have some sense of what you’re pushing your character toward—or I do. That’s my conception of plot.

With nonfiction, it’s much more a process of archeology and digging through and saying this moment is important, and so is this history. You can choose where to look around, but you can’t choose to make shit up like you can in a story. You’re engineering the world for maximum emotional impact in a short story. Whether you have the courage to do that or you get lost with all the possibilities is another question. When you have no constraints on reality, you can engineer any world you want, put your character in a room having sex with his secretary and in walks his wife, and boom—you just did it, it’s a dramatically dangerous situation. You can’t do that in nonfiction. You might write about your fantasies or wishes, but you have to write about stuff that actually happened and stuff that happens in your head. You can’t make stuff up to make it more dramatic. If you do, you have to call it what it is—fiction.

TAYLOR

Your flash fiction feels particularly lyrical. Do you approach very short work in a different way?

ALMOND

A lot of those started out as poems. But I realized they weren’t poems—they were little stories, little bursts of empathy. I read flash, and I always have a pleased feeling when a writer has somehow plugged into this exalted way of communicating. I feel like they’re singing to me. In those little stories, I’m just trying to capture moments where something devastating happens. I’m trying to capture five seconds in amber—like my great-aunt being walked across an icy street by this handsome young guy who calls back, “Can I have your number?” in front of his friends—a moment of gallantry and how beautiful that is. Nothing more than that. You don’t need to know her whole life. You don’t need to know where she grew up. This is the moment that matters. That’s what those flash pieces are about.

STUBSON

In Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life you write that songs taught you a lot about story.
Would you talk a bit about expression in song versus expression on the page?

ALMOND

Music allows you to reach feelings you can’t reach by other means. The best writing does that too, although it’s a lot more inconvenient because you have to sit there and pay attention, whereas if a great song comes on, boom, you’re in it. You have an immediate set of memories and associations and an emotional reaction. Reading is harder. In a certain way it’s more fulfilling, because with a piece of writing you have to do much more work than any other art form. You’re an active participant in the construction of these images and so forth. You’re making the movie in your head; I’m just giving you the perspective.

So that’s very exciting, but the reason I listen to a lot of music, and kind of always envied musicians, is that it just gets across much more quickly and intuitively through the primal and instinctual language of melody and rhythm. There’s no comparison. And you could ask almost any writer, at least any writer you’d want to spend time with, “Would you rather be a musician and go on tour and be able to do your crazy ecstatic thing of making music, or would you like to be a writer, sitting in your fucking garret going, Ughhh I hope, I hope, I hope?” That’s not to degrade writing. I think it’s great, I love it, blah, blah, blah. But the thing I learn from listening to songs and listening to albums—these guys want you to feel something and they’re not being coy about it. They’re not writing their little obedient, minimalist short story or earnest autobiographical essay. They’re singing; they’re trying to get across to you emotionally.

I think all young writers think, I have to be taken seriously; people have to know I’m a serious artist; let there be no confusion about that. And they’re more reluctant to get into the real reasons they’re working on a particular piece—to get their characters, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, into that real emotional trouble we talked about. With a good song, you’re in emotional trouble right from the first chord. It’s an ecstatic, immediately emotional experience.

In my writing. I want to construct a ramp to these important emotional moments, slowly drawing the reader in. But I also think that in the most emotional moments of a story, writers are trying to sing. That’s what James Joyce is doing at the end of “The Dead.” That last paragraph is like a beautiful song. That’s what Homer is doing, that’s what Shakespeare is doing, that’s what all great writers are doing—Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Denis Johnson, whoever. They reach these ecstatic moments, and in order to describe the complex, contradictory feelings they’re experiencing, the language has to rise up and become more lyric and sensual and compressed in order to capture that kind of exalted moment, whether it’s grief or ecstasy or some complicated mix of emotions.

Listening to songs makes me wonder why I am not writing towards those moments where you just open your throat and sing. And if I’m not, then what am I doing? Of course, you can be sentimental and screw it up and I hate that kind of writing. It’s playing it safe. If the character isn’t at some point in real trouble, if the language doesn’t reach up into a sort of lyric register, what is the point? I’m not saying that’s how all writing should be, but that’s my feeling about it. If you’re not writing for those lyric moments, what are you writing for?

BELL

Are those germs for story? Do you know the moment, or do you start with the character and get there?

ALMOND

I usually start with characters and I have some sense of what they want or what they’re after, what they’re frightened of. And the rest of it, at least to the extent that you can, you’re trying to let your artistic unconscious steer. You might have broader sense of, Okay, Aus is a closet gambler and that’s got to be revealed somehow, and Sharp—I didn’t know who Sharp was—he walks in. I like that he’s got an attitude, I like that he’s sharp and jagged and well- defended, but I didn’t know he was going to start talking about his kid and reach this moment where his wife is on the brink of leaving. That’s just stuff—I don’t even know how to explain it. As you’re writing the character, suddenly that’s who he is, that’s what pops out. Undoubtedly it comes out of my own preoccupations and obsessions, but I’m not trying to figure that out as I’m writing. I’m just hoping my artistic unconscious is going to feed those moments where characters come apart against the truth of themselves.

You can engineer the plot to an extent, but the lines themselves and the journey that a particular character takes toward that moment should be a mystery to you. That’s the joy of writing fiction. There’s this mysterious thing that takes over. And to some extent, nonfiction as well. I didn’t know that Candyfreak would lead me in this, that, or the other direction. That’s part of the pleasure of writing. If you know it all already you start to feel self-conscious and predetermined. There should be lots of stuff you don’t know. That’s what allows you to surprise yourself and keep a preserved sense of mystery in your work. Your artistic unconscious has to deliver so much to you. It’s way more powerful than your conscious efforts to jury-rig things.

STUBSON

Can you consciously train your subconscious so that you can make those kinds of discoveries?

ALMOND

All you can do is be honest about the things that stick in your craw, without trying to psychoanalyze them or understand why. As a nonfiction writer, Susan Orlean becomes completely obsessed with orchids, and she just follows it. She doesn’t wonder, Why am I interested in this. What is it about? She just follows the trail. Can somebody teach you to be that way? No. You’ve got to find it within yourself. I tell my students to write about the stuff that matters the most deeply to them. In fiction, you don’t always know you’re doing that; you have to sneak up on it.

I wrote this story years ago called “Among the Ik.” It’s in My Life in Heavy Metal and it’s based on something that happened to me. I went to visit my friend Tom in Maine, whose mother had just died. Also, he’d just had his first child, a baby girl. I walked in the house and there was the baby and the baby’s mom and Tom’s brother-in-law and sister in front of the fire, and they were having tangerines. This beautiful tableau. But I walked into the kitchen first and there was Tom’s dad, and Tom introduced me to him, this grieving widower, and he’s nervous and for whatever reason, rather than allowing me to move into where the action is, where the new life is, he nervously cornered me and found out I was an adjunct. He was thinking, I guess, about when he was an adjunct, and he told me this story about having to identify the dead body of one of his students.

It was a weird story, but as a fiction writer you’re always on the lookout for that. It stuck in my craw. I don’t know why it did, it just did. I sensed that he was frightened to integrate with the rest of the family. So for whatever reason, this lonely guy telling me this story about a dead body gets in my craw and I start writing about it. I’m not investigating why. I just know it’s stuck in my craw and that usually is the signal to me that I need to write. So I write this story and I change a bunch of things—he’s a poet in real life, but I make him an anthropologist. My artistic unconscious feeds me this memory of when I was in second or third grade and we watched this film about a tribe somewhere called the Ik, and how the environment there is so unremittingly harsh that parents sometimes leave their children behind. It haunted me for years, rolling around my subconscious, and up it pops the moment I needed it in this story, when I’m writing about parents and kids and families and how they connect emotionally or are unable to connect emotionally.

I finish the story and when My Life in Heavy Metal comes out, my dad sends me a long note saying, “Oh, gee, Steve, your mother and I really like the stories; we’re very, very proud of you, and about that story ‘Among the Ik’—I just want to tell you that I never realized I was such a distant father.” And my immediate reaction was, What are you talking about, Dad? That story’s not…about…you. It’s about that episode that got stuck in my craw. When I wrote it, I didn’t sit at the keyboard and wonder why I’d been thinking about it so much. I just chased the story.

I don’t think you can train your mind. But you can spend time at the keyboard and you can try to be relaxed when you’re at the keyboard and write about the things that you’re preoccupied with and be as unselfconscious and as unremittingly honest as you can be. That’s about all you can do. I don’t know of any push-ups for your artistic unconscious. I just know that the best work I’m able to do is when I’m writing about stuff I’m obsessed with, especially with fiction, when I have no idea what I’m doing; my characters are acting on my behalf and my obsessions are disguised and I just sneak up on them.

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Lynn Emanuel was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Surrounded by an extended family of artists, and raised by a businesswoman mother, Emanuel distills her early experiences into a potent cocktail, rewarding diligent readers with unpredictable, meticulously crafted, hyper-aware poetry. In typical Emanuel style, a poem about her dead father, “Halfway Through the Book I’m Writing,” moves in a startling direction: “‘What gives?’ / I ask him. ‘I’m alone and dead,’ he says, / and I say, ‘Father, there’s nothing I can do about / all that. Get your mind off it. Help me with the poem / about the train.’ ‘I hate the poem about the train,’ / he says.”

Of Emanuel’s most recent book, Then, Suddenly—, Gerald Stern says, “There is some Eliot here, some Stein. Emanuel carries self-consciousness to the shrieking edge—and almost falls in. Well, she does fall in. She is a master of the negative, but she doesn’t sigh in boredom; she yells in pain. Her vision is original; so is her language.”

In addition to Then, Suddenly—, Emanuel is the author of two other collections of poetry: Hotel Fiesta and The Dig. Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry, among other anthologies. Her honors include the National Poetry Series Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets for Then, Suddenly—.

Emanuel earned an MA from City College and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Vermont College Creative Writing Program. She currently directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. We met in her New York City hotel room during the rush of the Association of Writing Programs 2008 conference, where we discussed comic strips, “breaking up” with Italo Calvino, and the culture of getting by in America.

SHIRA RICHMAN

Could you take us on the adventure of writing a poem, any poem you can think of, from its inception to how it grew, shrank, and found its own skin?

LYNN EMANUEL

It’s often a long, rather uncomfortable process for me. Right now, I’m getting another book together, and as I was gathering my work, I found a poem I had published in long-line couplets. I also found an earlier, longer draft, and I thought, Oh no, this is a much better version. Which I often think—that I remove too much material. So I went back and put the more substantial, longer version into the manuscript, and I brought it with me to New York, thinking I could read some new work. Of course, I looked at the draft I brought and thought, God, this is awfully wordy and long. The cliché about poems not being finished, just being abandoned, is particularly true for me. I never feel that a poem actually does reach the right form; it just reaches the form where I cannot bear any longer to change it.

Often it’s a process of scraping a lot of material away. I never write short poems. Never. The one short poem that Poetry published started out being much longer. I showed it to a friend and she crossed out everything but the last eight lines and that was it. I sent it to Poetry with a group of other things and that was the one they took.

I’m someone who carves things out of a larger block and then I feel the discomfort of having done that. Maybe I cleaned it up too much. Or maybe I’ve taken too much out. Or maybe I’ve diminished things.

REBECCA MORTON

Are you comfortable carving out a small piece of something longer?

EMANUEL

Well, it worked that time because I was a) so pressed for time, b) so fed up with that particular draft, and c) when I looked at what my friend did, I said, “Oh, that’s brilliant!” That was an extreme example. I feel both comfortable and uncomfortable writing that way.

The poet Bill Matthews was a friend of mine, and I remember him saying at one point, “The trouble is that it never gets any easier.” I think that may be especially true of poetry. The longer I write, the more difficult I’m finding it. Each book is different. I arrive at a moment when I have a certain number of pages and think, Okay, how do I put this together? I should know this, I think, I’ve done this. But each book presents its own problems.

One of the troubles is that as you get older, the expectation you have of yourself—that you know how this is going to work and you know how to do it—is actually something you have to battle against. When you’re younger, it’s all sort of scary, but you realize your book is going to be kind of a provisional form: You’re not going to achieve nirvana when you put this book together. You know you have other books down the road and you’ll get it right then. By the time you get to your fourth book, you think, Oh no, it’s never going to be… right. It’s always going to be like starting from the beginning. And you feel resentful. I do. I’m fifty-eight. I don’t like not knowing.

After my first book, what interested me were the ways in which the form of the book itself could be expressive. If I were a fiction writer, I would write novels. Never short stories. Giacometti said at the end of his life, “The only thing I care about is the feeling that I have when I’m working.” Which is a marvelous and unnerving thing to say. It’s wonderful, but it’s also like, And that’s it. I don’t feel I’m a great artist; I don’t feel inspired. That feeling while working was all he cared about. All I seem to care about these days is the larger unit of the book itself, the drama of turning a page, how I’m going to feel at the end, the unfolding of ideas and, often, narrative. I’m less and less interested in the work of perfecting a single poem. And though I work like a dog on that, in an odd way it doesn’t interest me. What interests me is the joining of the parts into something else. But I’m exhausted by it. Enough already; I want to be Steve Dunn.

The story I tell about Steve Dunn is that I was at a writers’ colony—I think it was MacDowell—and as I was walking out of my little cabin in the woods one morning, he was on his way with suitcases, and I said, “Oh, you’re leaving today?” He said he was, and I asked what he was doing until his ride arrived. He said, “Well, I have an hour left and my book is due at my publisher, so I’m going to assemble the manuscript.” And I realized that if you are Steve Dunn you can do that. It’s something I envy but can’t seem to do.

RICHMAN

So you’re not working on individual poems, you’re working on a group?

EMANUEL

It seems that I am. Always. Even when I pretend I’m not. My poems aren’t interesting to me until they’re part of a larger form of articulation. I’m interested in contradiction. I’m interested in saying something and then unsaying it. Or saying something and then inventing a voice that says, “No, that’s not at all the case.” If you’re interested in binaries and contradictions and conflicted versions of yourself and anything else, then maybe you have to be interested in the larger unit.

RICHMAN

I know you described Then, Suddenly— as a group of rebellions, such as the characters against the author and the author against convention. How much do you see the writing of that book as a rebellion against yourself and your previous work?

EMANUEL

Honestly, at the time I was writing it, I didn’t see it as being very different from my earlier poems. It was only in retrospect that I became aware that it was. I wish I could say, “Oh, yes, I was rebelling against my earlier work or I was re-seeing it or undoing it.” At the time, though, I didn’t realize that.

My father’s death came in the middle of writing that book, which was so enormous an event it swept away everything else. I remember Molly Peacock saying there was a time in her life when she was so sad and spiritually miserable that the only thing she could do in a poem was to get from one syllable to the next. And that’s how she became a formalist, which I always thought was a magnificent account of why it is that one might make a certain kind of choice in one’s writing. I think in an odd way that Then, Suddenly— was like that for me. I was just drenched in sorrow. The book had started as an investigation of my interest in movies and film, and the difference between sitting down and experiencing something on a page and sitting down and being moved by a film. That was going to be the subject of my book.

And then my father died. Then the issue of what it meant to be moved and be moving became an incredible heartache. I wish I could say that, at the time, I understood that this book was different from my others, but I didn’t. I just tried to get from one syllable to the next. I just tried to deal with grief and finish a book. I didn’t know how different it was until afterward.

MORTON

Do you think your concept of the book you are currently writing is different now than it will be after it’s done?

EMANUEL

There are writers who are much more articulate about what they are doing at the time they are doing it, and I seem to be someone who needs to undergo a generous period of self-delusion and think I’m doing X when all the time I’m doing Y. So I don’t really know.

I’ve written a series of poems in the voice of a dog, and I’ve invented an idiom for this dog. It talks a little like a cartoon. I began the poems when I was teaching for one semester at the University of Alabama. I felt I was absolutely outside of the English language, because all around me it was being spoken in a way that made me feel like a Yankee foreigner. Also, it felt like daily speech was much more engaged in the sort of—I don’t know—eloquence and figurative possibility. Everyday speech seemed to accommodate figurative language in a way that, when I was teaching my students or getting groceries in Pittsburgh, didn’t happen. So I felt clumsy and awkward; every time I opened my mouth, I was The Other.

This dog started to talk to me and it was a companion in clumsiness and awkwardness. The dog also became a figure for a kind of class—an underdog—and a whole landscape grew up around this character, a world of diminishment and poverty. So I think that’s going to be part of the book, but I don’t know quite how.

RICHMAN

It seems you’re often interested in the relationship between language and class. What are the origins of that interest?

EMANUEL

I always felt that The Dig was really about class and work and impoverishment and how those things impinge on women. That continues to be something I’m interested in. It comes from my own background. When I was growing up, there was a time when my mother and I lived on our own; we had few resources and little money. That kind of hardship is very very moving to me—to live in this culture just barely above the line that says you are really poor. Just kind of making it moment to moment. A lot of people in America live that way, and I think they always have.

Frankly, it’s one of the things I love about Gwendolyn Brooks’ poems. They inhabit that landscape so fully; they’re about the culture of getting by, especially her early work. I think that’s what this dog is all about. I was reading the New York Times this morning and one of the articles was about the dogs they rescued from Michael Vick. It’s sort of unreal, the cruelty that was visited upon these animals. But it’s not about the Michael Vicks. It’s about a culture in which an animal, domesticated so that it is deeply part of our lives, has such cruelty visited upon it. Sometimes a dog is not just a dog. Sometimes it is a symbol for how we mete out cruelty to each other and about the abuse of things that don’t have power. Women, dogs, poor people.

It was incredible to me when, during a discussion regarding ways to recharge the economy, someone in Congress said, “Well, let’s give people more food stamps,” and someone else said, “Oh, no, let’s not do it that way. Let’s do it another way.” I thought, How can it be that someone can say, “Let’s give people who need food more food or a way to buy more food,” and then someone else says, “No, let’s not do that,” and that is considered merely part of daily conversation? It flabbergasted me, that kind of cruelty. In some way, this whole thing about the dog is part of that, although the backstory will never make it into the book.

MORTON

In an interview a few years back, you said that one of the reasons you’re drawn to film noir is for its obsessiveness, the same image coming up over and over again. What are your current literary obsessions?

EMANUEL

Comic strips. It’s weird. My imagination has to be obsessively faithful to some muse. First, it was the muse of film noir; now, it’s the muse of comic strips. I’m fascinated with how, in a way, each panel in the strip is like a single poem, maybe a sonnet. The panel is a little box and an image and some language; it’s an extremely tight, circumscribed form.

I’m particularly interested in one by George Herriman, called Krazy Kat, that lasted from the twenties into the forties or fifties. There were three main characters: a cat and a mouse and a policeman. Herriman listened to immigrant language, to the language of people who were learning English, so the language of the strip was saturated with this fabulous nontraditional English. The language is itself a kind of character and landscape, and that really interests me.

That’s my current obsession. Can I get away with this? Can I create a sort of comic strip character, and do I need graphics? How do I wed a graphic element to the text?

MORTON

The image of the dress comes up frequently in your work. What does the dress mean to you?

EMANUEL

Clothes have their own life. They are symbols and icons, and people don them. They put them on, and they are read in a certain way. R-e-d and r-e-a-d. I think that one privilege of writing out of a noir aesthetic is that icons of clothing in film noir are very clear. There’s the bad girl and the good girl and the gangster. There’s a way the gangster dresses and a way the good guy dresses, and what kind of hats he wears, and the way the police dress. There are only about four or five possibilities. The palette is very limited.

Also, it seems to me an underutilized possibility. Why aren’t more people writing about clothes? Why can’t a hat or a dress be a symbol like a rose? Why are pieces of clothing a less legitimate series of symbols than other things? Why is clothing less legitimate than trees? In India, walking down the street, you can read people’s castes from their clothing, and I think that’s also true in the U.S. I don’t think clothing is any less legitimate than the natural world as a source for metaphor.

The same is true of food. Sometimes even I’m surprised by how much I write about food. It fascinates me. And I think that these subjects—food and clothing—are seen as traditionally feminine. You can be a man and write movingly about trees and water and flowers because Wordsworth did—although he stole a lot of it from his sister—but writing about clothing is typically seen as a product of the feminine imagination or of the “feminized man.” I think that’s one reason food and clothing don’t have legitimacy as a source for images.

RICHMAN

You grew up surrounded by all kinds of artists: dancers, sculptors, choreographers, and painters. Did you feel there were other possibilities for your life, or did you feel you had to choose among artistic pursuits?

EMANUEL

I had about as much choice as someone who comes from a family of lawyers and has to go into law. To some degree, it was not a choice. It was so all around me that another way of being in the world didn’t seem an option, even though my mother was a businesswoman. But she was a real pioneer. She was singular. There were not a lot of women who were serious businesswomen in the 1950s. So, that felt like an anomaly. It was an anomaly.

RICHMAN

Do you wish you’d had a choice? What else might you have done?

EMANUEL

Now I wish I had. [Laughs.] I don’t know what I would’ve done. The older I get, the more I feel that now I want to do something that’s more directly helpful to people. I would like to be an advocate for children in courts. The older I get, the more I think about how much more time I have. It’s great to write poetry, but I want something that’s more direct.

MORTON

Your last book, Then, Suddenly—, is so funny. Do you see risks in incorporating humor into your work, or do you fear that incorporating humor will cause people to take you less seriously?

EMANUEL

I have never had that fear. I always feel that my humor emerges out of rage and sorrow. There are different ways of being funny in books and different forms of humor. When you are part of a disadvantaged group, you often use humor as a way of getting back at the dominant culture.

I have never felt that I would not be taken seriously because of humor. I know this is something people talk about and a concern that writers have. Maybe I should be concerned about that. But I’ve always felt that in any book I’ve written there’s been enough gravity that the reader doesn’t just yuk it up all the way through. In Then, Suddenly—, my dead father’s voice comes in and says, “God, I hate this poem,” or, in another poem, “Who are you dating?” Maybe I’m wrong about this, but if you’ve experienced the death of someone close to you, that kind of thing is both extremely funny and just horribly hurtful. People die, but they don’t go away. They are still there and they visit you. So when the father in “Halfway Through the Book I’m Writing,” says “I’m alone and dead,” I find that a horrible moment that sort of balances the humor.

RICHMAN

Are there influences in your life that helped you hone your sense of humor? People who you saw or studied or learned from, or ways in which you were forced to use humor?

EMANUEL

I don’t think so, but growing up, I did see a lot of people in my family use humor as a way of keeping themselves afloat. Humor is like the ability to sing well. It’s a kind of pleasure you can provide for yourself that doesn’t depend on anything or anyone. You are able to provide your own joy and you don’t need anybody else to do it. Since I couldn’t sing, I think humor became that.

And I will say, now as I think about it—I can’t remember how old I was—maybe I was in my middle twenties when I met William Matthews at Bread Loaf. He was the most extraordinary talker. You would want to sit for hours and listen to him. He was so eloquent and funny, and his humor was often extremely cutting. I remember once when we were in New York, I was saying something about the influence of a well-known poet and Bill said, “Oh, yes, So-and-So likes everything from M to N.” It was perfect. He was absolutely right. That was the other thing about Bill’s humor, it was not only wonderful, but it was surgical. And after that, I could never feel bad again about So-and-So, because I would look at him and think, Oh, yeah, he likes everything from M to N. Bill inspired me. I learned from him that humor could be complicated.

RICHMAN

Once, an interviewer asked you, “So did you quit reading Italo Calvino?” and you answered, “Yes, it was like quitting smoking.” Why?

EMANUEL

Because, at a certain point, reading Calvino was a kind of addiction. I felt, Why should I write? Here’s someone who’s written every book that I would ever want to write. I must be him. I am totally unhappy in the world unless I can be reincarnated as Calvino.

So I had to stop reading him because there was no reason to be myself. In order to just get a book written, I had to stop reading him because he was one of those authors who—for me—seems perfect. Then, luckily, I discovered that he wasn’t perfect. I think there’s a lack of tragic vision in Calvino. It was marvelous when I found that out. Aha! Here’s your fatal flaw! You bastard, you had me in your clutches all these years!

All of my homages are arguments with poets. Walt Whitman, get out of here! Who can be an American poet? Nobody can be an American poet—you’ve already been every poet in the world. Every permutation of American poetry that we could possibly imagine, you’ve already done it. You’ve ruined us.

And Gertrude Stein. I mean, I love Gertrude Stein. Sometimes, I think there were these writers who were beamed down to us from more advanced civilizations and I think Stein may have been one of them—I’m sure Emily Dickinson was one of them—but it’s also true that Stein is sometimes just a typewriter. I don’t think it’s interesting to be someone who just worships Gertrude Stein, so I had to have an argument.

I had to have an argument with Calvino, which meant at a certain point I just had to say, “Okay, I’m turning you off. I’m changing the channel. No more Calvino. We’re breaking up.”

Actually, I hope it works. I’m writing an homage now to Baudelaire, and, by the way, he is the poet of clothing. And whenever I wonder, Why do I think it’s legitimate to write about women’s dresses? I read him. Of course, he was French and I’m not, but nevertheless—I absolutely have to break up with him now. He doesn’t know it, but… [Laughs.]

MORTON

What elements of your work are influenced by Stein?

EMANUEL

Here’s the thing: stylistically, aside from that one homage, “inside Gertrude Stein,” I don’t think there’s much influence. It’s not talked about often enough that one can have a lot of influences as a poet that don’t show up stylistically. I was influenced by the idea of her. I was influenced by the way she makes nouns and verbs and syntaxes into characters—she was beyond the pale.

I taught a course on the avant-garde with a colleague of mine, and nobody we read was as radical as she. So I love the idea of her and I love some of her writing—I love the way she critiques syntax, critiques the sentence—but I don’t feel therefore obliged to deracinate sentences because of Gertrude Stein. There are poets who do feel that way, and I admire that, but I seem to be able to be completely and comfortably contrarian in my writing. It doesn’t bother me. I can use conventional syntax and love Gertrude Stein, love her critique of conventional syntax, believe that she’s absolutely right—and still use conventional syntax. I would have no trouble being a collaborator during a war, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t occur to me that I couldn’t play both sides. Or I could easily be a double agent, the spy who spies both ways.

RICHMAN

That’s partly what relates you to Gertrude Stein, because I think of that as a sort of Cubism. And one of the things in Then, Suddenly— that’s so interesting is that, as a reader, you can go from poem to poem and never know what your role is going to be. It seems as though you’re examining the roles of reader, writer, speaker, and character from all these different angles and points of view.

EMANUEL

That’s exactly what it was. [Laughs.] I knew that! That’s wonderful. Perhaps you’re right, although I don’t think I understood it until you said it. I think you’re right. You don’t feel you have to remain faithful to a certain point of view, nor do you have to resolve the contradictions, nor do you have to, at the end, think, Well, okay, here, we’ve arrived here. I felt it was enough to simply present this reader, that reader, this speaker, that speaker, this author, that author, and that was the composition. That’s exactly the reason I’m in love with Stein.

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Thomas Lynch is Milford, Michigan’s funeral director, a job he took over from his father in 1974. Through his examination of death and mortality, Lynch has found much inspiration for his writing. But to label his work as being about death would be an oversimplification. A 1998 Publishers Weekly review stated that “The combined perspectives of his two occupations—running a family mortuary and writing—enable Lynch to make unsentimental observations on the human condition.” Though Lynch often builds from themes of death and grief, his writing moves across the spectrum of life, offering flashes of humor and insight along the way.

He says of himself, “I write sonnets and I embalm, and I’m happy to take questions on any subject in between those two.”

In 1970, Lynch took his first of many trips to Ireland, reconnecting with family in West Clare. He has since inherited the ancestral cottage there, where he regularly spends time. His relationship with Ireland is documented in his most recent book of nonfiction, Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans.

Lynch is also the author of three books of poetry: Still Life in Milford, Skating with Heather Grace, and Grimalkin & Other Poems. Lynch has also authored two essay collections: The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, winner of the Heartland Prize for nonfiction, the American Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award; and Bodies in Motion and at Rest, winner of The Great Lakes Book Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Esquire, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Irish Times, and the Times of London. We spoke with him over lunch at Café Dolce in Spokane, Washington.

AARON WEIDERT

You associate a great amount of humor with death in your writing. Do you write with that juxtaposition in mind?

THOMAS LYNCH

I don’t set out to write anything “jokey.” But I do think that the way things organize themselves, the good laugh and the good cry are fairly close on that continuum. So the ridiculous and the sublime—they’re neighbors. I think that’s just the way it works. If you’re playing in the end of the pool where really bad shit can happen, then really funny shit can happen, too. And then there are times you just take on a voice, where you’re consciously thinking sort of in hyperbolic tones, and then, as long as you go with it, it’s fine.

MANDY IVERSON

Being an undertaker has obviously influenced your writing. How do you write multiple essays and books on the same subject?

LYNCH

I’m not conscious, starting, of where I’m going with it. I’ve said before, and I think it bears repeating, what Yeats said to Olivia Shakespeare—that the only subjects that should be compelling to a studious mind are sex and death. Those two, those are the bookends. And think of it, what else do we think of, what else is there besides that?

I write sonnets and I embalm, and I’m happy to take questions on any subject in between those two. I think most people are that way. I think most people drive around all day being vexed by images of mortality and vitality. All they’re wondering about is how they’re going to die and who they’re going to sleep with, or variations on that theme—what job they’re going to have, whether they’re tall enough or skinny enough or short enough or smart enough or fast enough or make enough money, and all of it plays into these two bookends.

If you’re writing about life, you’re writing about death. If you’re writing about life, you’re writing about love and grief and sex and all that stuff. Once I go outside those pales, I’m trafficking in what is, for me, not only the unknown, but also just not interesting.

IVERSON

Does a nonfiction writer need to have an interesting life?

LYNCH

My work as a funeral director is like most people’s work. Parts of it are routine and dull. Parts of it are hilarious. Parts of it are very, very compelling.

Alice Fulton is a poet I much admire and have been friends with for a long time. When she began teaching at Michigan, I said to her, “Alice, you might be better off waiting tables than teaching students, because you have such a huge voice and you don’t need any other voices interrupting you.” Teachers are constantly being interrupted by the voices of their best students. They have high volume, good students do. So I would think that if you find yourself waiting tables or doing brain surgery or professional wrestling, anything that leaves room for your own sort of imaginative leaps, you’re fine. You’re okay.

It’s handy to be a funeral director—because how we respond to this predicament of death is sort of baseline humanity. I’m very fond of sex, so that’s handy in the other subject that Yeats said was important. That works out well. But I can’t think of any work that you could disqualify from being just as interesting or just as much a metaphor for the human predicament.

WEIDERT

You talk about how your job has its dullness and routines and hilarity. Do you realize later that there’s something there to write about? If it’s not the dullness and not the monotony, at what point do you realize, This is something I could write about?

LYNCH

I’m a writer, so I don’t wait for something interesting. I write. Period. And if there’s nothing interesting, I’ll make it interesting.

My son’s a fly-fishing guide. There are days when the fishing isn’t good. But by God, no one ever goes with him who doesn’t get a good guide. Because he’ll take you down the river and show you things you never saw before. And you will feel the excitement of catching and releasing fish in the most unlikely ways and places. That’s a good guide. Not that you come home with a slab of dead fish, although there are people for whom that’s the deal. For me, writing means I use language about whatever. The world is open to me that way. So if I stopped being a funeral director, I wouldn’t stop writing or stop having things to write about.

For me, writing starts with a line, or some imagination, or some notion, and I just go with it as far as I can. And you know how this works, this idea that you sort of set yourself afloat on the language. And you think, I’ll see how far it can take me before this little raft I’ve cobbled together falls apart and everybody understands that I’m really just a fraud, or drowning—whichever comes first. But when it’s really working, the reader goes with you to the most unlikely places. They take big leaps with you. I think Frost said that “Every poem’s an adventure—you don’t know where you’re going with it.” But you go. And writing nonfiction, essaying, the personal essay, the familiar essay, is exactly the same as far as I’m concerned. This adventure where you are counting on language, you are trusting in the language to keep afloat whatever the notion or image or metaphor or intelligence or opinion or whatever it is you want to get across. The bridgings. And the nice part is that the times you sink, you don’t have to send them out there. Oops, you have to go back and revise it, tie the slats together in a different way, rope the little raft together and then send it out. And see how it goes.

WEIDERT

When the title essay in The Undertaking was first published in The Quarterly, it was titled “Burying.” They’re not quite the same—there are minor revisions throughout. Do you often continue to revise, even once work is published?

LYNCH

If you read The Quarterly, that would have been in 1988. It was later published in the London Review of Books—and Harper’s picked it up from there, and I probably made changes all along until it got into the book. I haven’t made changes since. Once it’s out in a book, you figure it’s done. Although, going back over, there are parts I remember in that Sweeney piece that I’d like to mess around with. I won’t be doing that soon.

WEIDERT

In “The Undertaking,” you write that people think you have “some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to, the dead.” The implication seems to be that it isn’t true and yet so many of your essays deal explicitly with death. Do you see that as a contradiction?

LYNCH

In “The Undertaking,” I followed that up by saying something like, “A dentist is a dentist, but he has no particular fondness for root canals or bad gums.” That is sort of his office in brief, to take care of that, but what I wanted to point out is that it is not death—death as a subject is dull, mum, it says nothing—but all the meanings attached to the dead that are the basic stuff of human beings.

When anthropologists are trying to figure out the place at which that walking anthropoid crossed the human barrier, it is when the anthropoid began to notice its mortality. I mean, that is the signature event—that we do something about mortality. Other living, breathing, sexy things don’t. Cocker spaniels, rhododendrons—they don’t bother with that stuff. They don’t seem to care about others of their kind dying. We do. And that, to me, is the signature of the species. I could just as easily argue that all I’m writing about is human beings, humanity. And Humanity 101 is mortality. Humanity 102 is sex. Or maybe it’s the reverse. [Laughs.]

IVERSON

Quite a few of your essays deal with political issues: abortion, big business vs. small business, euthanasia. Do you think nonfiction writers have an obligation to engage with the outside world? Or even get political?

LYNCH

Both. We were talking earlier about the reason that poets aren’t read is because we don’t hang any of them anymore; we don’t take them seriously; we don’t think that poetry can really move people to do passionate things. But poets did. Poets could change cultures. Before there was so much contest for people’s attention, poets were the ones who literally brought the news from one place to another, walking from town to town, which is how we got everything to be iambic and memorable and rhymed and metered because the tradition was oral before it was literary. And I do think we are obliged. Maybe it’s not just to opine about the issues of the day, but I think we are obliged to step outside of our own work and consider other writers’ work.

Writers should review writers—to say, “This, you might like.” If we don’t have a go at the marketplace of ideas and writing and poetry and the rest of it, then how can we expect people to just take it up without any sort of guidance? That’s the great regret about the disappearance of the independent bookstore. You can buy a lot more books on Amazon, but you don’t know whether or not you’ll like them or why you should read them. Whereas you stumble into a proper bookstore, and someone on that staff has read the stuff you’re picking up and will tell you, “You won’t like that,” or “Yes, you will,” or “You should try that.”

I think writers, particularly poets, should be in the opinion pages and on the record about certain things. Now, some of that I come by only through experience; I remember the first time I got a call from someone at the New York Times—asking if I’d given any thought to the idea that we could find out who the Unknown Soldier was, from Vietnam, because they’d come up with the DNA technology. They had narrowed it down to two people, and they knew they had the DNA, and they knew if they disinterred the body from Arlington they could tell. And the question of the day was, Should we? They thought maybe I’d have an opinion about that. And I said, “Well, I’ve never thought about that, but now that you mention it, interesting thought. I’ll bet I would have something to say about it.”

And the editor said, “That’s nice. Can you give us eight hundred words by tomorrow at five?”

And I thought, Well, I’m an artist, and they don’t talk to poets like that. And I said, “Well, what’re you going to do for me?”

And he said, “Well, we’re going to give you a million and a half readers.”

And that’s like drugs.

And I said, “Fine, I’ll have it ready for you.” And I did. Course, whores that they are, they had sent out to several other writers—not so artistic, but faster—and they got what they wanted faster, and they booked it. But I did send the piece to the Washington Post and they took it. And I thought, Aha, this is how it works, to be ready for whatever’s there. I’ve been sort of fiddling with the advantageous ever since. I like the idea that eight hundred words could just [snaps fingers] tweak the world a little bit.

WEIDERT

Do you still do that?

LYNCH

Not all the time, but enough so that a year doesn’t often go by that I don’t have a couple pieces in. Because it’s a good exercise—then it’s just like targeting. I can remember thinking I wanted to say something about the wonders of the changes in Ireland, and I thought that St. Patrick’s Day would be the perfect day to get this published in the New York Times. Think of all the Irish-Americans who would read it. So I wrote this piece and I sent it to them the week before. I said, “Now, this is only good for one day.” And by God, they took it.

The nice thing is they title everything. You can come up with the best titles—they change them. But the title they gave it was the most brilliant one—“When Latvian Eyes are Smiling,” they called it, and I loved it, and they had the most beautiful graphic with it. It’s just like playing multidimensional chess with these people. Because they’re all smart young editors who care less who you are or what you do; they just want the best page they can get.

WEIDERT

I’ve read that you consider Dr. Jack Kevorkian a serial killer.

LYNCH

I do think of him as a serial killer, and so possessed of his own importance about his role. I’ve buried suicides, and I’m impressed by their resolve and it bothered me that something on the order of seventy percent of his “patients,” or victims, were women. It seemed like a bizarre and cruel kind of gender-norming. The known fact is that women attempt suicide by a factor of ten compared to men. And men, this is a funny word, “succeed” at suicide more than women. Kevorkian seemed to be like the helpful hand who would sort of level that playing field. But he was not killing terminal cases any more than nonterminal—except in the philosophical sense that we’re all dying—and so, for me, the slippery slope was not all that far between what he was doing and a clinic at the corner where my daughter would go if she didn’t get a prom date—and that’s a painful, painful experience. Why shouldn’t she be able to claim sufficient pain to get her assistance?

I mistrust judges and I mistrust lawyers and I mistrust politicos when it comes to life and death matters. I think they’ve made a mess of war. I think they’ve made a mess of capital punishment. I think they’ve made a mess of abortion. Not because I think there’s a right way or a wrong way to think about reproductive choices. Twenty-five years after Roe v. Wade we’re still carping about it—thirty years now. You have to say it’s not a great law if we’re still carping about it. Settle law when it’s settled, you know. Whatever the outcome, the way they got there was not right. Didn’t work. Hasn’t worked. I’m much more trustful of the woman who puts a pillow over her dying husband’s face to save him another round of chemotherapy. She’ll live with the moral implications, and she might even live with the legal implications, but I’d rather deal with those on a case-by-case basis than have this crackpot man in the van running around doing it.

The thing that was instructive to me was that the talk in the culture about it was so disembodied. It was all sort of like, Isn’t this a nice option; doesn’t this sound nice—“assisted suicide”—which is oxymoronic to begin with. I mean, take the words apart, and there’s no way you can do that. And it wasn’t until we showed it on TV, until we actually saw, that we went, Oh, that’s wrong. And then he went to jail. As soon as we saw it, we knew it was wrong. But for most of four or five years we were going around as if we were having a conversation about radial tires. So yes, I do think of him as a serial killer, and I think he got his proper comeuppance.

IVERSON

Do you have an agenda with your writing?

LYNCH

Well, there are times I do. Most times, the agenda is just to fill my office as a writer. I write. When I write a poem, I do it for the pure pleasure of having that poem on the page. They are to play with. But when it’s done, published, it’s like it has its own digs; you’ve done your part for it. But there are times when I’ve consciously set out to change the discussion on a particular topic. And I think Phillip Lopate is very instructive on this, when he talks about essayists being, among other things, great contrarians. I always look not for the “this or that,” but the “have you thought of it this way?” So that piece on abortion is not necessarily about abortion. It’s about reproductive choices, and the costs of them.

And I don’t know of anybody yet who has figured out exactly where I stand on abortion. I would think it a weakness of the piece if they could say, “Ah, he’s one of those.” Because the job of an essayist is not to be right, left, or center, this or that, but to make people think in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise thought—and to keep as many in the room as you can while you’re doing it. Barack Obama is doing the same thing in his campaign—he’s trying to keep people in the room.

I remember wanting to say something about the shame and sadness of this war and how to frame that. I was sitting over in Ireland in August one year, reading about the president going off to Crawford, Texas, and I thought, I’ll write something about the president and me, because he was on his ranch, I was on mine. So I did. And they took it, which was very nice, because it was another one of those pieces that was only good for three or four days, and they took it. I don’t think the president reads the New York Times, but people who work for him do, so at least it got to be part of the conversation.

WEIDERT

Have you ever had any backlash from that?

LYNCH

I wrote a piece about capital punishment, about Timothy McVeigh. It was the first federal execution in my generation. I’m from a state that doesn’t have the death penalty. So it was the first time that, clearly, I was one of those people they’re talking about: When “we the people” are killing McVeigh, I was one of them. This was my federal government killing this man.

I don’t know the answer to whether I’m for or against it; that answer is not available to me at the moment. But I do know that if it’s being done in my name, I should be there for it—or at least be allowed to watch it on TV. And the fact that they had prohibited that specifically was, to me, offensive. So I wrote about that.

Greta Van what’s-her-name, and Sean Hannity, they were all calling to see if I’d go on, and I said, “I don’t think so.” The letters to the editor were interesting, the ongoing conversation about it at the time. The same with the piece on reproductive choices—oftentimes, I’ll meet someone who has some vexation about that. And that’s good. I like that. I think we should vex each other. But I’ve never had a bad experience, I’ve never had an “I wish I hadn’t done that”—one of those moments.

With poems, I have. I once wrote a poem about a former spouse that was one of those poems that would have been better off tucked away and found among papers. That said, there was a therapy in it—in a very selfish way. But it was needlessly hurtful. I’d like to think I’ve evolved past that.

WEIDERT

Do you write poems that you know in advance will get tucked away?

LYNCH

I try to avoid those.

WEIDERT

You try to avoid writing them?

LYNCH

I try to write, period. And I think poetry is as good an axe as a pillow. You should be able to cut with it if you want to. But I do want to avoid hurting people inadvertently. I don’t mind hurting people I intend to hurt—but inadvertent damage is the thing I fear. And I think all writers are capable of it. You’re dealing with powerful tools, you know; words are powerful business. I’m not saying you should be guided by fear, but I think general kindness is still a better thing. It’s just evolution. We want to be better people.

MARK CUILLA

You deal with feminist themes in your poetry and nonfiction. Do you consider yourself a feminist?

LYNCH

I’d say humanist. I’ve read a fair amount of feminist literature, and I was a single parent for a long time, which I think, for men, makes them feminists.

One of the boxes you have to fill in on a death certificate is, “Usual occupation,” and the next one is, “Type of business or industry”—funeral director, mortuary, writer, that type of thing. For years, I would often have a son or daughter or a surviving husband say, “She was just a housewife.” And I can remember, after being the single custodial parent for years, thinking: You do it for a week and come back and tell me “just a.” Because the effort to minimize the hardest work I’ve ever done was offensive. I can only imagine what it would mean to a woman who had done it all her life.

All the women in my life have been powerful, powerful women with strong medicine—dangerous people. Every one of them. Some of them still are. My sisters are dangerous people. And my wife is a lovely, lovely person, but she’s a powerful person. I just don’t see them in any way, shape, or form as having ever traded on victim status. What’s irksome to me about so much of the third-wave feminism of the day is that it did seem to traffic in victim status. I remember being in Edinburgh one year for the book festival, and I was rooming near Andrea Dworkin in this beautiful hotel in Belgrave Circle. I’d read just enough of her to know I wanted to meet her and talk to her and have a little go-round with her, you know. I sent her a note asking for that. I put it in her mailbox and got no response. I then saw her in one of the tents in Charlotte Square, where they do the festival. I said, “Possibly you didn’t get my note, but I’d be very, very honored if I could take you for a cup of tea or coffee.”

“I won’t have time,” she said.

I came away from that exchange thinking, Well, go piss up a rope. I did feel bad when she died. She was a much misunderstood person. Like most of us, our own worst enemies.

CUILLA

Can you talk about the intersections between nonfiction and poetry?

LYNCH

I think that any kind of writing just depends on reading poetry. I can’t imagine ever wanting to write anything at all if I hadn’t first been completely smitten by poetry. I can’t exactly tell you what it was I was smitten by, or when, or what it was that I read. I keep having to pour the shit in because I can’t remember any of it, except bits and pieces. It’s really exciting when you come across a poem that just lights up the room. For me, it’s the thing without which nothing else would happen.

I think the poet—the fictionist, the nonfictionist—is trying to disappear in the words. I once commissioned a painting of the island off the coast of our house in Ireland. I said to my son, “I want a painting of Murray’s Island. Could you paint one to hang over the mantelpiece? I’ll give you enough money to make it worth your while.”

He set to work doing it and he’s out there, and he’s a perfectionist in all things and he was really getting agitated by this commission, you know. “What do you want?” he says.

And I said, “I want it to be unmistakably a Sean Lynch, and I want it to be unmistakably Murray’s Island.”

And he says, “Then I’ll have to disappear.”

And I said, “Well, you’ve got it. That’s exactly right.”

So it was one of those things where you would look at it and it’s unmistakably Murray’s Island, but it has his fingerprints all over it. And I think it’s the same with writing poems. Who it is that we’re writing, or what version of yourself you channel is sort of random, really. You can take on different voices. Nonfictionists do it, too, I think. Some days you come to play, some days you come to pray. It just comes to who shuffles in on the first sentence. And sometimes it shifts in the middle of it. What starts out as sort of basic expository writing becomes self-revelation. We don’t know how that happens but if done deftly it really does seem seamless.

It’s Montaigne who says that “In every man is the whole of man’s estate.” Just start concentrating on something. Write about your toilet habits, what you had for dinner. What’s that thing they always say when they’re testing you for a microphone? Tell us what you had for breakfast. I’d love to start an essay with what I had for breakfast and see where it went, just for the heck of it.

CUILLA

Much of your poetry clearly comes from the personal. Richard Hugo writes in The Triggering Town that “You owe reality nothing, and the truth about your feelings everything.” Does this hold true for your work?

LYNCH

Ah. Well, the way you frame the pairing, yeah. Things don’t have to be true in a—I mean, I’m not here to tell you all there is about how it was for me this morning, but there’s something truthful about my keeping a record of it. And then you recognize something in yourself or something that’s generally true of all of us.

When writing doesn’t work for me it’s because somebody sets out and they are too self-enamored. And I think this is where James Frey got in trouble. It’s not so much that he was lying; it’s that he was trying to puff himself up. He was telling us lies about his experience not for the sake of some other truth, but in the service of him—his own sort of heroic self.

And heroes are tiresome ideas today. They really are. Because a hero always knows the end. They’re going to win, or they’re going to save the day and save the world. Essayists don’t know the end. And poets don’t.

I think Hugo’s saying that the truth is, we’re muddling through. We’re going with the best of it. That’s the truth of it today; we don’t know the outcome of this. At least for poets and nonfictionists, this is the excitement, this is the “essaying” of it, this is the setting forth. Not that there isn’t some bravery, but there are no heroics. It does take faith that the language will do its part if you do your part. The word itself is good that way—all of the etymological roots of “essay” are really good there.

WEIDERT

You deal with religion and religious issues in your work, but your examination seems to change from The Undertaking, through Bodies in Motion, to Booking Passage, which deals much more explicitly with your own issues with religion. Could you talk about that evolution?

LYNCH

The longest piece in Booking Passage is an effort to make sense of religious experience as a part of faith experience. With that whole piece about the church, it was handy to have a priest in the family and to have his pilgrimage and his sense of calling to work with as sort of the anchor for that piece.

I think we are trying to find ourselves in relation to whatever the hell is out there. Maybe the relationship between myself and whomever is in charge here is changing as time goes on. The first essay in The Undertaking was written in 1987 because Gordon Lish said, “If you write this, I’ll publish it in a very important literary magazine that I edit,” by which he meant that there would be no pay. But it really was the first time my nonfiction was commissioned. And between 1987 and 2004, when I was writing the last of that book, one would hope that, as Muhammad Ali says, “We are different people.” If not, there’s something very wrong. And my relationship with religiosity is changing a little bit over time, too.

John McGahern, a fictionist I really admire, died in the spring of 2007. He had been sort of banned by the church in Ireland as a young writer. He had a brother or a cousin who was a priest, I think. Large Irish-Catholic family, orthodox upbringing. He had every reason to feel thrown out of the church and abandoned by the church, and his books were banned and censored, et cetera. Anyway, when he died, I was impressed by the fact that his instructions were to have them do the Requiem Mass and nothing more. He didn’t want any eulogies, or opinions, or any of the sort of post-Vatican II add-ons. He just wanted the old words. And that’s true—and maybe this returns to your question about poetry and essaying—that there is a ritual part of it. There is sort of an artifice to it all, sort of a structural beauty to it. I’m still trying to figure out how it works. I’m glad you noticed some change.

I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago at a synagogue, called, “The Same but Different.” They took the title from me. There were hospice people and social workers and clergy, and I was to give the keynote speech about funeral customs and bereavement and how we respond to death—that type of thing. The lunchtime panel was a rabbi, a priest, a pastor, and an imam. And one of the questions from the audience was, “Does religion ever get in the way of people?”

They all gave predictable answers until the imam said, “There is no trouble with Islam. Muslims, however, are troublesome.”

And I thought, Isn’t it just so? I haven’t any trouble with Catholicism or Christianity, but Catholics, myself included—and particularly the reverend clergy—can really put me through spasms of doubt and wonder. And here’s the difference: I have come to think of them as articles of faith, as something that the life of faith requires us to doubt and wonder and ask and mistrust and think it over and ask again. And to check into the book-making. We are people of the book, so we should check into all the acknowledgement pages, the tables of contents and all that stuff to see where they were first attributed. Because I think those boys got together and figured out a way to change some of the text.

And this is where I’m a feminist. The sooner they put women in charge, the better off we’d be. I mean really. I was four-square in favor of women in the military, but for the wrong reasons. I thought that it would reduce our appetite for war as soon as women started being killed. It hasn’t. And more’s the pity. When I was a much younger man, I said, “Instead of sending the young men out to do violence to each other for the sake of old men, which is how it’s always worked, send women out to do kindnesses—to old men.” [Laughs.] And there will be no war. Now, that’s probably not a feminist thought, but it could work no worse than what we’ve got going now.

IVERSON

In your essay, “Y2Kat,” you state repeatedly that writing is not therapy. However, in Bodies in Motion, you talk about writing in a way that makes it seem like a saving grace. Do you think writing is edifying?

LYNCH

Tell me about “edifying”—the word, “to edify.” Tell me what you make of that word.

IVERSON

Redemptive, maybe.

LYNCH

Yes. I love the idea of redemption from it. I do think—and here, I defer to Mr. Rogers—that if you can name the feeling, you can sort of keep track of it. What was Mr. Rogers always saying? “Name that feeling?” Hugo goes on to the same thing. Tell us the truth about that feeling, not the heroic stance, where it doesn’t bother me, but the stance that says, “That sucks and it hurts,” or, “That makes me want to strangle whatever.” Tell the truth about that. Yes, that can be redemptive.

And what’s more is that it brings around it a community of people who feel the same way or may someday be in the same predicament. That’s precisely why we read, isn’t it? To find out that we’re not crazy or are at least crazy in defensible ways, that other people have exactly these same responses. Hugo was right about that.

CUILLA

In Still Life in Milford, you quote, as an epigraph to the first section, an art exhibition guide that reads, “Subject matter is less important than personal vision, based at once on a physical intimacy with, and a metaphysical distance from the real world.” How does this relate to your work?

LYNCH

I stole that from the museum in London. They were having an exhibit with still life. The second epigraph contradicts it, doesn’t it? The first one says exactly what you’ve recorded, and I stole it from the Hayward Gallery in London, where I was at this exhibit. And the second one says, “It is difficult to make moral or intellectual claims from the arrangement of fruit or vegetables on a table”—which is what Still Life in Milford is. My point was, I was trying to make some moral and intellectual claims for just that. I don’t know about this first one. I can’t remember, now, what drew me to that—I’m sure it was the notions of physical intimacy with, and metaphysical distance from, the real world. I’m always drawn to the notion of the body in things—the corpus.

Part of my professional life has been marked by the disappearance of corpses in the funeral ceremony. Our culture is the first in a couple generations that attempts to have funerals with no bodies. We just disappear them. If you read the death notices in the paper today, you’ll notice that most of them are going to involve some type of memorial event, sans body, sans corpse. Also, most likely, without sort of the gloomy stuff that comes along with having a corpse in the room. But the way to deal with mortality is by dealing with the mortals. And you deal with death, the big notion, by dealing with the dead thing. And this you can try at home: Go kill a cat—see how you get through it.

Really, that story about the cat, “Y2Kat,” has it right, up to the part before the cat’s going to be dead. But after the cat died, the truth of it is that the way my son figured out how to deal with the cat’s death was by burying the cat.

We’re very good when it comes to cats and dogs. We just don’t have a clue when it comes to our people. We have them disappeared without any rubric or witnesses or anything like that. And then we plan these, “Celebrations of Life,” the operative words du jour. These celebrations are notable for the fact that everybody’s welcome but the dead guy. This, to me, is offensive and I think perilous for our species. So, in Still Life, one of the things I was trying to say is, Yeah, there is an intellectual—an artistic and moral—case that can be made for not only fruit and flowers in a bowl on a table, but also a dead body in a box.

CUILLA

There’s a series of sonnets in Still Life, and several sonnets in Skating with Heather Grace, and, at the end of Booking Passage, you write about your early work in forms. How much are forms still influencing your work?

LYNCH

They’re very handy for me. I love them, and form has changed a lot. I think one of the last poems in this new book is called “Refusing, at 52, to Write Sonnets.” I was younger then. It was a fifteen-line poem; I just miscounted. [Laughs.] Literally. And I’ve been writing sin-eater poems. Somehow, this guy turned up again. He’s been around since the first book of poems I wrote, and he’s always going to appear in twenty-four line apparitions because the first one was twenty-four lines, so having that form helps.

But form is such an open thing. There’s a poet, my dear friend Michael Heffernan. I probably would not write anything had I not met Michael Heffernan. Certainly, I wouldn’t have written books if I hadn’t met Michael Heffernan. Over the years of our correspondence, we’ve gotten to the point where we only correspond in poems; because we’re both old and cranky, we piss each other off, we’re both recovering alcoholics—you know, just land mines everywhere. We write poems back and forth and we seem to get along very, very well. So the form of the day is, I have to respond to what he says. He sends a poem called “Purple.” I send back one called “Red.” There’s the form. All it has to have is red in it. I write one called “Euclid goes to Breakfast with the Old Farts,” and he writes me back something Euclidian. So the form is very, very free flowing.

But having a task, which is the form itself—this is what I want to say about this, and I meant to say it when you asked about poetry: I think poets made up sonnets and sestinas and pantoums, and all those other epic forms because nobody was asking them to write poems. People could care less. So the poets thought, Look, I’ll give myself work to do. If I could jump through this hoop, surely they’ll be impressed. And they set off to write these different forms so people would say, “Oh, that’s very clever.” But they were making themselves do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

And this is the hard part about essaying and poetry—that you’re setting out to do something you wouldn’t otherwise do and you have no direction; it seems like chaos. And when you finally figure it out, and when you finally get it right, it’s just joyous when it’s done. That’s true of poetry and essaying. When you make that leap across a paragraph or over a stanza, and the reader goes with you and you really land it, then you think, Ah, I’ve done something that’s never been done before.

I always tell my students that it’s very much like crossing water. And it is. You’ve got to give readers some sort of standing stones to grab onto. But if you make it too easy, they’ll get bored and fall in and drown. If you don’t give them any stones, they’ll say, “No, I’m not going there with you.” But if you can space those stones just perfectly, so that they can leap with you, when they get to the end they’ll say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Sooner or later, they think they did think of that, and then they write something new. That’s how it works.

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Dorianne Laux is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Facts about the Moon (Norton, 2005), was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She recently published a chapbook called Superman: The Chapbook, and co-wrote, with Kim Addonizio, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasure of Writing Poetry.

Laux says of her poems, “It’s really important to me for people to understand what it is that I’m trying to say. On the other hand, I don’t want to write simple poems. I want to give people something really meaty to chew on.” Her poems balance the complexities of life with an understanding of the emotions of ordinary people. In her poem, “Facts about the Moon,” she writes, “The moon is backing away from us / an inch and a half a year. / That means if you’re like me / and were born around fifty years ago / the moon was a full six feet closer to the earth. / What ‘s a person supposed to do?”

Born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952, Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a BA in English from Mills College in 1988. She is known for poems of personal witness and for writing about everyday experiences. A review in the American Poetry Review referred to her book, Awake, as “Gutsy in its use of daily practice, daily grief and joy. Dorianne Laux’s Awake is one of the best first books I have ever read. These are poems of remark­ able maturity.”

Awards for her work include a Pushcart Prize, an Editor’s Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Awake was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry and her second book, What We Carry, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Laux has taught at the University of Oregon, and now lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches at North Carolina State University. We met at the Spokane Club where Laux peeled an orange and discussed pop culture, jazz, and the beautiful arches built by termites.

TANA YOUNG

It seems that much of your work is autobiographical. Am I correct in reading it this way?

DORIANNE LAUX

I’m a poet of personal witness. I know there’s a lot of feeling out there that the “I” is dead and the reader is a void, but I feel I’m talking to somebody. I don’t know who it is, but I’m talking to them, and I’m telling them about my experience of being alive, hoping that experience somehow translates or touches someone else’s experience of being alive. So yeah, it’s almost all autobiographical. There are moments when I shift things, and of course memory is faulty. And then on top of that, you’re translating what you feel in your heart and your guts and spirit, trying to translate those things into language, which is already an impossible task. It’s all a pastiche, but it’s true to my experience—as true as I can make it.

YOUNG

There’s a contrast between the idyllic sense in the poems you’ve written about your child and the difficulties described in the poems about your own childhood . What do these poems tell us about your journey?

LAUX

I came from a dysfunctional family as many of us do. My experience is not that different from anyone’s, it’s just that people don’t tend to talk about it because it’s embarrassing, or shameful, or complicated. Too complicated. Like somebody innocently asks, “Hey, do you visit your parents?” Well, it’s just too complicated. So I might say, “Sure, yeah, it’s fine. I have a wonderful relationship with my parents,” or my siblings, or whatever.

My parents’ generation wanted things to be economically better for their children. They worked hard to ensure that their children didn’t have to work as hard as they did. I think my task was not so much to make things economically better for my child, although that was certainly a goal. But I was also trying to make things emotionally and spiritually better for my child. And they were. So it’s still that American concept with a different slant, or a different set of goals. I wanted her to have a childhood that was free of all that. Of course, I didn’t protect her completely, and she didn’t have an idyllic childhood. You know, bad things happen all the time no matter how hard you try.

One might look at those poems and think, Well, this is what it’s like to have been a mother to this child. It was like that, and this poem is representative of this child’s life or this relationship between mother and child. And in fact, it’s one moment that’s been captured. I have yet to capture other moments, maybe, that aren’t as idyllic.

To me, poems in some ways are wishes. They’re asking us to look at what our best possible situation could be, so that we have an actual visual or aural representation of what we can work toward. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s like that. It means that we wish it to be like that, and so if we can somehow make that alive in language, we can actually make it alive in reality.

SHIRA RICHMAN

In your latest book, Superman: The Chapbook, you seem to be playing with the intersection of the ideal and reality. How did you choose to publish a chapbook at this point in your career?

LAUX

Well, it was wonderful in the way it came about because Joe [Millar] and I went to visit Redwing, Minnesota, where they have an artist colony called Anderson Center for the Arts, and on the grounds they have Red Dragonfly Press. Joe and I would go over every day to watch this wonderful guy, Scott King, work at his small press, and he has a couple, maybe three of these old, falling apart, beautiful, antique printing presses. He’s one of the few people in the United States who still makes type, actually forges the type, you know, casts it with metal.

We were just fascinated. We’d go over and watch him casting type and the hot metal pouring down through this little funnel and the letters coming out and he’s cutting them. We were hanging around all the time, bothering him. How do you do this? And how do you do that? So one day, he asked us if we would like to make a broadside. He said, “You can actually set the type yourself if you like.”

We went over and started setting the type, which was nor as easy as it sounds. There’s this big box with all the letters set up in this counterintuitive way, all the most used letters on the outside, and the least used letters on the inside. And so we’re trying to find the A and the L and also trying to make sure that the M and the N don’t get mixed up. We’d set the type, and then make an experimental plate of it and realize we had all the letters backwards and upside down. We’d have to start over. It took us hours and hours and hours to get these two little broadsides. The broadside I made was of “Hummingbird,” which is from Facts About the Moon.

After we made the broadsides, Scott asked me if I’d like to do a chapbook. He had created chapbooks for authors like Barry Lopez and W S. Merwin. He enjoys making these fine-press, beautiful little things and he wanted to know if I had a group of poems that I thought might work well together. And I said, “Sure.” So we worked on that for a while—he did all the work on it. I didn’t do any more typesetting.

Those are new poems, and it’s somewhat common for a writer to put together a chapbook of new poems that you wouldn’t get anywhere else, and the small press makes some money. All those poems will be in my next full collection, but they’ll be published in the chapbook first.

RICHMAN

Are the poems about pop stars indicative of a general direction in which your work is moving?

LAUX

Those poems were really influenced by reading people like Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, these kinds of pop poems about popular culture. Among my poet friends, I’m the one they come to when they want to know about popular culture. They’re like, “Who is Bono?” [ Laughs.] Many poets, they’re just not hip to all this—”What’s Survivor?”—and I can tell them. “What’s Facebook, MySpace?” I know all this stuff. I don’t know why. I’m just a junkie for popular culture, and when I was growing up in San Diego, I loved all the popular music of the day.

So I thought, Why shouldn’t I write about these people I know? I grew up with Cher. I feel like I know her intimately. Why wouldn’t I write a poem about her? And Superman; I feel really embarrassed for how much I love Superman. No joke. When a Superman movie comes out, man, I’m right there. I want to see it. Of course I know that Superman is absolutely ridiculous. This whole idea of America—he’s going to save the world—it’s romance at its highest pitch. Yet there’s something moving about it, something very stirring about Superman. I’m not sure if this is where the bulk of the work is headed, but the poems were fun to write and will flavor the new book for sure.

YOUNG

Those poems feel like coming of age pieces to me. They take me back to the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, to those summers.

LAUX

Those were good days. They were also terrible days. Of course Superman is not Superman in that poem. He’s Superman with cancer, and he’s smoking dope, and he’s trying to stop the pain in his head, knowing he can’t save the world. He breaks my heart in that poem. But that’s how I see the United States in some ways, too. He’s representative of this culture, which is sick. It’s an interesting way to get to some material. Pop culture can influence art on a deep level. If you read somebody like Denise Duhamel or Tony Hoagland, you realize there’s something deeper going on underneath that surface. When you think about popular culture, you think immediately of surface. But what’s underneath? Like the whole idea of the Beatles breaking up, and what that public and highly contested division meant to a generation.

TERRANCE OWENS

You’re known for writing about ordinary people, but these pop culture references seem to go against that in a way, though they also connect ordinary with not-ordinary people—

LAUX

Well, Superman is as not-ordinary as you can get, and yet I make him an ordinary man. The same with Cher, who’s this huge diva-idol, but in my poem, she’s just a woman getting Botox treatments. So yes, I am dealing with a patently not-ordinary person, but I’m taking my vision and applying it to her. And of course, Cher is ordinary. If she weren’t ordinary, she wouldn’t be influenced by a culture that tells her she’s not beautiful. She’s scared. She doesn’t want to get old. She doesn’t want to lose her attractiveness, her sexuality. That’s what all of us are facing.

RICHMAN

David Wojahn said he thinks Americans have difficulty allowing the personal and the political to intersect, and that’s why there aren’t a lot of successful American political poets. What are your thoughts about that?

LAUX

I do think it’s difficult. Our definition of the political is complex. We think of politics as being what’s going on, for instance, in Iraq right now, or what’s going on in the government, or some issue like feminism, or something that we can put in a little box and say, “Here’s the issue, and here’s the person talking about the issue.” However, any time you ask readers to consider their lives, in any aspect, in any way, to consider their relationships to their children, to their lovers, their husbands or wives, to their jobs, to money, to power, whatever, you’re asking them to stop and think. That’s a political act, especially right now in America.

We’re having a hard time stopping and thinking. We’re having difficulty recognizing what makes us human beings. That we’re on the earth for a very short time. That life is precious. That death is on the doorstep—that’s a huge thing. You’re asking people to stop making widgets for a minute or two and consider what role they’re playing, not only in their lives, but on the large stage. Any art that’s political stops people in their tracks for a moment and asks us to consider.

So it depends on how you want to define political, and I think my poems are political in the way that I just spoke of. But it’s also true, more and more, I think, that they’re moving into a larger arena. On the other hand, I am not an overtly politicized person. I certainly have my ideas about things—and how I vote, how I move through my life has political implications, but I’m not, quote, a political poet.

In some ways, I think poets tend to be apolitical, because we are so open to possibilities, which makes it difficult to come down on one side or another. We see the complexities of things, so it’s difficult for us to say yes or no. We’re dealing with stuff that’s somewhere between yes and no.

If you said, “Do you think it’s right to kill people?” I would say, “No, absolutely not.” On the other hand, I suppose there are situations in which I’d have to reconsider that statement, while many people wouldn’t. They’re firmly on one side or the other. So is that political? I don’t know. In some ways you’re in Hamlet territory. To be or nor to be. You’re going to be asking yourself that question for the rest of your life. There are no real answers, and we know that. And poetry is a way of allowing a human being to live between those two ideas and feelings for a little while.

YOUNG

This reminds me of the encounter you describe in “S. Sgt. Metz,” in which you get to the person underneath the camouflage.

LAUX

The uniform, yeah, you could see that man in front of you and say, “Oh my God, what is this guy doing going to war? What an idiot. I hate everything about him, everything he stands for.” Or you could be on the other side of things, and say, “Look at this brave young man.” Both of those positions are simplistic ways to look at the human being standing there, trying to do the right thing, and you’re looking at him really trying to see who he is.

As an artist, I looked at him and thought, This is the perfect specimen of a male human being. The idea of him torn apart on the streets of Iraq was horrifying. To think of this beautiful human body, perfect in every way, put in front of bombs and gunfire was just unfathomable.

Maybe he’ll get through, you know? That’s the other thing, he’s a real person in the world. I never spoke to him. I just observed him, and I saw him talking to an older woman who was standing in front of him, jostling her bags, and he helped her. I could see that he was intelligent, kind, graceful. He was this human being living his life and that life was going to possibly be cut short for reasons I can’t fathom, and I don’t know if any of us can.

Humans are absolutely fascinating creatures to me, and I so much want to represent them in their dignity. We’re capable of miraculous things, and on the other hand, we are cruel, horrible, just horrible. I’m infuriated by humans and absolutely awestruck at the same time. We’re such fallible, fragile creatures. And this takes me back to my youth during the Vietnam War when I was saying, “The war is wrong. I’m burning these letters. I hate you. How could you do this?” It took me living for thirty or forty years to look at my brother and realize that was my brother I was hating. How could I have a brother who was killing people? How could I sleep with a boyfriend who was killing women and children? I was too young to recognize certain complexities that I’m now able to recognize. When I was younger, I thought, Oh, this is right and this is wrong. Now I realize I don’t know what right and wrong is. All I know is that human beings are gorgeous and worth preserving.

RICHMAN

Hearing you talk about Sergeant Metz makes me think of your poem, “Teaching Poetry with Pictures.” Why wasn’t that included in Awake?

LAUX

I know. Why wasn’t it? My editor didn’t like it. He said he just didn’t like it, so it stayed out. And now it’s gotten so old that I’ve never thought to put it in a book. I’d forgotten it until you mentioned it right now. I’ve written a number of poems that have ended up in anthologies or magazines but that never made it into a book.

There’s a little poem I wrote that was on the Portland buses called “Romance,” and it’s only a five- or six-line poem. I really like it, but it’s never made it into a book. It just hasn’t fit somehow. These poems are just sort of out there, but they’re not completely lost. You found one of them. Maybe it will make its way into a book someday. Who knows? Maybe somebody who has more time or interest or patience than I do will gather them.

OWENS

You said in an interview that “First lines are often important when determining the rhythm structure of a poem.” What’s the spark that first allows the rhythms to come in?

LAUX

It’s like music. When you listen to Glen [Moore], who plays jazz, and who I love to read with, he’ll just take a line, a piece of music, a musical phrase, and start playing with it. It’s basically—this won’t be worthy of an interview because you can’t transcribe it into the text, but it could be something like [hum s a jazz riff]. That would be the phrase, and then he goes [hums contrapuntal jazz riff]. And then you take that phrase and you start playing with it. That’s American jazz, the one thing we export that’s beautiful. Most of what we export is not so beautiful, mostly violent movies and fast food. But jazz is something we can be proud of. Now we take any rhythmic phrase and play with it.

That said, I do have a few rhymed poems. “Life is Beautiful” is an example:

Life is beautiful and remote, and useful
if only to itself. Take the fly, angel
of the ordinary house, laying its bright
eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out
delicately along a crust of buttered toast.
Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest
dump where other flies have gathered, singing
over stained newsprint and reeking
fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate
ballet above the clashing pirouettes
of heavy machinery. They hum with life.

I can hear the music that I’m playing with, and the lines are approximately syllabic—between eight and twelve syllables per line, somewhat dactylic—beautiful, delicate, intricate. It’s also a rhymed poem: Useful/angel, out/toast, singing/reeking, intricate/pirouettes, and it’s end rhymed—all the way through, ending on “disorder,” and “gorgeous.” Not perfect rhyme, but good enough for rock ‘n’ roll. The poem posits a question: Maybe there are too many of us, and yet the other side is that we’re “gorged, engorging, and gorgeous”. Yes, maybe there are too many of us, but on the other hand, isn’t it beautiful? [Laughs.] Stuck between yes and no.

I grew up in a musical family. My mother played piano, so I was inundated on a daily basis with music. She would play everything from Beethoven, Bach, classical music to pop songs to musicals. She’d play from The Music Man, South Pacific, whatever the popular musicals were at the time. Also, I’d come home from school and say, “I heard this new Sonny and Cher song,” or, “I heard this Beatles song,” and she’d listen to it, pick it out on the piano, and play it for me. She could play anything. And everyone in my family ended up being musical, except me. I try to put it into my poetry.

RICHMAN

How did that happen?

LAUX

When I was first born, my mother divorced my father and went to California. She was a struggling, single mother and finally met my stepfather and was scared of having kids. When I was coming up, she played, but they couldn’t afford a piano. Later, she managed to get one and she started teaching the children. Well, I had already gotten past the rhyme of being taught piano. So, my sister after me, my sister after my brother, all of my brothers and sister’s kids play. I did play guitar, but I dropped it after a little bit and went to poetry. I think I took all that musical training into my ear. I could recognize a musical phrase and see how it could be played with to make it interesting.

That’s one of the things I start with. “Life is Beautiful.” I hear that word phrase as music. I love reading aloud because, to me, it’s like playing an instrument. All the phrasing is like singing. I feel like I’m singing; I’m just not singing. [Laughs.] But it feels like singing to me.

YOUNG

There’s a point at which one goes from being a student poet to a master poet. When you write, are you still pulling from a mysterious place?

LAUX

Probably 90 percent of what any artist does is practice. We practice and we fail and we fail. You set your pen to the page every day, and of course, you’re hoping that something grand will happen. But the chances are slim, and you know that going in, but you go in anyway. That’s faith. You keep hitting the page, hoping that something’s going to fire, something’s going to happen, something’s going to bloom out of it. And the more you practice, the more that possibility of success is present. The more you do anything, the greater the possibility that something might actually come of it. So you constantly live with failure, and yet, you know that that failure is teaching you something.

B. F. Skinner discovered this thing, intermittent reinforcement, where you can reward somebody at random intervals. It might be the third time, and the next time it’ll be the twenty-fifth time, and the next time it’ll be the first time, and the next time it’ll be the eighty-seventh time. You can’t know when the reward is going to arrive, but that’s what keeps you going. It’s going to come sometime. And that’s all I care about. I don’t care if it comes the hundred and fiftieth time as long as it comes, and it’s a very powerful thing. Any time you happen upon a poem, your spirit, your entire body, is filled with this energy of that magic that has happened, and you’ll do anything to get back to it. You’ll do anything to find it again.

I don’t worry anymore about writing. There are times that I go through dry periods. I never go through a block. I’m always writing, but there are times where I’m just not on my game, and I’ll use that time to read some new poets, go see some art, walk down to the river and just stare at it, or have a conversation with my sister, or whatever—do whatever it is that I do in my life, hoping that I’ll get filled up enough. And something will happen, some juggling will happen and boom.

Ellen Bryant Voigt has a great essay in her book The Flexible Lyric. I can’t really write about poetry. Some people are wonderful at it, like Ellen Bryant Voigt. I get lost writing about poetry. But she writes these wonderful essays, and in one of them she talks about termites—I think it is—how some people were studying termites. And they put them in a kind of aquarium with all their stuff they use to build these beautiful arches that make nests—dung and wood chips and whatever it is that they use. And she said the termites run around chaotically for a long time, and they have little pieces of this stuff in their mouths. Ultimately, one termite will accidentally drop a piece and another termite will drop another piece on top of it. And once that happens, they all get excited and run over and pick up chips and start making the arches.

When that happens, they all get alert and they’ll say, “Okay, it’s time to make an arch.” And I think that’s a wonderful metaphor for how we make poetry. We’re just running around in these chaotic circles with dung in our mouths, or wood chips, or whatever. And we drop something and then something else and suddenly this arch starts to appear. We really don’t know how it works. I think Ellen’s essay comes closest to describing how a poem happens.

It’s just this odd coupling of sound and image; our minds are so filled with chaos. Our bodies are filled with it, our emotions, our spirits are just chaotically running around, saying, “What, what? What, what, what, what, what?” And then something happens, and things start to make sense for a moment. Of course that’s all that it is, a moment, the moment of making the poem—and the moment of getting everything into its order is a beautiful, ideal moment. Then you go back to chaos, hoping for that moment again .

OWENS

That’s a good metaphor for jazz, too.

LAUX

Absolutely; that’s what jazz musicians are doing—riffing off a phrase, hoping that things will come together and build an arch of some sort. Of course an arch is a beautiful metaphor, right? There are termites on both sides, building their columns and they meet in the middle. And so you can think of that too as the reader and the writer. They’re coming together in the middle and touching.

YOUNG

Are there people you read that help get you in a state of mind for writing?

LAUX

Reading other poets is often what will spark my imagination. I’ll see one of their arches and get inspired. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll write a brilliant poem; it just means I’m inspired. It has to be both inspiration and something else that happens. I reread the poets I teach: Phil Levine, Ruth Stone, Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, Carolyn Forché, Lucia Perillo, Gerald Stern, Lucille Clifton, C. K. Williams, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marie Howe and Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland, another good essayist. Too many to list, but you get the idea. I love poetry that feels as it thinks. I’ve been memorizing Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Assault.” Those poems inspire me.

But lots of things inspire me. Travel—I’m really looking forward to moving to North Carolina, because it’s going to be a whole new landscape, a whole new culture, a history that I’m completely unfamiliar with, new people. All of this change is wonderful for a writer because you’re shaken out of your habitual responses.

We all get habituated, right? You get up in the morning, have your coffee, and read your newspaper, and that’s great. Everybody loves life in its mundane, daily aspects. It’s what makes us feel secure. But I also start to go numb a little bit and I don’t see what’s around me. So I put myself in a new situation and suddenly I’m really seeing the person next to me, hearing music, and I’m smelling, and I can’t help but want to write it down.

YOUNG

Do you have a particular time that you write every day?

LAUX

Some people are very disciplined, but everybody has their own way of approaching their art, and for me, because I started my writing life as a single mother and while working as a waitress, it wasn’t like I had an office and time every day that I could sit down and write. Life was too chaotic. So I got it when I could. When my daughter was off at school, I’d write. Sitting on the bench waiting for her to come out, I’d write. I’d be doing an errand, and I’d pull over to the side of the road, pick up a Jack in the Box bag, and write something on it. That’s how I managed to get poems written—in between times. I’ve continued doing that.

Whenever it strikes me, I sit down and write. Of course now I’m in a university, so I have all summer to write, which I never had when I was coming up as a poet. I have that time, and my body does sort of click in when spring comes. I can feel my body going, It’s getting to be writing time. Yeah. It does kind of get into these seasonal responses. Joe and I are going to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for five weeks this summer, and we’ll write every day.

I’m hoping I can start putting the new poems together and making them into a book. I need concentrated time to do that. I can write the poems between times, but doing the revision work—that’s the hard part. When you’re at a writers’ colony, you get up in the morning, have your breakfast knowing you have hours to write before lunch, and more hours after lunch and before dinner, and you can get a lot of work done. But most of the time, you’re just squeezing it in, and that’s fine with me. I’m happy sitting at a bus stop and writing a poem.

RICHMAN

Or at the airport.

LAUX

Yes, I started that Metz poem at the airport. I got halfway through it and my plane was called. I went down to Santa Cruz with my friend Ellen Bass and stayed for a couple of weeks. Ellen gave me an exercise. She said, “I want you to use these words, and these phrases.” So I went back to the Metz poem and used the exercise to help finish it, and I used all the words she’d given me. I’m grateful that I can write anywhere.

RICHMAN

Your attraction to capturing moments, is that why you don’t write fiction?

LAUX

I love people and psychology. I love stories, dialogue, relationships, description, everything that goes into making a story. But I also love compression and music. And of course our best prose writers do, too, but I’m much more interested in moments. I love reading novels and short stories, but as a writer, I’m not so interested in Fred getting from the living room into the car. I couldn’t care less. I want to go inside Fred’s soul and play there. Not that fiction writers don’t do that as well, but they’ve got all these other concerns. And I’m much more interested in the psychological moment , the moment of epiphany. I want brush strokes versus whatever is the opposite of brush strokes, which I don’t think there is an opposite. But that’s what I want to do. I just want those light feathery things.

But back to practical circumstances: I only had these moments in time to write because I had a child. I had to get the dishes done. I had to get the rag out, and the mop. I was writing in these tiny spaces and it’s difficult to write a novel like that. You could, but it wasn’t something that I had a whole lot of time for, so poetry was a great form. I could use all this stuff: dialogue, arc, character, description, and I could use it all in a very small space within a limited amount of time. While my daughter was at school, I could do this. Poetry was a practical issue for me. I could do a draft of the poem and then go off and come back and play with it a little bit and go away and come back. But more than practical, it was the fact that I loved sound. And fiction, novels, prose at its best does have that sound, but it’s a rare novel that ‘s musically beautiful throughout. It’s more often getting information out: And then she went to the store and picked up some oranges and a gun. It’s moving things along on a plot level, and I’m not so interested in plot. Reading plots, yes, but not writing them.

OWENS

You seem interested in meeting your readers in the middle, not making them walk across the whole bridge themselves—

LAUX

I grew up as a navy brat in San Diego, living in Quonset huts with bunches of other kids from all over the world, and those kids couldn’t care less about reading the back of a cereal box, let alone a book of poetry. Those are the people of my life. Those are the people I want to speak to, the people I grew up with, ran around in the canyons with. It’s really important to me for them to understand what it is I’m trying to say. On the other hand, I don’t want to write simplistic poems. I want to give those people something to chew on. And that’s a fine line, writing a poem that’s accessible, and yet has the complexity you feel it needs to be a true work of art. So yeah, I want to meet my reader, and I want mystery, but not misery, not where they’re throwing up their hands and saying, “What is this? I can’t understand it. What the hell’s going on here?” It may be out of fashion, maybe even a bit radical these days, but I feel strongly about being understood.

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Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Mark Childress comes from a southern family and grew up in Ohio, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Though he continues to move every four or five years, it is because he writes about the South, Childress says, that he is identified as a southern writer and often placed alongside Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, and Truman Capote. “On the one hand, it’s a kind of ghettoization,” he says. “On the other hand, it’s a really nice ghetto.”

Childress is the author of six novels, including Tender, a Literary Guild selection; Crazy in Alabama, published in eleven languages and named the [London] Spectator’s “Book of the Year” (1993); and his most recent, One Mississippi, of which Ann Lamott says, “Mark Childress is at the top of his form.” He has also written three children’s picture books, and his articles and reviews appear in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Times of London, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other national and international publications. His awards include the Thomas Wolfe Award, the University of Alabama’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Alabama Library Association’s Writer of the Year.

After graduating from the University of Alabama, Childress worked as a journalist for ten years, until he eventually decided to focus all of his time on his own writing. He currently calls New York City home, where he is working on his seventh novel. We talked with him over coffee at Café Dolce in Spokane.

Rachel Kartz

One Mississippi takes place in the South, in the seventies, and explores the heightened racial conflict caused by the desegregation of public schools. In an earlier interview, you said you were in the South at this time but weren’t old enough to participate. Were you worried, when writing One Mississippi or Crazy in Alabama, about getting it right or possibly offending somebody with your take on these things?

Mark Childress

No, because what I’m trying to write is fiction. So I felt like as long as I was true to the spirit of the time and what happened then, and as long as I was honest in the way that fiction is honest, it’d be fine. It’s hard to say that a pack of lies, which is what a novel is, can be honest. But I truly believe that, in a lot of ways, fiction is more true than nonfiction because you can get inside people’s heads and tell what they really think. You can’t do that in nonfiction.

As a journalist I used to be frustrated that I couldn’t get people to say what their motivation was for something, even when I knew what their motivation was. People protect themselves. Novelists go right through that, to the heart of what characters really think.

Certain people criticized Crazy in Alabama because there’s a theory in civil rights literature that white people have to be the hero, that black people should never be the hero of their own narrative. This is the self-justified southern white way of saying, “We were really the good people.” I could never consider for a moment that Peejoe was the hero of the book. In fact, there’s a point where Peejoe says, “I’m not the hero.” His telling on the stand that the sheriff killed the boy is the one heroic thing he does, but it happens very late in the book. So, I didn’t set him up as a hero. I wanted a character that white people would be sympathetic to, a character that approached the racial conflict—see, to my mind, the sheriff is a human too. And he’s dealing with the forces of history pushing in the direction that he had to go. And I wanted to present the racial question in all of its subtlety. It’s not black and white. It’s all shades of gray. Just like every question.

Kartz

How much research do you conduct when writing about historical facts or people?

Childress

It depends. Tender was very much a novel of Elvis Presley. So, before writing that book, before I wrote one word of it, I read every book ever written about him, listened to every piece of music he ever made, which is a lot. I went to Graceland and worked as a tour guide. I toured all the homes where he lived, tracked down the addresses just to see what the settings were like. Then I started writing the book and I threw some of that away, changed things as I wanted to, because I wrote it as a novel. So, for that book, the research was critical. But I haven’t done research like that for any other book.

With V for Victor, I did go back and do a little research. Usually, I’ll write a first draft and look at the history of it and see what I need to check. Then I go back and maybe do some research, and change it on a subsequent draft. I don’t tend to do that much. One Mississippi was a different set of circumstances and actions, but a setting very much like the high school that I attended. I knew exactly what that library looked like, what the hallways smelled like, and what the cafeteria looked like. That’s pretty much just lifted from my life—the setting—though all the events are fictional.

Neal Peters

When writing about politically volatile material, like Peejoe’s experience in Crazy in Alabama, do you have a message you’re trying to deliver?

Childress

I think it was Louis B. Mayer who said, “If you want to send a message, send a telegram.” I really don’t think of my books as having messages when I’m writing them. When I go back and look at a book, I can say, “Okay, I suppose you could draw the lesson of A or B.” But when I’m writing a book, I’m actually just in the act of figuring out what happens, what people are going to do, and what they say, and trying to make it as interesting and dramatic as I can. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stop and think if you’re sending the right message, but I think those reflections, like whether or not I was excusing white guilt, those are all things that arrive after you’ve published the book––those are critical reactions to the book. It’s not your concern when you’re writing it. You’re just trying to be true to the book’s internal rules.

Within Peejoe’s world, he doesn’t think of himself as a hero. The civil rights movement is set up as a story of villains and heroes. And there’s no room for gray areas—the media doesn’t describe gray areas—you’re either good or you’re bad. And so they chose which side he would be on. To me, one of the most interesting characters in that book is Uncle Dove. He’s much more like most people were in the South. He knows that racism and segregation are wrong, but he thinks it’s just too big for one man to change and it’s never going to change, so you have to kind of go with the flow and be kind to people as far as you can. And that explains what a lot of white southerners went through at the time.

The thing a lot of people miss, that I tried to explore in that book, is how close black and white people were before integration. Almost all white households had a black person working in the household. Even relatively poor families would have “help,” so the contact was a lot closer than it is now. In some ways, our society down there was more integrated than it is now. Not the public accommodations, not the pools and the restaurants and things like that, but everybody was in contact with everybody else. On a person-to-person basis, there wasn’t a lot of hatred. But there was a lot of interest on the white side of perpetuating the system that kept black people down.

Peters

Crazy in Alabama is written in varied points of view. Chapters alternate between Peejoe’s first-person point of view and Lucille’s third- person. Can you talk about the opportunities and limitations of using multiple points of view?

Childress

The thing I liked about opposing those points of view was that I wanted the story to have kind of a dark side and a light side and to go back and forth between the two. At times, Peejoe’s becomes the light story and Lucille’s becomes the dark story—they change places a few times. But I like a sense in the book that, Oh man, that was a heavy scene and Taylor’s dead, and that’s terrible, or, Okay we can relax because Lucille’s having a good time in Vegas. I like books that make you cry and laugh and that go back and forth between those extremes. I love John Irving’s books because he always does that. At the happiest moment in the book, you’re almost dreading what’s going to happen next, because you know it’s not all going to turn out to be so happy. And that’s so much more like real life than a story that’s all dark, or a story that’s all comedy. I kind of like that, giving the reader that sucker-punch, where it’s like I’m distracting the reader with something funny and then snap, something tragic happens. It happens that way in life. I like those contradictions and complexities.

As I get older my writing tends more toward linguistic simplicity, but more complexity of the narrative, if that makes sense. I think my style has become plainer on the page, and that’s been an intentional thing I’ve worked toward. A World Made of Fire is written in iambic pentameter—it’s extremely layered, there’s a lot of difficult dialect in it, and it’s a very challenging, “literary” kind of novel. At the time, I thought that was sort of the mark of art—to make something challenging and difficult and dense and layered and all that. I began to realize—and a lot of writers have written on this—that the harder thing to write is the simple sentence that expresses complexity. Or a story that’s accessible to a general reader yet has every layer of meaning of a literary novel. To me, that’s a bigger challenge, so it’s the kind of thing I like to take on because it’s the kind of book I like to read. You know, where the narrative grabs you and pulls you through. Dickens is somebody we study, but he’s also incredibly enjoyable to read. That’s the dividing line between the kind of books I like and the kind of books I don’t like—a book with a narrative that hooks me and drags me through it, and at the end, I go, Wow, I didn’t know that was going to happen. I love that effect in a book.

Kartz

What’s the difference between genre and literary fiction?

Childress

It keeps changing every year. When I was in college, it was the time of the metafictionalists and experimentalists, and Barth and Barthelme and Gass were the heroes of the teachers I had. Vonnegut. And these people were writing anti-novels and were all about subverting the form, changing the form, doing experiments and things like that. I didn’t respond to those kinds of writers. I read them and did my papers and discussed them, but I always preferred strong narrative. I was an addict for Dickens and books that have things that happen in them and things that change and people who are different by the end. It’s a strong narrative that draws me through.

That’s why I was so turned on by the Latin Americans. I discovered Marquez and Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes and all these great writers who were just as besotted with narrative as I was. Some of those books brought narrative back into fashion in North America. You can almost trace it. After One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mark Helprin wrote Winter’s Tale—which was a huge hit and was sort of a literary fabulist novel, a magic-realist novel set in New York—that sort of opened a lot of people’s eyes. They said, “Oh my God, we don’t have to write pinched little exercises in mental masturbation”—which is what some of that metafiction was to me. You can read every word of a Gass book and by the end of it, you may have learned something, but you haven’t felt anything. I like fiction that makes you feel.

That said though, the whole idea of genre, I mean, the idea of a “literary detective novel” didn’t exist twenty-five years ago. But even the great masters used to write them. Conrad wrote them. Twain wrote his. We got very uptight in the sixties and seventies about, you know, this is art, and this is commerce. And a book can’t be good if it’s popular. That’s as much crap as saying a book can’t be good if it’s unpopular. Popularity is no determinant of quality.

It also has a lot to do with shifting fashions. Narrative was not in style twenty-five years ago, and now it is. Now, oftentimes, you have books that have very strong narratives and are extremely popular. These two things used to be, could be, synonymous. But there was a kind of anti-commerce movement in the art. You know, Let’s throw out anyone who’s popular. And I’m glad to be part of the wave that’s brought it back the other way.

Peters

How do you think literary fashion will change in the near future?

Childress

I have no idea. Everyone in publishing has been predicting the end of publishing since I entered it twenty-five years ago, yet there are a lot more books being published and sold now than there were then. Everyone thought that the death of the independent bookstore would kill fiction and literature in America. The opposite has actually been true. I hate it as much as anybody––the death of the little independent bookstores in New York where I live. Now, all we have in our neighborhood is a Barnes & Noble. But on the other hand, in a typical small city in Alabama, there are now two Barnes & Noble stores with more books than that city had access to before. In a lot of small towns around the country, that’s replicated. In a Barnes & Noble, you have over five hundred thousand titles for sale. Before, maybe you had a mom and pop shop with six thousand titles. I’m sorry for ma and pa, but the people of that city now have an excellent bookstore. I kind of see it as a two-edged sword.

That said, the cell phone novel is coming from Japan. Have you heard of this? This is the rage now––they sell millions. They’re written to be read on cell phones. The modern generation––the ADD, caffeinated generation––will they have the attention span to read an eight hundred page novel? Seems to me enough of them will. Look at the list of bestselling literary fiction, fantastic books that are selling widely today. Everyone’s worried about the death of the physical book with these e-readers and Kindles from Amazon. I still say that until you can go to sleep on the thing, throw it across the room in a fit of rage, or tear a page out to write a grocery list, then regular books are going to survive. I still like to physically hold a book.

Peters

In your opinion, who is the best writer, or what is the best work of fiction, in the last twenty-five years?

Childress

Oh, wow, that’s an impossible question because literature is not a beauty contest. There’s not one person whose vision is better than everyone else’s. There’s a tendency, especially in America, to try to single out what’s the “best.” I have particular writers and particular genres that I go to over and over again. But I don’t rank them that way.

It’s very easy for me to say To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite book because I was born in that town and it gives people something to talk about. But To Kill a Mockingbird was really my favorite book when I was thirteen or ten when I read it first. I haven’t read it in a long time so it’s not currently my favorite book. But, that said, I currently have a particular obsession with Latin American writers. I think Gabriel Garcia Marquez is probably one of the great writers of our time. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a seminal book for me that I go back to over and over again. You see Marquez’s footprints all over Gone for Good.

Usually, frankly, when I’m writing fiction, which is most of the time, I don’t read much fiction, because I tend to mimic what I read in my writing. I like to hear the way things sound. So if I’m reading a book by Jayne Anne Phillips, then the next page I write is somehow going to sound like Jayne Anne Phillips. Usually when I’m trying to write fiction, I read nonfiction or history or current events, then I save up novels. Then, when I’m in between writing, I’ll read a whole bunch of them at once.

Kartz

You were talking last night about Crazy in Alabama being a historical novel. What’s your definition of a historical novel?

Childress

A historical novel is a novel that takes place in the past, in which the fact that it takes place in the past is somehow central to it. I was telling the anecdote about the movie executive who said, “Yeah, I know it’s a civil rights story, but does it have to be period? Couldn’t we move it to today?” Because that would’ve cut the budget. And no, it couldn’t. Because the central concern of Crazy in Alabama is desegregation and the moment when desegregation actually happened in the little towns. When I wrote that book, I felt that there hadn’t been a novel that dealt specifically with that moment. Everyone thinks To Kill a Mockingbird is a civil rights novel, but it’s a novel about the thirties, way before the civil rights movement started, and at the end of the book, black people are no better off than they were at the beginning.

When I was a kid, that was that moment of demarcation. I remember very specifically coming back to the town where my grandmother’s house was. The year before we had swum all summer in the brand new swimming pool that had just been built. We came back the next year and they had filled it with blacktop. There was the diving board and the ladders that we used to get into the water and, one year after they built it, they had filled it with blacktop rather than let black people swim in it. I was seven years old that summer and that had a mighty big impression on me. It still doesn’t make any sense to me. That story was repeated all over the South that summer, because the public accommodations law was passed. Swimming pools were ruled public accommodations, so instead of letting black people swim, they just closed the pools. As a matter of fact, when we were scouting for the movie, we saw ten or fifteen pools that were still relics of that time. No one had ever swum in them again.

Peters

You move around a lot, never staying in one place for more than a few years, and yet, in some of your books—especially Crazy in Alabama—you explore social complexities against a backdrop of strong community ties. Do you, as a transient citizen, ever feel isolated from the communities you live in?

Childress

Absolutely. And I think in some way that may be why I move—to become a stranger again. That’s very much following the pattern that my family had when I grew up. My father had a job that transferred us every few years. It was like being in the army. We hated it as children, because we always had to leave our friends, and we were always the new guys in school, and just when things would be going good, you’d pick up and move and have to start all over again. But then, as adults, the three of us brothers have continued to move. Four or five years into a place and we say, “Well, I feel a little itchy now, it’s time to move on.” I think also that estrangement from the community is sort of what you seek as a writer. When you go to a place for the first time, you see things that people who have been living there for twenty years don’t see. It’s all new to you, the smells and the sounds and the kind of food and the way people talk. I still remember when I first moved to New York. It all seemed very powerful and exhausting and loud and busy and crowded. And now it’s just home. Trying to sleep without sirens going and garbage trucks at four in the morning, I’m like, I need some noise, it’s too quiet. When I start feeling too much at home in a place, then it’s time for me to leave. I think as I get older maybe that’s going to settle down. But, I don’t know, I haven’t seen much indication of that.

Kartz

Even though you keep moving, most of your books take place in the South. And you identify yourself as a southern writer—

Childress

I don’t identify myself as that, but everyone identifies me as that because most of the books I’ve written take place in the South. I come from a southern family. I’ve said being southern is like a virus––you carry it with you wherever you go. Just because you’re in Indiana doesn’t mean you’re not southern; it just means you go to the black side of town to find turnip greens. We carried our little southern household wherever we went, anywhere in the country. If I were from Kansas I’d probably be writing obsessively about Kansas. I wrote Gone for Good, which has nothing to do with the South, but its hero is a southerner, from Alabama and Louisiana. I just think of it as my country––my people—and that’s who I write about.

Actually, when I started, except for Truman Capote and Harper Lee, there really weren’t many fiction writers from Alabama. And now there are several really good younger writers coming up from there. I don’t think I had any effect on that, it’s just a generational thing. Living through the civil rights movement had a big impact not just on me but on the generation after me, the people who were younger than I was when it was going on. It continues to resonate. In the beginning, I felt like I was writing about a part of the country that no one else was writing about, because Truman Capote wasn’t writing about it anymore, and Harper Lee wasn’t. So I felt like it was my little territory. Now there are conferences on Alabama writing. That’s weird. That’s a new development in the last twenty-five years.

Peters

What does it mean to be a southern writer now?

Childress

A lot of times it means there’s a separate section in the bookstore, where they kind of ghettoize you—put you over to the side. African- American and gay and southern writing, these are ghettoized sometimes.

That’s the reason a lot of writers resist the label. If you come from the South, which is the most distinctive part of the country, you know you’re different. And the literature of the South is a different set of books than the literature of New York or California. But it’s kind of funny that nobody has conferences on midwestern writing and, in the South, there’s a conference every week on the question of, “Are we becoming too much like the rest of the country?” On the one hand, it’s a kind of ghettoization. On the other hand, it’s a really nice ghetto. Faulkner’s there, Harper Lee’s there, Flannery O’Connor’s there, Eudora Welty is there. Toni Morrison I count as a southern writer. Alice Walker’s there, Zora Neal Hurston. So, if you’re going to put me in a ghetto, I’ll take that ghetto. And I understand. Our culture’s all about subdividing us into little groups and trying to find which niche we fit in. Nobody ever considered Hemingway a Michigan writer, but if he were publishing now, he’d be considered some kind of provincial.

Kartz

You completed your undergraduate degree at the University of Alabama, but you didn’t pursue an MFA. Can you talk about the benefits and the drawbacks of not being in an MFA program?

Childress

The community I got into was journalism. I went to work for newspapers and magazines right out of school. For the next ten or twelve years, while I was writing my fiction at home, I was very much in a writing community—it was just a different kind of writing that we were doing. I feel like I wrote a million words for newspapers before I ever published a word of fiction. And I think each sentence I wrote—even if it was about a Gardendale city council meeting—was teaching me how to write. I do believe that writing is a combination of gift and craft, but I feel like practice makes you better. I think that I was a much better writer after ten years of working on deadlines and having to pump out whatever the editors told me to go cover that day. It took the ego out of the writing. You can’t have ego about your writing in a newspaper. You have a deadline. If you don’t turn the story in on time, you get fired. And that’s really motivating—to learn to sit in the chair and write.

I think sometimes in academia, inspiration is overplayed––that we have to find that moment for the muse to strike us. Well, bullshit. If you wait for the muse to strike you in the publishing business, you’re fired. Just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean you don’t have a certain duty to do your work.

The one thing about MFA programs, and that I regret I didn’t do, is read a lot. I mean I was reading, of course, all the time, but not in the way you do for school. When not in school, you tend to read more of what you like and you don’t always take on things that challenge you or that you feel are good for you. I needed to pay the bills some way and I thought that being a working writer was probably going to help me as much as doing fiction workshops. I had done four years of them at Alabama and they were great, but I kind of felt I had gotten all the juice out of them.

Kartz

You said in an interview that often your characters are much more in control of the story than you are. Nabokov said, “That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as quills. My characters are galley slaves.”

Childress

[Laughs.] Good for him.

Kartz

How do you reconcile these two statements?

Childress

Well, I didn’t make the Nabokov statement, so I don’t have to reconcile that. [Laughs.] He’s a hero of mine, and a brilliant writer, and I will guarantee you that when he started Lolita he didn’t know everything that was going to happen. Now, he would tell you that he made that happen and that he told those characters what to do. But I’d bet that, at some point, those characters became alive in his mind and were speaking dialogue to him––because that’s what they do.

When you really know a character, you know how he or she would say everything they might want to say. It’s kind of a semantic argument to say the characters did it. Of course, the characters are creations of your mind, so actually, your mind did it. I think it’s just a question of imagination. If you imagine the people to be real and you imagine them for long enough––an intense enough period of time––you come to know those imaginary people as real. And then they start doing things that you didn’t necessarily tell them to do. Now you have to give them permission to do those things. Maybe that’s what Nabokov was saying: they’re his galley slaves. If they took him in a direction he didn’t want to go, he would stop, go back and cut what he had just written and go off in another direction. So he’s definitely the captain of the ship, but I think those galley slaves sometimes grabbed hold of the rudder and steered him in a direction he didn’t think he was going.

Kartz

Regarding “Good Country People,” Flannery O’Connor said that when the wooden leg was stolen, she hadn’t known the character was going to do that, but in the end it was inevitable. Do you align more with that statement?

Childress

In my experience of writing, yes. But of course, I’m not Nabokov, so I can’t know what was going on in his head and the psychological somersaults he flipped to achieve what he put onto the page. But that sensation of Flannery’s is, to me, the sensation that I want––that sensation when I come to a moment in the story where something happens that I didn’t expect… and it seems perfect. That, to me, is the unconscious working through fiction. Some part of you prepared for that moment, but to the conscious part of your mind, it was not what you thought was going to happen.

In One Mississippi, I was about 180 pages into the first draft when I realized what was going to happen at the end. I’d had no idea. But when I went back and looked at the beginning, all the clues were already there. From the very first time you meet Tim, there’s something unsettling about him, something dark. I don’t know why I put that in there, but when I realized what was going to happen I stopped for about a month and said, I don’t want to write a book that ends with a school shooting. That was not what I had started to write. But that was what the characters did.

I don’t know if Flannery’s right or if Vlad is right, I just know that at that point, as hard as I tried to steer the galley slaves in another direction, they wanted to go where they wanted to go and I followed them. It’s a glorious moment when you’re writing a book and you reach that point where you feel like it’s telling you what’s going to happen. The story begins to write itself. That’s the moment where the writing becomes fun—instead of gutting it out to see what the hell you’re trying to do, which is what most of it’s like.

Kartz

The only two homosexuals in the novel––Tim and Eddie––kill themselves. Are you worried about the commentary this is making on homosexuality or homosexuality in the ’70s?

Childress

There were a couple others in there but you never quite realized who they were. For instance, if you read very carefully, the note that Tim left––it turns out that the guy he was at the rest stop with was Red. And there are a couple of other closeted characters that you have to go back and find for yourself. I understand that Tim and Eddie both commit suicide, and, I guess, in a way that’s a commentary on just how “nonexistent” homosexuality was in Mississippi in the 1970s.

There’s a wonderful memoir by Kevin Sessums, called Mississippi Sissy. He grew up the sissiest kid in some little Mississippi town. He went and had this whole gay life in Jackson in the ’70s, in the period of One Mississippi. I lived in Jackson in the ’70s, and, A: I didn’t know I was gay, B: I didn’t know any gay people, and C: I didn’t know there was a gay bar in Jackson, and I lived there. It was so completely closeted that unless you took that step you had no idea those people existed. It was a really different society, and I’ve read statistics that say, to this day, 30 to 40 percent of teenage suicides are closet homosexuals who can’t admit that they’re gay. And that’s now––when it’s so open. I didn’t set out or plan for those boys to meet that fate, but I think it was… God, if I tried to be out, in high school, in Mississippi? I probably would be dead in some way. I’d have either gotten killed or I’d have killed myself if I wasn’t able to pass as a “straight kid.” Some kids were just too sissy they couldn’t pass. A lot of them killed themselves or moved away.

I’ve definitely chosen, as an adult, to live in places that are a lot friendlier than that. I moved out of Alabama in 1987, and I’ve never lived there since, because I like to live in a freer place.

Tim, in One Mississippi, probably didn’t even know he was gay. Until, at some point, he had to admit to himself that A: he was, and B: he wasn’t going to change. I think that’s when he decided he’d just rather die. I hate the choice he made for himself.

Everyone says you can’t connect the gay experience with feminism, with civil rights, but it’s all the same thing—it’s all oppression and repression. I mean, you can’t pretend not to be a black person. That’s the only difference––everyone knows you are.

Peters

Crazy in Alabama later became a movie, for which you also wrote the screenplay. When you write a screenplay, what do you give up and what do you gain?

Childress

It’s a whole different medium and it was hard to learn how to do it. The studio sent me a box of scripts and the books they were based on. I spent two months reading the books and then the scripts. Some of them were great movies and some of them were really pulpy. I mean, how do you turn a Tom Clancy novel into The Hunt for Red October? I realized that the main thing you lose is like two-thirds of the story. Because if a movie’s as long as a novel, it’s going to be ten hours long. The first thing you start to think about is what to get rid of, what to throw out. And this is the reason that the book is almost always better than the movie—because the book is usually simply more than the movie. It’s more detailed, with more incidents––more complex, more subtle. If you made One Mississippi into a movie that had every flip and turn of the story, the thing would be twelve hours long and nobody would watch it.

So the first thing you have to do is stop being a novelist and become a screenwriter, which means you start looking for what you’re going to throw away. I had too many characters and too many stories going off in different directions. Then I had to look for the action that could be told in pictures. At the same time, as you’re losing a whole lot of story and you’re losing a whole lot of words, you’re gaining pictures. And so you can tell the whole story in a series of pictures.

There’s this scene in Crazy in Alabama I was proud of because I wrote it on the set like two days before we shot it. We were trying to look for a way to do that police riot at the swimming pool. A riot, by its very nature, is scattered. Something’s happening over here, and something over there. What is a visual image that could take us throughout it? And I came on the idea of focusing on the little brother of Taylor. You see him first. He’s watching the riot, then he climbs into the swimming pool and stretches out––the riot’s going on all around him. He’s just lying there, like Jesus lying in the water looking up. It said so much about the nobility of the soul of the people who were doing the protesting, and the evil going on around them. If you tried to describe that in a novel, it wouldn’t work. The words would just be spattering all around it. It’s such a simple image, that, to me, was the best moment of the movie because it was a visual distillation with no dialogue that in the book is seven pages.

I don’t know if you’ve read many film scripts, but they seem flat and the dialogue is very short. That’s because the actors and the set and the music and all this other stuff is added in to make it rich and full. That’s the hardest thing––to try to keep all that richness off the page of the script because that just distracts the director; he doesn’t need to know all that. He needs to know where they stand and what they say, and he’ll figure out the rest of it.

They’re both intriguing forms. I prefer the novel, because I get to be the director and the producer and the casting director; I don’t have to consult with anybody, and nobody can come in and cut my novel without my permission, or buy my characters. In a movie contract, they buy the right to your characters from now until the end of time—it’s stated—in any medium now existing or yet to be invented throughout the universe. And so I called my agent, and said, “I want Saturn. They can have all the other eight planets, but I’m hanging onto the Saturn rights.” He said, “That’s a deal killer.” I said, “Okay then forget it.” It’s ridiculous. They own your characters. So if they wanted to turn around and do “Crazy in Alabama 2,” and have Lucille become a black woman who moves to Detroit and works with Diana Ross—they have the perfect legal right to do it. In the novel world they can’t do that. I’m the author and I control it absolutely.

Kartz

You said once that when you’re writing novels, it’s like you’re seeing a film in your head—

Childress

We’re all poisoned by movies and television; we’ve had them since birth. I do tend to see scenes visually, and to see things in my mind, and then describe what I’m seeing in the scene. You have to use language that suggests all the senses. Not just what you see and hear, which is all a movie can do. In the book you can talk about how things taste, and how they smell and how they felt, and the temperature and all those things that are not accessible to a moviemaker. In the book, you can look at Lucille, and you can have your own picture in your mind of who she is. In a movie, it’s Melanie Griffith. So if you don’t like Melanie Griffith, you don’t like the movie. A book is a more universal thing, because your mind takes the place of all those other people that work on the movie. It fills in those gaps for you. That’s why one of the most exciting things to me is when a high school kid comes up and says, “God, it’s just like you’re a spy in our high school. That’s just what it’s like at our high school.” And then a seventy-year-old woman says, “Wow, that’s just like what it was like for me when I was in high school.” And you realize their experiences were completely different, but they projected their experiences onto yours and that’s got meaning that works for them. That’s the thing about fiction. That’s what fiction can do. I love that part.

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There is a kind of consensus among professional and amateur reviewers that Charles Baxter is a writer’s writer. Everyone says so. Baxter, who has called himself a “former poet,” is the author of five novels and four collections, including Believers, which he described to us as probably his best work. His novel The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000, and he has received National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation grants.

In an interview with the Atlantic, Baxter said, “I feel as if I’m in my family’s house when I’m writing short stories since I know where everything is. I know the logic of them so well.” But he didn’t publish a collection of stories until he was thirty-seven, in 1984. It was his first book of fiction and came on the heels of three failed attempts at novels. Baxter’s career is marked by this kind of persistence and flexibility and by a generosity that is evident in his teaching.

Unlike many writers employed at universities, Charles Baxter doesn’t complain about his day job. For many years he directed the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and he now teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he was born. He treats his teaching and mentoring of young writers as a natural extension of his vocation, and in the past twelve years he has published two exceptional books of essays on the craft of fiction, Burning Down the House (1997) and The Art of Subtext (2007). So the cumulative impact of Baxter’s work is—like that of the literary giants he cites: Stein, Brecht, Barthelme—more than the work of a prolific writer. It is the work of an artist, teacher, and scholar. We met with him at the Spokane Club during Spokane’s annual Get Lit! literary festival.

Samuel Ligon

In your writing about fiction, you talk about postmodernism and about Barthelme and about being enamored of postmodernism’s ethic or ideal. But you’re not a postmodernist writer.

Charles Baxter

No, but I once wanted to be. I wanted to be one of the writers who flies way up there and looks down at people like little dots on the map. That’s power: to think of people as little objects moving around on a chess board. That’s what a lot of postmodern writers do, though it seems unfair to Barthelme to say so. The characters don’t come to life; they have a kind of symbolic importance, but you don’t view them completely as human beings. They’re placeholders for certain ideas that the writer’s moving around.

Jonathan Frey

How’s that different from Kafka? You mentioned at your reading last night that you think Kafka is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Baxter

In Kafka you don’t even know what the system is. The characters are trying to figure out what they’re enmeshed in, and there’s an overflow of feeling—mostly claustrophobia, but it can be mixed with other emotions too. Kafka is down here with us, looking around, trying. His characters are always asking, “Where are we? What is this that I’ve gotten myself into?”

When I was trying to get my PhD diploma at Buffalo, I kept going to the registrar to find out if I was going to get my degree, the one on paper. And, though it’s a trivial example, I thought: Kafka was right about this. Every time you go to an airport, it feels as if it’s the Franz Kafka International Airport. You’ve seen that video thing in the Onion? The Franz Kafka International Airport? It’s fantastically funny.

But that’s fundamentally it: Kafka is always down here with us, and I don’t get that feeling with some of Pynchon, and I don’t get it with Gaddis or some of the others. They’re snobs, saying, “I’m looking down at this, and I’m telling you how all this works. Oh, and by the way, it’s all chaos, or it’s a system beyond our knowing. Did I forget to mention that?”

Ligon

But you use some of the structural devices that came into prominence in the time of the postmodernists—what somebody might call metafictional elements. I’m thinking of the structural devices in The Soul Thief and The Feast of Love.

Baxter

Right, that’s true. But in The Feast of Love, it just disappears. It functions as a frame, but by the time you’re on page thirty, it’s gone. I thought somebody opening that book and starting to read and seeing that there were these voices coming at them would say, “Where are these voices coming from? Who’s listening to these voices?” In The Decameron you have a similar structure of people telling each other stories, hiding from the plague. In The Canterbury Tales, they’re all on their way to Canterbury, so they’re telling each other stories. And I thought, I can’t just have these voices coming from out of nowhere. I have to have a reason for it. So there’s a guy with insomnia, he can’t sleep, he goes out to a city park in the middle of the night. And there’s somebody else there who’s got love trouble and can’t sleep, so he says, “All right, I’ll tell you my story.” And the insomniac writes it down, and that’s where the voices come from.

Frey

And the fact that the insomniac’s name is Charlie Baxter is just play?

Baxter

Yeah, it’s play. But we’re all used to that now. Philip Roth did it. It’s something we can play around with. It’s something we can do, and most readers won’t be shocked by it. Naive readers won’t like it. But it’s not all that new, this device; it’s as old as the hills.

Part II of Don Quixote begins with the false Quixote coming in. The first part of Don Quixote was such a success that another writer wrote The Further Adventures of Don Quixote, and, of course, Cervantes was outraged. So the false Quixote runs into the true Quixote, and so, to some degree, metafictional devices are as old as the novel. Writers never quite get over the pleasure of reminding their readers that it’s made up. That there’s an author behind it.

Frey

Is that related to Brecht? Or is it different?

Baxter

Brecht’s idea was that we spend so much time in capitalism, being taken in by the systems of commerce—newspapers, commercials, political advertisements—that it’s one of the tasks of art, to wake us up. To remind us that people are trying to sell us things. All the time. So, the alienation technique—as it’s called in Brecht’s term—is to make you aware of the techniques people are using to get you to think or do something in a certain way. My novel does keep reminding you that this is a novel. You are going to fall asleep into it. You are going to dream. And then I’m going to wake you up.

I think that we’re all conscious of the fact that when we enter a novel, we are going into a kind of dream, like Alice at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland reading a book and then getting drowsy and then going down the rabbit hole. Reading is like going down the rabbit hole.

A French critic said to me, “You Americans fall asleep more easily into fiction than we do.” There’s more of a rationalist tradition in France, he was saying, and they have a harder time falling into the dream of fiction than Americans do. I think his argument was that Americans fall into a dream world fairly easily.

Ligon

I hear what you’re saying about the dream, but it’s not dream logic that governs a novel. So how is that different? What kind of a dream is it?

Baxter

It’s half-waking. When you’re reading a book, these characters are in the scene and they’re talking to each other, and you’re reading it, and reconstructing something in your head in a twilight way. And if I write, “She walked in wearing a blue blouse, and a white skirt, and she had a red pin in her hair. And she turned to the right…,” you’re reconstructing this. You’re imagining it. You are reimagining it, and it’s not a dream, but you’re participating in the story, aren’t you?

Jane Smiley and I had an argument about this a few years ago in Houston. I was reading a paper about how faces are represented in fiction, and she raised her hand and said, “I don’t think you see anything when you read a book.” And I said, “No, I’m sorry. I do.” You say, “A woman wearing a blue blouse and a white skirt, wearing running shoes, came into the room,” I’m going to see her with…a frown on her face. I’m going to reconstruct her.

Ligon

Unlike Barthelme’s metafiction—like “The School”—yours is character-driven. I don’t think “The School” is a character-driven story. Much of his fiction asks us to reconsider how fiction works. What does drive “The School”? What is “The School” interested in?

Baxter

What drives a lot of Barthelme’s stories is the way that we’re caught in a world of representations. Everywhere you’re surrounded by representations that are taking us over. It’s like product placement has entered our lives. So Barthelme’s characters are always asking, “What am I doing here? What am I doing in this school? What am I doing in this house?” Barthelme’s always asking, “How did I end up here? Why am I in this world? Why am I wearing this Campbell’s Soup can illustration on my necktie?” Why? Because the representation of the soup can is going on in this world, and I guess it’s on my necktie.

What drives Barthelme is ideas—ideas and existential unhappiness. That’s what motivates Barthelme’s characters. They’re ill suited to live in the world. Barthelme always felt as if he wasn’t suited to life in the world. Not this world. That particular sadness animates his stories.

Melina Rutter

If you’re not a postmodernist, where do ideas fit into the process? For instance, in First Light, you use the ideas of astrophysics, and I’m wondering if you made a conscious decision to have those ideas inform, in some ways, the structure of the novel. Or if that just arose.

Baxter

It arose. Because the character I first imagined was Dorsey; I saw her pasting stars—little adhesive stars—on the ceiling of her bedroom. And I thought, Oh, she’s going to grow up to be an astrophysicist. Then I thought, That’s too bad for me. I don’t know anything about astrophysics. I had to go into research mode to find out about that. And then because that was what she was doing and researching, it made narrative sense for the book to go backwards in time. I could get this whole historical, cultural level into the book having to do with the atom bomb. In an odd way, physics was the grounding of that book and took you into a realm that was somewhat away from the family structure of Hugh and Dorsey together. It opened it up for me.

Rutter

I felt oriented when I was reading it, but I would think that there’s a risk involved with including such content.

Baxter

Fiction readers want to find out about stuff. You tell them, as Philip Roth did, how gloves are made, leather gloves. People love to find those things out. If you tell them something about the nature of astrophysics or even certain kinds of fireworks, readers love that. The factual basis has always been part of the novel: how you do something, where something came from. Nicholson Baker’s first novel, The Mezzanine, is full of this kind of material, and I wanted to give First Light a doubled kind of perspective.

But, at the same time, it’s a very emotional novel. The material facts, I hope, balance out the emotion, particularly Hugh’s idea of being lost in his own light. Dorsey has found her own light, but Hugh is married and has children. He’s one of these guys who was a jock in high school and was popular with girls, and then he marries and settles down, and he doesn’t know why this life hasn’t been as good for him as it was in high school. Once he becomes an adult, it’s a mystery. Dorsey had an unhappy life in high school. She’s one of those smart girls who frightens everybody, but she grows into her life, and she’s okay with it. For me, it’s very emotional. It’s soaked in feeling.

Frey

Why are so many of your books about love?

Baxter

For some people, it’s just not an important subject. It’s something that they take for granted, and it’s something that they can get past. It has not been something that I have ever been able to take for granted. My father died when I was a baby. My mother was unstable. I always knew where the next meal was coming from, but I developed what therapists call hypervigilance. The question of whom I would love and who would love me became almost a matter of life and death for me. Almost by necessity, given the nature of my early life, I got attuned, I got obsessed by it. When The Feast of Love came out, I made statements of this sort, and some readers said, “But this is not mature love in your novel.” Well, of course it isn’t. It’s not stable. The kind of love that’s portrayed in that book has to do with infatuation and instability, and that’s the reflection of somebody who has never found that landscape to be particularly stable.

Rutter

Brecht’s idea of the destruction of the fourth wall is theater theory. Can you talk about how theater has influenced the ways you think about writing and literary theory?

Baxter

One of the reasons theater has come into my thinking to such a degree is that I noticed that in the stories I was getting in my workshop, and actually, in some of the fiction written by contemporaries of mine, the stories are not particularly dramatic. As if drama were some kind of embarrassment. We can all talk about character; we can talk about setting; we can talk about dialogue; but if you begin to say, “Well this isn’t very dramatic,” it’s as if you farted, and you’ve said absolutely the wrong thing. But I think that we have to get back to the idea that, if people are going to read these books and stories, we have to consider the dramatic elements that underpin the great books. I noticed, some years ago, when my students at the University of Michigan were taking corollary classes, the ones who were taking acting classes often seemed to improve their writing by having gone through the techniques of learning characterization, and scene-building, and the structure of the play. So I began to read the work of my students and think, You know, this is under-staged. We don’t know where these bodies are in space. We don’t know whether they’re turning to or away from each other. Often it’s not even notated whether these people are listening to each other, whether they’re looking at each other, what they’re doing with their hands.

Now, it’s true you can overdirect. I know of one writer, a friend of mine who’s a very fastidious writer, but when you read her work, you’re getting too much of the line readings, and you’re getting too much of the tiny details. And you think, C’mon, get on with the story.

Focusing on that kind of minute detail only works when the psychological atmosphere gets really congested. If the couple is about to break up with each other and they’re meeting for coffee, everything they do becomes important. Like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” He’s trying to convince her to have an abortion, and she hates the way he’s doing that. So Hemingway pays attention to everything they do in that scene. I mean, you could put it right on stage. I don’t think that’s overdirected because the emotions are so thick. If they were just talking about whether they were going to get on the train or not, it’d be unbearable. There has to be something big in the scene, emotionally, for that kind of thing to work.

Ligon

The kind of dramatic action you’re talking about, that you see missing, is that plot?

Baxter

Yeah, it’s plot, and it’s getting a character out there performing an action that may result in bad outcomes. I don’t know about you, but I read fiction because I want to see bad stuff happening; I can’t get enough of it. I want to see people misbehaving and getting themselves into real trouble, serious trouble. That’s what I go to fiction for. That and the sentences and the sense that I’m learning something about people.

Rutter

Is the antagonist that you see missing always taking the form of a person, a villain?

Baxter

Oh, sure. You have an antagonist in you. I have one in me. We’re all self-divided. The antagonist within ourselves is that part of us that wants to indulge in an impulse of some kind that leads to various addictive behaviors. The antagonist can be located inside the self very nicely. I like it when it’s externalized, but it doesn’t have to be. When it’s externalized, it’s almost always easier to write because then the dramatic materials take over and you, the writer, don’t have to explain everything. And of course, an antagonist can be a force in the world.

Rutter

Like the capitalist system?

Baxter

Yeah, or fascism. Or militarism. Or environmentalism.

Greed is probably one of the most powerful emotions. I think it’s more powerful than lust, I really do. It makes lust look kind of innocent. They’re related, but lust dies and greed goes on until…forever it seems.

Ligon

In Burning Down the House, you say that you’re nostalgic, as a writer, for mindful villainy. What does that mean?

Baxter

In Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, there are two characters who are down on their luck and poor. Over here there’s a rich, beautiful young woman who’s dying, and the poor woman says to her boyfriend, “I know what you should do. You’re handsome; you should go over there, and you should woo her and get her money.” That’s mindful villainy. In a way it’s rational, and people are deliberately making choices that they know are not quite moral. Those sorts of situations have an overtone of melodrama to them, but they’re interesting because they reveal a lot about the way we behave.

In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, there’s a character who reads her stepdaughter’s diary, and thinks, I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but nothing’s going to stop me because I want to know what she’s thinking. Oh Jesus! Look what she’s thinking. Small things like that. You know, it’s often the small things: We violate somebody’s privacy. It’s really revelatory. You don’t have to run somebody over in the street to practice mindful villainy. It’s the small items that accumulate that are really interesting for the fiction writer.

We see less of it now, and I think there are two reasons. We have a form of self-righteousness that results in people thinking, Oh, I didn’t really do that. Or, The outcome was good, so I really didn’t do anything wrong. After all, if we tortured people and got information out of them to prevent more violence against us, it wasn’t really wrong, was it? And I think the other reason is that young people going through writing programs right now are largely decent people who are kind of bookish, and very observant. And so, we’re not used to action. We’re used to observing. It’s hard to get these mindful actors into our fiction because many of us are not like that.

This also goes to the question of plot. When you’re young, you don’t like the idea of plot because it seems to lead toward something that becomes inevitable after a while, and nobody likes the idea of inevitability when they’re young. You like the idea of everything being open to possibilities. It’s that progressive idea too: that things can always change. After a while you realize things can’t always change.

Frey

So, do we like inevitability more when we’re older?

Baxter

You come to accept it. You don’t like it. Trust me, you don’t like it.

Ligon

But we do like it in story. You’ve said that the sudden recognition of inevitability makes a piece beautiful.

Baxter

Yeah, but you don’t want the inevitability to be built into it and completely predictable. Sam Shepard said about his plays that what he really was striving for was a combination of surprise and inevitability, that the best plots bring you to that particular combination. You think, What a surprise! I should have seen it coming.

Ligon

O’Connor talked about that inevitability with “Good Country People.”

Baxter

Her stories are interesting in that way. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the story starts out when the grandmother says, “Look here in the paper. It says the Misfit has got himself loose.” Then the family gets in the car, and they’re headed out on the trip. And where are they? They’re near Toombsboro. They’re near Toombsboro! You can’t say you weren’t warned. Toombsboro, and the Misfit drives up in a hearse.

If you read all of Flannery O’Connor’s stories in a row, some of them can look as if….I mean, their plots are great. Somebody’s always being run over by a tractor, or having their legs stolen, or drowning in a river, or hanging themselves from a rafter in the attic. But after a while some of it does feel….

Ligon

Manipulated?

Baxter

I’m not saying.

Ligon

You wrote in Burning Down the House that the truth writers are after can be dramatic only if it has been forgotten first. That the story, in other words, pulls something contradictory and concealed out of its hiding place. How does forgetting or concealment create drama or drive fiction?

Baxter

Suppose Grandma is dying, and you have a scene in which she’s in bed and she’s dying. We have all read scenes like this. When she’s dying, certain events of a sort are happening to her, but it’s not dramatic until you bring up something important. So, in Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Grandma is dying, but actually what’s happening as she dies is that these layers are being peeled back. Suddenly she’s four years old again, and it’s a four-year-old who’s lying in bed, dying. She never stopped being the four-year-old she once was. She never stopped being the sixteen-year-old she once was. Those things are still inside of her. We all forget that, and Katherine Anne Porter reminds us, so that scene becomes interesting and dramatic. We’re all, to some degree, writing about things that are familiar to our readers, and what you have to do is find the off-kilter detail that makes it come alive again, the part that nobody else had noticed.

Frey

This kind of critical approach—talking about antagonists and plot and drama like you do in Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext—this isn’t the way we normally hear contemporary writers and critics talk about writing.

Baxter

What we’re talking about this morning are critical terms that academics are not especially interested in using. This is formalist criticism, and they would all say the discipline has gone past that.
In formalist criticism, you’re looking at a piece of fiction, and you’re asking what elements it has in it formally: how it’s shaped, how it’s put together, how that shaping—that form—contains the subject matter. So: form and subject matter and the way that they define each other. To a degree, as a writing teacher, I’m a formalist. I’ll ask, “How is this story shaped? To what degree is it made out of scenes, expository material, transitions? What seems to be its central trajectory? What are the subplots?” I mean, that’s all formalist.

Now, mostly, our cultural studies are in the wake of Foucault and French theory, but even that’s beginning to fade from the scene. The focus there—I can’t summarize Foucault—but the focus there is how literature is a form of cultural production that mirrors or duplicates power relationships, how literature is an arm of power that has been deployed in culture.

Frey

Where does formalist thinking fit into the writing process?

Baxter

You can’t think about these matters when you’re putting your draft together.

Ligon

You’ve said that, in the context of initial composition, the act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation. It sounds like you’re talking about mystery there. What does one consent to?

Baxter

The original act of writing, sitting down and trying to get a story or some characters on the page, is still to me a complete mystery. How it’s done. How I do it. How anybody else does it. The more I write, the more I think that everything you’ve done up to the point that you’re writing isn’t much help. You always start out in the dark. When you sit down and you start writing, you agree with yourself that you’re going to make mistakes, that you’re going to blunder your way through the damn thing, and you’re just going to give yourself a lot of permission to get it done any way you possibly can. The critical skills that you have, that all comes later.

When I’m writing I’m not thinking about anything. When I’m writing a first draft particularly, I’m not thinking anything but, Who are these people? What are they saying? What do they want? Where are they going? I don’t even ask, Why are they interesting to me? I just write them. I have a friend who read two of my recent stories and said, “Why are you writing about these unpleasant people?” And I said to him, “Because they interest me. I can’t help it who I’m interested in. If I’m interested in scumbags, those are the people I have to write about. I’m sorry if you don’t like it.”

Frey

It seems that young writers can become enamored of the initial creation, the mystery, that sort of unnamable aspect that you’re getting at. They’re enamored of that, and so they turn around and eschew formalism later in the process.

Baxter

When you’re a young writer and it’s going well in your first draft, it feels sacred; it feels holy; it feels like something that shouldn’t be interfered with. It’s hard to break through that and say, “Yes, I was in the zone, but I also made mistakes. So the first draft is not as effective, not as pointed, not as clear as it should be. I need to go back and fix it.” To the degree that young writers don’t like revision, it’s because that initial state feels so wonderful, as if nothing could possibly be wrong in the way it was coming out, given the way you felt about it. Which is why it’s a good idea to put it in the refrigerator, and then go back in a few days or weeks. You have to get away from the spell you cast over yourself.

You get some distance on it. Then if you go back and it’s still casting the same spell over you, that’s a good sign. You can start to muck around with it, but you have to pay attention to those moments where you think, You know, I’m a little bored. This scene is a little boring. I didn’t think it was boring when I first wrote it, but it seems boring now. That’s when it’s time to go to work.

Ligon

In Burning Down the House, you write that “When writers over-parent their characters, they understand them too quickly. Such characters aren’t contradictory or misfitted. The writer has decided what her story is about too early.” Why is it a problem to understand characters too quickly, to decide what a story is about too early?

Baxter

It makes the story over-determined and the character over- determined. Before very long, as a reader, you think, I know what this character’s going to do. It flattens the characters. You say, “Oh, Jaime, she’s the quiet one. She’s the one who always worries things.” So in the story all she does is sit in the corner and worry things. That’s understanding her too fast. It lessens the interest in the story. It’s not just over-parenting, it’s bad parenting, because it stereotypes your own children and turns them into flat characters.

Ligon

And what about understanding a story too early? Do you ever understand stories?

Baxter

We have undergraduates all the time who sit down and write stories, and they attempt to prove that this fraternity boy, Jake, is a cheap bastard who really doesn’t care about women. The story’s there to prove that point. Most writers go through a stage in which they write stories that are point-making. One of the best things to ever happen to me was that I gave one of my stories to a poet I know, and she drew an arrow to the opening paragraph, and said, “Too point-making.” Often you don’t see it when you’re doing it yourself.

Regarding my own stories, I don’t always understand them. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think, Well, this is about that particular subject, that particular trouble. But I don’t think so until I’m halfway or three quarters through the story. Sometimes I’ll come to the end of the story and think, What the fuck is that about? I don’t mind that feeling.

Frey

If formalism is beneficial not in initial drafting but revision, is Foucault valuable to writers ever?

Baxter

I think so. Foucault was always asking, “Who has the power here? How did he or she get it? How is he or she using it? And what bigger things does that person tell us about power in the culture?” The easy way to summarize this is by saying, “Do you think George W. Bush just happened to be this guy who was elected president, or was George W. Bush a symptom of something?” If we say George W. Bush was a symptom of something, then that sort of sends you in the direction of Foucault, who will say, “Yes, of course he was a symptom of something, and we need to talk about what. What is he a symptom of?”

Ligon

What was he a symptom of?

Baxter

Oh, let’s not go there. [Laughs.] For me they were the years of nightmare, his presidency. I was in France when he was elected and somebody interviewed me and said, “Oh, it makes no difference who the president of your country is.” And I said, “No, you’re wrong. This is a catastrophe.”

Rutter

How do you reconcile the reality of an individual being caught in a power structure with your idea of a victim narrative, where characters never take responsibility for anything?

Baxter

It’s irreconcilable. You can’t. I’m saying two contradictory things at once. And both of them are true, I believe. We’re individuals; we have agency; we can change things. That’s a politically progressive idea: Everybody can do something. Barthelme said, “There are always paths, if you can find them, there is always something to do.” I love that. I believe it’s true. I also believe that we are inside a vast system, and the system has tremendous power over us.

I went to the Republican convention in St. Paul last summer, and if you’ve never seen the machinery of the state—and I don’t mean the state of Minnesota, I mean “The State”—guys in riot gear and tear gas canisters and trucks. Guys on horseback with revolvers. I’m not naive, but I’d never seen it. I’d never seen guys look at me like that. It’s a reminder that you’re a speck of dust to them, a dangerous speck of dust, and they want to put you in your place—the dustbin.

I think all of us feel both things at one time or the other. Sometimes we think, This whole thing is too fucking big for me. There’s nothing I can do about it. At other times, we think, I’m going out there. I mean, politically, I’m going to do this. I can do this; I can do that. I believe that I am able to shape my life.

Going back to the victim narrative, certain political or economic systems are more likely to breed that narrative. Totalitarian systems do it. The great fiction of the Soviet era is largely about people caught up in the Soviet system. To the degree that state power makes itself obviously felt or corporate power makes itself felt, the victim narrative becomes visible. Catch-22 is a great novel of being caught up in a military command structure during war. Heller’s next novel, also a great novel, Something Happened, is about being caught up in a corporate structure. People are paying a lot of attention to Bolaño right now because he seems to be interested in the kinds of political structures that were arising in South America.

Rutter

Do you view your writing as a political act?

Baxter

Sometimes. Shadow Play was a very political book. The novella Believers is political. There are parts of Saul and Patsy that I believe are political in the sense that the book, in its second half, is about the problem of who will take care of the kids who are under-parented, whom no one has taken care of. What’s going to happen to these kids? That book is also about the political nature of grieving, and how important it is to grieve and not just react with violence. I thought that one of the things that happened to this country after 9/11 was that we went into attack mode without grieving first. That made its way into Saul and Patsy. I think that my work is political, maybe by implication, if not directly.

Frey

Last night you mentioned that your first three attempted novels were conceptual—avant-garde, you said—and that that was the problem. You said that the experiments of the avant-garde were fine at the time but they’re over now. So is that whole movement dead, or is there space for that kind of experimentation?

Baxter

There’s a book by a critic named Paul Mann, called Theory-death of the Avant-garde. His argument is that the avant-garde has suffered a theory death, that every time people talk about experiments now, they’re basically talking about modernist revival. The kinds of experiments that they do are no longer experiments. These experiments have already been done. Some of them have succeeded, others haven’t. This isn’t to say that there isn’t something new that you can do with a novel. There is always something new you can do. But that particular idea of the avant-garde, stretching say, from 1900, before the first world war, to Samuel Beckett and the sort of allied experiments and abstractionism in painting, I think that’s over. I think we’re in a post-avant-garde era. I don’t think you can do something to a text conceptually that somebody hasn’t already done.

Frey

So experimentation is sort of like a closed system that happened for a while and now it’s….

Baxter

So you’re Gertrude Stein, and it’s around 1914 and you’re interested in what happens if you free sequence structures from narrative necessity and some of the words from their word-locks. You sit down and you write Tender Buttons. And people are shocked. Actually, you can go into an undergraduate class today with Tender Buttons and the kids will still be shocked. That’s kind of great. And you can take William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch into an undergraduate class, and they’ll get upset. You can take Lolita in, and they’ll be upset.

But for those of us who have sort of tried to keep track of what’s happened, somebody comes along and says, “I’m going to write something experimental,” and it looks like Gertrude Stein. I just think that’s like redecorating this room in the form of art deco and saying, “This is contemporary.” It’s not contemporary; it’s art deco. So, I just don’t think that the forces that gave the avant-garde its particular energy, aesthetically, are there. And it’s partly of the nature of capitalism to absorb everything you can think of and use it to its own purposes.

Ligon

What forces were driving the avant-garde?

Baxter

In the early part of the century it had everything to do with the freeing of words from sequence structures and what we took to be their obligations to meaning, in the same way that figurative painting gave way to non-figurative painting ideas of what the picture plane is. It also had to do with freeing narratives from actions and events.

The last section of Tender Buttons begins, “Act so that there is no use in a center.” And then it goes off into this giant coda. Stein concludes that with “all of this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.”

“To know to know to love her so. Four saints prepare for saints. It makes it well fish. Four saints, it makes it well fish. Four saints prepare for saints it makes it well well fish it makes it well fish prepare for saints. In narrative prepare for saints. Prepare for saints.” Which is from Four Saints in Three Acts. It’s great. It’s music, and it has nothing to do with
fish. Well, maybe it does.

Ligon

And it has nothing to do with rational meaning?

Baxter

No, it comes to you in some other way. The last time I taught Four Saints in Three Acts, I had two kids in the class who were in a relationship, and they were painting the apartment they lived in. Over the weekend, he would sit on the floor reading Four Saints in Three Acts to her while she was painting, and then she got tired and she would sit on the floor and read Four Saints to him. It’s like the radio going in the background. It’s really nice to have words used like that. It’s a release from “John came into the room pointing a gun at Maria.” You get tired of shit like that. You want to hear something like Gertrude Stein. “For a long time being one being living, he was trying to be certain whether he had been wrong in doing what he was doing. And when he couldn’t”—this is Matisse, “The Portrait of Matisse”—“and when he could not come to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing, when he could not absolutely come to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing, then he knew he was a great one. And he certainly was a great one.”

I love it. I just love it. But she did it. She did it and it’s kind of unreproduceable.

Ligon

Is she saying to release yourself from the rational coating of the language?

Baxter

Yes. Yes.

Ligon

And one can still do that….

Baxter

But it’s not an experiment anymore. We’ve got it. It’s ours. You can do anything with it that you want to. Gertrude Stein has started to be incorporated the way that all the other great writers of the past have been incorporated. I used a lot of Stein in The Soul Thief, and I used her in that story called “Winter Journey.” The ending is right out of Stein. I couldn’t go on my whole life writing like that. But I’m so glad she happened. She’s like this crazy aunt who gives you things.

Rutter

How do your teaching and writing inform each other?

Baxter

I think they feed into each other. I don’t think that I would teach books in the way that I do if I hadn’t also written them and thought about how they’re put together. I don’t think I would be able to go into a workshop and help my students critique each other’s manuscripts if I hadn’t also written and thought about the problems they’re up against. I don’t know that I could become a full-time writer anymore. I once thought that was all I wanted to do, but I like going into classes. I like talking about books. I like teaching workshops because I think they’re worthwhile. I know there’s a line of thought that says we’ve all crippled ourselves by doing all this teaching, that we should have written many more books than we have. But I don’t think productivity is a value in and of itself. I just don’t. In America, in capitalism, you often think, the more the better. I don’t think so. I never did.

Rutter

So, is this approach to the writing life an act of dissent? A response to the capitalist culture?

Baxter

It can be. But it’s not the solution.

It’s not a solution, but I’m not sure art can ever be a solution. It’s a place where you go for what you can’t get elsewhere. But I don’t think art will save us. Art will not save us from capitalism, or, really, from anything. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

---

Fady Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in Houston, but he isn’t generally described as Texan. His parents were born in Palestine and, besides the United States, his father’s career as a professor took the Joudah family to Libya and Saudi Arabia. Fady Joudah continues to lead a life of international engagement. He has practiced medicine in Zambia and Darfur, with Doctors Without Borders, and in what he describes as a “war zone” in Texas, the emergency room of a veterans hospital.

Joudah became well known in the literary world somewhat suddenly when, in 2008, his first book, The Earth in the Attic, was published as the winner of the Yale Younger Prize. That same year, The Butterfly’s Burden, his translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, won the Society of Authors’ Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. If I Were Another, Joudah’s second translation of Darwish’s work, was released in October 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

About The Earth in the Attic, Louise Glück writes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of the conception is inescapable. Fathers and brothers become prophets, hypothesis becomes dream, simple details of landscape transform themselves into emblems and predictions. The book is varied, coherent, fierce, tender: impossible to put down , impossible to forget. It will make itself felt.”

As a Palestinian-American, and having worked extensively with refugees around the world, Joudah expresses the sense of displacement poignantly, while offering hope through his view of its universality. In his poem “Proposal,” we see the displaced re-placed in disorienting, often alienating contexts: “I think of a little song and / How there must be a tree”; “We left our shoes behind and fled. / We left our scent in them / Then bled out our soles”; and “God reels the earth in when the sky rains / Like fish on a wire.” But it is the constant shifting, which the sea seems to do best, that offers the promise of survival:

And the sea, each time it reaches the shore,
Becomes a bird to see of the land
What it otherwise wouldn’t.
And the wind through the trees
Is the sea coming home.

Poetry, like the sea, offers accessibility to the things most longed for, as Joudah expresses in a piece he published in the Kenyon Review, “In Memory of Mahmoud Darwish,” in which he addresses Darwish: “I would memorize and forget you, tuck you in deep hiding places of my soul, as if I were slowly saturating my being with your seas…sea, that word that also stands for prosody in Arabic.”

We met with Joudah, during the annual AWP Conference, in the Chicago Hilton, where we discussed spiders, playing with time, and “one of the best-kept American secrets.”

SHIRA RICHMAN

I’d like to start with a question about the title of your book, The Earth in the Attic. As humans, our lives revolve around the earth, yet in this book the earth is relegated to an isolated, confined, but elevated place—the attic. Can you talk about how you happened upon this beautiful, strange metaphor?

FADY JOUDAH

It’s a metaphor that comes out of a simile that is in one of the poems in the book, “Along Came a Spider.” As the poem indicates, I happened on it because in one of the refugee settlements where I served, we would wake up an amazing plethora of spider webs after night rain. And spider webs disappear very quickly when the sun scorches them and the moisture evaporates. So it was an amazing scene to drive in the Jeep toward the clinic every morning during the rainy season and see the earth like an attic, in the sense that it was filled with spider webs.

As that poem, “Along Came a Spider,” addresses, it was for me the whole idea that the displaced people of the world, the stateless people of the world, or even the non-citizen citizens of the world—if you want to expand it beyond the boundaries of of governments, nation-states, and refugees—are in the attic. As you say, it is maybe, physically, a higher place. But not in all places is the attic a higher place. In some cultures the attic is a separate room, not necessarily a separate floor as we have in many of our homes. Nevertheless, it is just the idea that you store something you don’t want to throw away, your sense of existence—you store it and ignore it. Only when you move from that house do you check what you left in the attic and see what you want to take with you or throw away. It was that kind of negligence that I was after.

RICHMAN

Were you also thinking about the story of when spider webs hid Muhammad by covering the mouth of the cave and saving his life? Is there something especially treasured about spider webs?

JOUDAH

What interests me is: How does one divert his gaze to nature, without addressing nature as something separate from what we call human progress? Living where I was—I don’t like to name the place and I’m going to get to that—we were surrounded by spiders and other insects. You live comfortably with them. If you see a spider in your house, you don’t call the fire department. So I found myself roommating with spiders or living with spiders and that sent me to the childhood story about Muhammad and then to ideas of identity and spirituality and religion. And that also sent me to another concept, which is the very distinct reality that an Arab or a Muslim in the English language is and has been persistently dehumanized, really.

I say this with particular care, not to necessarily make that identity holy by virtue of an absolute sense of victimhood, because no victim is necessarily a saint and there is no such thing as a race of victims. But I do think there is an arc in the poem that tries to address the humanity of the name, beyond the jargon of history. There’s also a particular slippery slope in the poem I’d like to address about revolutionary ideas in general. I was trying to create, revolutionize, introduce the concept of displacement of the refugee as that which sends us into a new era of hope and “progress,” because it is that sense of horror as byproduct of the nation-state that will probably get us past this limitation of the nation-state and its concept of citizenry and so forth.

In a sense, all religions, when they arose, were modern, revolutionary; they broke with the past, and they advanced the people that initially jumped on the ship. They advanced people, whether or not they were monotheistic. Then myths and traditions and rituals take place. I went far to try to reengage the concept of modernity through the refugee. It’s a bit problematic because if you are a refugee or a stateless person or a displaced person, it does not necessarily mean you are some form of saint, whatever that means. But I think we don’t have enough recognition of the victim as a victim first and foremost. And there’s always a tendency toward apologetic that end up dehumanizing victims more and more.

REBECCA MORTON

Yesterday, at your reading, you mentioned that you work to not abstract people’s suffering.

JOUDAH

I think we all walk around with a filtered vision of other people’s suffering, and naturally we cannot preoccupy ourselves with it too much if we are going to go on with our daily lives, nor should we to a large extent. But I think that people’s suffering becomes a matter of image­-intensive desensitization. I think this is particularly the case for us in the U.S., because we are among the five percent of people in the world who have access to the Internet, to movies, to the digital age, and so forth. We think this access is actually the norm, because each of us has whatever phone we have that we can’t operate and laptops and so forth. I see the importance of universalizing suffering. One does not necessarily need to carry the banner of each trauma in the world to at least remain cognizant that suffering which plagues us all is really in large part a product of the abstraction of some people’s humanity and not others’.

Some people are seen as fully human, so their suffering is something we connect with and make holy, and other suffering is just racialized or what have you. There is—I think in Darfur—a stunning example of an entire movement that was and still is obsessed with naming the atrocities, and it is unfortunate because it does nothing for the people of Darfur. Even if the naming stuck, it would still do nothing for the people of Darfur. What remains of that “game of the name” is basically racial politics. I was shocked about this because I was there and suffering was far beyond the pettiness that we think of in our important intellectual skin here in the U.S. We’re always the interventionists; we’re always the ones who are able to do something about things. But the suffering I witnessed was beyond all this jargon.

Theodor Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia something called The Paragraph. You won’t find it in all editions of Minima Moralia, but there’s a section in the book Can One Live After Auschwitz? called The Paragraph, and he basically talks about the term, the aporia, the paradox, or the unsolvability of naming something and what happens to the name, and he was specifically referring to the UN charter on genocide. It’s a fascinating precedent in the ’40s—around sixty years ago—about how this whole idea of naming genocide will eventually turn into a game of names. After what point does suffering on a mass scale deserve no name and become something that has to be addressed, or at least recognized, by everybody?

I go back to the concept of the universality of suffering. The answer to this for some people is: Well, we’ve decided in international law, which is an important thing if it is at least adhered to and approved—and that is nor the case—that if it’s genocide, we will intervene. The game of the name is to do enough to where those who know how to play with the law—whether they wrote the law or know how to play with the wording—go far enough in their atrocities not to have it called genocide.

So what happens? Ethnic cleansing is, in many people’s minds, an early stage of genocide. So do you not intervene there? What about civil war that is so horrific in its detail, in the Congo, or in Angola when they had their civil war, or in Sri Lanka, or in places that didn’t have civil war—what the Indonesian government did in East Timor? How can you claim that there is a holiness of suffering more important than another or even a legality of suffering? How can you turn such massive suffering into a classification? And whatever answer you give, we have enough history to show us that we know what happens with the politicization of suffering. It dehumanizes the victims repeatedly.

I’m not necessarily saying that we should reduce our threshold for intervention. I’m not necessarily sure that the word “intervention” is the modum operandum here for me, but I think what interests me the most is: Are we truly willing to recognize, first and foremost, suffering, without gaming the name? And then, if we get to that point, what happens afterward? Because I think it would be, hopefully, a brighter moment.

REBECCA HALONEN

How do you understand the role of a poet in all this? What is the poet’s duty?

JOUDAH

I don’t think that writing the poems themselves has to address these issues necessarily, but I do think that one has to be engaged, as a whole person, with such things, to be open to them and courageous enough to recant one’s errors of judgment regarding a larger humanity. I say these words as though I’ve reached this state, but I’m very far from it.

I can’t say that poets should do this or write that. It’s an art form; it’s an imaginative state of being that dabbles with time, and it cannot necessarily be limited to certain concepts. There’s a lot more to poetry and art than the drama of American family life or the politics of refugees. There’s room for both ends of the spectrum, I think.

Bertrand Russell engaged himself as a literary man and a morally committed person. For instance, many of us don’t know that the Russell Tribunal (after Russell’s death) for human rights declared the U.S. action in Vietnam to be genocide. And here’s a man who was celebrated in the English world and the Western world and the world over, won the Nobel Prize and whatever. It is not necessary to say that the U.S. has to be punished or not punished. I’m not even getting there. All I’m saying is that the Tribunal’s declaration should be recognized. Again, until we recognize such things, morality becomes a political game.

A poet should be engaged wholly with such morally difficult questions, being very careful and aware of the slippery slope of proximity to power. You don’t want to raise a banner. We can all get a little too passionate and find out twenty years later that we actually got a little too intense about an ideal or an ideology and ended up as fascist as those we were professing against. But we do have examples of people like Bertolt Brecht or Walter Benjamin who were Marxists and had no trouble backing away from Marxism, when it stood as a political regime they recognized as a problem.

A poet has to be fully engaged, but also has to be careful of the dangers of ideology. I think a poet should struggle for a form of moral and cognitive independence from the jargon of politics or history.

HALONEN

Do you think political poetry is attempting to do that?

JOUDAH

I don’t like the term political poetry. I think it is demeaning, and probably a reflection of certain problems within the literary canon and its relationship to power establishments. It’s convenient to call something political poetry, because it seems to deflect how the poetry establishment itself is deeply embedded, naturally or otherwise, within the larger political system of power, and I think it’s essentially a description as full of hot air as truly propagandist poets are.

There is no such thing as political poetry and non-political poetry. There’s good poetry and bad poetry. Whether good poetry happens to be about your dog or about war—it doesn’t matter to me. But anyway, there’s good poetry. And good poetry is not simply defined by form and theme. There’s a larger human engagement that should be addressed within it.

MORTON

You touched on this before, but I’d like to return to naming. There are no place names—or very few place names—in your book, and because of this, I think the reader is a little unsure about how to inhabit the poems. It feels a little like we, as readers, not being placed, are in a sort of exile. I wonder about exile and the position of the outsider in the poems.

JOUDAH

I have to answer in two parts. I think that refusing to name the place is because of the tendency toward sensationalizing the locale, and that distracts from the suffering and the humanity of others. People refer to Darfur in my book of poems, and I insist on not mentioning which parts of the poems speak of Palestine and which speak of the Congolese and Angolan refugees I took care of in Zambia. But it’s interesting that some people feel a particular sense of comfort in mentioning Darfur, and that’s their problem, not mine.

There’s a lot of stuff that merges with so many other states of being. I hated the idea that people would say, ” Did you hear what he wrote about in Zambia?” And it’s not necessarily about Zambia. It’s about the human condition.

There’s no doubt that identifying myself as a Palestinian rubs many people the wrong way. The information is also utilized by people to ends I’m not interested in whatever those ends are. You mention the word “Palestinian,” and you get people standing on either side of the aisle. I’m not interested in that in my poetry—maybe in some other arena, but not in my poetry. Sometimes it’s comical to me to hear the commentary or to read reviews because some people are trying to dabble with how to make sense of political views in the book. Actually, what they’re trying to do is make sense of their own political views or lack thereof, not necessarily the poetry that I’m trying to write.

As for exile, I think it’s the state of the poet, period, whether it’s internal exile or external exile, and in most cases it’s both, which I think is also a state of the human condition. I think we all feel internally exiled from ourselves or even our loved ones. You wake in the morning and you’re tired of going to work. You put on a particular persona when you’re at work, and it’s different when you’re at home and it’s different when you’re with your mother or your father or your wife, husband, and so forth. Sometimes the pressures of life make you feel like you’re far from who you think you are or who you aspire to be or all these things that we grapple with in modern day psychology. Then there’s the external exile, which goes back to the original point that I mentioned—the idea of one of the syndromes of our contemporary existence: What does it mean to be a citizen?

MORTON

I read that you began writing during your residency. What was it that you wanted or needed in poetry during that time?

JOUDAH

Chinua Achebe said something about how you write because you have a story to tell. I have a story to tell; I could have written novels or I could have written essays, but why did I write poetry? I don’t think anyone knows how to answer that question. I just think it’s some little twist in the brain, that I’m inclined to the rhythms and patterns of poetry as opposed to other methods of linguistic expression.

HALONEN

Do you write in Arabic?

JOUDAH

No. My relationship to Arabic has become quite automatic. There are many instances where I am probably writing something in English directly from Arabic, not being conscious of it at the moment, but when I put it down on paper I realize exactly where the syntax came from, exactly where the automatic translation process came from.

RICHMAN

Why don’t you write in Arabic?

JOUDAH

Because I exist in English, I guess, for a large part—as far as writing poetry. In reaction to that, I chose translation from Arabic into English to maintain a relationship to Arabic in poetry. But I have a busy life as it is—as a physician, a father, and a husband. I’m trying to write, I’m glad to be writing. I’m writing and so I’m happy about that. I don’t want to put too much emphasis on linking my identity to the language that I write in, as if it’s somehow part of a political statement or a cultural statement. I’m glad to be writing poems when I can.

HALONEN

Can you talk a little bit about the opportunities or limitations of translation?

JOUDAH

Translation is a mistreated aspect of poetry. I think all poetry is translated. Perhaps all life is translation, since we consider reality as a matter of perception, and so is our perception of our own reality through language. It comes across as a translation. At least in creative writing as opposed to the hackneyed speech that we all share over the air and whatnot. So that is one aspect of it.

The other aspect is that the actual process of taking work and writing it in a new language gets a bad rap in the sense that the concept of fidelity is, I think, prostituted by even the best minds. Because there is no such thing as infidelity and there is no such thing as fidelity. All forms of translation suffer from fidelity and benefit from it, and suffer from infidelity and benefit from that. Those who say, “Well, you should try to make it seem as much of a natural poem as in the host language,” are after fidelity in a different way than those who say, “No, you should be strictly accurate and representative of the original language.” They’re after a different kind of fidelity. Or a different kind of infidelity. Freud would be happy with this.

What’s most important for me in translation is the transference of the spirit of the text. If I translate poetry five or ten years from now, I might have a different opinion, because I think my relationship to language changes as I learn more and have different opinions about it and so I approach things differently. I do think translation should attempt to infuse something new in the host language, so it allows for that sense of mystery to exist, as opposed to those who want a natural poem in the host language—whatever that means, because “a natural poem” has its own problems. The host language has a wide array of “natural poems.” I think Celan said, “There is no such thing as translation. You write a new poem.” I disagree with him, because my poems take a lot longer to write than it takes me to translate. But that’s not what he was talking about. I think he meant that if you’re infusing something, you are writing a new poetry, introducing a new poetry.

RICHMAN

You seem to use rhythm deliberately in your work, and in many places I’ve noticed a symmetrical meter, most obviously in the titles The Earth in the Attic and The Butterfly’s Burden. When scanned, they have identical rhythms. There’s symmetry in many parts of the poem “Pulse”—in section seven, within the line: “One of us shouted Wow in her sleep,” and between the lines of the last couplet of section nine: “Then saplings and mud. / And then the dried sand.” How deliberate are you in determining your rhythms?

JOUDAH

Not very, at this point. I used to count syllables a lot, and not for lines. I counted them sometimes for sentences, and sometimes, in shorter poems, I counted them for the totality of the poem. But not per line. I do like the focus on a deliberate rhythm, as you call it. And I also do like occasional merging between classical prosody, if you will, and a contemporary sense of rhythm. But I go a lot by my ear, knowing that poetry is largely dependent on normal speech, whatever that means, and on normal speech patterns, which are varied.

There’s an interesting concept in formal contemporary Arabic poetry, similar to what I said, where the unit for prosody, which is called taf ‘eelah, is basically in the entire poem or in the entire stanza, so it’s not dependent on a line. And I was always interested in this way of looking at the whole poem. That goes back to why I used to count syllables in the entire poem. If I had an even number, I considered the poem metrically complete. But that’s obviously not true, because you can also have an odd number and it all depends on whether you use an anapest or a dactyl or a trochee and, again, it goes back to speech patterns, so it’s not fixed. But it is a whole idea that in the sentence, in the stanza, or in the entire poem, there is a sense of complete foot count, if you will, a complete meter of sorts, without the focus on line-per-line symmetry.

RICHMAN

I don’t know if I’m imagining this, but in “The Onion Poem,” is there a glimmer of a ghazal?

JOUDAH

I remember sharing that poem with Marilyn Hacker, and she said, ”I’m glad to see you’re making your own form of a ghazal.”

I don’t like the ghazal form, though, to tell you the truth.

I don’t disparage it at all, but somehow it just doesn’t appeal to me. I like repetition in poetry, and I think poetry is dependent on repetition and parallel, but I’m not into that form. I guess you could say if the idea in “The Onion Poem ” is to repeat the tone of question—the repetition of question and answer, which is an ancient idea in poetry—you could say that it parallels the ghazal in that sense. I guess “The Onion Poem” presents its own dialectic in the first question and resolves it, seemingly, in the answer, in the reply. But then again, if I say that, I am not paralleling the ghazal line; I’m just paralleling an ancient method of call and response in poetry.

Formal elements in poetry, especially in free verse, are wonderful when they go past that idea of metrics and numbers, because there are so many aspects of language that lend themselves to formality, whether regarding alliteration or anaphora or epiphora or parallelism or chiasmus. All these wonderful tools, for me, are what make the free verse poem formal.

RICHMAN

In the poem “Proposal,” the sea becomes loosed from its seabed and becomes a bird. It becomes wind, which allows it to see aspects of land and to know the trees as home. To what extent do you identify with the sea?

JOUDAH

I don’t know. I feel a little emotional to address the question. It’s a trope. The sea is a trope. I guess I can hide behind that in my answer.

RICHMAN

I was wondering if you were referencing the fact that the Mediterranean Sea dried up at one time and then somehow returned to its place?

JOUDAH

If I engage in this conversation, I’d be analyzing the privacy of the poem, dragging it out into some sort of a factual discussion, and I think that would take away from it. For me, it’s important that readers see and hear that sea the way they wish—as the Mediterranean or as the sea you hear in the air when you’re far from the sea. I’m also aware that some people don’t know what to do with the mention of the word “Haifa,” for instance.

I’m addressing my wife and her father and my father. But really, the poem was written far away from the past and the Mediterranean. I can tell you that much.

MORTON

In the book’s first poem, “Atlas,” the speaker says, “Let me tell you a fable.” This sort of storytelling appears throughout the book. Why?

JOUDAH

I don’t have a spontaneous inclination toward a full narrative poem, but I think narrative is essential to poetry and to the contemporary poem. To incorporate it, I have to wed it to lyric. Some people have a rash about the concept of “lyric narrative,” and some people are puritans—either there’s a lyric poem or a narrative poem. I guess I believe in that merger, or that unity.

I have a tendency toward playing with time. Narrative means that there is a chronological order, or disorder, but I try to incorporate lyric into my narrative so that the narrative appears to be from within my time and from without it. Some people might use the word “legend” or “myth” for that, and for me, much good poetry comes out of the attempt, the successful attempt, to rewrite myth.

But what is meant by myth? Is it the sublimation of a ritual? And I mean sublimation in the way solid goes into gas, that chemical process. So you take a ritual and you somehow release it of its own physical properties through the language of time. Whatever that means. In interviews you have to say, “Whatever that means.” You have to include these disclaimers.

HALONEN

Which poets do you return to?

JOUDAH

I think it varies in different phases. I used to go back to Rilke, but I don’t look at him at all now. These days I go back to George Oppen. I love his lyric. I think he’s an incredibly engaged poet with the world and has a wonderful sense of humanity that pierces through ideology. A light with luminosity. You can see there’s something magical about his abandonment of poetry. He quit poetry and then twenty-odd years later he returned and had a very prolific output in his older years. Through those years you see how he progressed with his syntax. Or not how he progressed, but how he varied and experimented with syntax and lyric. It’s refreshing to see this engagement with the world in his actual life and in his poetry while still being true to art itself—instead of getting lost in ideologies.

He’s one of the best-kept American secrets. There is a rise to his name now because we are in a state of war. Which I think diminishes his brilliance. This brings me back to political poetry—a lot of people consider George Oppen a political poet, which for me is just absurd. Maybe it’s similar to how people get all worked up about the term “confessional poetry.”

RICHMAN

I read that when you were seven, you were watching television, and you announced to your mother that you wanted to be a doctor. What were you watching?

JOUDAH

I don’t know. I know there was a family gathering—my aunts and cousins and so forth—and we were in Libya at the time. It’s a question we all know—everyone turns to you when you’re younger and says, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I don’t know why I said I wanted to be a doctor.

I must have been overwhelmed by some sense of…I was thinking about it this morning actually, and this is a way to address the restructuring of memory. This morning I wanted to say that I must have felt some sort of angst in the room or in the family situation. Something must have happened. My family—my immediate family and aunts and uncles and my older cousins—are all refugees in the true sense of the word. They had rough childhoods. I don’t know if some of that sense of anxiety was somehow seeping in the conversation and I picked up on it and decided that I had to say something or whatever. I have no idea.

RICHMAN

When did you realize your interest in poetry?

JOUDAH

Probably around the same age, because I used to memorize a lot of poetry when I was younger and recite it and get encouragement and support for such memorization. I started to write random lines— three- or four-line poems or something in Arabic prosody. So I think I’ve had that interest since a young age, but there was all this side-tracking, with the medicine and leaving one culture and coming to the next. Eventually, I realized I just had to keep writing. I had to keep expressing my own existence.