Interviews

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JESS WALTER FOLLOWED A CONVOLUTED PATH into the literary mainstream: He was a newspaper reporter who became a nonfiction author who became a ghostwriter who became a mystery novelist who became a literary novelist who also writes screenplays. But no matter the genre,  Walter’s work is stamped with vivid watermarks—prose that blends rapid-fire rants with unerring rhythm, a dark humor that has been called “standup tragedy,” an engagement with the political and social, and a devotion to storytelling. “The idea that plot is this ugly, brutish thing that we have to drape our beauty over is infuriating,” he says, “because to me, plot is this beautiful, elegant shape.”  

His essays, short fiction, criticism, and journalism have appeared in Details, Playboy, Willow Springs, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the  Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book,  Every Knee Shall Bow, was a finalist for the PEN Center West literary nonfiction award in 1996. His novel Citizen Vince won a 2006 Edgar  Allan Poe award, and his following novel, The Zero, was a finalist for the  2006 National Book Award. 

Walter started his career writing for his hometown newspaper, the Spokesman-Review, where he helped cover the standoff between Randy  Weaver and federal agents at Ruby Ridge, in North Idaho—work that eventually led to the publication of Every Knee Shall Bow in 1996. His first novel, Over Tumbled Graves, came out in 2001, followed by The Land of the Blind, Citizen Vince, The Zero, and most recently, The Financial  Lives of the Poets, which Time magazine called “a small masterpiece, a  Wodehouse-level comic performance. But it’s also a deceptively amusing  survey of the post-Fannie-and-Freddie American landscape, with a mother lode of bitter truths lying right below its perfect, manicured  lawns.”  

We spoke with Walter over two meetings at Spokane’s Davenport  Hotel, which features prominently in The Land of the Blind. “It’s taken  me a long time,” Walter said, “to arrive at a place where I feel like I’m  doing the work I set out to do.” 

SAMUEL LIGON 

How has your writing career evolved or developed since your start as a journalist? 

JESS WALTER 

It’s evolved accidentally, the way natural selection works in making platypuses. If you decided to become a literary writer by going into journalism and then ghostwriting and then writing mysteries, that’s the worst path you could take. I like to say I’ve taken the service entrance into literary fiction. 

I started at the newspaper in 1986 as a junior in college. When Ruby Ridge happened in 1992, I started sending out proposals right away and I took sabbaticals from the newspaper to work on that book. Later, my publisher asked if I wanted to help write Chris Darden’s book on the  O.J. Simpson trial. I was compelled by Darden’s Shakespearean angst. I teased him about it later, and called him “Black Hamlet” because I  didn’t understand what he was so anxious about. 

 My publisher at the time said, “Would you be interested in helping  him write his book?” In my naiveté, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ghostwriting. I knew it existed, but I didn’t realize it was an industry, so when she asked me to help him, I just assumed we were going to write it together. We sat down to negotiate, and I didn’t have an agent at the time. I sat across from his agent, his lawyer, and Chris,  and they have this contract that says I’m ghostwriting, and I said, “I’m not doing this if my name’s not on the book.” They were like, “How big  do you want your name?” I said, “I want my mom to see it from outside  a bookstore window.” So that was the agreement, and then there was discussion about what the cover would say—“By Christopher Darden,  as told to,” or “By Christopher Darden with”—and I said, “I don’t care about that. I just think it’s a lie to not have my name on the cover.”

Later, when I would do ghostwriting projects—I didn’t want my name on a book once I realized the stigma, and once it became clear to me that ghostwriting was not what I wanted to do. But that was the first ghost job, the Darden book, and again, it wasn’t strictly a ghost project,  because my name’s on it. And also, this was a really intelligent guy, and I  said, “We’re going to write this book together.” So we had two laptops,  and we’d write sentences back and forth. It was collaborative. I moved in with him. And I feel…everything’s accidental, nothing’s planned,  but I look at that early part of my career, the ghostwriting, which began with Darden and ended with the Bernard Kerik situation placing me at Ground Zero. I’ve got Ruby Ridge, the O.J. Simpson case, the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I kind of had a perfect fiction writer’s vantage to these cases that, for someone who loves satire and writing about the culture, turned out to be perfect training. It’s not the training I’d advise someone to undertake, and I was miserable through much of it, but it turned out to be a great track to the kind of fiction I wanted to write. 

LIGON

How have your books changed from Every Knee Shall Bow to The  Financial Lives of the Poets? 

WALTER

Each book I write is a kind of reaction to the last one. It’s a constant leveling and adjustment to try to make each book complete and full in itself. When you’re in a book, you’re not thinking about the next one or the last one, you’re only thinking about the one you’re in, but you bring the way the last one felt. My starting point is often, The last one felt like this, now I need to do that. Especially Over Tumbled Graves—I  was stunned that everyone saw it as a mystery novel. I look back now and see that’s because it was a mystery novel. You put a serial killer in your book, people tend to treat it like a serial killer book. You eat one lousy foot, they call you a cannibal. But at the time I was writing it, I  thought I was writing this deep literary novel that happened to have serial killers and cops in it. And then when it came out, that wasn’t the response. So, with Land of the Blind I thought, Well, I’ll nudge it over a little further. And with Citizen Vince, I think I was a little aware of the way these books were landing, the way they were received, the way they were perceived, the way they were put into bookstores.

There are all sorts of indignities along the way that cause you to do certain things. I remember I was excited to have a reading at Powell’s,  this amazing bookstore. I told some friends to meet me there. I didn’t really think that two o’clock in the afternoon was a funny time for a  reading at Powell’s. So my friends show up and I walk to the desk and  say, “I’m Jess Walter, I have a reading here.” The woman at the counter says, “Oh, that’s a drop-in signing. What’s your book about?” And I said,  “Well, it’s a kind of literary crime novel about a serial killer—” I didn’t  even finish and she grabs the microphone and says, “Genre department.”  This guy comes forward and my friends are standing right there and I’m thinking, Oh, this sucks! 

LIGON 

Can you talk about the difference between “literary” fiction and  “genre” fiction? 

WALTER

I’ve often felt frustrated at the divide between commercial and literary fiction, because to me, it hurts both. You can have this horrible writing in crime fiction because people only focus on plots, and they treat them like crossword puzzles. “Well, I knew who the killer was on page eleven! I’ve solved it! Why do I need to keep reading?” And when people complain about literary fiction, they say there’s not enough story.  So I’ve always felt like there’s got to be some sweet spot in the middle you can hit. With Land of the Blind, I thought, Oh, I’m writing a coming of age novel, and I’m kind of melding it with this other thing, and it’s also a novel of ideas! You have all the conventions of crime fiction that I  wasn’t following. There was no murder. It starts with a confession instead of the body, which is where you start with a murder mystery. I wanted someone to come in and confess to a crime that hasn’t actually been committed. And then it was a kind of twenty-five-year-long murder that began when they were children—it’s really about the way he treated this guy as a kid. So it was, in my mind, a coming-of-age novel disguised.  Again, you hit what you think is some sweet spot and no one wants it.  People really want crime fiction and they love those books. You mess with the conventions, they don’t understand why. I was making Subaru  Brats—you know those little Subarus that were a cross between a pickup and a car? Nobody wanted those or there would be a bunch of them around today. And I made a great Subaru Brat, but I was the only one who appreciated it. 

LIGON 

Do you think anybody succeeds in that kind of hybrid? 

WALTER

I think Richard Price comes closest. Once he established his literary bona fides he could write crime fiction. Pete Dexter, because he won the  National Book Award, can write a crime novel and have his position. John Banville wins a Booker Prize and can go write crime fiction. But it doesn’t work the other way. You can’t name someone who’s made a career as a crime writer who is then respected as a literary novelist. 

SHAWN VESTAL

But after you won the Edgar for Citizen Vince, the next book, The  Zero, was a finalist for the National Book Award. 

WALTER

When I say no one’s done it, I kind of think I’m the only one.  [Laughs.] And I don’t know that most people want to do that. It’s one of those Guinness Book of World Records things that no one else really wants to do. You stand on your head on a toilet for four years and you’ve done it longer than anyone else. It’s not a path a lot of people want to take. 

BRENDAN LYNAUGH

Citizen Vince felt like more than a crime novel. Were you aware that you were turning a corner? 

WALTER

It felt like the kind of novel I wanted to be writing. I get really excited about thematic elements, probably more than I should, and more than most writers. I kept thinking, This is really about voting. That was the sweet spot I had always imagined between crime fiction and literary fiction—you know, that I could create characters that were hopefully deep and rich. There would be all these ideas swirling around, especially in the character Vince and in his monologues. I like ranting and riffing,  and Vince could do that in a voice I was pleased with, and yet, I could still drape it over the conventions of a crime novel. I think it was more the sort of novel I’d imagined I would write all along. And it does feel like I turned a corner at that point. And then I moved on to The Zero and Financial Lives of the Poets. 

LYNAUGH

You’ve mentioned having to teach yourself how to write a novel.  Can you remember big moments in that process? 

WALTER

I still feel like I’m teaching myself all the time, learning things and in a constant conversation with myself about what it is. The emotions of writing a novel, the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the loathing for what you’ve written—I described it in my journal at one point as the diary of a man living on the ocean who has no idea what tides are. “Oh my God, the water’s going out! It’s a drought! Oh my God, the water’s coming in! It’s a flood!” I couldn’t believe how seriously I took this. With every book I would say, “If this is not the worst thing ever written… I need to just throw this away and start from scratch.” And then the next day, I would say, “I may be writing a new kind of literature here. There’s a very good chance that my grandchildren will have to study this book. I should put a little note in there for them.” The grandiosity was stunning, and the lows were stunning, too. 

I think of it as this engine, these pistons going up and down. The process that I fool myself with is that I write the last sentence last, and so  I’ll comb over the beginning so many times, but I can’t finish if I feel like there’s something wrong early on. I always have to go back and rewrite things. The moment I finish a novel, I always feel the same incredible high. My finishes are phony at first. I always have to go back through dozens of times, but that sense, when I write the last sentence and pull my hands away or clap my hands like a Vegas dealer, it’s thrilling. And then maybe a week later, or two days later, the crashing doubt comes back. I’ve learned now that I love almost every part of that journey. I even love the self-loathing. I think to separate the hypercritical self-loathing writer from the one who dreams of doing something beyond his ability is impossible and probably not even worthwhile. I don’t think you could have one without the other. 

I just read David Shields’ new book Reality Hunger and now my debate and argument with myself is also with him. I’m constantly walking  around, saying, “Well, take that, David Shields!” or “What about this,  David Shields?” Which is great—to have a foil. But that book was remarkable and vexing in so many ways. I found myself walking around arguing with him, which is such a pointless thing to do. It reminded me of some drunk guy on the dorm floor you’re trying to argue with and he just keeps quoting Pink Floyd. You can’t win that argument. And other times, it reminded me of arguing with a girlfriend, because you say, “Well, clearly this, this, and this,” and she says, “But that’s just how I feel.” You can’t win that, either. 

But it makes me want to debate those points, because I think it’s a really compelling case, a great read, and really powerful work. Because it’s a manifesto, it wants to make a case, and it’s a case I would certainly argue with. First, that narrative is dead, and that there’s some supplanting of it by a desire for reality. I think the reality that we’re really desiring is far more narrative-driven than he’s letting on. We don’t really want reality. We want reality set in a certain narrative frame. What we really want is the Elephant Man. We want freak show. Reality tv is not like the lyric essay, which is the thing he’s arguing for. It’s like the Elephant  Man. It’s the freakiest stuff you can imagine. That’s what we want to see on YouTube—glimpses of the freakish. 

I find it illustrative that A Million Little Pieces was rejected as a novel, because you couldn’t get away with that shit in fiction, but you can, oddly enough, in this kind of hybrid nonfiction thing. So there’s the idea that fiction and nonfiction have blended in a way. That because history is subjective, that because memoirs only come from memory,  because journalism has been proven to be imperfect, there should be no filter between fiction and nonfiction, which I find to be almost insane, almost a kind of academic trick in which you point to a swamp and say, “Look, therefore there is no land, nor water. They are only the same thing.” And you get there through some sort of “if or then” dialogue with yourself, and pretty soon, you’re trying to drive a boat through the desert. You can’t do that. 

Just because there are places where there’s swampland doesn’t mean that there isn’t a desire and need and higher form for nonfiction and fiction. So that’s the argument I walk around having. Zadie Smith wrote about Reality Hunger—something like, “All right, Mr. Shields, read better fiction. You’re right. There’s a lot that’s dead with fiction. Now go read the good stuff, because those manipulations and tired conventions are exactly what good fiction tries to overcome and subvert and not fall victim to.” 

LIGON

You suggested that nonfiction can get away with stuff that fiction can’t. Like what? 

WALTER

What was Tom Wolfe’s famous pronouncement? That fiction can’t keep up with the real world? I think fiction has the responsibility of a kind of universality that nonfiction doesn’t. A good example is Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. His portrayal of Tourette’s is—to anyone who has nervous habits or tics or things—so real that it immediately takes you inside that condition. It’s brilliant for that. It isn’t just someone with Tourette’s spouting dirty words, which is what the reality television version would be. It’s a human portrayal of this thing that may be freakish to people who don’t have it, but through Lethem’s telling is a fully realized and human condition that we relate to. 

LIGON

You mentioned two North Korean pieces the other day, one fiction, one nonfiction. What could the nonfiction deliver that the fiction couldn’t? 

WALTER

The first thing that pops into my head that the nonfiction delivered was context. Both pieces had to do with the period of starvation in North Korea. Both had people making this sort of paste from tree bark that they would eat. In some ways, the nonfiction was more harrowing for its authority, for its truth, I guess. It provided context. I found out how many people starved to death during this period. And the nonfiction piece was structured almost like a short story, which is really interesting, because it was not a big societal piece. It was focused on one woman who had been a party believer and whose husband and mother and one of her children had starved to death. She’d finally made her way into South Korea. And it was a narrative of these people starving to death, with the context that this was happening to the entire nation, the politics behind it, the seamless way in which those externalities could be brought in and not break you out of the illusion of the piece. You could come in and out of narrative and pure informative reporting, and I think when fiction does that—one good example is The Known World—it can be thrilling, but it’s also a really tricky thing. It’s an innovation of voice that when I see it, I’m kind of thrilled. That’s what this nonfiction piece was able to do. 

The great thing about it, the thing I would probably agree with  David Shields about, is that it did not require a movement at the end. It did not require some artful ending. It just ended. The woman went to South Korea. She lived with her daughter and she put on a bunch of weight. There didn’t need to be one last scene in which she goes out to the woods and strips some tree bark and takes it home because she’s acquired a taste for it. It was able to sort of just play itself out. 

The short story (which hasn’t been published yet but is forthcoming in Playboy) by Adam Johnson was about an orphan in the same time period, who kidnaps Japanese tourists and brings them back to North  Korea—kind of sanctioned by the army. The story is full of starvations, full of all this stuff, and the movement of it, the artful movement is really pleasing and yet you’re aware that that’s where it’s going. When it finishes, you have the sense of release of a story. You’ve been taken to this world and then released from it. And you’ve seen a full movement of character. You’ve seen something that wasn’t required in the nonfiction piece, a reckoning or a surprise or some other narrative turn; the stone was carved into a figure. And I think we know those effects and we know those feelings that we expect to get from both, and maybe that’s what  Shields finds so thrilling about the hybrid style that he’s working in. To confuse those effects, to fire off these neurons when you expected those to be fired off, that’s what every fiction writer hopes to do—to not give you what you expect, but something that’s satisfying in some way and which you didn’t see coming. 

LIGON

Do you think that the nonfiction was about a phenomenon that occurred in North Korea and something systemic to North Korea, and the fiction was about a person?

WALTER

It’s funny, because the nonfiction was about a person, and this person was used to illustrate a condition within North Korea. And so the person was almost a way of viewing the larger context, whereas in the short story, the context was backdrop at most, or was a way to sort of narrow down on that person. You know the world you’re in. You’re in North Korea. It’s this period of hardship and starvation and that telescopes down on the individual, whereas the other one opens up the world that way. I do think those are both intriguing shapes and that they do very different things. Thank God for both. 

LYNAUGH

Often in your books, the main character has some sort of disability— the blindness in The Zero, and various characters in other books who can’t sleep the entire story. What does disability do for your novels? 

WALTER

I think everybody has some disability. I think that’s the condition of being human. What happens when they’re more visible, more on the surface? You’re definitely putting pressure on. That’s what I like about crime in fiction. I like conflict that’s sharper and higher-pitched. And I like that within—I think it’s another kind of conflict, a conflict within the character, and the way in which the world deals with these people and they deal with the world. I guess it’s heightening that stuff. 

I got a stick in my eye when I was five and had to train myself to look people in the eye, because when I was a kid I would constantly look down so that other kids wouldn’t make fun of me—so to me, disability is a very real state of humanity that I think we all have in some way. I  think I use the vision and eyesight issues because that’s such an elemental and key way in which we deal with each other. I also think it’s probably an autobiographical desire of mine to try to explore this in fiction. 

LIGON

In Land of the Blind, Clark lost an eye as a kid. In The Zero, Remy has a problem with detached retinas. How does your experience of getting a stick in the eye when you were a kid move away from autobiography in your work and take on a fictional quality? 

WALTER

Autobiography is a tool of the fiction writer. I think that Land of the  Blind is all about vision, about how Clark sees himself, how the world sees him. And the gaps within there. You become interested in those things in a really personal way, and then I think the thing to do with fiction is refine that interest, refine that sort of thematic push that you have in something until it takes on some meaning you weren’t aware of. I think you arrive at levels of meaning in fiction that you don’t always reach with memoir, that you might not reach with any other kind of writing because of the process, which forces you to go possibly deeper into character than you would with nonfiction or memoir. I think it forces you to create themes that are even more alive than a memoir would be. We’ve all read those autobiographies by generals or politicians, in which you think, “Were they even around for their own life?” They seem to be describing it as this series of achievements that have no motivations connected to them. 

VESTAL

You write about the newspaper industry in The Financial Lives of the  Poets. Do you think the decline of journalism’s had an impact on fiction? 

WALTER 

It’s hard to not focus on the ancillary effects, where the review is going to come from and things like that. I’ve always thought that journalism has been a great training ground for novelists. I would make twenty-seven percent of our novelists go work at a newspaper, because you learn to navigate these systems. 

You cover any sort of politics, you cover crime. You begin to see the difference between public and private, the way people show themselves in public and the way they really are. You learn the mechanisms of a culture, how a courtroom works, how a police department works, how an election works. One of the ghost jobs I did involved a political campaign and these political operatives…. I’ve got these characters stowed away. They’re such great characters because they have insight into the hypocrisies that we know are there, but we don’t exactly know how they work. That precision, that journalistic precision, is something.  Like Richard Price. He’s very much like a documentarian in that style. He’s in there, in those cop cars, in those projects. He’s working with those social workers, and to hear anyone describe his process, it sounds exactly like immersion journalism. So in that way, I think journalists can be outward-looking in their fiction; I think they can get beyond the limits of their own experience and imagination more freely because of their training. 

Also, you write every day. You lose fear of publication. You know how to work on deadlines. But you also get out of yourself as a writer.  You write something that is very utilitarian—people use it. It’s sort of disposable. I remember being in MFA workshops and people bringing their stories in and the angst of that room was almost too much for me to bear. They had so much invested and I never felt that. 

At a newspaper someone is going to handle your stuff. They’re going to edit it, they’re going to change things. You learn to keep your stories separate from yourself. That’s valuable for a new writer because the fear of publication stops a lot of people from working, the idea that it’s got to be perfect. No journalist goes in thinking that they know everything at the beginning, and yet, today, as a fiction writer, you almost get more attention for your debut novel than the ones after. You’re expected to kind of arrive as this fully formed artist, and I know I wasn’t. It’s taken me a long time to arrive at a place where I feel like I’m doing the work I set out to do. I used to have an editor at the newspaper who would say,  “All right, this is beautiful writing here, but you have three adjectives.  We’re going to pick one. What’s the best one?” I was constantly pruning and looking for the telling detail. 

Also, because of the constraints on space, I think journalists often write better-paced fiction, which is the reason people love crime fiction and other potboilers. It’s not that people have bloodlust. It’s about pacing. 

VESTAL 

Many of your books have humorous elements. What makes something funny? And how do you use that toward a serious purpose? 

WALTER 

One of the tics I’m trying to get away from is tending toward things only because they’re funny. A few times, I’ll find myself so in love with something I thought was funny that it takes away from the narrative or it introduces something that strains credulity. Some of the humor in Citizen Vince I’m proudest of is the really quiet stuff. It doesn’t come out of absurdity. It just comes out of small character moments. I guess some of it is absurd, two guys in a witness protection program debating the pizza in town, but that’s also a complaint I’ve heard from every New Yorker who ever moved to Spokane, so it seems weirdly grounded, too. You don’t want anything to be a crutch. Plot has been a crutch for me,  suspense has been a crutch for me, and sometimes I think humor is a  crutch for me. 

LIGON

Plot seems to be one of the hardest things to talk about, and people  often ask writers, “Do you know the plot before you go in?” What do you know of the story before you start actually writing words? 

WALTER

There’s a fallacy that the story starts when you’re writing words. I  walk around with the idea, with the characters, with all of that stuff,  until I think I may have a clear sense of what that story is—before I  start writing it. 

I’m going to digress a little bit. One of the frustrations I have with  Shields’ book is that he keeps saying narrative is clearly dead, that clearly no one likes narrative. And it’s like, No! People are reading Dan Brown not because he’s a great prose stylist, but because of the narrative. Story is alive and well. People love it. And it doesn’t even have to be a new story. It can be the same old story. That central premise is totally wrong. 

I loved reading Charles Baxter’s essay on rhyming action, because  to me, there’s an artistic elegance in plot and story. There’s a sense among some people that there’s been an academic movement away from storytelling. There was a great essay—and I call it great because it was infuriating to me in so many ways—that blamed the Cult of the  Sentence for the death of literary fiction, the much talked about death of literary fiction, the idea being that somehow, writers focusing only on the sentence as a unit of beauty and on the writing itself, have divorced themselves from what readers want. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but I have heard writers say, “I don’t want any story at all. I just  want beautiful language.” And I think, first of all, Bullshit. But second of all, the idea that plot is this ugly, brutish thing that we have to drape our beauty over is infuriating, because to me, plot is this beautiful, elegant shape. And that’s what I get so thrilled about in writing. That’s what I got excited about with Citizen Vince, when I began to see this kind of movement of the character and the way the language and everything would reveal this movement that would take you to this place where you would have a feeling of completion. The plot of that story is inseparable from a kind of motion in which Vince lives in this town. He’s afraid someone has been sent to kill him from New York. So he goes to New York, where he’s assigned to kill the guy he thinks came to kill him. I love that movement. 

LYNAUGH 

In the plot of Citizen Vince, toward the end, there’s a withholding of Vince’s plan. Did you worry about that being too “devicey”? 

WALTER 

I love device. When that comes about is when we go in Reagan and  Carter’s heads, the day that Vince comes home. If I’m showing those scenes, he’s on an airplane, he’s thinking, Holy crap, now I gotta go kill this guy. Or maybe I won’t. I’ve got a big decision. It would have been so static. The book is third person and there are plenty of other times in which you don’t exactly know what Vince is up to. You don’t exactly know what he’s doing at that card game until he tells Gotti why he’s there. So if it was the first time it had come up, it would have felt far more “devicey” and I probably would have been too embarrassed to do it. But instead, we’re looking at Carter and Reagan, who are doing a sort of thematic dance around what this novel is about, the idea of shadows following each other, and when we get back to Vince, he’s taking action and his thoughts are in the moment. 

GABE EHRNWALD 

Some readers might feel there’s a kind of withholding in terms of the vote. 

WALTER 

Who he votes for? Maybe because I initially saw this as a screenplay,  I thought of that scene as a camera shot, like the famous tracking shot in Citizen Kane in which the camera rises and rises and rises. It’s one of the longest shots in history. It rises completely out of where Kane is speaking. And so I imagined that same shot when Vince is voting, that you’d be centered over him and you’d be seeing the ballot the way he does and then all of a sudden, the camera rises and rises and rises so you could see the act of voting but you could never see who he voted for. I  really did imagine that I turned my head when Vince voted and gave him the same privacy we all get. 

LIGON 

What does it do for the novel that the reader doesn’t know? 

WALTER

If it was just a novel about a guy who became a Republican or Democrat, what would that be worth? It’s about a guy who chooses as his point of redemption, his symbolic redemption, the process of voting,  which is a really corny thing, and I knew it was corny the minute I thought of it. Am I really going to write a civic thriller? That’s what it is, a kind of civic thriller, but no one else gets to choose what our own symbols of redemption are. And for Vince, voting is meaningful. On the most basic level, not telling the reader who he votes for connects with a theme of the book, that it’s about this person choosing this thing we all take for granted and maybe see as empty or corny or whatever it is, and around that creating a new identity and allowing himself to change. 

LYNAUGH

Can you talk about other devices you’ve used? 

WALTER

Fiction writing can feel kind of meek sometimes, and if we’re going to run from device, if we’re going to run from things like that, it’s going to stay meek. Your job is to engage the reader. Sometimes to fool them awhile, sometimes to suspend something that you don’t want them to know for a while. Sometimes it’s to have the action interrupted by an end dash and not tell the reader what happened. Sometimes it’s to write something in the first person. There are all different kinds of tools and techniques and I don’t know what makes them devices. But I like to be playful, and I like inventive styles of writing.

The book that nailed me the hardest in the last few years was David  Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which is a Russian nesting doll of a book. It’s a  device at its very genetic core and I was thrilled reading it. I loved to see what could be accomplished. 

I don’t have some bag of devices. But I certainly am constantly looking for something inventive to do with structure, with voice, with all of those elemental pieces of writing that combine to make the whole. So it might be a large structural thing. It might be a voice thing. It might be something that feels as “devicey” as having the action break at midpoint in The Zero and then having the character discover alongside the reader what’s missing. Which feels more blatantly “devicey,” but opens up the thing in a way that you wouldn’t have gotten if you’d written the novel straight. I think those kinds of formal inventions and devices and gimmicks can sometimes lead you to a place to discover not only what’s possible with the language and the sentences and paragraphs, but also what your story is about, what brought you to this. For me, when it works the way it did in The Zero, there’s not a lot of distance between the formal playfulness and the thematic drive that made me want to do it in the first place. 

LIGON 

Why is withholding important to fiction? Can withholding ever become cheap? 

WALTER 

A lot of times, what makes something work is what isn’t there. We know that with language, we know that with character, so why wouldn’t it be the same with story? Why wouldn’t the things that you choose not to put in be those things that kind of open the piece up? 

When is it cheap? When you’re honestly assessing your own work and you worry about things, what I worry about is that I’ll sell the farm for a cheap gimmick. One of my favorite novels is Martin Amis’  Time’s Arrow, which occurs in reverse. It’s all gimmick. Does it work?  Depends on the reader, but I love the inventiveness of it. And Martin  Amis referred to that book in The Information, which is another great novel. In The Information, the novel that the protagonist has just written makes people nauseous and causes them to have strokes. Amis is writing about Time’s Arrow and people’s reaction to it. 

You know your weaknesses and strengths as a writer, so I’m probably the worst person in the world to ask when a device becomes cheap, when it overwhelms the thing it’s working on, because I tend to like those.  Maybe it’s because I read a great deal and I’m looking for something new and different. But I also think it goes back to the fact that I’m most interested in the elemental things, finding out what exactly makes voice,  and then the large things, almost like a scientist. Science is interested in the very tiny and the huge, the universe and the subatomic. So I think that my concern with structure, with the fullness of things, makes me more prone to like those sorts of innovations. 

VESTAL

What are the similarities or differences between the Spokane in your books and the real one? Or have you set out to capture the “real” Spokane? 

WALTER

I don’t know if William Kennedy said, “I’m going to capture  Albany.” You just tell those handful of stories that strike you, and then later, if they end up creating a full sense of a place, I can’t imagine it being anything more than accidental at best, because I never set out to create Spokane. I was a crime reporter, so I think I’ve probably created a much more downtrodden, crime-ridden, nasty-ass place than really exists, and yet, I think it’s a very real version of some of those places,  too. The Financial Lives of the Poets is set anywhere, and yet to me, it’s so clearly Spokane. People write to me and say, “I think that 7-11 is right by my house! I live in Santa Monica.” “I think that 7-11 is right across  the street, except it’s a Piggly Wiggly here.” So I think there’s probably something universal in what I’m envisioning as Spokane in that book. 

VESTAL 

Vince makes a brief cameo—uncredited as Vince—in The Financial  Lives of the Poets, and it made me wonder if you had a sort of vision of a kind of world behind the immediately present world. Or a kind of network. 

WALTER 

I think I do, and I think every author kind of does. I don’t mind those things overlapping a little, but in no way do I think of that as some definitive portrait of the city. It’s just the terrain that I happen to be writing about. Usually when I’m done with a book—I don’t, for instance,  wonder if anything else happened to Brian Remy from The Zero. Maybe  Carolyn Mabry from my first two novels, I think there might be more to talk about there, but for the most part, I don’t feel like characters deserve a second novel. And though some of my characters have reoccurred,  they’ve been fringe characters. I think it’s another kind of playfulness that made me sneak Vince in there. And the fact that I don’t call him  Vince—because at the end of Citizen Vince he’s sort of gone back and claimed his early identity, which is Marty. But I also liked the wink at myself that ninety-nine percent of readers won’t get. When people do  discover it, though—again, we talked about withholding—there’s a kind  of withholding. I could have easily made it Vince and made it clear, but  when people get it, it’s like this special thing between me and the couple of readers who have noticed it. 

LIGON

Does your fiction get anything from the place—Spokane—that it wouldn’t get from a different town, like Tallahassee or Des Moines or  Providence? 

WALTER

I think Spokane is one of the most isolated cities of its size in the  United States, and that its isolation casts a lot of different shadows. I  think there’s a sense of isolation here that’s great for fiction. And yet the place doesn’t have an accent. It doesn’t have a special ethnicity. It’s a really general place, but hours from anywhere, which gives it a kind of lab quality. As if you could have any kind of experiment here that you wanted. There’s a lot of film work here now because it has that quality—it could be anywhere. So I think yes and no. Spokane could be  Des Moines. It could be Providence. It could be the Lower East Side in certain ways, and yet, I think its isolation allows a lot of different things to happen. In thrillers, you’re constantly trying to get your hero alone,  and if you think about it, cops always travel in at least twos, sometimes twelves, and yet, you’ve got to get to a point where your protagonist is alone facing whatever he or she is facing. I think that the isolation from the rest of the world that Spokane has creates story possibilities. You can have guys from the Witness Protection Program show up here and have everything they need. It’s kind of self-contained. Most cities of two or three hundred thousand are not self-contained. Most are outside bigger cities and this is like Pluto. I guess Pluto isn’t a planet anymore.  It’s like Neptune, a small, distant planet. It doesn’t have moons. It’s in its own orbit. 

EHRNWALD

What’s the difference between writing a screenplay and writing a  novel? 

WALTER 

Screenwriting is so collaborative. It’s not the writer’s medium. It’s a director’s medium and an actor’s medium. So that’s the first thing,  the collaboration. Also, form is so important and so is economy. Form and economy are the two things you’re constantly battling, and I sort of equate the formal restrictions to poetry, not that I’m much of a poet myself. But I’ll start writing a poem and it’ll turn into prose because I can’t master the economy or the form. I’ve said before that scripts tend to be more external, more action-driven. They don’t have to be. You can have a voice-driven script. You can have My Dinner with Andre, all dialogue.  So it doesn’t have to have action. You could have 110 pages of voice-over. It could all be internal. Didn’t they make Johnny Got His Gun into a movie? I think they did, which takes place entirely inside the mind of someone who has been maimed in battle and is unable to communicate with the outside world. Then it’s done through flashback; you still have to show something on the screen. But practically, they couldn’t be more different forms. I like both. Screenwriting I just don’t take as seriously. I  don’t think it’s as hard. I don’t think it’s as interesting. I don’t think it’s as rewarding. I think because it takes someone to animate it and make it live that it is beyond my understanding. I can’t imagine ever being fully satisfied with a screenplay. I like fiction better, as a reader and a  writer. I like the process of reading a novel far more than seeing a film. 

Because my own fiction has flirted with being adapted and made,  I’ve had to kind of come up with a mental divorce between a film and the source material—because they are totally different things. One Flew  Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of my favorite novels and one of my favorite films, and they are not the same thing at all. You can’t get that paranoia from the book in the movie. You can’t get the walls, the machinery behind the walls from the novel into the film. You couldn’t get Jack Nicholson into the novel and you shouldn’t try. You couldn’t get Danny DeVito as Martini. Those things are animated by actors. 

VESTAL 

Were there any trends that you noticed as a judge for the 2008  National Book Award? 

WALTER 

Another judge told me, “You’ll be stunned by how many good  books you read and how few great ones.” And I think that’s probably true of any year you judge. There’s a ton of very good fiction out there,  but I finished most of the books with some sense of their failing. And their failing was not necessarily the author’s fault. The thing that comes to every writer as they start to finish something is that they’ve begun an imperfect journey. I don’t think any book is perfect and sometimes things are more interesting because of the imperfections. 

The other thing you’ll hear people say sometimes: “Why isn’t anyone  writing realism?” or, “Why did postmodernism die?” or, “Why isn’t  anyone doing this or that?” And the thing I realized is that everyone is doing everything. I found examples of every literary trend you could imagine. Are we finding our way to those books? Are publishers getting behind those books? Are those books reaching wider audiences? No. But someone was trying almost everything. There were some small things that I noticed, like books with titled chapters. There were a lot of linked story collections. It’s hard to tell what’s driven by the writers and what’s driven by the marketplace, such as it exists. It may be publishers saying,  “We need more linked stories.” The collections that I thought worked best, though, often weren’t linked. Those collections that were linked  felt like bland novels or you’d make a game of saying, “All right, which  story did they write to try to link this together?” 

VESTAL

A lot of your work involves an individual with some kind of fraught relationship with a system. Did your work on Ruby Ridge in any way set that course?

WALTER

I think my whole life as a reporter was geared toward seeing how systems fail us. You look at the systems we love—just the people at this table—we love universities and they’re in a kind of spiral of failure right now that is epic in scale. We love newspapers and they’re dying out from under us. We love literature and it’s not healthy at all. I love movies and that system’s falling apart. It isn’t just the criminal justice system, it isn’t just the government. The kind of systems that we create to take care of us and to take care of the things we care about and love always break down and fail, almost inevitably. You build the machine and the machine is going to fall apart. The thing I always go back to in my fiction is that these systems, in a way, don’t even exist. They’re powered by people’s insecurities, emotions, greed. One example is New  York politics. It’s a huge interworking system of all of these different elements, and yet my experience of it was Rudolph Giuliani, who had a  kind of Mussolini-like desire for power and acclaim, and Bernard Kerik,  who was a figure destined to implode because of his own appetites,  weaknesses, and frailties. And the O.J. Simpson murder case, which  I saw kind of secondhand, coming into the wreckage afterward, was all about the failings of people, or the way human frailty causes these systems to break down. 

There’s a relationship between a jury and the judge and lawyers that approaches Stockholm Syndrome or one of those syndromes. Gerry  Spence, in Ruby Ridge, was brilliant at playing juries. He would do everything but crawl in the box with them. “You and I all know that this  case is insane….” The most brilliant thing that he did in that case—the prosecution put up all of these rifles. All the Weavers’ guns were on this  big pegboard. It was daunting, all these guns. At one point, Spence just strode up there and yanked a gun off and sighted it and then handed it through the jury box. The prosecution objected, and Spence said,  “Your Honor, they put them up here. I just wanted the jury to get a  closer look.” Knowing that an Idaho jury—everyone’s sighted a rifle at some point. So now these rifles aren’t things on a wall. You’d see jurors  looking around the courtroom with rifles, and the prosecution going,  “Oh shit, we just lost the case.” That was the kind of thing that went on in the Simpson case, too. 

I find the anti-government furor today fascinating in so many ways.  Because there is no government. It’s us. And in Every Knee Shall Bow,  that was the thing I sort of tried to pull back the curtain from. White separatism was another kind of system. Systems don’t battle. It’s the people within them. 

LIGON

Do you see common attributes in your characters? Can you look at  your characters and say, “I recognize this character as having this kind of  moral code or that set of beliefs, or being stuck in this system?” 

WALTER 

It’s one of those things that can freeze you up if you spend too much time thinking about it. My characters can be wiseasses. They can be a  little lost, a little out of step with everything going on around them.  But that also allows them to be more observant of paradoxes and ironies and of those moments in which the things that we strive for, and the things that we do, don’t connect. Or, to go back to systems, the things that the system’s supposed to do and what it actually does don’t align. 

I think the kind of character I’m drawn to is someone who sees the cracks that other people don’t see, Brian Remy in The Zero being one example—he’s the only one aware of his own condition, which he comes to believe the rest of the world shares but just doesn’t recognize.  I think the characters’ awareness of the absurdities around them is the main thing. And then there are obviously some surface things—that they don’t sleep, they’ve all lost an eye, they probably order the same drinks.  They riff the way I like to riff. I love Marilynne Robinson’s answer when  someone asked her if any of her characters were her and she said, “Oh,  yes, all of them.” I think there’s that sense when you create these people that they’re extensions, hopefully not only of you, but partly of you. 

LIGON

You talked about fragmentation in Over Tumbled Graves, but there was a different kind of fragmentation in The Zero. Did that fragmentation come early for you in the writing? 

WALTER

I had written a short story years ago called “Flashers, Floaters, and  Vitreous Detachment.” In that story, there was an insane person who saw streaks and lines and believed the streaks and lines were connecting people and buildings and ideas and things. I had that piece just sitting there forever. When I was at Ground Zero, we kept not finding bodies.  We kept thinking we were going to find more bodies and we kept not finding them. The idea that these people were just gone, that they had been atomized, was hard to get your mind around. I kept thinking about that Maltese Falcon idea of disappearing and starting your life over. So I  started mulling a novel about someone who disappears and starts life over. 

More than any of the other books, that was a thematic book. There were all these things I wanted to say about the culture, about the way we reacted to September 11th, about the leadership at Ground Zero, about all those things that were bubbling around, and yet I couldn’t quite ever complete those thoughts. I couldn’t get my mind around what it was  I was trying to say to myself. And I thought, If I wait for this, I will never get there. I sort of transferred my own confusion and inability to track and process to the character. And that felt right. I can’t remember the first time I wrote one of those sentences where I just ended it with a dash, but oh my God, it was the most freeing thing, realizing that you don’t have to write those transitions. Transitions suck. Transitions are almost always forced. Or if they’re not, then they take you—they transition—to a place you don’t want to go. 

I had done some screenwriting at that point, and there’s an old saw in screenwriting that you want to begin a scene as late as possible and end it as soon as possible. And I thought, What if I end the scene way before anyone even knows what the scene is about? The freedom of that was a great discovery once I realized I could just bail out of scenes any time I wanted. Sometimes, the scene would accomplish what I thought it was going to, and other times, it would just hang there, a complete fragment. I was aware, all along, of the larger story I was telling, but the fragmentation kept it so fresh for me, because I was never sure how  much of it I was going to reveal. I had almost two versions of the story.  I had the full story, and I had this fragmented version I was telling. It made me a little crazy as a writer to be walking around with this kind of insane story that I’m telling myself in my head. 

LIGON

And that book was also about systems—

WALTER

Part of it is that I’m writing in 2003 and we’re all gung ho to get into  Iraq, and I’m writing a book that when I showed my wife, she said, “I  think you’ll go to jail for this.” And my agent said, “I don’t think I can  represent this book.” But I couldn’t stop working on it. 

I went back to Kafka and kept drawing in my mind these lines between Kafka’s systems and the kind of overarching sense in Kafka’s work that the state is bearing down on him, on the individual. And in  my mind, this was worse, because we were culpable. We were the system that was bearing down on us. We had a part in it by our inaction, by the fact that we kept electing George W. Bush. We were culpable in the surreal nature of our response to this action. We all knew that we weren’t really going to war because Iraq had gotten yellowcake uranium. We  knew that wasn’t the reason. We just wanted to kick some ass. Maybe some of us put little “no war” signs in our windows. And I felt a little  bit…I felt as if we’d all gone insane, as if the whole culture had gone  a little bit insane. Maybe some of us were only a little insane, but it felt like such a big, important thing to be working on and writing and saying. And from a writer’s standpoint, it was thrilling to be dangling  these scenes, and to be sort of nakedly saying things that I, as a younger  writer, would not have had the courage to even try to say.

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Lydia Millet discovered that she loved the desert when she attended the University of Arizona’s MFA program. And though she didn’t stay in the program, she returned to live in the desert a decade later—a wild, expansive setting fitting for both her fiction and her environmental advocacy. Millet is the author of six novels and, most recently, a collection of short stories, Love in Infant Monkeys, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA award for fiction, and embodies her interest in what she calls an “agenda of empathy” through the perspective of a grudgeless woman who has experienced a life full of misfortune and abuse.

Born in Boston and raised in Toronto, Millet lived in both Los Angeles and New York City before settling outside of Tucson. Her fiction deals with subjects as diverse as extinction, the creation of the atomic bomb, and celebrity worship, and shares a commitment to cultural investigation that is by turns serious and satirical.

In an interview with Eclectica Magazine, Millet described the condition with which her characters grapple as follows: “It seems to me that adult lives are not chiefly lives of discovery but of calcification and sedimentation: we become more rigid and we become more passive, buried in the sand that blows over us… And rarely, punctuating these long plateaus of sameness and non-learning, there are moments of rapture. In such moments we feel how near we are to touching truth, but how far away truth is, and how always and forever it will hover there beyond our reach… Many of my characters are caught up in moments of rapture and recognition, indeed such moments pop up like jack-in- the-boxes, because what else is worth the price of admission, finally? Myself, I live for those moments.”

We met with Lydia Millet on a shady porch in Spokane last spring, where we discussed imagination, the unsaid, and “the tragedy and glory of our individual selves.”

Samuel Ligon

Do you see yourself as a cultural critic?

Lydia Millet

I think any writer of substance is a cultural critic by nature. Almost any. I think books should have an agenda, but I don’t think you should be able to deliver a one-liner about what that agenda is. It should be an agenda felt by the reader, sensed by the reader, but not fully known. In my work, often there’s a sort of agenda of empathy. Very simple. Empathy is something I’m interested in. But other people have other agendas, a nostalgic agenda, or an agenda that circles the idea of longing. It could be anything. I just want to feel that it’s there, pulsing behind the bones.

Melina Rutter

Is the empathy agenda the same thing you refer to as the macrosocial? You’ve described that as writing that deals with the self in relation to the larger mysteries of the world.

Millet

Not exactly the same. One of the things I react against in contemporary literary fiction is the preoccupation with the personal. Obviously, it’s hard to define “personal” against “individual” or “the self.” But so much literary fiction seems to dwell singularly in the domain of the personal, the doings of the person, the social life of the person, the personal life of the person. And I find it very limiting. I’m not interested, finally, in just the personal. I’m interested in the relationship of the individual self to society and the social self, and morality, in fact, to use an old-fashioned word. Those connections are what I’m interested in exploring. But macrosocial can also be in the same vein as macroeconomics versus microeconomics, meaning larger systems or structures of the social. Government, for instance.

Ligon

Should fiction be interested in those kinds of systems?

Millet

Absolutely. It can be very covert, that interest, but I think it needs to be there. We’re a culture that’s dooming itself to navel-gazing, and has for a long time, and I don’t think that’s done us any favors. That’s not to say that navel-gazing doesn’t exist elsewhere, but I do think that we, as Americans, are in this crevasse of our own making in terms of the way we’ve allowed the apotheosis of self to dominate our thinking about the world, and I think it’s always a job of art to make us look at ourselves critically. Whether we do so overtly or covertly.

I’m not interested in polemics. Polemics are horrible to read. Even if a piece is satirical, if it’s sheer polemic, it doesn’t work as art. It doesn’t allow any space for the reader. I wrote some polemics when I was young. I wrote this terrible book called Parts and Services, which was a feminist screed, basically, against men. Every chapter was a part of a woman’s body. It was dreadful. Luckily, there are no extant copies of this monstrosity. But I started writing from that youthful angst-ridden passion about the injustice of the world, and then I moved away from that when I learned how to create something I was actually interested in. I have to be interested in what I’m doing, and any kind of polemic just shuts me out, someone else’s polemic or my own. The polemic kills imagination, essentially. Because it’s foregone. It’s already decided. There’s nothing in there that we’re helping to decide; there’s nothing we’re making in a polemic.

Ligon

What prose interests you?

Millet

I was asked recently whether I considered my taste to be minimalist in prose, and I never thought of myself that way, but I do like a lot of space on the page. That is to say, not actual physical white space, but I like there to be space, as with, say, some Nabokov, where there’s a lot of metaphysical space that’s somehow created by the language. I don’t like to be overwhelmed with words. I don’t want someone to try to do some “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” with their verbiage. I want there to be room for the silence of the mind in the reading.

Ligon

How does that manifest itself?

Millet

I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a sort of magic. It’s not that I want sentences to be small. It might have to do with the way time passes, narrative time and reading time, and how they work together. Pacing has something to do with it, a certain economy of language, which would be aspired to by Carver-ites. I don’t want any flashy tricks. I want there to be contemplation in the world of the story. But as to how that’s achieved technically, I think there are myriad ways, untold numbers of ways. So it’s not that I’m looking for a certain technique or formula or anything in the work, or even a series of tropes.

Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian, is one of my favorite writers, and my favorite book of his is Woodcutters. All of his books are about some version of himself, and he’s very bitter, he hates the world, but also hates himself, and he has these long internal monologues of—because he wrote in German—these run-on sentences. It’s very interior, and very judgmental of culture. He hated Austrian culture with a vengeance, which was his own culture, the culture of Vienna. But it’s not without humor. Part of the space I’m talking about prose generating has to do with humor. There should be a lightness. A book that does this well is
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. It’s perfectly spaced for the reader. It perfectly generates a world of thought and moment. I like books where the unutterable and the ineffable are lurking behind everything, where you approach the unsaid consistently in some way throughout the book. I like the unspeakable.

Ligon

You mentioned time. Is fiction always about time?

Millet

Always. But stories also help us to situate ourselves outside it, or to feel that we have. Obviously, there is no situating ourselves outside of time, but the illusion of being outside of time is exhilarating. It always seems like you could live your life in a movie, or in a book you love, a charismatic book. What if you had a score for everything you did? What if there was always music playing? What if there was always momentum, and always the shifting of landscapes, and you were that hero. It’s romantic, and I think all of us love the romantic, whether or not we admit it.

Ligon

But poetry isn’t always concerned with time as fiction seems to be.

Millet

There is a stop-time thing with poetry. But still, within a poem there has to be an expression of time. I think it’s a different relationship to time, but I’m not sure there’s not a concern with time in poetry. Because I think there always has to be time where careful language is concerned. There’s always time that we’re responding to and time we’re invoking in our sentences. I don’t think it’s a non-time with poems.

Rutter

Is music a non-time?

Millet

No. Music is all about time.

Rutter

You can take a piece of music out of context, like what you said about having a score to your life, or to a movie. You can take music out of context and impose it somewhere else.

Millet

Of all the arts, music is the best at allowing us access to the present, I think. And whether that has to do with neurology, neurolinguistics, whether it has to do with the way that blood cycles through our bodies, I don’t know, but the rhythm and the power of music is, I think, in allowing us to live in the present in this particular, unique way that is remarkable. If I could, I would be a great musician.

Rutter

I was reading your essay about the Mekons.

Millet

I love those damn Mekons.

Rutter

In an interview you talked about rapture. Is the moment you describe in the essay—at the Mekons show—how you would define rapture?

Millet

You know when you’re at a music event, and you’re dancing around, or maybe you’re not, maybe you’re just still, and you’re loving with this deep love that you can feel for music? I think at those times I’m more aware of myself in space and the rest of the world than at many other times. It’s extraordinary. Music has that great power to make you want to be nowhere but there, at that moment. I don’t think fiction works that way. You can love a book and be deeply immersed in a book, and want to remain with the book, and you should, if it’s a good book. But it’s not the same. It’s in this sort of past time of the book. You’re in the world of the book, this already completed world, into which you’re injecting yourself, of course, in a changeable, mutable way. But it’s not the same as listening to a piece of music.

Rutter

And it’s not collective. It seems like that might have something to do with the feeling of rapture.

Millet

Definitely. It’s an idea of communion. It’s like a religious sort of ecstasy, I think. Folks who are involved in those sorts of ecstatic religions, they’re involved also in going to a Mekons concert, or whatever the brew of choice is.

Rutter

In your book, My Happy Life, when the narrator experiences what I thought of as rapture, it seemed to come out of feeling connected to someone else, for better or worse.

Millet

I do think that’s where empathy lies, in this recognition of the self and its relation to the not-self, to the community, to the species, another species, to beingness. It’s the pain of being individual selves, of being isolate. And yet, of course, our greatest gifts live in that selfhood also. Our greatest capacity. The privacy of our minds is such a glorious thing. Yet we’re social beings always straining for communion. And for me, much of the tension of my fiction, or the project of it, lies around that subtragedy of our individual selves, which is also our glory.

Laura Ender

How does the “pain of being individual selves” play a role in your work? The narrator of My Happy Life, for example, seems to experience rapture when she’s in physical pain, usually at the hands of others.

Millet

Her gift in this book, the gift that I wanted to give her, was the gift of being fully expressed and in commerce with other souls, which is clearly a fictional conceit. When I sat down to write that book, I think I was just turning thirty, and I was moving away from judgment as a main practice that defined my artistic life and world. When I lived in New York in my twenties, it seemed that my friends and I were always going to parties, and this also applied to our reading, and our choosing of what art we liked. Our practice was to go to these parties and separate ourselves and look at all the things we didn’t like, and all the people we didn’t like, criticize people for what they weren’t, or what they were. This was the way we defined our taste. As I grew older, I became more interested in—well, I’m still highly judgmental, but I became more interested in defining myself by what I loved. And by love in general, by love of the world and its denizens rather than by criticism of it. So I wrote this book as a gesture for myself. Could I write a character who was unlike myself in this extreme fashion, in this fashion of living an un-judging life? And, also, what would the tragedy of that look like? What would the sadness of that look like? Because I believe we should, in many cases, be more judgmental, actually, as a culture. So it wasn’t that I was simply creating a utopian character. It was that I wanted to look at the practical reality of a self who fails to criticize the society in which he or she lives.

Ender

Is violence important to that point?

Millet

Yeah, and that’s why the events in that book had to be extreme, any of the various torture episodes. I didn’t wish to linger on them, and I don’t think I did linger. It’s not a graphic mayhem that’s occurring, because I had no interest in that. It’s a form of voyeurism, but I wanted to establish the parameters of her servitude in ways that were fairly extreme as a backdrop. You couldn’t play such a character off anything that was less than extreme. Or I couldn’t.

Ender

You use violence in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love and in Omnivores. Do you think violence is important to fiction?

Millet

I think of myself as tending away from reading violence, as being less interested. We get so much of it in other places that I never think of fiction as the locus of that. So I guess I’m more interested in references to violence than descriptions of violence. Most of my violent scenes, when you read them line to line, are not graphically violent. They just state that a violent event has occurred. For example, there’s a scene in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love where she’s sort of raped, you know, but you don’t actually see the details of that. You don’t see any physicality of it. We’re already deluged by so many images of violence that they’re sort of throwaways now, and they’re everywhere, in every procedural that comes on TV. They’re so everywhere that they’re formulaic, and so I think a reference is really all that’s required to invoke the feeling of that.

But I also don’t see much of a need for landscape descriptions in fiction. There’s a lot I don’t see a need for or am not interested in prosecuting in fiction. Most physical description I’m not interested in. I like it when other people do it well, as long as they don’t linger, but I’ve never been very… you’d be hard pressed to say where any one of my characters is situated on a given page. I mean, where are they in the world? It’s not clear. What does their world look like? That’s all for the reader to make. I’m just not interested in lengthy textual exploration of physicality in general, I guess.

Rutter

Do you think that human/animal relationships in literature have been romanticized?

Millet

That’s a broad question. What are your thoughts on it?

Rutter

There seems to be an archetype of the human/animal relationship in literature: the man going out in the wilderness to conquer the beast and show his dominion over nature.

Ender

Like The Old Man and the Sea.

Millet

Or Moby-Dick. There certainly is that sort of predator/prey dynamic in a lot of earlier American literature.

Rutter

And there’s something different going on in your work.

Millet

You should read Joy Williams’s essay collection, Ill Nature. The hunting piece, “The Killing Game,” is a polemic, but she’s someone who can do that in an essay better than anyone I know. It has this moral weight to it that’s just brilliant.

I guess what I find more in contemporary American fiction is a rejection of the world of the non-domesticated animal. Pets don’t really count. There are plenty of dog-obsessed people. I’m a dog-obsessed person. But there’s a rejection of the whole nonurban world, and even the urban nature world. At the same time, there is sometimes this fetishization of the animal, you know, obscure bits of natural history that people cling to, or just the symbolic weight of animal morphology, like the beauty of animals, that does make an appearance in much contemporary fiction, but is not to be dwelt upon. More in an almost nostalgic way, as though the animal is already gone. As though these things are not somehow relevant. The wild animal as pet, I think, appears in contemporary fiction, but it’s difficult to cite my references here.

I also think that animals are extraordinarily difficult to write about. And can be boring to read about. Because they are other. They don’t have dialogue. There’s contemporary fiction that does deal with animal subjectivity, for example Barbara Gowdy’s book, The White Bone, which is written from the point of view of the elephants. Or there’s that quasi- commercial pop fiction, the guy with the tiger on the raft. Life of Pi. So there are attempts. Gowdy’s a Canadian writer who’s not probably known enough in the U.S. Her book is strange—very ambitious and sort of a misfire, cringe-inducing at times. Because it’s really hard to write well from the point of view of an elephant, a difficult project. Few are more difficult, I think. So there are some things like that in contemporary fiction. But I think that the project of entering animal subjectivity is just immense and undoable.

What’s more interesting is the attempt to explore how animals aren’t us, and how different we are, you know, just the fact of embracing the unknowableness of the animal, and wanting that always to persist in culture, to be there. Even the most urban among us would feel impoverished in a world without animals and without trees. We may not be prone to hiking or whatever, but we live in the knowledge that somewhere in our land there is the wild. We don’t want to live in a world where that doesn’t exist. Yet we don’t talk about this very much. And it’s ceasing to exist more every day. There’s very little outcry about this. It’s problematic, for me. The intersection of environmental advocacy culture and literary culture has always been very—there almost is none, for one thing. And when it does happen, it’s odd, because I don’t typically love so-called nature writing. I don’t do a lot of reading in that area. I do like Barry Lopez, his nonfiction. But I’m bored by a lot of writing that is more pastoralist.

And the whole style and aesthetic of the environmental movement, in which I’m immersed to some degree—because I work in it and my husband is an environmentalist, and my graduate degree was in the field—but it’s not a culture where I feel at home at all, because I don’t like the aesthetics of it, and I don’t like the single-mindedness of it. There are two sides of it now in America. There’s the kind of granola-ey, more grassroots-y culture of it, and then there’s the national-environmental- group-super-corporate culture of it, which is full of lawyers. And I’ve worked in both. When I lived in New York, I worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council for three years, and wrote grants for them, so I’ve seen both of these arenas, and I don’t like either. The people in them don’t—and there are exceptions to this—but they don’t read literature at all. In many cases, the art that is gravitated toward by enviros is just not of the first order to me.

My husband is a rare exception to this, a voracious reader of poetry, with an almost-PhD in phenomenology, so he’s philosophical and he’s a theory head, more erudite than I am by far; and he also loves art. But he’s so rare. I mean, people in that world just aren’t interested in the books that I love and revere. On the other side, my literary friends have very limited interest in environmentalism, which is an awkward and uncharismatic word anyway, not one that sufficiently illuminates the nature of these matters—we’re talking about a range of things having to do with human life support, quality of life, and the ontological reality of the world, so I don’t like the term environment or environmentalism. But that said, most of my literary friends see a certain tediousness in the strivings of that subculture. I understand in a way, because the aesthetics of environmentalism are so limited and unfortunately passé, but the refusal of the U.S. intelligentsia to engage in these sorts of social issues, beyond just a passing acquaintance with them, is tragic. And it’s greatly exacerbated here, compared to say Latin America, where there’s a more well-rounded relationship to social problems and art, where these things are more interlinked.
I think we have a culture that refuses to confront itself in honest and powerful terms. It’s partly the ironic gesture, the supremacy of the ironic, which in the wake of 9/11 was dismissed by various idiotic critics. Irony certainly has not disappeared, nor should it, but I do think there’s a distance between the literary subculture and the subculture of advocacy that wants to say, quite rationally and urgently—because given what the science says about climate change, we don’t have much time at all—“Look. We have serious problems, and we need to pay attention to them if we want our grandchildren to live in a bearable world.”

Ligon

I wonder if there’s a rejection of the human in the environmental community—a focus on the fact that humans destroy—and what’s valued is the pristine, where humans aren’t. There seems to be a rejection of the human, which, as a fiction writer, is one of your primary concerns.

Millet

There is a reaction to anthropocentrism in that community that rejects the human and the human-preoccupied. But I don’t think it’s calculated. I think it’s more a sort of thoughtless rejection of maybe an urban sort of elite, a certain kind of materialism. I do believe there’s a better way to do that, that it’s possible and in fact necessary to reject the centrally human without rejecting the human. I’m interested in our foibles and our beauties as a species. This doesn’t make me any less interested in the rest of the world; indeed it makes me more interested in the rest of the world.

We’ve got all these false dichotomies in the culture, like the dichotomy between creationism and evolutionary biology—Darwinism and creationism. This whole idea that you can’t have God if you have evolution is so obviously specious. It’s just unreasoned and specious, and yet has become this leviathan in culture, that these things are at war with each other. It seems like category errors are made all over the place. I’d like to see a world where the literary folks were more interested in extra-literary concerns, and where activists—and not just environmental activists—were more interested in the arts. And also, if more scientists were interested in the arts… I read lots of stuff about popular science, but I don’t know a lot of scientists who read literature. There are some, don’t get me wrong, but it just seems like we so tragically undervalue art and literary art.

Ligon

Are we too specialized? Is that the problem?

Millet

I do think there’s extreme specialization, but there’s no intrinsic reason that the specialty has to close out the rest of the world.

Ligon

Was this less true fifty years ago, a hundred years ago?

Millet

Certainly a hundred years ago. What happened is just capitalism, I think. Extreme postindustrial capitalism. Competition is everything. Everything is a competition, and if you have to excel in a particular skill—like if you’re a shot-put thrower, you’re taught not to pay attention to the whole rest of the track and field world. We actually make a feast of this. It’s all that we do, this notion of excellence, wanting our children to excel, wanting ourselves to excel, which means focus on one thing to the detriment of the rest of existence or experience. A return to the Renaissance man would be great, and the Renaissance woman.

Ligon

Does your work ask us to reconsider the human relationship to animals or nature?

Millet

I hope it does. I almost always set my people in urban environments, in particular L.A. Generally, I’m not environment-specific, but L.A. looms large in my writing, because I think it’s sort of the ultra-America, an exaggeration of America. Or a perfection of American exaggeration. But also, I would find it boring to have my people constantly gamboling in nature. There’s no doubt that we’re urbanized and urbanizing more all the time. I think we should all go more to the woods, or the beach, more to the ocean, to the river, to the desert, but I’m not interested in situating my fiction there. Individual animals have always been more compelling to me; their charisma is more interesting as a subject of fiction. I think it’s difficult to write compellingly about trees. John Fowles did it, but I can’t.

Ligon

Did you have an experience that caused you to reevaluate your relationship to animals?

Millet

It wasn’t any particular moment, really. It was when I left Manhattan and moved to the desert outside Tucson. This was in January of 1999. I lived in an apartment in the West Village with my then boyfriend, but I had loved the desert since I first went there a decade earlier and briefly attended the University of Arizona—my brief foray into an MFA program. So I went back to live there part-time, like four months a year, and then a week after I got there, I bought the house I now live in. My boyfriend wasn’t too happy about that, because he didn’t want to live in the desert. But coming to that desert, I realized that the sky was so huge, and it was the only place I’d ever felt all right about dying in. I realized, here is where I can be comfortable with death, with the idea of my own mortality. Because here the world is so beautiful, that to be a part of it, even if I’m just dead, is all right with me. I’d always hated the idea of growing old in New York and hobbling along those cold sidewalks in my old age, even though I’d only lived in Manhattan for three years and still love going there. But I realized, this is actually the world. The world is not the places we have built on it. The world is this. And it’s the world that I want to live in, where I can see a million stars at night over my house and animals wander through the yard. So it wasn’t any sort of epiphany, but just going there and realizing I should be there.

Ligon

Recognizing something larger than yourself, or that you were part of?

Millet

No, I’ve always had awe. I had awe at great cities, too. I’ve always lived with awe, but it was actually that I wasn’t a part of it, that I didn’t have to be a part of it, that this world would exist after I did. It would go on and on and on without me, and that’s in My Happy Life. So it wasn’t that I was a part of it; it was that I was not a part of it and didn’t have to be.

Ligon

It seems like Europeans, but especially the British, have attitudes about human relationships to animals that are different than Americans’. For example, we see an animal rights movement in Britain more than in the United States.

Millet

I think that’s true. Of course, Europe has destroyed its own nature long since, for the most part, but I do think they have a more sophisticated relationship to animals in general. I think that has a lot to do with the philosophical underpinnings of our various societies. American pragmatism, materialism, the Methodist sort of John Wesley get rich and richer and richer, all that philosophy that was so crucial to the birth of our country—Puritanism—prepared us for a more objectified relationship to the natural world. Whereas in European philosophy, you know, your Derrida, your sort of continental philosophy, there’s a greater appreciation for and understanding of the nonhuman.

Ender

Are you addressing that in “Sexing the Pheasant” when the character is considering what’s American and what’s English?

Millet

I’ve done that a lot lately, you’re making me recognize, because in the book that is the sequel to How the Dead Dream, called Ghost Lights, and then the third one, called Magnificence—they’re not published yet, but they’re in existence—the protagonist of Ghost Lights is the father of Casey in How the Dead Dream, and he’s an IRS guy. He goes looking for T down in Costa Rica. After he discovers that his wife is cheating on him, he wants to get away, so he invents this expedition to find T, who has disappeared, as in the end of the first book. He meets these Germans there, and he objectifies these Germans, and at the same time adores them. It’s comic, but it’s like the Aryan ideal, and I’m thinking now that I do that a fair amount, just playing off the European.

Ender

Madonna is the main character in “Sexing the Pheasant,” and every story in Love in Infant Monkeys features some sort of celebrity or historical figure, alive or dead. Where does the celebrity end and the character begin?

Millet

Of course I have no idea what Madonna is like personally. I just had my version of an invented Madonna, although I suspect there are certain accurate parallels. I let myself write whatever I wanted to about these living and dead people. You can’t be constrained by fact.

Ligon

The way you used fact in that book reminded me of Don DeLillo with Libra, how you would take characters, and I’m thinking of Harlow, who you reveal as somewhat despicable, and then humanize them. How did fact play into the fiction, or how did you get away from fact?

Millet

I take what I like amongst the facts and play with it. I love despicable characters. I’m fascinated with them. When I read my book Everyone’s Pretty—when I’m forced to read a portion of it—I realize just how harsh that main character is, but I loved him at the time, his wickedness. I love the wicked and the dismissive, and the narcissistic in particular, probably because I find these things in myself, and in other people—but all those terrible parts of our selves exaggerated are just so much fun to play with. I’m very opportunistic, I think, when I write about historical personages or contemporary living individuals. I pick what I want out of the shimmering vision of them that’s ambient in culture, and play my own game with it, and please myself in rendering it in whatever form I see fit for the purpose of the story. I feel little obligation to verisimilitude. So that’s liberating, but I think that’s why I’m a poor candidate for nonfiction. Because it’s very difficult for me to—and I’ve written a few essays, probably enough for a collection now, but only a couple of them are good, I think, and that’s because I’m not very able to situate myself comfortably in a narrative eye that has to reflect my actual self in some genuine form. I have a couple of times, I think, succeeded in that, but it’s hard to reduce yourself. I envy good nonfiction writers that capacity. I think it’s exceptional. Very few do it to my satisfaction, actually. It’s hard to construct a narrative persona in nonfiction that is not repugnant in some way. Because how self-praising do you allow yourself to be, or how self-deprecating, and just what parts of yourself do you choose to represent in nonfiction? It’s such a difficult negotiation, and one I don’t
care to undertake very often.

Rutter

Part of what’s effective about Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is the juxtaposition between straight historical fact and the narrative that the reader is already involved in. How did that structure evolve?

Millet

I did something a little bit like that in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, too, where I had quotes at the beginning of each chapter, often from George Bush himself. I did a lot of primary research for Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. I went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I went to the Nevada test sites, and Los Alamos, and the Trinity Site. I really wanted to ground it, and there was so much that was fascinating about the facts, as they pertained to this piece of history, that I didn’t want to lose them entirely, so I played my obviously fanciful narrative off of that. I think, perhaps, because I did so much research, I simply wanted to inject it into there. I read shelves of books about these men, all the biographical writing about them, and far more than I needed to know about nukes in general, and I think that it was a thing where, for me, the stakes were so high, in terms of what actually happened. And what actually happened had such terrible beauty of its own that I didn’t want to give it short shrift.

Well, the creation might not be beautiful, but the explosions of the bomb are beautiful, ridiculously so. The mushroom cloud is sublime, and I didn’t want my book to exist as a fancy completely divorced from this very heavyweight reality. Also, the nonfiction narrative parts served to anchor portions of the book for me. I don’t know if it completely worked, honestly, because those pieces take you out of the narrative, and are by nature didactic. I feel that of all my books, that is the least technically successful, although some people only like that book. But for me, artistically, it was a harder thing to pull off. Probably because it’s a long book, and I’m not really a long book person. It’s difficult for me to maintain tone over the course of such a long narrative, and those didactic segments also allowed me to release myself from the job of maintaining that tone. But between the hardback and the paperback, I cut 15,000 words. That was how dissatisfied I was.

Rutter

I thought the structure gave variance to the reading experience. I guess it was giving variance to the writing experience, too. The juxtaposition was where I found that metaphysical space you were talking about earlier.

Millet

I hope it does that; I’m not always confident in it. But a curious thing with the reception of that book was that several of the readings I gave attracted physicists from the Manhattan Project who were still alive. Several of them came up to me and told me that they felt my portrayals of the other physicists were not far off. Which was astonishing and perhaps not true, because I don’t think they were the intimates of those physicists, so it may have just been their social projections onto these figures that they had worked with. I don’t know. I don’t entirely believe it, but it was odd for me that they attributed any verisimilitude whatsoever. It remains for me the most realist of my books, and I think that’s why its fans are a discreet segment among my readers, who don’t tend to go as easily into the things that are less earnest.

Ender

Your book covers feature the color pink and babies and pink and more pink. But it seems like you’ve escaped the chick-lit ghetto more than most female writers. What are your thoughts on marketing of contemporary fiction by women?

Millet

For a long time I was angered by what I perceived to be real sexism in the publishing industry, and it absolutely still exists. Now I’m more likely to laugh at it, though the laugh is definitely not your light-hearted, dizzy- with-joy type laugh. It’s more like the laugh of a cackling inmate. But it is purely laughable, the way merely solid writing by men gets anointed as genius with a kind of methodical, institutional urgency. Literary writing by women isn’t pushed or touted as “genius” the way writing by men is. Men, and especially men who write long books, are touted as geniuses at the drop of a hat, frankly. But many women who write with equal or greater brilliance are lucky to get called by lesser names, are never viewed as powerhouses, and are often relegated to the margins. As to chick lit per se, there are so many categories: your urban power-outfit chick lit apparently for grownups, your teen-fiction specimens that groom young girls to be vapid, your middlebrow women’s fiction concerned chiefly with relationships and the home front… and then of course there are numerous serious writers with two X chromosomes who simply get overlooked or dismissed as minor.

Ligon

Alice Munro can write about “women’s” issues, and she doesn’t get pigeon-holed.

Millet

That’s true, but she has much greater austerity and more metaphysical space in her prose than so many writers of both sexes, even though I actually went on record sort of lambasting all of the Alice Munro fans in the world on the front page of The Globe and Mail’s book section. You can’t fault Munro for the work she does, in the sense that she’s technically brilliant and very intelligent and a great writer in some ways—she’s a serious writer, someone I respect—but I do think that domestic microscopy is problematic in literary culture. It’s just that she does it so well, it’s really hard to object to Alice Munro. But I wish there weren’t as many Alice Munro imitators. It’s sort of like Carver. I like Carver. But I wish there weren’t so many Carver-ites….

I once wrote a vicious review of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which would fall into a middle-aged, Hermès-scarf-wearing female-bonding category… I detest that kind of thing. I find it materialistic and status-quo promoting and “let’s all play bridge at the country club.” Or the uber-commercial chick-lit products like the Sex in the City franchise: Let’s all bond by wearing designer clothes. Sex in the City is the equivalent of setting up a huge line dance by lung cancer patients singing a glittering show tune about the fabulousness of their premium-brand cigarettes. Which would at least be funnier. What amazes me is that so many women, some of them actually smart, delude themselves that the Sex in the City line dance, with skinny chicks belting out the praises of their high-heeled shoes, is empowering. That kind of presentation of female bonding is vile to me. Although there’s nothing wrong with female bonding. I practice it in my own life, and I love women, but there’s not much to like in chick-lit culture. It’s a pathetic trivialization of femaleness.

Ender

There’s a lot of biology, zoology, and anthropology in your books.
Would you say writing is a kind of anthropology?

Millet

Anthropology has a way of objectifying the “other,” and fiction also objectifies. You can’t not. Humorous fiction especially is all about objectification; that’s how we’re funny. There’s a kind of distance required for humor, I think, and to achieve that distance, you need to objectify. It’s not always that you’re objectifying a character. You might be objectifying a trend, or an entire people. There are numerous forms of objectification. But it’s almost always in some form of it, I think, that the funniest funny occurs. I think that’s why I seem never able to write a book where there aren’t marginal characters who are severely objectified. In even my gentler books, there are throwaway objectified characters, lampooned caricatures. They’re types, archetypes or stereotypes. And anthropology has this, you know, “white man’s burden” kind of aspect to it, even when it tries to be postmodern, or post-structuralist, when it attempts to say that it’s not doing what it’s doing. It’s still always about this microscopy of the other. I always want, in what I do, to have both objectification and sympathetic identification; I want them to coexist. I think that the tension between those two is interesting in fiction and that some of the best fiction is highly aware of the play between the object and the subject. I think we automatically objectify everywhere we go, all our perceptions; we’re not just meaning-making machines, but specifically objectification-creating machines. We can’t help objectifying others, and to a degree, ourselves, by reducing, categorizing, labeling, naming. All the things that make us who we are, in a great way, also make us compulsive objectifiers.

Ligon

And when we objectify, it means we don’t see the person?

Millet

It means we can’t see without naming. There’s no complete vision of the self or of others, but the way we make sense of the world is to create objects. This book I just blurbed is a 30th anniversary reissue of a famous John Fowles essay called “The Tree.” It’s a beautiful essay about the way we relate to nature, and don’t, and the difference between those among us who are cultivators, and those who just like to look at trees, and what that difference is. At least briefly, he talks about this sort of “thingification” of nature. He doesn’t call it that. I guess reification, though he doesn’t call it that either. But it has to do with a way we can look at something like that ponderosa pine, and as soon as we turn away from it, or even in the looking at it, we have already made of it a thing. There’s a way in which it’s really hard for us to not make totality into things that we then see ourselves seeing as things, if that makes any sense. Let’s say you’re on a hike—and this could be in an urban environment equally, where the trees are the buildings—but you’re walking and you see something, a tree or a house. You’re there with it, but almost as soon as you turn away, it’s already not itself. It’s already something you are bracketing in your own experience as something you have experienced. It’s hard to parse, but I’m interested in that. It’s a form, obviously, of objectifying the world around us, that we seem unable not to perform. We can’t escape it.
But there’s nobility in the struggle to try, I think. Because otherwise, once every being is classified as a thing, we’ve experienced a great loss in understanding, even our attempt to understand ourselves as a part of the world. It’s the difference between art and nature he talks about. Art is something that already is what it is. It’s complete. It’s done. You read a book. It’s what it already was. But nature’s constantly changing, and we find it difficult to interact with, because we can’t rely on it the way we can the things that we’ve created, even if they’re beautiful. We can’t rely on it to remain the same. We can’t “thingify” it entirely. And by nature, I mean the entire world that we live in, that we inhabit, and I’m certainly not the first person to see this, but this sort of alienation that we feel from totalities, I think, has had a pernicious effect on us as a species. We’re dying as we speak. We’re changing, our cells are changing; we’re not art; we’re not made, but being. We’re nature, so we’re also things that can’t be relied upon to remain the same.

Ligon

Are we afraid of that? Is that part of our problem?

Millet

Of course, of course. Because we can never dwell successfully in the present, and that’s part of our tragedy. We’re always creatures of the future or the past. Both of them we feel we control to a greater degree than we do the present. We can’t get a grasp on this. What is this “us” sitting here? We don’t even know what we are because we’re changing as I say this. I already feel different from the way I felt five seconds ago.

I think there’s a great narrative beauty in anthropology, a great charisma in objectification in general. It’s beyond charming to make people into characters and events into stories. It’s compelling. It’s lovely. It’s our way of bringing color into our lives, to create these linear paths for ourselves. We don’t know any other way to exist than by making stories, and that applies to everyone, not just writers. All we can know is a story, and that has to do directly with the fact that we’re not creatures who can fathom the present. The making of things we don’t understand into stories, there always has to be reduction in that. It’s always an act of reduction. And that reduction is so fucking fun. It’s an adventure.

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PRAGEETA SHARMA IS THE DIRECTOR of the MFA program at the University of Montana and author of three poetry collections, Bliss to Fill, The Opening Question, and Infamous Landscapes. When asked about a guiding notion for The Opening Question, she answered, “I started with the idea of a kind of unabashed confrontation with disappointment and worked towards a way of reeling it in with a hopeful lyrical edge.” Her work takes on topics to which many may have aversions – philosophy and feminism – with humor and insight as seen in poems such as “Everywhere:”

I was crafting crafts, I had needles, I was sewing butterflies

like women do – but only in terms of thoughts,

not in terms of doing. Or I thought, alas,

lightness is part of the commune of despair.

The scene of a woman doing needlework becomes increasingly strange when we realize she is embroidering thoughts. The thoughts open passageways that lead into communes in which despair surprises with its lightness.

Poems, Sharma asserts, are “places in which you can actually take ideas on, and figure out how they can be inhabited.” Her poems, Major Jackson writes, reveal “’the posture of the life of the mind.’ ascending, where humor is unabashedly handsome and an enormous intellect alluring even to the most cynical pedestrian.” While Jackson points out the ascendant movement of Sharma’s poems, Lisa Jarno takes us to their transcendence: “Prageeta Sharma’s poems are as ever imbued with a crafty playfulness by which the appearances of the ‘I,’ the ‘You,’ and the ‘We’ transcend tricks of the trade.” Thomas Sayers Ellis also notes the expansiveness and profundity of Sharma’s poems that, as he puts it, “seem to live everywhere we’ve lived without wallowing in identity or judgment.”

Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, to Hindu parents. “Being raised a Hindu,” she says, “I was taught to honor knowledge and books like a religion and so for me poetry keeps this relationship close, true, active.” She earned an MFA at Brown University in 1995 and an MA in media studies at the New School in 2001. In 2010 she received a Howard Foundation Grant. We met with her at the Hyatt in Denver during the Association of Writing Programs Conference where we discussed escaping the institution, poets are creative consultants, and limits of the image.

SHIRA RICHMAN

Your poetry addresses feminism in a playful, humorous way. Does humor feel like a way to be taken seriously when discussing feminism?

PRAGEETA SHARMA

I always felt like I had this split personality culturally – I was very quiet, but in my poetry I felt conscious of what a dramatic voice and a dramatic “I” sounded like. It felt melodramatic to me at times. I wanted to construct a voice that was closest to my personality in speaking, in the way that Frank O’Hara had that kind of conversational tone or Kenneth Koch. It was natural to think about a feminine voice that could be conversational and informal, or intimate in ways that weren’t exaggerating the terms of intimacy, but were playful. It is a kind of feminist position to feel comfortable with your voice and engage the reader without putting on airs or trying to construct an over-determined identity for the poem.

When I was beginning to write, a lot of Indian poets were educating the reader about their identity. I wanted to present my personality rather than educate the reader. I’m interested in how we can be, not our best self, but our quirkiest self in the poem, because we have to be this other self all the time. Our artistic self, or the need to be an individual, should be in the poem. That’s a feminist act: to not be one-dimensional in the poem. But I do think a lot of Indian women, culturally, are set up to not have anything to say – except to explain, or to mediate, or to be a messenger of something “more important” than their inner lives.

RICHMAN

Such as what?

SHARMA

When I went to grad school – I graduated in 1995 – there was a lot of “salvation” fiction about the first-generation immigrants and immigrant experience. The subject matter was also very domestic, and I was sort of rallying against that passive “I,” where the character was examined through an omniscient narrator reporting on the culture the characters were immersed in, but never having an opinion about it. You were basically writing for a white reader, who would learn about your culture through you. You were learning nothing about it. You were just putting it on display.

I didn’t want to create poems that merely educated the non-Indian reader. I wanted poems where thinking was happening, because that was a canonical thing. Helen Vendler would talk about the thinking that was happening in, say, Keats – and I’m actually not trying to align myself with “great poets,” but it became this real whiteness – that writing was cerebral thinking, and if you were a person of color, you were telling your story or you were writing the narrative. You were educating people around you instead of actually thinking in the poem, too. It’s important to explore the variety of cognitive experiences in the poem rather than just telling a story.

AMANDA MAULE

Where do you see that thinking happening, or what kind of thinking are you doing in your poetry?

SHARMA

I don’t know if it’s evident in the progression of the books – this is just something I’ve always returned to – but I like thinking of the poem as that place to speak about theory without it being academic. Artists are developing their theories about the world, and we do that in a poem. We don’t have to do it in an essay. That’s the kind of thinking I hope I’m doing. All the stuff that you can’t do anywhere else.

In all three books, I have poems where I’m proposing ideas, a personal philosophy that I think is lofty in an absurd way, but where it’s fun to be absurd with thought. I think a lot of German philosophy is lofty, and a lot of Hindu is more general – you know, general audience ideas. So I wanted to explore places where you could have extravagant thinking without having it fixed to one movement or another. I think men do this all the time. And going back to humor, when women explore humor, sometimes it’s sort of slapstick or jokey, and that can be awkward. But there are so many male poets who are funny in their poems, like Kenneth Koch.

RICHMAN

I think women are funnier.

SHARMA

Women are funnier. I’m just wondering if it’s as much in the poem as in the way we interact and engage. But we may be funny when we’re making points when we’re remarking on something that’s unfair. We can be slightly snide and funny. Are we using the poem as a place to enjoy our playfulness? We are now, I think. A lot more poets are. Arielle Greenberg is, I think. And Matthea Harvey, in the way in which her humor is felt through abstraction and character. There’s that playfulness to the poems. I think her second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine, does that. She has nouns and objects stand in for people. I think there’s a lovely quality in the strangeness of the humor there.

Among South Asian poets, I think there are a few male poets who explore craft and wit, really think of it formally, but I’m wondering if there’s still not more of that playfulness that could be found. In terms of gender, I’m not sure if we’re still fixed with the kind of confessional “I.” Or when we experiment, do we just extract language from the narrative and not necessarily put our personality in there? I don’t know where we are with humor in terms of cultural identity. But in terms of gender, a lot of women are playing; they just don’t want to be too slapstick. There’s a particular poet who I’m not going to mention, who may be just a little too funny. Then you’re like, Ugh, I don’t want that. I don’t want to be a comic. So there’s the risk, I think. A lot of men can be comedic and even use one-liners, and it’s okay. They just take that kind of space.

RICHMAN

I’m having trouble thinking of funny male poets. You mentioned Kenneth Koch.

SHARMA

Kenneth Koch I really love. And Tony Hoagland.

MAULE

Dean Young can be funny, too.

SHARMA

Yeah. And people have said they see connections between what I do and Dean Young’s work, structurally. I like his work. I haven’t thought about it in relation to my work, but I certainly know he was publishing when I was younger, and his poems were playful and exploratory. Structurally, they had a voice that was working against some perceived notion of the poem he was undoing. That’s something I like to do. If there’s a rule, I want to play with it.

RICHMAN

One of the funny poems of yours is “After the Weekend with Geniuses.” The fiction writers are the geniuses who are full of pages, and the poets are the warriors and false gardeners who end up languishing on the lawn like love-starved lawn ornaments. Are poets lazy and ornamental? How are fiction writers different?

SHARMA

I spent a weekend with a bunch of fiction writers and we were helping Heather McGowan, a fiction writer, think about her first run of edits on her novel, which was experimental. Whenever we talked about it, I would say, “You know, if it were a poem, you could just do this and you wouldn’t have to do those fifty things.” But it was never helpful because she couldn’t just do this. So I thought, “We’re so extravagant, poets. We can just do this little thing and then lounge about and not do any more.” With the poem, you have a lot of autonomy I don’t think you have as a prose writer. We poets have more autonomy to be ourselves. That’s extravagant, I think.

MAULE

Dean Young has surreal tendencies. Do you see a relationship to surrealism in your work?

SHARMA

My undergraduate study was really formal, and I learned a lot about modern and contemporary poetry – the canonical lens – and then went on to Brown, which was an experimental program. There was a new or different, alternative cannon: Stein and O’Hara and Ashbery. And realizing you could read Eliot and Pound and go one way, or read Eliot and Pound and go the other way. You could go to Lowell or you could go to Olson in your thinking. That was really new to me to think that – Oh, there are open parentheticals, or, Oh, language, words can stand in for other words. You don’t need a simile here; we don’t need to do this with craft.

Then I moved to New York and realized that the poets who seemed to have the most fun, in general, were having fun on the page and having fun in their lives. It spoke to me that I could play in the poem, and I could find surrealism. I think there are some poems trying some surrealism….

But I guess, more, it’s imagination – really figuring out where you want your imagination to be. I think it would be easy to say that I’m surrealist, but I don’t think I am. I don’t think it’s a structure I try on. I just like pairing certain ideas. I like being contrary, so a poem is set up to sort of contradict itself. Just as we go from one thought to another, the poem invites another idea. I don’t think I’m as experimental at all. I’m that square peg in a round hole. I’m not sure what makes the poems so different from somebody else’s in terms of contemporary, nontraditional poems – if we call narrative traditional. But I don’t know if we’re doing that anymore.

I do like some surrealism, but after a certain point I get tired of a poem being purely nonsensical, in the sense that I don’t need meta-symbolism for the poem. Tate does an American surrealist thing where suddenly you step back – I forget which poem it is, but he’s talking about a daughter marrying a prince. After a certain point, you realize the absurdity of this father-daughter relationship and where it goes, and it’s quite metaphorical but it’s also absurd, and you understand that the essential part of the poem is that father-daughter relationship can be estranged in such complicated ways that you might not be able to talk about them directly. I love Tate because the surrealism provides a way to talk about complicated relationships. The surrealism serves a philosophical purpose, makes room to talk about something. I think Dean Young does that, too. I think American surrealism, if that is indeed the right term, does something that the metaphor isn’t always able to do.

RICHMAN

In some of your more recent work, you put the urban into a wild setting, such as being mugged in a river. What sorts of things do you do to ground or un-ground your imagination?

SHARMA

I don’t know how I ground myself. I do feel like an outsider in ways in the West. I used to feel like an outsider in suburbia, growing up with no other Indians around me. I can really go to places where things are invented for me. There are social norms I have to explore. I try to create high stakes around some questions, and then my imagination takes over. I position myself in a place where I have to explain myself, and the terms that I’ve set for myself are both real and imaginary. For example, Homi Bhabha, the theorist, talked a lot about – I’m going to butcher this because it’s been a long time since I’ve read the essay – but he talks about how colonized people will mimic the colonizer. That’s a very interesting power dynamic. He has this beautiful line where he says, to paraphrase here, Mimicry represents ironic compromise, not always representationally but even in the language, then I was somehow enacting a theory that felt very close to me, which was about power relationships.

RICHMAN

You seem to write a lot about ideas – your ideas about ideas, and what triggers a viewpoint.

SHARMA

Theory is interesting to me. I’m naïve and excited about it at the same time. Poems seem to be places in which you can actually take ideas, and figure out how they can be inhabited.

RICHMAN

Do you think that’s a common view? I’ve heard that ideas are for essays and images are for poems?

SHARMA

I can’t stand rules like that. After a certain point, you have to have the strength and character and belief to be a writer. Images aren’t going to save you from yourself. Beyond craft issues, you have to start wrestling with why you are who you are. Your poems are going to have to save you. If you think about great poets, they’re always doing something new. If we talk about anyone who’s doing something interesting, we’re not talking about how they follow the rules.

I’m teaching an insider and an outsider class where we read poets inside and outside canon. I think what’s hardest for all of us is to say what makes us uncomfortable. When do we think the poet is getting away with something? Why is that so disturbing? When do we think correcting them is appropriate? What are the problems with over-determining the body of work by any given poet and its significance? Sometimes I just want to stop being in the institution and say, Well, what is the real pleasure here, and what’s the pleasure you’ve been taught to experience in the poem. Un-schooling may allow you to write something different.

RICHMAN

What would it take to escape the institution?

SHARMA

I don’t know if anyone can escape. In grad school, our professor, William Keach, asked my friend what he was doing for the summer, and he was like, “Oh Professor Keach, I don’t even want to tell you, you’re a Socialist/Marxist.” And he said,  “No, I want to know what you’re doing for the summer.” My friend said, “I’m working for Citibank,” and Keach said, “We’re all working for Citibank.”

In essence, we live in the institution. I think I make fun of being in an institution because I work in an MFA program. There are things that naturally happen in that environment. But I think it’s funny to think more ironically about it being an intentional community and that we all agree to be a certain way and do certain things and push against certain things. It seems people don’t generally like work that’s far from the institution. “Language” poetry’s been co-opted by the academy, but people don’t know what to do with spoken word. People see a lot of outsider poetry as being written by someone not knowing, not reading, or not understanding literary traditions. It’s interesting to thing about what inside and outside mean.

I try to introduce my students to poets who either write outside the academy or don’t consider their poetry identity to be their primary identity – you can have a multi-functional, professional identity. Ofelia Zepeda is a linguist at the University of Arizona, and she’s a poet. What she’s don’t for Tohono O’odham culture – she’s been preserving Tohono O’odham language for Native communities – has been primary and has served her poetry, and her poetry enacts it. I think it’s interesting when you have certain ideas and your work enacts them, so that you’re engaged in how your work does something maybe larger socially.

I think that goes back to how I want South Asians to feel good about how complicated they are. Rather than trying to please the reader or aim for certain success, they can fail. So much immigrant culture is based around this idea of needing to be successful, so usually you don’t choose to be a poet because it’s not a choice that can pay the bills or that can make your family proud of you. In some Indian communities, it’s fine to be an intellectual. But being a poet is kind of scary because it’s creative.

I’m interested in communities where people do explore the difficult: being a poet, writing about things that aren’t cool to write about. I think if you’re only success driven, your art will fail.

MAULE

Could you give more examples of outsider poets you’re teaching?

SHARMA

We’ve read Amiri Baraka; his earlier work as LeRoi Jones is so popular. People love how he writes about influences – the Beats, Black Mountain, Olson, Pound, Eliot – in ways that re-center him around racial discourse. He’s not that confrontational in the earlier work, but the more confrontational he gets, the more uncomfortable the white reader is with Baraka.

I found I was in this non-place where I didn’t feel threatened by the work at all. I was interested in the politics, and I’m interested in what the work tries on. I’m trying to explore what it’s like to be a white reader reading work that’s confrontational, having never occupied that space where I’m confronted as the person employing the power. It’s interesting when you’re both inside and outside, and I’m trying to get my students to figure out how their identity is complex but not generalized. They love the canonical work. I taught Jorie Graham’s first book so we could talk about a first book that propelled someone into the canon. They can identify all those moves in Graham. They can very much imitate Graham. But imitating Baraka is hard for them. If we go back to Homi Bhabha’s ideas of mimicry and ironic compromise, maybe they’re not experiencing enough of that compromise in the poem.

I’m also teaching an Indian poet, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, who’s a cognitive scientist. She writes out of the model where there are some strange narrative turns in the poems that you don’t expect. We’re reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Claudia is Jamaican, so she looks at her identity as it relates to being in America, but she also has other ideas of lineage – that’s the thing I’ve really been trying to get my students to thing about. What if they could construct this imaginary lineage that they come out of? What would it be? Would it culturally represent just one thing? What does that mean, to be a contemporary poet writing out of one kind of lineage? Some poets aren’t writing out of just one lineage.

Some of my students – especially at the undergraduate level – are like, “We don’t have a lineage, and we don’t know what you mean by that.” I have to ask them, “Do you want to have a lineage, or do you want to figure out the places you’re writing from? Wouldn’t it be nice to think of it as a lineage, or is it that a cultural thing – that I would want a lineage?” Because in Indian culture, you really love the idea of mentoring, passing down wisdom. I always loved that idea that I had a lineage.

In talking about feminism, maybe you can have a feminist lineage and thing of women you write out of. I’m always thinking: What do we do with class now? or What did Sharon Olds offer or Anne Sexton? I don’t really like Sexton’s work that much, but she was a big outsider poet in a lot of ways. She was a sort of strange housewife in therapy in Newton, Massachusetts – I’m from Framingham, Massachusetts – so I always thought, God it’s funny to think of her getting on the subway and going to Cambridge and taking a workshop and having her therapist. That was very outside.

RICHMAN

Speaking of lineage, it’s been said that in Infamous Landscapes you are responding to Wordsworth and a landscape “cast in hysterics.” Can you talk about this?

SHARMA

I see Wordsworth as naïve and lofty and I thought of what the feminine equivalent of that would be. So I thought, I want to try hysteria. I’m interested in the individual and the sublime and how you have the landscape stand for certain emotional intensity and registers. I wanted to reposition that kind of loftiness in a feminine voice and see what it would look like. But then, I also like George Oppen and Barbara Guest, so those three influences, if you put them together, would feel closest to the work in that book.

I wanted to replace a kind of innocence or idealism with more of a hysteria. I say “hysteria” but I don’t mean that the woman is always cast as hysterical. I just like taking up space in ways that confront the masculine poetic authority. What do we have for poetic authority for women? We can be kind of dramatic and insistent upon certain ideas, but we can also be confrontational.

Somehow we haven’t managed to assume the same kind of, even, romantic poetic authority. It’s very hard to figure out, so I was just trying to assume poetic authority in ways that would mirror or counteract it in romantic work. I mean, Byron has so much poetic authority, and yet he’s transgressive. You know, we’re always hearing how bad Byron is, like, “He’s having way too much fun.” I mean, they all did.

Wordsworth is kind of the most naïve – I say naïve because the poetic authority is always that wandering and speculation – but you don’t really know where you’ve arrived at the end of Wordsworth. I was thinking of inhabiting that romantic space, but enriching it with a more feminine sensibility, rather than a childish one, or a naïve one.

MAULE

Where do we find poetic authority? Or does it just happen and we look back on it and say, “There it was.”

SHARMA

I think we are steeped in the poetic authority of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and we have it in the 20^th century, too – I guess Lowell had poetic authority – but I’m thinking of Eliot and Pound. I always felt really uncomfortable with male poetic authority because I felt that it was a way to flex knowledge. It was like saying, “Okay, pack the poem with everything you know.” And if it didn’t have that, such as in Lowell’s later work that’s more confessional, then it becomes, “I’m a wealthy man who can’t bear it.”

I started to connect to this poetic authority with craft, so that you have to set up the stage, your poem has to have placement, the voice has to be determined, and you have to figure out if your images are really serving what they’re supposed to serve. When you away from tradition, what are you doing it for? Are you turning away from poetic authority or are you reconstructing a kind of authority that has been ignored or has not been engaged with? I think you can do it formally or informally. People always talk about Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott: what Brathwaite does informally, Walcott does formally. You know, Omeros is an amazing book for what Walcott does with Homer. So, wow! That’s an incredible shift in poetic authority.

I’m thinking about whether authority comes out of craft or if it comes out of the space to do what the poem needs to do. Historically, I think it came out of white men who believed in the tradition. I think I’m always trying to deconstruct the tradition, to figure out if you can have authority after that. But I know that I have a lofty authority in my poems to try all this out.

MAULE

If my name was Prageeta I would want to put it in a poem, and you’ve done that. How does this affect the relationship between the poem and the reader?

SHARMA

I like to be self-mocking in the poem and I like to have the reader understand that certain truths are constructed but that I am still trying to play with the seriousness. So we have the “I” as the ultimate authority, but what if you put your name in the poem? What does it do to the “I?” Or what does it do when I’m writing in the third person and I refer to myself as the third person? It’s obnoxious in one sense, but it can also allow the poem to have a natural remove: I am removed in some way from the authority of the “I.” I’m playing with that.

I apologize a lot, and I am interested in how we have certain gestures that are constructed culturally in terms of gender, and how we play with our diminutive self. I try to position myself in these powerless places that are my most vulnerable powerless places, and then play with that. Or, when the reader is instructed or spoken to, it creates an intimacy in the text. It’s almost a reaching out or an invitation. I like trying to break down the spaces of reader and speaker so that there’s an intimacy that maybe the speaker doesn’t always have.

MAULE

I see that breaking down of the space between reader and speaker in Bliss to Fill. The whole first section is called “Dear _______.”

SHARMA

Yeah, I’m interested in the lyric in that book. In that epistolary form, that heartfelt engagement, I really am trying to speak to the reader as a friend, or as all sorts of manifestation. I wrote that in New York my first couple of years there, steeped in a fabulous writing community.

A lot of poems in The Opening Question were my graduate manuscripts that were reformulated with additional work. So, Bliss to Fill was my second manuscript. I knew it could be freer because Subpress Collective was a really generous project. So I could enjoy all of the vulnerability of O’Hara’s lines. That was really an exciting time to think about the immediacy of the poem. I don’t know if my poems now are as focused on that immediacy of the poem. I don’t know if my poems now are as focused on that immediacy as they were in Bliss to Fill. There is a certain rawness to that book that would be hard to recreate.

MAULE

Poetry allows us so much freedom and intimacy and the ability to lounge out on the lawn. What is the biggest challenge of poetry?

SHARMA

Our challenge is that we allow ourselves to exist outside the economy. That’s why we get a lot of freedom. It’s very political and very interesting and if people could sit comfortably with that, they’d feel more empowered.

RICHMAN

Value, worth, and money come up a lot in your work.

SHARMA

I’m lucky in that I have a good job. Before I took this job, I worked a lot of different jobs in New York and I had the same questions with each: “Okay, who is the person I’m working for?” Or, “How’s this environment going to help me be creative, help me believe in a lifestyle, and help me take care of people whom I love?”

I worked for a famous artist who made a lot of money. He taught me essential things about being an artist that were not about the work. And so I realized, The work is private – you do it, you believe in it – but you have to make smart decisions about who you are outside your work. You have to deal with money. You have to know how to. This artist taught me how to insure things. I learned that poets should be collecting art and figuring out how to have assets that are non-traditional. Poets should be immersed in their culture, the culture being produced around them, and engaged with it. And to really live in your mind by being shrewd – don’t think that just because you’re a poet you can’t figure out how things work around you.

I am really interested in money. I don’t know if it’s because I’m first generation American born and my parents are immigrants; they came here from India with 200 dollars. They’ve done well, they’ve struggled, and they’ve experienced a lot of racism and a lot of discrimination. I have, too. I don’t have the luxury of not thinking about money, but I also really love what poetry offers me in terms of my identity.

At a meeting yesterday, I was joking and everyone went silent. I said, “Well, you know, we may not be able to promise our students lucrative careers, but they won’t have a midlife crisis.” I think we’re providing them an inner life, which actually keeps people from buying crazy cars or leaving their spouses. I think there are a lot of interesting things that poetry offers that aren’t about money. But I’m still a director and I recruit people to come to an MFA program. I’m not trying to be a hypocrite. I get a paycheck. I don’t want people to take out loans for poetry. But I also think that people take out loans for the most ridiculous things anyway. Like why would renovating your house be more important than your inner life? I think people should pay more attention to what they spend money on and what it means to spend money on something. What’s actually nourishing?

RICHMAN

I love this set of directions for poets and I’m especially interested in the one about how poets need to be engaged with their culture.

SHARMA

We are so keen to historicize what has been interesting in the past for poets. It’s like saying, “In the 50s, we had O’Hara who’s a poet among painters. Oh, that’s great.” Well, he was smart about knowing what was going on in a really exciting world – a parallel universe of art-making. A lot of those poets were involved in the arts and they knew they were on the pulse of seeing great work as it was being done, and they were also making work and making connections.

We have a weird economy of high and low art, but we forget that curators are looking at what’s happening in strange rural places and seeing amazing work coming out of those spaces. Poets need to participate in everything going on around them or instigate or initiate or collaborate and see themselves as participating and engaging… or articulating a sense of what’s going on around them. That is, creating the history that will then be romanticized.

It just seems strange. I think scholars can do all that historicizing. Poets need to be making work right now and believing that they have some kind of agency. It’s useful to not historicize, to not call attention to something that doesn’t exist anymore, but to look at the living artists. All these careers are propelled by just believing that you have agency – by doing something new – and a lot more poets should worry less about whether they’re being read or how many books they’ve sold and just be more involved in the arts in ways that will feed them.

You don’t have to think you have to be somewhere; you just have to be immersed fully where you are. Dale, my husband, is a performance artist, and I will have a crazy work week where I’ll be talking about poetry and I’ll be writing a little bit or whatever. And he’ll present something and I’ll just think, “Oh my God, it’s just genius.” I know I’m biased because he’s my husband but he has taught me so much about being in your work all the time and believing that it’s the most meaningful place that you have to be in the present, and understanding and engaging with it.

MAULE

Do you see any potential for technology/poetry collaborations?

SHARMA

Well, my biggest fantasy – have you been to BAM in Brooklyn – the Brooklyn Academy of Music? I remember my parents actually went there in the 70s when Peter Brookes had created that adaptation of The Mahabharata. It was a very experimental theater in the 70s, and here was this suburban family from Boston going to see this beautiful adaptation of the classic Indian text.

But then I thought, Wow! Brooklyn Academy of Music has done all the great commissions, and the poets have collaborated with artists and composers. Tom Waits and his poet wife have done these incredible productions. And I’m thinking, Well, all the language in all of those things has the lyric in it. It’s got poetic elements. It’s fragmenting language in order to heighten it, so it all involves poetry when we’re looking at experimental theater or multimedia productions.

I think poets could be more actively engaged in cross-genre productions, in the aesthetic experience and the pleasure of it. In my workshop, I teach Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and I think, How does video art become so extravagant, whereas when you have it in the poem, it’s unreadable? People will watch video art or animation – why is the visual element so much more engaging than what your mind can conjure? Why is it so disturbing when it happens in the poem? But you can spend five million dollars on it and have it represented at a gallery and it’s conceptually the same thing. In some ways it’s more flawed because of its budget.

I think poets need to hijack more things. We need to be out there saying, “You should really have a poet do that.” Matthew Barney should hire a poet to work with. We bring a lot more imagination to pieces. Sometimes what’s surprising about some of the video art is that it’s literal or Freudian. Even David Lynch. But we have his early videos and we see credit to C.K. Williams as a consultant on one of his films from art school. It would be nice if poets were not seen as so “fringe-y” but more useful. Like vessels of imagination.

MAULE

Why are poets seen as “fringe-y?”

SHARMA

Because we don’t make money. Painters are “fringe-y,” too. Until they have big accounts.

RICHMAN

So many people think there’s no need for so many people studying and writing poetry, but it seems like you’re arguing the opposite – that as many people as possible should discover the inner life of a poet.

SHARMA

I don’t think you have to be teaching at a university to be a poet. I don’t think you have to give up who you are to do one thing or four things. There are 5,000 students entering MFA programs a year. But that’s a very American thing, isn’t it, to have anxiety around people studying the subject? Isn’t that inherently competitive? Say we could have 5,000 people a year who are more engaged with their humanity? Though you could be a narcissist going through the program, so you have to split the 5,000. Maybe 2,500 are interested in bettering themselves. Not that poetry has to be therapeutic. But on the flip-side, all of those narcissists are actually doing something productive, instead of being awful people. So, in some ways, however you come out as a writer, it’s all productive.

RICHMAN

What do you do in your life to maintain literary friendships and the kinds of community you need to nurture and support yourself as an artist?

SHARMA

I like community; I like being involved in what people are doing, but I think a lot of people don’t. They want the community to serve them, but they don’t want to do enough for the people around them. I’m not saying I do everything right, but I like paying attention to what people need. What I really like about the MFA program is that you’re all present with each other. And that stays. I think students and faculty get to keep and protect and preserve the community around them. But I think it can be hard being the poet. It’s easy to send poems out and publish, but it’s hard to believe that you did the right thing. That’s where all the struggle is – believing that it’s okay to be a poet, especially when you’re invisible.

But, then it’s kind of funny, too. I’m seeing a family friend tonight – she’s going to come to the “One Hundred Days Reading,” this celebration of Obama’s first hundred days in office. She’s a nurse in Boulder and I was like, “There’ll be a lot of people in this space; it’s going to probably be a little bit unsettling.” It’s like, all of the interest and engagement – I don’t know how many of those poems are going to make sense to her. But Obama makes sense to her. And then she’s going to have this funny experience with these poems playing in rhetoric language. But it’s all play, ultimately. That’s what’s so confusing to non-writers. They’re like, “Oh… this is all fun.” and that’s the secret. We’re having fun all the time

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Richard Russo was born and raised in the “Glove Cities,” Johnstown and Gloversville, New York, which would become the backdrop for many of his novels. In a 2007 interview with NPR, he said, “I’ve always had the distinct feeling that there was a ghost version of myself still living back in that place that’s still so real in my imagination and that I’ve been telling fibs about all this time.” In “High and Dry,” an essay featured in the summer 2010 issue of Granta, Russo revisits his hometown, grappling with the unpleasant history of Gloversville’s leather tanning industry.

Russo is the author of seven novels, including the Pulitzer Prize- winning Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs, and most recently, That Old Cape Magic, as well as a collection of short stories entitled The Whore’s Child. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Esquire. He’s written and co-written screenplays for movies such as the 1998 film Twilight and 2005’s The Ice Harvest.

Russo’s work has been widely lauded for its humor, its sharp storytelling, and its keen portrayal of the world it inhabits. The New York Times called Bridge of Sighs “an improbably neighborly and nonchalant version of the great American novel.” In a review of That Old Cape Magic in the Washington Post, Ron Charles said, “American white guys may have no better ally in the world of fiction than Richard Russo.” We met with Mr. Russo at Spokane’s Davenport Hotel, after attending a panel discussion in which he and several other screenwriters talked about the intricacies of adapting novels into films. We discussed the ups and downs of writing partnerships, damaged characters, humor and suffering, Russo’s doctoral study despair, and how he discovered that he was going to become a fiction writer.

Sam Edmonds

In a 2006 interview, you said that you initially wrote to avoid working construction in college, and then you wrote to avoid doing scholarly research. Did this type of avoidance get you where you are today?

Richard Russo

I did what a lot of people who love literature do. You become an English major, and you think what a great deal this is. You spend your time reading great books, you write about them a little bit, it enriches your life, and if you become a teacher, you can make a decent enough living out of it. So you do a BA, and then you do an MA, and the MA is even more fun, because you get to concentrate. If you liked Huckleberry Finn, for example, then chances are pretty good that you’re going to be able to take courses where you get to read Pudd’nhead Wilson and all the other good Twain stuff; you get to go deeper, and the more of it you read, the better rounded you become as a human being and certainly as a reader and teacher. But to have the kind of career that a lot of people in that circumstance want—why not do the PhD? And then you can become, instead of a high school teacher, a professor. There’s a kind of allure to becoming a professor, but when you get into the PhD program, you realize that you’re not really reading books anymore; you’re reading books about books. You’re reading scholarship. And you keep going, because you’ve started, and you don’t want to stop once you’ve started something. But every year in the PhD program I became more unhappy. I had started down a road that was only likely to get worse. I was looking at my professors at the University of Arizona, the people in literature, and seeing how difficult it was for them to find ever more and more obscure things to write about. You couldn’t just teach the books you loved, because you would never get tenure that way, and so I found myself starting down this road toward scholarship regarding second- and third-ranked writers and some of their most obscure books. I found that I would have to buy that franchise. I would be serving that food, and you’ve got to defend it against other franchises, or other people who want into your franchise. So you become the Twain scholar or whatever. By the time I’d finished my course work and was starting to write my dissertation, I was in a pit of despair. I realized I’d made a terrible mistake that was going to affect and infect the rest of my life. I could see absolutely no way out of it, until I discovered creative writing. I discovered that, in doing all of that reading, I was studying to be a writer. Creative writing gave me another avenue, and it saved my life.

Brendan Lynaugh

So studying literature, as opposed to creative writing, helped you become a writer?

Russo

Yes, especially the kind of reading I was doing. A lot of my colleagues, who were in the MFA program in fiction writing, were reading contemporary stuff. I don’t want to call it a literary dead end, but it certainly wasn’t mainstream. They were reading William Gaddis, Stanley Elkin, Vonnegut, William Gass, John Hawkes, all the biggest names in metafictional, experimental writing, and they were all weaned on it. That would not have been good for me, because as great as those writers were at what they did, I was, without knowing it, going to be writing 20th century or 19th century novels. That’s the kind of writer I was going to be. I wasn’t interested in metafictional games, and it didn’t matter to me how great that stuff was, whereas, when I realized that I was going to have to start reading contemporaries who were doing what I wanted to do, I discovered Richard Yates and John Cheever, and all those people who are much more traditional and had a sensibility closer to my own. I was the kind of writer who was informed by Dickens, the Brontës, and Twain, all of whom were clearly more important in terms of the writer I ultimately became than if I’d been taking contemporary fiction courses in writers who, despite their brilliance, didn’t have much to say to me.

Lynaugh

You’ve done a lot of screenwriting in addition to novels and short stories. Has screenwriting enriched your fiction?

Russo

When I first started writing screenplays, I had some writer friends who said, “Oh, do you really dare to do that? Aren’t you afraid?” They said they would be afraid of all sorts of things—that I would be corrupted by film, corrupted by the Hollywood lifestyle. When I wrote my first script, a couple of friends said, “Are you going to move to LA?” As soon as you mention that kind of work, there’s an aura about the whole thing—“Oh, Russo’s sold out,” as if I’d give up novel writing, move to LA, drive a Porsche, and do nothing but take meetings. Needless to say, none of that happened.

The other thing people worry about, when they worry about novelists working in Hollywood, is that the novels you write after writing screenplays will become more like screenplays and less like novels, that they’ll become dialogue-heavy, take place in time present, that the amount of fictional time that will take place in order for the story to unfold will get smaller, that everything will shrink. They say, “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to become a different kind of writer?” And strangely enough, writing screenplays plays right into my strengths, because most screenplays are about dialogue, which comes easiest for me. The other thing about screenplays—they’re action heavy. You put characters in motion and let them talk and behave in ways that reveal their inner life, and those are the two things that, for me, are easiest to do. What happens when I’ve been working on a screenplay for a while, though, especially if I do a couple of screenplays, is that it almost feels like I’m cheating. Because I’m not required to do the things that are, for me, the most difficult. I’ve always thought that I have a better ear than eye, and when I’m writing badly, it’s like I’m taking dictation. Somebody says something, somebody responds, somebody says something, somebody responds. When I’m writing badly, I’m often writing very quickly, and what’s happening is that my ear’s taking dictation, and my eye’s forgetting to see the world out there. I have to remind myself, Slow down, slow down, because if you’re missing things with your eye while your ear is having a real good time, and if you’re just moving along at that great pace, you’re going to miss important props in a story, important objects. After I’ve written a couple screenplays, when I get back to writing novels, I feel like I’ve been working with a hammer and a wrench, maybe a socket wrench, and when I start on a novel again, it’s like I take out my old tool box. I’ve only been using a couple of tools, and then I flip it up and look at all those things in there that you use when you write a novel; it’s good to be able to use all those tools again.

I started writing screenplays right after Nobody’s Fool came out. I worked with Robert Benton on the film version while I was writing Straight Man. The two novels that came after that were Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs, both of which were bigger, more expansive, more interior. I never spent as much time as I did in Bridge of Sighs describing the physical world; I just luxuriated in all the physical objects, from the trunk that Lucy gets stuck in, to the items on the shelf of that store, and how they were placed, and how the store was going to be run. All of that stuff became enormously important, because I’m not a particularly interior writer. I don’t spend an enormous amount of time in my character’s heads. I like to know who they are as a result of what they say and what they do. And yet, in those two books, I probably spent more time in my characters’ heads than I had in any of my other books. I trace that back to screenwriting, because I had those things denied. So when I came back to novel writing, I was able to embrace them in a way that I hadn’t before, and make them part of my repertoire.

Lynaugh

How is the process of writing a screenplay different from writing a novel?

Russo

Screenplay writing is much more collaborative, although I enjoy collaborating with the director much more than collaborating with other writers. There are two times that I’ve worked with another writer on a screenplay, once with a Colby colleague of mine at the time, Jim Boyland, who was interested in learning the form, had an idea. So I said, “Well, let’s sit down and we’ll write the first act of a screenplay.” We wrote a couple drafts and sent it out to a few people, and there wasn’t an awful lot of enthusiasm about it. Some liked it, some didn’t, and some thought it would be difficult to get made. But at any rate, Jim was having a wonderful time, and that’s the kind of person he is, very collaborative, and he enjoyed the process. Plus, he was learning.

So I worked with him on that, and then I collaborated with Robert Benton on Nobody’s Fool, but it wasn’t so much a collaboration. He was unable to work on it, because it was snowing and he was shooting every day and he was getting further and further behind, so he would send me a set of instructions, and I would rewrite a scene. After that, we wrote a script together called Twilight. I’d send him twenty pages worth of scenes, and he’d write back and revise what I’d written, and then I’d go back and revise what he’d written, and then for a while he would take over the story and write for twenty pages or so and send me what he’d written, and I would busily change everything he’d done and send it back to him. When we got about a hundred pages into this detective movie, neither of us knew who had committed the murder, and we were twenty pages from the end of the script. So we went backward and just decided, All right, here’s the guy who committed the murder. All right, so why?

And then we worked backward and rewrote the screenplay the same way. Even as I tell that story, it’s astonishing to me that the movie could possibly have been made working in that lunatic way, and I think that Benton is a genuine collaborator. He loves to collaborate with another writer. He loves to collaborate with the actors. He even enjoys talking with producers at the beginning stages of things. How are we going to cast this, where are we going to shoot it? For Benton, making a movie is like inventing a family who you’re going to live with for a long time; he loves every aspect of it.

I had been a novelist for so long that the actual rhythm of writing twenty pages and sending it off to him and waiting for a couple of weeks for him to write back drove me crazy. To be honest, I also didn’t want to share. I was having a good time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want his opinion, but I would have rather written the whole thing start to finish and had him revise the whole thing start to finish. It was like reducing a three year film school program into five months, because he’s such a brilliant writer and director. But after learning what I learned, I thought to myself, I don’t think I want to collaborate in quite that way again.

Laura Ender

Is it difficult for you when actors become part of the collaboration? Do you trust them?

Russo

It depends on the actor. Strangely enough, sometimes the actors with smaller roles are more problematic. One of the reasons I love to stay away from the set and rehearsals is that the actors, especially good actors in smaller roles, always lobby for more lines. They wanted to do the movie, but they get into the movie, and then if the writer is on set or there in rehearsals, they’re always saying, “You know, I really love my character, but I feel like I need just a few more lines….” They’re always working behind the director’s back. The director doesn’t want to hear any of that. If the script is being rewritten at the time, it’s to the director’s specifications, not the actors’.

Some actors will want to subtract from another character’s lines. And other actors are curious—Paul Newman’s a perfect example of this. When I was on set for Nobody’s Fool, Paul was the soul of generosity, but he was also the soul of curiosity. When I went to the set the first time, he took me aside. He didn’t want the director there, didn’t want anybody there, and he started rifling questions at me: “When Sully’s alone in his truck, what kind of music does he listen to?” He had a whole list of questions, and it was so deeply embarrassing and humiliating, because I didn’t really have any answers for him. I had no idea what kind of music Sully would listen to. Everything I knew about that guy was in the book, and it wasn’t like there were outtakes that I could sweep up from the floor. But he was voraciously looking for anything that would give him more of a handle on who this character was. When I met him, he was already limping, and I almost asked him if he’d hurt himself, until I realized he was in my character, Sully, who’d broken his knee. Paul limped during that entire shoot, on and off camera. He was always looking for something to anchor his character to—he wasn’t looking for dialogue. It was nothing that was ever going to be on the screen, except in a close-up on his face.

We had a pivotal scene, where Sully and his son are sitting in a truck, and his son has asked him, basically, why he left him and his mother. Sully’s explanation to his son in the script was a page and a half, Sully talking about the kind of man his father was, the kind of woman his mother was, how much his father drank, how difficult it was for his mother, who tried to step between his father and him. It was a writer’s explanation of a character that Paul felt very uncomfortable, in character, giving to his son. So he kept asking us to cut. And I would cut and cut, and it was still too much. We finally got it down to a third of the size it was. It became a wonderful scene. In my script, I had written about one particular night where Sully’s father had just beaten the crap out of his mother, and Sully found her on the floor and she was bleeding. Paul took all of that out and I think kept just one or two lines. He says “Your grandfather… your grandfather…” And he pauses, and just looks off, and then says something like, “And of course your grandmother, she was just a little bit of a woman. He could make her fly.” That was it. “He could make her fly.” All the rest of it, he cut out. Everything that man had ever done to that woman was written on his face. We didn’t need any details. He just had to know what had happened to him as a young man, and all the explanation in the world wasn’t going to get him there, wasn’t going to get the movie there. He just needed a little suggestion and a metaphor, and then let all the viewers see his face and see that woman, as the result of a punch, fly across the room.

Lynaugh

You brought up Sully’s problem with his knee. A lot of your protagonists seem to have disabilities—in Straight Man, Hank has trouble peeing from the onset, and in That Old Cape Magic, the protagonist hears voices. How purposefully do you make the choice to limit or disable your characters, and how do these disabilities help the novel?

Russo

Damage plays a role, and not just with the main characters. Maybe it has something to do with my sense that, that’s just human nature. We all get damaged in some way or other, and if you can make that damage seem real, we relate to it in ways that run below the surface.

In the The Risk Pool, there’s a scene that’s as graphically violent as anything I’ve ever written, a scene in which father and son have gone fishing, way back up the river, and Sam Hall, who can’t admit to his son that he has no idea how to fish, he goes up around the bend and immediately has a nest of monofilament on his line. He can’t cast anymore because it’s tangled. The first thing he does when he’s trying to untangle the line is snag his own thumb with a barbed hook, and he spends the rest of his time trying to get the fish hook out of his thumb, while his son and the other guy are fishing. Sam succeeds only in driving it deeper into his thumb as he’s trying to maneuver it out. At the end of the scene, his son, who’s ten years old, and his best friend, Wussy, come walking back up the stream, and here’s Sam sitting on the rock, still connected to his rod, and Wussy just takes one look at him, shakes his head, comes over, and says, “I need my rod back now,” and he bites off the monofilament, like Sam hasn’t figured out that that’s the obvious thing to do, because he doesn’t have any pliers. He bites off the line, takes his rod and reel back, and Sam has to follow. So all of this takes place over a short period of time, but as they walk out of the woods and get back to the car, Sam, by this point, is enraged. He wanted to take his son fishing and everything has gone wrong. As he’s driving down the road, the monofilament line, which is still hanging out of his thumb, is dancing in the breeze, and at one point they have to pull over. That’s when the car breaks down. Sam’s trying to do something with the length of monofilament still dangling, and he just can’t take it anymore. He wraps it around his finger, pulls, and a chunk of his thumb comes out. I remember the first time I read that to an audience. Everybody in the place went “Gasp!” and it taught me a lesson. We’re living in a world in which we’re seeing people blown apart, where violence gets amplified to these epic, often melodramatic proportions. But if you can get somebody to feel a small pain that they have felt, that doesn’t feel small at the time, and get them to relive that, the rewards are astonishing. I even disable dogs. In Nobody’s Fool, I give a dog a stroke. In Straight Man, Hank’s trying to pass a stone. The moments of pain come in small packages, but they can be enormously, dramatically rewarding. We’ve all had the sliver that works its way under the skin and then comes out later, and the way we worry about it.

Ender

That thumb in The Risk Pool gets injured over and over. Is the thumb symbolic? How does the character’s pain work within the novel?

Russo

Every now and then when you’re writing a book you realize you’ve done something, and it works, and you think, All right, how can I use this again? I’ve always believed, as it’s possible, in what I call the rule of threes. When something really works, it’s good to use it three times. The first time it just happens, the second time it seems to pivot a little bit, and the third time brings it home. It becomes something other than the thing. The first time it’s just a thumb, Sam’s thumb and Sam’s pain. The second time, as I recall, it’s the kid trying to understand about pain, saying, How can you do that, doesn’t it hurt? And Sam trying to explain to him, that’s not the point. It’s learning to deal with it. I think when you stumble on something in the real world, you try to use it two or three times, just to see how much you can get out of it and how you can transform it from something that’s literal into something that might be symbolic, or carry a little bit more weight than its literal weight.

Ender

All your books are funny. When you go into a book, do you think, I’m going to make this funny, or does it just happen?

Russo

I think my least funny book is almost certainly Bridge of Sighs, and I don’t think I went into that thinking it was going to be less funny than my other books. If I thought it was going to be less funny, I’m not sure I would have written it, because I’m basically a comic writer. The material itself has to dictate how many laughs there are going to be. Bridge of Sighs is a book about despair, at least on some level. Lucy Lynch starts that book locked in a trunk, and lives the rest of his life kind of locked in the trunk of Thomaston, and has done a terrible thing, really, as regards his wife. He has been throwing away the letters that Bobby has been sending them, and pretending that they are going to Venice, when he knows perfectly well that they’re not. When he almost makes it across that Bridge of Sighs when he goes into his wife’s painting and he’s trying to make it all the way across the bridge into the darkness, that’s as dark a place as I’ve ever been in a book. His suffering is so intense there. If I could have seen anything humorous in that, I’m not above making a joke, as you know.

I think the best humor is related in some ways to suffering. Most of the time, if you think about them in adjacent rooms, the door adjoining suffering and humor is very often wide open, but as we get closer and closer to suffering, the doorway adjoining the rooms gets smaller and smaller, because you just can’t stand it otherwise. Or you just seem to be making bad jokes, or cruel jokes, at somebody’s expense. So it has something to do with distance, too.

Straight Man was the easiest of my books to write and the funniest. Part of the reason it was the funniest was that it was the easiest. There’s Hank suffering and trying to pass that stone, and there’s also a kind of suffering of middle age, he may be losing his wife, there’s something going on with his daughter. It’s not like there’s nothing at stake, but those stories of academic absurdity I had been storing for years—it had been almost ten years since I walked around at Penn State Altoona. I walked around a pond with the dean. Classes were to start in three or four days. He still didn’t have his budget, and he couldn’t hire his adjunct teachers. And this real-life guy said to me, “Same every year. What am I gonna do, kill a duck a day until they give me my budget?” And of course he meant it figuratively, but ten years later I figured what to do with that, and as soon as I get to make it literal, as you often do with things, you sometimes have a pretty good joke. And then, suddenly, all of the absurdity of my life as an academic gushed out. But by that time, I was out of a couple of horrible jobs that I’d had and into a good one, and I had distance on it, and I could do it without one-upsmanship; I wasn’t writing that book out of revenge. I didn’t want to do any “gotcha,” or get even with any academics. I could do it from, I hoped, a good spirit. Distance gives you the ability to do that, I think. But it’s the material itself that tells you in terms of tone just how funny it’s likely to be.

Lynaugh

When you say it all came gushing out, does that also refer to plot? Was it easy to map the book out?

Russo

Part of a fiction writer’s job is to make it look like he knew what he was doing right from the start. When you read a novel like Straight Man, and you think, Boy, how did this get orchestrated this way? part of what you’re thinking is, How did this writer keep all of that in his mind and know exactly the time to reveal this and withhold that, and when do we bring in the woodwinds? But what happens is that you just do it, and you make all kinds of mistakes, and you don’t have to do it right the first time. It’s not like a stand-up comedian who has to go in front of an audience and get the joke right in the first telling. Really you have years. It took me five years to make it look like all the ducks were lined up facing the same direction, like I knew what I was doing from the start, whereas often what was happening was I would look at it and I’d say, “All right, we’ve gone too long here; we haven’t seen Tony Camilia in a while, and Tony is always good for a laugh.” I had him in another scene fifty pages later, but thought, Let’s move him down here, because he’ll break up this scene. We’ve seen these two characters too often, or I need to separate this peeing scene from that peeing scene. So that might have been in draft six, that I saw that this works better over here, and that over there, and you get things to line up, and then hopefully, at the very end it looks like you knew what you were doing from the start.

Ender

Did you do that kind of juggling with any of your other books?

Russo

Every single one. Straight Man was the easiest to write and Bridge of Sighs was the most difficult, partly because it was so dark, but I’d also made a terrible mistake right at the start. I’d told Lucy’s story straight through. It began with Lucy about to become sixty, planning his trip with his wife, Sarah, to Venice, and then telling the story of his life, and it was interrupted by all these flashbacks into his youth with his best friend, Bobby. I got to a point, about 250 pages into it, where I just couldn’t seem to force his story any further, and I felt trapped inside Lucy’s voice, because he’s not a reliable narrator. He doesn’t know the truth of the story he’s telling. I thought at that point that it would be kind of interesting to have Bobby’s take on all of this, so I started in, and I introduced Noonan. On page 251 Noonan is in Venice, waiting for his agent to come along. They’re going to talk about his upcoming show in New York, and whether he’s going to go to New York, and how long he’ll have to stay there, and he has not been feeling well, so he’ll go to the clinic. I set up various meetings with his agent, and I thought, All right, so he’ll have to go to New York or not go to New York. That’ll be the conclusion, but then we’ll go back and revisit many of those scenes that we saw through Lucy. Bobby’s going to see them differently, and then we’ll understand Lucy’s narrative. I wrote Noonan’s section start to finish, so now I’m up to 500 and some pages, and they’re both in love with the same woman. Well, how fair is it to have them both in love with the same woman—who would see things differently than both of them? You have to give her a say. So all right, now Sarah gets the third part, and so page 551 begins Sarah’s narrative. And now we’ve revisited some of these things three times.

I got up to about page 700, and I seemed to have three different novels. I thought I was suddenly in Lawrence Durell territory, where I was writing a trilogy or something, and I sent the whole thing off to my agent. I said, “I think I might be working on a trilogy, but if so, I don’t have an ending to any of them. I have three novels with no ending. Am I crazy?” I went to New York shortly after that, and we had a little walk around the park, as we often do, and he said “No. This is one book, but you can’t structure it this way. You have to go back and forth between all three narrators. You can’t finish one story before going on to another. You have go back and forth between past and present, and you’re going to have to withhold certain information that was revealed too soon, because it’s going to mess things up, and basically what you have to do is a juggling act, going back and forth, past and present, narrator to narrator.” I spent about an hour on our walk that day explaining to him why that could not be done, and by the time I finished it, of course I realized it could be done. By explaining to him how it couldn’t be, it got me thinking how it could be, and then I went and finished the book. Everything about that book ended up in a different place, almost, than where it was originally. I will always think of Nat as saving that novel, because I really was at a loss. I was completely up a stump. I didn’t know what happened next or how to go about it.

Lynaugh

It seems like in the past there was more of a working relationship between writers and editors, going back and forth, and now maybe that’s been replaced by agents.

Russo

I think it’s true—the editor/writer, agent/writer relationship has changed since I broke in. I think that, number one, there are fewer old-school editors around. My editor puts pen to paper. No sentence of mine goes unchallenged, and he’s a wonderful editor, a wonderful line editor, but there are not that many around anymore, and there are a lot of acquiring editors who will take a book and then turn it over to a copy editor, and that’s pretty much it. There are so many editors who will say, “I can sell this. I’ll send it to the copy editor and we’ll sell it,” which has meant that a lot of agents have, in the last twenty years, begun to take on some of the traditional roles of the editor. They’ll get a book that’s good, but it’s not quite there, and they’re not going to want to send it off to the kind of editor who can’t fix it, and so helping to fix it becomes part of what an agent does now, probably more so than twenty years ago.

Lynaugh

How do you choose a point of view for a story? I’m thinking about Empire Falls and the multiple third person points of view, some of which are in the present tense, some of which are in the past.

Russo

I think it was one of those things I probably just did and thought about later. I can tell you why it works now, years after the fact, but at the time it just seemed, instinctively, like the right thing to do. The present tense is the most immediate, which is why it works so well in film, and why films are almost always written as, “He does, he says,” not, “He said.” It’s happening now.

I think time changes. When you’re young, the clock goes slower, and everything seems to be happening in present tense, because you don’t have that much past tense in your life. In Empire Falls, I was convinced that the point of view was right by the time we get to the final scene where John Voss comes in. That section begins with Tic speculating about the nature of time. Do things happen fast or slow? That’s what she’s trying to figure out as she sees John Voss coming across the parking lot. When I started writing that, I thought, Well, that’s kind of what her point of view is all about. It slows the clock down, it makes everything happen in a kind of teenage time, as opposed to her father’s time. As soon as we go to Miles’ time, everything goes much faster in third person and in past tense.

Edmonds

In the story, “The Whore’s Child,” Sister Ursula is in a fiction workshop, but she’s writing nonfiction. Have you ever considered writing nonfiction?

Russo

I just finished a long nonfiction piece for Granta. I’ve done a little bit of nonfiction before, but never anything as sustained as this. And it was a new experience. It’s a piece about the town I grew up in, Gloversville, New York, and it’s odd because I’ve been writing about that town throughout my career. North Bath, Mohawk, Thomaston, even Empire Falls, although the novel is set in Maine, those are all towns based on my hometown. In those, I was able to start there and just create a world, but re-imagine the geography, do all of that fictive stuff. When I didn’t know something, I made it up, but in this piece I had to call it Gloversville, and I realized I had a responsibility not to the kind of truth that I normally strive for, but to the literal truth of real people’s lives. It made me careful, cautious; it made me absolutely want to get things as right as I could, because I was writing about people’s lives, people who had real names and had experienced what I was writing about secondhand. I had to get it literally right, making sure that their names were spelled correctly, making sure that I understood that part of this was about the kind of lives, the really dangerous lives, that people lived working in the tanneries where I grew up. Those machines were deadly. I was writing about people who had lost arms up to the elbow, hands, thumbs, in these machines, as a result of doing what, back in the industry at the time, was piece work. Everybody got paid by the square foot of stuff they shoved through the machines. The machines had safety devices, which these men took off, because they were being paid by the square foot, and the safety devices slowed them down. They could not feed their family with the safety devices on, and they’d take them off, and work until they sliced something off.

I had been hearing about these machines all my life, but I found out that I didn’t actually know what a staking machine was or how it worked. I just knew it was real goddamn dangerous. I talked with my aunts and a couple of cousins who’d been in the mills and knew how all of this worked, because I couldn’t afford to be cavalier about it. I mean, if people have lost limbs in these things, I could at least figure out how they worked and where the danger was, and what it felt like to be doing this kind of job, what it felt like to disable a machine in order to feed your family, and what it’s like to know that the foreman, the guy behind you, turns his back while you disable your machine. Because he fully understands what you’re going to do and why, and he’ll turn his back so that he’s not a witness to you doing it. That stuff was important, and I had to get it as close to right as I could. So it was different—I should probably be doing that sort of stuff in my fiction, but it was suddenly very important to me to get that stuff right.

Lynaugh

Are there other ways it was different?

Russo

A lot of the mechanics of storytelling remain the same. You still make a decision, for instance, about what to include, because so much of this is about the dangerous work that went on in the tanneries, and the way that people were maimed and the way they were poisoned and later died of various exotic cancers. Because of all of the details, you find yourself realizing that you cannot put all of those things in the same section of the piece. In order for readers not to turn away, you have to take them out of that world and into a different world for a time, so that when they go back to it, they’re not so shocked that they’re tempted to skip through the pages to get to the part where they’re not in that horrible world anymore. You want to structure the piece like you would a story. You want the rhythms of fiction, even though you’re writing nonfiction. I would find ways to go into that world and come out, go back into it again, come out, so you get the shock, you get that sense that it bends both ways. Entering. Leaving. Entering. Leaving. It was almost like a gothic novel or a gothic movie, where you have those portions that are shot in the daytime—and you know, the very fact that it’s shot in the daytime, that nothing terrible is going to happen. But then you look at the sun going down on the horizon, and you think, “Oh shit, here we go.” You know the werewolf or the vampire is out. I found myself shaping this nonfiction in the way I would want it to work if it were a story. Even though it wasn’t fiction, I wanted it to read like fiction, to have the rhythms of fiction. I would ask myself a lot of the same questions. Too much here, too many examples? Break it off? Do it differently, does it work better here, does it work better there?

Edmonds

How did you handle dialogue?

Russo

There isn’t an awful lot of dialogue in this piece, and a lot of it comes from just a couple of characters, a couple of real life people. I was pretty scrupulous about making sure that I didn’t say anything that they didn’t say, either literally or figuratively. I wanted to make sure I caught the essence of what they were saying. But I did play with their speech patterns, in some cases, because I didn’t want to do dialect that would make them look stupid. I didn’t want readers to think that because people did these jobs that their experience was somehow crippled by their inability to describe that experience in language that the reader’s used to. But I was always striving to catch the emotion behind the dialogue. Is this a person feeling rage, feeling fear? I tried to use those fictional techniques, like, “He cannot meet my eye,” or, “He looks off in the distance,” or “It takes him a while to continue,” that same sort of attribution that you’d make in a story. You set it up the same way on the page.

Lynaugh

In the collection, The Whore’s Child, the story “The Farther You Go,” has a lot of similarities to the novel Straight Man.

Russo

That was the short story that Straight Man grew out of. I wrote that first, came through the conclusion, and I liked the character. I put it aside for a while and then went back and I could not surrender.

Lynaugh

Do novels often come out of shorter pieces?

Russo

More often, shorter pieces come out of novels. The Sister Ursula story in The Whore’s Child came out of Straight Man. Sister Ursula was once one of Hank’s students. He’s got the kid that writes the misogynistic ripper stories, and the girl who writes these flighty symbolic pieces, and Sister Ursula was there writing her story about her childhood. But it was so dark. I looked at it, and my editor looked at it, and Sister Ursula’s story is so dark that it just didn’t fit with the rest of the novel, so we yanked it out, and the story “Linwood Heart,” the final story in The Whore’s Child, the boy in that story was Miles Roby. I took all of that out of the novel because it was slowing the story down, and gave him a new name and some other things to do. So, more often, I’ll realize that there’s something really good happening in a novel, except it doesn’t belong there, and I’ll excise it and come back at it as a short story later.

Lynaugh

What kind of truth are you going for in your fiction?

Russo

Well, when you reduce something it always comes out sounding… reduced. But I think it’s the truth of the human heart. It’s when Miles Roby in Empire Falls, after fighting with himself throughout his life, realizes that being a father, and a good father, to Tic, and being an adult in Empire Falls, is better than being a child, because his mother wanted him to have a different life, and he’s always in some way or other, because of her sacrifices, felt that he’s failed her and failed himself, and has always tried to escape. That moment when he realizes, after almost losing Tic, that everything he wants is right there, that’s the truth of his heart. It should have probably been obvious to him and to everybody, but it wasn’t, and he struggled through 700 pages or so to arrive at a conclusion. It’s the truth of his own heart. It’s the truth of his own experience of life.

At the end of a book, I always want to meet at a kind of crossroads where there’s an understanding. I don’t want to say a strictly intellectual understanding, but the character arrives at someplace that’s different. But for the reader, I want there to be real emotion to that. I want the reader not just to understand something, but to be profoundly moved. Take Bridge of Sighs. He begins the novel by saying, “We’re going to Venice. My wife and I. We will be going to Venice. We are going to visit our old friend Bobby. I’ve never traveled, but we’re going to go.” At the beginning of the book, he’s lying. At the end of the book, the last line is, “We will go.” And this time we believe him. Because that enormous journey he’s taken is from one sentence to the same sentence. A thousand pages later. He returns to his initial statement, except this time it’s true. There’s an element of human understanding in it, but I’m hoping that when that moment strikes the character, it hits us as readers not in the head, but in the heart.

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It’s difficult to read a Matthew Dickman poem and not uncover some essential nugget of humanity. His debut collection, Alt-American Poem, charts a wavering world of involved pleasures and intense dramas, where any experience is worth mining, be it a morning trip to die farmers’ market or ruminations on suicide.

While acutely aware of grief, his poems never become steeped in it, and his readers never feel bombarded by it. His voice is a companionable one: funny, warm, profane, yet always springing from some place of incense longing to connect with others, in spite of often violent or bewildering circumstances. Dickman’s drive for communion is refreshingly proactive, as he searches, sometimes manically, for any semblance of hope he can find, such as in “Slow Dance,” when he arrives at a place of sobering clarity:

There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard.

Dickman is also a master of die sensorium. So rich are his poems in sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and textures, reading them is like eating a full Thanksgiving spread with your best friend, men curling up by the fireplace together to listen to all your favorite records. Tony Hoagland, in his intro to All-American Poem, says, “We turn loose such powers into our culture so that delay can provoke the rest of us into saying everything in our minds. They use the bribery of imagination to convince us of the benefits of liberty.” For such art to exist, we are all for fortunate.

Calling Dickman’s rise to literary fame a “rags to riches story” wouldn’t be entirely accurate (when is it ever?) but one might call it “a rags to nicer rags story.” In 2008, when he won the Honickman First Book Prize for All-American Poem, Dickman was thirty-four and working at Whole Foods in Portland, Oregon. That Same Year, All-American Poem won the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ May Sarton Poetry Prize and, in 2009, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Stafford/ Hall Award for Poetry.
Add a New Yorker profile and fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Province town and the Vermont Studio Center, and Dickman seems a literary wunderkind. The man himself lacks all pretension though. During our interview at the Northern Lights Brewery in Spokane, he poured the beer, sporting a faded hoodie, a pair of thirty dollar blue jeans, and some beat up sneakers. He was in town for the 13″‘ annual Get Lit! festival, and talked with us about growing up in Portland, his relationship with Dorianne Laux, surrendering to influence, the importance of empathy, and what it’s like being famous.

TIM GREENUP

Let’s start from the beginning. How long has poetry been in your life and how have you nurtured it to where you are today?

MATTHEW DICKMAN

I fell in love with an older girl in high school who liked poems, so I started reading poems and writing bad versions of them to give to her in hopes she would make out with me or take her shirt off. I failed miserably at that part of it. But I started reading Anne Sexton and other poets, and Anne Sexton totally blew my mind. I’d never read poems like hers. In high school, we were reading Donne and Shakespeare, which were great, but not very exciting for a high school boy. Sexton led to others-Plath and Lowell and later Wachowski- and my reading life sort of took off, and I continued to write poems as well.

I grew up in a very healthy single-mom home in a pretty shitty neighborhood. No one was really hanging out reading poems. It was kind of a private thing, but it was also a way for me to deal with what was happening in my neighborhood with my friends: violence, drug abuse and things like that, also, sort of,  something to have that  was just mine. When I went into community college to start what ended up being my six-year undergraduate program, I got interested in the Beat poets, and I remember seeing a photo of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and all of these people standing on a corner outside City Lights bookstore. And I thought, This is amazing-a group of men standing together on a corner, and they’re not going to hurt anybody. Because, in my neighborhood, if I was walking home and there was a group of men on a corner, you’d want to walk around that corner. Something was going to happen or something had just happened. They certainly weren’t talking about beatific, angelic powers. I thought it was amazing that you could be a guy- you could be a man-and you could be humane and compassionate. You could be an artist, but you look at Neal Cassady and he’s still wearing jeans and a tight shirt. Not that I could ever pull that off.

I also had my twin brother, Michael, who is a great poet he and I started sharing poems. I ended up finishing school at the University of Oregon. I had gone there because Dorianne Laux taught there. But I never took a class from her. I went there, Michael, me and Dorianne all befriended each other- and then I worked as Dorianne’s personal assistant for a while. We would just hang out and talk about poems and write together.

GREENUP

How did you befriend Dorianne Laux? Is she just an approachable lady?

DICKMAN

I think all poets are. It’s poetry. It’s not like being able to approach a cobbler. “God, he makes really great shoes. He really knows how to fix a Birkenstock. Let’s not talk to him.” My brother and I found out Dorianne was teaching at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and we were living in Portland. It seemed really, really close and we were huge fans. So we called and lied to her. We called the university and said we wanted to talk to Professor Laux about an MFA program that we wanted to attend. We set up a meeting, which my brother and I thought was crazy. We couldn’t believe we could just call her office. We got into the only car we’ve ever owned- his station wagon-and cruised down. We went into her office and started talking and, of course, within ten minutes, she could tell we were full of shit, that we were nowhere near approaching an MFA program, but we did talk for an hour about poets we loved, and we wrote her when we got back to Portland and said, “Thank you so much for your time” and she was very sweet and wrote us back. We started writing back and forth.

I always tell people to do that. I have friendships with poets I never would have had if I hadn’t reached out in some way. And it was never like, “Hey, I really like your poems, do you think you’d write me a recommendation?” It was always like, “When my brother died, I read this poem of yours for months afterwards.” Or, “I’m pretty sure that this poem you wrote made it possible for me to have sex with this woman that I really liked.”

So if you reach out to poets and say, “Hey, your work has meant a lot to me; I think it’s awesome,” most people will write you back. If you connect as human beings, then you might have a mentor relationship, or you might have a friendship relationship, and I think that’s really, really important. Sometimes with schools, and different coasts, and different cities, we get into this thing where we feel like we can’t reach out, or we’re embroiled in our own scene. But poets, even the most “famous,” don’t get a lot of letters saying, “Your work meant something to me.”

DANIELLE SHUTT

Do you consciously bring that passion or drive to be in touch to your poetry?

DICKMAN

I think community is really important. I like that people have different communities. I think the danger is when you start only identifying with one community. Then you have things like the East Coast/West Coast rap wars. In my poems, I’m certainly writing out of my own life, and hopefully in some way it’s with a heart that tries to be inclusive. I want that in my relationships too. I have friends that barely read poems and I have friends that that’s all they do. I have blue-collar friends and I have friends who have earned millions of dollars. Bur I think we all have something in common. I’m also kind of a romantic, I think. And kind of naive.

DICKMAN

The immediate audience is always just me. It would be baffling to sit down and write a poem in a way that I would think, Okay, this poem needs to reach this certain person. I would not have the first idea how to do that. In fact, one of my fears is that my second book will come out and people will read it and be like, This is just Matthew talking. Why buy the book?

So I’m my audience, first and foremost, and then, after that, I don’t really imagine anybody in particular. I mean, I want my poems to be read by people. I don’t think any acting troupe ever rehearses a play for months to not put it on stage. And I love it when people read one of my poems and they’re affected by it. In kind of a base way, I’m happy if they’re affected, regardless of whether they like it or not. If they just fucking hate it and think it’s the worse, it’s something. The worst response would be, like, “Eh, it’s a thing.” I know there are people who like my poems and people who don’t, so I feel lucky in that combination.
I used to have rules for myself when I was writing, and ideas about whom I was writing for. However a poem gets written is great, but I used to write poems and do a lot of research first. Like, project-poems. And these poems were in stanzas, and pretty squared off. And then, right after my first year of graduate school, I had what some people refer to as a “mental breakdown.” A son of psychic break. I had to take a little time off, and during that time, I decided that I was not going to worry about poems.
I used to worry about them a lot before this happened. If I didn’t write within two or three days, I’d imagine I was experiencing this thing that people called “writer’s block.”

But during this time of getting my brain and my heart right, I decided l wouldn’t deal with it. I would read poems when I wanted to, but I wouldn’t write any. So I didn’t write poems for eight months or so. And then I went back to school and thought, Well, if I can’t write poems anymore, poetry will still be part of my life. It has changed my life, it has molded my life. I thought about doing something cool like a lit review, or running a reading series, or something awesome like that.

But I started writing again. Those poems ended up being like my poems in All-American Poem. No stanzas, no idea in my head before sitting down, just sort of an emotional feeling, like I needed to get something out. Like the poem “V.” I walked by this girl in Austin who was wearing a shirt that said, “Talk nerdy to me,” and I thought it was

SHUTT

Do you see empathy as the ultimate responsibility in what you’re writing about?

DICKMAN

I think empathy is one of the greatest things besides love. Empathy is in love; it’s a part of it. But empathy is the most important thing a human being can do. And I don’t ever, when I’m making a poem, set out to be empathetic. But I think the world is so scary, and in my experience it’s been, sometimes, so wildly violent, that’s my desire- my hope, and where my imagination goes–for there to be at least a strand of empathy there.

You know, making art and experiencing art are both pretty radical, because, in the end, art is about humanization, empathy, and even trust. I think everything can make art-heartbreak, erotic love, familial love, jealousy, headiness. All of these different attributes of human beings can make art. There are only two things that can’t make it, and those are meanness and violence. They can’t sustain themselves, because they-like some creature from Greek mythology-eat themselves and crap themselves out, eat themselves and crap themselves out. There are no moments of exploration, no moments of epiphany in meanness, like there are even in pettiness. I think that’s the only way that things are somehow ruled. You can do so much more out of empathy and love than you can ever accomplish out of meanness or violence.

You can create art looking at chosen things, but you can’t create art out of them. I have a friend who was a neo- Nazi for seven or eight years, and we’ve recently reconnected. He has not been involved in that gang for fourteen years now, but he writes about his experience. His prose about it is moving and terrifying and empathetic and complicated. He could never have done that when he was a neo-Nazi. He could never have created art that could sustain itself out of that.

KRISTINA MCDONALD

Your poems never feel like they’re excluding anyone. I’m curious who you consider your ideal audience. Do you think about that when you’re writing?

DICKMAN

The immediate audience is always just me. It would be baffling to sit down and write a poem in a way that I would think, Okay, this poem needs to reach this certain person. I would not have the first idea how to do that. In fact, one of my fears is that my second book will come out and people will read it and be like, This is just Mathew talking. Why buy the book?

So I’m my audience, first and foremost, and then after that, I don’t really imagine anybody in particular. I mean, I want my poems to be read by people. I don’t think any acting troupe rehearses a play for months to not put it on stage. And I love when people read one of my poems and they’re affected by it. In kind of a base way, I’m happy if they’re affected, regardless of whether they like it or not. If they just fucking hate it and think its the worse, it’s something. The worst response would be, like, “Eh, it’s a thing.” I know there are people who like my poems and people who don’t, so I feel lucky in that combination.

I used to have rules for myself when I was writing, and ideas about whom I was writing for. However a people gets written is great, but I used to write poems and do a lot of research first. Like, project-poems. And these poems were in stanzas, and pretty squared off. And then, right at my first year of graduate school, I had what some people refer to as a “mental breakdown.” A sort of psychic break. I had to take a little time off, and during that time, I decided that I was not going to worry about poems.

I used to worry about them a lot before this happened. If I didn’t write within two or three days, I’d imagine I was experiencing this thing that people call “writers block.” But during this time of getting my brain right and my heart right, I decided I wouldn’t deal with it. I would read poems when I wanted to, but I wouldn’t write poems for eight months or so. And then I went back to school and thought, Well, if I can’t write poems anymore, poetry will still be a part of my life, it has molded my life. I thought about doing something cool like a lit review, or running a reading series, or something awesome like that.

But I started writing again. Those poems ended up being like the poems in All-American Poem. No stanzas, no idea in my head before sitting down, just sort of an emotional feeling, like I needed to get something out. Like the poem in “V.” I walked by this girl in Austin who was wearing a shirt that said, “Talk nerdy to me,” and thought it was a great shirt. It was was common, but it was also more than that, because I went home and there was something bothering me about the shirt. Something that seemed to be resonating. I sat down and wrote the first couple lines, where this girl walks by wearing this shirt that says, “Blah blah blah.” No idea where I was going. It was like colorful building blocks, sort of being stacked one on top of another.

GREENUP

It’s interesting to hear you say you were working in stanzas and tighter lines, because, just looking through All-American Poem, there’s such freedom in how your poems are constructed. Is that really just a response to your mental state? Like you were one way for a while and you felt constricted by air, and once you broke free it was like, I’m never going back; I just want my lines to do whatever they want?

DICKMAN

I felt that way not just in my writing, but in my life. So, before I went to therapy, I felt that there were parts of my life I was constricting and not dealing with, and I was not as free as I could be. Which is not very free at all, for any of us. So I think it was a reaction to that, but it wasn’t very conscious. It was only after I had been writing like that for a couple months that I realized, This is actually fucking fun. I’m not suffering over the page as much. I might be suffering about what I’m writing about, but not how I’m writing it. I think you can trace that impulse back to the fact that I was a really poor student. It’s like somebody saying, “Well, I don’t do essays. Or paragraphs. I don’t figure out this thing that’s actually very fascinating.” I think stanzas, line breaks-you know, these things are interesting and powerful in molding a poem and your experience of a poem. But I’m horrible with line breaks and, for me, when I’m making a poem, I’m interested in the things that stanza breaks and sometimes smart line breaks don’t concern themselves with- the experience.

SHUTT

When do you get a sense that a poem is coming to its end?

DICKMAN

Sometimes it’s just instinct, like an exhale. Sometimes the exhale is short and sometimes it’s long and sometimes you can write a poem and it sort of naturally comes to the end and it just feels right. It’s like if you ask, “Why are you and this person together?” No one says, “Well, here’s the list of things that make us lit together. “You’re just like, “It feels good.” But, also, I’m a true believer in redraft and rewriting. I once asked Jorie Graham: “How Do you know a poem is finished?” I was particularly interested in a couple of her poems that were sort of listy and went on for a long time, because I’m kind of a listy, blabby, poet too. And that can go on forever. If it’s a bad date-how do you stop it so it’s a good date? She said, “If you’re unsure about the last line, you should write another fifty to a hundred lines.”

The instinct in workshops is often to cut stuff, which is natural, but sometimes unhealthy. Her suggestion might be rough if you’re writing a ten-line poem, but I think what she’s talking about, really, is to go beyond further. You’re not going to keep all of it, but you might figure out something about the poem with that kind of writing.

Sometimes, I’m having a rough time with a poem, I’ll read it and then turn it over and immediately type it up without looking at it. It’s not so much an exercise in memory; the point isn’t to read the poem, turn it over, and remember the whole thing. But you read it and you get a close sense of it, and if you try to write it again, new things will come out. What’s happening, I think, is that the conscious part of your brain is busy trying to remember the poem, and since you’ve got your conscious over in the corner being busy, your subconscious can come out and have more freedom. Other things will come up. And then I print it and look at them side by side. Maybe it’s a failure. Fine. But maybe, scuff that’s come up in this new draft looks better than the old one, or maybe the old one and the new one together makes you think about something else, which could lead to a better ending to the poem or a better beginning.

GREENUP

In an interview on Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt, you were talking about how you’ll read someone like Jorie Graham, someone who’s sort of heady and cerebral, and you’ll think, Why aren’t I writing chosen types of poems? But then, when you sit down to the page, it’s like, you do what you do. I feel like sometimes we put pressure on ourselves-at least I do-to become like, Oh, how can I be headier? or, How can I shatter the world a little more?

DICKMAN

I think we shatter the world in our own way. Jorie Graham Applied to be Jorie Graham. It’s no shock that if I applied to be Jorie Graham, and Jorie Graham applied to be Jorie Graham, she would get the job. I might be shortlisted for the work, but I wouldn’t get it, which is fine. But I think that’s a healthy reaction; it also means you’re a reader. You’re reading something beyond what you write, which is so intensely important.

When I came back to grad school from my waylay, something I started doing, which I never would have done consciously- I started imitating people I liked. Like, really closely imitating them. I remember reading a ton of Lucille Clifton. She’s amazing. And I started writing these Lucille Clifton kind of poems. They were short. I was trying to find these bright, hyper-energetic of crystalline images. A lot of poems were about my own mother’s bout with breast cancer. So, you know, sometimes the subjects sort of overlapped. I would do that for a while, and then I’d pick up someone else and start interacting them. I never sent out any of those poems to get published. I was just digging on them. And it was actually more exercise as a reader than as a writer, because in attempting to mimic them, I got closer to the language that I was reading. And even though each one was a type of failure, it was at least a failure in the left field of the same stadium that this person was in. Whoever said you should be cautious of in influence, or afraid of influence, is just wrong. We are influenced by so many things. If you’re afraid of influence, then don’t ever watch TV, don’t read anything, certainly don’t talk to anybody- I mean it’s a path of insanity to try to
not be influenced.

GREENUP

You’re observant of everything and it’s like, I see this, I’ll Follow it. I feel this, I’ll follow it. I smell this, I’ll follow it. Is there anywhere you haven’t gone that you’d like co go?

DICKMAN

The new book I’m working on is called Mayakovsky’s Revolver. Vladimir Mayakovsky was a revolutionary Russian poet who shot himself. There are rumors that the KGB killed him, but most of his friends believe he committed suicide. This book is called that partly because its center is a group of elegies for my older brother, who also committed suicide. Some moments are about friends of mine who died that way. I’m delving into a place I never went to in All-American Poem, which is this idea of the Shadow- the Shadow being, obviously, the shadowy, darker part of ourselves. We present ourselves like, I’m not going to kill you. But depending on the circumstances, who knows? We’re all nice people. I’m nice, we’re all nice together, but we have this shadowy, dark stuff. I wanted to explore some of that in an artistic way. There are a couple poems in the book that come out of almost exact personal experience. Like “An Elegy to Goldfish,” about killing my sister’s fish, and then chasing her around with a piece of an orange, telling her it was the dead goldfish and making her eat it. And then, another experience when I was younger: telling a very inappropriate joke in what my grandmother would call “mixed company,” and that joke being something that had happened to one of the people in the “mixed company.” And also, not just particular experiences of the Shadow, but also what’s emotionally of the Shadow, like my own failures and things like that. I mean, talk about multitudes: our failures
as well as our great moments of empathy.

MCDONALD

Is there anything you consider off-limits, something that doesn’t belong in a poem?

DICKMAN

If you consider separating areas, like writing a poem, into the spiritual world and the secular world, then in the spiritual world I don’t think anything is off-limits. In the secular world, there might be limits. You might have something you wrote about your grandmother or your boyfriend that you don’t want to publish while they’re alive. Or you might say, “Fuck it, it’s my life. I’m going to publish it.” Larry Levis once said in a poem, “Out here, I can say anything,” and when I heard that, it was this amazing moment about freedom, because we’re not free people, except when we’re making art. That’s the only moment when we’re truly free, the only moment when we’re the people with the key to the lock. I don’t think anything should be cast out as far as subject matter in a poem, though, or how you write a poem, or what you want to include in a poem. I mean, fuck, we’re going to die.

GREENUP

Would you talk a little about your whirlwind rise to poetry fame, because it all seemed so fast- winning the American Poetry Review first book prize and being profiled with your brother in the New Yorker. What was that like?

DICKMAN

Well, it was weird, because I had been part of this group of poets, and still am-me and my twin brother and my friend Carl and my friend Mike. My brother had this string of successes where he’d gotten poems in American Poetry Review, and I got a rejection. Then he got into the New Yorker, and then he got his book taken by Copper Canyon. And after that, Mike won the Starrett Prize, which is the first book prize for the Pitt Poetry Series.

Carl and I were like, “Well, can’t happen for everybody.” You know what I mean? We’re close friends, we all share our writing, we’ve shared it for thirteen years and I sent out to a bunch of book contests and to a couple publishers that were interested though the book I sent them was very different from this one. And they all said no.

Then I sent some more poems off to APR and I got an e-mail, and they were like “Hey, we want to publish these two poems you sent us.” I was fucking stoked. Like, American Poetry Review, which is huge. It felt great. In my e-mail back to them, I said, “I’ve done a couple redrafts on one of the poems that I’d love to send you, and you CU1 publish either version.

A week later, I got a phone message from Eliwbeth Scanlon at APR who’s a wonderful lady. She was like, “Hey, this is Elizabeth at APR Give me a call back.” I thought she was calling because I e-mailed her the redraft of the poem. I called her and she said, “Matthew, we are your new favorite literary review.” And J was like, “Oh, great, yeah. You guys are awesome.” And she said, “Do you know why I called you?” And I said, “Yeah,about the redraft I sent you.” And she said, “No, you just won the Honickman First Book Prize.” I was so shocked, I was like, “Get the fuck out.”

I got off the phone and ran down the stairs screaming and called my brother. From the time I found out to three days after-at least three days-I felt on top of the world. And then, after many months, I got the book in the mail. It didn’t feel like a real book. It felt like something I’d made at Costco, if Costco had a printing press. A Couple days later, I picked it up again and it looked like a real book. But just because it had my name on it, it didn’t seem real to me. A while after that it felt normal, and it was awesome and continues to be awesome.

The New Yorker profile interviews happened right before I got the book in the mail. So the interviews were conducted between finding out I’d won a book prize, and the book being printed. Then it came out, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine- a kind of “big deal” poet in New York- who was like, “So, how does it feel to be famous?” I told her this true story. I was working at Whole Foods in Portland and had recently moved from the dish room- where I’d started as a thirty-four-year-old- to the deli, where I’d just gotten done with this dinner rush of assholes who were really, super rude. That’s the sad tiling; I hadn’t done customer service in a long time and sort of thought we were really brave, just to be human. But then, working the sandwich/pizza lines at Whole Foods, dealing with people’s rudeness was amazing to me. And disheartening. I was sort of broken after the rush, standing there in my uniform, in my apron, covered in pizza sauce and flour, looking out the sliding glass doors at the little lights coming through the Portland sky. The cash registers were right there in my view, and there were all these magazines at the cash registers and the person who always came to switch out the magazines walked into my view. He took the old New Yorker off, and put the new New Yorker on that had this big profile of my brother and me. And then he left. I was at the pizza island, staring at it, thinking, This is life. You know? This is life. You’re working the shitty job, paying rent, but then , sometimes, something incredible happens. And so I wrote my friend about this. I was like, This is what it’s like to be famous.

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The fiction of Robert Lopez occurs in a world simultaneously oppressive and hilarious, in which people fail to recognize their spouses or lovers, in which something is wrong but it’s not clear what, in which characters are subjected to a kind of imprisonment they don’t understand and, at first glance, hardly seem to care about. But they do care; throughout the work, characters demonstrate a deep, subtle resistance to the restrictions of their lives and relationships and institutional affiliations or entrapments-a resistance coupled with an inability to master forces in a world they can’t begin to understand. Often noted for his distinctive voice and style, Lopez creates worlds and characters we somehow at once recognize and yet have never seen before, arising from language and cadences that compel like a kind of beautiful, weird song.

Robert Lopez was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised on Long Island. He’s the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and, most recently, a book of stories called Asunder. The Faster Times notes that “the Lopez syntax has evolved over the years to become both recognizable and utterly unique in its uncompromising approach. Language may be a dull instrument, but it’s the best we’ve got; lucky for us, Lopez is up to the challenge.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction refers to his prose as “like a great jazz performance : pointedly provisional, even damaged, and solicitous of audience participation.”

Lopez’s stories have appeared in Bomb, the Threepenny Review, New England Review, Willow Springs, Norton’s Sudden Fiction Latino, and many other places. He’s taught at Columbia University and William Paterson University, and he currently teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Pine Manor College’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. He’s been a fiction fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center. He edits No News Today, a blog, or running anthology of dispatches from a deep pool of writers, including Roy Kesey, Amelia Gray, Terese Svoboda, Jess Walter, and Nelly Reifler, to name but a few.

We met with Mr. Lopez at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington DC, where we talked about logic and connective threads, damage and its aftermath, repetition and refrain, knowing and not knowing, and how, as a writer, “you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions.”

BLAKE BUTLER

Throughout your work there’s a balance between knowing and not knowing, revealing and not revealing. Your characters seem at once unaware of their social function and hyper aware of it. Is this a product of you, the writer, not knowing what you’re going to write as you’re writing?

ROBERT LOPEZ

I’m always most interested in not knowing. That’s my default. To me, there’s authority in that ignorance, because I know that my narrators and characters don’t know anything and I know that they’re aware that they don’t know. I also know that it’s frustrating as hell to them, but that they, on some level, accept it. They want connection with people, but they know that connection is never going to happen.

JOSEPH SALVATORE

They want connection so badly they can’t do it right?

LOPEZ

They don’t know how to do it right.

SAMUEL LIGON

What makes a story feel complete to you?

LOPEZ

By the time you get to the end of a piece of fiction, I think you should feel that you’ve been someplace, that you’ve had an experience. Somewhere I read John Turturro saying, when asked how he played a character: “Well, what you saw is what I did. I can’t really go beyond chat.” Similarly, for me, the way a story works is how it works. It’s an intuitive thing. I might feel, Okay, here’s the end. But that doesn’t mean I necessarily know how my fiction works, or that I want to demystify it.

I do have a sense of how short stories work structurally and formally, though I can’t say I understand the workings of long fiction, even though I’ve written two novels. There are probably ten failed stories I cannibalized for Part of the World. Same thing with Kamby Bolongo Mean River. I cannibalize what doesn’t totally succeed in its original context but chat has something good or interesting, some language or a situation, and I use chat. The fragmentation leads to something that starts to feel complete. I like what Donald Barchelme said about college-something like “Fragments are the only form I use.” I work with fragments because it’s the only way I know how to work when I put together something long.

BUTLER

Some of the linchpins for your characters are their feelings of comfort when they recall memories from childhood, particularly in Kamby. All else-the concrete reality around the narrator-seems somehow chimerical.

LOPEZ

And what’s funny to me is that I don’t find anything particularly sustaining in memory. The present always beats the hell out of anything we may have done in the past. Same goes for the people in my past­ people I loved. Memory is flawed, hazy, and therefore unsatisfying. So it’s funny that to the narrators or characters in my fiction, memory is the only thing that’s reliable or real.

LIGON

What’s the driving force of Kamby?

LOPEZ

The character is static-he’s confined. But he wants out. It’s his desire to escape that’s the driving force, unlike, for example, Beckett’s character in Molloy, who’s in this bed, in this room. He doesn’t want to be anywhere else. He’s accepting of where he is and what he’s doing. He’s telling his story; he’s going to cell it now, tell it one more time, etc. Whereas, the narrator of Kamby wants the hell out of that place, but he doesn’t know how to achieve the escape. That’s where chose suicide attempts come in-if they are suicide attempts. But if he were to get out, I don’t think he would be able to survive.

LIGON

What’s wrong with him?

LOPEZ

I have no idea.

SALVATORE

You’ve said that you write in a state of not knowing, and that, after the writing is over, you remain uncertain of what you’ve done and maybe even why you’ve done it. One could say that your books enact that same not knowing. So, not only are the characters and the reader kept in the dark, but the writer keeps himself in the dark, too?

LOPEZ

That’s exactly right.

SALVATORE

So you’re totally resisting the old Fiction 101, which is that you should know your characters’ predilections and preferences- what color sheets he sleeps in, which cereal she buys, whether his wristwatch is digital or has a face. This is the stuff we’re told we’re supposed to know, even though cereal and wristwatches are never mentioned in the story.

LOPEZ

Exactly. For example, there’s no mention of the parents of the narrator in Part of the World, and I have no idea about them-who they were, how they brought him up. It never occurred to me. The truth is, to me there’s no such thing as character. There’s no such thing as story. Or plot. All we have are words arranged on a page. It’s on the reader to make character. There’s no such thing as a Holden Caulfield. Somehow readers experience and feel like they know this character, but there is no real character.

SALVATORE

But language has to signify something. Plot exists because the writer chooses to construct language to make meaningful articulations that move in a particular direction. We can’t just say that words are empty signifiers.

LOPEZ

Of course they’re not empty signifiers, because then you could put any words in any order. In the Raethke poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” the words are in a very specific order. Half of the poem’s readers think it’s about child abuse, the other half think it’s a father and son horsing around. Does it matter what Roethke’s intent was? No, it’s up to the reader to decide. As a writer, I’m going to do what I have to do to keep myself engaged. I hope I’m going to keep a few readers engaged along the way. And then, what you make out of it is what you make out of it.

LIGON

In Kamby, the reader does get deep context for the narrator’s life. We end up knowing a lot about him. Why do you show us what you show us in Kamby?

LOPEZ

I never think about what needs to- well no, that’s a lie- I do think about what needs to go into a story to compel the reader. I love what VS. Prichett said: ”A short story is something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye in passing.” I’ve always held onto that. And not just for a short story, but also for a novel. Obviously a novel has to be fuller; it has to be a different experience. But you can cultivate the “not knowing” part of that fullness. And so, what’s left out of Kamby and what’s left out of Part of the World is as important as what’s put in.

The narrator in Kamby talks about his injury, and then he mentions a place called Injury, Alaska. Now, is Injury, Alaska a real place? I have no idea, but he claims to have grown up there. Some of his claims are kind of ridiculous because, obviously, there’s no place in Alaska where they need air conditioning. So is he intentionally fucking around with the reader? I don’t think he’s intentionally trying to be duplicitous.
Unlike many writers, place really doesn’t interest me. Which is why Part of the World doesn’t “take place” anywhere. Kamby might take place in Alaska, or it might not. Very few of my short stories even mention place. And none of these people have jobs-at least that are mentioned. The jobs of the characters don’t interest me. What does interest me in, say, Kamby, is what is revealed about the character through his memories and his feelings about those memories. Whether it’s Charlie being a boxer, or his mother being kind of an abusive deadbeat. But my intention is not to explain why he’s where he is or how he got in that situation.

BUTLER

All of these things we’re talking about-the traditional elements of fiction-are play-toys for what’s really the magic of your writing, which is the logic. In your novella, The Trees Underground, we watch a character’s logic evolve by bouncing back and forth between orchestrations of place, person, and memory. In Kamby, when the character remembers what his brother used to do to him, it isn’t as interesting as him trying to figure out why he remembers that and who exactly that guy was. And it’s logical; it’s like math without anything following the equals sign. How do you use what I’m calling logic as a tool in your writing?

LOPEZ

It’s a great question and it really resonates with me. How do writers create transitions in narrative? My approach is to pick out something that’s come before the time in which the story takes place. I try to create a connective thread. So it’s just a matter of finding out what those threads are and which of those threads interest me. The narrator of Kamby might mention something that his current tormentors are doing to him; and that’s going to catapult him into talking about the time he was with Charlie and they were out early one morning sneaking out of the house or whatever. I couldn’t possibly work without that logical progression from point to point. Maybe I rely too heavily on it.

BUTLER

But that’s where the emotion is for me, because that’s how life feels.

LOPEZ

And that emotion is: How the fuck did I get here.

The narrator of The Trees Underground finds himself someplace and has no idea how he got there. But he’s there and he’s responsible for people who need his help. He doesn’t know what qualifies him to do any of the things he’s doing, yet he has to do them. He’s also hoping to get the hell out of there, just like in Kamby Bolongo. But unlike in Kamby, he has responsibilities. Both narrators find themselves mysteriously confined to a place. Both narrators feel a certain impotence because they have no real free will; they can’t leave for some reason or another.

SALVATORE

And in Trees Underground it becomes a question of, Does he really have these responsibilities, or is this something they do to keep him busy because he’s annoying?

LOPEZ

Yeah, it could be that as well. Absolutely. And I don’t know the answer.

LIGON

Is the logic logical? Is it rational?

SALVATORE

It’s logical to the narrator in the moment he’s in. It’s like a dementia patient. You watch them and in the moment they’re convinced-“This is this way and that is that way”-and the next minute, they’re almost a different person. “No-that’s not how it is.” And it continues to change because something’s wrong with their brain. It’s true now, and it’s true now, and now it’s not true, but it’ll be true again.

LOPEZ

Most of us can connect, maybe, to these narrators or characters to a degree, but not completely. The narrator of The Trees Underground is kind of extreme-dull-witted and totally befuddled by what he’s doing and who these people are, and he doesn’t understand very fundamental things. I think this rubs up against what we know of the world and how we move around the world and feel like we can give the appearance that we’re competent. We’re holding it together to an extent.

LIGON

Does fiction need damage to work?

LOPEZ

I think we’re born damaged. I think we’re marked at birth. You know, you come out of there and they slap your ass, and it’s already traumatic. And immediately you’re thrust into coping mode. As Larkin so famously said: Your parents, they fuck you up. And then our schools fuck us up. So, yes, I find damaged characters, damaged narrators to be the most compelling kind. But they have to be human at the same time.

BUTLER

The damage is always off the page. We don’t know what the hell is wrong with a character, as though we’re getting the aftermath.

LOPEZ

It’s always the aftermath-when they’re taking baby steps toward something that resembles recovery. For the people in my fiction, it’s baby steps all the way through, across tenuous ground. They’re trying to make it across somehow, without getting more damaged along the way.

BUTLER

You use a lot of diched language and repetition and something that almost feels like sampling. Characters repeat things they’ve heard. But you’re not really quoting it; you’re sticking it into the rest of their speech. It’s like they’re dinging to these meaningless ways of speaking.

SALVATORE

Yeah-the characters skew a cliche that reveals some kind of mystery in the story. And then the form enacts it by this recursive-what might be called repetition, but I’m thinking more like Gertrude Stein’s recursion­ where when we return to either a phrase or a sec piece, it’s slightly skewed again. Is that a strategy you practice?

LOPEZ

We all know the experience of deja-vu, like, I’ve done this before. I play with that experience in Part of the World-places and events and thoughts and language occur and reoccur. I use borrowed language to illuminate something and to create tension. In Part of the World, the narrator is totally unaware that he’s ripping off Nabakov or Proust or Wallace Stevens. Sometimes he’s doing it verbatim, and sometimes he’s fucking around with the text. But he has no idea, because he doesn’t know what’s his and what isn’t. He can’t distinguish a thought that might be original from something that he read or that someone said to him. He appropriates what another character says to him the same way he appropriates Beckett or Shakespeare. He doesn’t know what belongs to him.

LIGON

The repetition makes your sentences and word choices feel extremely deliberate. Your teacher, Amy Hempel, has been referred to as a “line writer.” Are you a line writer?

LOPEZ

I think there are certainly line writers, who produce work in which the line becomes the dominant experience of reading, as opposed to work that’s all about story or narrative. You could say Alice Munro is a narrative writer. But Updike, to me, was a line writer. Those sentences are put together in a way that seems much more sophisticated than, say, Alice Munro’s.

Music was a big part of my experience growing up, and as a teenager I started singing and playing guitar. I’m into the ways that music works structurally, and this informs my use of language and line. Repetition is key in music-the refrain is a vital element. If you take refrain out of music then the whole thing can fall apart.

LIGON

Is there risk in too much focus on line?

LOPEZ

There can be, certainly. And sometimes risks work out and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a writer’s prose is so dense that a reader isn’t able to extract any emotion. The language can be meticulous; the lines, the sentences, can be perfect. But one can’t get any feeling out of it. I’ve read well regarded work that has left me feeling cold- not cold as in the chill of fear-I mean cold as in flat-lined: books that are perfectly constructed, but I couldn’t draw a visceral response from the work. Language-wise they might be perfect, but I need something more. The language can’t be-for me, for my sensibility-it has to work for me. Like Gertrude Stein said, there has to be a “there there.”

SALVATORE

It’s interesting that you talk about the need for emotion, and Stein’s “there there” in light of your strategy of cultivating ignorance and not providing characters with jobs, places, and in some cases, past history. You’ve said you want compelling-

LOPEZ

It has to be entertaining.

SALVATORE

So, on the one hand you don’t want to know too much about what’s going on behind the curtain of your fiction. And yet you actually, think, you’re a craftsperson whose more conscious of a craft than he’s admitting. And who, as a reader, responds to the very craft elements that he feigns ignorance of. This is what it seems to me Blake was saying about characters making him feel human feelings. I’m wondering if, when you talk about creating compelling work, you’re not simply talking about plain old plot?

LOPEZ

Ah, God. I have no idea. I mean, for me- it’s like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. I know it when I do it.

Sometimes whatever it is that we’re calling “compelling” happens in the initial composition, and a lot of times it happens in the revision. For instance, in Part of the World it happened solely in revision, because in the very, very first draft, absolutely nothing compelling happened. I was playing with the tenets of the nouveau roman, trying to get rid of everything to see what was left. But then, going over it, I thought, Okay, you need something to happen. So, that sense of a “there there” definitely happened in revision with Part of the World.

LIGON

What bores you as a reader?

LOPEZ

Again, it’s similar to the Supreme Court thing. For instance, each of you goes about creating a story in an entirely different way, but when I read your work, I feel there’s a heat that’s generated. On occasion, I pick up The Night in Question, by Tobias Wolff, and every semester I teach “Bullet in the Brain.” Bue I recently picked up Back in the World and I read all the first lines, and they just weren’t as dynamic as his other first lines. Writers are cold, “The whole story has to be in the first line.” What bores me is the overly familiar, the pedestrian.

SALVATORE

If we apply that logic, “Call me Ishmael” would probably not pass-

LOPEZ

No, no, “Call me Ishmael” certainly does. There’s something arresting about “Call me Ishmael.” Is that not your name? Who are you? What else would we call you? That, to me, is a brilliant opening.

SALVATORE

Amy Hempel used to say that she couldn’t write past one line if that line wasn’t working. Is it that way for you with the first line of a story or novel?

LOPEZ

Every piece I’ve written-the novels, stories, or the play I just finished-comes from a single line. They never come from an idea or an image or an experience; they come from one single line. And the next line pushes off the previous line. In Kamby, that line is “Should the phone ring I will answer it.” I like the contingency of that. There’s power and powerlessness in that line. “Should the phone ring,” which is totally outside my control, “I will answer it.”

SALVATORE

The theorist Gilles Deleuze, in writing about Melville’s Bartleby, says that the comical is always literal. It can’t be metaphorized because of the way it works in Melville, the syntactic queerness of “I would prefer not to,” a linguistic formula that is the story’s “glory” and which “every loving reader repeats.” He talks about different kinds of humor, including works by Kleist, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett. Do you see yourself as a part of this lineage? It’s a humanizing kind of humor, in a certain way.

LOPEZ

I saw this really good movie recently- Winter’s Bone. It was entirely humorless. Now, you can do a dark, dark movie, and I respond to darkness. But God damn it, have some laughs along the way. That was my major problem with that picture- there wasn’t one chuckle or light moment or even a dark funny thing; there was nothing funny at all. When that happens, it’s one note and no matter how compelling it is I don’t respond the way I’d like to respond. I’m not saying I want something to be jokey, like Dave Barry in the Miami Herald or something.

BUTLER

I think there are two kinds of humor: inside and outside. Your characters tell jokes about things they think are supposed to be funny, or that they really think are funny, which makes their shitty world a little better. But then, there’s the humor where you’re looking at this guy who’s keeping track of which way his erections go, left or right. And he’s not joking . The scariest moments are when I see your characters doing things I do myself. I’ll be reading about something a character does and I realize that I do that and I’m like, “Oh my fucking God!” Because everyone does those things in different ways.

LOPEZ

I tell students that you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions. You have to use that stuff because it’s ultimately going to make the work vibrant and come off the page. All the stories we tell have been told a million times before. Nobody’s going to come up with a new story. It’s all the same old thing; somebody is losing something, somebody wants something, somebody is afraid of losing something, somebody is afraid of wanting something. We can’t not write those stories. We cultivate the strange things that make us unique, and that uniqueness is what connects us to other people. Otherwise strangeness is just a freak-show. Like what you see on Jerry Springer.

BUTLER

You’ve said you don’t know how to write a novel, though you’ve written two novels, you don’t think of yourself as a novelist. Do you consider your novels to be very long short stories?

LOPEZ

No, I think they’re novels. But when I think of a novelist, I think of someone who sits down and writes novels. John Updike is a novelist, Anne Tyler is a novelist. I do consider myself a writer, but as often as not, I feel like it’s almost always a happy accident every time one of these things comes together- whether it is a one-page story or a novel; like it was almost the luck of some sort of draw.

BUTLER

The last lines of “Monkey in the Middle” are, “I’ve come to realize that what goes on when I’m not around is none of my business. Mostly.” If it feels like luck to you, why do you keep doing it?

LOPEZ

Because it gives me something that nothing else does, and because it’s what I can do. When it’s working, it’s such a satisfying feeling. And, you know, it’s nice to have the books on the shelf. You can look at them and say, “I did that,” although I rarely do this. At any rate, there’s a line in the Wallace Stevens poem, “The Planet on the Table:” ”Ariel was glad he had written his poems. They were of a remembered time/Or of something seen that he liked.” And then later in the poem, there’s this: “Some affluence, if only half-perceived,/In the poverty of their words.” The desire to make something that wasn’t there before motivates me.

There’s a magic when a line comes and you put another line behind it. I remember Stanley Elkin saying something like-at this point he was in a wheelchair-“Well, I might not be much physically, but on the page, I’m a god.” When we write, we can be gods. Though, of course, our readers don’t think of us as gods. Kamby certainly has some detractors­ a few people have voiced their disappointment about that book.

LIGON

What do they want that they’re not getting? Plot?

LOPEZ

I imagine. But they can go to a million other writers for that. It’s none of my business. I wouldn’t know plot if it knocked me in the-

BUTLER

But you’re a huge movie lover. And plot is a major part of movies, particularly certain kinds of movies that I know you like, like The Godfather. So what’s the difference between telling a story in image and writing a script?

LOPEZ

When you do something visually you have the instrument of the actor who communicates so much without using language-without resorting to the base thing chat language is. One of my favorite moments in film is the brilliant Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day. He’s in his parlor, right? And he’s the most uptight character you’re ever going to come across-entirely introverted and withdrawn, scared of human contact. He’s in his parlor, he’s in his safe place, and he’s reading a book, and a woman he’s attracted to, played by Emma Thompson, invades his space. She wants to know what he’s reading; she’s curious. “What are you reading? Just tell me what you’re reading.” But he doesn’t want to tell her. By not wanting to show her the book, he’s saying, “This is my private time and you’re invading it. I want to be alone.” He’s holding the book to his chest, but she’s insistent; she’s moving in on him, which he is not inviting at all. She’s caking the book physically from his hands. And the heat that Hopkins has in his eyes, of repression-he wants her, he’s extremely attracted to her, but he doesn’t know how to go about the next human move. He can’t negotiate it; he can’t handle it; he can’t express it, certainly. But Hopkins somehow manages to communicate all of that without language. It’s all here; it’s all in his face.
That’s what film can do. And I can think of other moments. The end of Big Night is one of my favorite moments in film. The brothers have had this argument, it was horrible, and you think they’re now estranged. You think, This is it, they have to go their separate ways. The very next morning they’re exhausted, they’ve had this big night and there’s a scene entirely without dialogue that goes on for minutes. It’s extraordinary. Stanley Tucci makes eggs for himself and then for his brother, played by Tony Shalhoub. The whole scene is like a silent movie at this point. That’s the kind of thing that when we write fiction we just can’t do. And in film, I want to know what’s going to happen-I expect to know. I require plot. Whereas, in fiction, I don’t require that at all.

LIGON

You have a deep emotional response to the ending of Big Night. Can you talk about a similar response you’ve had to fiction?

LOPEZ

You know, it’s funny. I’ve almost never had- I’m not quite our new Speaker of the House where I can cry on a dime, but I can get emotional. I can be emotional. Music has moved me that way many times, film has moved me that way. That hasn’t happened in a long time with film, though. But there have been times with film where I’ve either felt leveled in the seat, where I can’t move, or I’ve been moved to tears. I have never been moved to tears, except for one time, with reading. And it wasn’t fiction, it was nonfiction. It was Andre Dubus in Broken Vessels. There’s an essay in that book that moved me to tears. But for fiction, I’m neither-it’s a different feeling. It’s visceral because I do feel stirred somehow. I feel compelled, I feel entertained, but somehow it’s a different kind of emotional connection. Maybe it’s because it’s the thing that I do. I don’t know.

LIGON

Do you get as much pleasure from it today as-

LOPEZ

Not even close.

SALVATORE

In what, reading or writing?

LOPEZ

Reading. I read to my friends, and I get pleasure out of that, but there was a time when-if a new book by a writer I admired was coming out, I was there that Tuesday getting it. And that doesn’t happen anymore. I think I’ve been over saturated. I teach four workshops a semester. That means I’m reading critically all the time. So even if I read somebody I consider a friend and who I like-not even a close friend where I want to read everything, but a casual good friend and I want to support them-I pick up the book, because I’m supporting it and I’m reading them, and I like their writing. But I go for a little bit, and then it’s as if I say, Okay, I’ve got a sense of that, and I put it down. It always feels like I’m on the job.

BUTLER

The pleasure factor has diminished for me, too. I don’t necessarily feel on the job, but I feel the pulling away. Each year I feel a little less pleasure, reading and writing.

LOPEZ

I remember feeling it was a magical experience to get a new book. Magical.

SALVATORE

What are some of those magical books you couldn’t wait to buy? And what are you drawn to today?

LOPEZ

These days, there are no authors other than my friends that I’m excited about. Because it seems I’ve already seen what’s being done. There’s nothing new for me there, which I know is bullshit, but whatever. And the books that I loved in the past- well, I picked up I Sailed with Magellan recently, and I remember the first time I read “We Didn’t”-it was in the nineties-and that story knocked me on my ass. I thought it was one of the greatest things I’d ever read. It lived in my memory as a brilliant, brilliant story. But when I recently picked up I Sailed with Magellan and reread “We Didn’t,” it just wasn’t happening for me.
That story is the same, but I’ve changed and now the story doesn’t work for me. I lament the change. I’ve become too ruthless as a reader. If there’s a line, if there’s a clause that explains too much or feels too commonplace, I can’t abide it and I stop. But I did read The Coast of Chicago recently and totally dug it. I didn’t have a single moment where I thought, “Well, whatever.” But looking at I Sailed with Magellan, I’ve been trying that and it just hasn’t happened for me. And I don’t know exactly why.

SALVATORE

Your work, it seems to me, is influenced by David Markson and Samuel Beckett. Would you talk a bit about those influences or others?

LOPEZ

I’ve said this before, but reading Hemingway’s ”A Clean, Well­ Lighted Place” many years ago made me want to write a story. So I wrote a story or two. I had no instruction, I wasn’t an English major. I took lit classes in college, but didn’t pay attention in them, so I never did the work. I actually paid for the papers I handed in. The way I was taught literature in high school and college was to look for symbols and memorize and extract interpretive meaning that was concrete. We would read a poem and say, “What’s the poet really saying?”
What’s the poet really saying? The poet said what’s on the page.

SALVATORE

But poets do talk about how hard they’ve worked on a metaphor, and to make a particular, very aestheticized event for the reader, right? So poets are thinking about it.

LOPEZ

And that’s poetry I’m not interested in. I read Wallace Stevens. I love Wallace Stevens. I don’t want to know that he’s trying for metaphor, because to me, he’s not. To me, he’s putting language down that has metaphor. To me-and I tell this to my students all the time-it’s like acting. You want to feel the anger, you don’t want to show the anger. If you feel the anger as an actor, the anger will come out. But if you’re crying to play anger, you’re going to be overacting. If a writer is trying to be true to whatever he or she is putting down on the page, the metaphor is going to happen. It has to happen, because everything. I mean, we don’t live in a bubble. We don’t live in a vacuum. Everything is contingent upon something else. Everything is related to something else. So metaphor is inevitable. It arises. It cannot not happen. So, when people say, “I’m trying for a metaphor, I need a metaphor,” I think it’s the wrong way to go about it. It gets heavy-handed. It makes the reader say, “You’re not trusting me as the reader to get it, and so you have to hit me over the head with it.”

LIGON

You mentioned Hemingway-

LOPEZ

Hemingway made me want to read. When I came across Carver, he made me want to be a writer. Not just write a story, but make a life out of this activity. There was something about the power and mystery of chose stories. Every one, at the end, had a punch in the gut. I felt like I’d been someplace. I felt I’d experienced something. And I had an emotional, visceral connection to it, along the lines of “Ballad of a Thin Man;” something has happened here but you don’t know what it is. And I was totally fine with not knowing what it is.

But when I came to read Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and the fragmented way that was put together, I said, “Okay, fragments. That’s something I can move around in.” And so that worked with me and that sparked something in me. And also, Beckett’s Molloy-where he strips everything down, and gets rid of so much. I like what Faulkner said in his Nobel acceptance speech, ”All literature is the human heart in conflict with itself.” And, to me, I try to distill that down to someone in a room-How did I get here? How do I get out of here? How do I make connections with other people? There are feelings of isolation. And disappointment. Beckett and Markson handle that on a language level and a narrative strategy level that moved me and opened up my head to what could be done on the page.

LIGON

In contrast to some of the bleakness of the worlds you create, are you a romantic? Your characters are so often disappointed, like: “It shouldn’t be this way. We’re damaged and it shouldn’t be this way.” There’s something innocent and romantic in that view.

LOPEZ

I’ve never thought of it in those terms, but I think you’re right. I mean, I think all of my narrators believe that life shouldn’t always be this hard. This is how it is, but it shouldn’t be this way. And almost like Jesus on the cross: “Why have I been forsaken, oh Lord? Why me? Why have I been forsaken?” But then, also: They get through somehow. Somehow, they get through.

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In Blake Butler’s work, the ordinary world is made and remade, the familiar becomes strange, the quotidian becomes uncanny, haunted: families discover their own doubles living among them; homes retain their usual dimensions on the outside, but inside are doubling and expanding with secret passages and dark tunnels and strange rooms; caterpillars mysteriously overrun mailboxes and children get inexplicably sick. But that’s mere content. Butler is also a narratologist’s dream dissertation topic. As one of our interviewers, Joseph Salvatore, wrote about There is No Year in The New York Times Book Review: “[T]his novel presents itself as an eye-widening narrative puzzle. Its surface features alone immediately call attention to themselves. Some of the passages are typographically laid down in verse, running Whitmanesque across the page, Dickinsonianly down in thin shafts or randomly in block stanzas. Italics abound. White space abounds. Footnotes are employed, some of them without primary referents: mere subscripts floating on the empty page like gnats.”

Blake Butler was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where he currently lives. He is the author of three novels, Ever, Scorched Atlas, and There is No Year; as well as a nonfiction book, Nothing. Butler also founded and runs the popular website, HTMLGIANT.

A New York Times review of Nothing noted that “Butler is obsessed with the possibilities of syntax, and the most obvious feature of Nothing is a lyric and intellectual buffer overflow that results in long, often interestingly ungrammatical sentences, sometimes stretching over six pages. The most ornate of these is adorned with footnotes, a nod to David Foster Wallace, to whose memory the book is dedicated. As such the book draws attention to its own linguistic surfaces in ways that most memoirs never attempt.” And from the website Creative Loafing: “Nothing is endlessly surprising, funny, exciting, harrowing. There are some cues from the sprawling internal monologues of Nicholson Baker and the genre-defying nonfiction of William T. Vollmann in this expansive exploration of sleeplessness, but Butler is a writer unto himself.”

We met with Mr. Butler at the Palmer House in Chicago, where we talked about ordinary and anti-ordinary worlds, insomnia, dementia, parents and children, the use of footnotes, the internet, popular culture, HTMLGIANT, David Lynch, David Foster Wallace, reading habits, houses and homes, and the problems with metaphor.

ROBERT LOPEZ

All of your books have a post-apocalyptic or dystopic feeling. Can you talk about how the natural world works in your fiction, or how natural and unnatural worlds work together?

BLAKE BUTLER

Those worlds just seem like every day to me, like how going to the grocery store seems hellish. So why shouldn’t I show it in a hellish way? In no way am I the architect. It doesn’t seem like apocalypse; it seems contemporary. That’s what I’m feeling. Maybe it’s more like emotional texture than reality. Maybe I’m angry, without being angry on purpose—like getting up and driving to the room where I’m going to write makes me mad. So, the fact that I have to do it, or whatever other minor orchestration of feelings I have for a day might be what makes me kill people on paper.

SAMUEL LIGON

That room where you go to write is in your former home, your childhood home, and much of your work is about home. How important is that room to your material?

BUTLER

I’m actually afraid of that going away, because I’ve never been able to write anywhere else after getting used to that place. I can do a coffee shop, but it just doesn’t feel right; maybe there’s more emotional texture in that room that comes out in the writing. I write in the dark, with just the computer screen, and for a long time the room was full of crap, like if you turned on the light, it was a room full of trash. But it was all my stuff. It’s the room that used to be my bedroom, and it’s the room I write in now, which is totally weird, right? Nothing was written in that room, and that’s where I edited There Is No Year, but the books before that were written in another room, a second room. I used to write on my mom’s computer. She’s a sewer and an artist and a quilter, and she has a workroom with her computer, and I’d use it to write and if she came in to do anything I’d be like, “You’re ruining my air,” and finally she was like, “Go put your computer in the other room and work in there, and then you won’t be bothered.”

It’s totally weird writing with your parents around, but at this point I do it to save my mom’s brain a little, because she’s dealing with my dad’s dementia, which is pretty deep at this point. He’s basically a toddler: He wears diapers, needs full care at all times, and acts like a child, banging on things all day. He thinks he’s working, so he always wants to be busy, constantly walking around. I get up a lot while I’m writing and go to see him. Someone asked me recently, I think Michael Kimball, “Is the father in There Is No Year your dad?” And I was like, “No man, not at all.” Then I thought more and looked at some of the behavior in the book, and I thought, Yeah, he is.

JOSEPH SALVATORE

There Is No Year seems to include criticism of traditional masculinity, especially regarding fathers and sons. The father in that book is in many ways ineffectual. He’s got weaknesses—his memory is bad, he’s unable to find his way back home, and he watches porn. The mother finds the copy father more pleasant than the “real father.” And the mother is a more active character, with a great deal of agency and depth and heroism, in the Campbellian sense. I don’t hear much about gender issues when I hear Blake Butler being discussed, but they’re at play there with the mother and father. Is that something you think about?

BUTLER

I don’t ever think: The mother’s like this. But when typing, that’s how it comes out. And I’ve always been closer with my mom. She was an art teacher, and read me Don Quixote, Dickens, Twain, all before I could understand any of it. There weren’t children’s books in my house. We read those books. I think I became a big reader because of her.

The way she got me to read when I was little, five or six, she’d buy a bag of books, and she’d let me reach in and take one, without looking. When I finished reading and had talked to her about it for a minute, I could take another one. I don’t think I enjoyed the book as much as I enjoyed the idea of, What else is in that bag? I read voraciously because of that.

And I’ve always been closer with her. I think my dad and I have an interesting relationship, but there was also this distance because he was working constantly. He’d get up at five to go to work and when he was around, it’s not like he wasn’t there, but I just—the one I was surrounded with was my mother. She’s so stellar a person, and creatively, she’s just, like, perfect to me, so I guess that’s where that depth of the mother comes out, just because I see the amount she gives to me and everything around her. I can’t see a mother any way but that. And maybe I like to beat up the dad because I see myself eventually doing things a dad does, and it’s probably more internally me beating myself up than my dad, but some of the agency maybe comes from his actions.

SALVATORE

Does your father have opinions about your writing?

BUTLER

My dad has read one book that I know of—Bill Clinton’s My Life. And he didn’t really read that. He just liked Bill Clinton, so he bought it, but he’s not a reader. He went to a one-room schoolhouse and he never went to college.

LIGON

A mother figure comes up often in your work, but you don’t seem to worry about Freudian implications. Or what the repetition of Mother might mean.

BUTLER

Right. I’d rather look at the thing itself than figure out what’s around it. I’m more interested in images and sounds than I am in plots or unconscious machines behind the thoughts.

LOPEZ

It’s interesting that you say images and sounds. I’ve heard Dawn Raffel—who generally writes short—say that the acoustics of a sentence is basically all she’s concerned about. I think you can get away with that in a short piece, but in longer work, there has to be something more than just sound. Do you consider that in terms of form or the genre you’re working in—that there has to be more than sound? Or is it sound all the way through?

BUTLER

I always thought it was sound, but now I’m thinking it’s more rhythm. I know a lot of people in revision will read their work out loud to see what it sounds like, but I never do. I think I like more the way sentences connect together. I mean, I like interesting sentences, but that’s a given. I’m more interested in how a sentence can reflect an image and then the next sentence comes from that sentence and slightly alters the image. There Is No Year came from one image. The book starts with the mother and father sitting next to each other on the sofa without touching, very close, and that was where the book came from. An image. And I describe the image the way it made sense to describe it, and then started another page, writing scene after scene, and the language was important the whole time and sound was important the whole time and rhythm is what makes me type, because I’m not thinking, you know, just kind of running through what comes to me, analyzing it as I go, you know, as a reader, writing it as a writer and a reader at the same time.

I’m not trying to find anything or reveal anything. I like the feeling of typing and I like the momentum. The times I feel best writing are the times I’m in a frenzy. I get the beginning and then little jumps start happening and you almost completely lose the feeling that you’re typing. And I think that burst is awesome. But you can’t do that for hours and hours. So I’ll leave the desk, letting my mind disconnect from what I was doing. And then I’ll come back and look at where I ended, the feeling of it, and progress from there.

I tried to write books where I stayed and sat in the minute and had an arc that just continued the right way and I was really bad at it. I’d feel like I was under some kind of stress. It wasn’t pleasurable. It was like, How am I going to figure out this problem? I know the guy needs to do this, but how? My solutions were always bad. I couldn’t do the straight line. My line would get so curvy that it was like: This is idiotic; this is a horrible story; you’re not a good storyteller. But I do feel like I know when to respond to images and how to put words to them.

LOPEZ

You alternately use the words “typing” and “writing.” And I’ve seen you refer to “typing” in HTMLGIANT posts. I think about what Capote said regarding Kerouac’s work, something like, “That’s not writing; that’s typing.” Is there a difference in your mind between writing and typing?

BUTLER

I prefer the word “typing,” because it’s not romantic. I don’t like the romantic idea of the writer. I’m repelled by the romance of the ego and the writer. I come from a technical background. I went to Georgia Tech for computer science and I grew up writing code, basic programs, and they told stories on the computer. And that’s typing—you’re typing commands into the computer—and I still think of writing as just that act. I like the more logical, almost proof nature of constructing something. So it’s like I’m not trying to tell a story; I’m almost constructing a proof or a program more than I’m writing. I sometimes think I like writing because all it is is pressing a lot of buttons, and I like pressing buttons.

LOPEZ

So you never write longhand?

BUTLER

I’ve tried and it comes out like I’m an eight-year-old. Just horrible. Or it looks horrible and it feels wrong. It has to be on the machine.

LOPEZ

Your second book, Scorch Atlas, is unlike any other book I’ve seen. Each page is different. Where did that design come from, and how did the visual interact with your text? If that book were to be republished, would how it looks be part of the next incarnation?

BUTLER

The design of the book was all Zach Dodson at Featherproof, an intensely focused designer. I told him I wanted it to look like a beaten up science manual from the 1970s, and he came back with that. The fact that there are like eleven storms raining different stuff from the sky throughout the book, that was all one piece beforehand. It was Zach’s design idea to weave those sections throughout the book, so that he could let each storm affect the look of the pages thereafter, which made the book to me.

My first book, Ever, has brackets throughout. When I sent it to the editor, Derek White, it was all numbered lists and he was like, “The numbers probably work for you to write it, but they look weird on paper.” So he put the brackets in there.

And I got addicted to em dashes. I like visual elements. I think the way you look at something while you’re writing it changes your relationship with it, and that’s why there’s a lot of space play in There Is No Year. Design has always been important to me.

LIGON

When I look at the chapters in Nothing, and the lyrical footnotes, or when I look at the lists you’ve published, I see you playing with form. When are you conscious of the work and the form and shaping it to an end?

BUTLER

I’m a big fan of writing a fast first draft. I like the idea of a book being almost a photograph of your ideas at that time. And because I spent so long trying to write a straight novel—and the longer it took, the more I fucked it up—I try to do a fast draft, because I can get that energy in there. But then returning to it as a reader and revising it, it’s like, Oh, I missed this, or, Look at that thing that’s stuck in here that I didn’t develop at all, and then whole other scenes might eject from that, in the same way that programming is routines and subroutines. It’s very analytical—it can’t be mush; it has to be logically placed ideas that come from not quite knowing what you’re doing.

Those lyrical footnotes try to reconstruct how a thought process works. When I’m trying to go to sleep, the thing that keeps me awake is busy brain. Often, one thought has three thoughts at the same time. So how to mirror that? I can do the run-on sentence and pack a bunch of things into it, but it’s still one thought at a time. And so I looked for moments where it felt like another thought would be inserted, and a lot of times it’s quotes or gibberish, the nature of the other thought so widely varied and particular to a moment. That was my way of trying to replicate multiple thoughts recurring, and they kind of mess you up as you’re reading.

LIGON

I thought the footnotes provided relief in some sentences, acting like punctuation. Sometimes it seemed like a footnote was talking back to the text, while also providing relief, and throughout, the footnotes felt like conscious punctuation. But you’re saying they weren’t?

BUTLER

No. I was trying to punctuate the moment. It wasn’t like I picked any random quote and stuck it there or any random thing. It’s more like this exact thought ejects this exact thought. I could have actually maybe even stuck them in as more of the sentence, but they’re in some way parenthetical and they’re supposed to be happening at the same time. So they’re definitely supposed to continue the logic of the thing. But you can read it without those, too. Still, in order to get that jumbledness of brain, I think it’s important to have them as footnotes.

SALVATORE

The footnotes in your fiction work differently. How would you compare your use of footnotes in There Is No Year to Nothing?

BUTLER

There are only two parts of There Is No Year that have footnotes, the list of people who died young, and the second list mirroring that, and it’s the exact same number of footnotes each time, a mirror image of the sections. That’s why the names look like a spine, because the names were there and now they’re not. I wanted to replicate the list of names, of dead people as being gone, because part of the book is about people being removed from the world before their time. And so that first list is all people who were creators of things, who were then removed and therefore did not create other objects that would have been part of the world. The fact that they’re absent and the objects that they were going to create don’t exist—that’s a residue of sorts. I wanted to show them gone, and at first, the second section was just blank footnotes. But I was like, No, they’re not just blank; there’s something missing where they were going to be, or something left behind, so that’s what the footnotes in the second section do. They’re way more intuitive than abstract, and work in a functional way. The first time the footnotes appear, it’s all, He died in this way; you know, it’s factual and it’s meant to give context to the situation of dying as a human. The second half is the residual.

SALVATORE

And so regarding the missing referents, the footnotes in the second section correspond to the first section of the obituary list—but they seem figuratively connected rather than literally, as in the biographical manner used in the first section. For instance, you have this line, “One white hair grown out on all dogs surrounding.” I read that and had to hunt back through the book and work to understand what that meant. How did you conceptualize that second set of footnotes?

BUTLER

The mirrored section I figured out while I was revising; it wasn’t in the original draft. And when I realized what I wanted to do, I was like, But how am I going to make it work? I was in my mother’s bathtub and I’d go underwater—she has a humongous bathtub—and I figured out that it had to be these pieces like the one you read, and maybe the first one occurred to me as actual words, like I’ll often just think of words and that begins the ejection of other ones. I was lying there and maybe it was the words that came to me or maybe the idea of how it should work. It was probably the words. I got out of the bathtub and went and typed them.

SALVATORE

In a way, the second list functions like a copy family. A mirroring. But in the case of the footnote mirroring David Foster Wallace’s earlier note, when you write the line, “Another Instant for the Night,” should the reader assume that’s the narrator’s comment on Wallace? If so, are we to understand it as poetic? Or something else? Or is it not intended to be read in any way other than merely to experience the language of it?

BUTLER

I don’t know that I did it for each person specifically, but Wallace, he’s last on the list for a reason—because he’s why I started writing. I was at Tech, a computer science major, and I read Infinite Jest and that was the first book that I was like, You can talk like this on paper? You can make these things happen on paper? I became obsessed with him. I think he’s a brain that’s been unmatched. So, to me, he’s one of the biggest examples of that missing thing. He’s a presence still and there’s something not there because he was removed.

LIGON

Do you get irritated when people say they like Wallace’s nonfiction, but not his fiction?

BUTLER

I think it’s idiotic. His nonfiction is amazing, but Infinite Jest is the greatest literary achievement of all time to me. Most people who say that about the nonfiction didn’t read Infinite Jest. And I don’t know if he would think this, but I think it’s clearly his crowning work.

LIGON

When you started writing those widely published numbered lists, it seemed like a move toward nonfiction, because they felt like hybrid poetry/nonfiction pieces. And you’ve now written a book of nonfiction. What’s your relationship to nonfiction versus fiction?

BUTLER

I’ll always write fiction first. Nothing was a specific project. I sold the book before I wrote it and I wrote it to a deadline, the same way I write for the internet for a living. I like the challenge and the puzzle of it, but my heart’s in fiction and I think fiction’s more interesting. That’s you creating space, whereas nonfiction is analyzing space, although you can create space also. But the bigger art to me is fiction. There are a lot of my fictional elements in Nothing that I wanted to get in there, and I’m feeling weird calling it nonfiction, to be honest, because it’s just like a big collage of things to me.

LIGON

But like in the lists, we have these mini-moments in Nothing where you’re bringing the reader specific news from your research. That feels like traditional nonfiction. But then you work against that with other parts of the book, like those lyrical passages.

BUTLER

I don’t know that I’m working against it; that’s just my natural assembly process. I’ve been asked a lot: Do you intend to obfuscate the reader’s direction and challenge them? No, that’s just how I think about things. I started writing the lists because I was working at a collection agency and I came in one day and the guy that was like my overboss, who sat in the desk behind me, I looked at him and I was like, I can’t fucking stand this room right now. The first list came out of me being angry in that room. And then I realized that it was a puzzle, and I challenged myself to write fifty lists of fifty things, and it was like I had a model.

I like the way form can dictate content. I knew certain things about the orchestration of the frame of Nothing when I was beginning it. I’ve been finding that form gives me a structure to play inside of, like it encages you. It’s mathematical more than exploratory.

But as for nonfiction, when I was researching Nothing, I read all these books about insomnia, and they were all so dry and straight ahead. They had an approach, but I wanted to convey the feeling of restlessness and unconscious tension rather than talk about how to solve it. You’re just going to frustrate yourself looking for a cure. Ironically, I entered the best sleeping period of my life after I wrote that book.

SALVATORE

How would you characterize your insomnia? As a clinically diagnosable condition with an objective “cure”? Or is there something more personal and frustrating happening?

BUTLER

I think the latter. I took sleeping pills for a while and they were putting me to sleep, and when I ran out of them I was like, I have to have more of these. What stresses me out usually isn’t the creative thing—like, I have to figure out the next sixteen pages of my novel—or remembering to do something; it’s all entirely garbage thought, and the more you try to stop thinking, the more you think.

I write every day and most of the day, because that’s all I really have to do. The way I work, the way I make money, is partitioned into a different time, but I have most of all day, every day to write. And because of that, I think: I should be writing. I have intense guilt about that. It’s gotten better since I started to accomplish things, but during the time I was having the worst insomnia, I was like, I have to sit down and get something done today so I can feel good enough to sleep tonight. The insomnia would be worse if I didn’t do anything. But that sets you up for a whole lot more shit, because you type and you make this thing and it doesn’t go anywhere and you’re like, Oh, now I feel even worse, because I sat here for eight hours, didn’t make any money, and nothing will come of this except that I spun my wheels some more. But if you’re going to write without the beginning position clear, then you have to do some of that to get to the project that you want to do. And that’s what the list project came from; it was like, I just don’t know how else to get this out of me. I like to have little things between finding the project. It’s almost a puzzle. Like, Oh, I’m going to do this to start the day every day so I at least feel like I did something. I’m completing an equation.

LOPEZ

Your work seems to exist in the moments between wakefulness and sleep. It seems like you couldn’t be who you are unless you were sleepless, and the sleeplessness comes through the work, and almost everything feels born from that and is about that. Would you ever want to be a good sleeper?

BUTLER

Not sleeping knocks you off center a bit. You feel a little crazy. The times I feel most productive are when I am sleeping well, and I’m always fearing sleeplessness, because when you don’t sleep, you can’t get up and write well. It ruins your brain to some extent. But being in that middle zone works pretty well. A good night of sleep for me is five or six hours, so I’m still a little bit off. It takes me like five hours to wake up, before I can really talk to people, so I always feel like I’m in that middle, waking- up-or-going-to-sleep mode.

That’s probably the worst part about sleeping. Because I know I need to be well rested to do what I want to do the next morning, I want to go to sleep. My mania starts around three, and if I’m not feeling tired, it’s like it reverses itself so it’s a self-fulfilling insanity. If I could press a button that said, You will sleep eight hours a night for the rest of your life, I would press it. And I would be the same person. But if I hadn’t gone through that insomnia as a teenager and through my twenties, I’d probably still be coding computers instead of writing.

LOPEZ

Do you think in terms of a body of work, or how your books work together in sequence?

BUTLER

I don’t think about it while I’m writing. I don’t think about anything while I’m writing. I started to think about arc, because I guess I ended up doing more than I thought I would already. But when I sit down, if I think about that, it will make me get on Facebook instead of writing. I have to be blank of mind when I’m typing. It’s good to have an idea of where you’re going, and from the beginning I knew I wanted to write novels and the first thing I ever sat down to write was a novel. I didn’t write poems or short stories—well, I wrote poems when I was sixteen—but after I read Wallace, I was like, I’m going to write a novel now. And I wrote like seven novels that are never going to be anything, because they were all me learning how to write. I learned how to write a novel by writing one and failing over and over, and I finally got to the point where I was broken and wrote the first real one.

I was starting with the story, like, This will be about this. And I’m a bad problem solver in that way. It took me finding out that the less I knew—and actually knowing absolutely nothing and not even thinking—the better. To be able to get to that level of confidence and that level of intuneness with how I type took doing it a lot. And finally, like the fourth of these novels I wrote got me an agent. I published a short piece online and got an agent and he took on this novel. It was called Pupils of an Inflated Giraffe, and it was about two brothers who were in their fifties living with their severely obese mother and it went into all this crazy stuff.

And then I went to an MFA program and they were like, What is this stuff? In the first thing I workshopped, I remember there was some description in there, and the teacher was like, “I can’t see that. I don’t know what that means.” I must have done something weird. But then I was getting beaten up and being encouraged into ways I knew weren’t what I wanted, and writing these novels for this agent, who kept saying, “Oh, it’s weirder, man. You keep getting weirder. Go the other way,” and that’s when small presses were really starting to pick up again, and I thought, I’m just going to send this out myself. Then it worked out its own way and I ended up with a different agent by getting my own book deal. And he probably thinks I’m insane, too. I’m still pretty much selling it myself.

LIGON

Are you interested in plot?

BUTLER

I love plot, but approaching plot as plot doesn’t work for me. I like to fall into plot, write until I figure out what the plot is. The plots create themselves, rather than me creating them. If I think I’m going to write the story of a man who goes home to Wisconsin, the way my brain would want to write that would be horrible. But if I start with a sentence, and the next sentence comes from logic, then that’s still linear storytelling. I feel like I’m telling an A to B story in There Is No Year, even though there are all these weird parts. It has a plot, even if it goes through these weird patterns to get to it.

LIGON

How would you describe the plot of There Is No Year?

BUTLER

There’s a family—a mother, a father, and a son—and the son has been sick with an illness that should have been terminal, but he didn’t die, so he’s kind of living in this phase of death still coming for him, because death didn’t occur like it should have. I would say there are like four plots, though I don’t know how to tell you about all four. It’s the same as the ejection, the thoughts inside of thoughts. There’s a plot about the son not having died and the lure of death and the fact that he’s making this object—he’s writing a book—that should not exist, because he was supposed to die. He’s creating an object that should not exist, and the world doesn’t want him to do that and is trying to destroy him. People living are kind of haunted by this air, like the fact that we live in the middle of all this, and all this has happened over and over again. You know, there’s a kind of air that we live in. . . I don’t even know what it is. This is the problem of me trying to tell a story. I see so many plots working at the same time.

After I gave this to my editor, he said, “So I’ve read the book eleven times, and I think I know what it’s about now—I think the father is molesting the son.” And I was like, “That is not what this is about at all.” Then he showed me all this weird penile imagery. He pointed out these things and I was like, I’ll have to get rid of that. I added 10,000 words and then removed 5,000, because I was like, I don’t want this to go that direction, and I do want it to go this direction, and, Look here’s this thing I didn’t find, like another room I should add.

SALVATORE

If you were teaching young writers, how would you help them understand the notion of plot? I guess to do that you’d have to define it. How would you do that?

BUTLER

Plot is what happens to the reader while they’re reading the book. It’s more effect based to me than a story. Traditionally, plot is the story that happens, but I want it to be more interactive than that, and that’s why I use images that could mean multiple things. People often have different responses to a book, and I like the fact that it’s open-ended enough within the logical plot that it can go these multiple directions. The reader has to be involved with that. Even though the object is the object and what’s in the book is in the book, the person interfacing with it, their approach, is going to change the field, right? I like the fact that I have a vision of what I feel the book does that no one’s ever said exactly, and I like that people say different things.

SALVATORE

Regarding that idea of plot being the reader’s journey, when I get to a section from There Is No Year like, “Passing the parents’ bedroom he heard the mother talking to herself in a language the son had only heard one time,” I wonder, When was that “one time”? In a traditionally plotted book, that might be a moment where you get a flashback to a specific “one time.” The passage continues after a dash, “heard through the crack of his old bed frame, the bed the men in plastic had come to haul away—the bed the doctors said had been infested and was the reason he got sick. The son knew that wasn’t why he had gotten sick. It was a bed. No one would listen. The son had heard the mother’s language noises once coming also from a crack in his newer bed, but he stuffed the crack with gum. The house would sing to him for hours. The son did not try the parents’ door.”

But the source of the son’s illness really isn’t the point, and whether the doctors got the diagnosis right isn’t the point, and this “one time” when he’d heard the mother’s talk is not really a plot point at all. So, for me, there were strands that I felt never got tied up. You said earlier that the one time you tried to write a “straight novel”—and it’s interesting that Lynch has a movie called The Straight Story—you said you “fucked it all up.” So when you talk about extracting 5,000 words and putting in 10,000, are you worrying about connecting dots, or are you going to put this object or that image out there and let the reader do what she will with it?

BUTLER

It’s more like setting up the frame for it to go in. I don’t want to explain away the image, but the image has an order, right? So I’m looking for moments where image is giving too much or giving too little and I’m trying to organize it in a way where it opens more, instead of closes. The reason I love David Lynch and the reason I love reading is that they open things I didn’t understand before. Or they bring me things I couldn’t experience anywhere else that make my brain come alive.

The image of the white horse from Twin Peaks is a haunting image, and the man behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive is terrifying. Why? Because Lynch doesn’t say, “The horse is this. Or that.” He has no idea. That’s not to say that the image of the horse should not be specific. You have to fine tune all the elements of the image, even if you don’t know what the image is doing. And I also like to pile things in. For instance, there’s a reference to every Lynch film in There Is No Year. I like using other people’s containers in ways that, like, I steal the idea, but not in a palpable way, more a way of figuring out how to say what I wanted to say.

SALVATORE

The egg in the novel reminded me of the black box in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

BUTLER

And there’s one point where the father’s walking through the house and I write, “The father aged eighteen months,” or something like that, and that comes from Eraserhead. When they were filming Eraserhead, it took so long to get enough money to film it, you see Jack Nance walk up to the door, and he opens the door and comes in and, literally, in the change of the shot, there were eighteen months between, and he looks exactly the same. I love the discontinuity within the continuity. Or I remember reading William Vollman talking about how he revises. He talked about messing with a sentence, packing things into it and removing things till it pops like a popcorn kernel. It was this egg-shaped thing and all of a sudden it explodes into all these textures. I love reading and thinking about sentences in that way.

LIGON

You often use repetition, even certain words coming up over and over, like “meat,” “air,” “light.” How does repetition serve your work?

BUTLER

I feel comforted by repetition. I try to live every day as if it were the same day. In my ultimate world, every day would be the same day, in which nothing happens except I sit in a room and do what I want by myself. The art I like does that too. And so I keep saying “hair” and “light” because I can’t stop. If I’m writing without thinking about it, those are the words that are going to keep coming out of my hands. I do it too close in sentences, or it feels redundant, I like that it can create a texture—but you can overtexture something. I’ll try not to use the same words in the same sentences unless I mean to. You know, like I’ll go back and be like, Oh, I said this twice and it’s just kind of annoying. It doesn’t have that ecstatic repetition; it’s an annoying repetition.

LIGON

You seem to trust image and metaphor and let metaphor do a lot of work. But in a footnote in Nothing, you wrote, “There’s no such thing as metaphor.”

BUTLER

I have a good buddy and we get in this metaphor argument all the time. Metaphor seems like an orchestration to me. When I say that there’s a closet full of hair, I want there to be a closet of hair. When I say the father aged eighteen months walking across the living room, I want that to happen. The same goes with the copy family. And that’s real; that’s not science fiction. Like you have copies of yourself. I think it’s so defeatist to call that a metaphor, because that compacts the world in a way that’s boring. The art I like makes me know that those things exist, even if it’s like believing in god. I believe in the fact that there can be seven of me in a room that I can’t see. Or that anything can happen.

When you say something in fiction happens, you’re creating that instance, and that’s why fiction’s not just reciting your mom’s bedtime stories. It’s creating space, rather than explaining it. That’s why I love Lynch. Because the rooms in Lynch are places, and they don’t have a name, but they’re places, and you can think about those places and you can traverse those places and they didn’t exist before he orchestrated them, and that’s why the deletion of people making those spaces is so important to There Is No Year.

And that’s why the reader is part of plot to me, because I can’t control what that is. Because you’re going to read “hair” and without even thinking about it, hair is going to mean one thing to you and it’s going to mean another thing to someone else.

Maybe my problem with metaphor is that I don’t want there to be one specific thing that it stands for. It should be all the things that it could be. That’s why you don’t pick one or explain it, and that’s why movies that do explain or books that explain, I don’t think about them after that—Okay, that’s what you were trying to tell me, I got it. I heard that. But I want to be haunted by a book. I want to be haunted by an object. That’s art. I like to read things that wash over me. I like to not have to organize myself when I’m reading. I want to be pushed and knocked around and then think, Oh, what just happened? I don’t know, but I felt something was happening.

SALVATORE

When I first met the copy family in There Is No Year, I thought they were a metaphor for the dark side of a family, but it never turns out to be anything like that. And so I believe you when you say you’re not thinking about metaphor when you write.

BUTLER

I’m saying it’s obsequious or overbearing, because so many people do rely on metaphor, and I think it’s important to counteract it by saying metaphor doesn’t exist. Of course metaphor does things. That’s just an abstract way of saying there are bigger things than the thing is, and that’s fine. But I’m going to shit on the feeling of the traditional use of metaphor, because I think it’s destructive to the language and books.

LIGON

Poets talk about how a poem teaches you how to read it, that you learn how to read the poem by being in the poem—and I think your work operates that way. There was a moment when I was reading Nothing that I realized what I was doing was experiencing consciousness, and needed to let that wash over me.

SALVATORE

And in There Is No Year, I had to admit that I wasn’t fully going to understand everything, but I felt the author was in some kind of control. And so I give up trying to read it as a “conventional” novel, as though certain details were clues: like, Oh, I get it: The son got sick because he was incested or because the mother drank when she was pregnant with him—the family-secret plot. I came around to accept that that’s not the way this book was going to work.

BUTLER

I hope to be in control of the thing. I don’t want it to be a mess, and I get frustrated when a reader comes to a book with expectations, and if those expectations aren’t met, then the art failed, or they just give it up. To me, the fun of reading is going into the book—books shouldn’t be entertainment, or at least the books I’m interested in.

SALVATORE

David Foster Wallace would say that it’s got to be fun.

BUTLER

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be fun. I’m saying a reader should come with a willingness to be open to this game. A lot of people read and they’re like, I want this out of this book, and what I got didn’t make sense to me. And I think, You didn’t even try. Just keep going. Why not experience something without knowing what it is? So entertain, sure. But create a space rather than explain a space. I don’t want to read a book that’s all work for me. And I think there are a lot of funny parts in my work that are dark because of the dark context, but it’s supposed to be a fun thing, though not to provide a solution on a platter. Brian Evenson was important to me in learning how to tell a fun and compelling story, but also to be doing something inexplicable, while incorporating horror tropes and terror tropes—doing the same thing a horror movie does, but also opening into an intense space. And that’s entertainment to me. I have fun reading that. But it should keep you wanting to do it. Books fail that try to do these grand things and don’t get that the reader needs to pay attention.

SALVATORE

Are there any works you’ve come to with certain expectations as a reader, and then found yourself resistant?

BUTLER

Often the way it happens is that the book explains too much to me. I don’t need you to tell me this. It’s disrespectful. It’s like assuming the reader can’t do some work. I’m looking for a reader who’s interested and wants to be in that puzzle. I can’t force someone to work a puzzle.

LIGON

How has the internet shaped you as an artist?

BUTLER

I can’t write without it. If the computer is not attached to the internet, I’m not going to write. Because that comes into play under my anxiety. While I’m writing, my Gmail, Twitter, and probably two other things are open, and I am constantly going back and forth between what I’m writing and links and things. So I’ll write in a burst, and like I said, I get up, or I read a website for a minute. I think that gives your brain a turn off moment where you stop over-analyzing what you just did, and that gives you a reset and feeds you in ways that you don’t realize you’re getting fed. You read a story and it gives you something, changes your mood, and that gives a palette for your writing to change into, unprompted. I like being chaotically programmed by my emotions, and maybe that’s sadistic. To me, typing without the internet on my computer feels like writing longhand. I need that machine.

But I hope I’m not part of that machine. It’s a sick space, but I mean, I sleep with the computer on my bed at this point. It’s the first thing I do in the morning, the last thing I do at night. I spend more time with it than anything. But I’m looking at the same seven websites, refreshing them, e-mailing people, Gmail chatting.

LIGON

How much of your day is taken up with HTMLGIANT?

BUTLER

Usually not very much. I don’t really edit anything. Everyone writes whatever they want. I correct the way it looks. I orchestrate the tastes and pick the people that are in there. I tune in enough to pay attention to the feel of the website. I’m more interested in being a facilitator and putting my own voice in, but not controlling it.

There’s pretty decent traffic and I think that’s because there’s not a critical apparatus for the kind of writing I’m interested in. There are a lot of people putting it out there, but there aren’t a lot of places for it to be discussed and analyzed. So I want a forum. I want a conversation. I don’t have people that I really talk with about writing much at home, and the only way I’m not just a sad bastard in a room typing on my mom’s computer is that there are other people inside this box. I built a place to play with those people.

And it’s a place to get rid of some of the tension that comes from sitting on the internet all day, a place to talk about books. It’s like a mess and intellectual at the same time. Hopefully, it brings people together. The reason we started it is that I was reading thirty different blogs on my RSS feed, all these websites, and I was like, Why don’t we just put these people in the same place, instead of these people just barking in their own area. And why do I have to go to this website and refresh to see if this new thing is up. Why isn’t there a site that will just tell me? I think we meant at the beginning to have more of a “new issue of x or y” and blah blah blah, and we did that for a while, but it’s become more of a conversation now, and a place to have conversations.

SALVATORE

In There Is No Year there’s a string of stuff about celebrities, most of whom are dead. Those sections were the places I felt the author’s controlling hand most, setting up quotes to frame certain sections. What role does popular culture play in your work?

BUTLER

A question I’ve gotten a few times is: Why are the characters nameless, but then, McDonald’s has a name. And I think, Because I thought it was funny. That was where it came from, but I also like the idea of absorbing auras from things. I can mention Sharon Tate and quote her and that automatically sets this weird tone. It’s like stealing the tone. In There Is No Year, the object that the son’s trying to make, that shouldn’t exist, is a book that transcends possible, transcends what a book can do. It contains all things. I like the idea that all objects could contain all other objects. That doesn’t answer why I would use McDonald’s. I think it comes down to the comedic, mixed with eeriness. The child is nameless, but the buildings around him aren’t. That, to me, seems like a kind of deleting in a way, and it makes the body of the person a specific site, whereas McDonald’s is a site that exists all over the world, but with one floor of sorts. Or how Walmart seems to have this weird air, and you think about it as Walmart, but the feeling of being in a Walmart is very specific. And it’s as compelling in its own way as a desert.

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Erin Belieu’s poetry moves. Each line break holds the potential for a rapid expansion of the poem’s emotional and imaginative reach. The result is sometimes unsettling, sometimes relieving, sometimes hilarious, but always wonderfully consuming. To enter a Belieu poem is to surrender to the paradoxes of the heart and mind, and reading her work feels like an act of liberation. Her lines are often chiseled and muscular; they propel readers forward with purpose. A hard-earned, well-worn fearlessness permeates her work. Take her recent poem “Perfect”:

Your sadness gets a perfect score,
a 1600 on the GRE,

but if I had a gun,
I’d shoot your sadness through
the knee. Then the head.
Or if I were a goddess,

I’d turn you to a tree with silver leaves
or a flower with a center as yellow as sunlight,
like they used to do when saving
the beautiful from themselves.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Erin Belieu is the author of three books of poems, all published by Copper Canyon Press, including Black Box (2006) and One Above & One Below (2000). Her first collection, Infanta (1995), was selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series, about which she says, “I don’t know why Hayden selected me—maybe he had a cheese sandwich instead of a tuna sandwich that day, when he was looking at the finalists for the National Poetry Series.” We suspect more than chance was at play.

Her poems and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications, from Ploughshares and Slate to The Atlantic and The New York Times. Belieu is a workhorse, on and off the page. She served as director of the creative writing program at Florida State University, and is currently the artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. She also co-directs VIDA, an organization designed to “explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities.”

We met with Ms. Belieu at a noisy bar in Chicago, during the 2012 AWP Conference, where she warned: “I’m a Libra, so every time I say one thing, I have to say the opposite.” We discussed her poetry, the importance of public service, the perils of technology, and growing up in the Midwest.

TIM GREENUP

Are you a Nebraska poet?

ERIN BELIEU

I am a one-woman chamber of commerce for Nebraska, which is the best of all states. I feel like that landscape is in me. There’s a way of being where I grew up, a kind of openness, a generosity. Maybe it’s because there aren’t enough of us to get on each other’s nerves. When you only have eleven citizens, it’s easy not to crowd each other. But my sense of enthusiasm and, hopefully, if I have a sense of generosity—it comes from that place.

But there’s also a kind of internal astringency Nebraskans have, a rub-some-dirt-in-it-and-stop-whining approach to life, and those things are part of me as well. In a lot of ways, I think Nebraska is where the West begins, and I think I have a Western mentality—as if that were one thing. Even though I’ve spent most of my adult life on the East Coast, I feel real affection and affinity for the West. I spend a lot of time in Port Townsend and Seattle because I’m the artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and my press is Copper Canyon, and in some ways, I think I translate a little bit better in that part of the world.

DANIELLE SHUTT

You translate to me—and I’m from rural southwest Virginia.

BELIEU

Maybe you’re making a good distinction; it’s not geographical; more, as Donny and Marie would say, I’m a little bit country and a little bit rock ’n’ roll. I don’t feel the need to fuse those two together. I feel like that’s an interesting opposition. But, obviously, I have no real idea. I can sort of get hints through reviews, how people evaluate me, but you can’t think about that kind of stuff or you won’t write anything. You’ll spend all your time knotted up about how you’re being received. Let time sort that stuff out, and hope you’re lucky enough to have anybody reading your poems at all.

I don’t think I’ve ever fit neatly into anything. I’ve appeared in formalist magazines, I’ve been a fellow at Sewanee, but my poems have also appeared in magazines that focus on experimental and alternative forms. And maybe that’s been bad for my “career,” as if a poet could have a career; I don’t think Keats had a “career.” Poetry is a devotion, and it’s the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice.

I don’t mean to be cavalier. I have a great job. I’m able to feed my kid. I’m able to live in my house and buy groceries. For a poet, that’s a pretty big deal. I mean, I actually have health insurance. So I feel like I’ve been given this huge opportunity to be genuine and true in what I do. And I’ve also been given the gift to do things like VIDA, because I’ve got tenure, bitch! Academia doesn’t make you a bad poet, contrary to popular belief. But thinking of poetry as a career is definitely bad for your poems’ health.

SHUTT

Does tenure make people lazy?

BELIEU

It does sometimes, but that’s the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to make you brave. I feel that if you’ve been given the gift of a livelihood, then you have a responsibility to others who haven’t been as lucky. I very much believe that. That’s why I helped to found VIDA with Cate Marvin. And founding a national feminist literary organization—well, that can put you on the hot seat sometimes. But I thought to myself, What’s the point of having tenure if I don’t use it to do what I think is important and necessary? Tenure should allow us to never grow too comfortable.

My father was the head of special education and gifted programs for my public school system, and my parents were community-oriented. They were involved in grassroots Republican politics, back when the name Republican didn’t equal bigots like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. But my brother and I turned out to be hardcore Democrats. And once my brother came out, my parents became Democrats. They were like, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” I don’t think they ever voted Republican again. That made me really proud of them.

I come from a family where service was valued, so all my life I’ve had an urge to serve. I still have my First Class Girl Scout certificate signed by Ronald Reagan. I did something like 3,000 hours of community service. I was that girl. I was also on field staff for the Dukakis campaign, and dropped out of college for about a year and a half to organize all over the country. I’ve always believed in political activism. And that’s what I’m teaching my son to do, too. If you want your opinion counted, you have to step up. You better put your money where your mouth is.

SHUTT

Community is a dominant thread in your poems, too. Across your three collections, there are poems that engage people, whether it’s a poem dedicated to someone or talking directly to a historical figure. Could you talk a little about that?

BELIEU

My poetry is almost always written in response to someone, or it’s a portrait of someone. When I think of the fiction I most admire—and poems to a certain degree—it’s almost always novels that are social novels, like Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, and all of Jane Austen, where people are put in these social, moral, spiritual conundrums that reveal the essentials of human beings, what it means to be human. Robert Pinsky talks about how poets have a kind of monomania, an animating obsession, and I think I’m obsessed with understanding why people do what they do.

What does Mr. Bennet say in Pride and Prejudice? “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?” I feel very much like Mr. Bennet sometimes, because people generally crack me up. But I have a lot of affection and sympathy for how ridiculous we are, all of us. The way we front and the way we lie, and our self-important posturing. AWP is such a weird little aquarium for that reason. Every variety of creature is on display. And I know I exist somewhere in the aquarium, too, but again, I don’t invest in thinking too much about how others perceive me.

My poems are frequently responses to some bit of argument I’ve encountered. I have a poem called “Your Character is Your Destiny,” which comes from Aristotle, and it talks about this idea of what it means to have a soul, and whether that sense of a soul is your destiny. Is it predetermined that we are going to move in the world in a certain way, and is that something we can escape? Are we stranded in a universe of hard determinism? I have just enough philosophy and theory to be dangerous. I’ll take a little bit of Aristotle or Slavoj Žižek or Lacan, and throw it out there, not yet necessarily totally understanding what they’re talking about. I just start with, Well, is my character my destiny? Really? I like to think out loud in poems, and find out what I think as I go along. Almost everything I’m interested in is dialectical; that’s where the tension in our lives is, where the tension in our art is. There’s all this absurdity around us, but there’s also the truly hideous. There are big and little tragedies. That’s why I love the poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” where Auden points out: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

GREENUP

In One Above & One Below, the opening poem invokes the muse. Does the muse exist?

BELIEU

There are lots of ways to think about the muse. My background is in feminist and psychoanalytic theory, so when I talk about the muse, it’s my metaphor for those unconscious parts of ourselves, and wanting a fluid access to language and imagination. Being able to access these is the hard part. We’re surrounded by noise and advertising and technology, and it just gets more intense every year, so that voice, that inner muse, gets drowned out so easily. That’s one of the things the poem you’re referencing is about, the feeling that you don’t always have access to the thing that centers you, that part of you which, if you hold still and be quiet, will tell you something interesting.

There are many times in workshops that people automatically want to put poems in stanzas, because they’re overwhelmed by the idea of a three-page poem without stanza breaks. And I think, Wait a minute. Are we doing this because that’s what the poem needs? Or are we doing this because we’re now used to everything being in tidy graphs and sound bites?

Maybe that’s how forms change over time, because forms are just reflections of human beings and their preferences and what makes sense rhythmically and in rhyme at a given time. But I’m not sure how I feel about those things changing. We’ve turned into a collective ADHD society, in which a three-page poem without a stanza break seems overwhelming. We’ve become like flies that mentally zing from one thing to another, so we can’t settle too deeply into anything. I don’t mean to sound like a crabby old lady. You can see I’ve got my iPhone here that I check constantly. But I’m pretty sure I could go to one of these “back to the land” sort of things. I mean, I would complain a lot, but I could probably do that and ultimately be comfortable.

The technological world has created all kinds of wonderful opportunities, too, but—human beings as animals—I don’t know how we can keep up at this pace. We really have to struggle in a way that we didn’t use to in order to create a quiet space. Poetry is more often than not meditative—an interactive meditation between writer and reader— so that you have to have that still space to come together and discover one another. One of the things I love about poetry is that we have to be willing to hear each other. The reader has to be so active when reading a poem, which is why I’m grateful when anybody reads my poems.

SHUTT

You’re often compared to Sylvia Plath or Sharon Olds. What do you make of the critical impulse to construct genealogies for female poets from other women poets?

BELIEU

I think, sadly, there are so few reference points for women poets that it becomes really reductive. We don’t have this long, nuanced tradition to point to. It’s like, Oh, are you Elizabeth Bishop or are you Sylvia Plath? Like you’re choosing between Betty and Veronica in the Archie comics. There’s a lot in between, there are other options to make a comparison, but how many people have ever been able to actually name a good number of women poets? Happily, this is starting to change.

But so much of that kind of comparison just has to do with hype and publication, and that rarely has anything to do with what an artist is doing or why. I mean, seriously, I don’t sound very much like Plath. But some critics make lazy pronouncements and easy comparisons. And I guess they influence some people. But they don’t really know who’s going to be read fifty years from now; they don’t know who’s going to be read five hundred years from now, or how those writers will be received. Some people believe in heaven, and maybe they’ll look down and see their readership from there, but here and now, we don’t know. Which is why I think people who pretend, people who want to be kingmakers or tastemakers, I just find the whole thing tedious. You have your taste and you have what you believe in, and good for you. But to try to make that some sort of poetic law? You, my friend, are puny in the face of time. And that’s the way it should be.

I sort of play with that idea in a new poem, “Ars Poetica for the Future.” I imagine myself burying my poems in Ziploc baggies, because then I win. A thousand years from now someone will find my artifacts— assuming we don’t blow ourselves up—and I’ll be Sappho!

GREENUP

Where does that drive to become a tastemaker come from?

BELIEU

Probably insecurity—the urge to force everyone to believe what you think is truth, with a capital T. But there are poems I don’t love that I must respect. And there are poems that aren’t particularly of value to me that other people admire, and so I think, Well, maybe I need to think about this some more before I reject it. I’ve never been able to finish The Magic Mountain, no matter which translation I read, no matter how many smart people tell me to read it. And I’m pretty sure the problem’s not with it. I’m pretty sure the resistance is within me. But we grow into things when we’re ready for them. Usually the tastemakers are just fighting over power and turf. Which again, has nothing to do with literature itself.

Cate Marvin and I talk about this all the time. There are certain types who seem to think, Oh, there’s only one pie and I gotta get my slice before somebody else gets that slice, because the pie’s gonna be gone! And Cate and I both think, Why don’t we just bake another pie?

It strikes me as a profoundly anxious way of being in the world if you have to prove that you’re more by proving that somebody else is less. And that goes into that whole dustup with Rita Dove and Helen Vendler, when Rita had done an odd, inclusive anthology, which I found really revealing of her. It was a portrait of a reader, as if Rita were saying, “This is my expression of what I think is really right.” And she was willing to acknowledge her idiosyncratic way of thinking about things, and I thought that was honest. I was disappointed that Helen Vendler was so scathing, as if there were some objective truth she felt was under assault. And I think, But Helen, there are no objective truths about poetry. I know you have strong feelings about it and it’s your life’s work, and I have many good reasons to respect you, but we’re not talking about the nuclear codes here. Which is not to say I don’t believe in criticism, or that I won’t argue strongly for my point of view. I just keep in mind that more than one thing can be true at the same time. Sometimes even opposite things.

I don’t have any particular anxiety that poetry is going to hell and then the whole literary culture will die. Poetry is a lot bigger and badder than any of us. And what does Auden say? It’s a mouth, right? It is the mouth. “Poetry makes nothing happen” is a line people misunderstand frequently. He means poetry makes nothing happen directly. Not in the way of commerce and politics and scruffy immediate human intercourse. He’s saying something more profound: Poetry is essential in the way that a mouth and tongue are essential. It doesn’t go away. It’s not going to disappear if we don’t fight to the death about it. How about we try a little more humility in the face of the poetry mouth? Such ego, to think that poetry needs us to protect it.

There are the more immediate things like prizes and jobs that get people all wadded up, but beyond that, there’s the great fear that we devote our lives to this ephemeral thing and we don’t know if we’re right or wrong or how history is going to see it. It’s a total crapshoot. Think about all the writers who have fallen out of fashion, only to have people who were obscure come to the forefront. We don’t have any control over this. But I’m okay with that. I’m okay with being a minuscule dot in the universe. I’ve accepted that fact. I get to eat and drink and have sex and live in a body and I get to make poems and I get to love my son and I get to love my partner and I just feel like maybe that should be enough, and we should stop trying to control the future with our pronouncements.

I’ve never understood why people are so unnerved by the tininess of our human experience. It’s always made sense to me, ever since I was a little kid. We’re just biological blips in the wholeness of time. But what a lovely thing to be. What a gift. I just want to be recycled into a willow tree eventually.

SHUTT

There’s some anger in the poems in Black Box. In some criticism, I’ve read that anger—particularly in women’s poetry—is a limited emotion. Or if you’re a woman poet, writing about anger—it’s just anger that readers get out of your work. How do you feel about that view of anger in poems?

BELIEU

Women get smacked with that stick all the time, and I’m pretty— pardon me—fucking tired of listening to it. I feel like, All right, old man. I know you hate Sylvia Plath. Duly noted. Now move along. You’re boring me.

There was an unfortunate confusion about Black Box regarding the back matter. Black Box isn’t actually addressed to my ex-husband, of whom I’m very fond. We made a wonderful child. We’re still friends and raising a person together. I would not use a book to attack someone. Poems aren’t therapy and poems aren’t journals. Which, as a woman poet, it seems you’re often in the position of having to point out. I didn’t set out to write biography. I write poems, which are acts of imagination. It’s weird that I feel, as a woman, a need to explain that not everything I write is a transcription of my love life, my vagina, and my daddy issues. I actually make things up, and I care deeply about the form of the poems.

In Black Box, I was interested in the performance of grief, and grief as this multiple experience. Grief is so awkward in American culture— maybe it’s awkward in Vietnam and Canada too—but it seems to me a very American thing that you’ve got about two weeks to feel whatever it is you’re feeling. You have about two weeks of casseroles and people really focusing and saying, “How are you doing?” And then, understandably, as Auden talks about in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” people get back to their lives. But you’re still there with your grief. And a big part of grief, especially at the end of a love relationship, but also at the death of a loved one, is anger.

I’m interested in feminist issues and I’ve read a lot of feminist theory, and I was interested in this idea that in some ways female anger seems like our last great transgression culturally. I’ve always been fascinated by how anger is performed by women in literature. Or not performed—sometimes it seems to me it’s enacted through depression, through passive approaches. Eleanor Wilner, a poet I admire immensely, did a translation of Medea. And in her introduction, she deals with this idea of a woman whose grief is so angry, so epic, that it consumes her entire life and her children’s lives. She is vengeance incarnate—suicidal, homicidal, operatic, terrifying, and truly pathetic. I was really interested in trying to achieve and sustain that pitch as I was writing the poems in Black Box. Honestly, I wanted to see if I could write an exorcism. The exorcism as form. That was a fascinating challenge.

So, especially in the long poem “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral,” the speaker keeps taking on different masks. At one point, she’s a Borscht Belt comedian. At one point, she’s the Bride of Frankenstein. At one point, she’s the voice of a Ouija board. She keeps trying on these costumes and putting them aside and taking on another costume to dramatically perform her sense of betrayal and loss.

I am very aware of anger—of female anger—as transgressive. And female anger is something that’s not spoken to often in poetry. Or anywhere, really. I think of women artists who’ve addressed this feeling directly and the backlash is usually intense. Very much a how-dare-you reaction. Which is absurd when you think of how surrounded we are by expressions of male anger in our culture. How venerated they are. Male rage is cool! But female rage is still disturbing, displacing, abject, unnatural. Except it’s not. It’s normal. And more than any other poem I’ve written, people come up to me and say, “Thank you for writing the Red Dress poems. They’ve meant a lot to me.” Which is about the nicest compliment anyone can ever give you. And I think parts of the “Red Dress” sequence are pretty funny. I meant them to be funny, because they’re so over-the-top. It’s worth noting that the poem’s title comes from a quote in the movie Moonstruck, which is a satire. Or like that scene in one of the Batman movies, when Michelle Pfeiffer plays Catwoman, and she’s standing in her latex suit looking totally vatic, and then she just says, “Meow,” and boom! It’s funny and intense and a little scary all at once. And I was like, I wonder if I could write a poem that can do that.

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying I’ve always been interested in this issue, and I wanted Black Box to perform that. Some reviewers got it, and some reviewers—which is typical of the way women are reviewed— focused on what they thought was biographical information. I wonder how it would have gone if that information hadn’t been there. I have a poem in my forthcoming book, Le Déluge, called “12-Step,” and it’s about lighthouses and taking an A.A. pledge not to write confessional poems. Obviously, another satire. Because I feel like there’s nothing safer, nothing less likely to get you in trouble, than writing about lighthouses. I can say, Oh, this isn’t about me; there’s nothing personal here. I’m just a wee poet writing about the landscape. Objectively.

KRISTINA MCDONALD

I believe you’re working on a memoir about your son. How’s that going?

BELIEU

The fun of working with nonfiction has been that it’s not poetry. It’s a different set of problems to solve, formally. And that’s been a huge pleasure. But then I got to a certain point where poems started to come again and I sort of put the nonfiction on hold.

It’s also a difficult subject. My son has a mild form of cerebral palsy. Jude appears as almost completely typical; if you saw him, you’d go, “Oh, cute kid.” But when he opens his mouth—his speech is deeply, deeply impacted because he was strangled by the birth cord when he was born. But the thing about a kid like Jude is—I mean, people say, “Oh, he’s a miracle!” and in a way, Jude really is a miracle, because the fact that he was impacted as little as he turned out to be is very unusual. He should have been dead. He should have been damaged beyond recognition. And he turned out to be this wonderful, smart, beautiful—freakishly beautiful—kid. One of his teachers referred to him as a radiating joy machine, and he does naturally exude joy. He’s one of those people whose smile comes from the inside.

But imagine what it’s like to be such a person and also to have 99% of the world unable to understand you when you speak. It’s been a journey—to have the gift of him, but also the responsibility of him, to try to help him figure out how he’s going to live in the world. His speech has gotten a lot better. If you were to listen to him now, he can make himself understood. But his journey is ongoing. He’s only eleven, and so part of me feels like I wrote to a certain point, but I don’t yet know the end of the story.

GREENUP

In an interview you did with Saw Palm, you described writing a poem as “like being a diamond cutter,” in that it “requires great powers of concentration.” How do you keep your concentration?

BELIEU

I don’t, honestly. I get distracted all the time and that’s my biggest challenge—to find the space for poetry. I’m a full-time mom. I have an academic job. I’m the artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. And these are all things I enjoy. But my biggest challenge is finding the time to sit in a quiet space and make work.

I’m back to it again, but I still struggle to make time. Of course, I run around like a chicken with my head cut off. I mean, I walk in the house and I’ll think, Okay, I gotta go to a meeting, then I’m gonna pick up the dry cleaning, then I’m gonna go get Jude, then I’m gonna come back here to meet the washer repair guy, then I’m gonna meet a student, then I’ll go grocery shopping, and then I have to go to a reading.

I really want to have a commune, like a poetry commune where we all have a big island, and if you want to have kids, we help you raise your kids, we take turns, just a big family, and everybody has writing hours. I feel like this would be a very cool thing to do. Though, as we’ve seen, it’ll all go to hell. I mean, look at the Manson family.

But, you know, when your kid is young, it’s probably not your most productive time as a writer. And that’s okay, because I like Jude more than poetry. He’s my poem in progress. And the world is not going to freak out with, “I can’t go to bed because I haven’t had my next Erin Belieu poem!” They’ll be okay.

GREENUP

When you do get the time, is it something that you can access quickly, or is it something that takes some digging to get back to?

BELIEU

Sometimes it takes digging and sometimes it’s right there, and it really depends on the day and how mentally healthy I am. If I can brush off, in a Jay-Z-like fashion, the voices in my head about how, “She’s too this,” or, “She’s too angry,” I can get clean and write what I want to write.

The big difference between being a poet at twenty-five and being a poet at forty-five is that I’ve spent a lot of time considering what I believe about poems and polishing my formal chops. I have strategies. I’ve read a lot. I’ve learned a lot. It’s good for younger poets to know that time helps you. I mean, unless you’re a totally useless git, after a certain amount of time, things stick to you, and you don’t have to worry so much anymore.

What I do worry about is what’s worth saying. Do I need to write a Persephone poem? Does anyone need to hear that from me? Maybe not. I don’t feel this necessity to put anything out, and I don’t think students should ever feel that pressure. It’s not a career, it’s a devotion. Find other ways to live your life, find other ways to make money, because God knows there are better ways than poetry. Put your energy into finding a way to maximize the amount of time that you have to write.

Some poems I’ve had to work very hard for and considerably fewer have been gifts from my lesbian personal trainer muse, but it’s amazing how many of the ones that were free flowing are the ones that are often anthologized. And I’m like, “But I worked so hard on this other one!” and they’re like “No, no, we want the one that was really easy. We like that one best.” But it’s all part of the process, because that ease probably comes from the hard work of the ones you ground out.

A good example: When my first book came out, I was working at AGNI as managing editor and I got a call out of the blue at my office from The New York Times—not something I’d ever had happen to me— and they said, “Um, we like your book Infanta, and we want to feature one of your poems in The Times this week, and we’re doing a feature on the subject of Labor Day. We would really like it if you could give us all the poems you have on Labor Day.” They said, “You have poems about Labor Day, right?” And I was like, “Yes. Yes, of course I do. It’ll take me some time to go through those many poems I have on the great lyric subject of Labor Day and choose the right one for you.” And I hung up the phone and I was like, The New York Times! Labor Day! Okay, what do I do? Because I was not going to miss the chance to have a poem appear in a place that my parents had actually heard of. So I whipped off this poem called “On Being Fired Again,” which is now one of my most anthologized poems. I didn’t sweat for that poem at all. But for the majority of my poems, I have totally sweated and I feel stupidly wounded that certain ones haven’t gotten more attention. But that’s exactly why you have an audience. The audience wins, the audience decides. And you can’t argue with the audience. You just shut your mouth and say thank you.

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Major Jackson’s poetry is clear, fluent, and musical, sometimes relying on formal structure, sometimes referencing pop culture, and often investigating how seemingly disparate subjects can interact and inform each other. He asserts that a poem “becomes a kind of time capsule,” and as such, can contain references to both Kanye West and ancient Greek mythology, as illustrated in his poem “Letter to Brooks,” when Jackson writes: “O, Orpheus grant the skills to stir / the dead like Kanye mixing music with fire, I … Rescue the underground so they can aim higher.” Here, the poet’s use of high­ brow and lowbrow references also connects the present to the past.

Jackson is the author of three collections, the first of which, Leaving Saturn, won the Cave Canem Prize, and was also a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. A former member of the Dark Room Collective, and current Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson experiments with form in his work, without sacrificing the vernacular of the Philadelphia neighborhood he grew up in. As Andrew Dubois pointed out in a review of Jackson’s second book, Hoops, his “greatest strength … is his ability to marry without anxiety the traditional forms of the English poetic tradition with … the human concerns of an urban, black population.”

Jackson’s poetry draws a road map from classic traditions to the heart of the inner city, always with an ear attuned to the blues and jazz rhythms he grew up with. Whether he’s inhabiting the persona of Sun­ Ra or writing an extended epistolary homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, his poems combine striking imagery with muscular, fluid rhythms.

We met with Mr. Jackson at a deli in Spokane one afternoon last April, where we talked about Kim Kardashian, building community, and the seduction of sound.

CASEY PATRICK

How do pop culture references interact with more highbrow references in your poems?

MAJOR JACKSON

I’ve never made distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, although some would say I come from lowbrow. The education I received made everything open and available to me. No one said, “Although we’re teaching you Shakespeare right now, that’s not yours. That belongs to the Brits.” To learn about Plato’s Republic—to read Plato’s Republic­—eventually it’s all kind of absorbed into your DNA, and eventually it becomes part of how you order and shape the world around you. When you put those bricks of intellectual inheritance and knowledge into a form, it creates a certain dynamism, the melding of cultures, and it’s also a nod to the past. Allusions—whether they’re Greek or biblical or whatever—create a bridge to the reader. If something’s in a poem that a reader’s familiar with, they’re on stable ground. And if they’re not familiar, they might seek out whatever’s being referred to, and it might enhance their reading.

AILEEN KEOWN VAUX

Is it optimistic to hope that readers will perform their own research?

JACKSON

I think there’s always a bit of optimism on the poet’s part. Some of my friends who read Anne Carson—a classicist, a scholar—feel intimidated by her, but I believe one of the brilliant strategies in her work is how she makes classical figures contemporary, creating an opportunity for us to look at them as human and fallible. She asks what basic kinds of emotions did Eurydice deal with, or Pygmalion, who wants to sculpt the perfect wife. We exercise this wonderful power as writers; we get to impose meaning and import on the world around us, including how it relates to popular culture. If I write a poem about Kim Kardashian, she might not be the familiar name in forty years that she is today, but my poem will help continue her life. That’s what happened with Marilyn Monroe as a cultural icon. There were enough people who wrote songs about her, or poems, or who created image of her that her story didn’t get lost. We get to shape the future in that regard. We push our present day passions forward in a poem, and the poem becomes a kind of time capsule.

KEOWN VAUX

Do you think incorporating a variety of references into your poems indicates an active searching for a variety of audiences?

JACKSON

If I am doing that, that audience would be geeks like me, people who get kind of high off of history, pop culture, hip-hop, Greek mythology, people who’ve traveled to the places I’ve traveled, who’ve listened to the music I’ve listened to. It’s more like I’m creating a community around me, across boundaries of class, race, gender.

KRISTIN GOTCH

In an interview with Green Mountain Review, you talked about feeling debilitated after the success of Leaving Saturn and the subsequent fear of letting your readers down. Once you build that community around you, how does it change with each book you publish? Do you still experience that psychological connection?

JACKSON

I guess I do, to some extent. First books normally don’t gain the kind of attention that Leaving Saturn gained, and I felt fortunate and blessed, but I also felt like I needed to keep writing similar poems. It was like having a pancake house that everybody comes to every morning, and every morning they want the same order. Do I change the menu? Do I change the recipe? My impulse was to go forward and be loyal to my own aesthetic and emotional and intellectual interests. And if readers don’t follow, the hope is that other readers will appreciate the different types of poems I’m writing. I know that people might want what you gave them before. But I was only one book in, and I kind of felt a shift at that time. And then I had a really drastic shift from Hoops to Holding Company, and at that point I didn’t care.

KEOWN VAUX

What happened between Hoops and Holding Company?

JACKSON

Divorce, heartbreak, falling in love, travel, reading poets I hadn’t read before—Cavafy, for example. I thought the poems in Leaving Saturn were written out of a certain kind of urgency. These new poems were, too, maybe even more so. But some of what helped drive that newer work wasn’t connected to what was going on in my life. Some of it was just being kind of restless with poetry. How could I teach myself something about language and art?

PATRICK

In Hoops, we see a continuation of poems that we first saw in Leaving Saturn. Would you talk about that evolution?

JACKSON

Well, the poems weren’t finished for me. “Hoops” was meant to be a sequence poem, as was “Urban Renewal.” In fact, I had imagined my first book not being Leaving Saturn, which was my graduate thesis, but being a book filled with “Urban Renewal” poems, modeled off of poets I was reading who did similar kinds of poems—Robert Lowell and Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott. All three men put out books that had these sixteen-to-twenty-line poems that felt like extended sonnets. So I starred in that sequence and wrote it for Leaving Saturn when I was a graduate student, and then I wrote some more of chose in Hoops. Now I’ve gone back to writing “Urban Renewal” poems. I want to fulfill chat dream of writing a book of only “Urban Renewal” poems. I’m not sure how they’ll be received, but that’s my mountain to climb.

GOTCH

All of your books seem to be in dialogue with one another, but you’re also in dialogue with different poets, living and dead. Is that emblematic of your own work, or do you see that something poetry does in general?

JACKSON

I come from the African-American literary tradition, particularly the Black Arcs Movement of the 1960s, which influenced me when I was an undergrad at Temple University. I studied with one of those poets, Sonia Sanchez. As someone who’s explicitly interested in social justice and peace, I admired the social function that particular poetry seemed to take on—and part of that project, writing poems that would raise awareness, was in the tradition of the praise poem. So you have poems to Malcolm X and John Coltrane and Frederick Douglass. These are historical figures. But are they likely to be taught in schools? When I was younger, probably not. The poem became a vehicle to raise awareness. And when Sonia Sanchez gave readings, before she read, she would just—in a kind of roll call, in this trance-like way—call out all these political leaders, artists, musicians, poets, and I loved that, because poetry emerges out of a long tradition of praise, but, historically, praise poems were for the fallen dead, a soldier or a great general, and what she celebrated were creative, imaginative individuals. And then I heard the wonderful Polish poet Adam Zagajewski talk about entering the conversation of what it means to be human, and that concept became important to me. One time, a man came up to me at a festival where I was attending a friend’s reading , and he said, “You’re Major Jackson ,” and I said, “Yeah, and you must be a poet,” and he said, “No, I’m a counselor. I run a group for men who batter their wives. But I open every session with your poem ‘How to Listen.”‘ And I was just floored by that. Because I imagined my readers as other poets, or at least as a kind of poetry reading public. The fact that poems can enter into other realms of our lives made me think a little more seriously about chat conversation of what it means to be human.

KEOWN VAUX

You’ve talked about how art influences community, specifically how it functions among communities of artists. There’s a line in “Letter to Brooks” where you call Thomas Sayers Ellis your Ezra Pound, in reference to Ellis’s role in the Dark Room Collective. Can you talk about how these writing collective form and if physical proximity plays a role?

JACKSON

What triggers poetic movements is often a reaction to some sort of dominant poetics. And on other occasions, as in the case with Pound, there’s a dynamic figure who’s politicizing his or her particular aesthetic agenda. I mean, Pound was the manifesto king. I guess with the Dark Room Collective, it was proximity, but what I love about that group is that it was founded by readers who were admirers of a tradition in American literature, or a wing of American literature, that wasn’t being acknowledged, at least visibly in Cambridge when Thomas [Sayers Ellis] and Sharan [Strange] and Janice [Lowe] were students in the Boston/ Cambridge area. And then it kind of widened—I mean, I was down in Philadelphia, Natasha [Trethewey] was kind of close, in Amherst, Massachusetts. So, yes, geography can be important. The thing with the Black Mountain Poets is that it was [Charles] Olson who was there, for the most part, as that dynamic figure. [Robert] Creeley wasn’t there­—Creeley would come later, Denise Levertov never set foot on campus, so it was orchestrated slightly differently than other groups.

PATRICK

Why do you think these groups form so consistently throughout history?

JACKSON

I think it’s out of common interest. Two years in an MFA program isn’t enough. I somehow landed with poets in New Jersey—and I adore all poets, let me just say. But there’s the poets around Princeton and then there’s the southern Jersey poets, and I think we just naturally become cliques. Like I was saying earlier, in terms of reacting to dominant aesthetics, that was very real in the ’50s, when we had a reaction against Modernism and then swung way back in the other direction, with a certain kind of formalism, and then those people were in the academic institutions and became the granters of awards, deciding who got published , and so there had to be a reaction against that.

GOTCH

When these groups form, there seems to be the risk of building expectations. In an article you published in the Boston Review about Countee Cullen, you said he wanted to be read “as a poet, not a Negro poet.” Do you see readers having those same sort of expectations from African-American writers today—or any groups of writers?

JACKSON

Less so today, let’s put it that way. I think what we’re realizing is that there are not homogenous kinds of experiences for ethnic and racial groups in America. There’s many different ways of being a woman, or being an African American. In fact, I like to believe that we’re widening our understanding of what a human being is with these particular markers. How do people both refract and individuate their lives as humans—people who are men, women, white, black, Asian, Latina, octogenarians, teens, transgendered? I had a student who was a female-to-male transgender, an honors thesis student, and I loved the poems he wrote. They were so rich in humanity. One poem was about being young and teaching the girls how to pee standing up. Someone else has probably had that experience, and if I think about the canon as a collection of selves, I want that poem in the Norton Anthology, so that, again, we have a wider understanding of what it means to be human, and don’t so easily fear and hate what’s unfamiliar. With the wide range of poets writing today—I’m hoping we’ll see writing in ten, fifteen years that will be more representative of the rich community of selves that we are.

PATRICK

Understanding what it means to be human seems like it would necessarily involve the political. In an interview with Third Coast, you said, “I do not believe in safe subjects.” Are there any subjects you find too dangerous or off-limits?

JACKSON

You’ve heard of Minnesota-nice. I think about how there are just some things that aren’t discussed, and I see what that does to a family and to individuals. I want to believe that there’s no topic that’s off-limits, and I do believe that all things come to light anyway, at some point. It may be years down the line, but at some point, we see it. What’s great about a poem is that you can go to it with a certain amount of freedom from those temporal and spatial kind of restraints. Sharon Olds told me about an exercise she received from Muriel Rukeyser when she was young. Muriel said, “Write the poem you would never show anyone.”

KEOWN VAUX

And Sharon Olds went on to make a career of that.

JACKSON

Exactly. It takes a kind of courage, a kind of vision and courage. Some people dismiss poems grounded in personal experience that might seem a little too revealing, but you don’t have to read that poet. Just don’t read them. Some people appreciate the personal, though, because we too often live our lives in silence, even when there’s suffering and anguish. And the poem, I’ve realized, really does become a vehicle, a life raft to some extent.

KEOWN VAUX

Sharon Olds has an interesting relationship with her readership, because a lot of people want to read her work as purely autobiographical. Is that something you’ve faced, as well?

JACKSON

I had a neighbor who was a mental health counselor, and one day he said to me, “Major, I read your poems. I see that you’ve had a traumatic life,” and I thought, Dude, you know nothing about me if you’re going to read my life through my poems. It’s too easy to make a one-to-one correlation between a life and a poem. Someone who wants to do that­—a critic, a reader—does not realize the nuances of composition that may transform what was once fact into fiction. And poets, too, exercise their imagination and play with the facts so that they’ll serve the poem, rather than serving up a transcript of their life. One of the things I found frustrating when I read Ian Hamilton’s biography of Robert Lowell was his strategy to start with the poems and then connect them to what was going on in Lowell’s life. It seems dangerous to try to do that, because if we’re writing about our lives, there are things that are being translated­—the language itself is going to play a role in that transfiguration.

I think if l attend to the aesthetic decisions of a poem, if l look at my line breaks, if l think about metaphoric language versus overly descriptive language, I believe—and I’m aiming for a certain kind of cadence, a certain kind of sound—if l tend to those pleasures, because that’s the first order of seduction for a reader, the aesthetic dimension—if I tend to that, then naturally the poem is going to evolve away from whatever “facts” I bring to the page. I tell my students that they can play with a reader’s expectations of who’s speaking. If they’re thinking they’re getting too much of the self, then do a little bit of cross-dressing, you know? Or, truly, write out of some other speaker’s experience.

KEOWN VAUX

What do you get out of writing in someone else’s voice? What changes in the writing process?

JACKSON

Stepping into someone’s shoes creates moments of empathy—and the relief or freedom from having to come up with a subject, particularly if you’re used to writing about your own life, or turning to your own experiences. Writing about someone else can also invite other kinds of intelligences to go to work in a poem. When you write about other people, you’re the historian, you’re the psychologist, trying to figure out motivations. Sometimes I don’t know what motivates me to do the things I do, but I can assess someone else’s behavior and sequence of actions, and theorize about why they did what they did.

KEOWN VAUX

In other interviews, you’ve mentioned place as a vehicle for getting readers to think critically about their own cities, their own towns.

JACKSON

And place is a convenient way of talking about the interior.

PATRICK

Philadelphia appears a lot in your work, though you’ve lived in other places. Has living elsewhere changed how you view Philly?

JACKSON

I think we create our paradises wherever we are. Some people have a difficult time seeing what’s special about where they’re at. When I moved to Eugene, Oregon, my affection for Philly grew. It was almost like I was asleep, and in the waking moments of writing I could reflect back on those times. I could almost smell the rain on the sidewalk, or I’d recall my mother driving along the Schuylkill River, on Lincoln Drive and Kelly Drive, the windows down. Those are foundational experiences, and I guess there’s always a longing for Philly. But it’s been the other way around, too, in that Philly has allowed me to discover my other sacred places. Cape Cod is one of them; the Northwest is important to me. New Orleans is important to me, too. Having lived there, I try to go back every two or three years. So, yeah, I’ve been in Vermont eleven years, but Philly still excites me.

KEOWN VAUX

How do you define a sacred space?

JACKSON

A sense of safety, a sense of my body feeling like—I’m about to get all mystical, but when I land in certain places, there’s a kind of calm, a lack of anxiety. The people are decent. There’s a certain regard for life in all of its manifestations, the natural world and other human beings. And of course, these places are all over the world. I’m just starting to be able to have the means to visit other places and have those same sorts of experiences. I feel like it should almost be mandatory that before you go to college, you drive cross-country with maybe two or three other people. And maybe you do volunteer work where you get to know people, not just driving through and stopping at diners and filling up your gas tank, but really getting to know people. Just imagine all the connections you could make.

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David Shields is one of today’s most controversial writers and also one of the most passionate. Jonathan Lethem says of Shields: “While on the one hand I feel the urge to compare Shields to the very most incisive and smart contemporary essayists I know—Phillip Lopate and Vivian Gornick and Geoff Dyer— in another sense he’s accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth.”

In addition to his new book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Shields is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Utne Reader; he’s written reviews for The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Shields has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he teaches at the University of Washington. Since 1996, he has also been a member of the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, and Farsi. He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonfiction panel.

We interviewed Mr. Shields on two occasions, and this printed version is a combination of those interviews. The first meeting was over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane, on May 19, 2006. We met again at Hsu’s restaurant in downtown Atlanta, during AWP’s annual conference, on March 1, 2007.

SAMUEL LIGON

Your two upcoming books, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, have similar structures. Were you working on them simultaneously?

DAVID SHIELDS

I see the connection between those two books. So much of them is trying to argue my view for a kind of nakedness or a kind of rawness. In each case, I’m trying to get either to the primitive body or to the primary text. I’m trying to strip the body of defenses or the text of fictional apparatus. I see them as corollary texts in this interest in what I would call nakedness, stripping the body of false spiritual consolations. They have similar opinions toward what I’ve come to regard as the groaning contrivance of the fictional apparatus. There’s a drive for what I would call the raw or the naked in both books.

LIGON

You talk in these upcoming books about becoming conscious of taking risks. When you mention rawness and nakedness, you’re talking about a kind of risk-taking. Can you address artistic risk-taking?

SHIELDS

My first novel, Heroes, is probably my least risk-taking book. The book is back in print and I’m proud of it, but it’s not my favorite, because the whole idea of embarrassment matters a lot to me, the idea of nervous discomfort, nervous-making. To me, the best way of doing that is some level of psychic risk on the writer’s part. Obviously not literal risk; compared with actual physical risk, it’s certainly different. But I guess part of my drive from fiction to nonfiction, if you want to call it that, is that the temperature of the room seems to go up in my nonfiction. The nervousness goes up when there’s a sense that things you’re talking about aren’t under the guise of fictional apparatus, because you can’t hide behind that.

For instance, in Black Planet, the narrator/author, who I call myself— but who to me is a fictional projection or exaggeration of my real self—says that while having sex with his wife, he basically imagines that he’s Gary Payton, the basketball star. There’s a review in The Washington Post by Jonathan Yardley that suggests my wife should divorce me. To me, that’s just the highest praise. The book got under his skin that bad. It made him that nervous. So many books bore people to death. In reality, I never felt exactly what I wrote, but I said I did because I wanted the book to channel white guilt, white insanity. All these things. Have I ever felt that? I don’t know. Maybe I thought it. I must have thought it on some level because I wrote it down.
All these ideas are so interconnected—embarrassment, nervousness, risk-taking, rawness, primitiveness, nakedness. These are my watchwords as a writer and reader.

LIGON

But to get to what? You’re talking about creating this emotional state in the reader and writer—to get where?

SHIELDS

To what it feels like to be alive. I can’t know what it’s like inside you and you can’t know what it’s like inside me. We’re existentially alone. One of the great values of art, especially writing, is that it actually allows conversation. The loneliness that we feel as human beings is bridged through extremely serious literature. It definitely doesn’t get bridged, in my view, through well-made stories. I watch you create narratives, like I’m watching you build bridges, and I applaud that bridge-making. But I don’t get to know you in a thrillingly intimate way. And when someone writes about how his father used to beat him and that’s how he came to become a heroin addict at twenty-one, I’m not interested, even if it’s not done in some boring, bloodletting way. I’m interested in knowing the deepest secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets really are the same.

We all have demons within us that we project as fears of insanity. And that’s what creates the moment when the narrator of Black Planet projects a Gary Payton-esque sex doppelganger. Some guy from a magazine happened to interview me a couple days ago about that book, then he sent me links to his blog. During the interview, he seemed to like the book, but in his blog, he criticized it. All these other readers were typing in, saying, Yeah, you go man! or whatever. One guy wrote that he expected, at some point in Black Planet, for me to ask Gary Payton to “Do my wife.” That was so interesting because it told me that my book made this guy so uncomfortable he had to fight off the insight by projecting those insights onto me. In those moments, you’re actually getting to something. So he thinks he’s trying to fight off my insights with a kind of, It’s your problem man, not mine, whereas a more serious reader, a more adult reader, would wrestle with it.

There’s also an opposite example from that same book, another line people talk about a lot. In the book, I say sort of embarrassingly that I’m not the type of person who, out of politeness, opens the door for people. But if the person behind me happens to be black, I tend to open the door, I tend to not want to be racist, and I also tend to open the door for women, playing like, you know, the polite usher. I definitely debated a thousand times whether to put the line in or take it out.

In an indirect way, that line is more embarrassing than the other line, and so many people have come up to me, a lot of black people, saying, Thank you for writing that. And white people say they’ve felt that all the time. I didn’t think anyone else was as crazy as I am. Black people told me, You have no idea how many times I’ve felt that. And in those moments, human beings are actually connecting in a really interesting way. Conversation gets deeper. Human beings get to know each other slightly better. The loneliness of the human condition, to put it grandly, is slightly dislodged. And writing is no longer some time-killing activity, it’s actually connecting human beings. That’s what I’m about.

LIGON

I see that in fiction, as well. I’m thinking of “A Small, Good Thing” by Carver, where we see that connection occur. We also feel it in Carver’s “Cathedral.” The end of “The Dead.” Chekhov’s story, “Gusev,” in which readers see and feel that connection. Are you saying nonfiction creates more opportunity for connection than fiction?

SHIELDS

Yes. But obviously it’s subjective. It would be absurd to say that Black Planet matters, but “The Dead” doesn’t. I’m not going to put myself in a totally ridiculous position. Who knows why, after writing three novels, but fiction has gone slightly flat for me. I find Carver hopelessly sentimental. “A Small, Good Thing” is terrible and “Cathedral” is really bad. Those are just very sentimental works. He’s a hack. He wants you to love him for loving humanity. Talk to Tess Gallagher about how Carver appropriated “Cathedral” from her. You know that was her story, her visitor. I’m interested in that story. Carver, this loving guy. He stole that story. But in the fiction, he presents himself as Mr. Enlightened—Look at how I love humanity.

LIGON

Although that protagonist does not come off as somebody who loves humanity. He comes off as a misanthrope.

SHIELDS

At the end, he does. And everyone talks about the Chekhov story, “Gusev.” I almost always love fiction writers’ nonfiction more. For instance, Chekhov’s diaries interest me far more than any Chekhov story. Cheever’s journals are by far the best book Cheever wrote. Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up interests me more than any Fitzgerald novel. J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is to me Coetzee’s best book, an amazing mix of lecture and confession and quasi-novel. “The Custom House,” the preface to The Scarlet Letter, is better than The Scarlet Letter.

LIGON

Are you more interested in those works because they provide insight or connection to artistic process?

SHIELDS

I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just saying this is what interests me. For instance, the other day I was teaching Stephen Frears, the British director. He directed The Queen and was doing promotional interviews hoping to get the Academy Award. The interviewer was talking to him about his previous movies, and High Fidelity came up, which Frears directed, and they were talking about the Nick Hornby novel on which the film is based, the voiceover work in the film, and how Frears worked to try to translate the best moments from the book into the film. Frears found, to his surprise, that the best moments were the voiceovers, and especially the direct speeches of John Cusack to the camera, not just voiceover, but actual direct address. He said something very interesting, something like, “What we realized was that the novel was this machine to sort of get to these twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and masculinity and art and music and list-making, and masculine distance, and masculine drive for art, masculine trouble with intimacy, blah, blah, blah.” And I realized that is the way I experience almost all novels. You have to read seven hundred pages and then you get these insights that were the whole point the book was written for and the apparatus of the novel is there as this elaborate, huge, overbuilt scaffolding.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think fiction should go away?

SHIELDS

For me, I mean obviously everyone should write and read what they write and read. If you want to be Bell and write these huge novels about Haiti, more power to you. You probably have far more readers than I have. I’m just trying to stay alive as a writer and reader. Ninety-nine percent of stuff, I cannot get a toehold on—so many books that people praise, endless books, books that win prizes. If you put a gun to my head, I could not read Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections.

LIGON

What about his nonfiction?

SHIELDS

It’s not good either. I’m just trying to read stuff I actually love. Most readers are bored. I don’t want to read out of duty, I want to read out of love. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. They form a tradition which D’Agata calls the lyric essay. And I just want to go to the mat for those books because I really love them. They sustain me and nourish me, and some of them happen to be quasi-novels, like Tristram Shandy or Proust. Or V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World, which is published as fiction in the U.K. and as nonfiction here, which is interesting. Or Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, the only bad parts of which are the novelistic moments; the parts which are pure, gorgeous meditation about Flaubert I really love. I’m trying to stay alive and awake and not bored and not rote. I don’t know if you know the new, young nonfiction writer, Eula Biss. She’s at Northwestern.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The Balloonists.

SHIELDS

I love that book; it’s beautiful. I’m meeting with her because she has friends publishing short, book-length works of poetic nonfiction. It’s a wonderful crowd. I think The Balloonists is really strong work.

To answer your question, Adam, about what I want to do with fiction: There are a lot of works of fiction which I love, primarily because they retard the narrative impulse. Their motor is not “Guess what happens next.” Their motor is “Watch me think deeply about human existence, watch me take you as the reader deeper into the human predicament.” And maybe they have a very slight novelistic frame, very slight, like Camus’s The Fall, say. I feel like, Why are we here on the planet—to tell each other stories? For me, no. For many people, yes. I want to try to understand slightly better who we are as a species. The energy of storytelling is, “Guess who is behind the closet?” I don’t care who’s behind the closet.

LIGON

Yet there is a lot of narrative in your work. Not anecdotes, but narratives from your own life—

SHIELDS

But it’s subservient to a larger investigation. There’s a wonderful line which I probably appropriated in Reality Hunger. It’s a line from Alain Robbe-Grillet. He says something like, “The anecdote is not dead. The innocence of the anecdote is dead, that we can no longer tell stories naïvely.” Stories are still told. And I definitely still tell stories, but I would say I tell stories not naïvely, like I’m aware of who is telling them. I try to undermine them. I try to ironize them. I try to put them in triplicate quotations marks. I try to marry them to the larger investigation. There’s a story in A Handbook for Drowning called “A Brief Survey of Ideal Desire,” which to me is sort of the crucial break in my work. And my sister books, Heroes and Dead Languages, are to varying degrees relatively traditional novels. A Handbook for Drowning mixes the essay and story and brings a collage from the pieces some read as quasi-confessional, personal essay, some read as relatively traditional story. And the pieces that interest me the most kind of blur forms. “Brief Survey” is the first time I did that. There’s a critical reading of Joyce’s “The Dead.” There’s a third person account of obsessive basketball playing. There’s a discussion of looking at pornography. There’s a discussion of the protagonist visiting a massage parlor. It’s like six or eight different little things, and you’re supposed to figure out how they’re all connected. I think it is a short story. There’s a character named Walter in it. It felt like something popped open for me in that story, where the loyalty of the fiction is not “Guess what happens to Walter next,” but “Watch me investigate how platonic desire works. Watch how fucked up you can be when you’re always projecting desire out—some absolute outside yourself—rather than some desire you actually feel for real.” In ten short pages, I’m actually investigating something about desire—and the stories are part of that investigation, as opposed to the other way around.

LIGON

Would the statements or ideas have weight without the narrative?

SHIELDS

That’s the objection most people raise, and I think it’s legitimate. When you just want the insights—where Nick Hornby stands, his essay on the male animal. And that’s not probably what we want. I’m not interested in psychobabble either. Or street philosophy. I’ve talked about the war without and the war within. People have different aesthetics. And for me, the way that a novel works, say, the war is generally without. Which is to say that characters do battle with each other. King Lear has an argument with Cordelia and they are sort of butting heads, then at the end, there is some resolution. The essay form, the lyric essay, the personal essay, is just as full of conflict, and the conflict goes inside—the writer at war with himself. I find the intimacy of that discussion takes me to a deeper psychic place. I find the intimacy of that more naked- making, more strip-mining, more primitive, raw, embarrassing, et cetera. Someone else—say you or Jess Walter or whoever—would find the form I espouse solipsistic, narcissistic, navel-gazing, or whatever. And that’s okay. But I prefer the war within. I find the level of discussion, potentially—not by any means always—but potentially thrillingly higher. When that’s good, nothing’s better. A lot of it is horrible, memoir or journalism, or woe is me stuff, but when it really is at the highest level, it is really important to me. Maybe the war within is my own self-enclosure.

LIGON

Do you want to consciously articulate these truths or realities in a way that a painting might not let you? We have a response to painting or music that might be emotional, that might be just as true but difficult to articulate. Are you interested in clear, conscious articulation of truth?

SHIELDS

That’s a very good point. I think I am. There’s this line by Yeats that I disagree with, which is, “You can’t articulate the truth, you can only embody it.” That’s wrong. You can articulate the truth. I really believe in language above all else. It goes back, as so many of my tropes do, to stuttering. I grew up with a stutter, still stutter slightly sometimes. I wrote a novel about it. In a way, it’s sort of the core of my being. So many of my theories unconsciously draw from it. I love articulation. I love saying—telling, not showing, that workshop bromide. Bromide of bromides: Show don’t tell. I so adore telling. Showing bores me to tears. It always has. When I think about my favorite moments from Huck Finn, they aren’t like, Oh look at this plot turn or this dialogue. It’s just Huck saying something. Those are the moments that I live for. I am drawn toward articulation as revenge on stuttering.

LIGON

I’m guessing that you don’t care for Flannery O’Connor’s stories—

SHIELDS

I did a brutal thing to Flannery O’Connor once. I was trapped in some cabin for a long weekend and I read the collected O’Connor front to back. That is one formulaic writer, I promise you. Every single story is exactly the same story. Obviously she was a master crafter of stories. I went through a phase where I very much admired O’Connor. I think “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” an awfully well-made story. But she doesn’t interest me. I couldn’t imagine reading her. She is a religious writer. I think so much of my work is founded on a godless meaninglessness. There is no meaning. We are lost. We are existentially alone. How do we get through the next hundred years of our lives, or the next fifty? If, finally, your vision is underwritten by religious salvation, we’re on very different sides of the path to hell. But who am I to criticize O’Connor? She is a quintessential example of someone who is by all accounts a great writer who holds zero interest for me. Especially the third person. I’m just allergic to the third person. To the degree I can read fiction, almost by definition it has to be first person, because at least we’re pushing toward some authorial “I.” The moment that we’re in the storytelling mode, I tend to be not interested. But who am I to end the world of fiction? Obviously a fiction writer and a poet and a nonfiction writer are all trying to get to the same stuff.

LIGON

I see Reality Hunger as an artist struggling to be vital, to be born, in effect. And this is an artist who is already alive, who has already been an artist for some time—

SHIELDS

And this artist is me? This is me struggling to be born?

LIGON

Yes.

SHIELDS

How so?

LIGON

I see you creating systems of belief about art in the entire book and then examining them, arguing with these beliefs, building them up, tearing them down, looking to other artists for insight.

SHIELDS

That’s exactly right. This friend of mine read it and he said that it’s the most personal book I’ve ever written. But obviously my friend was being sort of coy. By most accounts it will not be thought of as my most personal book.
Is he—I mean, am I—born or am I dead?

LIGON

The conversation is ongoing, I think. When you talked before about Cheever’s journals, it seems that you’re interested in how that artist exists. For me, Reality Hunger shows an artist struggling with who he is, struggling to create meaning in his life and out of his life.

SHIELDS

I was listening to this show on public radio recently. It’s basically three or four stories read aloud by actors on a Broadway stage called “Stories on Stage,” something like that. Again, I’m sort of making an easy case. Some guy was reading a Cheever story. It wasn’t “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” but it was very close. Basically a story about a guy who is somewhat estranged from his wife. He’s living in Rome, and he writes a sort of fantasy version about how they’ll actually connect. It was a beautiful story and fun to listen to when I was driving around. So beautiful that when I got home, I ran to my radio so I could hear the end. But it pales compared to the journals. I probably sound like I’m kidding, but they are far and away Cheever’s best book. They’re basically journals he kept from 1940 until he died. They’re very consciously written—written for publication, it’s obvious. They’re so sculpted. There are scenes that come in and out and leitmotifs. It’s an amazing work of art. But hearing the fiction story, as well done as it was, was the sketchiest investigation. You’re comparing a twenty-page story to a 300,000-word journal, but still, the fiction felt like gossamer compared to the depth of the journal. The journal let him get away with absolutely nothing. He was relentless toward himself, and in so doing, connects himself with us. The fiction is full of grandiosity of logic, and he gets away with murder. I was constantly listening, going You lying sack of shit, I read the journals. I know what it’s like at ground level for you. Don’t give me these happy coincidences and sweet endings. Not that the fiction by any means has to have a sweet ending. The groaning contrivance of the story compared to the electrifying rawness of the journals, there was no comparison. To me it was a really instructive example.

LIGON

Reality Hunger contains dozens of unattributed quotes from various writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and other people. Are you getting any noise from Knopf on the legal end?

SHIELDS

They’re publishing The Thing About Life first, to my shock and dismay because to me, Reality Hunger is a more timely book. I was pushing for a Vintage Paperback Original published maybe in September—just go. Forget the galleys, forget everything. But for some reason, they insisted that The Thing About Life come out first. And Reality Hunger will follow in September of 2009. So in a way that book is, frankly, not really on their radar yet. They bought both books together, a two-book thing. So I’m just developing all my legal arguments.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What if they ask you to include an acknowledgements page?

SHIELDS

At one point in the book, I say, “You get a brownie point for every different quote you identify.” That pretty much tells it. They’ll either deal with it later, or—I don’t know.

Jonathan Lethem is a good friend and we have a sort of pact that when it comes time to make that argument, we’re going to go in and just argue the case to the hilt. And I’m probably going to lose the debate, to be honest.

There are quite a few quotes from John D’Agata in there. And John said, “Promise me you won’t ruin the book by putting a bunch of sources in the back.” Everyone has been amazingly generous in the spirit of the book. I have quite a few quotes from my friend Michael Logan. From a former student, James Nugent. Paul Bravermann. Friends are the main quotes. A lot of them, I’ve remade. Some are my own. So much of the argument of the book depends on learning those boundaries. The moment you’ve said page twenty-one is from Vivian Gornick and page twenty-nine is from Coleridge, the book is over. It’s not over, but it’s considering domestication.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Remote has an acknowledgments page—

SHIELDS

The paperback does, and it’s kind of cool because all those footnotes are in the back.

LIGON

What about a page that simply says, “The following works were considered or used as part of this collage.” In effect, the acknowledgements page. That’s it.

SHIELDS

I’ll probably be thrilled if I can get away with putting something like that in the back. I’m talking brave now, but we’ll see how far I get when it comes down to it. I would love it if there was something elegant about silence. You remember in the end of The Wasteland when Eliot tells you where every quote was from? I hate that whole idea. If you recognize the quote, fine. If you don’t, fine. But the idea of turning it into this kind of snarly apparatus—

LIGON

Why do you think Eliot did that?

SHIELDS

I think he was trying to raise the mystery of the work. People went into Eliot’s library. What was that book of his called, by that lady? Jessie Weston? From Ritual to Romance? Something like that. They went into Eliot’s library and it still had the cellophane wrapped around it, a book he was supposed to have been quoting from. The point being that so many contemporary poets will give you every line. Like, “Line twelve is a translation of…” That’s such a dead gesture of quasi-scholarship, of good citizenship. I feel strongly—as do so many friends who are quoted in the book—that citing everything would hurt the book’s intent. I feel strongly about it. I’m going to argue strong. Obviously I’m not going to say, Well, forget it. I’m not going to rip up the contract. I’ll deal with it as I deal with it. Why do we need all these citations of sources that pretty much anyone can find on the web? The biology of acne or something like that? Why do we need that snarly apparatus?

LIGON

When is it appropriate to attribute credit?

SHIELDS

I think John D’Agata is really good about this issue. It’s almost like an art form struggling to be reborn itself. John has this feeling that if we’re going to look at nonfiction as art, we’ve got to stop sourcing it. And if you’re writing a work that has no aspirations to be art, let’s say a biography about Thomas Jefferson or something—it’s a work of history. I don’t read that; I don’t write it; I’m not interested in it. You’re going to source the fact that someone else found a document about Jefferson as a slave owner or something like that. And you’re writing this history of Thomas Jefferson. In that kind of work, you have the whole snarly apparatus. But in the kind of work that I’m trying to champion, that I’m trying to write and read and love, you find a feeling that if a work has any chance of existing as a work of art, as a liberating thought experiment, we have to get away from the idea of sourcing things. It establishes a pedestrian or journalistic and/or scholarly context. It takes away the whole aura of a work of art which is crucial to the planet. Look at painters, the way they approach art. Look at Rauschenberg and Warhol. Do they say, This comes from the Campbell Soup Company? They just go and do it. Until all the lawyers got involved. Look at how musicians and hip-hop artists come in and just slash and burn. And turntablists go in and remake stuff. The moment you get lawyers involved, the moment you get journalistic and scholarly good citizenship involved, you’re dead. If anyone wants to take my work and remake it, they’re more than welcome. If anyone wants to take Black Planet and make it into, whatever, an opera—it’d make a great opera; if they want to take Remote and turn it inside out—they’re welcome to it. If it’s aspiring to be art, it’s crucial we remove the rubric of non-art in my view.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Why is Reality Hunger structured the way it is, in 563 sections?

SHIELDS

The fact that we all teach, that I’m not up on some Vermont mountaintop with twelve hours to write every day of the week, that I’m checking the Web every five minutes for gossip of some kind. We live in an attention deficit age. I’m influenced by collage artists from the last hundred years. I think it’s totally congruent with what I argue. It’d be absurd for me to have a three-hundred-page essay that’s smoothly lucid and coherent. It’s the way I think. There are twenty-six categories from A–Z. That’s a sort of funny idea of the alphabet. There’s a pretext of being thorough. We’ve got the A–Z, the explanation that explains nothing. The categories mean relatively little except you’re supposed to realize how much turnstile jumping there is in the categories. Sometimes something’s in the wrong category. The A–Z stuff feels fairly arbitrary at times. The quotation. You can’t tell what the “I” espouses. You ask, Who is saying this? David Shields? Robert Lowell? George Orwell? Who is saying this? Categories are break-downable. I even argue for the virtue of brevity in the book. Drawn to collage, aphorism, sound bite.

LIGON

Many of your books are broken into similar short sections—

SHIELDS

A friend of mine called it “Aphorism sent through radiation.” I just love that idea. Remote is not quite as fragmented, but it’s pretty montage- like. Enough About You is somewhat. Body Politic is somewhat. But this pushes it further. Collage—to piss off some more people—collage is the evolution beyond narrative. It’s the next step. I’ve written ten books and there’s almost a direct movement from very grounded, well-made, linear, realistic novels. The first is a four-hundred-page book and each chapter’s forty pages, and boy is it grounded in the real, in narrative. Now I’m onto a book like Reality Hunger, where there’s no section longer than a page. I don’t know what to say other than that’s how my mind thinks. The books I seem to love the most are often what I would call speedy and they cut to the chase. There’s very little furniture moving. There’s very little table setting, just bursts of language and of insight. A fiction writer might ask, “Okay, we’ve got a bunch of insight, but where’s the context?” There is a context. The book is nothing but 563 insights, but they keep building upon one another. The context needn’t be narrative. The context could be contemplative. That’s what I’m drawn toward now.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Should people still read your fiction?

SHIELDS

That’s a great question. I’m doing this sort of easy thing where I’m like nah-nah-ing at fiction as a way to boost the assignment of nonfiction, but I’ve got three books of fiction out there that on some sort of trivial level, I want people to read.

LIGON

Is it a trivial level?

SHIELDS

I’m just saying trivial level of, Let’s go out and buy those books or something, as if those book sales will change my life in some substantial way. I still love those books. Those books still matter to me, especially Dead Languages and Handbook for Drowning. Heroes to me, less so because it’s so traditional and so conventional. There’s very little of my aesthetic driving it. It was influenced by a University of Iowa aesthetic. I was trying to write in a realistic way, a traditional way, a conventional way that probably doesn’t play to my strengths.

But Dead Languages is so clearly the forerunner of what I’m doing now. The reason it is ten times a better book than Heroes is that I’m making all the gestures I’m making now, but further still. Dead Languages talks about stuttering. It talks about masochism to a certain degree, it talks about self-destruction, my love-hate affair with language. It’s phrased in fictional context, but it’s the evolution of my artistic aesthetic. I think that book holds up really well. And I really like Handbook for Drowning quite a lot, too. The pieces I love the most are the most collage like—“The War on Poverty,” “Brief Survey of Ideal Desire.” Those books are not very far from my current work. I’m encouraged by the idea that you’re supposed to change as an artist. Part of me is stupidly nostalgic for my early fictional writer self. Somehow calling yourself a novelist still has a slight glamour to it. I mean, it doesn’t really have any glamour in the culture, but in literary culture it somehow still seems slightly more respectable. Whereas the stuff I do doesn’t even have a goddamned name.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you have a name for it?

SHIELDS

I like John D’Agata’s term, “lyric essay.” It’s sort of a mouthful, but I despise this “creative nonfiction” term. It’s absolutely meaningless. I don’t mind “personal essay.” But a book-length essay, what do you call it? What do you think of it as?

LIGON

You call Reality Hunger a manifesto.

SHIELDS

Manifesto is a very specific-book word. The Thing About Life—what would you call that? A collage?

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

It’s less a collage than even Enough About You. It seems like a struggle between the personal story and scientific research, those two things playing against each other.

SHIELDS

But then there are the quotations from all the sources. I hope there’s a relatively complex play. Tolstoy weighing in, quotes from Lucretius to Coetzee, me and my dad. Somehow those play off each other in what I hope is an interesting way. Do you have a term for those kind of works? I think lyric essay seems to be catching on. Someone will be crowned a genius if they can come up with a term for this. I don’t know. It’s such a shame, though, to be working in a form. Literary nonfiction sounds sort of self-congratulatory and self-marginalizing, as if somehow you’re writing an essay on Shakespeare or something. And creative nonfiction? Creative as opposed to what? Destructive? Destructive nonfiction? Maybe that’s what I write. Destructive nonfiction. That would be good. I swear that’s it.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

If you have one book coming out that’s a meditation on death and one that’s a manifesto, what could you possibly do after that?

SHIELDS

I’m starting a book about sex. Part of me feels like that’s sort of the goal. I’m deeply middle-aged, so I want to make sure to cover a lot of big topics.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Sex, death, and life.

SHIELDS

Exactly. Sometimes I’ll get an idea for some book, like from the guy who runs the mailing place around the corner, who’s from Iraq, and we always talk about the war. Part of me wants to do a book with him about Iraq or something. I have all these ideas, dozens of ideas for books. You want to make sure that they are essential topics. You kind of want to get down what life feels like to you. It’s a good question. I feel like writing The Thing About Life changed my outlook. It made me both very morbid and completely free from morbidity. On the one hand, I feel like, My God, we’re just animals and there’s no point to anything. Okay, if there’s no point to anything, you might as well try to enjoy life on some level. Dark fluid entered my body through that book in some really serious way. Though I think the book is not heavy. It feels sort of light.

We are just nerve endings. And that book does feel like some end game on some level. The manifesto’s saying, Here’s what I believe about art. So I agree, I’m at a weird impasse. After I finished those two books, I couldn’t do anything for a couple months. I just sort of reorganized my files. I threw a bunch of stuff out. It was like some weird death thing. I threw out all these old clothes. I cleaned up my computer files. This weird cleansing. I had really gone through these two crucial discourses which I’d been dying to write for my whole life, death and art. Destructive nonfiction.