Ten Questions for Melissa Faliveno

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Melissa Faliveno, whose debut essay collection, Tomboyland, is out today from Topple Books. Tomboyland opens with a vignette from 1984, when the largest tornado in Wisconsin’s history destroyed a small town only eight miles west of Faliveno’s childhood home. “Maybe the wind was howling. Maybe there was thunder,” she writes. “Maybe, more likely, there was only silence—that still, strange calm Midwesterners know so well, the kind that heralds the most violent of storms.” No matter her subject, Faliveno conjures each scene with similarly precise language. Drawing on both personal memory and thoughtful reportage, she roams from the site of disaster to softball fields to meditations on gender and family. She is also always more than one thing: a Wisconsinite, for instance, but also a New Yorker—one of those “city slickers who ask a lot of questions.” Tomboyland is a book of the questions that arise from living in various in-betweens and Faliveno models how to thrive in the mystery. “I didn’t just read Tomboyland, I scribbled in its pages, photographed its passages, pressed it on friends, and felt an urgent need to talk about it,” writes Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. Melissa Faliveno previously served as the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, and Green Mountains Review. She received her MFA in nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where she currently teaches in the graduate writing program. 

1. How long did it take you to write Tomboyland? 
Oh man, a very long time! I’ve been working on this book, in fits and starts, for about ten years. I wrote the oldest essay in the collection, “Of a Moth,” in 2010, when I was a graduate student. (My teacher and one of my advisors, Vijay Seshadri, gently eviscerated the first draft, telling me I needed to read more deeply about moths; it was great and necessary advice.) Between then and now I’ve been slowly chipping away at these essays. Some I’ve revised again and again, picked at, gutted and remade. I wrote the newer essays a little more quickly—and by that I mean a year or two, rather than ten. Although, the near-title essay, “Tomboy,” came in something of a torrent in 2017, after the election. It was something I needed to get out of me, these big hazy questions about womanhood and queerness and class and the body and the lands we come from and inhabit and leave—and how it all shapes and complicates our identities. That’s the piece that got the attention of my agent, and really kicked the book into gear. Between then, in early 2018, and when I finished the book, in the summer of 2019, it all went pretty fast. But mostly I’m a long-game writer, and it takes me forever to be satisfied with something. And even then I’m never actually satisfied. I just hit a deadline, or someone takes the proverbial red pencil out of my hand and says, “Okay, M, that’s enough now.”

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Whew—all of it? Just kidding. Kind of. I spent so many years thinking I would never actually make it here, to seeing these essays published in a book. I got rejected a lot, but more often than not I was my own worst enemy in terms of belief in my work. I was usually convinced that being an author just wasn’t in the cards for me. Sometimes I got very close to quitting—and there were long stretches of weeks, and months, when I didn’t write at all—but I always eventually went back to it. I realized at some point that I couldn’t stop writing even if I wanted to, even if these essays were just for me. So, in a sense, those long years of writing alone, of never quite believing in myself or my work, was the hardest part. 

But in terms of the writing process itself, I ended up exploring some pretty difficult stories and experiences in this book—some of which belonged to other people, some of whom hadn’t told those stories aloud before, and they were giving them to me to hear, and then hold, and then write down. That’s a huge responsibility and hard work—to take the best possible care of people and the stories they give you so that you, in turn, can give them away again. I also interrogated a lot of very personal questions and experiences of my own—many of which I had done a prime Midwestern job of repressing for a very long time. It was difficult to put myself back in those places, to confront those questions and truths about myself and my life, the stories I grew up believing and eventually began telling myself. What results from that interrogation are some pretty personal revelations—a few of which people close to me never knew before reading this book—and that’s a pretty terrifying and vulnerable feeling. It’s also pretty liberating. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
This has changed a lot in the past year, since finishing this book. For about fifteen years (including nearly eight of them when I was an editor for this very excellent publication—I miss you guys!) I almost always worked 9-to-5 jobs, which of course are never actually 9 to 5. I snuck in writing time when I could, in the wee hours of morning, nights and weekends, whenever I could get away for a few days. Since finishing this book, I’ve had the good fortune of being able to restructure my life as a writer and a teacher. I write every weekday now, usually in the morning, after a cup of coffee and a chapter or two of reading. Regardless of what I have to do that day, I always try to get in at least an hour or two of writing—or revising, or editing, or whatever project I’m working on. I’m a creature of habit and routine, so that structure really helps me keep going. I often give myself weekends off, but I still write if and when the iron is hot. And the more regularly I write, it turns out, the hotter the iron stays. 

I have a little office in my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with red walls and several overflowing bookshelves and a few plants and a couple guitars on the wall, and my writing desk is nestled in tight between the dog crate and the litter box. It’s a hot, smelly little room, but it’s a room of my own.

4. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy, which is devastatingly good. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time. And I’m currently reading Genevieve Hudson’s debut novel, Boys of Alabama, which is hitting some very good spots for me—masculinity, ruralness, religion and cults, small-town football, queerness, class. Basically everything I want in a book all the time. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Oh, so many. But one I will shout from the mountaintops forever is Joni Tevis, whose essays are truly extraordinary works of nature and beauty and music and love and, always, exploration—the best thing an essay can be. Joni is also just the kindest and most generous human on the planet, and everyone should know her and her work. Start with The World Is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse. It’s, you know, pretty timely.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Money and time, which of course are related. And by “related” I mean a vicious and unrelenting cycle of work and stress and anxiety and despair built and perpetuated by capitalism!

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s pretty clear that the entire system is due for a serious reckoning. It’s well past time for institutions and publishers to take some real action—beyond statements of allyship, and even beyond publishing more work by people of color, queer and trans people, working-class people. We need to be making space for marginalized people to hold positions of power. This might mean actual sacrifice, and it might be pretty uncomfortable for people who have been very comfortable for a long time. This industry can’t claim to be “diverse” while relegating marginalized people to low- and mid-level positions wherein they have no actual autonomy, they’re living paycheck to paycheck, and they can’t stand up for what they need or believe without fear of losing their jobs. There’s no real change if we’re sticking to the same old game, with straight white men and women at the top, and young, underpaid, marginalized, and strategically silenced people grasping toward some semblance of stability beneath them. I’m hopeful that some things are starting to shift. But we need a sea change, not just a tide that swells every so often and then recedes again. Also: We really need to pay writers better for their work. See question six.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Tomboyland, what would you say?
Trust yourself. Stop trying to please so many people, especially those who don’t actually care about you and your work. Keep seeking those who do. They’re out there. You have something to say, and it has value. People will say no, but keep going anyway. You’ll finish a book someday. And then it will be published! I know this sounds like an impossible lie! I promise you, it’s not. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My good friend, the brilliant essayist Melissa Febos. She was the first reader of Tomboyland in manuscript form, and I trust her wholly. Not just because she’s a friend who won’t bullshit me, but because she’s a writer whose work I deeply respect, admire, and connect with. She tells me when something’s working and when it’s not. She asks questions and suggests ideas for getting through something that’s tripping me up. When I’m freaking out, which happens regularly, she talks me off the ledge. She also reminds me to celebrate when it’s time to celebrate—something I’ve never been good at—and sometimes she’ll even bring me a cupcake. Every writer needs a Melissa Febos in their life. (Thanks, Mitch.)

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
My former graduate thesis advisor and longtime mentor/essayistic magnetic north, Jo Ann Beard, recently said this: “You always feel better when you’ve done your work. So do your work.” Also, someone else said this, and I wish I remember who said it, but it stuck with me: “Writing is hard. If someone tells you it’s not, they probably aren’t a writer.”

Ten Questions for francine j. harris

8.4.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features francine j. harris, whose third poetry collection, Here Is the Sweet Hand, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In Here Is the Sweet Hand, harris commits to observation and inquiry no matter the risks. Early in the collection, she writes, “They put away things / as soon as you ask about them.” Here and elsewhere, the speaker has a piercing stare, a watchfulness that will accompany all her questions about landscape, language, and Blackness. And while her position is sometimes lonely, the speaker is also deeply embodied and engaged with and against other individuals and the nation. There is fighting, argument, and blood spilled. There is also great love and repair: literal and metaphorical suturing. With Here Is the Sweet Hand, harris “fully emerges as one of the best and most relevant contemporary poets,” writes Craig Morgan Teicher. francine j. harris is also the author of play dead (Alice James Books, 2016), which won a Lambda Literary Award, and allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and PEN Open Book Award. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Cullman Center for Scholars, and the New York Public Library, she teaches English at the University of Houston. 

1. How long did it take you to write Here Is the Sweet Hand? 
This is always a difficult question for me because I build manuscripts from poems that fit together. The oldest poem in Here Is the Sweet Hand is probably from 2007, but many of the poems that determine the mood of this book were written in the last two years. Also, several of the poems were written during my time in northern Michigan a few years ago that kind of set the stage for the collection.  

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
To follow the previous thought, figuring out the arc of a poetry collection is always pretty challenging for me. Particularly when the book is not themed. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write sporadically and edit often. A lot that I write lately is connected to instruction and teaching. Communications go up when you join a faculty and it’s interesting how much attention in the first year is devoted to lucidity and availability. Particularly with the pandemic, there has been a focus on being available to one another that makes my job feel very public. I can see how this will settle and I’ll get back to a quieter place in my head where I usually write from. That said, the atmosphere in my brain just now makes it a little bit easier to focus on fact-based writing and research, which is very helpful for the fourth collection I’m working on. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
A few things: Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, Tamiko Beyer’s We Come Elemental, and Dawn Lundy Martin’s Good Stock Strange Blood. A few of these I’ve had on my shelf for a while and because they are longer, like Dawn’s, or more thematic, like Natalie’s, I’m just getting into them in a devoted way. Reading has been an immense source of pleasure during quarantine.  

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many and I answer this question differently every time it comes up. One writer who I hope will get a wider audience with her second book is Lauren Russell. Her first book, What’s Hanging on the Hush, is so beautiful. Frantic. Experimental. Risky. I’m really looking forward to reading Descent and to everything else she does. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I think in some ways, lately, it is a nervousness I’ve developed about being wrong. I used to not care about this at all. Now I feel so much more responsible for what I say. I don’t know if this is social media, or the place I’m at in my career, but I feel more careful about what I say and to what end I say it. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, per se, but it definitely makes the writing pace much slower. 

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
The MFA is a great place to devote time to writing while getting a community of support. It’s usually an opportunity to get teaching experience. It’s a stripe in the genre and without the terminal degree it’s difficult to teach at the college level. It’s an excellent opportunity and I am grateful for the experience. I will say that in my experience, it’s not really the place one goes to learn how to write, but rather how to hone. And I’ve long thought that it will be a better experience for people if they have taken a break after undergraduate school and gotten some life skills first so that they have experience to bring to the craft. 

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
More transparency in the processes. And more Black women in positions of leadership and curation. More Black editors, board members, presidents, and chairs. One could very well mean the other. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
It really depends. I share writing with very few people. And I share depending on what I’m working on. I may share individual poems with friends, usually not for feedback but just to share. But I did nervously ask Carl Phillips for guidance on Here Is the Sweet Hand and he was really instrumental for me in thinking through order and theme. I owe a lot to him for this collection. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s not just for writers, I don’t think, but creators in general: Make the thing you want to see exist in the world.

francine j. harris, author of Here Is the Sweet Hand. 

Ten Questions for Cherie Dimaline

7.28.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Cherie Dimaline, whose latest novel, Empire of Wild, is out today from William Morrow. In a tight-knit Métis community in Canada, a young woman named Joan has been searching for her missing husband, Victor, for eleven months to no avail. One morning, however, a mysterious revival tent appears in the nearby Wal Mart parking lot, and when Joan wanders inside she discovers a man who appears to be an exact copy of Victor, only he insists that he is a reverend named Eugene Wolff and that he has never met her before. Joan doesn’t even get the chance to let her discovery sink in before another tragedy strikes, when a beloved family member is attacked by some kind of animal. Working with her young cousin and a Métis elder, Joan resolves to recover and protect both her husband and her community. Inspired by the Métis story of the Rogarou—a werewolf-like creature that is said to haunt native communities—Empire of Wild is a literary thriller about family, tradition, and the ongoing colonial violence against First Nations people. “Empire of Wild is doing everything I love in a contemporary novel and more,” writes Tommy Orange. “It is tough, funny, beautiful, honest, and propulsive.” Cherie Dimaline is also the author of the young adult novel The Marrow Thieves (Dancing Cat Books, 2017), which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Young People’s Literature and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature. A member of the Georgian Bay Métis Community in Ontario, she was the first Indigenous author to serve as writer in residence at the Toronto Public Library. She lives in Vancouver. 

1. How long did it take you to write Empire of Wild?
Empire of Wild, start to finish, took about a year. I like to try to write as quick as I can since I get completely consumed. Like, days in pajamas, forgetting to eat, locked in my office with papers taped to the walls kind of consumed. Basically, I am a health risk while I write so it’s best to get it done in gulps.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The story of the Rogarou is one I heard growing up, told by the old women in my community. I enjoyed turning him into a sexy, charismatic dandy, but it was a challenge to make sure that I was still following the rules laid down for his original story—the ways in which he is brought forth, the ways in which he can be tamed….

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
This is a cliché, I know, but, everywhere and always. Empire of Wild began as notes on the back of a barf bag while I was taking the red-eye flight from Vancouver to Toronto. It’s hard to shut it off. A few years ago, I wrote an entire book while working in a cubicle at a government job. Sorry, employers. We do that.

4. What are you reading right now?
I am rereading Young God by Katherine Faw Morris and The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand. I am also doing a shit ton of research on the Salem Witch Trials, souvenir culture, and roadside attractions for an upcoming project—so lots of very strange books and articles.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Oh my god, so many, especially since Canadian writers often get left out of the wider literary scene. Eden Robinson, who writes Indigenous horror; Kevin Hardcastle, who writes northern hillbilly noir; and Canisia Lubrin, whose work is Black brilliance crystallized in poetry, are all Canadians that deserve the spotlight. In the U.S., Omar El Akkad is a damn genius and American War should already be a movie. Why isn’t it a movie?! Why is no one standing over his chair making sure he is finishing another masterpiece?!

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
We need more diversity at the decision table and not just in the writing trenches. We need editors, publicists, agents, and executives of color, with different backgrounds and identities, who can champion our work, utilize lived experience to understand what goes into marketing them, and give the work the best chance to thrive. Our writing doesn’t need a “leg up” to compete in the mainstream. It needs a mainstream that operates in part from our perspective and community. No extra legs needed. Just more brilliant minds.

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? 
TRUTH! I need to know if I’ve written a project for the recycling bin before I get my hopes up. I need to see all the red lines at once so I can go home and cry about it for twenty-four hours before diving in and getting it done, or redone, in this case.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Empire of Wild, what would you say?
I wrote Empire of Wild during a time when my young adult book The Marrow Thieves was enjoying a huge run on bestseller lists in Canada. It was completely intimidating to have so many people waiting for the next book and I was all wrapped up in the reality that Empire was completely different from Thieves and worried about how that would play out. I would remind myself that every book has its own life and to just have faith in the story. Sure, a lot of young adult fans were disappointed it wasn’t another Thieves, but I found a whole new audience who loved Empire just as much.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My agents. My husband is not valid as he is contractually obligated to think I’m amazing. My agents—Rachel Letofsky, Ron Eckel, and Dean Cooke of CookeMcDermid Agency—will tell me the truth. They also entertain my meltdowns without telling me how ridiculous I am being. Oh, and they understand the importance of champagne at business meetings.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Indigenous Canadian writer and Elder Lee Maracle once told me, “Don’t throw anything away. There’s a reason you wrote it in the first place, even if it doesn’t belong in the piece you’re drafting.” I keep a folder on my laptop with snippets that have to be cut. After editing one of my novels, I ended up using the pieces in the folder to finish a volume of short stories. 

Cherie Dimaline, author of Empire of Wild. (Credit: Wenzdae Brewster)

Ten Questions for Adrian Tomine

7.21.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Adrian Tomine, whose graphic memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist is out today from Drawn and Quarterly. Adopting a new minimalist, black-and-white style, Tomine depicts poignant and comedic scenes from his life and career. The story begins with Tomine traveling to Comic Con in 1995, recalling the childhood bullies he left behind: “Well, I showed them!” he thinks to himself. “I said I was going to be a famous cartoonist when I grew up, and now… Here I am!” But despite his success, Tomine reveals there are more bumps in the road than an outsider might realize—results of the cruelty of others as well as personal mistakes. In illustrating these moments of vulnerability, especially in the comics world, he depicts a more complete vision of reality than is ordinarily revealed. “A wonderful book about feeling morbidly self-conscious while also longing to connect with other people,” writes Roz Chast. Adrian Tomine is the author of the ongoing comic book series Optic Nerve and several books, including Killing and Dying and Shortcomings, which was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times. His illustrations appear regularly in the pages and on the cover of the New Yorker. Tomine lives in Brooklyn.  

1. How long did it take you to write and draw The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist? 
About two years, but with a fair number of interruptions from other projects and life.

2. What was the most challenging thing about creating the book? 
Getting it printed, with all the bells and whistles I wanted, just as the world was going into lockdown.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write and draw? 
At a drafting table in the corner of my wife’s and my bedroom, whenever our kids aren’t demanding something else of me.

4. What are you reading right now? 
The Sky Is Blue With a Single Cloud by Kuniko Tsurita, Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, various “George and Martha” books by James Marshall.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Yuko Tsushima.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life? 
My two daughters, who are also the biggest inspiration in my creative life.

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
This is actually too big of a topic for this quick questionnaire, but in the simplest terms, we need the industry to be more reflective of the audience.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, what would you say?
Don’t insist on making this book look like a real Moleskine notebook.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My wife, Sarah. She’s an extremely sharp and sensitive reader, both unsparing in her criticism and generous in her praise. If something is unclear or confusing to her, I know there’s a problem. She’s had a huge influence on me in terms of trying to find humor in even the darkest stories, as well as finding some sort of empathy for even the least appealing characters. She actually was a book editor when I met her, and I’m sure she could’ve excelled in that career had she chosen to do so.

10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? 
My friend Richard Sala had two catchphrases/mantras: “I can’t win” and “It never ends.” Taken together, they seem like the perfect summation of creative struggle.

Adrian Tomine, author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist. 

Ten Questions for Kendra Atleework

7.14.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kendra Atleework, whose debut memoir, Miracle Country, is out today from Algonquin Books. Miracle Country begins in 2015 as a wildfire devours Atleework’s hometown, Swall Meadows, an obscure outpost just east of the towering Sierra Nevada mountain range. While the region had always been prone to extreme weather—fires, floods, blizzards—this fire was unique for arriving in February, when snow cover would usually offer some protection. Beginning with ash, Atleework moves back and forth in time to tell the story of her complicated relationship to this landscape that’s become increasingly volatile due to climate change. She remembers how her parents taught her to love and thrive in the desert, but how this love became strained after the loss of her mother to a rare autoimmune disorder. No matter where else she travels, however, Atleework writes, “I am always thinking of home.” A narrative of both flight and return, Miracle Country is a love letter to family, home, and the earth. “Blending family memoir and environmental history, Kendra Atleework conveys a fundamental truth: The places in which we live, live on—sometimes painfully—in us,” writes Julie Schumacher. “This is a powerful, beautiful, and urgently important book.” Kendra Atleework is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Her essay “Charade,” which became the basis for a chapter in Miracle Country, appeared in The Best American Essay 2015. She serves on the board of the Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers, and lives in Bishop, California.

1. How long did it take you to write Miracle Country? 
I worked on the book for a solid six years, but the idea began with an essay I wrote in college called “Charade”—the assignment was to write about grief, and so I wrote about what it was like to be a high schooler living on a mountainside and losing my mother. Research and years of studying craft allowed me to refine that kernel into a book. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Creating a structure. It took years of revision to find Miracle Country’s narrative spine. It was never going to work as a more traditional, chronological memoir—even though I rewrote an entire draft that way! I had to wrangle a narrative arc out of centuries of history, mounds of research, the fraught lives of my own family members, and the most emotionally loaded pieces of my own life. That was a challenge. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Reading and researching are, for me, inseparable from the writing process. I grab every chunk of the day that I can to read. I sit on the floor with a book strapped into my nerdy bookstand and I read while I eat breakfast, again while I eat lunch, and so on. As for writing, I often draft the messy new stuff late into the night. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow, which just came out in a beautiful paperback edition. I love stories about small town life, and this novel gives the reader a glimpse of rural North Carolina, where a canal marks the color line. It’s a family story with characters that vivify their homeplace. And the writing is lovely. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Ellen Meloy. I’m always surprised when readers of nature writing and the literature of the West haven’t heard of her. Meloy transcends genre. Her voice is quirky and warm and her prose is stunning. In one essay from her book The Anthropology of Turquoise, a home repair project turns into a thought experiment when she accidentally staples her hair to the roof. I also appreciate her revolutionary celebration of things devalued by capitalism: beauty in its many manifestations, and the desert, despite its apparent infertility and lack of resources to remove. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Social media! I’m excited to connect with readers there, I like sharing about other authors’ work, and it’s certainly led me to discover a lot of cool books. But I’d prefer to be walking with the local cows on the canals than doing anything on my phone. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Patience. My wonderful agent, Janet Silver, taught me this through her unwillingness to rush this book, and I am so grateful. Could we have gone out years earlier and sold the book? Perhaps. But giving it time to develop allowed it to become something I’m extremely proud of. It was a lengthy process with a lot of tossed pages, but nothing is wasted when it comes to writing—a finished book is the tip of an iceberg of invisible work. Janet’s willingness to read draft after draft, and to ask me hard questions, allowed Miracle Country to grow into itself. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Miracle Country, what would you say? 
I wouldn’t tell her anything! Let her learn the hard way! I especially wouldn’t tell her that she’ll wind up working as a snow shoveler in Minneapolis to fund her writing habit. Otherwise she might sabotage me by, like, getting a desk job. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
It’s clear that all industries need to purge themselves of institutional biases, systemic racism, existing in thrall to capitalism, etcetera. Easier said than done. As a way toward achieving that goal, I would love to see the essay gain greater recognition as a literary genre. I would love to see it represented in popular culture as robustly as the novel. What I love about the essay is that it deals in uncertainty. The questions an essayist poses are not answered, or even answerable—instead, over the course of the writing and thinking, they become more complex. Amping up our tolerance of complexity and nuance could save us from the devils of our own nature, I believe: our tendency to be reactionary, to entrench, to not listen. We need the sensibility of the essay to rescue discourse. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
In the early stage of a project, write fragments. Don’t get bogged down by trying to conceive of the whole. My mentor in grad school, Patricia Hampl, taught me this during my very first semester, when I was convinced I would write the first page of my book, well, first. That’s a really absurd and funny idea to me now. Describe a photograph, she told me. Describe your father’s hands. Don’t worry for now about how it will all come together. Develop your instincts by reading—then trust those instincts. Feel for the thread. Follow it through the dark. 

Kendra Atleework, author of Miracle Country.  (Credit: Amy Leist)

Ten Questions for Ryad Girod and Chris Clarke

7.14.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ryad Girod and Chris Clarke, the author and the translator of the novel Mansour’s Eyes, which is out today from Transit Books. In 2015 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a young Syrian architect named Mansour al-Jazïri is about to face public execution. As he is led through the crowd to the center of the square, his close friend Hussein looks on in grief, and reflects on the preceding months that led to this moment. Three months ago, Mansour began experiencing increasingly intense headaches, suffering the early effects of a degenerative disease a doctor deemed “irreversible,” but Hussein held out hope: “I felt that, in spite of everything, Mansour sensed things and understood situations,” he writes. “He always returned to me, descending from atop his dune, his eyes always luminous.” While telling his friend’s story, Hussein reflects on the life of Mansour’s great grandfather, the famous Algerian leader Emir Abdelkader, and recalls the execution of another Mansour from history, Sufi mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj. Illuminating and connecting these various pasts, and gradually revealing the full circumstances of Mansour’s misfortune, Mansour’s Eyes is a complex exploration of religion, politics, and history. Mansour’s Eyes is Ryad Girod’s first book to be translated into English. He is also the author of Ravissements and La fin qui nous attend. He lives in Algiers, where he teaches at the Lycée International d’Alger. Chris Clarke has translated numerous French language authors, including Marcel Schwob and Patrick Modiano. He is a PhD candidate in French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

1. How long did it take you to complete work on Mansour’s Eyes? 
Ryad Girod: The book was written during two different periods. The idea of writing a story set in Saudi Arabia came to me during my final year living in Riyadh. I wrote a few paragraphs over the course of about a month, then I put it aside when my second novel was being released, as I needed to focus on promoting it. I didn’t take up the writing of Mansour’s Eyes again until two years later, and it went quite quickly. It took about eight months.

Chris Clarke: Transit Books had asked for a relatively quick turnaround on the translation, and so I worked on the translation of Mansour’s Eyes every day for the better part of two months last summer. I was also writing my PhD dissertation at the time; to make progress with both, I translated from morning coffee until after lunch, and then shifted gears to my dissertation in the early afternoon. I suppose if I had known at the time that we’d be stuck indoors all spring in 2020, I might not have set things up so that I would end up spending the entire summer of 2019 indoors, parked at the kitchen table. But at the end of the day both projects are completed and I’m happy with how they turned out. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about the project? 
Ryad Girod: The initial idea was to write a story around the possibility of understanding situations in this modern world through the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. But early on it became clear to me that it wasn’t going to work. And so, more modestly, I instead wrote a story that still dealt with comprehension, but I made sure that it was neither too philosophical nor too superficial. As if I was moving along the line that formed the crest of a dune… 

Chris Clarke: My primary challenge was learning how to inhabit Ryad’s syntax. His descriptive passages are very rhythmic and, for me, it was very important to recreate that rhythm. I felt that his sentences, especially when he’s describing the Najd, mimic the shapes of the dunes and cliffs they describe, and it took me some time and a lot of reading aloud to find those crests and valleys. Another interesting problem was how to approach the transliteration of the Arabic names in the text, as the methods in use in French differ from those in use in the Anglophone world. Neither language is very consistent about this, and the options also haven’t remained static over the years. There are political implications to such choices, but I was helped in my decision by some fascinating conversations with a colleague and further talks with Ryad.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often do you translate?
Ryad Girod: I don’t write all that much. But when I get going, I do nothing else. Mostly in the morning, in bed, when I first wake up. Although with Mansour’s Eyes, 80 percent of it was written in my car. In the parking lot of the pool where my daughter Aziadeh had been swimming two hours a day four days a week.

Chris Clarke: It all depends on my deadlines, and on what else I’m working on at the time. But typically, when I have a project underway, every day, most often in the afternoons, and for five or six hours at a time. Much more than that and my work starts to get sloppy and takes twice as long.

4. What are you reading right now? 
Ryad Girod: Saint Augustine’s Confessions. An “Algerian” philosopher from the fourth century who wrote in Latin. It’s a work that is both deeply spiritual and very human. 

Chris Clarke: I’ve very recently submitted my PhD dissertation to my reading committee, and won’t be starting my next full-length translation until after the defense in about three weeks, so I’ve been relaxing by reading old hard-boiled crime novels. David Goodis, Fredric Brown, Charles Williams, and most recently, Derek Raymond. It’s a lovely breath of fresh air, as I haven’t been able to indulge in such reading for a long time.

 5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Ryad Girod: Claude Simon, without any hesitation. For a Nobel Prize winner, he still isn’t a household name, and his body of work, which is incredible, is relatively unknown. In my mind, he’s one of the fathers of the modern novel. For Anglophone readers, he could be compared to Joyce or Faulkner. Also, Marie NDiaye: so understated, a breathtaking stylist.

Chris Clarke: In French, Jacques Jouet comes to mind. I’m really hoping to translate one particular book of his in the coming years—I think he’s very underrated. His work interests me from a formal and constrained-writing perspective, but he’s also just a really good, natural-feeling writer, and very funny. I have also recently enjoyed the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin’s books, in Megan McDowell’s translations. Her work has been getting some love in indie circles, but I’m surprised she hasn’t caught on in a bigger way. I’ll read anything that pair offers up. As for English-language writers, I’ll need a few months of catch-up time before I have an answer.

6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry? 
Ryad Girod: For France, nothing in particular. Algeria needs more bookstores and better distribution.

Chris Clarke: It would be great if more readers purchased literature in translation, and if the major publishers were more open to publishing it. It often seems to me that despite them being the ones with all the capital, they leave it to the independent publishers to find the next great non-Anglophone voice, and then jump in and grab them up after the risk has been absorbed.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Ryad Girod: I have a tendency to write very long paragraphs, sometimes without real syntax or punctuation, something that Selma, my editor, refers to as “monoliths.” As a result, I’ve learned to aerate them.

Chris Clarke: I learned that Transit Books publisher Adam Levy has a pronounced phobia of exclamation points!!!

8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life? 
Ryad Girod: Work! I still have to teach to earn a living… And social media, such a time-eater.

Chris Clarke: The same as most everyone else: time and money. And trying to find some semblance of balance between a productive career and the rest of life.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Ryad Girod: A reader I don’t know, someone totally impartial.

Chris Clarke: My wife Renee, whose insights always brings me back to the bigger picture when I get lost in the details. And my colleague Lara—we trade our finished translations back and forth and offer each other many suggestions and comments. Her comments make me think through my choices in ways I otherwise might not.

10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? 
Ryad Girod: Listen to music while you write, which is something I do routinely. Classical, jazz, sacred music…

Chris Clarke: I agree with Ryad, I almost always translate with music on. For me, it really needs to be instrumental music so that lyrics don’t get in the way of the voice I’m trying to hear. On a more technical level, I often think back to a comment from Richard Sieburth, who taught me that writers and translators can put too much emphasis on using adjectives and adverbs to punch up their descriptions, when sometimes it can be done better with a well-chosen verb.

Editor’s note: Ryad Girod’s answers appear in translation from the French by Chris Clarke

Ryad Girod and Chris Clarke, the author and the translator of Mansour’s Eyes. 

Ten Questions for Andrew Durbin

7.7.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrew Durbin, whose novella, Skyland, is out today from Nightboat Books. Written in the form of a diary, Skyland begins in New York City, where the narrator is preparing to depart to Greece in search of a lost portrait of the writer Hervé Guibert. The narrator is planning a biography of sorts—more accurately, “a literary map of [Guibert’s] personality”—and hopes finding the rumored painting might give him some new sense of the author: “The way he might have really lived, the expressions he made, the way he set his mouth.” On the island of Patmos, the writer and his friend Shiv enjoy the beach as much as they search for the painting itself, but while they bake in the sun and seek out casual sex, they become increasingly aware that the island’s idyllic appearance masks an uneasy conservatism. While documenting the details of everyday island life—memories of sun-kissed men, food, and friendship—Durbin equally draws attention to the refugee crisis and the global rise of fascism against which the characters’ movements unfold. “Gusty, luminous, elegiac, and unexpectedly moving, Skyland is a languidly-paced meditation on the fecundity of objects (be they imagined or finally discovered) and a quietly hedonic seaside travelogue,” writes Harry Dodge. Andrew Durbin is also the author of MacArthur Park (Nightboat Books, 2017) and Mature Themes (Nightboat Books, 2014). His writing can be found in numerous publications, including BOMB, Boston Review, Triply Canopy, and the Paris Review. He lives in London, where he works as the editor of frieze. 

1. How long did it take you to write Skyland? 
In late 2017 the British magazine Tinted Window asked me to adapt a portion of my diary as a short story for their inaugural issue, which was devoted to the work of Hervé Guibert, the French novelist and photographer. Though I was happy to do it, the story never felt complete to me, so after it was published in the United Kingdom—where I now live—I set it aside. About a year later, in early 2019, Stephen Motika of Nightboat Books encouraged me to revisit the story and expand it into a novella. In all, about two and a half years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The sentences. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write almost every day, usually in the early mornings and then again in the evenings. I tend to devote most of Sunday to writing too, and that’s usually my most creative period.

4. What are you reading right now? 
George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which is one of the most entertaining books I’ve ever read. I’m always surprised by the kind of humor and lightness she can achieve, even at her densest. I’ve recently discovered Denise Riley, whose Selected Poems is on my bedside table. Also, Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris. During the lockdown, I zipped through all of Ogawa’s books translated in English. Her novel The Memory Police perfectly encapsulates the feeling of the world disappearing around you, something I keenly related to this past spring. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Hervé Guibert, the French novelist and photographer at the center of Skyland. Thankfully, a collection of his short stories and a reissue of his novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life have been published this year by Semiotext(e). His work is endlessly inspiring to me. But I can’t limit myself to just one. The work of poets Diana Hamilton, Harmony Holiday, and Shiv Kotecha always thrills me.

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
More translation—and more trust that translated literature can succeed in the United States. There are so many great books and authors English-language readers, particularly Americans, are missing from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I think that would change if we empowered more multilingual editors, more editors of color, more editors from outside the U.S.

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? 
Care.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Skyland, what would you say? 
You’ll get there. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Stephen Motika, the editor and publisher of Nightboat Books. I have never had a more watchful eye over my work than his. I’m not sure where I would be without him.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Kevin Killian always told me great fiction lets you know how things smell. 

Andrew Durbin, author of Skyland.  (Credit: Jeff Henrikson)

Ten Questions for Sophie Mackintosh

6.30.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sophie Mackintosh, whose second novel, Blue Ticket, is out today from Doubleday. In the world of Blue Ticket, a lottery determines every young girl’s fate. On the day of their first period, girls must report to stations where they are issued either a blue or a white ticket. Blue indicates the freedom to pursue a career, while white indicates a life devoted to marriage and children. “Your life becomes a set thing, written and unchangeable,” says Calla, the novel’s protagonist and a blue-ticket woman. “To wish for any other was a fallacy at best, treasonous at worst.” But despite having obtained the ticket to “freedom”—the ticket her father says her late mother would’ve wanted for her—Calla does begin to wish for another future. She is overcome by the desire to bear a child even though the system has indoctrinated her to believe she would be an unfit mother—even though the choice would make her both outlaw and outcast. In charting Calla’s trajectory, Mackintosh poses urgent questions about social expectations and free will that are relevant to all realities. “The cool intensity and strange beauty of Blue Ticket is a wonder,” writes Deborah Levy. Sophie Mackintosh is also the author of The Water Cure, which was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and won the 2019 Betty Trask Award. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Dazed, and the Guardian, among other publications. Born in Wales, she lives in London. 

1. How long did it take you to write Blue Ticket? 
From first draft to final edits, it took me almost two years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
It was written at a chaotic time—my first novel, The Water Cure, was attracting a lot of attention due to being longlisted for the Booker prize; my partner was diagnosed with cancer and spent a lot of time in hospital and convalescing; I was newly freelancing as a copywriter and made the common mistake of taking on too much work out of fear; and we topped it off by moving into a wonderful old house that’s also falling apart around us. But I realized that there is literally always going to be stuff happening and for me, personally, having the focus of a project I felt very compelled to write really helped me with all of the above. It probably explains why it’s a bit intense though.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I try to write every day, unless I’ve finished a draft of something, after which I take a few days off while it percolates. Before the pandemic I usually wrote in local cafés, or at a temporary desk set up in the living room. Now, with two of us in the house, I start work at my kitchen table, early in the morning, before my partner or the rest of the world is awake. This is the routine I got into when I was working full time, and it still works for me—I do prefer to write at less antisocial hours, but quite annoyingly, this is when I seem to get the most done.

4. What are you reading right now? 
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat—a beautiful debut exploring the emotional journey of a queer Palestinian American woman as she grapples with love addiction. I’m finding it very compelling.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Joy Williams—her short stories are really things of wonder. One of my favorite books is her novel The Changeling, which is woefully underappreciated. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
I don’t have a dedicated writing space at the moment, so I dream of a little office where I can organize research and stick things on a corkboard and have a selection of color-coded Post-its. Luckily all I actually need is my laptop, so this is a very minor thing in the scheme of things—there is really nothing major impeding my writing life at all, an astonishing privilege that I’m so grateful for every day. I know it’s very unlikely to last forever, one way or another, so I’m making the most of it while I can.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
To think about the reader more. Ambiguity features prominently in my work, but there’s a balance to be struck between what you reveal and what you hold back; sometimes I could be more generous with this.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Blue Ticket, what would you say? 
I would say to be gentler with myself, and that writing my first book was not a fluke—the trick can be repeated, and will be completed, somehow. And then you just have to figure out how to repeat it again. And again! Actually, maybe that’s not helpful.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My agent, Harriet Moore, who I’ve worked with for close to a decade now. She has an uncanny knack of knowing exactly what I’m trying to achieve, and her advice is always incredibly generous and thoughtful.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I don’t remember exactly where I saw this—I think on Twitter?—but it was the concept of a “bay leaf”: Something in your writing that you end up taking out, but it’s not a waste, as it was a necessary step to get to where you were. Something that enrichs the flavor of your writing, maybe, or leads to something better. In early drafts this concept helps me try things out and doesn’t see the numerous, numerous cuts I end up making as wasted time. It’s all going somewhere.

Sophie Mackintosh, author of Blue Ticket. 

Ten Questions for Kyle McCarthy

6.23.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kyle McCarthy, whose debut novel, Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, is out today from Ballantine Books. An aspiring novelist, thirty-year-old Rose moves to New York City and pays the bills by tutoring the children of Manhattan’s elite. Shortly after her arrival, she reunites with Lacie, her childhood best friend—a friend she betrayed—who is also a primary character in her secret, semiautobiographical novel-in-progress. After moving into Lacie’s spare room, Rose’s fascination with her old friend only grows. She watches Lacie, even tries on her clothes when she is out of the apartment, seeking to understand and develop fictional-Lacie’s point-of-view. But as times passes the line between Rose’s life and her art begins to blur, and when she becomes involved with Lacie’s boyfriend, Ian, her life and mental state become increasingly precarious. A dark and psychological novel, Everyone Knows How Much I Love You is a startling account of violence, obsession, and shame. “Everyone Knows How Much I Love You is breathless and precise at once, utterly gripping, animated by the propulsive unfolding of hungers that can’t be controlled or fully fathomed,” writes Leslie Jamison. Kyle McCarthy’s fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, American Short Fiction, and the Harvard Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received support and grants from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Lighthouse Works, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

1. How long did it take you to write Everyone Knows How Much I Love You? 
The earliest files on my computer about a love triangle novel are from 2011, so clearly I’d been kicking around the idea for a while before I began to write in earnest, sometime in 2015. I sold the book about three years later and sent it in for copyediting a year after that, so four years of active writing, after about four years of daydreaming and notes.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Strangely, I think one of the most challenging things was letting people finally read it. I wrote the first few drafts without telling anyone anything about it. I let a good friend read a draft, and then didn’t show it to another soul for another eighteen months. So when it came time to let people into this private world I made, I unexpectedly found it excruciating.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
First thing in the morning, at my dedicated writing desk—almost always. I put my phone on airplane mode and set up my internet blockers the night before. It’s a little extreme, but I find keeping the daily world at bay helps for cultivating that trance-like spell required for writing fiction.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m thinking about hauntings and houses right now: Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Beloved, The Haunting of Hill House. I just finished Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal and loved it. Next up is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Oh, and recently while writing I keep dipping back into Severance by Ling Ma; I admire the heck out of that book.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Nearly every author, but I’ll limit myself to six: Evan James published a brilliant essay collection, I’ve Been Wrong Before, right as the pandemic broke. Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas seared me when I read it. Michelle Huneven is one of the most stylish, witty, and understated writers I know. Jamaica Kincaid is widely read, but I think she should be more widely read. Lore Segal is a national treasure. Finally, César Aira. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is not to be missed.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
These days, it’s distraction, pure and simple. When the pandemic began, my boyfriend moved in to my one bedroom apartment, and solitude became a lot harder to find. The news has been reliably overwhelming. And I have a first book coming out. But I try to write a bit every day. So much of writing is about being gentle but firm with yourself. I try not to blame myself for not composing my masterpiece in quarantine; at the same time, I make sure I make it to the desk each day.

7. What trait do you most value in your editor? 
My editor, Sara Weiss, has the gift of articulating what’s not quite working in a narrative. She has a finely tuned sensor, and she holds me to a high standard. Yet I know that in-house, she’s been a terrific champion of the book from the moment she read it. It’s that mix of passion and rigor that I so value.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, what would you say? 
The girl I really want to talk to is the one writing her first novel, right out of grad school. I’d pick her up by the lapels and say, Stop beating your novel to death. I’d say: Writing is supposed to be fun. Enjoy yourself. Your perfectionism is getting in the way. By the time I started Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, I’d figured this out, which is part of why this book was such a pleasure to write.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
As the recent #publishingpaidme discussion on Twitter has made abundantly clear, publishing needs to fight racism by paying BIPOC authors equitable advances; hiring more BIPOC, especially at higher levels; and generally strengthening its commitment to anti-racism. Publishing is quite literally the storytelling industry; to blame our paucity of voices on the marketplace is a dodge. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
From Marilynne Robinson: Writing is like prayer. You might as well be honest.

Kyle McCarthy, author of Everyone Knows How Much I Love You.  (Credit: Patrick McCarthy)

Ten Questions for Emily Temple

6.16.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Temple, whose debut novel, The Lightness, is out today from William Morrow. High up in the mountains at a place known as the Levitation Center, sixteen-year-old Olivia is searching for answers. One year ago, her father, a dedicated Buddhist, traveled to the center and never returned. Olivia knows he’s probably long gone—off at another retreat or temple or community—but she enrolls in the center’s special summer program for teens all the same. “I thought that if I learned this place, I would also learn him,” Olivia says. “That I too might be transformed. Into what exactly, I didn’t know. Something new and pink-skinned, fresh and holy: a girl worth coming back for.” Shortly after camp begins, she bonds with a trio of girls—Serena, Janet, and Laurel—and the four set out with unique determination to learn the elusive skill of levitation. In tracing their pursuit of this perilous practice, Temple tells a mercurial tale of girlhood, love, and faith. “This remarkable novel is made up of equal parts desire and dread; it constantly surprised me, eerily outpacing my expectations,” writes Garth Greenwell. “The Lightness is a glorious debut.” Emily Temple’s fiction has also appeared in Colorado Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Indiana Review, No Tokens, and other publications. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Virginia, she is the managing editor of Literary Hub and lives in Brooklyn. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Lightness? 
About five years, all told. It began as a short story in the spring of 2014, and I spent the next year expanding it into a novel for my MFA thesis. We sold it in 2018, and edits took about a year. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Sorting out the plot. I experience literature most acutely at the level of the sentence, and that’s where most of my interest is as a writer, too. So it took me a relatively long time to figure out how to herd my characters from A to B—they just kept stopping to look at stuff and make snarky comments to each other. They still do a fair bit of that, to be honest.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write in bed, in the mornings before work and on the weekends. I try to write every day when I’m deep in a project, but it’s also my policy to let myself off the hook if I can tell it’s not going to be a productive day. If I stare at the page for an hour and nothing good is happening, I get to close the computer and read instead. I always write better from a place of joy than I do from a place of discipline, and joy can’t be manufactured.

4. What are you reading right now? 
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Diane Cook! She’s already a beloved writer’s writer, but she should be a household name. The same is true for Mary Robison. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
All the usual things: money, time, myself, and the nonstop attention-seeking of the world around me. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
My agent taught me the following, without ever saying it in quite these words: When in doubt about an element, just cut it—you can always stick it back in later, but probably you’ll realize you don’t miss or need it, and in the end, you’ll be left with nothing but what’s essential to the book. By the time I submitted the novel for the last time, I realized that I had cut more than three times the number of pages I wound up with in the final draft…. Don’t worry, I still have them all.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
It depends on the writer, but in general, I would say yes—if you are lucky enough to get full funding and a stipend. If you have to pay, it’s not worth it. Unless you’re rich, I guess! Then you should probably go to Columbia. For me, the most valuable thing the MFA did was plop me down and tell me to take myself seriously as a writer, which it did over and over again for two years. It worked—but not too well, I hope.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Both my agent and my editor have been enormously helpful and have made this book a million times better with their careful reads and useful suggestions. But at the end of the day, I’m my own most trusted reader. You have to be—it’s the only way to get to the finish line.   

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Robert Frost wrote: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I keep that written on a little card tucked into my mirror. In the same essay, he wrote that “a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” That part isn’t actually advice, of course, but it is also what good novels—and stories and essays—do, and I always strive to achieve it.  

Emily Temple, author of The Lightness.  (Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Rachel Eliza Griffiths

6.9.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whose latest book, Seeing the Body, is out today from W. W. Norton. In poems and self-portraits, Rachel Eliza Griffiths traces her grief in the wake of her mother’s death. She looks closely at her mother’s body—her hands, gestures, language—in both sickness and health, and examines, in turn, how this witnessing of illness and loss affects her own body. “I miss / the mind I had when I had / my mother,” she writes. Beginning and ending in this most intimate loss, Griffiths seeks a new way to be in the world, to continue to make art, fight injustice, and hold onto the loved ones that remain. “Radiantly elegiac, this hybrid work of poetry and photographs is one we all need for living, loving, and letting go,” writes Edwidge Danticat. Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multimedia artist and poet. She is the author of four previous collection of poetry, including Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award. Her literary and visual works have also appeared in various publications, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica. She lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write Seeing the Body?
My mother died in 2014. Maybe I began writing poems, at least fragments, during 2015. I was doing edits right up to the last moment I had to turn in the final copy. The photographs in the book were created within a similar window. That’s around six years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The uneven rhythms of grief don’t allow you to do or to feel life as you did before. Even the writer you were before is altered. It’s unquantifiable. Losing my mother forced me into the most difficult transformation of my life. Each poem drew me further into something I didn’t want to accept, which was that my mother was dead. Slowly, I understood that I also needed to put a lot of things in my life that frightened me to rest so that I could hear my own voice. It took some time for me to say that these poems were becoming a book. I didn’t want to say it.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I make things every day. I write. I work with visual material. Reading is my writing too. Deadlines are my frenemies. Given the current world, so much drains me, but making anything, even dinner, helps. Lately, I find myself needing to rest in ways I didn’t before. Writing is restorative, yes, but it’s taking so much more to get the engine into the air. 

4. What are you reading right now?
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, Jack Whitten’s Notes From the Woodshed, Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Joy Harjo’s How We Became Human, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, and some essays about Joan Mitchell. I keep returning to Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Also, I’m diving into Melville’s Moby Dick again for a project.  

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I want everyone to read Ama Codjoe’s poetry. Read Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press). She’s divine. Read Rio Cortez’s I have learned to define a field as a space between mountains (Jai-Alai Books). Read Aldrin Valdez’s ESL or You Weren’t Here (Nightboat Books). Authors published by Archipelago Press or Alice James Books have my attention.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Trying to do too much at one time. I can hold a constellation of cross-genre projects simultaneously, and work on all of them, but sometimes there are moments when I really must concentrate on one thing. If I don’t then I end up sacrificing the quality of everything. There’s a rhythm to saying Yes and No, whether to myself, or to others, so that I can actually work. 

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I’d ask writers who want an MFA what they think they want from it and how they came to that thinking. But I wouldn’t recommend one thing to all writers because we all need different things. No matter how you’ve come to writing, you are aware you have no idea how any of it will turn out. Except, of course, that you must write—and read. 

Especially right now, many writers can’t afford to go into debt for an MFA—speaking as someone who is still paying for mine—when there are so many resources that can be curated to have community, support, and feedback. There are marvelous MFA programs that will support you. Find them. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Seeing the Body, what would you say?
Be careful with your sadness. I don’t want you to die. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My most trusted reader of my work is myself. After myself, it’s my agent, Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency. Once I’ve gotten the work to a certain point I know she’ll give it her full attention. Her questions help me think and feel through my language and my ideas. Her voice complements my intuition. And she is always truthful, on behalf of what the work wants and needs for its own sake.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
My friend, the incredible and generous poet, Willie Perdomo, once told me to work on my writing in pieces, breaking it down, and do a bit each day. I needed his wisdom. Because I can get overwhelmed. Left to my anxiety, I’ll ambush myself before I even begin because I think I have to know the entire life of a story and that it must be a single breath. But that’s not how we breathe. 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Seeing the Body. 

Ten Questions for Ilana Masad

5.26.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ilana Masad, whose debut novel, All My Mother’s Lovers, is out today from Dutton. Twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause has a complicated relationship with her mother, Iris, who seems to disapprove of her daughter’s androgyny and queerness. But when Iris dies unexpectedly in a car crash, Maggie begins to realize there’s a lot about her mother that she misunderstood. After flying home to assist her father and younger brother with the funeral, Maggie finds that her mother’s will is accompanied by five letters addressed to mysterious men. While her father and brother sit shiva, she sets out on a road trip to deliver the letters and find out what secrets they might keep. As more details of her mother’s life emerge—and the illusion of her parent’s perfect marriage shatters—Maggie must make decisions about what to share with her father and brother, all while juggling her own first relationship. “Ilana Masad’s debut is a queer tour de force,” writes Kristen Arnett. “A tender look at love, relationships, motherhood, and how we oftentimes hurt the people we love most with our silence.” Ilana Masad’s writing can also be found in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, and the Paris Review Daily. She is the host of The Other Stories podcast and the assistant nonfiction editor for Prairie Schooner. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Masad is pursuing her doctorate at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. 

1. How long did it take you to write All My Mother’s Lovers? 
About a year, from the time the characters started rattling around in my brain to when I finished editing it to my own satisfaction. Another six months if we add in edits for my agent and editor. In terms of time spent actually writing during that period? Probably three to four months. I wrote the first half during November 2017, I think—using NaNoWriMo as a way of kicking my ass into gear has always been useful for me—and then wrote for another four weeks in the summer of 2018 during a residency. I rounded out the first draft with a two- or three-week push during October of the same year, let the manuscript sit for a month, and then edited it during December. In between, I was thinking about it a lot, which counts—I think? I hope?—but I wasn’t actively sitting down with it every day.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I’m not sure. It’s a strange exercise, trying to look back at a process that felt alternately thrilling and agonizing in order to pinpoint its most challenging element. I think writing my way through the middle of any project is a drag. There’s this middle third, or maybe even a goodly half—after the first quarter and before the final quarter—where everything just sucks. I don’t know whether my characters are believable anymore, I feel like the plot is a total mess, and there’s a sense of such deep doom and gloom over the whole thing that it feels like I’m willingly dropping myself into a muddy pit without a ladder every time I sit down to write. Since I also wasn’t working on the book consistently due to school and work, I left part of myself down in that pit during the longish breaks I took. But this isn’t the first novel I’ve written—only the first I’ve sold—so I knew that I’d eventually find my way out of that soul-sucking muddy middle area if I stuck with it. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write every day. So do you, I’d wager. I text and I e-mail and I tweet and I WhatsApp and I write papers and I grade and I make to-do lists and maybe journal and possibly write an article or review or listicle or newsletter for work. I do those things anywhere I have my phone or computer with me, because like many people, I have a deeply unhealthy work-life balance in that the Venn diagram of those things is a circle. 

Where, when, and how often do I write creatively? Wherever, whenever, and as often as I can, to be honest, which isn’t saying as much as I’d like, because the reality is that I don’t prioritize creative work nearly as much as I wish I would or could, nor as much as I believe I should. Which is to say, I suppose, that I don’t have particular rituals nor any healthy or actionable habits that I keep to.

4. What are you reading right now? 
A wonderfully strange mix of things! In Praise of Paths: Walking Through Time and Nature by Torbjørn Ekelund, translated by Becky L. Crook, which I’m reviewing; Shadow Distance by Gerald Vizenor, a collection of his writing across various genres, which I’m reading for school; Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience by Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden; and, as an audiobook, Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken—which I’m finding deeply disturbing so far—for research. Last but not least, a friend just leant me Ursula K. Le Guin’s children’s book Catwings which I’ve begun and am deeply enchanted by! 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All the ones who’ve written incredible books—but that’s probably not a helpful answer. Here are some authors whose work I try to push into people’s hands most often, for various reasons: Josephine Johnson, Lindsey Drager, Jacqueline Carey, Helen Oyeyemi, Nella Larsen, Elizabeth Tan, Charles de Lint, China Miéville, Sayed Kashua, Brittany Newell, Edith Pearlman, Dawn Powell, Amy Hempel, Etgar Keret, and I should pause here or I won’t stop. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The practical insecurity that is at the core of what it means to be a working writer. Or, perhaps more accurately, the practical insecurity that is at the core of what it means to be a working writer in the ways that I am capable of and qualified to be. 

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)?
This is actually true of both of them: I most value their kindness and honesty. I feel so deeply, deeply lucky to have such human, humane people working with me who have been able to clearly tell me what needed work in my manuscript, who haven’t sugarcoated or BSed me about the nature of the process, and who, at the same time, I enjoy chatting to on the phone or via e-mail about what we’ve been reading and watching or about how we’re all holding up during this time. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started All My Mother’s Lovers, what would you say? 
Hang in there! You’ll write a book with a plot—that other people also agree is a plot—one day! 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My mom. Because I love her and she’s been working as a writer and editor and freelancer in a bajillion industries and is wise and funny and warm and has a wonderful critical eye and I think she’s rad. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Writing is work, and you have to sit your butt down in that chair and actually write in order to get better. 

Ilana Masad, author of All My Mother’s Lovers. 

(Credit: Joshua A. Redwine)

Ten Questions for Kate Zambreno

5.19.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kate Zambreno, whose latest novel, Drifts, is out today from Riverhead Books. The narrator of Drifts is a writer at work on a long-overdue manuscript. She lives an active creative life—she corresponds with fellow writers, photographs and documents obsessively, analyzes the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Albrecht Dürer, and writes exquisitely of her terrier, Genet—yet the various pieces of her life seem to conspire against her most important work on the page. Taking long walks around her New York City neighborhood, she searches for a new way to talk about and make art. “What is the landscape you’re working in, I start to ask other writers…rather absurdly,” she says. “A better question to ask, though, than What are you writing? Or What is your book about?” Her questions, notes, walks—and a number of dramatic, unexpected disturbances—gradually give rise to a shift and new understanding. “Kate Zambreno’s writing is mysterious, unclassifiable, and yet intimate and familiar too,” writes Jenny Zhang. “Reading her is like looking through a kaleidoscope—the world is at once more beautiful and more terrifying.” Kate Zambreno is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including Screen Tests, Heroines, and Green Girl. Her writing can also be found in BOMB, the Paris Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other outlets. She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

1. How long did it take you to write Drifts? 
I started writing through this elegiac, hungover period as soon as Heroines was published eight years ago in essays that were prodromal to Drifts. Soon after I moved to New York City, I began compiling the notes and journals that would later be the raw material for the novel. I’ve probably been intensely working on and revising the book for five to six years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
It was challenging to sell a novel to my editor, Cal Morgan, who was then at Harper Perennial, when it was just a concept, more of a longing for a potential book rather than anything materialized. Then I had to figure out what the book was and how to write it once I was under a contract. And then of course life got in the way and Drifts became about life getting in the way. I had to then sell this draft of what became quite a different book to Cal again once he moved to Riverhead. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
If you were going to ask the person who wrote most of Drifts, the answer would have been on train rides to teach class, and in my notebook in coffee shops, and during the summer and December when I’m not teaching, in concentrated periods of working in my office and lazing around in bed or on the couch. But the answer right now, with a toddler, is in periods of intense activity when I have a deadline, which is often why I give myself a deadline, and in notebooks in moments snatched while in bed or on the couch, and often not at all. I often don’t write much, but I try to at least think about my project or something relating to writing once a day, to confront it in some way.   

4. What are you reading right now? 
Moyra Davey’s Index Cards, an anthology of her essays and books that New Directions is publishing at the end of May—I love Davey’s intensely referential work, her essays that are about reading and the lives of others, both her written texts as well as her accompanying video works.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Sofia Samatar, who is one of the major correspondents within the world of Drifts. She is extremely respected within the fantasy world, but I wished everyone read her stories that read like essays and her nonfiction that reads like speculative fiction. Her recent nonfiction manuscript, The White Mosque, is as brilliant and as sui generis as anything by W. G. Sebald or Olga Tokarczuk. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
I know some might look at my life right now and answer “motherhood”—but I don’t think that’s it, actually. I think in some ways I’ve written more since becoming a parent than before, mostly because time has more meaning and weight to it now. The real answer I think is capitalism and the precarity that comes with it. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
The book has gone through many permutations on its way to being published. I think in the process of trying to get it published over the past two years, what has stuck with me is everyone’s reliance on the concept of “autofiction,” and reading Drifts within that context, which is a newly remodeled historical concept with which I don’t really connect. The tradition I see Drifts as existing within ranges from American New Narrative to French writers like Hervé Guibert or Marguerite Duras, or writers like W. G. Sebald or Robert Walser, or my contemporaries like Bhanu Kapil and Moyra Davey, rather than this contemporary trend of calling certain types of fiction that’s seemingly autobiographically-based as autofiction. One editor rejected the book by telling my agent he was bored with autofiction. Another actually, a male editor of a blue-chip small press, told me he was freaked out by the pregnant narrator, although maybe, he wrote, that could have just been him and his own discomfort. Yeah, maybe. 

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
I find this concept of “comps” or comparisons that I think I’m referring to in the previous question as pretty poisonous actually—that to get published by a larger press you must present your work in direct comparison with a work that’s been commercially and critically successful, preferably a bestseller. It waters down work to have it compared to everything else published recently, especially the onus on it selling well. I’m tired of everything being compared to what’s been out just the past five years, in general. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My most trusted reader is my partner John Vincler, who always has given everything I’ve written a first read for the past fifteen years and who I can count on to say whether he thinks something is good or bad, interesting or not that interesting. He’s also a talented line editor. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
It sounds a little nutty coming from someone who’s been teaching writing for more than a decade, but I’m mistrustful of writing advice in general—which relates to my irritation that writers are now expected to be sages. But I have noticed that the writers who are willing to revise their work substantially are eventually able to get their work to do what they want it to, and to find someone willing to publish it.

Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts. 

(Credit: Heather Sten)

Ten Questions for Cooper Lee Bombardier

5.12.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Cooper Lee Bombardier, whose memoir-in-essays, Pass With Care, will be published on June 9 by Dottir Press. (Previously scheduled to be released today, the publication date was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.) Writing over the course of two decades, Cooper Lee Bombardier charts his coming into his identity as trans and as an artist. He remembers conversations with friends, road trips, gigs, loves, sex, and loss. No matter the subject, Bombardier models how to tell a story on one’s own terms: He shifts from poems to prose, from memory to theory and back again. A record of bygone eras—notably the queer punk scene of nineties San Francisco—Pass With Care is equally a contemporary political text that wrestles with questions of queerness, transness, and masculinity as they unfold today and into the future. “Bombardier leads with curiosity and vulnerability, unveiling a story of possibilities and resilience, and shining a light on a self who has learned ‘how to make freedom,’” writes Carter Sickels. Cooper Lee Bombardier’s writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Malahat Review, Ninth Letter, BOMB, Longreads, and the Rumpus, among other outlets. His work has also featured in numerous anthologies, including The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Healthcare and Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Speculative Fiction From Transgender Writers, which won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. 

1. How long did it take you to write Pass With Care? 
Writing Pass With Care took both twenty years and two years. The book spans over two decades of writing coalesced around the theme of gender, but the process of pulling this collection of writings—many in different tones or structural forms—into a cohesive volume was a two-year process with my publishing team. I’d gone from self-taught to a much more experienced writer over those two decades, and it was important to bring the various pieces into conversation with each other, and to connect them along a narrative arc, even if it is an intuitive one. My publisher’s vision for the book really took it beyond what I’d even imagined it could be.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
It was challenging to figure out how to place work operating with different formal concerns in an adjacency that cohered and flowed, but the team at Dottir had such a great ability to see the big picture and to create a broader structure for the collection. 

It’s challenging to keep faith that the world wants to read trans stories written by actual trans people. Another thing that was challenging was adding a never-before-published essay investigating moments of personal failure, healing, and accountability. It is a vulnerable thing to expose one’s least-glamorous moments to the scrutiny of the page, but all of the artists and writers who’ve impacted my life have done exactly that, so I trust in their example that this is work worth doing. 

It’s also a pretty bizarre time to have one’s first book come out. As my in-person May/June book launch events got canceled, at first I felt pretty bummed out, but then I realized that in the scope of things, my book launch is by far not the most important thing, even if it is the apogee of years of work. At the same time, these many weeks of isolation has reinforced the importance of books, of artists and writers, in our lives. Art makes the unbearable bearable, and so I hope we’ll all do what we can to support authors and artists during this strange, sad time. Tuning in for a virtual reading, buying a book, supporting your local indie bookstore, posting a book review online, chipping in for an author’s Patreon, buying art or taking a class from a favorite artist…these are little things we can do to keep authors and artists going.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I have a tiny office in my house where I write. I also sometimes like to work in a busy café. Since the pandemic hit, this of course has not been an option. I make my living as a writer and what this looks like is that I teach in a low-residency MFA program and sometimes teach part time at other universities, I do freelance writing and editing, I get paid to give talks and guest lectures, I tutor students in a university writing center—one of the most rewarding parts of my writing work—and I sometimes get paid for the actual writing. So, my writing process has had to be adaptable to whatever else I have going on. This means that I often work on shorter projects like essays and interviews during the school year, and work on more in-depth projects like book manuscripts during times I can totally sink in, like writing residencies. Right now, I’m done with the school year and, because of self-quarantine, I’ve really needed structure, so I am writing every day from 9 AM to noon, Monday through Friday. I can get a bit manic and intense with the book I’m working on, so taking the afternoons to work on my editing gigs and other projects is helpful. And it’s important to me to figure out how to work from home without always working, hence the weekend off from all work whenever possible. The break also helps what I wrote during the week congeal a bit. I find that useful.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Later by Paul Lisicky, Funeral Rites by Jean Genet, and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
The novelist, essayist, and poet Ryka Aoki should be read by everyone. She’s so gifted in any form she touches. Her novel He Mele A Hilo: A Hilo Song is a work of brilliant, fabulist generosity. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Capitalism. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
When we embarked upon the editorial process, my publisher told me, “You’re not alone,” and this felt like such a gift when so much of writing is solitary and there is so much quiet space to doubt and headfuck oneself about the work. I felt very supported as we transformed the manuscript from what seemed like a bristling bale of hay into a book that I feel really proud of. 

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
As a subset of the broader culture, publishing is in no way immune to the discrimination, biases, and favoritism that arises out of a white supremacist, inherently misogynist, cis-centric society. I’d change not only the demographics of who primarily gets published—and paid well—but also who occupies seats of power and decision-making in publishing.  

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
I’ve had the luck of working with many incredible editors through the various outlets that have published my work, but my most frequent and consistent reader is my wife. She’s my biggest fan, but she is also immune to my tricks and will take me to task about anything she questions in my work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I guess it would be an amalgam of what a few writing heroes of mine have told me: There is no one “writer’s life,” and in fact the mythological writer’s life is pretty much just that—a myth. The writer who writes around the kids’ naps and a day job is just as much a writer as the one who gets seven-figure advances and has no other demands on their time.

Cooper Lee Bombardier, author of Pass With Care. 

Ten Questions for John Elizabeth Stintzi

5.5.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features John Elizabeth Stintzi, whose debut novel, Vanishing Monuments, is out today from Arsenal Pulp Press. When the assisted living facility call to inform Alani Baum that their mother’s dementia has worsened, they immediately pack their car and begin the drive north from Minneapolis to Winnipeg. Alani ran away from Manitoba and their mother nearly thirty years ago, but something tells them if they don’t go back now, they never will. Moving back into their mother’s empty home, Alani is confronted with difficult memories. A photographer, they wrestle with how to hold onto this place, whether and how to document its rooms, and when to let go. Alani has “a history of doing things far too late, of running from one burning building into another’s sparking start,” but they persist all the same. “Vanishing Monuments is a beautiful portrait of disassociation at once between countries, family, gender, identities,” writes Joshua Whitehead. “An absolute monumental achievement of a first novel.” John Elizabeth Stintzi is also the author of a poetry collection, Junebat, which was published by House of Anansi Press in April. Their writing can be found in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and the Malahat Review, among other outlets. Born and raised in northwestern Ontario, they are the recipient of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. 

1. How long did it take you to write Vanishing Monuments? 
I technically began writing it in the spring of 2014, back when it was a short story that refused to end, but I didn’t really start treating it as a novel until the summer of 2015. So the intense, intentional work of writing and rewriting the novel took about four years—with many setbacks along the way.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
It took me a very long time, and many iterations, to find the form of Vanishing Monuments. Many earlier attempts at writing it—after it failed to be a short story—were far more experimental than the final novel. I tried writing the novel as a series of letters-never-sent, as an artist’s journal, and as various other more conventional forms that fell apart before I could finish a draft. Once I learned about the mnemonic technique “the memory palace” in graduate school, I had a eureka moment. I realized that technique—and Alani’s mother’s house—could be used as the blueprint to structure the narrative, and I was finally able to tell the entirety of Alani’s story.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write mostly at home, either on our tiny dinner table or at my desk in the sunroom—a sentence that makes our apartment sound significantly fancier than it is. I mostly write before noon, because that’s usually when my mood is lightest and when I’m the most caffeinated. As the day goes on it gets more difficult to start writing, as often I’ll have darkened from the fact that I’ve not yet written. It’s easy to convince me to feel hopeless.

If I’m working on a project, and I’m immersed in it, I can write every day with ease, unless I’m teaching or otherwise occupied. I thankfully work pretty part-time/sporadically these days, which gives me many flexible days in a week. That said, I’ve been having a bit of a dry spell over the last year between teaching and the editing I had to do with Vanishing Monuments and Junebat—my poetry debut, which is also out this season—and since most of the writing work I need to do are revisions of my second and third novel manuscripts. It’s always a little harder to get excited about revision, but I’m working on it, and I’m hopeful.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading my partner’s novel draft, which is always an exciting time, and also Ivan Coyote’s new Rebent Sinner and Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian). Next on my list is Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I recently read Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel, which came out in 2010 but was just rereleased by Coffee House, and having finished it I was instantly angry that it took ten years for me to discover that book. Yamashita has obviously published a lot of books, which I’m now starting to get into, but I Hotel completely blew me away and I know I’ll be thinking about it for a very long time. More people need to find her, and especially I Hotel, which refuses to be irrelevant despite being set in the sixties and seventies. Aside from Yamashita, I’ll add T Fleischmann as someone who deserves a wider audience, because their book Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through is one of the finest and most exciting nonfiction books I’ve ever read. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Probably my ability to balance working and writing. As I said earlier, the last year has been a challenge to my writing practice, since in the fall I was teaching three courses while I was also editing and proofing both of my books, and this spring I’ve been getting caught up in marketing. It’s been a challenge finding a routine in the irregularity of this new life I’m living. These impediments are compounded, of course, by my depression, which has always been and will always be the most indefatigable impediment I face. 

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
I’d love to have more limited book advances for bigger writers—who will make money hand-over-fist in royalties, anyway—in favor of funding more risk-taking projects, specifically with under-privileged writers, in particular, trans femmes of color, who are the least represented in publishing, and not because they don’t write. I’d also love to see cultural shifts happen in publishing houses that would allow people of color and other marginalized people to actually be able to create long-term careers in publishing, which I believe would have to be achieved by paying people in publishing a living wage, which could be accomplished by taking strides to decentralize the industry to cities that have affordable costs of living. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Vanishing Monuments, what would you say? 
You have no idea how much this book is going to change your relationship to your life. Don’t be shocked when you realize that despite the fact that you tried to write a character that was pretty different from you, all you really did was write yourself.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
For a majority of my work, especially my short fiction, my partner, Melanie, is my first reader, alongside a select few other trusted friends, but for novels specifically my friend Tony Wei Ling, the managing editor and a fiction editor for Nat. Brut, has been instrumental in giving me thoughtful and challenging feedback. I’ve been lucky to work with him both on an early draft of Vanishing Monuments as well as the surreal novel I’m currently working on, which is either going to be my second or third. His readings have been truly transformative for both books and he always pushes against the shortcuts I tend to naturally take in writing. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Write what you do not know, which I think is particularly helpful because—not to sound too much like Socrates—I’m not really convinced that anyone knows anything. Also, pay attention to your verbs. 

John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments. 

(Credit: Melanie Pierce)

Ten Questions for Rufi Thorpe

4.24.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rufi Thorpe, whose novel The Knockout Queen is out today from Knopf. Set in a rapidly gentrifying suburb of Los Angeles, The Knockout Queen concerns neighbors and unlikely friends Bunny Lampert and Michael Hesketh. Bunny and Michael have lived next to each other for years and attend the same school, but they only begin to talk to each other after Bunny catches Michael smoking in her yard in the tenth grade. Bunny is wealthy, the daughter of a successful real estate agent, and lives in an upscale mansion, while Michael lives with his aunt in a small stucco cottage next door. Despite their surface-level differences, both are outsiders: The unusually tall Bunny, who lost her mother and whose well-to-do father struggles with alcoholism, is desperately lonely, such that Michael observes, “her loneliness was so palpable as to be a taste in the air.” Michael is wrestling with his own family troubles, while also coming to term with his sexuality. Darkly comic and fiercely intelligent, The Knockout Queen documents the unique intensity of their friendship, and the aftermath of an act of violence that shakes both their lives. “A blistering, brilliant look at friendship and violence, suburbia and class, all told by one of the most observant, engaging narrators I’ve read in a very long time. This book is going to stay with me,” writes Grant Ginder. Rufi Thorpe is the author of a previous novel, The Girls From Corona del Mar, which was longlisted for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A graduate of the University of Virginia MFA program, Thorpe lives in Los Angeles. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Knockout Queen? 
I wrote a book about Bunny Lampert ten years ago and shelved it. It was a completely different plot, but the character is recognizably the same. This current iteration took me about three years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I was at a real low point in terms of confidence in myself as an artist when I started, and so I decided to write whatever I wanted. It felt too scary to try to write something good, so I just let it rip, and the book has a lot of urgency to it as a result. Which is to say, there was nothing hard about writing it, it was more like finally giving in to some terrible force.   

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I am working on a book, I write pretty much every day, semi-recumbent on my living room sofa, my laptop balanced on my knees so I can watch the crows in the avocado tree and see if the neighbors do anything interesting. I reheat the same cup of coffee thirty times until it is vile with a gummy film on top. When I am not working on a book, I go into a reading frenzy. There are just so many fascinating things to learn about. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’ve gotten really interested in the future of war and weapons development, so I read Future War by Robert Latiff, but now I’m reading Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan, which is fascinating. Novel wise, I just finished Perfect Tunes, Emily Gould’s new book, and it was pure pleasure.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Joseph Kertes. His books are simply astonishing—luminous and wise and make-people-in-public-think-you’re-crazy funny. I once peed myself a little in a Greek Café. How many writers can say their books made people pee in cafés? Not many. Start with Last Impressions because it just came out, but make sure to read The Afterlife of Stars as well! 

6. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
On our first phone call about the book, my editor told me she also had been obsessed with RuPaul in high school and had a huge poster of him in her room—my characters Bunny and Michael are devoted to Ru, and I have always been a fan. I am sure the drag community has mixed feelings about their ardent teen girl fans, and obviously drag is bigger and more complex than what it meant to me at fifteen, but what a lifeline it was to see female beauty taken apart and put back together again, to see the harshest criticisms and the importance of self-love side by side. When teen girls love a thing, oh man, they love it hard, and I felt like I could see the ghost of my editor as a teenage girl and the ghost of me as a teenage girl, all the beds we flopped on and ceilings we stared at trying to figure out how to be a person. Chewing on the ends of our hair, watching RuPaul on TV, feeling the itchy, inflamed yearning and numb doubt that perhaps all teenage girls since the beginning of time have felt. 

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
If you can go without going into debt, then it is basically a free two years to try to figure yourself out, but in my experience you learn how to write novels by writing novels, not from workshop. But it can be nice to make friends, and it is less depressing than waitressing because it allows you to maintain important delusions about yourself. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Knockout Queen, what would you say? 
Have fun. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My mother reads everything I write and she is a brilliant editor. Because she is my mother, she is willing to be gentle to the tender, blistered skin of a work in progress—a true boon.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Oh, there are too many, I would love to compile them all like a spoon collection, but I suppose the most central one for me is that Annie Dillard quote: “One of the things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”

Rufi Thorpe, author of The Knockout Queen. 

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Frances Cha

4.21.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Frances Cha, whose debut novel, If I Had Your Face, is out today from Ballantine Books. If I Had Your Face is told from four points-of-view: Kyuri, Miho, Ara, and Wonna, four young women who all live in the same apartment building, each struggling to make their way in contemporary Seoul. Kyuri works at one of the city’s most expensive room salons where she entertains wealthy businessmen; Miho, Kyuri’s roommate, is an artist who has recently returned from school in New York City; Ara, who lives across the hall, works as a hair stylist; and Wonna, one floor below, is trying to have a baby with her husband. Shifting between her various narrators, Cha illustrates how each character contends with poverty, patriarchy, and increasingly impossible beauty standards. As the characters weather the heartache and stress of daily life, they find enduring strength in their friendships. “Each voice in this quartet cuts through the pages so cleanly and clearly that the overall effect is one of dangerously glittering harmony,” writes Helen Oyeyemi. Frances Cha is a former travel and culture editor for CNN International in Seoul and Hong Kong. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, V Magazine, and the Believer, among other outlets. A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia University MFA program, Cha lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

1. How long did it take you to write If I Had Your Face? 
From the first word on the page to publication day, it’s taken ten years. For the first half of that decade I was working full time and in the second half I had two children, so I was writing while being a stay-at-home mom. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Mustering up the bravado to continue writing for years in the dark when it felt like no one cared except for me. Since I was writing a novel set in contemporary Korea, and I had not seen another novel set in contemporary Korea come out from an American publishing house, I was also very afraid of the chances of making it past the gatekeepers. In the past, the few times I had brought up a book with Korean themes to people in the publishing industry, they had shaken their heads and said that the readership would be too small. The entire time before my book deal felt like I was writing with terrible heartburn. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
In Korea, where most of this book was written, my favorite place to write was at study cafés, which are usually used by high school students cramming for the college entrance exam. In every room there is a white noise machine, humidity is controlled, everyone gets their own carrel, and there’s free tea, coffee, juice, and a separate kitchen, and it costs $1.50 an hour. Pure, silent heaven. 

In Brooklyn I write at home in the mornings when my kids are at school and then walk about thirty minutes to a writer’s workspace in the afternoons. It’s a fifth-floor walkup next to a highway and the desk I write at rattles when trucks go by, but it is my favorite place in New York. I need three things to write: snacks, drinks, and silence. I try to write every weekday. 

When I used to live in Manhattan, I wrote in laundry rooms, hotel lobbies, apartment lobbies, and diners. All with sirens going off in the distance—we lived on the same street as a hospital—and music playing loudly above my head and bathrooms that I needed to ask for keys at the front desk. That was miserable in retrospect, but I was too desperate to know better. 

4. What are you reading right now?
And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass. A Winter Book by Tove Jansson. The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung. A lot of magical children’s picture books too: The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken, Cloud Bread by Baek Hee-na, and Being Edie Is Hard Today by Ben Brashares. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Tove Jansson’s Moomin books for children are astonishing to read even as an adult. Full of wistfulness, longing, whimsical characters, and truly imaginative plots. She is a brilliant writer. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My urge to try to be a good mother. Oh, and this global pandemic. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Both my agent, Theresa Park, and my editor, Jennifer Hershey, are working moms of two and the most surprising and moving thing about working with them is how they always look out for me when it comes to balancing family needs with writing. They tell me to take care of myself first, which has been so comforting when I am constantly being hit with panic attacks for one reason or another—family emergencies, publishing in a pandemic, etcetera. And it is so encouraging to hear that they think I have a long career ahead of me, which in turns makes me consumed with the desire to not let them down. 

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Cautiously yes, because it is a signal and a commitment to yourself that you have to do this or die. 

9. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started If I Had Your Face, what would you say? 
“You should really exercise more. Because writing requires perseverance and health. Read Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Also, everything you’re writing right now is going to be edited or cut anyway, so stop poring over every word so painstakingly and being precious about it.”

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I used to reread Ann Patchett’s essay “The Getaway Car” whenever I got discouraged. There’s something wonderfully reassuring about her stories about waitressing at TGI Fridays while working on her first novel. It’s also packed with practical writing advice that I take to heart: 

“Even if you’re writing a book that jumps around in time, has ten points of view, and is chest deep in flashbacks, do your best to write it in the order in which it will be read, because it will make the writing, and the later editing, incalculably easier.” 

“Time applied equaled work completed.” 

“Make it hard. Set your sights on something that you aren’t quite capable of doing, whether artistically, emotionally, or intellectually. You can also go for broke and take on all three.”

Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face.

(Credit: Mia Jang)

Ten Questions for Ho Sok Fong and Natascha Bruce

by

Staff

4.14.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ho Sok Fong and Natascha Bruce, the author and the translator of the story collection Lake Like a Mirror, which is out today from Two Lines Press. In precise, unassuming prose, Ho Sok Fong draws readers into the world of her stories detail by detail. The scenes at first appear familiar, but gradually slip into the surreal. In one story, an old woman becomes increasingly thin until others are able to see through her skin, even observe “the air passing magically over her throat.” In another, a man arrives at the same guesthouse every day and asks to book a room, but in such a way that it becomes clear that, each time, he thinks it is his first visit. Vividly imagined, Lake Like a Mirror offers an intimate exploration of individual lives, while speaking broadly to issues of politics, gender, urbanization, and many other themes. In this interview, both the author and the translator were invited to respond to the same set of questions. Ho Sok Fong is the author of a previous story collection, Maze Carpet. She is the recipient of the Chiu Ko Fiction Prize, the China Times Short Story Prize, and the United Press Short Story Prize. Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her previous translations include Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon, individual short stories by Dorothy Tse, and, with Nicky Harman, A Classical Tragedy by Xu Xiaobin. 

1. How long did it take you to complete work on Lake Like a Mirror? 
Ho Sok Fong: Almost eleven years. The stories were written at different times, in different places, with the earliest, “The Wall,” written while I was living in Petaling Jaya, a city near Kuala Lumpur. During this period, I wrote all kinds of short fiction. Of all the pieces I wrote, nine stories seemed to speak to one another somehow, and I gathered them together to make Lake Like a Mirror. The stories also share a geographical connection to Southeast Asia and Taiwan.

Natascha Bruce: One year or four, depending on how you look at it. It can take quite a lot of work to be able to start work on a translation. In 2015 I e-mailed Sok Fong to ask if I could theoretically, one day, translate one of the stories; in 2018 we signed a contract to translate all of them; by early 2019 we had tied up most of the edits. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about the project?
Ho Sok Fong: I am attracted to topics that resist categorization. I didn’t want the Lake Like a Mirror stories to reach neat conclusions. I hoped they could lay open the gray area—the crease, the playground—that exists between apparent binaries, such as approval and rejection, or fidelity and betrayal. Desire is very subtle, I feel; it plays hide-and-seek with us, and I wanted to write about hide-and-seek.

So one challenge was how to write open-ended stories that were grounded as much as possible in concrete events, settings, objects, and vocabulary but also expressed the paradoxes and ambiguities inherent to their context. I tried to write stories that could be interpreted in many possible ways, while at the same time allowing all these possibilities to hold together. Even if a reader does not pick up on all the clues between the layers, there should still be a story there to read.

Natascha Bruce: Like most translators, I think, I worried all the time about the parts that I didn’t know I was missing. I couldn’t be the reader who didn’t pick up on the clues between the layers, because I needed to make sure that they didn’t vanish completely in English. The parts I struggled with were almost a relief; I knew to pay attention to those. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Ho Sok Fong: I used to change jobs and move every three or four years. For over a decade I was writing in different places, including Taiwan, Singapore, and towns all over Malaysia. 

After my master’s I went back to my hometown for a while, and I often think of that as one of my calmest and most focused periods of work. Things seemed to be decaying all around me, and I felt lonely and frail, but also cleansed. It was just my mother and I living together, and it was almost as though we were married. She got up in the morning and went food shopping in the pasar, and when she came back we would prepare lunch together in the kitchen. After lunch, once the dishes were washed and put away, I would sit at the kitchen table and write until evening.

Natascha Bruce: I translate full time, which used to mean “all the time,” but lately I have been striving for balance. I read that Ursula Le Guin gave herself permission to be very stupid after 8:00 PM, and that struck me as a good idea—a cut-off point. I moved to Chile last year and, before the virus came, I translated mostly from the Biblioteca Nacional, where the opening hours kept me in sync with a working day. These days, of course, I translate from home: My girlfriend and I alternate weeks between who gets the desk and who gets the kitchen table. 

4. What are you reading right now?
Ho Sok Fong: Most of the time I’m reading for my novel, which means books about rainforest vegetation—although I’m not planning to write about plants—and historical accounts of the May 13 incident in 1969, when racial riots broke out in Kuala Lumpur.

I’ve also been reading YZ Chin’s story collection, Though I Get Home. It caught me from the first story, how it links community-led anti-pornographic task forces with the high-level surveillance carried out by the Malaysian government, the two sides united by their absurd preoccupation with the female body. It’s how political writing should be.

Lastly, I’m working through the poetry collection Tell Me, Kenyalang, by an Indigenous Sarawak poet called Kulleh Grasi, translated into English by Pauline Fan. Grasi’s language is very hybrid, blending Malay with Indigenous words, and he draws a lot on local myths—I find this an exciting enhancement to Malay-language literature.

Natascha Bruce: The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha, translated from Indonesian by Stephen Epstein. Conceivably it is now all I’ll ever read, because it’s a choose-your-own-adventure and the possibilities seem endless. I compulsively backtrack. I keep thinking to myself how remarkable it is that before this I read novels and took no responsibility at all, the author just told me what was going to happen, and I went along with it. 

5. Which writer, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ho Sok Fong: The Japanese writer Minako Ōba. She compares the process of writing to spinning, and the resulting invisible thread to feelings and emotions. Her rewritings of Japanese folktales, as well as her novels, are told from a gendered perspective, of a woman’s bodily experience; she writes of the alienation of existing as a woman in the world. I think she might be the most accomplished Japanese writer of her generation, although her fame pales in comparison to that of, say, Yukio Mishima or Haruki Murakami. It’s hard to believe how few of her novels have been translated. Even the ones that exist in English seem to be out of print.

There’s also the Taiwanese writer Tong Wei-ger. I love his novel Summer Downpour. It’s like a long prose poem, entirely without plot or dramatic arc, and yet, when you finish reading, you feel as if you’ve read the whole of One Hundred Years of Solitude. There’s that shivery, melancholy feeling of an era coming to an end, of everything withering away.

Natascha Bruce: Preeta Samarasan. I read Evening Is the Whole Day during the final months of translating Lake Like a Mirror and still regret not acting on my impulse to write Preeta a fan letter gushing about her language. 

6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry?
Ho Sok Fong: From a narrative perspective, a change I and other Southeast Asian writers are striving for is to recast and unshackle from tradition. We want to challenge readers; for them to experience stories as if they are participating in them as the narrative unfolds. We want to explore difference, and to demonstrate what is possible within the short story form.

Natascha Bruce: I am hesitant to mention money here, but I realize this is part of the problem—for translators, I wish there were less hesitancy around mentioning pay, more transparency about it, a greater acknowledgement of how most people cannot do without it, and need it to be enough, and need it to be on time. And already, I feel the urge to add the caveat, “I know no one forces us to do this! It is a privilege to choose to translate!” It is a privilege, but I don’t think it should be. At least not in the sense that you can only do it if you are lucky enough to be able to withstand either the precarity or the intensity of managing several jobs at once. We need translations and a more diverse pool of people to be able to do them. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Ho Sok Fong: When we were working on the English translation, the editor mentioned that, as the book shifted language and region, a lack of cultural context might mean readers struggled to appreciate it. And when the translation came out, I could see what she meant. At first I found this hard and felt a little defeated. I thought perhaps the editor was being gentle with me. That perhaps it wasn’t just a matter of geographical or cultural divides. That because of the existence of these divides, I’d written in a so-called minor way, making it even more difficult for any outsider to appreciate. I even considered whether, in the future, I ought to try something different: Without losing the artistic vision, or the underlying complexity of the work, could I write in such a way that anyone could read it, from across any divide, and understand what I was trying to say? But I’m not sure this is possible. My invisible reader comes from books I’ve read, and from here in Malaysia, where I am. Though I can also accept this invisible reader is not fixed; they’re always changing, can always be provoked.

Natascha Bruce: Our U.K. editor, Ka Bradley, wrote in her editorial note that “The Chest” was “an incredibly sensitive portrayal of grief and the ways we hold onto it,” and this completely changed my relationship to the story. I had been so homed in on finding the words for Sok Fong’s words that I had pushed aside the feeling beneath them. Now, even mentioning the title makes me feel like I’ve swallowed a water balloon.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life?
Ho Sok Fong: When I lose confidence. 

Or when I try to guard against my own shortcomings by expressing them in writing—although, then again, this last point can also end up inspiring me to write more.

Natascha Bruce: When I was eight a friend told me that she liked a painting I’d done in art class, but I hated the painting so much that I assumed she was making fun of me, and I ripped it in half. It would be a tremendous help to my creative life if I could break this pattern of behavior.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
Ho Sok Fong: I rarely show my work to anyone before it’s published. Most of the time I send it straight to the publisher. Maybe it’s because I worry about losing creative authority. Maybe friends are reluctant to point out weaknesses in my work because they worry about losing the friendship. In my experience, discussions among writers here stick to literature, more generally; to the “literariness” of fiction, and all those other “-ness” qualities it can have. 

That said, I do share work with one friend, Low Swee Lan, a Malaysian living in Beijing. She is a writer herself, publishing serialized novels online. Occasionally, I’ll e-mail her stories of mine once they’ve come out. She’s perhaps the only friend I trust to give my work her full attention and offer me an honest opinion. I don’t know whether it’s intuition or sharp observation, but she always seems to know exactly where I’m struggling and how I can fix the places where things are stretched too thinly. She’s very incisive and she compels me to reconsider my creative choices. Even when I don’t immediately agree with her, the points she make stay with me, and I find myself mulling them over for a long time afterwards.

Natascha Bruce: For one glorious year, Jeremy Tiang—a fellow Chinese translator, but also author, playwright, editor—was my translation mentor, and he read almost everything that I translated. This is no longer the case, sadly for me, but he is still a reader I write to when I just cannot think what to do with a word, or a sentence. Early on in the mentorship, alongside a particularly convoluted mixed metaphor, he left me the comment, “I’m not sure a shark could pat itself on the back.” Ever since, this is always on my mind during edits: Am I trying to make a shark pat itself on the back?

10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard?
Ho Sok Fong: Local, nonfiction materials, written into fiction, are their own, unique form of creativity.

Natascha Bruce: It might not be the best I’ve ever heard, and it certainly isn’t the most appropriate for this moment in time, but the advice I most often need to hear is: You’ve got to get out. Take a walk. At the very least, these days, leave the screen and stand by a window. So much work can happen while you’re not working. I think this is instinctive for some people, but I always have to remind myself; otherwise I end up stuck and hunched and ripping everything in half.

Editor’s Note: Ho Sok Fong’s answers appear in translation from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce.

Ho Sok Fong and Natascha Bruce, the author and the translator of Lake Like a Mirror. 

Ten Questions for Krista Franklin

4.7.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Krista Franklin, whose new hybrid work of poems and visual art, Too Much Midnight, is out today from Haymarket Books. The collection is the latest title in the BreakBeat Poet Series, which celebrates “work that brings the aesthetic of hip-hop practice to the page.” In the pages of Too Much Midnight, Franklin builds upon and explodes the parameters of this aesthetic in order to excavate the intersection of poetics, popular culture, and the African Diaspora. She shifts effortlessly between historical vignettes and nods to modern figures such as Toni Morrison and Lil’ Kim; she obscures and reveals newspaper clippings and other found text with paint and cut photographs; she writes in prose poems, then tight stanzas. In troubling every possible boundary, those that others might not even think to disturb, Franklin cultivates and demonstrates the possibility of creative liberation. “Too Much Midnight is a refreshing and all-consuming text,” writes Hanif Abdurraqib. “This is work of uplift, of persistence, of dreams for a new horizon and a better world beyond it.” Krista Franklin is also the author of the chapbook, Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012), and the hybrid work, Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018). Her visual art has been exhibited nationally and her writing has appeared in BOMB, Callaloo, and Poetry, among other outlets. Born in Dayton, she lives and works in Chicago.  

1. How long did it take you to write Too Much Midnight? 
The writing and art that appears in Too Much Midnight was created in an eighteen-year time span. It took a little over twenty years to accumulate the work, piece it together—with a lot of direction from my editors at Haymarket, Maya Marshall and Kevin Coval—and publish it.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I didn’t set out to write Too Much Midnight—it’s a book that formed over time. I’m certain there were thousands of challenges along the way, but the biggest challenge for me to accomplish any project is working to keep myself out of the way. I’m a master procrastinator.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Mostly I write where I live. Occasionally I write in museums or art spaces. “When” is a fantastic question. At this point in my life I write very sporadically. My visual art practice takes up a lot of physical, mental, and emotional real estate, so the writing happens in bursts, or when someone commissions me to write. The most writing I tend to do these days is presentation essays about my art practice, which generates a great deal of anxiety for me. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished You by Caroline Kepnes. Now I’m reading A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Metta Sáma. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Visual art, maybe, but since some of my writing is fueled by visual art—by others as well as my own—that may not be accurate. 

7. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
An extraordinary amount of patience. There’s a lot of emotionally-driven histrionics on my part, so any editor or curator who works with me has to be patient, thick-skinned, and adaptable. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Too Much Midnight, what would you say? 
I probably wouldn’t say anything to an earlier me. I think I’d be too preoccupied with listening to what earlier me had to say. I tend to get hypnotized by the past, so I would more than likely interview my earlier self in search of who-knows-what.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
I am. My writing hinges mostly on sound and rhythm, and I’m the only person who intimately knows the sonics of those compositions. I revere and deeply respect outside readers and viewers of my work, but I trust my gut the most.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
To just write, to practice the act of writing daily in order to keep the pump primed. If it’s already ritual then the writing will flow naturally when you have to write. Now, if I could just follow that advice.

Krista Franklin, author of Too Much Midnight. 

Ten Questions for Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

by

Staff

3.31.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, whose second novel, Hex, is out today from Viking. When a Columbia University student dies from toxic exposure in the course of her research, the school expels the remaining members of the lab. But one PhD candidate, Nell Barber, is compelled to continue her deceased peer’s work; she steals materials on her last afternoon and set outs, independently, to break the speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. As Nell’s apartment fills with her deadly specimens, her social life is also becoming increasingly complicated. She idolizes her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, and finds herself trapped in a web of grudges and obsessions that includes Joan, Joan’s husband, her ex, her best friend, and the best friend’s boyfriend. All six characters collide in this spellbinding campus novel—spinning a tale of poison, antidote, and emotional intensity. “Hex is sexy, unhinged, revelatory, so smart it gives the reader whiplash,” writes Julie Buntin. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight earned her BA from Yale and MFA from New York University. She is the author of a previous novel, The Sunlit Night, and a poetry collection, Lofoten. Her screenplay adaptation of The Sunlit Night premiered as a feature film at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Born in New York City, she lives in New Hampshire. 

1. How long did it take you to write Hex? 
I wrote Hex in a kind of fever dream, daily and obsessively, for six months. Then I put it aside for another six months. I returned to it with my stellar editor, Allison Lorentzen, and edited for another two months or so. But all in all it was a surge rather than a slow build, which was refreshing given that my first novel took six years and several complete rewrites.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The research. Nell is a biological sciences PhD candidate; I am not. I grew up in New York City, without a garden, so even the basics of planting were new to me. I relished the really difficult task of adding a scientific basis to my previously aesthetic appreciation of flowers, seeds, bulbs, the components of the natural world.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I like to write in the morning, after a cup of coffee and a banana and/or bowl of cereal—I ate a grotesque quantity of Kix cereal while writing Hex. I write from about eight-thirty to eleven-thirty, break for lunch, and then go back to it from about one to three. That’s a full day. When I’m working on a book, I try to do at least the morning segment of that schedule every day. Just opening the document each day keeps it on track.

4. What are you reading right now?
A lot of essays: the transcendent Selected Writings of Walter Pater, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, Lydia Davis’s Essays One, Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places. I find their linear concision helps ground me during the promotional phase of Hex’s release. When I start a new project, I’ll return to reading fiction.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Vita Sackville-West, a 1920s novelist and poet who lived brilliantly and got basically replaced in posterity by her contemporary and companion, Virginia Woolf. Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians was a lodestar for me while writing Hex.

6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I loved the MFA program I attended at NYU, but I didn’t have to pay for it. The generosity of the fellowship program there made it possible for me to pursue that degree. Once inside, I found the friendships I made there invaluable, but I would never have entered the program without that crucial financial support. If you can make the tuition work for you, with or without assistance, an MFA program most importantly gives you a structure in which to focus on your work. That can be an enormous gift.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Find the opportunities.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Hex, what would you say?
This is a fun one.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My husband, John Knight, is an independent editor and he’s extraordinary. He has made every text I’ve brought to him—novel, screenplay, essays, every assignment I wrestle with—immeasurably stronger, clearer, tighter, more purposeful, and altogether more beautiful. If you’re looking for a reader, he’s at knighteditorial.com.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Make it a ritual. Bind writing to a daily non-writing activity so that you have a cue: the coffee, the Kix, the computer. The toothbrush, ten pets to the cat, the computer. Take the pressure off yourself to initiate writing and build it into an external sequence so you don’t have to ask yourself whether or when to begin. It’s decided in advance. The dishes, the gingersnap, the computer.

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, author of Hex.

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Marianne Chan

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Staff

3.24.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Marianne Chan, whose debut poetry collection, All Heathens, is out today from Sarabande Books. In All Heathens, Marianne Chan weaves history with personal narrative to map the heart of the Filipino and Filipino American global community. Despite the many distances, there is enduring kinship across the time and space of the diaspora: “Around the world, we are the same people,” she writes. “We have merely moved our feet.” And whether reimagining the origin story of Eve, charting the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines, or narrating her own memories, Chan proves that history is not static, but rather a living home. “Alive on every page, this book is a song that refuses to sing of anything less than the true, the piercing and true,” writes Chen Chen. Marianne Chan earned her BA in English from Michigan State University and her MFA in poetry from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her poems have appeared in various publications including the Indiana Review, the Margins, Poetry Northwest, and the Rumpus. From 2017 to 2019, she served as poetry editor for Split Lip Magazine. Chan lives in Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a PhD in creative writing. 

1. How long did it take you to write All Heathens? 
The oldest poem in All Heathens is “With,” which I wrote in 2014 while I was pursuing my MFA. The newest poem in the collection is “The Lives of Saints,” which I wrote in summer 2018. So, I guess this means that it took me four years to write the book. However, I should say that, until I took James Kimbrell’s manuscript workshop at Florida State University in 2018, I didn’t devote all of my writing time to this project. Before that workshop, I wrote regularly, but I wasn’t really writing towards a larger manuscript. Kimbrell’s workshop helped me to see how some of my poems worked together thematically. During that semester, I wrote two poems that I believe are the heart of All Heathens: “Lansing Sinulog Rehearsal, 2010” and “Some Words of the Aforesaid Heathen Peoples.” After I’d written those poems, I saw how the collection could be structured, and I finished the book at the end of that semester.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I worried a lot about getting things right. Several of the poems in All Heathens incorporate facts about Magellan’s circumnavigation and his “discovery” of the Philippines, as told by Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s chronicler. I am not a historian or an expert in Filipino history, and sometimes I would misremember information. I kept having to go back to Pigafetta’s Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation and other resources to make sure I was getting details right.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
My goal is to write at least twice a week. Because I’m currently in a PhD program at the University of Cincinnati and my schedule is hectic, I’m inconsistent about when and where. I often write in my living room next to my sleeping cat, but sometimes I bring my computer into my bedroom or to a coffeeshop. I’m a moody person, and the places I write depend on mood. I wish I could simply walk into an office every day and feel ready to go, but that’s just not the case for me, and I know that by now. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m currently reading Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima :: Limón and Kathryn Cowles’s Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World, both of which are spectacular. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I’ll take this question as an opportunity to say that Filipinx/Filipinx American literature should be read and taught and written about much more than it currently is. To name one writer, I’m in love with Nick Joaquin and his strange, creepy, feminist, political stories in The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic.  

6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
I loved my experience in my MFA program at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. The program gave me the time and space to develop better writing practices, to deepen my understanding of literature, and to develop relationships with mentors and other writers. That said, I don’t think MFA programs are beneficial for all writers, so my answer would really vary from person to person.   

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
I think mental health should be more of an emphasis. I’ve been a part of a few different writing communities and I’ve seen people struggle with addiction, anxiety, or depression, myself included. I think it’s incredibly important for programs in particular to emphasize wellness and self-care and make counseling resources more readily available. 

8. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? 
It is important to me for an editor/publisher to be excited about the book! I remember when Sarah Gorham and Jeffrey Skinner from Sarabande Books both called me to ask if All Heathens was still available. I will never forget how excited and supportive they were about the project. Since then, I’ve been confident that they’d do a good job designing, editing, and promoting it, and I’ve been so grateful to the staff at Sarabande for everything they’ve done for my book. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Clancy McGilligan, my partner, whose novella History of an Executioner was published by Miami University Press this year, is often the first person to see my writing. I trust his opinion, and I know he’ll be honest—even if he knows I’ll be angry about it later.   

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
A few weeks ago, I read a craft essay called “Intersectional Bribes and the Cost of Poetry” by Sagirah Shahid for an awesome creative writing pedagogy class, taught by Leah Stewart, which I’m taking at the University of Cincinnati. In this essay, Shahid offers some advice about listening/reading. I’m not sure if it’s the “best piece of writing advice” I’ve ever gotten, but it certainly is wonderful, so I thought I’d share it: “Read widely, certainly across disciplines and absolutely beyond the United States and Europe and without a doubt within your own cultural traditions, but also listen to the album, the chapbook, the holy book—listen to that textbook that actually is not a textbook but is the person sitting right next to you on the bus ride home. There is a lesson there, that might also be a poem but you will never arrive to the poem if you aren’t listening.” 

Marianne Chan, author of All Heathens.

(Credit: Clancy McGilligan)

Ten Questions for Paul Lisicky

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Staff

3.17.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paul Lisicky, whose memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World is out today from Graywolf Press. Later opens in 1991 when Lisicky is packing up his car to move to Provincetown, Massachusetts. He arrives to a community consumed by the AIDS crisis, which takes hold in a different way than in America’s cities: “It’s not that anyone is less energetic about saving lives at the end of the world,” he writes. “It’s just that in a town that comports itself as a haven, where there’s no resistance from within, the desire to save lives take a different shape.” Weaving personal narrative with epigraphs and excerpts from queer artists across the ages, Lisicky traces this “different shape”—the unique structures of care, pain, and love that manifested in the Provincetown of the early nineties. At once intimate and expansive, Later is a vital exploration of queer life past, present, and future. Paul Lisicky is the author of five previous books including Unbuilt Projects (Four Way Books, 2012) and The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship (Graywolf Press, 2016), which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His writing can be found in the Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Fence, Ploughshares, Tin House, and other outlets. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, he is also the recipient of awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University–Camden.   

1. How long did it take you to write Later? 
It began as a novel all the way back in 1997, and I ended up showing it to others too soon, when I probably should have let it steep some more. In retrospect, I wonder whether it was a mistake to create a fictionalized version of an early 1990s Provincetown, when that place was already so much itself, without much of a comparison point. Which other small town, on the tip of a peninsula, took in people with HIV and AIDS, along with artists, people in recovery, people who refused to fit in?

I put the draft aside. Still, the urge to write about a community during a time of crisis never left me. I guess someone could argue that all my books since my first are attempts to capture this desire but through different people and objects and surfaces. Back in 2015 my father developed pneumonia. He went into hospice, was expected to die at any moment, recovered, went back home again. This happened over three cycles in six months. To put it simply, I felt emotionally pulled back into those early AIDS years again even though my father was old by that time and wasn’t HIV positive. A few weeks after he died, I started writing. I was the thinnest membrane and maybe that need to conjure up the community I once knew kept me going. The memory of that community, and its combination of affection, play, and turmoil, was company.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I could feel myself “processing” emotion in the early draft, which might be another way to say making certain moments a little too tidy, knowable, consoling, orderly. I don’t think those are necessarily problematic turns of feeling, but I think they should be questioned, especially if they start to feel reflexive. I wanted to write a book that made space for anger and disintegration, while also pointing to the kind of life force that that community summoned up on a collective level. So the trick was to find a form that embodied all of that. I started fragmenting the book, titling the individual sections, shifting it from past to present tense to create a deeper immediacy, on-the-spotness, which is certainly the way we lived those days. There wasn’t an overall plan back then. We had to be awake to emergency and disruption. How to write a book that behaved like that, in its structure?

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
All the time, honestly. I’m a lot less structured about my writing than I used to be, unless I have some extended time off, which is rare. My favorite place to write isn’t necessarily at home anymore—though I do write a lot at home, along with the coffee places in my neighborhood—but on a train or a plane or a subway. That sensation of rushing though time and space frees up my mind somehow. This must involve some early resistance about the act of writing requiring one to be pinned to a chair. I always admired any creative person who could literally move around as they worked: visual artists, actors, musicians. So if I’m not moving, at least the structure around me could move, damn it!

4. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, which is as glorious as everybody says it is. Not just on the sentence level, but on what it has to say about shame. How do encounters with shame open up the constricted stories we tell about ourselves? I suspect I’ll keep going back to it for the rest of my life. I also just picked up Danez Smith’s Homie, and I’m very excited about the poems I’ve read so far.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
So many people. Anyone who writes books deserves wider recognition in this culture. I think there are people who don’t get talked about as much as they should because they’re not on social media, don’t have a web presence. I really love Salvatore Scibona’s work, for instance. He’s already been a National Book Award finalist, and that’s more recognition than most of us will ever get, but I think we should be talking more about his novels and stories, which are so impeccably written and intellectually present.

6. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
The early drafts of this book suppressed the character of the speaker, out of need to obscure myself and put the attention on the other people, whose experiences were much more precarious than mine. But my editor thought that the life in the book was with the speaker. The book needed a rudder, a guide. So she gave me permission to write a more vivid book than it had been. 

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
If you feel like you need to be a part of a community to develop your work, to learn how to read like a writer, then yes. Definitely. Ideally the culture of an MFA should lead you toward thinking about why you write and how—that’s where vision develops. But sometimes all of that doesn’t happen for years after the MFA, and that’s okay. You might leave and think, That’s it? I’ve gotten grief, disrespect, and anxiety, and nothing else. But in truth an MFA gives you some tools. I think it’s up to you to decide whether you’re going to use those tools after you graduate. I mean I think my own work took off a year after finishing my MFA when I decided to write some work that I believed my workshop mates would have had very mixed feelings about. And I’m talking about particular writers whom I absolutely respected and adored. But I needed that point of resistance to say why and how I wanted to write.

But I’d never recommend pursing an MFA because you think you have to—no. I don’t believe in moving to a part of the country that you know you’re going to actively dislike, because that’s going to impede your work, your ability to be present. There are all sorts of rigorous online workshops that aren’t part of the degree-giving system.

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
It definitely needs to be more inclusive on every level—we’re finally articulating that, insisting on it. At the same time, the prose world needs to be more democratized in terms of advances. The tactic of giving only a few literary books seven-figure advances and the rest next-to-nothing is toxic for writers and for the culture of books. A friend of mine who’s an editor in France is baffled by what the American publishing industry does.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
It’s my friend and former MFA classmate, Elizabeth McCracken. She and I write different kinds of work, but I’m always thinking of her as my primary reader. I don’t really show her my writing until it’s very close to finished—I’ve learned to keep my work to myself for a very long time—and she often doesn’t say chapter 3 belongs in place of chapter 2, but I want to write something that, well, knocks her out. I want to write to her standard.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Mark, my ex, and I were once driving down East 34th Street, and I pointed out a particularly styled poodle on the sidewalk and said something like: “The poodles of my childhood were unkempt.” He replied that that was an opening line, and I might have said, “Who would care about that?” Well, I ended up using that in a story in Unbuilt Projects, but the point was that he believed you should write what you need to write, not what you think editors and agents want. Work that’s good, that’s itself, eventually gets seen. Maybe not through the expected, gatekeeper-ish channels, but trust that it gets seen.

Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World.

(Credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

Ten Questions for Carolyn Forché

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Staff

3.10.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Carolyn Forché, whose fifth book of poetry, In the Lateness of the World, is out today from Penguin Press. In her first new collection in seventeen years, Carolyn Forché meets her readers at the end of the world. The first poem, “Museum of Stones,” catalogues civilization by its ruins: “stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,” “stones, loosened by tanks in the streets,” and those “newly fallen from stars.” Nearly unbearable darkness follows, yet Forché presses forward and remains present. She imagines herself on the boat alongside refugees, and she walks among the beetle-infested trees. She finds no other path but resilience. “there is nothing / that cannot be seen,” she writes, “open then to the coming of what comes.” Carolyn Forché is a poet, translator, and activist whose work has been translated into over twenty languages. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes, and her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Her many literary honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the Windham-Campbell Prize. She lives in Maryland and teaches at Georgetown University.  

1. How long did it take you to write In the Lateness of the World? 
The earliest poem was written in 2003, and the most recent in 2018, so fifteen years. In the past I published a book every decade or so, beginning in my twenties, so this one took longer.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I didn’t write a book so much as I wrote individual poems during those fifteen years, and discovered the connections among them, subtle or apparent. The greatest challenge was in recognizing which poems belonged to this book and which did not, and in allowing the whole of it to evolve, rather than to determine in advance what it would be. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write in small notebooks, often in the early mornings when it is still dark, but also throughout the day, most days, and everywhere I happen to be. I like to write while traveling, especially on trains.

4. What are you reading right now? 
At this moment, the stack includes Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Fortune for Your Disaster, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land, Jenny Offill’s Weather, Marcelline Delbecq’s Camera, the new issue of Lapham’s Quarterly on memory, Mark Nowak’s Social Poetics, and Jeff Sharlet’s This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are many, but I will name two, both working-class writers: Meridel Le Sueur and Edward Dahlberg. Read Le Sueur’s The Girl and Dahlberg’s Because I Was Flesh.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Perfectionism, which has nothing to do with the work itself, but which leads at times to procrastination, not only of the writing, but of releasing it into the world. That, and the demands of contemporary life that distract us all. Sometimes illness has stood in the way of my work, and also manmade disaster—years were swept away when a broken water-main flooded and destroyed our house. Cancer and water. On the other hand, it is possible that these interludes allowed the writing to deepen.

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? 
Patience, and the ability to read a work on its own terms, to comprehend it from within. I’m fortunate to have found these in both my literary agent, Bill Clegg, and my editor, Christopher Richards.

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
There should be more people of color on publishing house staffs at all levels, which entails, among other things, creating entry-level positions well enough paid that a person could survive on salary alone. Unpaid internships are possible only for an economic elite. Corporate-owned houses should emulate the independent houses of the past, more generously subsidizing serious literary art, including poetry, with profits from their more commercial endeavors. It’s sad that poets’ first books must win contests in order to be published. As for the “writing community,” I would say that they are plural—there are communities of writers, rather than a single community, and they exist everywhere, not only in the coastal cities. There should be greater recognition of this. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
For the past thirty-five years my most trusted reader has been my husband, Harry Mattison. He is a photographer, but we both began reading and writing poetry as children. Very early in our relationship he recited Hart Crane to me while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Among his few possessions then, other than cameras and darkroom equipment, were poetry books, and Robert Creeley was among his closest friends. From the beginning, he knew intuitively how to respond to my work, and his readings have helped me immeasurably. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Goethe’s “Do not hurry; do not rest” serves as the epigraph for Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, where she offers most of the best advice I have encountered, including: “You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks.” And: “Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.” There is also something there, too, about how long it takes to write a book, as much or in my case, more than a decade. I found this to be comforting.

Carolyn Forché, author of In the Lateness of the World.

(Credit: Don J. Usner)

Ten Questions for Jordan Kisner

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Staff

3.3.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jordan Kisner, whose debut work of nonfiction, Thin Places: Essays From In Between, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Blending reportage with personal memoir, Kisner examines various uncanny scenes from modern America. She traces her own brief but intense foray into evangelical Christianity, the history of mental health treatment from exorcisms to pills to electrode therapy, the rise of the robocall, and more. Kisner exposes the rules human beings have enforced on one other in order to cope with their fear, mortality, and permeability. And with unique empathy and intelligence, she ponders how American communities and she herself might begin to question their orthodoxies and experience a new kind of vulnerability and faith. “With revelatory grace and insight, these essays refract the world you think you know in a new and brilliant light,” writes Alexandra Kleeman. Jordan Kisner writes criticism for the Atlantic. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and been selected for The Best American Essays 2016. She lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write Thin Places? 
I wrote roughly half the essays in a slow, sporadic way between 2013 and 2017, and then I buckled down and wrote the rest between June 2018 and June 2019.  

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The first essay, “Attunement,” took all seven years to write. I lost track of how many drafts I went through, but it’s some appalling triple-digit number. Initially, I was trying to cram all the ideas of the book into that one piece—the collection exists only because I kept realizing, incrementally, that this or that thought in “Attunement” needed its own essay. Once I realized that “Attunement” was actually an introductory essay, the challenge became finding a way to lightly establish the curiosities, intellectual concerns, and themes of the book—i.e. to indicate a sense of intention in the essays that follow, which are fairly catholic in subject matter—without being ham-fisted. I’ve always admired Toni Morrison’s openings—in her novels, the whole book is somehow contained in the first few sentences, though on first reading they don’t seem freighted or microcosmic, just compelling. I wanted to do that here, which felt like a tall order.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I struggle with establishing any writing routine, though I thrive in the short periods when I manage to keep one. I write at home, in a small office in my apartment, and lately, I try to write three pages of notes or stream-of-consciousness babble at the start of the day. How much I write for the rest of the day depends on what deadlines are coming up—I only get things done because of deadlines, though I dread deadlines. At least half the time I’m working I’m reading, reporting, researching, or taking notes. When I draft, it’s often in big heaves—a few calamitous days rather than a measured, thoughtful approach. I think the measured approach would be better. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I just reread The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits, which I tend to pick up every few months and begin rereading from someplace in the middle. That book is friendly and intimate and so smart and—I mean this as the highest praise—refreshingly odd, and I prescribe it to myself when I’m feeling strung out or blue or like my brain is broken. It’s restorative. I’m also reading Homie by Danez Smith, which is so beautiful that it’s making me cry while I read, which I never do. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
She’s certainly recognized, but I’ve always wondered why Amy Fusselman isn’t wildly and extravagantly famous. Her books are so fearless, hilarious, brilliant. I keep extra copies of her memoir 8: All True: Unbelievable lying around so I can give them away.

6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Generally speaking, I avoid recommendations that prompt anyone to go into debt for any reason. That being said, lots of MFA programs don’t require you to go into debt, and I think studying writing at the graduate level can be useful under certain circumstances. I pursued an MFA because I’d spent all my school years intending to go into theater, and by the time I sorted out my real aspirations I was twenty-three and didn’t know where to begin. I desperately wanted to be initiated into the world of Literary Writerly Technique—as I then imagined it—and I wanted to study under writers I admired. I wanted their reading lists. I’m glad I went: I came out with a clearer understanding of the history and range of what you might call literary nonfiction, and with an idea of what I wanted to strive for. Also, I got the reading lists, and they were great. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Give yourself more leeway to think out loud on the page. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Thin Places, what would you say? 
You’ll be fine. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The internet.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Read. Also: I don’t think this is good advice, or advice at all, but I once heard someone say, “A writer is someone who wrote today,” and I tell that to myself often. It’s not true—lots of writers don’t write every day; I certainly don’t—but often I find the notion of being “a writer” ephemeral and fraught, while being “someone who wrote today” feels straightforward and manageable. If you were to reframe this from a statement of (dubious) fact to a piece of encouragement, it would be nearly perfect: Just write today. 

Jordan Kisner, author of Thin Places: Essay From In Between.

(Credit: Ebru Yildiz)

Ten Questions for Kawai Strong Washburn

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Staff

3.3.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kawai Strong Washburn, whose debut novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, is out today from MCD/FSG. When the Flores family is at its most vulnerable, ancient Hawaiian gods appear to intervene. Out at sea off the coast of Kailua-Kona, Hawai‘i, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls into the water, but is quickly rescued by a shiver of sharks that gently return him to his mother. The gathering of sharks is the first of many supernatural events that transpire around Noa and his family, and Washburn alternates between their different points-of-view to create a prismatic family saga. Shifting from Hawai‘i to the mainland United States and back again, Sharks in the Time of Saviors charts the family’s exile and pursuit of salvation, their bond to one another and to their home. “Sharks in the Time of Saviors is a lush, virtuosic novel with breathless scope and last depth,” writes Claire Vaye Watkins. “Kawai Strong Washburn’s vision is searing, his talent explosive, his heart beating loud on every page.” Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hāmākua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His writing can also be found in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. He lives in Minneapolis.

1. How long did it take you to write Sharks in the Time of Saviors? 
It was ten years, or maybe longer, from the time I first pressed the keys on a keyboard until the words appeared on physical pages. The central image—a child being pulled gently from the water by sharks—had been in my head for a few years before that, so I’d been unconsciously interrogating it for some time.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Since none of the characters are consciously based on anyone I know, including myself, I had to create a set of characters completely out of thin air. They each needed distinct psyches and distinct voices, a challenge in itself. But an outgrowth of developing those voices was the challenge of how to represent Hawai‘i’s patois, commonly referred to as “pidgin,” in a way that I thought read well on the page and wouldn’t be too challenging for the reader’s eye, yet still captured the rhythm as best as possible.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
It’s changed over the years, from the time I was single and wrote whenever and wherever I wanted—ah, the halcyon days of productivity—to now, where I try to write every morning from about 5 AM until my kids wake up and the school day scramble starts, usually around 6:30 AM. But the kids keep getting each other and me and my wife sick, which means I’m never healthy enough to mortgage my sleep for writing. That has taken a huge toll on my productivity over the last six months or so.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I work heavily in climate policy advocacy at the state and national level. So, one of the books I’m reading is Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy by Hal Harvey, an excellent technical guide to the policy options at our disposal for preventing the most catastrophic outcomes of climate change. There’s a lot we can be doing right now, if we focus our political attention and will. I just finished reading Red Panda & Moon Bear with my daughter. It’s an excellent graphic novel about two young Cuban American child superheroes that roam their Miami neighborhood in a series of delightful adventures. So much fun. Also, my wife and I read out loud to each other at night, and right now we’re reading Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, which is fantastic. Reid’s also incredibly charming and intelligent in person. I could listen to her talk for hours.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I didn’t encounter Toni Cade Bambara’s work until probably three years ago, after I’d been working as a writer for quite a long time. Hers isn’t a name that comes up often enough in the American canon, which is mostly a dumpster fire, anyway, when it comes to recognition of value, at least as far as I’m concerned.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The financial obligations of family: housing, healthcare, daycare, food, education—especially college savings. All the boring stuff. None of those is insignificant, though. If I only had responsibility for myself, I’d probably live in a van down by the river and write my ass off, at least after my first advance. But I don’t know if that would necessarily be a better life.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
My agent, Duvall Osteen, has always encouraged me to take care of myself first. I try to remember that, especially as a debut author; I’m typically in a state of such humility and gratitude that I overextend myself.

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
I was recently reading an article in National Geographic about how the 1994 genocide in Rwanda resulted in a massive political reorganization of the country. A mandate of 30 percent parliamentary representation for women has led to huge changes in both laws and, to a lesser extent, norms. Rwandan parliament is now at 61 percent female—twice the mandate—with similar figures in other major institutions. Discriminatory laws of land and business ownership and gender-based violence have been eliminated. A new generation of women are reimagining their roles in society and being supported in that imagination. I’m still new to the publishing industry, so I don’t know exactly who’s in charge; but whoever is needs to deliberately retain, cultivate, and promote historically marginalized people—of color, gender, and every other category—into positions of significant, durable power. It’s the only way to achieve lasting equity. The art would be better for it.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Danny Vazquez and Sean MacDonald, my editorial team at MCD/FSG. They’ve been excellent and frank in highlighting the weaknesses in my writing, without being overly prescriptive. At the same time, they’ve brought their own ideas to the work—things I never would have considered on my own—that have vastly improved this current novel. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I’ve been terrible at everything I’ve ever wanted to be good at—dating, tying my shoelaces, athletics, writing, driving, math, drawing, fashion, parenting—the first time I tried it. But years ago, my father, who’s a musician and public-school teacher, told me about how much better his music had gotten when he’d just made it a point to commit to doing it—with focus and intention—on a daily basis. Even when it’s terrible. Especially when it’s terrible. Intentional, focused practice: that’s it. Maybe some people are phenomenal enough to not need it, but for me there’s no shortcut. Not for anything.

Kawai Strong Washburn, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors.

(Credit: Crystal Liepa)

Ten Questions for Nancy Krygowski

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Staff

2.25.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nancy Krygowski, whose second poetry collection, The Woman in the Corner, is out today from the University of Pittsburgh Press. In The Woman in the Corner, Krygowski discovers grace in even the most trying of circumstances. In one poem, she tries to help a friend who fantasizes about suicide rekindle a sense of purpose. She offers—both to the friend and to her readers throughout the collection—a series of impossibly delicate images: “Here. Let me show you,” she writes, “those perfect empty shells” of the egg tossed at her house by “a kid who doesn’t know yet why he’s angry.” No matter the subject—American politics, sex, marriage, the act of bathing a mother who can no longer recognize you—no scene is reduced, only polished to allow its ambiguity to shine. “Krygowski’s ferocious wit and no-nonsense truth-telling thrill and sting,” writes Dianne Seuss. “The Woman in the Corner is a woman who has lived, and struggled, and knows that struggle is often (though not always) beautiful.” Nancy Krygowski is also the author of Velocity, winner of the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She is the recipient of awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Pittsburgh Foundation, as well as residencies from Jentel, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches at Literacy Pittsburgh and in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.

1. How long did it take you to write The Woman in the Corner?
A long, long time. I pretty much stopped writing after the publication of my first book, Velocity. My life had changed drastically, and in this new life, I had trouble locating myself as a writer. I forced myself to start writing in drips—mostly unhappy drips. Then, foolishly, after a few years I thought I knew how to put a book together, having done it once before. I wrote poems to that idea of a book and it failed. So I took time off, tried to figure out if I wanted to write, and eventually started writing poems more honestly—without the goal of a book. After about two years of this, the book started taking shape. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
This is embarrassing to admit, but in a good review of Velocity, the reviewer questioned whether I could “do it again.” I questioned the same thing for a long time partly because I didn’t know what “it” was. Writing in some ways feels magical to me—I’ve never been good at figuring out what poems are going to work for other readers. This is particularly challenging for me when I’m writing about deeply personal stuff.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in this great windowed room in my house. If I look one way, it’s like I’m in the country hills; if I look the other, I can see downtown Pittsburgh. I prefer writing in the early morning, but that’s not always possible, and for this book, I had to give up on my notions of needing to have the right time and/or circumstances to write. The “how often” is super erratic: Sometimes I write once or twice a month, sometimes, like right now, when I’m participating in The Grind—a poem writing challenge created by Ross White—I’m kicking out a draft of a poem every day for a month. 

4. What are you reading right now?
Poetry: I’m reading Kathleen Graber’s new book, The River Twice, which is gorgeous, Vievee Francis’s Forest Primeval, and Martha Collins’s Because What Else Could I Do, and I’m rereading Anna Swir’s Happy as a Dog’s Tail. Fiction: I’m reading Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend. Nonfiction: I’m reading Tony Hoagland’s The Art of Voice and Damon Young’s What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Isn’t the answer to that question all but the ten wildly popular poets of the moment? There are too many underappreciated poets to name—and a lot of them live in Pittsburgh! I hope that’s not a cop-out answer.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have a job I’m passionate about: I teach English to refugees and immigrants at Literacy Pittsburgh, a nonprofit. It’s simultaneously an extremely different way to interact with language —I always need to be super direct and super simple—and crazily similar to writing poems: I am literally thinking hard about every word that comes out of my mouth. This kind of work, where I’m helping others and where there are real-life problems to solve, always, always is more important to me than sitting alone in a room plunking out poems. I’m constantly battling how to balance my work life and my writing life. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Woman in the Corner, what would you say?
I’d say, Nancy, remember that the desire and ability to write is a privilege—having the time, the luxury, to dig deep into your heart, your soul, your weirdo brain. Sometimes that desire can feel like a burden, but it is a privilege.

8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
The fiction writer, former San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist, and editor of Tiny Day Danielle Leone has been by my side writing and otherwise for many, many years. She’s a great editor and she believes in me and my poems in a way that’s astounding and comforting, but even more importantly, her writing makes me love what people can do with words and makes me want to write.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Oh, please, can I do two? First, I’d let writers just be writers instead of publicists/self-promoters. And secondly, I’d find a way to magically build a larger audience for poetry. I’ve puzzled over this for forever: You’d be hard pressed to find a person who hasn’t, at some point in their lives, written a poem, harder pressed still to find a person who hasn’t read and loved a poem. However, people don’t buy poetry books as much as I wish they did and it’s difficult to get people to come to readings—even though everyone loves being read to! 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Not so much advice, but words about writing. Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” The idea of beginning in not knowing is a comfort to me—there’s so much I don’t understand about the world and our human hearts. And another: A poet friend who has a super large reading audience told me that when he writes, he’s writing for the few people he thinks really get him. There’s something for me about remembering that, at the heart of it, writing is about connection—to yourself, to those you love, and then, hopefully, to others—that is really important to me. This is what makes me want to start tapping the keyboard.

Nancy Krygowski, author of The Woman in the Corner.

Ten Questions for Brandon Taylor

2.18.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brandon Taylor, whose debut novel, Real Life, is out today from Riverhead Books. Taking place over the course of a single weekend, Real Life concerns an introverted young graduate student, Wallace, who is working toward a biochemistry degree. The only Black student in his cohort and having grown up in poverty, unlike many of his wealthy peers, Wallace contends with both micro and overt aggression in every space. From the lakeside, to the lab, to the bedroom, he is always weighing and analyzing how to approach each new interaction—even among his closest friends—and is wary of the not insignificant cost of offering up his full vulnerable self. “This book blew my head and heart off,” writes Kiese Laymon. “For a debut novelist to disentangle and rebraid intimacy, terror, and joy this finely seems like a myth. But that, and so much more, is what Brandon Taylor has done in Real Life.” Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his fiction and nonfiction have also appeared in Catapult, the New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, them, and other outlets.    

1. How long did it take you to write Real Life? 
Five weeks.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Telling the truth about the kinds of things that go on in progressive, liberal spaces without being polemical and without flattening the complexity of the characters.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write either at home or in a café, and I write almost every day. I can write at almost any time of the day. For a while, I was most productive at night, then mornings. Now it’s just whenever there’s a moment.

4. What are you reading right now? 
Right now, I am reading Alison Weir’s Lancaster & York. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Mavis Gallant, always Mavis Gallant.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own laziness and self-doubt.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
It’s probably when my agent described my book as “Kinfolk meets a gay version of Friends.”

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
I would like to see substantially less virtue signaling, and more transparency about the economics of the whole enterprise. Also, a living wage. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My friend Huxley. We’ve been reading each other’s work since our early twenties. He’s such a perceptive and sensitive reader. And he writes sentences that make me want to be a better writer. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Alexander Chee once said something like, When you put something that actually happened to you in a story, you have to privilege the needs of the story and not merely what happened. I don’t remember the exact quote, but I think about that all the time.

Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life.

(Credit: Bill Adams)

Ten Questions for Mark Bibbins

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Staff

2.11.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mark Bibbins, whose fourth book of poetry, 13th Balloon, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. In a book-length poem sequence, Mark Bibbins writes to a beloved who died of AIDS in 1992. He offers memories of their time together, of the terrifying world in which they inhabited, and what unfolded in his wake. “When it was my turn / to speak at your memorial / what did I say / a version of    you aren’t really dead / or see you again    some useless thing / any other deathstruck boy / lightly educated at state and city schools / might have said.” Within 13th Balloon, after all this time, there is more room to speak: to remember the heartache and to celebrate the soaring joy of love. There is the hospital room, the many other memorials of the era, but there is also the roof in Brooklyn, a picnic shared on the apartment floor, and so much more life to cherish. Mark Bibbins is the author of three previous books of poetry, including Sky Lounge (Graywolf Press, 2003), which won a Lambda Literary Award. His poems have also appeared in various publications such as the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He teaches writing at the New School, where he cofounded LIT magazine. He lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write 13th Balloon?
About six years, although during the first two I had no idea what was happening, let alone that it would turn into a book. As it grew I thought it could end up being a section of a book, or maybe a chapbook, but it kept adding to itself. It wasn’t until the final year or so that I felt I had some control over the shape and content, that I understood how the pieces worked together.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
It’s mostly an elegy for someone who died of AIDS at a very young age in the early ’90s, so writing it involved revisiting the horrible experiences around his illness and death. It also includes several embarrassing scenes from my youth—easy enough to write, but anxiety-making to share with an audience. Allowing myself to be more vulnerable in that regard has been a challenge. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Since I’ve somehow ended up without a desk in my apartment, I usually write while sitting on my couch or propped up in bed next to my cats. Airplanes tend to be weirdly generative too, but I don’t fly often enough for that to be viable. I’m amazed by people who can take their laptops to a café and write for hours—too many distractions for me. I’ve never been a morning person, so I used to write late at night a lot, but much of 13th Balloon spilled out during afternoons. There might be some metaphor in there about daylight. As for how often: not as often as I’d like.    

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m teaching two workshops and advising MFA candidates on their thesis manuscripts, so I’m reading lots of students’ poems, which is a delight and a privilege to be able to do. Also Bob Kaufman’s collected poems, Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, and Sarah Kendzior’s The View From Flyover Country.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Chris Nealon’s work is remarkable. Truly brilliant. His last book of poetry was Heteronomy, the title poem of which can be found online. Everyone should read it now. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Sorry, one of the cats just did something amusing, could you repeat the question? Ah yes, my inability to focus.

7. What trait do you most value in your editor?
That’s a tough one because Michael Wiegers, the executive editor at Copper Canyon, has so many admirable qualities. He’s worked in publishing for thirty years, and his dedication to poetry is inspiring and sustaining. We’ve become good friends since the press started publishing my books, and I value his honesty, his intelligence, his love of the visual arts, his wicked sense of humor. I’m happy to have failed at narrowing it down to one trait.     

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
A long time ago I met a painter who worked in a museum. I said that sounded like the perfect job for an artist, and she said it was like being a horse working in a glue factory. It’s probably for the best that I’m unfamiliar with the inner workings of the publishing industry, especially when it comes to things like giant advances and problematic rollouts of overhyped, poorly written novels.  

As I think of things I might want to see change in the poetry-writing community—which of course is not a single entity but countless entities of varying sizes that sometimes overlap—I realize my gripes seem really petty. So, starting with myself, less pettiness? 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
This might sound terrible, but I don’t show things to anyone until I feel they’re done, so I have to trust myself to be, or at least pretend to be, objective about my own work. 

I will say that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to David Caligiuri, who proofreads for Copper Canyon. He went above and beyond in terms of fact-checking the manuscript for 13th Balloon, thus rescuing me from several ridiculous errors. Rowan Sharp, also excellent, read the next version. I’d love to see proofreaders get more of the credit they deserve. John Pierce, Copper Canyon’s managing editor, was helpful and supportive throughout the production process, especially during the last stages of fine-tuning the manuscript.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
In “Personism” Frank O’Hara writes, “You just go on your nerve,” which isn’t the best advice for everyone—especially the “just” part—but I’ve found it to be useful, especially with 13th Balloon.
 

Mark Bibbins, author of 13th Balloon.

(Credit: Rex Lott)

Ten Questions for Gabriel Bump

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Staff

2.4.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gabriel Bump, whose debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, is out today from Algonquin Books. Claude McKay Love is an average, quiet kid growing up with his grandmother on the South Side of Chicago. One evening, he slips into the kitchen for a glass of water and overhears her discussing his problems—“sentimental, no backbone, adrift, unspectacular.” Yet despite or because of these qualities, Claude is an excellent observer. He tells his own story with a quick, clear voice, carrying the reader through the quiet and loud details of day-to-day life in the South Side as a young Black man. As  he grows up, he begins to feel increasingly adrift—uncertain about how to think, act, or be amidst police violence and social activism. Faced with the decision to join his friends in a protest or seek shelter, he wavers, “I considered which side to seek out. I tried to consider what was at stake. The lines between right and wrong seemed blurred and indecipherable.” When it comes time to go to college, Claude moves to Missouri, imagining he might leave the questions and concerns of Chicago behind. But home follows him in unexpected ways, and he continues to reckon with identity, nation, and belonging at every turn. “This book is astonishing,” writes Maaza Mengiste. “You’ll be smiling even as your heart is breaking.” Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His writing can be found in the Huffington Post, Slam, Springhouse Journal, and other publications. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was honored with the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He lives in Buffalo, New York.   

1. How long did it take you to write Everywhere You Don’t Belong? 
I started writing this book in college, back in Chicago. One of the first chapters, “Fog,” appeared with some slight differences in my undergraduate thesis. Of course at the time I thought I was just writing connected short stories, messing around with characters and setting, putting down words because I had to submit something for workshop. That was about eight years ago. I started viewing this as a novel when I got to grad school. The first draft was my graduate thesis. I fixed some typos a few months ago. It was a long process. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Making the ending come together. The first hundred or so pages came out quick over my first semester in grad school. That’s part one. And much of it is still the same. Part two, the final hundred and fifty pages, took years to get right. For me, Claude leaving Chicago, going to Missouri, was important. I didn’t understand how important Chicago and South Shore were to me until I left, how different the rest of the world could feel. I imagine most people that grow up in cities and attend college in rural areas feel the same way. I wanted Claude to leave and experience that. The problem was replacing these Chicago characters I loved so much—Grandma and Paul and Janice couldn’t come with him. It was a challenge. It was a fun challenge. If Claude doesn’t leave Chicago, then we don’t get Connie Stove. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
About a year ago, when I first moved to Buffalo, I would wake up early and go write in Perk’s Café and try to get five hundred words down. I work slow. I think about the sentences. I stare out the window. Getting into that rhythm, sitting in the same comfy booth, headphones on, listening to the same playlist on repeat—that was my most productive writing stint. Nowadays, since I moved away from that café, I sit at my dining room table before sunrise, make my own coffee. I miss that booth. Also, it’s harder to write when a cat and dog are around to pet.

4. What are you reading right now?
Bubblegum by Adam Levin. So far, it’s genius. I learned a lot from Adam at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I learned a lot from his first genius book, The Instructions. A lot of the humor and weirdness in my book isn’t always a direct result of me trying to make people laugh, it’s a direct result of me trying to write like Adam. Our first important teachers put handprints all over our work. I can look over Everywhere You Don’t Belong now and notice when I’m doing an Adam Levin impression. You can preorder Bubblegum now. It comes out in the spring.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
A few that I’ve worked with come to mind: Arthur Flowers, Noy Holland, Jeff Parker, Edie Meidav, Sabina Murray, Janet Desaulniers, Adam Levin, Padgett Powell. Their work has meant so much to me. Recognition, however, is a hard thing to quantify. 

From history, J. G. Farrell is my favorite writer I don’t hear mentioned often. His book Troubles is like if P. G. Wodehouse and F. Scott Fitzgerald combined at the height of their powers and produced a farce set in post-World War I Ireland during the Troubles.

6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
If you love writing, don’t know anyone in the industry, and want a chance to write a book, find mentors, and get published, MFAs still seem like the best option. You can always apply, see what happens, and make an informed decision based on campus visits, funding opportunities, and interviews with current students. It’s a serious commitment with no guarantee that you’ll get published. I guess a good metaphor is getting a college scholarship for basketball. The chances you’ll make the NBA are slim. Still, if you love it, you’ll learn a lot, make friends.

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)?
Kathy Pories (editor extraordinaire) and Alexa Stark (agent extraordinaire) are both honest and straightforward when something’s not working. They’re also compassionate. That compassion goes a long way. Alexa and I went through at least two major rewrites to the second half of my book. We cut and added about a hundred pages together. Editing is tough work for writers. With novels, editing could mean slicing off a third of the book, often more. Insecurity is omnipresent during the writing process, at least for me. If something feels great coming onto the page, I don’t trust it. Sometimes, I just need a pep talk from Alexa and Kathy. It’s nice to hear someone say, “Yes, this process is hard. Yes, you can do it.”

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Writer Twitter can stress me out sometimes. I think that’s because I’m bad at Twitter in general. How are all these people saying such smart and funny things all the time!? And where are all these followers coming from!? It sometimes feels like I’m in a workshop with millions of people arguing. And I’m trying to sneak in a witty comment. I’m not sure if I would erase Twitter. I think I just have to get better at it.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
It’s a tie between Kathy and Alexa. My writing voice grew with Alexa. We started out together. She knows when I’m not living up to my potential. She’s not going to greenlight something that isn’t good. I send her all of my first drafts. We all need friends like that. 

I know Kathy isn’t going to try and change my writing voice, even though I would if she asked. For the most part, she leaves my sentences alone. I do, however, have this tendency to move too quick plot-wise. Kathy can nudge my characters and plot in more coherent directions. If my sentences need a kick in the rear, Kathy can also provide that. We have similar tastes, want similar things from writing. She’ll also bring me back on course if I get overwhelmed. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’re ever heard?
Jeff Parker, my thesis advisor at UMass, would stress that we should write to surprise ourselves. As writers, we must try to keep the reader on their toes. If you start getting bored, there’s a good chance the reader will get bored. Surprise yourself; surprise the reader. The lesson still sticks with me. It’s an old adage, one that has existed in fiction for a while. Still, Parker passed it along to me right when I needed it. 

Gabriel Bump, author of Everywhere You Don’t Belong.

(Credit: Jeremy Handrup)

Ten Questions for Charles Yu

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Staff

1.28.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Charles Yu, whose latest book, Interior Chinatown, is out today from Pantheon. Every morning, Willis Wu descends from his tiny eighth floor apartment to the Golden Palace—a restaurant and, first and foremost, a film set. Everywhere in Chinatown a procedural cop show called Black and White is in perpetual production. Everything in Wu’s world is framed around the show and is subject to its rules. An Asian man can never be a protagonist, for instance; he’s most likely Background Oriental Male, Dead Asian Man, or Generic Asian Man Number Three. But Wu dreams he might be something more—Kung Fu Guy, specifically—the rarefied pinnacle for the Asian man extra. As Wu reaches for a place in the world, however, the story begins to shatter. What is Chinatown? he wonders. What will happen if he veers off-script and climbs outside? Written in a hybrid screenplay-novel form, Interior Chinatown is both fantastical and devastatingly real, demonstrating the ways in which stereotypes and racism entrap language, behavior, and relationships at every turn. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Charles Yu is the author of three previous books: Third Class Superhero (Harcourt, 2006), How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon, 2010), and Sorry Please Thank You (Pantheon, 2012). He has written for several TV shows, including the HBO series Westworld, for which he was nominated for two Writer’s Guild of America awards. His writing can also be found in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other outlets. He lives in California.

1. How long did it take you to write Interior Chinatown? 
Either a little less than two years or a bit more than five years, depending on how you count it. I basically wrote the book three times, and threw away the first two versions. I don’t mean drafts—I mean that I had a substantially different version of this book that just wasn’t working, scrapped it, did that again, and then the third time was a charm. Except even then it took me a while to figure out how to make it the best version of what I dreamed it could be, which took a lot of help from my editor, Tim O’Connell, and my agent, Julie Barer.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Figuring out what “reality” was. The protagonist of the novel, Willis Wu, dreams of being more than a bit player (Generic Asian Man Number 3)—of actually being a star. In the course of the story, Willis tries to break out of his role, but in doing so he calls into question—for himself, and for the reader—what the rules of his reality are. Is he trapped? What would it take to break out of a role? Who made up these roles, and what happens if he gets to the top, or jumps off the ladder completely? What is Chinatown? Why is he always on the interior of it? And what is on the outside of it?

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write mostly at home. I have a library, but my dog has stolen the couch in there, so I often retreat to a desk in my bedroom. My hours are fairly regular—after dropping off the kids at school and walking the dog (the same one who has taken over my primary writing area)—I sit down around 8:30 AM or 9 AM and write until 3 or 5 or 7 PM, with breaks for lunch or dinner. Many days are shorter than that; maybe handball or TV or running an errand takes precedence or my attention away. Or I just end up reading. I write Monday through Friday, if I can.

If I am working in a TV writers’ room, I don’t have nearly as much time to write, so I’ll steal time on nights and weekends. Driving in the car for up to four hours a day, as tedious as it is, does sometimes give me time to think in a way that sitting at a desk does not.

4. What are you reading right now? 
So many things! Too many. The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh. How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. I got a galley of If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha that I am very excited to dive into. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them, except for the eight people whose books are piled to the sky in every Costco. Can you imagine what that must feel like, to have your book sold next to blue jeans and shrimp? Must be amazing and also weird. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Me. 

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Living in L.A. I feel like an outsider. I still have romantic notions about publishing—having my book published by Pantheon and Vintage and working with the incredible people at those places (and with my agent), it still feels like a wish fulfillment thing. So I’m not sure I’m close enough to it to have an informed opinion. I guess maybe the only thing I would venture is that sometimes it feels like there is still a New York City-centric mindset sometimes? But that might just be my own insecurity talking. Ignore me.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Interior Chinatown, what would you say? 
“Oh man. I’m sorry. Sucks to be you.” And also: “Stay hydrated.”

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My editor, Tim O’Connell, and my agent, Julie Barer. They are both astute, generous, and see right into my blind spots in ways that continually humble and surprise me. For TV work, it’s my wife, Michelle Jue. I bounce pitches off of her, show her scripts—she’s good at pointing out where the story feels off or helping me articulate what I’m feeling but can’t quite figure out. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Read. There are a lot of formulations of this, but at the moment, Stephen King’s comes to mind: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” If you followed only the first part of that, you’d already be 90 percent of the way there.

Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown.

(Credit: Tina Chiou)

Ten Questions for Danez Smith

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Staff

1.21.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Danez Smith, whose third poetry collection, Homie, is out today from Graywolf Press. Homie is a tribute to friendships of many forms. There are two young Black boys on bikes who swerve, “friend-drunk, making their little loops, sun-lotioned // faces screwed up with that first & cleanest love / we forget to name as such.” There is kinship across generations—the lineage extended from Smith to their mother, grandmother, and on. There is love for the dead. And even here, in the face of the most gut-wrenching loss and violence, Smith takes heart: A friend becomes the dust in the room, on the fan, in the ear. “The wind is tangled / with the dust of dead homies,” Smith writes. With Homie, they model a vulnerability and tenderness that allows for a full self to emerge, allowing and inviting others to join it. “The world doesn’t deserve this book—this fierce abundance, this indomitable tender—but we need it, desperately,” writes Franny Choi. “Their virtuosic abilities are matched by the ambitousness of the heart.” Danez Smith is the author of two previous collections, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. They are also a member of the Dark Noise Collective and co-host VS, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness.

1. How long did it take you to write Homie? 
The earliest version of the oldest poem in Homie/My Nig was written in 2014, but I didn’t know I was writing this book then. The book didn’t announce itself to me until 2017, when I went looking for it. I scanned over the poems I had been writing, scanning to see what my brain had been up to without me noticing and there was a thicc thread of friendship and intimacy I had been quietly thinking into. From there, the book began to be a book and not just poems written out of urgency and curiosity. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Allowing myself to gush and love and stomp joy while avoiding corniness. Allowing myself to be corny. Embracing sentimentality—who doesn’t want abundant tenderness? Allowing myself to revel in a different voice than my previous collections. Allowing myself to hate the book sometimes and make that frustration useful instead of hindering. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Wherever I have to: I like my dining room table and airplanes a lot. Whenever I have to: lately I enjoy the haze of late nights or the loopy brain-state post-workout. However it gets done: I try to do first drafts or quick notes either by hand or in the Notes app, I edit better once I’ve transferred it to a Word document.

4. What are you reading right now? 
How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price. LOVED Rick Barot’s forthcoming The Galleons; it was invigorating to see a master poet push further and further into the strange unknown of their relationship with language, all the while the poems being full of intelligence and heart. Sitting next to Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone right now and can’t wait to crack it open cause ya girl is LATE to that party. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I am utterly confused that Harmony Holiday doesn’t have a Pulitzer and a MacArthur by now. Her work in and out of poetry dives deeply and sharply into the massive archive of Black American history and somehow emerges from all that familiar, lived history with something that feels completely new, completely original. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own ways and doubts. America. The rent. Being a Leo. Time. Depression. Long naps. 

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)?
Jeff Shotts is like a good doula. He provides all the advice and encouragement and can be a brilliant guide, but he knows to leave the pushing and the decisions to you. His editing style makes me feel not like my work is being “edited,” but investigated, interrogated, and uplifted. 

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
You know what would be a brilliant and vital fellowship? The “Pay My Insurance Premium” fellowship. I think money is great, but if there were structures around supporting the life and health of writers, I would weep for us, for the good done to the world of words. Some places have institutions focused on this work. In Minnesota, places like Springboard for the Arts are doing amazing work, but I would love if there were more large programs taking up the challenge of assisting folks make a life with room to write. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My poet friends. The lot of them. Folks in the Dark Noise Collective and folks like Sam Sax and Hieu Minh Nguyen. They know when to praise and when to call me on my BS in perfect measure. At this point, I feel like I write with them over my shoulder. I trust my own eye more because I have spent so much time seeing myself through their keen lenses. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
“Stop writing what you know you already know in the ways you know you can write. Write towards what you want to know in ways you’re not sure you can.”
 

Danez Smith, author of Homie.

(Credit: Tabia Yapp)

Ten Questions for Meng Jin

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Staff

1.14.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Meng Jin, whose debut novel, Little Gods, is out today from Custom House. Told from multiple perspectives and across multiple decades, Little Gods is sweeping yet intimate record of a mother and daughter of the Chinese diaspora. On the night of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, an ambitious physicist named Su Lan is about to give birth when her husband disappears from the hospital. As the bodies of protestors begin to fill the hallways, she faces a precipice of solitude, saved only by the small, quiet baby now in her arms. Driven by ambition and an urgency to escape the past, Su Lan decides to immigrate to America with her new daughter, Liya. “I am stuck in a reel of the same irrationalities and insecurities that plagued the first decade of my life,” she tells her neighbor. “I am leaving, again, to populate my world with unfamiliar, indifferent ghosts.” Less than two decades later, Liya is returning her mother’s ashes to China—a country she has never truly known—retracing the history her mother left behind. Coupled with Liya’s journey, the father she has never met tells his story; her mother’s old neighbor also narrates in sections. Between these various stories and souls, a shimmering portrait of Su Lan emerges. “A brilliant debut—intellectually bold but with a startling emotional core,” writes Gina Apostol. “Meng Jin’s Little Gods is a huge pleasure.” Meng Jin is a graduate of Harvard College and Hunter College. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Masters Review, Baltimore Review, and Bare Life Review. A Kundiman fellow, she has also received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. Born in Shanghai, Jin lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

1. How long did it take you to write Little Gods? 
Something like six or seven years? I’m not sure the rules of time apply in the same way when it comes to writing, and especially when it comes to writing first novels. This book went through so many drafts and changed so much in very fundamental ways over the course of the years and drafts, that I can’t really pinpoint when I “started” writing.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Much of the early years of writing this book was spent figuring out how to give myself permission. I had never written a novel before, I barely knew how to write a short story, I didn’t come from any kind of literary background. I felt very stupid—sometimes still do—attempting a project so ambitious in both form and scope for my first attempt. My earliest drafts were more like huge question marks seeking permission than like anything resembling a novel.

Once I felt like I had a foothold in the story, the challenge became time. I changed a bit as a person in the six or seven years—time changed me, and so did the writing itself. The world changed too. I remember the 2016 election as a very concrete obstacle in the writing of this book. I had just started working with my agent and felt I had a manuscript that was more than just question marks. But then Trump was elected, and I no longer understood why my novel mattered to anyone, including myself. I felt like my novel had been written for a world—and for a version of myself—that no longer existed. I spent much of 2016 and 2017 not just trying to find my way back into the book but also trying to convince myself that art still mattered. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I was deep in the novel, the answer was all the time. I would get up in the morning and make tea and sit down to write without changing out of my pajamas. Often my partner would come home from his day job around 7:00 PM and I still wouldn’t have brushed my teeth. There’s a beautiful Ada Limón poem, “Love Poem with Apologies for my Appearance” that too aptly describes my writing practice: “…the long bra-less days, hair / knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow /…the stained white cotton T-shirt, / the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange / peels on my desk…” I was gross. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, a beautiful and kind of astounding book that feels like a more accomplished, lost sister of my own. I read through half of it very quickly and am going back to start again with more care and attention, because it’s the kind of book that rewards care and attention. I’m also picking at Absence of Mind, a book of essays reframing modern scientific thought through the luminous mind/spirit/soul of Marilynne Robinson. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman is a book that totally floored me, and deeply informed my own novel. I think it won a prize in the U.K. but it hasn’t received as much attention in the United States. The Pathless Sky by Chaitali Sen is another beautiful book, published by Europa Editions, that I feel everyone should read. What I love about both these books is that their central characters are obsessed with some other field of expertise, mathematics in Light and geology in Pathless Sky, and the language and content of those fields reverberate meaningfully with the larger concerns of the novel. 

Celestial Bodies won the Man Booker International Prize; hopefully that has widened its readership. But in general, I think that in the Anglophone world—and especially in America—we don’t publish or read enough translated literature, and don’t give enough recognition to translators and the art of translation. Every time I read a work in translation, I am blown away by the wild and various forms literature can take and made newly aware of how narrow the American literary tradition can be.  

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
Since we live in a world where money is necessary for survival—more money! For writers, for publishers, and especially independent presses, so everyone can be less beholden to the demands of the market. I know too many brilliant and promising writers whose books don’t exist yet because their circumstances are not set up for art-making. As one can imagine, many of these writers are women and/or nonwhite. I wish our society valued art deeply, and made it possible for people from all walks of life to make art. 

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)?
Both my editor and agent respected and understood my vision for the work. Of course, we didn’t always agree on everything—that wouldn’t be good either—but I always felt like I could push back, and I always felt listened to. When the publishing process moved to the production phase, that listening and care remained. My editor and agent made sure I felt comfortable with any decision regarding my book, and I never felt pressured to do anything I didn’t want to do. They were and continue to be wonderful advocates for me and my work, and I am deeply grateful for that. 

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Hmm, I think it depends on the writer, and the MFA, and many other circumstances.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My friend Shruti Swamy, whose beautiful story collection A House Is a Body becomes a book in August 2020, because I trust her taste, and I trust her to tell the truth. When I say I trust her taste I mean that we both go to literature for similar things. What things are these? Ah, they are too mysterious to explain.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I’m not sure about best, but what they say about the Muse is probably true: If you keep showing up, eventually she’ll feel sorry for you and show up too. 

Meng Jin, author of Little Gods.

(Credit: Andria Lo)

Ten Questions for Anna Wiener

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Staff

1.7.20

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Anna Wiener, whose memoir, Uncanny Valley, will be published next week by MCD/FSG. As an assistant at a literary agency in New York City in her early twenties, Wiener knew relatively little about the tech-industry: “I was oblivious to Silicon Valley,” she writes, “and contentedly so.” But when the startup buzz reached a fever pitch, the promise of a new career—fresh momentum—eventually drew her out West. Recounting the story of her employment at a big data start-up, Wiener documents the machine from the inside: her peers’ prioritization of endless growth; the drastic gentrification on San Francisco; and the staggering and ever-expanding political power of an elite few. She charts her own coming-of-age within this world, of learning to look closely and ultimately speak out against unchecked growth. A cautionary tale, Uncanny Valley is a fair, thoughtful, but incisive portrait of a still unfolding era. “[Uncanny Valley] is diagnostic and exhilarating, a definitive document of a world in transition,” writes Jia Tolentino. “I won’t be alone in returning to it for clarity and consolation for many years to come.” Anna Wiener is a contributing writer to the New Yorker, where she writes about Silicon Valley, start-up culture, and technology. Her work has also appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and n+1, among other outlets. She lives in San Francisco. 

1. How long did it take you to write Uncanny Valley? 
Uncanny Valley emerged from a piece I wrote in late 2015, for n+1. I backed off from the material for about two years, then wrote the bulk of the book between the summer of 2017 and mid-2019.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Balancing personal narrative—and, I suppose, emotional accuracy—with critique. It was important to me to err on the side of generosity in writing this book, but I had a very difficult time, especially in 2018, summoning my mid-twenties idealism about the tech industry. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I am not an interesting person. I tend to write from home, at a desk, in a room that is ostensibly my office but is largely a holding place for stray ephemera and neglected paperwork. I often have multiple pieces going at once, and usually alternate between writing, research, and reporting. I wrote Uncanny Valley in a sort of feral state of focus. When I’m focused on work, everything else is out the window, which is a luxury. I’ll stay up until four in the morning, eating popcorn with chopsticks, crouched on my desk chair, revising the same sentence forty times—a rabid sort of perfectionism. It does not necessarily improve the writing, but I can get stuck in it. 

My life is strange now, in that I largely have control over my own time. Having a full-time job was a forcing function. The best days were cleanly split: I would do my tech job remotely, from about 7 AM until 2 PM, take a walk, eat something, then return to my apartment to write. It felt like such decadent productivity.

4. What are you reading right now?
Where the Light Falls, a collection of short stories by Nancy Hale; The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada; and Branko Milanovic’s Capitalism, Alone.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Impossible question! An endless list, especially as there are so many forms of recognition. With respect to Silicon Valley, I do wish more people, especially of my generation, would read Ellen Ullman. I think a lot of people out here would take great pleasure in her writing about technology, and her insights on an earlier iteration of the Valley. Her memoir Close to the Machine is wonderful.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Depression, self-discipline, anxiety, the internet.

7. What do you most value in your editor (or agent)?
My agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, is a great reader and a smart editor; he’s also brutally honest and quick with clear, straightforward advice. His calmness is a gift.

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The industry has a lot of problems to untangle, some unique, some more reflective of inherited social problems: insularity, homogeneity, stagnant salaries, lack of pay transparency, credential thirst, literary risk aversion, minimal incentives for mentorship, etcetera. There’s a fairly clear hierarchy in publishing. Most people start at the same place, as assistants, and the climb tends to be slow. I suspect that changing some of the hiring practices at the entry level—by, say, increasing assistant salaries, which would make these jobs tenable for a larger and more diverse group of people—would resonate in all sorts of ways, and pay off tremendously down the line. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
It depends on the project, and the stage—I try to choose early readers carefully. One of the first people to read a draft of Uncanny Valley was my friend Hannah, whom I’ve known for almost twenty years. She’s a writer, and a fantastic reader, but it’s also just impossible to bullshit someone who knows your family and can recite your tenth-grade prose poetry. I trust her to tell me when I’m embarrassing myself. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Not the best writing advice in any universal sense, but the best advice for me, from Dayna Tortorici at n+1: “Stop hedging.”

Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley. (Credit: Russell Perkins)

Ten Questions for Amanda Michalopoulou

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Staff

12.31.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amanda Michalopoulou, whose novel God’s Wife, translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito, is out today from Dalkey Archive Press. In the windowless laundry room of the “Heavenly House,” God’s wife begins writing out her improbable story. She anticipates a reader, “you,” who she implores to listen. Her life changed immeasurably when she met God: Notions of time and space gradually collapsed, and she began to forget “the meaning of the most basic things: a slap in the face; sewing back a button hanging by its thread; enclosing arms offering comfort.” Writing her thoughts down—and the imagining of “you”—is the beginning of her regaining some sense of reality: “The miracle is your existence, not His,” she says. With a startling premise and succinct prose, Michalopoulou offers a profound meditation on what it means to be a relational being; to seek and fight for faith, friends, and family; and to read and write. “God’s Wife is a stunningly brilliant book. At every turn, it avoids obviousness and cliché,” writes Simon Critchley. “Crisp, clear, clever, and compelling.” Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels, three story collections, and more than a dozen children’s books. Her work has been translated into twenty languages; in addition to God’s Wife, two others have appeared in English: I’d Like (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008) and Why I Killed My Best Friend (Open Letter, 2014). She lives in Athens, Greece.

1. How long did it take you to write God’s Wife?
I wrote it between 2012 and 2014. The first year was an intense customized course in theology, philosophy, and a bit of quantum physics. Then I wrote twice as many pages as there are now, and I had to cut that draft extensively. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When you conduct a lot of research you want that material to show up on the page. But I am still preoccupied with the thought that I should have cut more. My excuse was that the narrator, God’s wife, was a newborn student and the enthusiasm of an acolyte should show, until she was over and done with it all.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write every day when I am in the middle of a novel. And I write intensely when I am in the middle of a short story or a poem. At all other times I blame myself for not writing. As for where: I write all over the place. Writing looks and feels ideal during writers’ residencies, because time is dedicated to writing and talking to other writers, listening to their stories and their worries. God’s Wife was partly written at the Shanghai Writers’ Association residency and at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. I also vividly remember writing at the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk, the Bellagio Center, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program, revising at Art Omi and Blue Mountain Center, and spending a winter at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, in front of a perfectly frozen lake. But even when I don’t write—indeed, I didn’t write much during my recent stint at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program—I think about writing in a focused, almost religious way.

4. What are you reading right now? 
The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda, a Catalan writer who wrote exquisitely about the Spanish civil war. And Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson—she is one of my favorite writers and a favorite person too! I’ve never met someone who speaks so tenderly about the intellect. I also like what Maggie Nelson does, how she speaks intellectually about matters of the heart, which is quite the opposite of Carson. I just finished her wonderful Bluets.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The Greek short story writer Elias Papadimitrakopoulos. And the French Annie Ernaux, a magnificent writer of auto-fiction.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The fact that whenever I am stuck, I can’t face silence and darkness—that kind of silence and darkness that only existed before the internet. I am constantly looking something up online, pretending I need this or that for my work, when all I need is patience and time.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
In Greece our fellow writers become our editors. One of them told me, “Don’t try to impress people with what you know, let the story talk.”

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
In Greece? Start employing editors, and stop leaving the writers all alone in the editing process.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My seventeen-year-old daughter. She is one of the best readers I know and in that stage of life where she is impatient with me and strict but still shows some mercy, which is close to having a professional editor I guess.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I don’t know who said it, but I use it when I teach: “If a sentence catches fire, which words are you going to rescue?”

Amanda Michalopoulou, author of God’s Wife.

(Credit: Dimitris Tsoumplekas)

Ten Questions for Barbara Crooker

by

Staff

12.24.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Barbara Crooker, whose poetry collection Some Glad Morning was published in November by the University of Pittsburgh Press. In ekphrastic poems, sonnets, and various other forms, Some Glad Morning documents the quiet details of the everyday. In one scene, Crooker recalls a meal on a Portland wharf: the “translucent plate of oysters” and the “sunlit wedge of lemon.” Another poem, titled “Elegy,” begins with a simple fact: “Yesterday, an email telling me she’s gone.” Within a few lines these slight observations might shift seamlessly into meditiations on larger themes—climate change, war, visual arts—but the broad and philosophical never supplants the small and material, or vice-versa. No matter the scale of her subject, Crooker writes with the same respect and keen attention. “Barbara Crooker’s poems invite us into her garden, into castles and museums, into the rich complexity of life,” writes Carol Was. “She celebrates even the smallest moment showing us that time is as slippery as a silver fish.” Barbara Crooker is the author of eight previous collections, including The Book of Kells and Les Fauves. Her debut collection, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her writing has also appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and Midwest Quarterly, among other publications. Born in Cold Spring, New York, she lives in Pennsylvania. 

1. How long did it take you to write Some Glad Morning? 
Most of the poems were composed in the last couple of years, many of them at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts during several residencies, plus a residency at the VCCA’s studio in Auvillar, France. But the real answer is, “all of my writing life,” which is the past forty-five years or so. Whenever and whatever I write, I’m bringing everything I’ve learned in my practice of poetry to the writing table.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I think the most challenging thing every time I sit down to write is to make the poem on the page as alive as the poem in my head. Unlike my previous two books—Les Fauves, which focused on paintings and France, and The Book of Kells, which focused on the Book of Kells and Ireland—I did not set out to write the book that became Some Glad Morning; rather, I was just writing poems. When I was at the earlier-mentioned residencies, I spent a lot of time with recent work spread out over all of the available surfaces—tables, bed, floor—walking around them and looking for themes. Once I discovered what the poems were trying to tell me, I loosely organized them into sections and continued to write until I felt I had enough strong poems to make up a manuscript.  

 3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I try to engage in the written word daily, whether it’s reading poetry or writing it. Some days are better than others. Sometimes I’m only able to write about writing: returning e-mails, writing blurbs, doing interviews. I did write and publish fifty book reviews, which taught me a lot about the variables of book construction. Some days I’m only able to read a couple of poems, write an image or a line. Some days I can read an entire journal or collection—I’m slow partly because I read everything twice, once for pleasure, once taking notes. But I keep going. Mostly, I write in big chunks when I have colony time, and little dribs and drabs when I don’t. But even when I’m not writing, I’m still thinking about writing. At a colony, I have a “room of my own”—Virginia Woolf knew how important that was. At home, I just have a corner of the dining room; most of my writing life, I’ve been caretaking for my son, who has autism, and so I had to be in a spot on the first floor where I could keep an eye and an ear out for him, and also so I could see when his bus arrived. He’s in a group home now, but I’m still here in this corner.

4. What are you reading right now? 
As far as poetry: Agnostic by Christopher Buckley, Pilgrim by Jeanne Murray Walker, Somerset by Daniel Donaghy, Only as the Day Is Long by Dorianne Laux, Without My Asking by Robert Cording, More Than This by David Kirby, Incarnate Grace by Moira Linehan. For nonfiction: At Home in the New World by Maria Terrone, a memoir on the Italian American experience; Blessed Twilight by Bob Kunzinger, essays on Van Gogh. And a stack of journals. I’m always behind.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I’d say Christopher Buckley, whose work I’ve followed for years. He’s published twenty books, won some of the big prizes—he was a Guggenheim fellow, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Fulbright, and four Pushcarts—but I don’t think he has the recognition he deserves. Buckley is a poet, critic, essayist, and editor whose work never disappoints. He consistently writes multi-paged poems that take you on unexpected journeys that startle and delight. I think he’s my polar opposite, in that I start out trying to write long poems that take their time, ramble, go down winding paths, but I seem to end up with small, short poems that fit in the palm of my hand. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own life is the biggest impediment to my writing life! For the past thirty-five years I’ve been the caregiver for my son, which involved running a behavior modification program, implementing a gluten- and dairy-free diet, researching supplements and finding alternative doctors, driving to various therapies—speech, occupational, sensory integration training, hippotherapy horseback riding, vision therapy, auditory therapy—managing melt-downs, etcetera. For eight of those years, I also cared for my mother until her passing. And now my husband has shattered his right leg and will be unable to put weight on it for the next three months, which means no driving. I may only be dreaming about thinking about writing.

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I’m so far outside the loop of the writing community and the publishing industry, I can’t even see the loop. So there’s nothing I’d think of changing, as I’m just not part of anything. I have my writing friends and my friends in writing—i.e., my Facebook friends, most of whom I’ve never actually met—and that seems to me to be enough.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Some Glad Morning, what would you say? 
If I could go back in time and talk to my earlier self, the one who sent out her first book to every contest for over twenty-five years—there’s a poem in that book, Radiance, called “Twenty-Five Years of Rejection Slips”—and who thought her first book would likely be posthumous, it would be to tell her not to be discouraged. Wonderful things, things you would never have dreamed of, will happen: having that first book win The Word Press First Book Award and later being named a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Being invited as a featured reader to the Library of Congress, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Poetry at Round Top, the Scissortail Poetry Festival, Poetry by the Sea. Having Stanley Kunitz and Grace Schulman select poems for prizes—the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award and the W. B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. And, most recently, having the Pitt Poetry Series invite me to send them this manuscript, Some Glad Morning.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Marjorie Stelmach, who I met ten years ago on a residency; immediately we clicked. We are very different writers, with very different styles, but we both have the uncanny ability to see what needs to be edited in each other’s work. Sometimes, it’s as simple as changing punctuation or removing an article—we mostly just tinker—but then the whole poem falls neatly into place. We’ve tried to arrange residencies together when we can—she lives in St. Louis, I live in rural Pennsylvania—but mostly we do this by e-mail. I felt like she was with me when I was in residence two times at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, as I could send her a poem in draft before I went to bed at night, and get her response the next day. We keep begging each other to take our vitamins, to take care of ourselves so that we can continue to be there for each other.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
“Who said you should be happy? Do your work.” Colette. “Have I done everything the poem requires of me?” James Dickey. “Use everything.” Sister Wendy Beckett. 

Barbara Crooker, author of Some Glad Morning.

(Credit: Tonya Wilhelm)

Ten Questions for Tommy Pico

by

Staff

12.17.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Tommy Pico, whose fourth book of poetry, Feed, was published in November by Tin House Books. Bounding across time, New York City, and the wider country, the main character of Feed, Teebs, is always in motion. He walks the New York High Line park with his ex; friends and family teach him how to cook, to cut an onion with “claw hands” and salt and oil generously; and all the while his soundtrack plays, skipping from Beyoncé to the Cranberries to Hank Williams back to Beyoncé. No matter the scene Teebs is attentive to both the sensory details of the moment and to the complex histories that exist beneath every surface. The High Line train once ran along “tenth / avenue, or death / avenue as it was known.” At home, “an Indian reservation east of San Diego…the average age of death is 40.7 years old.” A map, a recipe book, a letter, Feed is unceasingly various and unflinching. Pico traces out a full life in all its loneliness, intimacy, and pleasure. “No one corrals our day’s chaos like Pico, who serves it up to us as some of the wildest verse the world has ever seen,” writes Danez Smith. Tommy Pico is also the author of IRL, Nature Poem, and Junk. He is a two-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Friends of Literature Prize, and a Whiting Award–winner. He also curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) alongside Morgan Parker and co-hosts the podcasts Food 4 Thot and Scream, Queen! Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, Pico splits his time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn, New York. 

1. How long did it take you to write Feed? 
It took about a year? There were two separate three-month periods when I accumulated the “material” of the poem, the word-things, lol. I had created this whole curriculum for myself: I could only read food books, watch food TV shows and movies, listen to food podcasts, everything I ate I had to cook myself, and twice a week I had to make food with other people in their kitchens. Then a few months later I was commissioned by the High Line to write a long poem for them and I kind of mashed the two projects together. The shape of the poem took a little longer. I wanted it to have this curated feeling of wildness, curated to look like a wild garden, the way the High Line is.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Writing sucks, I’m sorry but it does. Actually writing the book was probably the hardest thing about writing the book. It’s also weird because this was the first one I wrote totally and completely after I already had a book published. IRL and Nature Poem were written pretty much before I even had a contract for the first book, and Junk was probably halfway done by the time IRL dropped in 2016. For the first time I felt a kind of expectation shouldering its way into my writing process. That was freaking terrifying. I tried to write in spite of that feeling. I’m also really, really good at denial so that kind of saved me.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I was writing the poems, Monday through Thursday I wrote as much as I could without the editor voice. The goal was production. I wrote as much as possible and the only goal was that I couldn’t think about what I was doing. Then Fridays I would slash and burn upwards of 80 percent of that week’s word haul. Anything that stayed had to earn its keep. Saturdays and Sundays were for sandwich eating and sandwich eating only. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
EYES BOTTLE DARK WITH A MOUTHFUL OF FLOWERS BY JAKE SKEETS GOOD GOD READ THAT BOOK RIGHT FREAKING NOW PLEASE THANK YOU.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
JAKE SKEETS GOOD GOD JAKE SKEETS.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I don’t really write poems or like “literature” anymore, lol. I’ve kind of sold out to write film and television. When you’re writing poems and other weird stuff, people actually want you to be weird and different. That’s my experience anyway. There isn’t a ton of money in our industry. But writing for the screen? The same people who have always cut the checks are cutting those checks, and you as a writer are an investment. They have a lot of opinions about what you should make and how it should look and sound and feel. With budgets also come other practical concerns, like locations and sets and actors and wardrobe and all that. I wouldn’t say it’s an impediment, necessarily. It just adds a different constriction that I’m not used to, but I think it’s making me a lil more wily and resourceful? Idk. I just finished a book tour and my brain is practically a Kahlua-soaked Kind bar. For the record I don’t drink Kahlua, I’ll leave that to my bff Lauren Wilkinson, but it sure is fun to say.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
It was actually something that aforementioned bff Lauren Wilkinson told me about an agent who wasn’t very good at their job. She told me, “You’re the talent. They are lucky to have you. Any agent who makes you feel otherwise isn’t someone you should be doing business with.” Something like that. Tracks, tbh.

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
If these writers actually got the kind of money that their labor justifies? It would be over for you hoes. But in the meantime, it would be nice to see more diversity not just in the authors, but also the editors, the publishers, the agents, the managers, the producers, etcetera. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Ugh, this is going to sound so corny and self-important but it’s actually me. I write with the idea that I’m going to perform it, at some point, so it has to feel like it could conceivably come out of my mouth, you know? In that respect my instinct has to guide the final thing. BUT! Some people who have told me things that totally changed my mind, perspective, selfhood, ethos, etcetera have been: Ariana Reines, Jericho Brown, Alexander Chee, Lauren Wilkinson, Roy Pérez, Pamela Sneed, and Bird Runningwater. Readers who have an ear for what the “piece” is supposed to be, not how they would write it.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I remember Ira Sachs telling me that the learning curve wasn’t about submitting my voice to the medium, but making the medium submit to my voice. Something like that. That actually was the learning curve, and it maybe sounds egotistical but the process was really humbling. Also, one time the bff Lauren Wilkinson—I’m repeating her name so much because I’m going to ride her coattails into the sunset for sure—told me when writing, in so many words, to pursue the path of most conflict. It’s not always been so good on my body, but it has been great for my writing.

Tommy Pico, author of Feed.

(Credit: Niqui Carter)

Ten Questions for Jeffrey Colvin

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Staff

12.10.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jeffrey Colvin, whose debut novel, Africaville, is out today from Amistad. Shifting across the continent—from Nova Scotia and Quebec to Vermont and Alabama—Africaville concerns three generations of the Sebolt family as their lives unfold in the twentieth century. The story opens in 1918 with Kath Ella Sebolt, a young girl growing up in a small town in Nova Scotia that was settled by the descendants of slaves from the American South and Caribbean. The Sebolt story unfurls from this Atlantic outpost: Kath Ella obtains one of the few college scholarships offered to Black students in 1930s Canada; she bears a son, Omar/Etienne, who travels to America in the midst of the Civil Rights movement; and his son, Warner, carries the reader as the end of the century approaches. Rich in historical detail, Africaville traces the complex political realities of various eras through its vividly imagined network of relationships. “Despite departure and distance, Africaville ultimately proves to be a tenacious reclamation of story, of place, of belonging,” writes Terry Hong. Jeffrey Colvin is an assistant editor at Narrative magazine. His work has appeared in the Millions, Rain Taxi Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. In addition to studying at Harvard University, the United States Naval Academy, and serving in the United States Marine Corps, Colvin received his MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

1. How long did it take you to write Africaville? 
My debut novel began as a short story in the late 1990s. The story was set in a rural Black community in Alabama like the one where my grandmother raised a family. I did not envision this short story as part of a larger narrative until I read an article in the New York Times in 2001 about a black community called Africville that once existed on the northern edge of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Several reasons the novel took so long to complete will be familiar to many artists who work on creative projects that are large in scope. After getting an MFA I had to return to working again to earn money. In addition I had a very difficult stretch of years in which I lost both my parents and two sisters. The novel also required a tremendous amount of research including many trips to the southern United States and to Canada.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I wanted to explore how the pull of a community like Africaville could affect a family over several generations. Kath Ella Sebolt, the matriarch of the family grew up in Africaville but moves with her son, Etienne, to Montreal. Etienne later moves to Vermont and then to Alabama where his son, Warner, grows up. I knew what might pull the second and third generation toward cherishing their ancestral home in Canada—including the town’s unique history and the continued efforts by former residents to keep the town’s memory alive. But deciding what elements would estrange subsequent generations from Africaville was more difficult. Writing about Black characters who were light enough to pass for white was also a challenge since I did not want to rely too heavily on what I knew about being a Black person living in America. I had to imagine the life of characters who shared some of my own history but had their own unique ways of being in the world.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
In my New York apartment, I have a small space dedicated to writing. But I tend to be nomadic, traveling all over New York City in search of quiet spaces, usually libraries. For a long while I wrote in short stretches between working gigs and on the weekends. For the past six months I have been getting up in the morning around seven and writing until the early afternoon.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I am reading The Healing by Gayl Jones. It has taken me a while to get through it because I am savoring the prose. Reading the novel, I gain so many ideas about how to approach my own writing, not to mention being moved by many of the emotional scenes. I have also become engrossed in I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I will mention Gayl Jones again. She is a wonderful writer whose ascendance during the late 1990s was watched by many avid readers. She has since receded from much public discussion. Her debut novel, Corregidora, and her novel The Healing deserve wider current recognition.

6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I can only offer that an MFA program provided me time to devote to my writing without the drain of full-time work. I also benefited from access to a community of teachers and fellow writers, and I was exposed to works of literature I may not have encountered when reading on my own.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?  
You’ll only have the thrill of being a debut author once. Work hard but also try to enjoy the experience. Part of the advice has been difficult to achieve because the period of an author’s debut comes with much anxiety!

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
In the past the biggest impediment has been the drain part-time work can have on the energy I need to bring to my writing, particularly longer projects.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My literary agent, Ayesha Pande, has been an excellent reader, providing just the right mix of being thorough, incisive, and tough, but also supportive. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
The best advice I have heard works for many aspects of my life. Concentrate on your own work every day to make it better. Do not worry so much about what others are doing, or get caught up in comparing yourself to others, particularly those you consider more successful.

Jeffrey Colvin, author of Africaville. (Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Jeff VanderMeer

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Staff

12.3.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jeff VanderMeer, whose latest novel, Dead Astronauts, is out today from MCD/FSG. A work of science fiction, Dead Astronauts opens on the outskirts of a city with no name. Three figures appear through the dust. They have arrived here many times before—in different times and versions of themselves—always with the intent to destroy the ominous Company that has cast the world in the shadow of its biotech. Every mission has failed, VanderMeer writes, but “perhaps one day a certain kind of failure might be enough.” Slipping between various timelines and points-of-view, VanderMeer constructs a world and a mission in technicolor. As the figures trudge forward, he inhabits the minds of numerous others—a blue fox, a homeless woman, a fish. An exercise in destabilization, Dead Astronauts unhinges more than its own world, continuously questioning the broader insufficiencies and limits of the act of storytelling itself, particularly in the time of ecological disaster. “You want. Things to be words. That are not words. Could never be words,” one chapter begins. “VanderMeer is a master of literary science fiction, and this may be his best book yet,” writes Kirkus Reviews. Jeff VanderMeer is the author of numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. Annihilation, the first novel in his New York Times-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy, won the Shirley Jackson Award and the Nebula Award. His recent novel Borne was also published to critical acclaim, receiving positive reviews from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

1. How long did it take you to write Dead Astronauts?
I find time is an inaccurate measure of creative writing. Did it start eight years ago with that scene fragment written on a leaf while hiking? And if so, was my subconscious building story around that note the whole time or only later, after my prior novel Borne was published? Did it actually start while finishing Borne and wondering about the enigmatic “dead astronauts” in the dusty courtyard of a ruined city? And if so, what was the “time” to write it? Did that time include all the moments of seeing bits of the world around me that meant something to the novel? Or did the clock start when I realized “dead astronauts” was the theme of the novel, not just “three dead astronauts”? Writing—the writing it down—has increasingly become the least important part of the process. Living in the world of the novel, existing as the characters, viewing the day-to-day from their perspective, is the most important thing. And that part feels like it exists outside of time.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I don’t know. Perhaps, initially, in thinking about the structure, knowing I’m not usually happy with novels that have multiple viewpoints that don’t vary their approach. I once read a very unsatisfying novel with ten different first-person viewpoint characters. So I decided I would see if I could use first person, third person, limited omniscient, second person, and variations on those in terms of distance or intimacy with the characters. The other vector or factor in character voice and the form and structure of the novel concerned a certain modulation of lyricism. Which is to say, within these different voices, connected by their struggle against ecological and societal disaster, some are intensely poetic and others come to their lyricism through a blunt muscularity, with, again, variations within each “realm.” This included use of prose poetry, a “found poem,” and a character so distributed across the sections that gray text denotes their presence. Related to this is how many voices are nonhuman, which is achieved in part by imagining these voices as still contaminated by the human, so as to bring coherence into play. Were these challenges? I don’t know. They’re the book.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I live by the dictum of thinking about what I’m writing every day, but not necessarily writing anything down. Thinking deeply and richly about the fiction I want to write is most important. How that expresses itself on the page is variable. Sometimes I’ll write thirty thousand words in a weekend and then spend months honing it and understanding what it means. Other times I will write a scene a day or a scene in the morning and a scene in some other book in the evening. I do like to write in the morning, right after breakfast, but I have been known to write in the evenings. In my office. At the kitchen table. In a bar. In a coffee shop. Out in the yard. It’s important to switch it up. Once I’ve got most of a rough draft, I will usually switch to a more regimented approach: original text in the morning, revision of scenes in the afternoon, and line editing in the evening. I write almost all drafts longhand, then type them up, then back into longhand, to ensure I’m actually revising and not just moving words around the page. I want revision to be as radical and ecstatic a process as the original act. And each novel is different in approach—the rhythm and structure of an individual novel helps determine my process, which is meant to support that rhythm.

4. What are you reading right now?
I was a National Book Award judge, so the longlist faithfully represents some of my favorite reads of the year. But otherwise I’m reading the new Deborah Levy novel The Man Who Saw Everything—she’s a genius; the newly translated Clarice Lispector novel The Besieged City—another genius; and the graphic novel version of Andrea Wulf’s biography of Alexander Von Humboldt, The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Nobody’s ever heard of Michael Cisco and he’s brilliant. More recently, I’ve become a huge fan of Audrey Schulman. Her Theory of Bastards is one of my favorite novels of all time. Someone should bring her backlist back into print.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It used to be a soul-crushing day job, but even that could be channeled method-acting-wise to help the fiction. I’ve been lucky enough to be a full-time writer since 2007, which comes with its own impediments—like, sometimes, wondering where the next paycheck will come from. But in two ways I’ve been fortunate: I knew by age eight that I wanted to be a writer and I also knew that I would continue to write even if I never had a career or even got published. That is a powerful and liberating thing to realize.

7. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Sean MacDonald is my editor at MCD/FSG, and he has been such a blessing. He understands my fiction—in all of its forms, not just one or two—and his edits and comments are so insightful. He’s also a very kind soul. What I most value is that he allows me the space to find my own solutions while being incisive and precise in his comments. I also prefer bluntness, which he can provide.

8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My wife, Ann. Because I can talk about works in progress with her and not get writer’s block. Anyone else, I get blocked. So often novels are better even in rough draft form because of those conversations—about characters, situations, etcetera.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
More diversity in editorial hires is a huge thing. It’s so important—and that includes folks who are gatekeepers proactively mentoring the next generation.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Honestly, I generally learn best by finding the exception to the rule, which allows me to understand the rule. But one piece of advice I would give: Don’t divorce the craft of writing from the art of writing. The whole point of consciously absorbing more and more writing technique—even at the micro level of where you begin and end scenes—is it allows you to be more versatile in your art. There are plenty of unpublished writing geniuses out there who never understood that. Once you stop picking up technique, you begin to ossify—in your art. And part of how craft supports art is knowing what should be organic and what can be mechanical. You can mechanically improve your writing in certain ways, while other parts, like how your subconscious processes or creates narrative, should be left alone.

Jeff VanderMeer, author of Dead Astronauts.

(Credit: Ditte Valente)

Ten Questions for Dexter Palmer

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Staff

11.26.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Dexter Palmer, whose third novel, Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, is out today from Pantheon. A work of historical fiction, Mary Toft reimagines the story of a woman from the English countryside who, in 1726, shocked the nation’s best doctors by giving birth to dead rabbits. In Palmer’s telling, the local surgeon John Howard and his assistant Zachary Walsh run from the room retching after witnessing the first delivery. A man who prizes his rationality, John is disturbed less by the matted fur and blood than by how such a miraculous birth might disrupt his entire belief system. As news of Mary’s case spreads, she and her growing company of doctors are summoned to London by King George, where onlookers crowd outside her window anticipating another birth. Tested in new environments and circumstances, the characters’ hearts are ever-changing; illusions are both lost and acquired. “It is vividly composed and audaciously imagined,” writes Kevin Brockmeier of Mary Toft. “Filled with characters who do battle against a world that perceives them as strange—or who, conversely, assume strangeness as a mask in order to induce the world to see them at all.” Dexter Palmer is the author of two previous novels, Version Control (Pantheon, 2016) and The Dream of Perpetual Motion (St. Martin’s, 2010). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. 

1. How long did it take you to write Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen?
Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen took me about three years to write, which is fast for me—my previous novel took about seven, and the one before that took fourteen. Part of the increased speed is perhaps because I have a better idea of what I’m doing now as a writer; part of that is because it’s my shortest novel at just over 100,000 words.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing about the novel was writing the first fifty or so pages, when I first realized just how much I needed to know about my chosen setting—England in the year 1726. Most of that first year of composition was taken up with teaching myself how to do the necessary research. I spent a lot of time in libraries trying to figure out what a house would look like, or what people would eat and how they’d cook it, or how surgeries were performed. Sometimes at the end of an eight-hour day I’d have a single paragraph to show for it.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For this particular book I wrote whenever I had the time. There wasn’t much of a fixed pattern. Sometimes I’d knock out a few pages of dialogue in a single day; sometimes most of the work happened in my head rather than on the page. Usually, a day in which I get down 500 words that I don’t want to throw away is a successful one for me.

4. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, which I’ve been working away at for the past couple of months—I’m on page 1,148 of 1,268. It’s interesting, even if the book jacket’s description of it as a “true-crime story” is possibly the most inaccurate claim I’ve ever seen in jacket copy. Sometimes Albinati’s thinking in it is original and surprising; sometimes he expresses familiar ideas in novel ways; sometimes I find myself persevering through the book only to bear witness to the heroic effort of the translation.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Molly Patterson’s novel, Rebellion, is probably the best debut novel I’ve read in the past five years or more. It’s so accomplished at a sentence-by-sentence level, and so elegantly structured, that it doesn’t even feel like a first novel most of the time. But it also has what I think of as good “first-novel energy”: It’s stuffed almost to bursting, as if the writer wasn’t quite sure she was going to get a crack at a second novel, so everything was going to have to go into this one. I wish that book had gotten more attention.

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I’d teleport one major New York City publishing house, buildings, personnel and their families, equipment and all, to a city in a Southern state, and another to somewhere in the southwestern United States, outside California. Say, Atlanta or Albuquerque. That’d do.

7. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
This is the second book for which Edward Kastenmeier was my editor, and I appreciate his holistic view of the work—my books have tended toward somewhat complicated structures, and he has a great eye for whether all the moving parts are meshing together correctly. Susan Golomb has been my agent for something like eleven years now, and she’s been tenacious no matter how odd the projects I’ve brought to her—she’s never asked me to dilute the content of a proposal to make it more accessible, and her eye when reading a manuscript is as good as any editor’s.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, what would you say?
“As was the case with your other two books, when you reach the halfway point of the composition process you’ll wonder if this is working at all or whether you’ve wasted a lot of time. It’ll be fine.”

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I pick early readers for each book depending on the demands of the project, and I prefer to show works-in-progress to as few people as possible other than my editor and agent. For this one I went to a couple of old friends from England, Maria and Drew Purves, who I asked to make sure that I wasn’t introducing any inadvertent Americanisms and that I generally appeared to know what I was talking about; and to Brett Douville, a video game developer who was familiar with my earlier novels and who had some thoughtful observations.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
This is going to sound more nakedly capitalist than it is, but one of the things my editor said that helped with the writing of both my previous novel and this one was: “We want to be able to sell this book ten years from now.” Which is another way of saying that books that are rooted in the present moment can fade out of sight if they aren’t also able to speak to future readers. Some very good novels are ephemeral by design, meant by their authors to burn bright and quickly, but for the effort it takes me to write one, I prefer them to last longer.

Dexter Palmer, author of Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen.

Ten Questions for Nina MacLaughlin

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Staff

11.19.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nina MacLaughlin, whose second book, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, is out today from FSG Originals. In Wake, Siren, MacLaughlin inhabits the voices of nearly every female figure from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, retelling the many myths of the epic poem from their perspectives. Across chapters of varied structure and style, the women are newly in conversation with one another, enriching and complicating Ovid’s record. The same questions have endured across the centuries: “How can we make sense of change? What to do about the ends?” writes MacLaughlin. In Wake, Siren, simple answers remain elusive, but these perennial questions become more capacious—conscious of their edges, silences, and exclusions—and MacLaughlin lays bare the violence once glossed over and long distorted. “Savage, cheeky, incisively aware of the social-domestic-economic-political thorninesses that prick (and mortally or immortally wound) interactions between power unequals, MacLaughlin opens a pressure valve that’s been sealed shut for centuries,” writes Heidi Julavits. Nina MacLaughlin is also the author of a memoir, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter. Her writing has appeared in various outlets including the Paris Review Daily, the Believer, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Globe, where she serves as a books columnist. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1. How long did it take you to write Wake, Siren?
It took a little less than three months. It happened very fast. I have tried hard to figure out the precise alchemy that allowed for this altered kind of outpouring, and I hope to be able to replicate it in the future, but my sense is it might’ve been a one-time miracle. For perspective, my first book, Hammer Head, took over three years and I rewrote it, I don’t know, maybe seven times. I don’t know exactly how Wake, Siren happened, but it is a mystery I am so, so grateful for.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I finished, I did a spell check and sent it to my agent. I hadn’t told her, or anyone, I was working on it, and I didn’t read it over before I handed it off to her. The book sold and then I had to read it over. That initial round of edits, last winter, reading it over for the first time, was a bizarre and challenging experience. Much of the book I had no recollection of writing, and it was strange to be confronted with what I’d done, as though I was getting access to parts of my mind I hadn’t known existed along with the repeated sense, I wrote this? It was jarring and it was hugely uncomfortable.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Mostly I work in my apartment, sometimes on the couch, sometimes on my bed, sometimes at my actual desk, occasionally at the kitchen counter. My best hours for putting sentences together are the early ones. The fullest writing days run from about 6:45 AM to 1:30 PM. My idea-brain sometimes gets cooking after 8:00 PM, but for actual words on paper, morning is best. When I’m deep in a project, I write every day, even just a paragraph or two on an “off” day. I like to be in daily touch with it. When I’m less deep in a project, I still write most days. Like running, there are times when you do not want to haul your ass out of doors and run, but you never regret it afterwards. The 1,500 words I wrote yesterday about a sheepskin rug, they’re useless and will go nowhere, but it was better than not doing it at all. And, like running, at the end of an otherwise empty day, it’s possible to say, well, at least I did that.

4. What are you reading right now?
I just finished The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. I’d tried it three times before and it never held me. A friend told me it’s a book for when you have six hours on a train and nothing else to do but read and look out the window. I was in a situation that approximated that and tore through it. I’m making my slow way through The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard, which is an exploration of dreams and dreaminess and the poetic impulse. Some of it is ridiculous, but I like Bachelard’s enthusiasm and wild mind. I’m reading the intimate, potent Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde for my small and powerful book club. And before bed I’ve been dipping back into John Berger’s mini-bios of artists in Portraits.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I encountered the work of two poets this year which I’ve been talking about to anyone who will listen. The Chilean poet Raúl Zurita and the Danish poet Inger Christensen. They are widely recognized, and it speaks to my limits as a reader that I was so late coming to them. But I still want everyone to know. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Without question, the internet.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
I was talking with my editor about the natural sorts of nerves that arise in advance of a book coming out, one of which is the revealing that I have this perverse weird imagination. My editor shrugged, “Not that weird,” she said. This was both deeply comforting, and also motivating, as in, there’s space to get weirder.

8. What is the one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
To have more people of color as editors and literary gatekeepers. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My young brother Sam doesn’t give many compliments. And he’s almost always the first, and often the only person I show work-in-progress to. His ear and eye for precision is unmatched, and he has a poet’s sense of the risks that are—and are not—worth taking with language. Part of the benefit of sharing DNA is that he knows me well enough to have a sense of what I’m trying to do, even if I’m not quite getting there, and, like the best sorts of editors, can push in the right direction. I know I won’t get empty praise, and I will get thoughtful suggestions and places to improve, and the arguments about commas end in laughs.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
The best writing advice happens also to be the best life advice: Stay open. Pay attention. And whenever I sit down to start writing something, I repeat the words that the editor S.I. Rosenbaum told me years ago as I was working on a piece for her: “Tilt for the cliff,” she said. “Tilt for the cliff,” I tell myself as I start every piece, or when I feel things getting flat or safe. “Tilt for the cliff.” The words work like a spell and electrify body and brain both. Push, push harder.

Nina MacLaughlin, author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung.

(Credit: Kelly Davidson)

Ten Questions for Elaine Equi

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Staff

11.12.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Elaine Equi, whose poetry collection The Intangibles is out today from Coffee House Press. Concerned by the encroaching rule of algorithms, Equi resists with dynamic verse: “A poet is someone who goes out of her way to preserve / a mystery.” With incisive wit, she urges readers away from the “rectangular forest” of screens and models more daring pursuits. She imagines herself as a bouncer; she writes a love poem to her husband; she wonders at the nature of time—how is it possible that she’s been teaching for nearly forty years? Across these varied subjects, Equi always revels in the strangeness of her thoughts and emotions—her world, in all its detail, is sharply observed, but never pinned down. “She trims a narrative to its mad essence,” writes Wayne Koestenbaum of The Intangibles. “She winnows lyric into a shape more giddy than aphorism, more delirious than koan.” Elaine Equi is the author of more than ten poetry collections, including her debut, Federal Woman (Danaides Press, 1978), and Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2007), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her poems have also appeared in various publications such as the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Best American Poetry. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Equi lives in New York City. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA program at the New School. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Intangibles?
It took about four years. It’s ninety-six pages long, so that comes to about two pages per month. I usually write more than that, but a lot gets thrown away.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
About three-quarters of the way through the book, there was a fire in my apartment building. I was home at the time and one of the few things I grabbed before running out to the street was the manuscript. Luckily, no one was hurt, but it was incredibly disruptive. I had to put everything in storage and wasn’t able to return to my place for a whole year while repairs were being done. I finished the first draft of the book while sitting in a hotel lounge drinking iced tea. I was glad to have a project to focus on that made me feel more in control. I didn’t write about the fire directly, but the whole experience took me out of my comfort zone in what was ultimately a good way. Rather than knowing exactly how the book should unfold, organizing it became a way for me to respond creatively to the unexpected.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I used to like to write late at night, but now I much prefer the morning. And I almost always write at home. I have a big stack of notebooks and books piled up around my chair. I probably write something almost every day even if it’s just a few lines. Sometimes I keep a dream journal, which is a good way to ease into a poem. In the future, I’d like to try writing more outside, preferably someplace beautiful.

4. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Dunce by Mary Ruefle and really enjoyed it. Her poems are wonderfully wayward and weird—but not in a random way. I didn’t even want to wait for the paperback. I know I really like a poet when I have to get the hardcover.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That is a very long list, but I’ll start with Paul Violi. I had the pleasure of working with him at the New School in New York before he died in 2011. His poems are so witty and inventive. He’s written poems in the form of an index, a police blotter, a quiz. I’m glad there’s a nice edition of his selected poems still available. There are many poets I love who were mainly published by small presses, and after they die, their books often vanish. I wish more of those collections could be archived and republished as e-books.

6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I teach in an MFA program and think they are useful. If you have the time, money, and inclination, an MFA is a great way to focus intensively on your work. But there are definitely other ways to nurture and develop your writing. There are a lot of exciting literary and arts centers all over the country that offer workshops, lectures, readings, and events where you can connect with other writers. Plus, you can usually find terrific writing and literature classes in the continuing education departments of most universities. 

7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My nerves. I’m a moody person and sometimes I just can’t access the clarity and objectivity—the equanimity—I need in order to write. I have a line in one piece that says: “My poem that still suffers in the twenty-first century from neurasthenia.” Life often moves too fast for me.

8. What is the one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I’m as ambitious as the next person, but I think too much emphasis is placed on contests and prizes. It makes me sad that a young poet looking to publish a first book will probably be entering a lot of contests. I do realize contests help fund small presses, but they shouldn’t be the only or even the predominant path to publication.

9. Who is the most trusted reader of your work and why?
My husband, Jerome Sala. He’s an amazing poet, but he also worked for many years as a copywriter and creative director in advertising. He can edit anything.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t be afraid to cut it if it’s not working.

Elaine Equi, author of The Intangibles.

(Credit: Becket Logan)

Ten Questions for Malcolm Tariq

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Staff

11.5.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Malcolm Tariq, whose debut poetry collection, Heed the Hollow, is out today from Graywolf Press. Selected by Chris Abani as the winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Poetry Prize—an annual award for an exceptional manuscript by a Black poet of African descent that includes $1,000 and publication—Tariq’s debut is a complex and expansive exploration of the self, the South, Blackness, and queerness. Each poem is the site of multiple possibilities, the convergence of the past, future, and many, often dissonant, emotions. In the opening poem, “Power Bottom,” Tariq invokes both love and terror, employing humor and double entendre to shift from queer sex to lynching within the same page. In his introduction Abani notes some of Tariq’s conflations may well feel “problematic and uncomfortable,” but they are all the more vital and resonant for this reason. Heed the Hollow, Abani writes, “marks the possibility of a new set of terms to expand on the already beautifully complicated aesthetics of the grotesque.” Malcolm Tariq is also the author of a chapbook, Extended Play. He is a graduate of Emory University and earned his PhD in English from the University of Michigan. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Tariq lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write Heed the Hollow?
About four years. The writing for Heed the Hollow started in graduate school and grew more deliberately during the dissertation stage. I drafted the first long sequence, “Tabby,” in 2014. In 2016, I went to the Cave Canem retreat for the first time. I believe the first poem I wrote there was “Power Bottom,” which I had been trying to write for months. This was the catalyst. I had a better understanding of the types of poems I was writing and began to see in what direction this new project was moving.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Knowing when to stop adding poems and angles to the scope of what I was trying to do. When the manuscript won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, I didn’t actually think it was complete. Having a deadline for the manuscript from the publisher helped me be more comfortable bringing the writing process to a close.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
This depends on the genre. Ideally in the morning, but I don’t keep a deliberate writing schedule unless I’m on deadline or have a steady flow of ideas. Writing at home is difficult if I don’t have an office. I love coffeeshops because there is noise, people-watching, and other distractions. For poetry, I usually keep to paper for several drafts before I transition to a computer. My preferred notebook is a sharp-cornered, hardcover Roaring Spring black marble composition book with 20# paper, item number 77461, college ruled—I’m a Pisces and need a line to keep me grounded. 

Having a daily writing time hasn’t work for me so far because of school or work. In my last year, I pregamed academic writing by working on a poem. I finished the dissertation in two years by committing to a page per weekday. That’s five pages a week that can be done whenever. I do this sometimes with plays, just so I can stop stalling and get dialogue down on the page for me to work with. 

Great ideas happen for me while someone is talking or there is a discussion. It’s a form of active listening but also creation for me. It’s not unusual for my coursework notebooks and conference programs to have concept maps drawn in the margins. This is how I got through attending church as a teenager.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading three things right now. The first, which I’m reading rather slowly, is Derek Walcott’s collection What the Twilight Says: Essays. I’m currently working on a play about slavery in Savannah, Georgia; queer desire; and time travel. For research on this I’m working through Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry’s edited volume, Slavery and Freedom in Savannah. I haven’t been reading much poetry lately, but I had to jump into Rage Hezekiah’s debut, Stray Harbor, which is quite beautiful.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
This is difficult for me to answer. If I have to mention one person, I would say Assotto Saint, who is actually getting more recognition now. I only discovered him a couple years ago. I cried the first time I read Wishing for Wings, which has only happened a few times with art, Tupac’s “Dear Mama” and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora among them. Each line in Wishing for Wings is so deliberate that they are almost distinct little poems in their own right. More than this, the care that Assotto put into his work and the production of the work—from the poems to the plays—is so inspiring. That book in particular gives us so much insight into the era in which it was written. It generously illustrates how communities lived through the most challenging years of our experience with HIV/AIDS, and how we live with that in the everyday sense, even now. It also reminds us how much artists of color—at least from the 1960s well into the 1990s—curated their own professional and artistic lives from community resources when there were not other opportunities for them to do so.

6. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
In the original manuscript there was a definition for “tabby” that appeared at the beginning of the collection. I thought this was important because so much of the book depended on knowing about this word and what it meant. The incredible and patient Jeff Shotts, my editor at Graywolf, suggested that we move the definition to the notes section at the end. He was essentially telling me to trust the reader to get to that understanding on their own. As an academic this is often hard for me, because I was taught to be very clear with my argument, leaving little room for doubt. Art, for the most part, is different. Prefacing the poems this way also robbed the reader of having a deeper engagement with the work on their own terms. Jeff’s guidance here also taught me that when poems begin to take the form of a published book, I as a writer should also consider someone else’s experience of reading it for the first time.

7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Money? The standard work day in the United State is two to three hours too long.

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Why is Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen out of print? This is criminal. How can we prevent the same thing from happening to Assotto Saint’s Wishing for Wings and Essex Hemphill’s Conditions and Ceremonies?

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Something that has been helpful for me is sharing poems with writers who aren’t poets. This opens so many possibilities for innovation as well as the small details that I often forget about. One of my most important lessons in the power of images came from a writing group in which I was the only poet. That really changed my relationship to many of the poems in this book.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I went to Emory mainly because of the creative writing program, but I didn’t take any of the workshops because at the time I didn’t trust the undergraduate students there to be serious about craft. I studied English and sociology instead and spent those years reading. One day I was talking to a guy we called J. P.—John Peterson—who was studying philosophy. I told him I took a logic course for math credit but I didn’t think I could take a philosophy course because it was difficult and required too much thinking. His response was that everyone had a philosophy of some sort and that writing was my philosophy. This was pivotal for me because in my independent study I was learning how to say things, I wasn’t concentrated on what I was saying, why I was saying it, and who I was speaking to and with.

Malcolm Tariq, author of Heed the Hollow.

(Credit: Karisma Price)

Ten Questions for Kai Cheng Thom

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Staff

10.29.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kai Cheng Thom, whose latest book, I Hope We Choose Love, will be published on Thursday by Arsenal Pulp Press. In alternating essays and poems, Thom both critiques and reimagines contemporary activism. Documenting her own desire to be “good,” she speaks broadly to the intoxicating pursuit of ideological purity among activists, and the ways in which these obsessions engender fear and ultimately discourage the community from noticing and naming harm. In candid analysis of her own missteps and those of her immediate communities, Thom models the possibility of engaging with failures and moving forward. She makes the case for meeting the self and others with a radically open heart—with love. To embrace love, in all its inevitable pitfalls, might build a community that can last. “What would it take to build a community where we were really safe?” Thom asks. “Not perfectly, rigidly safe in the sense of totally free from risk—because such a thing is not possible in this life—but safe enough to pursue intimacy and adventure with the knowledge that there really was a community that had our backs?” Kai Cheng Thom is also the author of a poetry collection, a place called No Homeland, and a book for young readers, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea. Her debut, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize and was named a Lambda Literary Awards finalist. 

1. How long did it take you to write I Hope We Choose Love? 
It took a year for the project to come together after my publisher asked for it, but the pieces in the book span from up to about five years old to less than a year. Quite a few of my books are like that—woven together from old bits and pieces combined with newer work. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
This book is extremely personal as it is largely autobiographical. It also dives into some highly sensitive and politically charged topics, such as suicide and intimate partner violence, while taking a bit of a radical stance on those topics. All that to say, I’m a bit nervous putting it out in the world!

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I used to write every day, everywhere—at work, in transit, at home in the middle of the night. I wrote at a furious pace. I’ve slowed down quite a bit these days, which is probably for the best in terms of my health. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
Lots of young adult fiction and fantasy novels—my first loves when it comes to genre. I’m currently finishing The Border Keeper, a fantastic novella from Tor by Kerstin Hall. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are a great many, but one is the children’s author Laurence Yep, who was prolific throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His work was well-recognized at the time, but he seems to have slipped out of the public consciousness, which is too bad. His work deeply inspired me and many other authors of the Chinese diaspora.

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Well, imagining that I had unlimited powers over the shape of the universe, I would take capitalism out of the equation. The demand to constantly commodify not only our work as writers, but also our personalities in the age of social media, is something that is deeply detrimental to the integrity of the writing community.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I wasn’t agented at the time that the book was contracted for, but my editor, Shirarose Wilensky, did suggest some fairly significant shifts to the structure of I Hope We Choose Love, which I think changed the manuscript for the better. 

8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
I don’t trust any readers! And readers shouldn’t trust any writers. We’re all scoundrels, down to the last. More seriously, though, I would say that while I have had some very wonderful and supportive readers—mostly friends and editors—my experience of having a readership is that our readers often struggle to see us as real human beings, because the writer-reader relationship is an idealistic one while in-person relationships are realistic. The two aren’t compatible, and this can lead to disappointment on both sides. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Capitalism! Capitalism and the coercive nature of a social system that demands that we constantly produce so-called value that is extrinsic to our foundational value as human beings. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
This is from the young adult fantasy author Tamora Pierce’s website from back in the mid-2000s: I’m paraphrasing here, but I believe Pierce says that any actual piece of writing with actual words in it is always, always better than an imagined piece of writing that we tell ourselves that we are going to do as soon as the inspiration strikes, or as soon as we have the right teacher, or as soon as we know enough to “get it perfect.” Our works on the page are real, flaws and all. The “perfect” works in our mind are not. 

Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love.

(Credit: Rachel Woroner)

Ten Questions for Jami Attenberg

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Staff

10.22.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jami Attenberg, whose novel All This Could Be Yours is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Told from multiple perspectives across several generations, All This Could Be Yours follows the members of a family as they navigate an impending death. When doctors report Victor Tuchman is in his final days, his wife betrays little emotion, his son resists coming home at all, and his daughter, Alex, feels a kind of relief, wondering if her mother will finally tell her about her father’s shrouded criminal past. As the family gathers in New Orleans and the story unfolds, some secrets remain obscured, while others come to light. Neither triumphant nor despairing, All This Could Be Yours maps the ways in which family dynamics are always evolving, with new intimacies and alienations blossoming at unexpected turns. “Attenberg expertly weaves together a chorus of love, betrayal, and inheritance,” writes Hannah Tinti. “Each chapter a prism turned, revealing a new spectrum of secrets.” Jami Attenberg is the author of six other works of fiction, including the New York Times best-selling novel The Middlesteins. Her essays have appeared in various outlets including the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Longreads. Born in Illinois, Attenberg lives in New Orleans.

1. How long did it take you to write All This Could Be Yours? 
It took about a year from start to finish. About six months to write a draft I could submit to my editor, another three months of edits, another three months here and there through the copyediting process, give or take a few weeks at any point along the way. In general this is usually how long it takes for me to write my books.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The biggest challenge was capturing New Orleans properly. I had only lived here a few years before I started writing the book and I felt extremely responsible toward the city. So most of the research I did—on foot, by car, through interviews—was focused on the city and the region. I was really intent on getting it right.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I tend to write in the mornings, in the front room of my house, by hand. Or sometimes I’ll write in a café. In the afternoons I’ll type up whatever I wrote in the morning, and edit it through that process. When I’m actually in the process of working on a project I work five days a week on it.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m rereading this poetry collection I read while I was writing the first draft of the book. It’s called Absolute Solitude, by Dulce María Loynaz, a Cuban writer.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I don’t want to make anyone feel like their career sucks! But in general I want people to read more poetry and graphic novels. I love a lot of stuff Drawn & Quarterly publishes and I’ve read some great poetry collections this year. I read a debut collection called Hoodwitch recently by Faylita Hicks and thoroughly enjoyed it.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The internet.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Well, they always tell me to chill out, but I never listen.

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I don’t think the most recent wave of #MeToo cleaned enough houses.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My agent, Doug Stewart, has been my most consistent reader in my life. He is always looking out for my best interests, always on my side. Also he can look at what I’m doing and place it in my entire body of work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It has changed over the years—how relevant advice is to me and my craft and my career. In college I had a fiction teacher tell me to make every sentence so good that the reader would have to read the next one. So basic and obvious but I needed to hear it. (But that wouldn’t mean much to me now, of course!) I think what’s helpful to me is just to meet with writers I admire on occasion for a cup of coffee and I learn so much just by being around them. We’re a supportive group of people, and when one person succeeds, in the end we all do.

Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours.

(Credit: Zack Smith)

Ten Questions for Mimi Lok

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Staff

10.21.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mimi Lok, whose debut story collection, Last of Her Name, is out tomorrow from Kaya Press. In Last of Her Name, Lok brings to life an exceptionally various set of characters and places, reflecting the complex lives of diasporic women across generations. Told in alternating sections, the first story shifts between a British council home in the 1980s and Hong Kong during World War II. The final story follows a grandmother as she travels from one tent village to another, forced to seek out increasingly unlikely shelters after she chooses homelessness rather than being shut away in a senior home. Whether in seven pages or fifty, Lok brings each story to life in clear, precise prose, and draws the reader’s eye to strangeness and injustice without slipping into a didactic tone. When the absurd transpires, she passes no judgment. “I can’t think of a collection that better speaks to this moment of global movement and collective rupture from homes and history, and the struggle to find meaning despite it all,” writes Dave Eggers. Mimi Lok’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Hyphen, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is the cofounder and executive director of the award-winning nonprofit Voice of Witness. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Lok lives in California.  

1. How long did it take you to write Last of Her Name? 
I worked in earnest on the manuscript over the course of about three years. But in terms of the span of time the individual stories represent, it’s a bit more fuzzy than that. So many of the stories started off as kernels knocking around in my brain for ages, maybe from a decade ago or more, and then maybe a fragment here and there got onto the page, and then an early draft that was miles away from the final incarnation. For example, the title story started off as a short piece about two sisters painting a house. Then I forgot about it until my MFA in the mid-2000s, when I unearthed it for a workshop class and developed it into more of a family portrait that also delved into the parents’ marriage and earlier lives. Years later when I was working on it for the collection, it evolved further into a dual narrative between the older sister in ’80s British suburbia and the mother as a girl in World War II Hong Kong, both dealing with extreme, harrowing circumstances. I sometimes wish the writing process for me was faster, but things need to percolate in their own time, I suppose.  

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Balancing the need to write with the need to convince myself over and over that I wasn’t wasting my time.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I run the nonprofit Voice of Witness, which amplifies marginalized voices through oral history. As most people working in the nonprofit world can attest, it’s more than a job—it’s an extremely consuming labor of love. For the first few years, when I was building the organization (I’m also a cofounder), I barely wrote at all. It was really challenging to find the energy and the time and also the justification. Fortunately, I have terrific colleagues and a wonderful board who knew I needed to scale back, and writer friends who kept encouraging me. In recent years I’ve been able to go down to four days a week. I write all day Friday and also grab some time several mornings a week before work. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m on the second book in Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes trilogy. He’s known as the Chinese Tolkien. These are historical martial arts epics that are immensely vivid, exciting, and satisfying. I’ve also been enjoying Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing and have an early copy of Meng Jin’s Little Gods on my bedside table, which I can’t wait to dive into. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I don’t think Gina Berriault gets her due. Barbara Comyns is also a fantastic writer who a lot of readers outside of the United Kingdom it seems aren’t too familiar with.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Basically, life itself! Dirty dishes. Laundry. Not having enough uninterrupted time and space. But I’m a big believer in not trying to have it all. Something has to give. Let the pile of dishes grow. Create and communicate personal and professional boundaries. But maybe water that dying plant because you really don’t need more guilt in your life. 

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)?
So many things to admire about Sunyoung Lee, my editor at Kaya, but above all is her commitment to understanding me as a writer before making a single edit. 

8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I don’t have just one reader who fits that bill, as everyone—including myself—has some biases and blind spots. For me, I value having a small, diverse group of readers. I can rely on my writing group to give me insightful, honest feedback, and to read as writers, but I also appreciate hearing from people who aren’t writers or editors and who tend to focus their feedback more on their emotional reactions to a piece of writing.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I was recently on a short story panel moderated by Peg Alford Pursell, and we talked about how story writers are often admonished with the line that story collections don’t sell, and that story writing is perceived as merely a training ground for the more serious, grown-up business of writing a novel. So I’d love to see more investment in short story writers, especially those who offer rarely seen perspectives. More money, more representation, more exposure. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
When I was doing rewrites and my editor Sunyoung thought they didn’t work, it was invariably because she felt that the life depicted on the page felt fictitious rather than lived. I was crushed, of course, but I knew what she meant—I was approaching it more from an idea rather than from an emotional or sensory place. Robert Olen Butler pretty much says the same thing in his book From Where You Dream, which is full of helpful writing advice. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to get something useful out of it, and he doesn’t seem to expect you to. He basically invites you to do XYZ in this precise way, unless it doesn’t make sense for you—in which case, do the thing that makes sense!

Mimi Lok, author of Last of Her Name.

(Credit: Andria Lo)

Ten Questions for Adrienne Brodeur

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Staff

10.15.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Adrienne Brodeur, whose memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. When Brodeur was fourteen years old, her mother woke her in the middle of the night to confess she had kissed a close family friend. Brodeur describes the intoxicating effects of being chosen as her mother’s confidante—of protecting the secret for nearly a decade—without obscuring the costs of the affair that followed. Brodeur traces her own life as much as her mother’s, and uses the past to think carefully about how to move forward in her relationship with her own daughter. Leaning into the most difficult memories, Wild Game is a testament to the possibilities of writing and art as means to find personal clarity. The novelist Ruth Ozeki describes the memoir as a “courageous act of radical self-reflection and truth telling, Brodeur untangles karmic threads that bind families together across generations.” Over the course of her career in publishing, Adrienne Brodeur has been a writer, editor, and administrator. She is the author of the novel Man Camp (Random House, 2005); she was cofounder and editor in chief of Zoetrope: All Story and an editor at Harcourt. In 2013 she joined Aspen Woods, a literary arts nonprofit, where she currently serves as executive director. 

1. How long did it take you to write Wild Game? 
It took a lifetime to process and about two and a half years to write. With memoir, it’s less about the events of your past—the past is always there—and more about what you make of those events, your consciousness about them. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The most challenging thing was getting my relationship with my mother right and avoiding depicting our relationship as black-and-white. I heeded the advice of Vivian Gornick, who wrote that “for the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” That line was taped to my computer screen as I wrote Wild Game. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I’m in the thick of a project—which currently, I’m not—I write daily in my home office. I start at 5:00 AM with a cup of strong coffee and don’t stop until my son wakes up and comes in for a snuggle, usually around 7:00 AM.

4. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Early on, my agent told me that I should write my memoir like I was writing a novel, scene by scene. That guidance was revelatory. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m listening to Toni Morrison narrate Beloved on Audible, which is an amazing way to experience the poetry of her writing, and I’m reading Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, a lucid, bold and thought-provoking collection of essays. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are many. At the top of my list is Peter Rock, who writes one strange and beautiful novel after the next. 

7. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
I’m lucky to have a day job that I feel passionately about, as the executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit. I balance the two—if you can call it that—by compartmentalizing them. Typically, I’m finished writing long before my work day begins. I take a walk in between to shift gears, and then once I’m in work mode, I rarely look back. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Wild Game, what would you say?
I would tell myself to stop worrying about what others might think and just go for it. I would remind myself that I need to write this memoir in order to own my own story, make peace with it, and move toward a brighter future. I would tell myself that it’s going to be challenging to reveal so much about my life, but it will also be cathartic and empowering. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have many trusted readers, each of whom offered unique and thoughtful perspectives on Wild Game, making it a better book. That said, I did have one unexpectedly amazing reader—a friend who is not part of the literary community—who gave me brilliant feedback as well as encouragement when I was stuck. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Read like your work depends on it. It does.

 

 

Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me.

(Credit: Julia Comes)

Ten Questions for Saeed Jones

by

Staff

10.8.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Saeed Jones, whose memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Raised in Texas, Jones begins his story in Lewisville, Texas, where as a twelve-year-old boy he discovered his mother’s copy of James Baldwin’s Another Country. “Holding Another Country in my hands, I felt that the book was actually holding me,” he writes. “Sad, sexy, and reeking of jazz, the story had its arm around my waist.” Tracing his journey of finding and fighting for a life of his own—from Lewisville to Memphis and across the Atlantic and back again—Jones describes necessary distances and cleavings, but also pays tribute to home and particularly the love and labor of his single mother, who died in 2011. “Both love song and battle cry,” writes Jacqueline Woodson of the memoir. “Brilliant as fuck and, at times, heartbreaking as hell.” Saeed Jones is also the author of a poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A graduate of Kentucky University and Rutgers University in Newark, Jones currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. 

1. How long did it take you to write How We Fight for Our Lives?
The earliest iteration of the book was an essay about the most beautiful man I’ve ever kissed trying to kill me. I started writing it a few days after it happened in January 2008. I wrote what eventually became the first chapter of the book when I was in graduate school. I think I always knew this book was coming, one way or another. I started writing in earnest in 2011, sold the book on proposal in 2015, and finally finished it at some point last year. Now I find myself in the bizarre position of having to figure out who I am without this book’s writing process being a part of my daily life. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Because the book is about me, whenever I was struggling with a part of the book I’d begin to wonder if I was struggling because I don’t really know who I am. I thought that surely, if I knew who I was, writing about myself would’ve been easier. It was a vicious loop and very depressing. The process of writing a memoir can swallow you whole if you aren’t careful. I started therapy in 2017, which helped tremendously. I thank my therapist in the Acknowledgements for that reason. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I’m home in Columbus, I wake up around 8:00 AM, listen to a podcast while I drink coffee, and then write until I’m hungry around 11:00 AM or noon. I probably write five or six days a week. My desk is up against the window; there is a lot of light, which is important to me, and good views of shirtless men jogging up and down the street, which is also important to me.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. I keep highlighting every other paragraph and then reading what I’ve highlighted out loud. Experiencing her work with my eyes just isn’t enough; I want to hear it too. And this morning, I plucked Michael Lee’s chapbook Secondly, Finally from my shelf. The first poem is so good, it made me mad. Like, how dare you? That’s my version of a starred review. I’m excited to read his new book, The Only Worlds We Know. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I will not rest until every person in America has read The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. She’s hardly an unknown writer, and that book, rightfully, has received a great deal of praise. But look at what’s going on in our country. Clearly every American hasn’t read it yet, which frankly is traitorous. 

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s essential that we get more comfortable talking about money, contracts, and the business that enables our art to reach readers wherever they might be. The idea that it’s rude to talk candidly about book deals and contract negotiations serves the publishers very well but endangers writers, especially emerging writers. A healthy discourse about money would expose just how much publishing depends on the scam of white privilege, which is why gatekeepers work so hard to delay and derail the conversation. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Honestly, what sticks with me the most is what my editor and agent didn’t say. They never said “Where is that damn book?!” or “Why is it taking so long?” My editor only gave me concrete deadlines when I would ask for them. They protected me and allowed me to do what I needed to do. I was so anxious about finishing the book but I couldn’t rush the process. A quickly written memoir is a memoir full of lies. At one point, I was at a literary gala and someone at my table made a joke—“Oh, so you’re the writer who is taking so long.” I cried when I got home that night. And even now I picture his face every time I’m within striking range of a punching bag. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
White people. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My editor Jon Cox is, simply put, the most intelligent reader I’ve ever had the privilege of working with closely. I always marvel at the insight in his notes. He’s also incredibly handsome and nice. It’s very overwhelming. Anyway, I trust him with my writing almost as much as I trust myself. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Rigoberto González helped me understand that my success as a writer would hinge on my success as a reader. I’ve translated that advice into a ratio. For every poem or page I write, I try to read three times as much work by other people. I don’t have a ledger or anything but you get the idea.

Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight For Our Lives.

Ten Questions for Kimberly Reyes

by

Staff

10.1.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kimberly Reyes, whose debut poetry collection, Running to Stand Still, is out today from Omnidawn. Rich in literary and pop culture references, the voice of Running to Stand Still is both specific and wide-ranging. Quotations from artists as disparate as Frank Bidart and The Killers splice and introduce poems. In one section, Reyes repurposes screenshots of text messages; in another, partial strikethroughs enable multiple readings. Through this juxtaposing of different forms and language, Reyes weaves a deeply intimate portrait out of impossibly expansive themes: modern life, Black womanhood, family history, and technology. “The brilliance of these poems is their achievement of discomfit as they simultaneously travel distance and move inward,” writes Valerie Wallace. Kimberly Reyes is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Warning Coloration (dancing girl press, 2018), and a collection of essays, Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Columbia Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, and New American Writing, among other publications. A second-generation New Yorker, Reyes is currently a Fulbright fellow studying Irish literature and film at University College Cork in Ireland.

1. How long did it take you to write Running to Stand Still? 
All in all, about five years. I didn’t know the collection would become a book as I was writing the early versions of the poems that appear in the first few sections. But those poems became the chapbook Warning Coloration. That’s when I really started to see a narrative that I knew I had to do justice to in book form.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Sitting with and then ultimately bypassing the fear of what others might think. The book is a lot about the external gaze, and it’s no secret (if you’ve read the book) that I’ve had a problem with prioritizing other people’s opinions about me over my own for a long time. It’s a tough habit to break.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Honestly, not nearly enough. I’m in that loop of applying for fellowships, scholarships, and grants so that I can write, but then the next application cycle comes around and I need to be applying again instead of writing. I also might have some undiagnosed case of ADHD or maybe we are all just a bit frazzled with the state of the world today, but it’s not always easy to sit and focus. When I do find time to write, it’s like I’m back to myself. I’m back home. And that currently happens once a week or so. When I lived in San Francisco I lived in a heavenly cottage that had a half room with a loft and a big, garden-facing window so I would use that space as an office and write there. Now, as a Fulbright fellow in Cork, Ireland, I usually write upstairs in my bedroom, on my bed, using my nightstand as a desk, staring at the rain, and I feel just as productive.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
It depends if it’s poetry or prose, but for poetry my dear friend Irène Mathieu. We were roommates as Callaloo fellows, and she’s just a brilliant writer and reader of poetry—honest, sharp, and hilarious. For prose I don’t send out anything of importance without first sending it to a friend I’ve known since junior high school, Rachel Sur. She pulls zero punches and that’s precisely what I need, especially because so much of my writing deals with sensitive subjects. The work has to be done honestly and correctly, and she definitely has my back as far as that’s concerned. Our thirty-year friendship means that she knows when I’m bullshitting before I even do.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and whew, no kidding. Whew. What an amazingly raw and honest and beautiful and insightful work. That’s the kind of book that helped me sit down for my weekly writing session and just have at it. It’s a call to art, so to speak. It’s an example of the kind of honesty and reflection that can heal us.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Oh man, how to even begin? I won’t point out anyone in particular. I’ll just say people outside of the MFA networking world. I love reading the slush-pile success stories.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I went through a round of edits with Rusty Morrison that was everything I wanted it to be. She started by saying: We can publish this manuscript as is now, that’s fine, it’s a good book, but let’s make it great. I loved that artistic faith and freedom.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Running to Stand Still, what would you say? 
Don’t work with people who don’t respect you or your art. Publication isn’t worth that sacrifice. You put too much blood on the page to have something in the world that doesn’t feel professional. I learned that lesson the hard way with the project right before this book. I will revisit that project and make it what it should be, but the time and energy that incarnation of it took away from me… I’m not sure it was worth it. Working with Omnidawn was healing and affirming and this book is my true firstborn.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The networking, marketing machine. I talk about how socially awkward I can be all the time and I’m certainly not the only writer with that affliction and I just think the publishing community I know isn’t very tolerant of that. So many of our favorite writers were absolute recluses and we loved them for that, yet they wouldn’t be published nowadays. I like having my reclusive moments, and while it may not be good for my career it’s certainly good for my writing.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I think it was: Don’t read writers you don’t like. I can’t actually remember who said that but that sentiment was transformative for me because we are taught, especially in MFA culture, to slog through writing we don’t necessarily feel because it’s a good exercise in reading and expanding our horizons. But there’s way too much stuff out there to be moved by and to enjoy instead of wasting time with a backlog of books you loathe. It’s important to challenge yourself and to branch out, but life’s too short and there aren’t enough hours in the day for that kind of pain. 

 

Kimberly Reyes, author of Running to Stand Still.

Ten Questions for Maaza Mengiste

9.24.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Maaza Mengiste, whose novel The Shadow King is out today from W. W. Norton. At once intimate portrait and sweeping history, The Shadow King tells the story of Hirut, an orphaned servant who comes of age during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Travelling with the army led by the man she serves, Hirut, like the other women, is forbidden to fight. But as the war rages on and the emperor abandons the country into exile, Hirut helps disguise a villager in his likeness to inspire courage and becomes a warrior herself—the guard to the new “Shadow King.” Often shifting perspective to tell the stories of both Hirut and a cast of Ethiopian and Italian characters, Mengiste’s narration is unflinching, fair, and always complex. She speaks into silence, finding language for the trauma and courage—for the life—of a woman at war. “A beautiful and devastating work of women holding together a world ripping itself apart,” writes Marlon James. “They will slip into your dreams and overtake your memories.” Maaza Mengiste is the author of a previous novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (W. W. Norton, 2010), which the Guardian named among the ten best contemporary African books. Her essays have also appeared in Granta, the Massachusetts Review, the New Yorker, and other publications. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she currently lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Shadow King? 
It took about nine years to write The Shadow King. I had no idea the challenges that awaited me! I thought that after writing one book, the next would be easier. It was completely the opposite.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The hardest thing was figuring out how I wanted to tell this story of war. I knew the facts surrounding Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. I knew the details of the subsequent war. I’d read the articles, seen the reels, and looked at the published photographs depicting both sides. I didn’t know how all of this would take shape in a novel though, and that was because I didn’t know what story I wanted to tell about this particular war. What I eventually came to understand, from looking at several varied accounts of this conflict, was that history was biased. History is a narrative created by human beings who are biased, and make mistakes. I began to look into the gaps and erasures, the silences left deliberately or in error, and see what emerged. I started moving away from official accounts and archives, and instead started going through personal journals, diaries, and photographs of those involved in this war. I started talking to descendants of those who fought in the war. I started to “read” photographs taken by Italian soldiers stationed in Ethiopia, setting the images on a historical timeline, and attempting to understand what was happening in the background, in that area, when the photo was shot. Incrementally, slowly, another history emerged. With that second history came a new voice: insistent, demanding to be heard, often contradictory of a narrative that one of the characters was trying to establish. I went with that and gave myself the freedom to develop a new structure, a new way of telling. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I wrote this book at my desk, at many desks across several cities in New York and throughout the United States. I wrote this in different parts of Europe and in Ethiopia. I wrote at night after teaching and on weekends. I isolated myself for extended days and weeks and wrote. I wrote every day and, on those days when I had no time, I kept a small notebook for notes. I didn’t always feel like writing but I still made myself sit down and do it. I practiced discipline and worked towards inspiration.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That moment when you understand that the manuscript is now in other hands at your publisher’s office and they are going to read it for other ways to bring the story alive. For so many years, it had just been me and this book.   

5. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, which is fantastic. I’m reading Tishani Doshi’s beautiful and evocative Small Days and Nights, which comes out in January. I haven’t let Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls out of my sight; it’s riveting and absolutely brilliant. And I am completely engrossed in Jaquira Díaz’s stunning memoir, Ordinary Girls. It’s breathtakingly good.  

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
The late Dasa Drndic, who is getting wider recognition now after her death, but should be read by many more. Her book Trieste is spectacular, as are her others. Emmanuel Iduma has been breaking new ground in art criticism, fiction, and nonfiction and doing so well. His work is incredible. Read A Stranger’s Pose.  

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
When my very patient editor said, “Now I know why it took you so long to write this book.” It made all the years of frustration and fatigue and leaps of faith worth it.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My human need for sleep. 

9. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Shadow King, what would you say?
Hang in there, kid. This is going to take a while but don’t give up. Be fearless.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
From the late Dasa Drndic, who said to me: “Fuck story.” She meant, forget what you think you want to say. Forget what you know. Look at form, find the voice, let it roam freely and follow it. It will tell you the narrative. 

 

Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King.

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Anne Boyer

9.17.19

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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Anne Boyer, whose memoir, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In incisive prose, Boyer documents the diagnosis and treatment of her highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer and critiques how “the ideological regime of cancer”—as much as the malignant cells—determines the experience of illness. In the face of overtreatment, pharmaceutical greed, and the expectation of survivor heroism, Boyer turns to the long lineage of women writers examining illness with intellect and vulnerability for company: Kathy Acker, Eve Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde, to name a few. Boyer also articulates the possibilities for care in friendship—the present-day relationships that carried her through an otherwise compromised and corrupted social world. “Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the ‘carcinogenosphere’ obliterates cliché,” writes Ben Lerner. “By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together.” Anne Boyer is the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for poetry and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and several poetry collections, including Garments Against Women, winner of the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award. She was born and raised in Kansas and currently teaches creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Undying? 
The Undying took around four and a half years from first word to last edit. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Cancer was, including the devastating effects of its treatment, its disabling aftermath, and its crushing ideological and social weight, felt both individually and collectively. The diminishment of life under our present conditions makes cancer—around which all the other ordinary problems of life gather and heighten—almost too much to bear thinking about without collapsing in sadness or rage. It would have been easier to survive and turn away and try to forget. I had lost my strength and much of my capacity to think when I needed both the most, and I had to learn the humility of writing a difficult book while often weak, upset, and confused. But I had made a bargain with myself that if I lived, I would give a book of what I learned back to the world in return—an act of gratitude and sometimes vengeance—and I made it through. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When everything is going okay, I like to write every morning on my sofa until around lunchtime, but in times when things are more stressful and erratic, I write whenever I can steal the time away from my paid work and my obligations to the people around me. When things are at their best and there are few demands on my time, I write from morning to night, and being able to write like that is my perfect day. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I marvel at all the production and post-production work, the teams of brilliant and devoted people required, not just the editors and agents and publicists, but everyone else, paid and unpaid: reviewers, booksellers, assistants, teachers, interns, event organizers, designers, warehouse workers, librarians, and the people who do the infrastructural and maintenance work of all the places devoted to literature, the people who deliver books, maintain databases, clean rooms, and the people who care for all the people doing all of the above. It comes together in a way that foregrounds the name of the writer, but every book on the shelf is there because of all of these efforts, and the efforts of everyone around the writer, too, and all the other writers and the people who helped them who came before, and the people involved with the social movements and struggles that made it possible for so many of us to write and publish. A single name on a book is a ruthless abridgement of the facts. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, which is the perfect novel of middle age.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Bhanu Kapil, Lisa Robertson, Verity Spott, Ryan Eckes, Precious Okoyomon, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Wendy Trevino, Jackie Wang, Nat Raha, Diana Hamilton, and Nikki Wallschlaeger are all poets or poetry-allied writers making fantastic work right now. As far as nonfiction, I am eager to read a book by Chloe Watlington. Her recent piece in Commune Magazine was astonishing.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Both of them have told me this in so many ways, which is why I work with them: Write what you need to and don’t worry about it being strange.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Capitalism, which continues to devour the living world that we need as our home and to consume the hours of everyone’s lives for the profit of the very few, setting people against each other for the mere preservation of life and pressurizing gendered and racialized forms of oppression. There’s no writing without time, without air to breathe and potable water, without a body and earth that supports life, without each other. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Capitalism.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Clement of Alexandria: “To write all things in a book is to put a sword in the hands of a child.” 

 

Anne Boyer, author of The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care.

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Author: squong

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Date:
  • August 3, 2020
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