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Category Archives: Interviews
Shara McCallum’s Madwoman: an Exploration of Female Identity, Race, and Strength
Posted by Arianna Miller, GD Co-Poetry Section Head for 6.2
Shara McCallum was this semester’s visiting poet at SUNY Geneseo. I had not only the pleasure of sitting down for lunch with McCallum, both also of reading her diverse collection, Madwoman. Madwoman spans across what it means to be a woman, to have the privilege of being a black woman who appears white, and to accept being the daughter of a schizophrenic, all with the underlying presence of her Jamaican heritage. Continue reading
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Interview
An Interview with Anne Valente
Anne Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, was released from William Morrow/HarperCollins in October 2016. Her second novel, Utah, is forthcoming from William Morrow in early 2019. Her first book and short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize (2014), and she is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics, which has been re-released by Bull City Press in 2017. Her fiction appears in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others, and won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize. Her work was selected as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011 and her essays appear in The Believer, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and The Washington Post. Originally from St. Louis, she currently lives in upstate New York where she teaches creative writing and literature at Hamilton College.
Gandy Dancer: In your short story collection By Light We Knew Our Names (Dzanc Books), there are so many memorable characters, like Francie and her father in “Terrible Angels,” or the young women in the title story. Can you talk about how you create and develop such a range of compelling characters?
Anne Valente: Thank you for these kind words. For each story, setting and conflict often come to me first; I imagine a particular landscape or place, or else a particular situation, i.e. “What would happen if x happened?” From there, I then imagine how someone might react to that situation, and characters tend to be born out of how a particular someone might act or react. I’m also drawn to language and lyricism and how a particular character’s voice might interpret the world. In this way, characters also come for me from the rhythm, diction and syntax of the language.
GD: A number of the stories here make use of the first-person plural. Can you talk a bit about what this point of view offers? Why don’t more writers use first-person plural?
AV: I’m not sure why other writers don’t use first-person plural more often–maybe it’s considered off-putting, or even clunky as a central perspective–but I love its use and what it can do. Who’s telling the story always matters, and the social implications of a collective perspective are fascinating to me. A writer can play quite a bit with where the borders between the collective and the individual might rest, depending on whether there’s an individual situated within the collective or if the narration never identifies individual narrators. A writer can also explore how events, traumas, or everyday experiences affect an entire community. There is a great deal of tension in first-person plural between what everyone is experiencing and what only a few of the collective are experiencing, and for me, it’s a wonderful tool to employ in fiction.
GD: Many of the stories in By Light are coming-of-age stories. Is it difficult to get into the headspace of a young child or adolescent?
AV: The distance between adulthood and adolescence seems at times like it would be a bridge too far in trying to remember what it was like to be that young, but I feel sometimes like I’ve maintained a child’s sense of wonder as an adult. The same fascinations occupy my attention now as they did when I was small–how spiders build their webs, what it’s like to live in the ocean, whether there are any edges to the universe or if space just keeps going and going. For these reasons, getting into the headspace of a child doesn’t feel insurmountable, though I want to respect each individual character and not solely make them a reflection of who I was as a child, and in some ways still am.
GD: As a woman writer, do you find it difficult to write from a male perspective? Are there any tricks to this? Is there anything you keep in mind while writing from a perspective not your own?
AV: When I began writing, I actually wrote far more male characters than female characters. I feared an audience assuming that my characters were autobiographical, but more than this, I think I also internalized that readers were more receptive to male characters–in other words, that male stories were the ones that mattered. Because I’d absorbed so many masculine stories, it didn’t feel particularly difficult to occupy a male perspective, though certainly not all male characters occupy masculinity in the same way. However, I’ve since become far more invested in what it means to write an identity that I don’t share. We are essentially required to do this as fiction writers, but this becomes tricky when we are writing from a position of power or privilege regarding another identity. While I don’t have any fast and true tips for how to write outside of one’s perspective, empathy is at the heart of all good writing. To understand another character is to understand that particular character and not what we assume their gender, sexuality, race, age or ability represents.
GD: Many stories feature the use of the fantastical or supernatural. One of our favorites was “Dear Amelia,” which explored humans turning into black bears in the backwoods of Maine. Tell us the truth, were you a Sci-Fi fan growing up? How do you see the realistic and supernatural working together?
AV: I actually never watched or read much science fiction, but I devoured ghost stories and urban legends as a kid. I’ve found that many of the things I was most interested in during childhood–the supernatural, the world of science, the insects and trees in my backyard–continue to make their way into my writing and what I most love. I don’t really see realism and the fantastic as diametrically opposed but instead a spectrum along a border, and for me that border has always been relatively permeable. Science fiction, the supernatural, and magic realism can all be incredibly subversive, and, for me, they’ve become a tool of exploring alternative narratives to dominant modes of history, culture and human thought.
GD: Were some stories in this collection harder to write emotionally than others? We’re thinking of “Minivan” and the title story, in particular. Is there a certain headspace that you must be in to write these type of stories?
AV: Some were definitely harder than others. The title story felt especially difficult, given the world these young women must live in–and despite the extreme nature of it, how that world parallels our own. At the time of writing the story, I was noticing a lot of silence in my personal and professional life around sexism and sexual violence against women, and I wanted to create a world on the page where it could no longer be ignored.
GD: By Light came out in 2014, and then your first novel Our Hearts Will Burn us Down (William Morrow), was published in 2016. It started as a short story. Can you talk about the process of developing the story into a novel? What were the challenges in that?
AV: I never thought I would develop a short story into a novel, as every story that I’ve written has always felt done to me, or else written as its own, contained world. However, I wrote the short story version of “Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down” shortly after Sandy Hook, and as I watched the news cycle quickly forget yet another mass shooting–and one of the worst mass shootings we’ve seen–the story felt undone to me. Since the short story was centered on elementary school children, it was a challenge to modify that world into a community of high schoolers for the novel. I’m also pretty invested in lyricism in short stories, and I wanted to maintain that kind of prose for a novel without overburdening the reader. A greater emphasis on plot had to factor into a longer work as well.
GD: Can you tell us a bit about Utah, your forthcoming novel? We can’t wait to read it! Does it also meld the real and the fantastic?
AV: Thank you! The forthcoming novel does meld the real and the fantastic, to the extent of the kind of world the characters occupy. Utah takes place in a present-day world where planes are beginning to fall from the sky due to global warming and erratic weather patterns. As a result, two sisters must take a road trip to their mother’s funeral. One sister is a former NASCAR driver, and the other has just been released from prison for having burned down a library. It’s a strange narrative in pulling together so many strands of research that I knew nothing about before beginning to write: American racing, paleontology, falconry, geocaching, women’s prisons. But it was an adventure to write.
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Oliver Diaz & Evan Goldstein
An Interview with Kate Daloz
Kate Daloz was raised in the woods of Vermont, in the geodesic dome her parents built during the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she taught creative writing, and was a founding member of Neuwrite: Columbia Scientists and Writers. Her work has been featured in American Scholar, New Republic, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America, is her first book.
Gandy Dancer: We Are As Gods, seeking to chronicle a movement of hundreds of thousands of young people across the US out of cities, is a truly massive undertaking. We were wondering how you did it. Approximately how many interviews did you do? How did you record them and what methods proved most efficient for pulling these stories out of your sources and into cohesive narratives? How did you maintain all these threads while writing?
Kate Daloz: In addition to formal interviews, I talked to a lot of people informally, so I’m not one hundred percent sure of exact numbers, but it was scores of people and probably hundreds of hours. As many interviews as possible were in person, but I did a lot over the phone and by Skype. Whenever possible I recorded conversations using the voice recorder on my iPhone. I also took notes during the interviews, in case the recording failed. In person, I usually take notes by hand, but when it’s not in person and I don’t need to be making eye contact, I type because I’m faster that way. After each interview, I take extra notes on whatever I wanted to remember about the conversation itself (the setting, the mood, and any insights or areas for follow-up). Then I type up loose transcriptions, making it very clear where I used paraphrase and which were the subject’s exact words. I also include timestamps in the transcription so I’m always able to easily go back and double-check the original sound file. I give each interview a simple title of the subject’s name and the interview date.
Using the writing program Scrivener, which allows you to break a project into small, flexible parts, I make files for each area I know I want to write about (“communal child-rearing,” “Summer ’71”). After I finish each interview, I go through it and cut-and-paste its contents into the appropriate files, labeling each chunk with the interview title. This way, when I’m ready to start writing, say, about the summer of ’71, everything everyone told me about it is in one place, labeled with the source, so I can remember whose version was whose.
GD: You give vivid depictions of these communes’ landscapes. Although primary source material and interviews must have been useful for getting to know the settings in which you worked, it seems like you visited these commune sites (and, of course, grew up next to one). How much traveling did you do to write this book?
KD: I take every opportunity I can to go back to Vermont! Growing up in the area was absolutely vital for allowing me to write with authority about the landscape and seasons—what the air smells like in January as opposed to June. I only actually visited the site of the commune a few times, but on one of those visits, I brought a blank map and had former residents walk around with me and help identify where gardens and structures had been forty years earlier. Back in Brooklyn, I also used Google Maps and MapMyRun.com to get the specifics about routes and distances really accurate.
GD: In a few sections of the book, you qualify this back-to-the-land movement in terms of its racial and class makeup: the people who lived in these communes were almost exclusively white and middle class. How did you reconcile the seeming exclusivity of this movement?
KD: That’s a really great question and one I’ve continued thinking a lot about since finishing the book. Like many Americans during the Obama era, I found myself having more and more intense conversations with friends and family about race and class. I had long since noticed the extremely narrow demographic that made up the population I was writing about, but when I read “How Privilege Became Provocation,” in the New York Times, by my friend Parul Sehgal, something clicked. I suddenly understood the back-to-the-land phenomenon in a new way: as an expression of privilege. Though I tried not to use that word very much in the book itself, it informed the way I described my characters’ backgrounds and choices, as well as their confidence, assumptions, support networks, and blind spots. It let me approach some of the recurrent questions about simplicity movements (Who are these idealists? Why don’t more of these radical experiments last?) and emerge with new answers.
GD: In many ways, the communes are not perfect, particularly in their gender-specific divisions of labor. Are these difficulties products of inherent human flaws or a product of the fact that the communards still lived within American culture?
KD: Another great question! What I like to point out is that partnership, cooperation, and collaboration always involve conflict and negotiation. There’s a persistent fantasy that stepping outside of traditional structures—monogamy, say, or the nuclear family—will somehow also mean stepping away from disagreement and interpersonal tension. But domestic issues—questions about cooking, cleaning, childcare, financial security, how money should be saved and spent—have to be addressed, no matter how your family is structured. While it came as a surprise to many ’70s-era communards that it was harder to be “married” to twenty people than to just one, they learned a tremendous amount about group conflict resolution and how to structure healthy communities—lessons that are still in widespread use today.
GD: Have you explored any contemporary communes or cooperative living environments? If so, what is your opinion on these back-to-the-land-inspired movements and communal living experiments?
KD: I haven’t spent as much time in today’s collective houses, live-work spaces, or independent farms as I’d like to, but there’s no question that another back-to-the-land-ish movement is taking place today. If I could sum up the contrast between today’s idealists and those of the ’70s, I’d say that people undertaking these experiments today are far less naïve and ill-prepared than the ’70s back-to-the-landers. This is partly because they have the experience and practices of the ’70s generation to draw on—but they also have the Internet, with its almost limitless ability to connect people, resources, and ideas.
And it’s worth noting: The intellectual origins of today’s Internet culture, with its emphasis on sharing, stretches straight back through the Whole Earth Catalog, to the early hippie communes of the American Southwest.
GD: Throughout the book, we see many communes struggling with the question of whether they can transform society. Do you think any came close to inspiring a restructuring of American society? What do you believe is the largest success of this movement?
KD: America went through so many huge changes after the 1960s that it’s hard to give credit to any one element, especially one as short-lived as the commune movement. But as I’ve already indicated above, its participants’ extreme inventiveness and rejection of the mainstream gave rise to many structures and practices we take for granted today, from recycling programs to homebirth advice to food co-ops. The two biggest, I’d say, are organic food and the connected, information-sharing culture of the Internet.
GD: Do you see any similarities or differences between young people’s responses to American society in the ’70s and young people’s responses to the same social structures today?
KD: I had already begun working on this book when the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements started, making the parallels between today’s activism and that of the ’60s and ’70s much more obvious.
As much as I admire and am grateful for the real changes they brought about, I do bristle a little bit at the “Baby Boomer Exceptionalism” narrative that often accompanies comparisons between their activism and that of other generations. While there’s no question that Boomers’ idealism and frustrations with social ills spurred them to action, it’s also vital to point out that they were born into a period of tremendous economic confidence and inherited a job market in which a college degree pretty much guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. That background of privilege—not just on a personal, but on a generational level—was essential in letting such a large number of people feel secure enough to risk such widespread rejection of the status quo.
GD: What are you working on now?
KD: Right now, I’m working on another personal-history-as-American-history book—this one is about my grandmother’s sudden death in 1944, during WWII, and the decades of secrecy and shame that surrounded her story.
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5.2 | Interview
Oliver Diaz and Evan Goldstein
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5.1 | Interview
An Interview with Sonja Livingston
Sarah Steil
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Gandy Dancer Proudly Presents… Your 5.1 Managing Editors
Posted by Erin Carlo, GD Public Relations Manager and Fiction Reader for 5.1
Gandy Dancer 5.1 managing editors, Evan Goldstein & Oliver Diaz
First and foremost, we would like to welcome our readers and contributors to the fifth anniversary edition of Gandy Dancer! We are delighted to welcome an entirely new cast of submission readers who are eager to discover what it means to produce a journal as well as gain new perspectives on literary journalism. The start of the new semester also brings a brand new dynamic duo who will take the stage as Gandy Dancer‘s managing editors.
I had the opportunity to ask our newest managing editors, Evan Goldstein and Oliver Diaz, a few questions about themselves and their new roles as managing editors, and I am pleased to share their responses with you.
When did you first hear about Gandy Dancer?
Oliver: First semester sophomore year. My sister was a senior taking the Editing and Production workshop, in which Gandy Dancer is produced, and she introduced me to the journal, told me about the process, and that it might be a good idea to submit to it.
Evan: I first heard about Gandy during my freshman year, when I was in the intro to creative writing class. I was thinking of applying to the creative writing track, and I wanted to look at Gandy to see what kind of writing I should aim for. I think I looked at issue 2.1, the one with the photo of the guy in the forest as the cover. I remember I was impressed and scared by the poetry, and I wanted so badly to be able to express myself on that level. Continue reading
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Christy Leigh Agrawal
An Interview with Carey McHugh
Carey McHugh received her MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Manhattan where she works at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. Her poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds &c., was selected by Rae Armantrout for the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 Chapbooks Fellowship. I had the pleasure of interviewing Carey about her new book, American Gramaphone, a collection of poems, when she came to SUNY Geneseo for a reading.
CHRISTY L. AGRAWAL: I’m really interested in the titles in this collection, and how they engage in conversation with no only the poems themselves but also one another. According to the Notes section in the back of American Gramophone, many of these titles are actually extracted directly from mysterious relics of a disparate American and human history: a photograph of a car accident scene, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a how-to book of taxidermy, and so forth. Can you tell us a little bit about your process of creating a title? How do you select and then synthesize titles for your work?
CAREY MCHUGH: I’m always on the lookout for titles, and I take them from scraps of the everyday: from informational websites, artwork, conversations, old encyclopedias, museum placards, signs on the backs of trucks. I look for peculiar or creepy or linguistically odd nuggets that I think require further investigation. In these cases, the title provides the context for the poem, and I build out the text to answer or echo the title. When I take titles from the world, I often lean toward moments that might already hold a narrative. The title sets the scene up front, and I am free to explore the emotion of the scene in the body of the poem. For example, there is a poem in the book called “Death (as a Woman) Comes for the Draughtsman.” It’s taken from the title of an Alfred Kubin pencil sketch. The title already gives us the story, so the poem is free to explore the atmosphere of the moment: the panic, the astonishment.
CLA: I’m curious about when and how you determined that these poems were going to be part of a series since there is so much reverberation between the poems, both formally and thematically. Were all of these poems written specifically for this book, or did they come together somewhat independently to form this book? How did you decide how to structure them in different sections?
CM: I wish I could say that I sat down and wrote all the poems effortlessly and fit them together seamlessly, but that would be a giant lie! I started this book in graduate school and over the years, it’s had many forms. I’ve taken poems out and replaced them with newer poems, and then at times I’ve gone back and reinstated poems that I’d removed. There is an element of experiment when it comes to putting a collection together, but I feel like the book has a solid center, and the poems circle common themes and landscapes, so even though the poems were written over the span of about a decade, the book feels very cohesive to me. From the beginning, I knew that the book should be in three sections, and though I wanted the sections to vary slightly in tone, there are still threads—themes and structures that run throughout the book.
CLA: As I was reading, I noticed a distinct quality of transience: many of these poems exude a slightly unnerving energy, as if they waver on the edge of some inevitably approaching precipice that threatens to bring either everything we ever wanted or everything we ever feared, or both. This feeling of impermanence and imminence is mimicked in the agrarian landscape, where an ever-changing land can signify many things, even opposing ideas. How does the agrarian landscape depicted in this collection relate to the, at times nostalgic, emotions evoked within the poems, and what does this setting mean to you?
CM: This book inhabits a space at the intersection of memory and imagination. I had a rather transient childhood, but my extended family lived (and still lives) in Tennessee. It was the one constant landscape in my life. We would return to visit each year, and I think I was always a little surprised to find it intact; there was a fear that it might have vanished in my absence. I think this notion lives in the poems. When I was very young, my father and grandfather owned a cattle farm, and they would let me and my brother tag along as they worked—branding cattle, mending fences, baling hay—it seemed like such a mysterious world! Much of the agrarian imagery in the book comes from my memories of that time. In many ways, I think I’m writing to revive or respond to that landscape.
CLA: The way in which the form of your poems intersects with their content is very engaging, inviting readers to interpret the poems as not only a grouping or words, but also as aesthetic creations. One of the first times I picked up on this subtle relationship between structure and meaning was when I was reading through “Prep Guide for Basic Drill and Ceremony,” a description of a surgical kit that twice mentions ribs while also mirroring the image of a ribcage in that it’s composed of twelve lines, the same number of rows that compose the average human ribcage. What is your process of creating form and physicality for your poems? Do you structure them after they’ve been written or as you go, and how important is form to you in relation to meaning?
CM: Symmetrical stanzas with consistent line lengths appeal to me. They work to pin down a poem. They offer a tension that contrasts with the emotion and chaos of imagery in the text. I let the poem dictate the form as it unfolds; however, I should also confess that I go through phases where I become obsessed with certain structures. For example, many of the later poems that I wrote for the book are in single-line stanzas.
CLA: In “Supply Notes from The Home Book of Taxidermy & Tanning,” only two poems away from the end of this collection, is the first and only place in which the word gramaphone is mentioned, with “grinding wheel” right before it. I looked up the meaning of grinding wheel and discovered that it is “a wheel used for cutting, grinding, or finishing metal or other objects, and typically made of abrasive particles bonded together,” and it actually looks a lot like a record, the kind that might be played in a gramophone. I realized that this book could function very similarly to how a figurative grinding wheel as a record would function in my mind: a sometimes chaotic, sometimes smooth, and refractive melding together of the agrarian, the American, the bodily, and the emotional, a blend used to pierce and carve and grate and smooth and dissect and reconstruct the sound of some distant and yet ever-present song of humanity. This song is made even more complex by the word “taxidermy” in the title of this poem, which brings to mind ideas of preservation, of the impossibility of resurrection or recreation, and the insufficiency of physicality next to memory. This all led me to wonder how you decided on the title American Gramophone, and that soft pink and yet violent, fleshy image (which I read online is a hog and not a pig!) for the cover, as entryways into this collection?
CM: The gramophone is such a strange and beautiful creature. I like the curve of it, the squat body and long stem—almost a flowering hibiscus. Nearly a water bird. I like that this machine holds the prospect of these organic forms. Many of the poems in the book take place in an agrarian past, in a landscape with its own strange machinery and muted song. The gramophone seemed to be the perfect machine to bear this folklore and to amplify the sonic imperfections (all the scratches and skips) that exist in a dwindling memory. I was researching gramophones one day when I came across the title of a record label based in Omaha, Nebraska called American Gramaphone. I liked the title so much that I stole it for a poem (though I spelled it slightly differently). In my mind an American gramophone is a strange, inelegant machine—put together on the fly, maybe with spare parts, with all its seams showing. A rustic instrument that could echo a difficult landscape and the work required to maintain it. As the book evolved, I realized that this is how I wanted the collection to be held together.
As for the hogs…I was trolling the Library of Congress website (another valuable title repository!) when I came across the photo of a man working on an exhibit featuring three wooden hogs. A blurb that accompanies the photo explains that the exhibit was created for a livestock show held in Chicago in the late 1920s. The exhibit featured a hidden phonograph, which described the devastating effects of roundworm on hog populations. As the phonograph played, the pneumatic hogs would deflate—presumably to emphasize the devastation. The blurb that accompanies the photograph begins with the following sentence: “And now, the educated hog.” This sentence was so funny to me, so brilliant and strange that it became a title for one of the final poems that I wrote for the book. I love the photo, and luckily, it is in the public domain, so we were able to use it for the cover.
CLA: In our poetry workshop we discussed how your collection of poems builds meaning by continually defining and redefining things: bones appear again and again throughout this collection, however, each time in a different way (in my favorite moment they are described as: “the rigid endorsement of the body.”) This process of definition and redefinition not only creates a very detailed and multifaceted sense of meaning, but it also generates a sense of movement or fluidity: an unyielding refusal to be still. “It is what we fear the most: being motionless,” you write in “The Haywagon,” voicing part of the tension that drives me forward through this collection: a resistance to being defined or ‘rooted’. And yet, there’s a fear of being un-rooted or disconnected. How do you encompass and unify so many contradictory feelings and concepts in the same space, and what do you hope your readers will take away from this fusion?
CM: I think the book generates much of its momentum from this tension that you discuss: the impulse toward motion versus the wish for preservation. Being motionless implies a lack of agency, a stasis, a surrender. However, humans are also record keepers by nature, and this requires the need for reflection—the effort to distill a single moment demands a pause, a circling back. Record keeping comes in many forms: taxidermy is the record of a kill, planting and harvest are records of landscape and season. Photographs, sculptures, paintings, poetry and other artistic endeavors preserve an attitude, an emotion, a memory, a narrative. The final poem in the book is called “Original Migration Guide as Wholecloth Quilt.” What better record of the past than a textile built from lived-in fabrics—extracted, patched together and handed down? We may never be able to fully inhabit a memory, but it seems impossible to stop trying.
CLA: Many writers (including myself) worry about having to choose between a career in writing (which might take the pleasure out of writing by putting too much pressure on it) and a career away from writing (a choice that might be less fulfilling); hearing you talk at SUNY Geneseo about how you found your way really helped assuage my concerns about all this. Could you offer some advice or warnings or encouragements to us young, hopeful poets and writers?
CM: There are many career paths that offer opportunities to exercise your writing muscles—law, journalism, publishing, and teaching, among many others. Pursuing this type of professional path doesn’t mean you’re giving up on your creative writing life—it just means that you have health insurance and can pay your rent! Be practical. That’s my best advice. But whatever your day job might be, keep a toe in the creative writing world. For me, having a workshop is essential—for feedback and for deadlines. It keeps me writing. I’m a member of an informal, three-man workshop, and we’ve been meeting for over a decade now. They’ve been instrumental in providing criticism, motivation and encouragement. They helped me bring my book into the world. As for the rejection letters: they will always keep coming, no matter how much you publish. Expect rejection—then you’ll be pleasantly surprised when you find that a piece has been accepted.
CLA: What’s on the horizon for you? What can we look out for next?
CM: I recently found this incredible, pocket-sized first-aid book for miners in an antique store in Sweetwater, Tennessee. It was originally published by the Washington Government Printing Office in 1922. The book has helpful tips for assessing and treating wounds, ruptures, and poisons, as well as instructions for transporting injured miners. It’s very detailed, and a little frightening. I’m currently working on a series of poems that takes titles from the section headings in the book. The project is in its very early stages, but hopefully it will work its way into a new book or a chapbook. I’d like to say that I have mapped out a second book, but I’ll have to see what direction the new poems take me.
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Robert Held
An Interview with John Gallaher
John Gallaher is the author of The Little Book of Guesses (2007, Four Way Books), winner of the Levis Poetry prize; Map of the Folded World (2009, University of Akron); co-author, with G.C. Waldrep, of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (2011, BOA Editions), as well as co-editor of Time Is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt (2014, University of Akron Press). His poetry appears widely in such places as The Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Field, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Pleiades, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Gallaher is currently associate professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, and co-editor of The Laurel Review and The Akron Series in Poetics.
I had the good fortune of interviewing John Gallaher between two of his readings-one in Rochester, New York, where he read alongside Nickole Brown at Dine and Rhyme, a fundraising event for his publisher BOA Editions, and the other at SUNY Geneseo. During his reading of “XV” from In A Landscape, a poem about his cousin Lyle surviving a freak crash of the cargo plane he was co-piloting, Gallaher paused for a moment to comment that he couldn’t shake the idea that the students in the first row of seats looked like they were in an airplane cockpit. Gallaher weaves comments and anecdotes like these into his readings so often and so well that they become part of the poem. Some poets might take offense at being called a great storyteller, but I doubt Gallaher would. Gallaher told me he’s delighted by reviews of In a Landscape that call authorship into question. Wayne Coyne, lead singer of the Flaming Lips, for instance, writes, “Gallaher is not a writer or a poet, he is a psychic using words to trick us.”
ROBERT HELD: How does the conversational tone figure into your work?
JOHN GALLAHER: John Ashbery, when he wrote a blurb for one of my books, said “In some ways it seems like John Gallaher’s poems write themselves.” You could look at that as a negative, as if I’m not even an author at all. But that’s part of the John Cage idea: the context creates the art. If we really believe this stuff we say all the time about “if this author wasn’t there to write this work someone else would have because the age needed it,” let’s add to that “Okay, I don’t exist. Okay, you talk.” In Triggering Town, Richard Hugo talks about how poets have obsessive language, words that obviously mean more to the poet than to everyone else. In some ways, that sounds too mystical to me. I want words to be kind of conversational words, but at the same time, I think maybe for me it’s conjunctions that mean more to me than they do to most people. Maybe, perhaps, kind of, or… I love that language, because it’s not the language of finality; it’s the language of continuance and that means we have hope.
RH: Could you talk about your fascination with John Cage?
JG: My fascination with Cage started back in the 80s when I was an undergraduate. Right after Cage died, there was a documentary that someone made about him, and it was showing in a classroom. I wasn’t enrolled in the class or anything, but I walked by and saw this thing going on, and it looked so odd…It was these two guys playing chess with John Cage’s lilting voice talking about something or other. I went in and started watching it and was fascinated. At that time, I read Silence and I liked it and thought it was really neat. Later, in about 2009, I had a little bit of research money from my university to buy some books, so I replaced my copy of Silence which was long missing, and bought another one of his books, A Year from Monday. I also bought a CD, titled In a Landscape, of some of his earlier compositions. I sat down to write one day, and I was very not interested in writing as I had been writing. I was listening to In a Landscape, so I put that at the top of the page and started typing, and I typed for three months.
When people think John Cage, they think of “4’33,” some of his most avant garde compositions, but John Cage also made a lot of really melodic compositions. In his writing, too, some of it is very discordant, but interspersed are these anecdotes, just straightforward anecdotes-things that someone told him or that he knows from his own life, and I really like that aspect of the writing. Cage shows us that you can talk—you can just talk—and at the same time you can be having this theoretical conversation. This understanding allowed me to do the same kind of thing in my new work.
RH: You mentioned in your reading that the motive behind the new direction in In a Landscape was that you were tired of imagination and art.
JG: I’d been doing collaborative writing with my friend G.C. Waldrep, and when you’re doing that, you’re in this communal space, which is a big act of imagination. When we were finished with our collaborative work, we retreated into our own personal spaces, and for me, that meant a kind of denial of imagination. Of course, that’s all B.S., but this thinking worked to trick myself out of the imagination that I was very happy with and that I’d grown accustomed to. I call it the “John Ashbery imagination,” and because I loved that so much, I wanted to walk away from it, and say “I’m not going to make anything up. I’m not going to imagine something; I’m only going to recall… I’m not even going to try for music. I’m going to try for prose.”
RH: Speaking of Ashbery, you’re often compared to him. How would you explain your relation to his work?
JG: So many of us are so indebted to the barriers Ashbery broke down, to the territory he opened up. He inscribed that territory, so anyone who follows in that path will have Ashbery elements. At the same time, you can’t wear someone else’s clothes. So, how do you go into someone else’s territory and build your own house? How do you have your own psychological entity, but still inhabit that world? I was thinking, what are those of us who are writing in this vein denying, or what are they walking away from, and are we walking away from things that we don’t need to walk away from? In the 90s, I was reacting very strongly to a kind of 80s poetry that was pretty serious, kind of elegiac, had to do with parents and children. I walked away from that tone, but also that content. Now that we’re in an Ashbery landscape, what about that content? Can we bring some of that material back into our world that we’re making here?
RH: One thing I admire about both your work and Ashbery’s is the use of names. How do names function in your poems?
JG: There is one person who has been named in every single book I’ve written-I don’t think I’ve missed any-Margot. But I don’t know any Margots; I just like that name. Naming is also a New York School thing, but in New York School poetry it was real, well-known people, but when I name someone in a poem, it’s going to be someone like me that no one really gives a shit about. If you’re John Ashbery and you name Frank O’Hara in your poems you say “Well, it’s Frank O’Hara; this is important!” We can deal with made up names because there’s a power in those names, and I like that, but then with In a Landscape, I said forget that, I’m going to say Brendan; I’m going to say Natalie, and they have to deal with that, and I have to deal with that.
RH: How do you navigate the nonfiction aspect of your poetry?
JG: We have to respond in some way to veracity. You have to make these constant negotiations of “oh, I can’t tell that. I can tell this story but not this one little part of it.” One of the things I’ve decided is that anything said to me is open game. When I’m talking about someone in my poetry, I’m often writing about something they’ve told me, and I feel like that’s fair: they gave it to me. But if I pass by a window, and I see you doing something in a room, that feels like invasion. Unless it’s something really public, like my wife has some brothers who have had trouble with the law and are in jail. That happened, so I can write that. It might be uncomfortable for the family or them, but it happened. I have to say, though, my father doesn’t read anything I write. What if he did? He might not like some of it, but some, I’m sure he’d be okay with. I’m not mean. I’m not vindictive.
RH: How did you grow up? What is your life like now?
JG: I live in Missouri in a small town of 11,000 and have a couple kids. We ride bicycles, and I’m a youth soccer coach. As a kid, I moved around a lot. I was adopted. We don’t talk much about adoption as adults, what adoption does, not in a tragic way, just the regular way anyone who has been adopted goes through a certain psychological veil that people often deny, even the adopted child who doesn’t want to upset the applecart. You were brought into this space, this new family, and if you complain about it maybe you’ll be sent away. I was three-and-a-half when I was adopted, and I felt a little like I was performing. They say who you become is 50% nature and 50% nurture. I’m missing context about who I am. I think, at the same time, that this applies to everyone, to every child and every family: I came from space and showed up here suddenly, and I’m bringing some of my space with me. We all think, “These people are crazy. I’m not crazy, am I? Am I one of these people? Oh my god, I belong here.”
My life now is an interesting one because it’s a cornfield basically. A lot of people want to sentimentalize this setting or push it into the past. Talking about someone whose house abuts a cornfield, it’s either going to become a horror movie—children will walk out of the cornfield—or it’s either going to be this sepia tone, Americana thing, but what if it turns out there’s just a normal life there, you know? I get the same TV channels as everyone else
RH: With In a Landscape are you trying to open up that story?
JG: I think so. I was nearing fifty at the time I began the book, and my children were young, and other people, other men especially around the age of fifty, were dying of heart attacks around me, these middle-aged dads dying. It became this sort of “here are my stories, kids, in case I’m not here to tell them.” Being conversational was important to me, and not lying was really important to me, not making things up, but also really trying to say what I think about things, because that’s part of our story-try it! There’s not really a writing prompt for this. I was thinking about that today, because I was thinking about visiting a class and having a writing prompt for them, but the writing prompt I really want to give is this: tell me what you really think about asbestos, and use some object to explore this, like what was your last experience with a teacup? What happened? And then, of course, do you love your parents?
RH: Do you have any advice for undergraduate creative writers?
JG: It was easier in my age, because no one expected anything from you. I didn’t expect anything from me. All the literary journals were hard to get into, and all the people getting into them were thirty and up, even for the first time. So when I was twenty-four or twenty-two or twenty, I really felt like there was time, but now it seems like there’s so much pressure on everyone. Even when you’re still in school, you’re supposed to already have all these books and accomplishments behind you. I say, take your time, do your thing. I was thirty-six when my first book came out, and now no one asks me how old I was when it came out-I could have been twenty-six for all anyone cares now; it doesn’t matter. It only matters when you’re in the midst of it. Most of us don’t get to be the big innovators. Most of us just get to inscribe our little part of the territory. But for the people who do make the big innovations, like Ashbery, most of the innovation is done early in their career, but the best work come later.
Robert Held is an English (creative writing) major at SUNY Geneseo, makes video poems, wants to be a big boy, likes videos of farming equipment and playstation, and stepped in a muddy puddle today but didn’t get his socks wet! He’d be best friends with Voltron.
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Amy Elizabeth Bishop & Erin Koehler
An Interview with Karin Lin-Greenberg
Karin Lin-Greenberg earned her MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, an MA from Temple University, as well as an AB from Bryn Mawr College. Her short story collection, Faulty Predictions, was the winner of the 2013 Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press. Her stories can also be found in literary journals such as The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and the Berkeley Fiction Review. She is currently an assistant professor at Siena College, where she teaches creative writing.
Erin Koehler: We think the title Faulty Predictions encompasses the entire collection well. Can you talk about how you determined the collection’s title?
Karin-Lin Greenberg: I wanted the book’s title to be the title of one of the stories in the collection. I looked at all the titles and thought about whether there was one title that could encompass the themes and ideas in the entire collection, and I decided “Faulty Predictions” made the most sense. In each of the stories, characters set out with a particular set of expectations, and by the end, their “predictions” about their lives are turned upside-down. Generally, the characters learn or understand something about their own lives by the end of the story that they didn’t know at the beginning. Usually, something they didn’t expect to happen occurs over the course of the story.
Amy Elizabeth Bishop: The settings in Faulty Predictions are diverse—from Ohio to Illinois to Kansas, North Carolina, from college towns to big cities. How did you choose the settings for your stories? And how important is setting to you as a writer?
KLG: The settings are all places where I’ve lived or imagined towns that are similar to places I’ve lived. I’ve moved a lot in the last decade, and I wanted to incorporate each place I lived in my fiction. Some sense of setting is always important for me. I tell my students that we need to know a general sense of where things are taking place; if we don’t know, we often get scenes where characters are talking to each other, and readers can’t picture where the characters are. I’ve heard this called Talking Head Syndrome. In some of the stories in the collection, like “Bread,” I don’t specify a particular setting because place isn’t a terribly important element of the story. However, we know that some scenes are set in the protagonist’s house, others in a car, and others in a grocery store. In other stories, like “Miller Duskman’s Mistakes,” setting is incredibly important. I think in that story setting drives the plot in many ways. I taught for three years in a small town in Ohio that was very similar to the imaginary Morningstar, Ohio, of “Miller Duskman’s Mistakes.” The only outsiders in the real-life version of Morningstar were the people who came to teach at the college. I wanted to capture a sense of what it felt like to be an outsider in a small town, and I wanted to come up with a character who might be perceived as even more of an intruder than the academics who came to teach at the college. I thought a character who tore down an established business in Morningstar and opened a restaurant that was very out of place in this town could create some active dislike from the people who’d lived in the town their entire lives.
EK: The characters in your collection are unique, quirky, even, yet they feel very real too. We especially loved the characters in “Miller Duskman’s Mistakes” and this small town perspective. Are your characters often born out of real life experiences, people you know, or do they come to you in other ways?
KLG: Mostly my characters are imagined. They might be sparked by something that happened in real life or something that I observed or read or heard about, but for the most part I like to make up characters from scratch. I don’t think I’ve ever written a character that’s completely based on either myself or someone I know. I might take one or two traits from real life people, but I’d say about ninety to ninety-five percent of each character I write comes from imagination.
AEB: Character names seem important in your stories. In “Prized Possessions,” in particular, names are meaningful. How do you choose character names?
KLG: I’m mostly concerned with names matching who the characters are. I think about the ages of the characters and where they live and the time period in which the story takes place, and I try to choose names that feel right. I often find myself writing near bookshelves filled with books, so when I’m stuck for a character name I’ll look at the spines and the names of the authors and a lot of the time my eyes will rest upon either a first name or a last name that seems to fit the character I’m writing. Sometimes I’ll just do a Google search for something like “Most popular last names in North Carolina in 1990” and see what comes up. Sometimes I’ll poke around on baby name websites, but I don’t care too much about the meanings of the names; for me, these websites are just a way to scroll through lots of names. I generally try not to use names that are symbolic, but in “Prized Possessions” I believed the characters would name their twins Hope and Chance. So that was more of a decision to characterize the parents than to have these kids stand for these abstract ideas.
EK: A number of the conflicts in your stories take place within families or in friendships, which can be fraught in similar ways. In “The Good Brother,” for instance, adult siblings, who are thrown together for a surprising errand, come to understand each other. In the title story, Hazel and the narrator reach a similar moment of understanding. In “Prized Possessions,” there is resolution for the protagonist in both her family and her friendship. Can you talk about writing these moments and the role of humor in them?
KLG: I think the humor often arises from the situations the characters are in. What’s important for me in stories is to have two things going on, an upper story and a lower story. The upper story is simply where stuff happens. Sometimes people call this the actual plot. I try to be aware of making sure there’s enough going on in scene in my stories. I ask myself whether characters are doing things, whether they’re talking to each other, whether they’re in conflict in some way with each other. I want to make sure they’re not just sitting around thinking and pontificating. The lower story is where there’s some sort of emotional resonance to the stuff that happens in the story, and this can also be called the emotional plot. So the upper story is where the humor happens in action, but the lower story is where there are moments of understanding and resolution.
AEB: The stories in Faulty Predictions are told in a variety of points of view. “Editorial Decisions,” begins the collection with the first person plural, and you use first and third limited elsewhere. How do you choose POV?
KLG: For me, point of view is generally attached to character. If I’m working with a character with a distinct voice, I’ll usually gravitate toward first person. In “Editorial Decisions” I had a group of characters who were all thinking and acting in the same way, so I thought first person plural made sense as a way to tell this story. I think about second person as a distancing point of view, sort of like a displaced first person. I generally don’t think of it as a point of view that puts the reader in the character’s shoes. I chose second person narration for “Designated Driver” because I thought the protagonist would have a hard time telling the story in first person. It’s easier for her to not quite take responsibility for her missteps and instead push these actions onto a “you” character.
EK: There’s a lot of action in these stories—people going places, seeking out other characters or things, getting injured, etc. What types of scenes are most difficult for you to write, and which comes the most naturally?
KLG: First drafts of any sort of scene are always difficult for me. I tend to overwrite and indulge in tangents, and then in revision I cut away and keep only what’s important. I like the revision process a whole lot more than I like the process of getting the first draft of the story down. I enjoy writing dialogue, but I find in revision I can usually cut away at least half of the dialogue I initially wrote, which tightens up the subsequent drafts.
AEB: Your collection won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2013. Can you talk about the process of putting together a collection? Did you submit Faulty Predictions to other contests?
KLG: I started submitting a collection of stories to contests for book-length collections starting in 2006, when I graduated from my MFA program. We had to complete a manuscript as a final project, and my manuscript was a collection of stories. After I graduated, I submitted the stories that I wrote during my MFA to contests, but I was also writing new stories. I kept submitting to contests every year, and each year I would take out some of the older stories and swap in newer stories. I think the collection got stronger over the years as I kept working and writing and swapping out stories. In 2009 I was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor, which gave me a lot of hope and encouraged me to keep going even though by that point I’d gotten dozens of rejections for the collection. By the time the collection won in 2013, it probably looked about ninety percent different from the collection I started submitting in 2006. “Faulty Predictions” itself was written in 2012, so it was a really new story. Actually, three of the stories, “Faulty Predictions,” “Late Night With Brad Mack,” and “Half and Half Club” were all written within a few months before I submitted the collection in May. Those are the three stories in the collection that weren’t first published in journals because they were so new that I didn’t have time to get them published before the book went to press.
I learned a lot over the years about putting together a collection. At first, I thought that if a story had been published in a journal it belonged in the collection. So for many years I submitted collections that I don’t think held together thematically or in terms of voice or tone. Then I started thinking about collections as a whole and studying collections I liked. Even if the stories in these collections were about different kinds of characters and were set in a variety of places, they generally all felt like they belonged together in some way. So I got rid of some stories from my collection that didn’t fit in with the other stories. These were mainly stories that were more driven by voice than by character or plot and also some stories where I was more concerned with lyrical language than plot. In this collection that I submitted in 2013, I tried to include stories that felt tonally similar and had some humor to them, even if they were about serious topics.
AEB: We’re struck by the story about “Prized Possessions” being rejected numerous times before winding up in the prestigious journal Epoch. How do you know when to push on with a story and how do you know when to give up?
KLG: A big issue with “Prized Possessions” was that I submitted it too early. It was a story I was excited about, and I’d written multiple drafts of it and just couldn’t wait to submit it. It really wasn’t finished yet; I still had a lot of things to figure out with it, and I should have gone through a few more drafts before sending it out. I’m a lot more patient now as a submitter; I’m willing to put a story down for a while and revisit it before I send it out. “Prized Possessions” is the oldest story in the collection, and it started as an exercise in a class I took in graduate school. I think I often submitted work too early while I was a student.
Ultimately, figuring out when to push forward and when to quit has a lot to do with how much I believe in the story. And, maybe more importantly, whether I can stand to keep working on it. I’ve worked on some stories for five or six years before they got published (of course this isn’t steady work, but rather returning to the stories every few months). I think it’s also important to take another look at a story that’s been rejected a lot of times and see if I can figure out whether there’s something that’s simply not working with the story. And, if I can figure this out, the next step is seeing if I can figure out how to revise what’s not working. If I’m really lucky, some kind editors might jot down a few notes about why they rejected the story, and if I find that several of the notes say similar things, that might also help to lead me to what to revise.
EK: What are you working on currently?
KLG: I’m currently working on a bunch of things. I’ve been writing stories set in upstate New York that I hope will one day work together in a collection. I had fun putting together a collection that jumps around in terms of settings, but I’m now interested in writing a more cohesive collection. I’m also working on a novel that grapples with the question of what it means to be successful. And since I teach these genres and am constantly reading and thinking about them, I’m also writing some poetry and some creative nonfiction.
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