SYCAMORE REVIEW » CONVERSATIONS

“the past, the color pink”: An Interview with David Trinidad

Sycamore — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:22:13 +0000

by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry

When I was seventeen, I ganked the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry from the public library and found three poems by David Trinidad anthologized between Bob Kaufman and Woody Guthrie. This was—to my mind—pretty much the coolest thing ever. In his newly-published and completely-addictive Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, Trinidad has given us a prismatic funhouse of contemporary poetry, full of Yardley Slicker lipgloss, NRFB (never removed from box) collectible Barbie outfits, and Sylvia Plath. In this cultural detritus, Trinidad finds something thrilling, something human, and a poetry as formally unexpected and inventive as its subjects. He was kind enough to speak with Sycamore Review recently and discuss some his most recent projects.

Sycamore Review: This was a big year for you—your selected poems were published, as well as the collected poems of your friend Tim Dlugos, which you edited and introduced. What was the experience of working on these two projects together? Or did you consciously try to keep them separate?

David Trinidad: I worked on the books concurrently, usually alternating between the two projects. Tim’s presence was palpable throughout. I actually welcomed his influence on my own work—just as he’d influenced me when he was alive. The way he was able to dive into a poem, and run with an inspired idea, in particular, had an effect on me, gave me courage to face writing my new poems.

SR: Did working on A Fast Life change the way you thought about your own volume?

DT: It did give me a sense of finality, in a way. Tim was almost twenty years dead when I was working on A Fast Life. I had to reach into the past and retrieve all of his poems, reconstruct his life. Because I was also working on my selected poems, it made me look at my own poems through an archival lens. Maybe that would have happened anyway. The idea of discrete books, for instance, fell by the wayside. The poems now exist independently—in a more open chronological framework, not just within the confines of individual books. Each poem’s now part of this larger picture, or puzzle. A life’s work, if you will.

SR: Many of your poems seem to come from prompts—lists, ephemera, haiku for each episode of Peyton Place. The poem has a kind of goal for itself. What does the prompt give you, as the poet? What is the advantage?

DT: I’ve always said that prompts, especially forms, are toy-like. They turn writing into a sort of game. Challenging, but fun. A riddle you have to solve. But every poem, prompt or not, is a riddle you have to solve, or try to.

SR: In general, you’re a poet of many obsessions—’60s pop culture and Barbie, especially. Do you think of these obsessions as muses? Do you sit down specifically intending to write about Barbie stuff, say, or does it attack you?

DT: I guess I would agree that my obsessions are muses. Obsessions drive you, spur you on. It’s not always such a conscious decision, the things I write about. I suppose it’s too simplistic to say it just happens. I’m always trying to make writing happen. It just doesn’t feel like I’m in total control of what comes out. In fact, a large part of the work seems to be about relinquishing control, so the unexpected perception or admission can take place. That’s why the prompts, the forms, are useful: they distract you, or preoccupy you, while something magical transpires. At least that’s the hope.

SR: Some recent poems likewise seem to pick up on similar little artifacts, objects, rooms, occasions, from the life of Sylvia Plath. It seems to be less a literary obsession than one of celebrity, of adulation. One of my favorite of your new poems is “Underlined in Sylvia Plath’s Copy of Tender Is the Night.” How did Plath enter into your life? How and why does she remain there?

DT: I first encountered Plath when I was an undergraduate in the early ’70s. I was assigned Ariel in one of my lit classes. I’ve been interested in her ever since. It hasn’t been a constant thing; my interest has waxed and waned over the years. It was reignited, in a big way, about three years ago. I discovered that one of the Plath archives is in Indiana, at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, within driving distance of where I live. So I made a pilgrimage. That’s where I saw her copy of Tender Is the Night. It’s an amazing experience to be able to hold and study something like that, to touch something that Plath herself touched, underscored. Fetishistic, perhaps. No, that’s a put-down. It’s an intimate act, one that connects you with a writer, his or her energy, in a very personal way. It’s that intimacy, with Plath, that I find so exciting. To get that close to the source of such tremendous vitality, creativity.

SR: The long poem “A Poem Under the Influence” from The Late Show, included here in Dear Prudence, involves many “confessions.” One of them (“Confession: last Monday (February 21) at Columbia College, I gave my poetry workshop / a writing assignment (Joe’s I remember) and went to my office to bid on Bride’s Dream”) even mentions a workshop I was in. In the book, you’re engaging sometimes with the material of confessional poetry in a unique way, but do you think of yourself as a “confessional” poet?

DT: I can’t believe you were in that workshop! I suppose I do consider myself a Confessional poet in some respects, insofar as I have things to confess, that I feel driven to confess, that I’m not afraid to expose. So many poets are; they hide behind their intellect in order to evade the personal. But that seems to be what I crave, what I look for in other writers. Maybe it’s because the Confessional poets had a big impact on me early on—Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. When I began writing, they were the popular poets. More than that, though, there was a true affinity. I had been raised Roman Catholic; a strong belief in the redeeming power of confession was ingrained in me.

SR: The poem circles back around and mentions previous poems in the collection, previous “characters” we’re already familiar with having read your previous poems arrive to greet us again as they might in a memoir. It even mentions itself, the writing of the poem. How did you approach writing it? What is the “influence” of the title?

DT: I’d thought, when I started it, that I would write an instant New York School long poem: twenty page-long stanzas, one a day. I think I wanted to have something to show for my summer. It ended up taking a year and a half to complete. I still wrote each stanza in one sitting, just not over consecutive days. There were other “rules”: the first line of each stanza had to contain the word “pink,” each line had to exceed the margin and wrap, and (big surprise) I had to confess something in each stanza. The poem is obviously under the influence of the New York School long poem, specifically James Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem” and “A Few Days.” I’d read a page or two of Schuyler each time I sat down to work on my poem, as warmup. The poem is also under the influence of the past, the color pink, as well as innumerable other things.

SR: Often, the poems in the book seem to bounce back and forth between humor and catharsis, subverting our expectations in a kind of self-aware way. It’s like Barbie punk rock. The beginning of “April Inventory” starts: “This is typical / autobiographical / stuff” which is quite disarming for the reader, in a wonderful, satisfying way that seems to be a trademark of yours. How did you arrive at that? What influenced it? What turns you on in the poems you read?

DT: Like the Confessional poets, the New York School poets influenced me, so perhaps the relationship between humor and catharsis has something to do with that. Frank O’Hara, Schuyler, Joe Brainard, Alice Notley’s poems from the early ’80s. And of course Dlugos. All very intimate and open. Friendly. Funny. We relate, don’t we, when someone lets down their guard and reveals who they really are. Both these aesthetic impulses—Confessional and New York School—strike me as incredibly generous. I like poems that disarm me in some way, make me laugh, cry, feel human. That surprise or delight. As when I’m looking at art in a gallery or museum, I simply know what I like when I see it.

SR: It’s difficult to estimate the number of great poets you’ve hipped me to personally, just by reading the dedications in some of your poems—Dlugos, Amy Gerstler, and Elaine Equi to name a few. Who are you reading lately?

DT: I’m just finishing Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary. His intricate, even baroque descriptions of farm life. It’s an amazing book; the poems totally took me by surprise. One, “Struggle,” moved me to tears. I’ve also been reading Truman Capote’s short stories. And Schuyler’s art criticism. And Eula Biss’s essays. And every haiku I can get my hands on, as I’m writing a whole book of those Peyton Place haikus. Bashō. Issa. I’m always reading Emily Dickinson. Her poems blow my mind.

SR: I’m curious about your revision process. So much goes into your poems, what comes out?

DT: A lot. I revise quite a bit. I don’t take anything for granted. What does A.R. Ammons say: “one must write and rewrite till one writes it right.” I question everything I put on the page—sometimes endlessly, it seems.

David Trinidad’s most recent book, Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2011 by Turtle Point Press. His other books include The Late Show (2007), By Myself (with D.A. Powell, 2009), and Plasticville (2000), all published by Turtle Point. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011). Trinidad teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-edits the journal Court Green.

Total Absorption and Abandon in LAMB: An interview with debut novelist Bonnie Nadzam

Sycamore — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:08:33 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

Bonnie Nadzam was born in Cleveland, went to high school in suburban Chicago, and has moved continually westward since then. She studied English literature and environmental studies at Carleton College, and earned an MA and PhD from the University of Southern California. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, Story Quarterly, Callaloo, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She taught at Colorado College, where she served for two years as the Daehler Fellowin Creative Writing. She is married to her childhood love and lives with him in the Rocky Mountains.

Be sure to read our review of Bonnie Nadzam’s debut novel Lamb here.

Sycamore Review: One of the most striking aspects of Lamb is the narrator who occasionally steps in to introduce Lamb as “our man” and Tommie as “our girl.” At one point, the narrator even invites the reader to pause to contemplate how Tommie’s parents and friends are reacting to her sudden disappearance. In a separate interview, I saw that you refer to this point of view as not strictly third person, but closer to a distant first person. Did you find that you had to utilize the distant first (or extremely close third) in order to inhabit the character because a straight first person point of view would be too daunting for a character as deluded, manipulative and confused as David Lamb is in the book?

Bonnie Nadzam: When I wrote Lamb I was reading a lot of older literature, including many texts we now not only anachronistically call novels, but even novels with experimental narrators. At the time some of these books were written, however—like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones—the aim was not to write a realistic novel (whatever that means) or one that experimented with an as-yet unrealized “realism”; rather, the literary aims varied with the philosophical, political and spiritual backgrounds of each author. Fielding was a skeptic, and I found myself greatly intrigued by the way he deliberately inserted narrators/essayists/playwrights into his histories, essays and plays. He did so, I believe, not in any bizarrely early post-modern game, but because he was trying to instruct his readers and viewers how to read and weigh information, especially when mediated by some authority we perhaps ought not trust. Without the context of the time in which he was writing, it’s easy to criticize him for his “garrulous narrators,” for “shabby writing.” He is even still disliked because that quality of total absorption while reading (more possible with those who came later, like Austen) is not so possible—and I find that dislike so interesting.

Such absorption was then and has sometimes now been criticized too, for being dangerous (how those shameless women of the late Eighteenth Century neglected their duties of housewifery to read their novels!). I was equally intrigued—for personal reasons as much as scholarly reasons—by the very real danger of this total absorption and abandon that can happen when a story is really good/seductive. Or, since as a country we don’t read very much, insert “TV” or “video games” or their equivalent for what long ago were corrupting gothic novels…

While it may seem like a distastefully clever game to have taken Fielding’s lead on some of this in my own manuscript, it was in fact because I did not have the heart to present a novel or story to the reader “as if it were true” in the same manner that Lamb usually presents stories to Tommie. Of course we’re much more sophisticated/practiced readers of fiction than were readers two hundred years ago; still, I wanted there to be that gap, that toe-hold for the reader, should he or she want to stop (in a way Tommie does less and less as the story progresses) and say: hey, wait a minute. This story, however lovely and/or seductive, is being mediated by a person with motives, with limitations. Who is telling this story and why? What am I to take for truth (within the fictional story), and what am I to consider simply rhetorical manipulation designed to “suck me in” to the story? What are the essential differences among lying, truth-telling, lying in a work of fiction, truth-telling in a work of fiction, and self-deception across the board? If Lamb were a less pathetic/criminal character, I may have bypassed all these questions, formally. As it was I felt compelled to give Fielding a nod, and the reader some respect and wiggle space for his/her own judgment.

Sycamore Review: Early in the book, Lamb describes his cabin in the mountains to Tommie and I made a mental note of how deluded the pastoral scene he described to her was, but was taken aback when they finally made it to the cabin and it was just as he described it to her. The moment forced me to take stock of just how honest Lamb had been with Tommie throughout the book. Deluded and manipulative for sure, but their relationship is also honest in a way most relationship couldn’t be, and probably shouldn’t be. At any point in the drafting process did you worry if the reader might sympathize with Lamb more than he deserves? What is the responsibility, if any, of the writer to judge a character like Lamb, or is that the reader’s judgment alone?

Bonnie Nadzam: I don’t feel qualified to speak clearly or fairly about writers’ responsibilities other than mentioning the importance of bearing witness without flinching. I think if one examined the rhetoric of Lamb carefully, he or she would find a lot of authorial judgment. An embarrassing amount of it, really, tucked formally into the book no less humanly than in Lamb’s own manipulative games. I tried to minimize it not because I thought or think an artist has some big bad set of responsibilities, but because I wanted to try to erase my own personal motives from the storytelling as much as possible. The more I revised, the less I judged Lamb as all-bad and Tommie as all-good. I don’t think I have the authority to make these judgments let alone impose them on others.

Sycamore Review: After Lamb and Tommie arrive at the cabin they go for a hike and we learn that Lamb “smelled the sun block and his own sweat and knew that the end of the story had already begun.” There is also a recurring theme of a young girl saving an old red horse that begins with a story Lamb tells about the two taking the elevator down from the top of a city office building where “outside on the street was even worse. Steel cars and concrete and noise and girl leaned over the horse and she promised to get him home.” Lamb is obviously at the end of his rope when the story begins and is resigned that his story will end, but he also believes that if he can save Tommie from herself, then maybe she can save him as well, but only if they leave the city. In your mind, is there a correlation between the corruptions inherent to life in and around a city with the corruption of children, specifically young girls in this country? There is a certain tension in the novel based on the fact that I didn’t want Lamb and Tommie to travel any further west because of the frightening potential of their fledgling relationship, but I couldn’t help but sympathize with the Lamb’s need to return to nature and desire to introduce nature to Tommie. How cognizant were you of these two opposing forces as Lamb and Tommie ventured west?

Bonnie Nadzam: Unfortunately I don’t think the corruption of children is particular to any region of the country, or, indeed, to any country. My older sister works with abused children, and I was with her once in a very nice shoe store in the rural western town where she lives. She was taking shoe donations for these children, and the owner of this particular store was very receptive and looking forward to helping out/ collecting shoes. A woman who happened to be shopping in the store at the time was sincerely surprised, then shocked, then visibly upset. “What?” she said. “That sort of thing happens to children in this town?”

I think in terms of Lamb, the West is a place where he believes he might yet be able to salvage something of his masculinity and see himself as a hero in a story about good and evil. He’s pretty bereft when we meet him, and has this great opportunity, really, to own up and take responsibility. Instead, he starts weaving a new narrative that is utterly like the old one that has just unraveled. In this new narrative-about-David-Lamb, being a good force in Tommie’s life relies on being out West, for he convinces himself he can show her a “better” America she wouldn’t necessarily get to experience without the help of his own time and resources.

Like you, I sympathize with Lamb on some of these counts. It’s as much a heartbreak that the West and the wildness he is seeking are already gone as it is that he’s hurting Tommie so irreparably. I think at his best he really believes there’ll be some healing power of “returning to nature,” but it’s not something one can easily do in the U.S. , and certainly not something Lamb and Tommie do. I don’t think they are any better or worse off out there than they are in her impoverished Chicago suburb. There’s no new horizon except an internal one, and it’s precisely this that Lamb is running from.

Sycamore Review: Many readers of Sycamore Review are also writers and I wondered if you could share a little on your process of writing your debut novel. How many drafts did you write of Lamb? Was a huge rewrite ever necessary (POV, cut characters, setting changes)? What advice did you receive during the drafting process that proved the most helpful?

Bonnie Nadzam: There was a lot of re-vision in the process—tons. And I mean re-visioning, not editing or proofreading. Whenever I got stuck, I printed out the manuscript, deleted it from the computer, and started re-typing in a new blank document. Something about that wide-open blank page—it’s so unconcerned. Such a good listener. It sits there with its eyebrows raised, its face open, ready for anything. The all-accepting blank. I did get awfully sore hands and arms though. Too much typing.

I think the best advice I had when writing this manuscript had little to do with writing, per se. I remember the time as one thick with reading, and self-doubt, and self-incrimination, and shame, and a lot of worry that I was wasting my time and fooling myself. Not about being a writer, which I still don’t really consider myself, what’s one book, but about writing this novel as a way of getting closer to whatever it is we seek when we open a book of poetry. The advice was twofold, and I must precede it by saying while it sounds a little hippie-dippie, the advice was serious, and I pass it on seriously: Love yourself. Trust yourself. The writing, publication—that’s all secondary stuff. I think.

“What fun we’ll have, amid such pidgeons!”: Rimbaud in Translation

Sycamore — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:04:03 +0000

by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry

One hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, a provocateur was born in France. Arthur Rimbaud—published by fifteen, retired by twenty, dead by forty—wrote famously in 1871: “I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It’s really not my fault.”

Coincidentally, he who was “from the depths of the sea, back to the block”–Snoop D-O-double-G–was also born today, forty years ago.

We were recently treated to this wonderful new translation of Rimbaud’s sonnet “Rêvé pour l’hiver” by poet, physician, and translator Jenna Le, who was kind enough to address her process with us via email. In celebration of Rimbaud’s life and work, the translation and interview appear below.

Rimbaud’s Fantasy

This winter, we’ll speed off in a carnation-colored coupe,
our asses afloat on soft blue cushions.
In every corner of the car, a nest of kisses waits.
What fun we’ll have, amid such pigeons!

You’ll shut your eyes in order not to see
the jealous evening shadows,
a pack of black-furred demons and black-furred wolves,
shove their snouts against the windows.

…when, all at once, on your sensitive cheek,
a spider-like kiss will set its tiny scratchy feet;
it’ll jog along your jugular…

You’ll beg me: “Help me catch this little beast!”
And we’ll grope each other’s skins in an effort to seize
that spider—which will outrace us for hours.

Rêvé pour l’hiver

L’hiver, nous irons dans un petit wagon rose
Avec des coussins bleus.
Nous serons bien. Un nid de baisers fous repose
Dans chaque coin moelleux.

Tu fermeras l’oeil, pour ne point voir, par la glace,
Grimacer les ombres des soirs,
Ces monstruosités hargneuses, populace
De démons noirs et de loups noirs.

Puis tu te sentiras la joue égratignée…
Un petit baiser, comme une folle araignée,
Te courra par le cou…

Et tu me diras : ” Cherche ! ” en inclinant la tête,
- Et nous prendrons du temps à trouver cette bête
- Qui voyage beaucoup…]

Sycamore Review: In the New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn recently theorized: “the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him.” Yet, we’ve recently been treated to a new volume of Rimbaud translations from octogenarian John Ashbery. How did you first come to Rimbaud as a reader? What continues to interest you about his poems? Why are we still talking about him?

Jenna Le: I first fell into Rimbaud’s arms at age 13, when my middle-school French class was assigned to read the much-anthologized sonnet “Le dormeur du val.” Then, two years later, I was wandering alone in a Boston bookstore, straying afield from the science-fiction section where I usually woolgathered on summer afternoons, when the French boy-genius’s Einsteinian mop of brown hair caught my eye from the cover of his Collected Poems. Opening the paperback to a random page, I began reading the poem “Roman,” whose penetrating psychological realism drove an icicle through my chest: the teenage boy described in the poem was the spitting image of a 17-year-old boy I had met, and fallen miserably in love with, just a few days prior! It was the uncanniest moment of my life.

Today, over a decade later, I’m still intrigued by Rimbaud’s versatility, his ability to wear so many different masks. In “Le dormeur du val,” he wears the mask of a cautionary fabulist; in “Roman,” he is self-indulgently romantic and coldly self-mocking at the same time; in “Venus Anadyomene,” he delights in being shockingly scatological, ripping down all of society’s carefully maintained illusions about the supposedly attractive purity of womanhood; etc. Ashbery, interestingly, manifests a similar versatility in his work, which may partly explain why he was drawn to him.

Sycamore Review: What made you want to translate this poem? Did you sit with other English versions while working on it?

Jenna Le: “Rêvé pour l’hiver” is one of a few poems in which Rimbaud’s defenses seem to come down, and he speaks simply and straightforwardly about sexual desire, without hiding behind the defense mechanisms of scatology or grotesquerie. The poem has a refreshingly modern feel, precisely because it’s sexually frank without being self-conscious about its sexual frankness. In this poem, Rimbaud neither embraces nor violently rejects conventional notions of romance; he simply circumvents them.

Although I had previously read several other English versions of this poem, I deliberately chose not to look at any of them while I was working on my own translation, because I wanted to be faithful to my own relationship with the poem.

Sycamore Review: I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that your translation departs somewhat from a so-called “surface translation” of Rimbaud’s vocabulary, but maintains the poem’s vigor of language and music. When it came time to “depart”–so to speak–how did you arrive at that decision? What was your approach?

Jenna Le: From the very first line, I wanted to do justice to Rimbaud’s snazzy, colloquial voice by using slightly slangy modern English. And I wanted to use vivid, dynamic word choices that would resurrect Rimbaud’s beautiful winter fantasy, rather than merely make a pale mimeograph of it. I’m audacious enough to believe that Rimbaud would appreciate the phrasing I use in the second line—”our asses afloat on soft blue cushions”—because Rimbaud wasn’t shy about vulgarity, and he seemed to like the jarring juxtaposition of earthy words (“asses”) with ethereal ones (“afloat”).

I recently tried to verbalize my philosophy on poetic translation on my Goodreads blog, here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1509989-what-are-your-views-on-poetry-in-translation

Jenna Le works as a physician in New York City. Her first book of poetry, Six Rivers, is forthcoming from New York Quarterly Books in fall 2011. Her poems and translations have appeared in Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Gargoyle, Many Mountains Moving, Margie, New York Quarterly, Post Road, Rhino, Salamander, and other journals. She won the 2011 Minnetonka Review Editor’s Prize and was nominated for the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award.

Joe B. Sills: A Minefield of Concussive but Potentially Enlightening Moments

Sycamore — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:00:21 +0000

Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

The editors at Sycamore Review were thrilled when judge Antonya Nelson chose Joe B. Sills story “The Duck” as the 2011 Wabash Fiction prize winner. Nelson said of the story, “This story stands out for being both entirely original, and entirely paying homage to the father of short story writers, Anton Chekhov. It looks backward, it looks forward. It is spare, clever, elusive, and utterly satisfying.” We couldn’t agree more. We wanted to catch up with Joe and ask him a few questions about his story, Chekhov, and the relationship between medicine and writing. Read an excerpt of the Wabash prize winning story here.

Sycamore Review: One thing that became quite clear after reading your Wabash Fiction Contest-winning story “The Duck” and taking a look at Contributor’s Note is that you have a clear and frustrating lack of ambition. Not only are you currently in medical school, but I understand that you took a break to attend the MFA program at UVa, correct? Can you discuss how writing and medicine connect for you personally? Do they take up the same mental space, or do you think about your stories when you are making your rounds and think about patients when you sit down to write a story? And, oh yeah, how the hell do you find time to write?

Joe B. Sills: I did take a leave from my medical school at Tufts to go to UVa, and now I’m back in medical school again. Medicine and literature usually hang out in different parts of my brain. I used to think of them as roommates who get along fine but don’t have much to say to each other. That’s begun to change now that I’m spending more time in the hospital, and the occasional thought will pass between medicine and writing if it has certain properties that I can describe only through example.

One of my patients was this elderly woman, about whom I will be slightly untruthful to protect her identity. She was hospitalized for pneumonia, and my resident needed to draw a blood gas which can be painful. The nurse was holding down this poor woman while the resident hunted for her radial artery with a syringe, and I was trying to distract her with inane questions about her life, thinking that would helpful somehow. She’s this tiny, frail lady who’s writhing and moaning and I’m standing at the foot of her bed and asking about her cats. At some point she must’ve recognized how weak I appeared, and that her pain had given her a power over me, and she began telling me this Flannery O’Connor-ish story about her next-door neighbors who got into an argument in her driveway, and one beat the other unconscious with a shovel. She watched this happen through her living room window, and she shared this experience with me in an effort to captivate and calm me, and in doing so she was calmed, and the resident found her artery and drew the blood gas.

By the time I needed to leave her room, she hadn’t finished the story – she’d only gotten as far has the neighbor with the shovel noticing her at the window. For mostly selfish reasons, I told her that I’d check in on her tomorrow to see how she was doing and to hear the rest. But the following morning I learned that she decompensated overnight and died. Since then, I’ve had this story fragment embedded in my head, and I can still see that woman and her neighbor locking eyes through the window and wondering what will happen next. I was already somewhat aware of how a story retains its velocity even after its point of origin is gone, but I’d never witnessed that concept at close range.

Anyhow, that’s a raw, unprocessed experience, and I don’t know if I can write it into something good enough to be of emotional value. I don’t even know if the act of writing it will refine my understanding of how stories are created and shared and survive, or if I’ll just spin my wheels for a few thousand words before moving onto something else. Either way, the point I’m trying to make is that medicine is a minefield of concussive but potentially enlightening moments, and writing has always been my best shot at clarity.

I have no writing habit, no daily system. I make time at the expense of whatever errands I’ve decided to ignore. My mom made the mistake of gifting me an orchid that I’ve starved to death. There’s a petrified brick of clothes in my hamper. A horde of spiders nests in the space between my storm windows. But I can live with a dead plant, and I can wear the same pants tomorrow, and those spiders can stay as long as they want if that’s what it takes for me to squeeze in another hour.

Sycamore Review: An abridged list of the company you will soon be keeping as a doctor/writer (no pressure): Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, Chris Adrian, Louis Ferdinand Celine, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to name a few. Not to put you on the spot (but, in this case, you kind you put yourself on the spot), but I wonder if you can make a few grand, sweeping claims on why doctors seem to write such great fiction and poetry—just a few.

Joe B. Sills: That is very, very generous of you to think of those authors as my company. Chris Adrian is a living hero. I came upon his fiction around the time I realized I wanted to be a writer and a doctor but would be unable to abandon one for the other. It was a small relief to know that at least it was possible for someone to do both.

It’s also very, very generous to say that doctors write great fiction and poetry. I’ve read brilliant work by physicians, but I don’t believe that being a physician makes for great writing. Most of the best writers I know are shoe saleswomen, part-time waiters, or working for peanuts at lit mags. I know a wonderful poet who castrates wild horses in Wyoming, but I can’t claim to know if or why horse castrators write such great poetry. I think of Chekhov as a gifted writer who happened to be a doctor, and had he not been a doctor I’m sure we’d still be reading him over a hundred years after he died.

Sycamore Review: Speaking of Chekhov: Not only is “The Duck” inspired by the stories of Anton Chekhov, but the protagonist is young Anton himself. Antonya Nelson, the 2011 Wabash Fiction judge, said of “The Duck:” “This story stands out for being both entirely original, and entirely paying homage to the father of short story writers, Anton Chekhov. It looks backward, it looks forward. It is spare, clever, elusive, and utterly satisfying.”

Did this story begin as you trying to pay homage to Chekhov or was it simply a story about a young, sensitive boy who eventually announced himself to you as a young Chekhov? Did you do any research beyond reading Chekhov’s stories and possibly a biography to make the time and place feel so authentic? Did Chekhov, as far as you know, ever have a pet duck? Raymond Carver’s last published story, “Errand,” details the illness and death of Chekhov. Have you read that story and, if so, did it offer any permission for you to write a story about the young, anxious, but very much alive and awe-struck Anton Chekhov?

Joe B. Sills: About a year ago I read a collection of Chekhov’s letters, in which I discovered my favorite Chekhov quote:

“Could you write a story about a young man, the son of a serf, a one time shop assistant, choir boy, schoolboy and university student, brought up to fawn on rank, kiss the hands of priests, accept without questioning other people’s ideas, express his gratitude for every morsel of bread he eats, a young man who has been frequently whipped, who goes to give lessons without galoshes, engages in street fights, tortures animals, loves to go to his rich relations for dinner, behaves hypocritically towards God and man without the slightest excuse but only because he is conscious of his own worthlessness – could you write a story of how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop, and how, on waking up one morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is real blood and not the blood of a slave?”

I read that line, took the rest of the day off to recover, and thought, No, I couldn’t. But I also knew that I’d try anyway, and so I hammered out a series of clunkers, most of them having to do with his early successes and women troubles. Those stories didn’t turn out well, and eventually I gave up and recycled them for scrap. I don’t believe in permission when it comes to fiction, but I lacked the audacity to write about Chekhov after he had become Chekhov. Carver had earned his audacity by the time he wrote “Errand.”

I tried to put the story behind me but I’d accumulated a pile of Chekhov biographies that I was too disheartened to return to the library. Months passed, and I kept rereading the chapters about Chekhov’s childhood. That was a part of his life I felt more able to envision and imagine and manipulate. I’m not a Chekhov scholar, but I do consider myself an expert of miserable, miserable adolescence. At last I’d found a Chekhov in whom I could believe.

No, Chekhov did not have a pet duck, at least none that I know of. But when he was sent to bring a duck home for dinner, he’d torment it into quacking on the walk home, probably to let his neighbors know his family wasn’t broke yet. So a pet duck was within the realm of possibility, though I never expected it to become the story’s fulcrum. Other Chekhov lore smuggled their way into the story as well. The Taganrog official with the broom, the pair of wretched shop boys, the rat that drowned in the cask of oil; all true.

Sycamore Review: I also wondered about the point of view in this story, which is mostly limited to a close third on Anton with only a brief moment from his father, Pavel’s, perspective. However, much of the story is so deep in Anton’s consciousness that we get wonderful insights into his young and vulnerable mind, such as: “He imagines her skin on his lips and the flavor it might make on his tongue, but these thoughts catalyze a hot alchemy in his belly. It is humiliating to be taunted by this braver version of himself, and Anton replaces this feeling by counting the houses, old and welcoming like benevolent grannies.” Did you ever considered writing this in first person or perhaps at least experimenting with it to find his voice? Would it have been too daunting to write this story in first person?

Joe B. Sills: I take a crack at both the first and third person in all of my stories. In this case the first person couldn’t sustain the Chekhovian voice that I wanted to contaminate with my own. That line with the ‘houses like benevolent grannies’ is cribbed from letter that Chekhov wrote to his family while traveling outside of Taganrog when he was twenty-seven. The story is heavily ornamented with phrases in which the narrative voice is literally Chekhov’s. The first person brought me too close to the consciousness of thirteen year-old Chekhov, who would not have been as capable of such gorgeous observations as was his future self.

And you’re right; the first person was too daunting. I felt like an imposter inside Chekhov’s skin. The third person was a trick I played on myself so I’d feel as if there were a more comfortable distance between myself and Chekhov.

Sycamore Review: Between your time spent with the outstanding writers at UVa and mentors at your medical school you have been absorbing much wisdom over the past few years. Can you share with our readers a piece advice that you received that has stuck with you and that comes to mind whenever there is a blank screen in front of you?

Joe B. Sills: I am the grateful but not absorbent recipient of plenty of advice and wisdom. Maybe I will recall some of it by the time anyone reads this. So the honest answer is sorry, but no.One thing I will say is that I have nothing against blank screens. The moment before I’ve begun to write is a gift, because that means I haven’t made any mistakes yet. It’s much worse to slog through the millionth draft of a story and then realize that all you’ve done is polish a turd. And most days it’s enough of a challenge to arrive at the blank screen. If you’ve made it that far, you have my sincere congratulations.

Sycamore Review: Quick thought experiment: Your brother (or hypothetical brother) is going to be spending the next year at the international space station, alone. He only has room in his shiny space bag to bring one Chekhov story with him to keep to him company. Which story would you pack in his bag and why?

Joe B. Sills: I have a sister and we don’t even give each other anything for our birthdays. We have a tacit understanding that by not receiving a gift we are relieved of the burden of finding some doodad that the other will just throw away. So gifts meant to last a year are a little out of my league.

At UVa I taught an undergraduate fiction workshop. In each class my students discussed some canonical story, and they’d make these brilliant insights while I did my best impression of a competent instructor. But I secretly hated assigning stories because so much literature, including Chekhov, has been wasted on me in the same way. When I was in high school I was supposed to read “The Lady with the Little Dog” but I don’t think I even finished it. I hadn’t yet become the person who could recognize its peculiar magic. At UVa I pled with my students that if they hated a story, to wait a decade and try it again. I hope I didn’t cause any lasting damage.

My favorite Chekhov story is “Heartache,” but I didn’t assign it to my students. They were much brighter than I was at their age but I didn’t want to chance their apathy, which would have been like witnessing my previous apathy, and I have enough embarrassing memories.

“Heartache” – I’m reading it again now. It builds a world with perfect economy. Its comedy is one with its sorrow. Iona Potapov and his loneliness, his horse, his imbecilic fares who biff him in the neck, a beating that he hears rather than feels. The final sentences are too beautiful for me to quote without first reciting the story entire. It’s almost too good for anyone.

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Joe B. Sills is a medical student at Tufts University. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and Zoetrope, in which he was the winner of the 2010 Short Fiction Contest. His story “The Duck” was the winner of Sycamore Review’s 2011 Wabash Prize for Fiction and appeared in Issue 23.2 Summer/Fall 2011.

ITEMS FOR EXCHANGE: Excerpt and Author Response

Sycamore — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:18:32 +0000

Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

Many readers of Sycamore Review are also writers. So we wanted to pose a few craft questions to contributor Naomi Williams that might illuminate her process and techniques when writing “Items for Exchange” which can be read in its entirety in Issue 23.2-Summer/Fall 2011.

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by Naomi J. Williams

PLAUSIBILITY

He always forgets how unpleasant the crossing from Calais is. He has never once made the trip that there wasn’t inclement weather, contrary winds and tides, unexplained delays, seasick fellow-travelers, surly packet captains, or dishonest boatmen waiting to extort the passengers ashore. This time it is all of the above, and by the time he reaches Dover, he has, of course, missed the stagecoach to London. He spends the night at the Ship Hotel, where he endures a hard, flea-ridden bed and a neighbor with a wracking cough.

It is not an auspicious start to the journey. But Paul Monneron is not given to superstition. The trials of the crossing and the Ship Hotel do not discourage him; they were what they were and are now past. The next day brings spring-like weather, a passable meal from the hotel kitchen, the stagecoach ready to leave on time, and an unsmiling but efficient coachmen who gives the correct change. The only other passenger inside the coach is a man Monneron recognizes from the packet; the poor man had been gray-skinned with nausea most of the way from France. “Well, I daresay we are being compensated for yesterday’s horrors,” the man says. Monneron nods politely although he doesn’t agree. For him, the universe is not given to compensating one for past miseries any more than it exacts payment for one’s successes. But he’s not immune to the pleasures of a smooth ride on a lovely day. The Kentish countryside, or such of it as he can see through the coach window, is charming. Once he points out the window at a large bird, white-breasted with black and white wings, perched atop a post. “Please—what do you call that?” he asks. “I do not know the word in English.”

The man leans over. “That would be an osprey, I think,” he says.

“Osprey.” It’s rare that he encounters a word in English he finds nicer than its counterpart in French. But osprey is undoubtedly lovelier than balbuzard.

The brief exchange leads inevitably to an inquiry about Monneron’s trip to London. Almost everything he says by way of reply is true: That he’s a naval engineer, that he’s leaving soon for the South Seas, that he’s going to London to make some purchases for the voyage, that he was tasked with the errand because he speaks English—“Not that my English is so good,” he adds, to which the man says, “Nonsense! You’ve hardly any accent at all.” But part of Monneron’s account is not true: That he’s in England at the behest of a Spanish merchant, Don Inigo Alvarez, with whom he’ll be sailing to the South Seas . Monneron will be sailing with neither Spaniards nor merchants. There is, in fact, no Don Inigo.

It’s a French naval expedition he represents, a voyage of exploration meant to compete with the accomplishments of the late Captain Cook, a voyage that is supposed to be secret until it departs. This excursion to London is not just a shopping trip for books and instruments. He’s supposed to find out the latest on antiscorbutics—scurvy-prevention measures—and on what items work best for trading with natives in the South Seas. For this he needs to find someone who sailed with Cook—someone both knowledgeable and willing to talk.

This is the first time he’s tried the Don Inigo story on anyone. He’s surprised by the fluency and ease with which he spouts the commingled lies and truths. He hadn’t liked the idea of traveling under false pretenses—had, in fact, challenged the need for secrecy at all, and when the Minister of the Navy dismissed his query with an impatient wave of his beruffled hand, had considered turning the mission down. Considered it, but not seriously or for very long. There was no question of jeopardizing his place on the expedition. He would have stood on his head before the court of Versailles if required. Still, when the Spanish merchant ruse was first concocted, he’d burst out laughing. “Don Inigo Alvarez?” he’d cried. “It’s like something out of a play.” But the Minister held firm: “People are inclined to believe what they hear,” he said. “Speak with assurance, and no one will question you.” So far, at least, he has proved right: Monneron’s companion nods, interested, impressed, and apparently convinced.

FIVE NIGHTS’ ADVANCE

The stagecoach arrives in London the following evening, and Monneron secures lodgings with a Mrs. Towe, recommended to him by his brother Louis, who often travels to London on business. The house smells unaccountably of stale cider, but it meets Monneron’s most basic requirements—clean bed, convenient location, quiet landlady—and a couple of unusual ones—first, the absence of other lodgers, and second, a windowless storage room to which only he and Mrs. Towe will have a key.

Before going to sleep, he calculates his expenses since landing in Dover: a night’s stay and meals at the Ship Hotel, then 16s 8d for the stagecoach, plus the fee for his baggage and a tip for the driver, not to mention a half-crown for every meal and one night’s lodging en route, and now, five nights’ paid in advance to Mrs. Towe. He’s spent almost all of the English currency the Minister gave him before he left. His first task the next day will be to go to the bank. So far he’s had few choices about his expenditures, but now that he’s in London, he’ll be faced with myriad decisions, most of which will involve money. He can’t spend too much. But it might be worse to spend too little. He doesn’t wish to squander the Ministry’s faith in him, of course. Above all, he doesn’t wish to disappoint M. de la Pérouse, the real Don Inigo.

Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse is the naval captain who will command the French expedition when it leaves this summer. Monneron served under him during the American War, and now La Pérouse has appointed Monneron chief engineer on this voyage. He also recommended him for this mission to London. It wouldn’t do for M. de la Pérouse to regret these choices. Staring up at Mrs. Towe’s water-stained ceiling, Monneron reflects that there’s still time to appoint another engineer—and plenty of ambitious young men of good family eager to take his place.

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 23.2-Summer/Fall 2011 today.

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Sycamore Review: “Items for Exchange” is part of a linked collection of stories based on the La Perouse expedition. I read one of the other stories in the collection, the amazing “Snow Men” (Issue #131 One Story), and was surprised by how different both the content and style were between these two stories that will eventually share space in the same book. Can you speak a little bit about the larger project of the collection and what you hope to accomplish by presenting this expedition from varied perspectives? Did you ever consider writing a novel from multiple perspectives or did you always know they’d be linked stories?

Naomi Williams: The basic idea for the book – a bunch of stories about the voyage, each told from a unique perspective –popped into my head almost as soon as I first learned about the expedition nearly ten years ago. I think the episodic nature of an ocean voyage, where you go from point A to B to C and so on, lends itself to this treatment. And from a craft perspective, the format’s allowed me to play with different tenses, structures, points of view, voices, ways of rendering dialogue, etc., without worrying too much about maintaining a consistent tone or air-tight throughline across the manuscript. But more than anything, I wanted complete freedom to reimagine the voyage, not as one story that a group of people might help tell, but as a series of individual stories that can stand alone even as they might overlap, illuminate, or contradict each other.

Some people have suggested I call this “a novel in stories.” That’s fine with me, but in my head it’s a series of stories—it’s more an apartment building full of different-sized units occupied by different people with different tastes than it is a big house with lots of rooms for one big family.

Early on I submitted a synopsis and a story from the collection for one of those one-on-one manuscript reviews at a writer’s conference, and the guy who read it said, “You know, you should just be a good host, pick a narrator, and write the story.” Maybe it was arrogance, but I just shrugged off his advice and kept on doing what I was doing. I have no objection to reading such books – or even to writing one in the future – but it’s never interested me to take that approach with this project. That sort of seafaring story has been done many times over.

Sycamore Review: I am having a difficult time thinking of a precedent for a collection depicting a historical event like the expedition through a variety of narrators and perspectives. Andrea Barrett and Jim Shepard come to mind as masters of retelling/revising historical events and who often write against the grain of our “official” histories. Do you have any models for your collection or books that have inspired this project?

Naomi Williams: I’m really flattered to have both Andrea Barrett and Jim Shepard mentioned in a discussion of my work! They have both inspired me tremendously, especially Jim Shepard, with whom I’ve done a writing workshop. But I didn’t know their work till after I’d begun this project. When I started, I hadn’t read much literary historical fiction, nor was I all that familiar with the concept of linked short stories. I think Dubliners was the only such collection I’d read before.

When I try to think of what might have influenced the genesis of this project, I end up with a motley list that betrays my weird, anachronistic upbringing as a bookish, classical-music-loving, half-Japanese movie buff in an evangelical Christian household. I’ve always loved travel stories—from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to Robinson Crusoe to the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian. I’m also interested in texts that offer multiple takes on a set of events, like the four gospels in the New Testament or Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Then there are revisions of historical events or existing texts—Tale of Two Cities, West Side Story, Anita Diamant’s Red Tent. And art that strings together related but independent pieces, like Canterbury Tales, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, or Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. I think my project must somehow have emerged out of that odd stew.

Sycamore Review: Quick follow up: “Items for Exchange” is at heart a bildungsroman about the young, naïve protagonist, Moneron, desperate to accomplish his mission and be in good standing with company before the expedition begins. But the details and the world built around them was what really hooked me as a reader from the first paragraph. Historical fiction can be difficult in short stories because the writer must build the world of the story while also telling a story. How much primary and secondary research did you do to get all the details of 18^th Century London right? The townhouses, streets, carriages, and nautical materials were pitch perfect—not to mention that Alaskan myths and geographical details of Lituya Bay in “Snow Men.” How do you know when enough is enough and you need to stop researching and start to write?

Naomi Williams: It took me two years to write this story, and much of that time was spent researching: reading everything I could find about the artist John Webber; staring at his paintings online; reading about Joseph Banks; skimming through some of the thousands of letters he wrote; and poring over books and websites about 18^th-century English fashion and currency and transportation. One of the most helpful texts I read was the journal of German writer Sophie von La Roche, who visited London in 1786, the year after Monneron did. I got some wonderful details from her about when and what people ate, what the weather was like, how people traveled, etc.

As for knowing when enough is enough: I don’t. I love doing research and sometimes joke that the collection is just an excuse to keep going to the library. I actually asked Jim Shepard this exact question five years ago at the Tin House Writers Workshop, and he said that at some point you just need to put on your floatie and jump in the deep end. I loved that answer, and I’ve always remembered it. Sometimes when I know I’m just avoiding the hard work of writing by doing yet another Google search on South Seas canoes or 18^th-century coinage, I remember that and think, “Okay, Naomi, it’s time to jump in the pool.”

Sycamore Review: The subject headings that begin each scene are unique formatting and style decision for this story. What do you hope the illuminate for the reader, or are they a formal decision that recreates serialized stories of this era? Were they a part of the first draft of the story or were they added later?

Naomi Williams: I had to go back through my files to answer this question. There are more than 20 versions of this story, in various stages of completion, dating back to February 2009. The story began as a first-person account with no section breaks, then morphed into a series of diary entries, then into the current third-person, present-tense story with the subject headings. The headings appear in the original third-person version, so there was something about switching the point of view that seems to have inspired this format.

I do know that at this point in the drafting of the story, I’d come to understand that “items for exchange” didn’t refer just to the objects Monneron was collecting to trade with South Seas islanders, but to a series of exchanges that he himself was involved with – some monetary, some intellectual, some more psychological or moral. Each header represents something that can be, or is, exchanged in that scene.

Sycamore Review: If a young writer were to tell you they had a great idea for a linked collection of short stories and she was about to draft out the first paragraph, what advice would you give her? And no,“Don’t bother” is not an acceptable answer!

Naomi Williams: Yeah, don’t you hate those author interviews where someone’s asked for advice about writing, and the answer is something like “Take up welding” or some other form of “Don’t do it”? I’ve always thought there was something disingenuous and weirdly elitist about such responses. Anyway, I don’t know that I’m in any position to be giving other writers advice – I’m still very much in advice-receiving mode. But I’d always encourage a writer with an idea to pursue it. If an idea for linked short stories is really more conducive to treatment as a straight-up novel, I think the process of writing reveals that. I will say, however, that if I’d known at the outset how long it would take to complete a series of stories in which every piece takes place in a different part of the world and requires entirely new research, I might have tackled something else for my first book. But it’s been seven years, and I’m still fascinated by the La Pérouse story. My husband has occasionally said, “Can’t you just write one of those autobiographical novels like everyone else?” Maybe for the second book.

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Naomi J. Williams’s story “Items for Exchange” is part of a collection of linked stories about the La Pérouse expedition. Other stories from the collection have appeared in Ninth Letter, One Story, A Public Space, and American Short Fiction. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and an MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis, she lives and works in northern California.

Her story “Items for Exchange” was the second runner up in Sycamore Review’s 2011 Wabash Prize for Fiction and was featured in Issue 23.2 Summer/Fall 2011.

YOU ARE THE GREATEST LAKE: An excerpt and author response

Sycamore — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:57:08 +0000

Many readers of Sycamore Review are also writers. So we wanted to pose a few craft questions to contributor Greg Schutz that might illuminate his process and techniques when writing his story “You are the Greatest Lake” which can be read in its entirety in Issue 23.1-Winter/Spring 2011.

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BY GREG SCHUTZ

The next day is Sunday, the end of our long weekend on the shore, and Dot wants to fish. After breakfast, John finds a small rod for her and ties a golden hook to the end of the line. The knot he uses is a complicated, twisting thing, his fingers moving faster than my eyes can follow. He and Dot walk the edge of the yard, prying up rocks and rotten logs to gather angleworms and grubs. I watch from the kitchen window. Dot is fearless, plunging wrist-deep into the dirt.

Today, John heads out into the bay until he disappears from sight. I scan the horizon for him, but there is only the endless rolling of the waves. Dot is unconcerned. Fishing rod in hand, she walks the shore, catching tiny fish. The end of our visit has filled my head with muddy desperation, and so I steel myself and approach cautiously, as I might a wild animal.

Dot, however, is aglow with her success.

She shows me a fish as round and flat as a little tea saucer. “This one’s called a bluegill.” This may be the first time she has ever spoken to me unbidden, offering the words like a gift.

“Bluegill,” I say.

I learn that another fish, with the same round shape but prettier, speckled colors, is called a pumpkinseed. Dot pops the golden hook free from the fish’s mouth and lowers the fish gently into the water. It darts away, pauses for a moment as if to catch its breath, and then flits farther into the green reflections of the trees where it cannot be seen.

“Pumpkinseed,” I say, and Dot nods, very serious.

I follow her down the shore, my head empty as a sleepwalker’s. I move like Dot, with fluid gliding steps so as not to frighten the fish, and keep my careful distance so as not to frighten her. The clouds feather open; a white sun appears. Dot’s hair lights like a lamp. Frowning, she turns to the sky. Looking at her, I see John, chest-deep in the bay, squinting as the light burns his shadow onto the water. UV rays, he tells me, are the problem. They drive the bass out of the shallows and into the depths. Dot rubs the back of her neck. In her mind, I imagine, she follows the fish, sinking down and down. She is the Greatest Lake. Sweat glistens on her upper lip.

“I’m thirsty. Are you thirsty?” I am thinking of the lemonade in the refrigerator.

Dot blinks up at me, reminded of my presence. I might as well be the sun, spilling my dangerous heat.

“No,” she says.

I smile at her. I do not want to press my luck. This has been a good morning, something to build upon. By the time I’ve reached the top of the yard, the clouds have knit together again.

For an hour, I try to work in the mudroom, but how can I concentrate on the boilerplate language of quitclaim deeds? The words drift away from me. “Pumpkinseed,” I say, picturing Dot’s face. I slide my papers back into the accordion file and cap my pen. I sit in the armchair by the window. Down below, Dot’s toes are in the lake. “Pumpkinseed, I love you.”

I am sitting there still, drowsy and warm and contemplating lunch, when Dot screams.

Something has happened. Her small rod bows sharply to the water. Out beyond the reflected pines, a small bright patch of the bay turns to froth. A heavy brown fish throws itself clear of the water, crashes down, throws itself tumbling into the air again: one of John’s bass. The fish writhes across the surface. Dot, at the other end of the invisible line, is hooked to it.

I have never heard Dot scream before. There’s no ragged tremble of adult emotion, only a high, pure tone that reaches through windows and walls to pluck me from my chair and carry me out the door and down the lawn without my feet ever touching the ground. Still, it takes me a very long time to arrive. “I’m here,” I keep calling, “I’m here,” but this is a lie. By the time I reach her, it is over: the bass has torn the fishing rod from Dot’s hands. She stands open-palmed and shaking.

“I was pulling in a little fish,” she says. “And then this bass came up and—he took it.”

Her face bunches and purples. She bursts into tears.

John, I’m sure, good and patient as he is, a carpenter who builds things piece by piece until at last they stand complete, would know the right thing to say now. But I am not John. The bay is empty, and I am dry-mouthed with love. So I leave my sandals on the shore. The water is cold; my skin prickles. The pebbles are smooth beneath my feet, the broken shells sharp as teeth. My hands trail in the water. My skirt rises around my waist.

I find Dot’s rod and draw it, dripping, from the bay. The bass is gone. At the end of the line there is only a tiny fish, its fins stripped and its body crushed, the golden hook fixed to its cheek like a pin.

“Pumpkinseed,” I say.

The red gills flex. I feel the little muscles pulling against my palm. The mouth opens and closes as if trying to speak.

“Let it go.” Dot’s voice is small. “Let it swim away.”

“Dot,” I say, “I can’t.”

I mean that it is too late now; the damage is done. I cannot stitch torn fins, affix lost scales. When I pop the golden hook free, it leaves a ragged pinhole I cannot close.

“No,” Dot says as if I’ve misunderstood her. “It has to swim away now.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Her eyes wash over me, the dying fish in my hand. She pins elbows to ribs, fists to thighs, as if she were the one being squeezed.

“I’m sorry.” Spoken at last, the words now bubble up unbidden. I am a primed pump, spilling stale, wet, mineral-scented regrets. “I’m sorry, Dot, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Her reflection wavers in the water a moment.

“Huh,” she says.

She boils up to the house.

The yard is empty; Dot is gone. The windows of the cottage are filled with the bay. I clutch the tiny body because I cannot bear to watch it float away from me. Against my palm the little muscles pull, and pull, and pull, and stop.

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 23.1-Winter/Spring 2011 today.

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Sycamore Review: The narrator of “You are the Greatest Lake” is never named. Was this a conscious decision on your part or did you write the story and then realize you never named her? One of the themes running through the story is the inability of the narrator to find the “right” words to say to Dot, the daughter of her boyfriend, that will make amends for stealing her father from her mother. While drafting the story, did you think that keeping the narrator nameless would reinforce that theme? Did you ever try on any names or think it was unnatural to not name her?

Greg Shutz: I’m a fan of letting the subconscious do the heavy lifting. I did, in fact, brainstorm possible names for the narrator of “You Are the Greatest Lake,” but I never got as far as trying to work any of those names into the story. None of them felt right, though I couldn’t say why not. In the end, what felt right was a nameless narrator, so I stuck with that.

In retrospect, I like the explanation you’ve offered. To name something (like the fish in the story: “bluegill,” “pumpkinseed”) is empowering, and the narrator often feels powerless to connect with Dot in a significant way—not that this stops her from trying. Her namelessness may also attach to the thread of superhero imagery that enters the story through Dot’s make-believe game and provides the story’s title. Becoming a superhero often means sloughing off a civilian identity, and in this sense, the narrator wants to be more than just [insert name] for Dot, bound by all that person’s shortcomings, her past sins.

But I’m glad I didn’t arrive at these answers while I was writing the story. Rationalizations can usually be hashed out after the fact, as they have been here. I’d rather not know too much about why I’m writing what I’m writing while I’m writing it, for fear this knowledge will turn the story schematic, like an equation to be balanced. Even now, for me, the surest answer to this question remains my original gut-level conviction that, while the narrator’s name isn’t significant, her namelessness itself might be.

Sycamore Review: I mentioned in the above “Why We Chose It” post that the story has a certain subtle power that is magnetic for the reader thanks to the careful subtext in dialogue and landscape. How did the landscape and place of northern Michigan contribute to the story? Could this story be written in any other setting? Did you have any “guides” for this story–writers that you think influenced this particular story?

Greg Schutz: I wrote “You Are the Greatest Lake” while on a winter fellowship in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod, and the loneliness of that place—sand dunes and snow, compass grass and pitch pines—probably shaped the story just as much as Michigan, where I currently live, or Wisconsin, where I was born. The immensity of Lake Huron in the story feels to me, upon rereading, very much like my memory of the Atlantic that winter.

Still, I can’t imagine the story being set anywhere else. Maybe this is because the title came first: it was given to me as a gift, or a prompt, by my girlfriend Catherine. Working my way into the story from that title, I wrote the opening sentence—“We are at the tip of the thumb of Michigan”—even before I knew to whom we referred.

Meanwhile, some of my favorite fiction locates an almost supernatural charge in the natural world. Consider Breece Pancake in stories like “Trilobites” and “Hollow,” or Joy Williams in so much of her work, including “Shorelines”: “It was a place for children and we were using it up. The sharks would come up the inlet in the morning rains and they’d roll so it would seem the water was boiling. Our breath was wonderful.” The ecstatic interweaving of human and inhuman—Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping casts a very long shadow here, as does Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. Considering my narrator’s own brush with nature—that dying fish in her hand, pressing her awkwardly into action—I’d like to think that “You Are the Greatest Lake” has been enriched by my love of these works.

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Greg Schutz holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and was recently a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He teaches English at Washtenaw Community College and Concordia University in Ann Arbor, MI. His stories have appeared in Sycamore Review, Ploughshares, and Juked. His story You are the Greatest Lake appeared in Issue 23.1 Winter/Spring 2011.

The Audio Files: An Interview with Julia Story and Jessica Anthony

Sycamore — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:00:24 +0000

Novelist Jessica Anthony, author of The Convalescent, and poet Julia Story, author of Post Moxie, are two up-and-coming writers who have both recently published their first books. They sat down with Purdue University’s Visiting Writers Series Coordinator Kristin Griffin and Assistant Director of Creative Writing Jessica Farquhar before a live audience in October to discuss their craft and their first-time experiences with the publishing process. You can click on the following links to listen to audio clips from the conversation. A complete transcript follows.

Julia Story earned graduate degrees in creative writing from the University of New Hampshire and Indiana University and has worked as a high school teacher, short order cook, secretary, store clerk, waitress, and professor. Her poetry was nominated for Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Octopus, the Iowa Review and other magazines. Her debut collection of poetry, Post Moxie, was published by Sarabande in May. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Jessica Anthony was born in upstate New York. Her debut novel The Convalescent has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was a Barnes & Noble Discovered New Great Writers pick for the fall 2009. Her fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices, Best American Non-Required Reading, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Clip 1: Julia Story on Personal Myth

Clip 2: Julia Story on Organizing a Book & Internal Narrative

Clip 3: Julia Story on The Post-MFA Life

Clip 4: Julia Story and Jessica Anthony on Writer’s Block

Clip 5: Jessica Anthony on Returning to Voice

Clip 6: Jessica Anthony on The 2nd Book

Clip 7: Jessica Anthony on Becoming a Writer:You Can Do that for Credit?

Jessica Farquhar: One overlap that we’ve picked up on in both of your works is mythologies. I’m hoping each of you can both briefly talk about your interest in mythology and how it informed your writing.

Julia Story: Well, I think that when I wrote the book and in all of the poetry I write, something that always is sort of in the back of my mind is Carl Jung’s psychology. He had this idea. The way he got into psychology was that he felt like he didn’t know what his own myth was and this occurred after he began studying mythology. And so most of his life’s work was about trying to discover what his personal myth was. I really think it’s kind of morbid. I mean, it’s all really ambitious, but I think that’s something that’s at the back of my head when I’m writing. It’s sort of the way of not creating a myth but uncovering a myth, because I believe we’re all kind of powered by myth, because we’re all powered by archetypes. I read and studied a lot of mythology. It’s very detailed. Fairy tales and I guess just “the common stories”—I feel like they’re underneath all literature and all human stories that interest me.

Kristin Griffin: Maybe you could summarize for people who haven’t read the book yet the mythology that’s so huge for you with the Hungarian myth.

Jessica Anthony: Sure, the novel is called The Convalescent. Half of it takes place in modern-day Virginia with a Hungarian midget selling meat at a bus, and the other half takes place in an invented 9th and 10th century Hungarian society. So, it really vacillates back and forth between present and the past in this way.

Actually, when I first started writing the novel, I had no idea that I was interested in myths at all. It sort of came about because I spent time teaching English in Eastern Europe, and I met this Hungarian guy who took me around Budapest and we were talking about the history of the Hungarians. And he said, “Y’know, the Hungarians have no history.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, so much of the story of where the Hungarians come from comes, of course, from the oral tradition and mythmaking and storytelling.” That stuck with me for a couple of years, and when I was living in Virginia, at the George Mason University MFA program, I was walking through a mall and I walked by a McDonald’s, and I saw on the wall this photograph of a bus that said “Meat Bus” on it, and for some reason, it’s one of those random moments where you see that trigger—that little pickle in the back of your neck—and you want to write about it. I went back to my apartment and I started writing, and I was thinking about something Alan Cheuse, who was one of my professors, once said to me: “You have to think about where your characters are coming from, you have to think about where their parents are coming from, and so forth.” But this took me back to the 11th century in Hungary, and in the process of that discovery—because all of us who write fiction know that the process of writing a story is really discovering who our characters are as we go—I learned that there was this wonderful text called the Gesta Hungarorum, which is this actual 12th century Hungarian myth. I just became fascinated with it, and that’s where the book took off from. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I don’t know if I’m going to do any more myths. I hope so; I found it really interesting.

Kristin Griffin: We are both wondering, at what point you realized you were working on this big project: for you, Julia, when you knew you were writing a book-length poem, and for you, Jessica, when you knew you had a novel?

Julia Story: It certainly did not happen when I first started writing. It really started more of a journal exercise. I was going through a really a hard time. I was living in Bloomington, Indiana. Gradually, a lot of people I cared about left one by one until I felt like I was completely alone in my house in the middle of Bloomington. Which wasn’t true, I just felt really isolated. So, writing the poems just felt like journal entries to me at first. Just ways of getting stuff out. They kind of became my friends in a way because I felt like I didn’t have any friends anymore. So I was creating these little friends to hang out with. I would write every day. I’d get home from work—I have an office job at Indiana University—and I’d go to my computer, and just create new friends. That’s what it felt like. It was really amazing. I never in a million years would’ve thought that it was going to turn into something else. Then one day, I finally showed them to someone, and they’re like, “This is your next book.” Actually, I already have a book manuscript that I sent out for 5 or 6 years. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that one. So I guess after talking to someone about it, it seemed like, “Oh, maybe this is interesting to other people besides me.” It didn’t feel like it was because it was so internal, so insular. It’s really an internal landscape. I didn’t think it would be interesting to people. But, I guess maybe it is. So, yeah, that’s how it happened for me.

Jessica Anthony: I have three novels that I started writing, and I reached that page 80 or 90, where they just withered in my fingertips. They died on me. It’s hard to have that feeling. When you invest yourself in a story for so long and you really start to actualize the characters, and they’re just gone for some reason. And for this book, it was interesting that it started when I was thinking about Susan Shreve. In one of her classes, I was doing this little voice exercise that I was interested in, and it was a messy amalgam of The Stranger and Notes from Underground, so like Dostoevsky and Camus. And I don’t know, there was something about the anti-urgency and the tension that I was curious about it. It interested me. And that, above all, is what kept me going. I had other moments where I felt like the book wasn’t going to succeed, but then I’d return to the voice and I’d again become interested in the characters and it just sort’ve propelled me forward. It was very much like an ocean wave where you’ve got to force yourself to return even when it’s the last thing you want to do. I mean, it took me four years to write. I hope that’s natural. I think it’s natural.

Jessica Farquhar: Our next question is about the different narrative threads that you have in your books. For Julia, I’m especially curious about how your book length poem tells a story and at the same time, seems to resist narrative?

Julia Story: One thing that’s interesting about Post Moxie is that I did write it relatively quickly. It took two years. But that’s pretty fast, I think, to write a book-length anything. And then it was published much more quickly than I thought it would be. Usually, it takes a really long time to get your first book published—not for everybody. But it was picked up pretty fast. In a way, I feel like I’m still sort of learning what it is all about. And I feel like I’m still kind of writing it in some way…So, it’s a really good question. It’s something I’m still thinking about, too.

I think there’s definitely a narrative. The poems, as they appear in the book, are in the order I wrote them. There’s actually no variation in that at all. The first one in the book is the first one I wrote, the last one is the last one I wrote. I wasn’t planning on it for turning out that way. I can’t imagine ordering another book that way. It seemed to work out that way for me. It’s almost an autobiography of this period in my life, but what was going on inside, just super internal. Things were happening externally at the time, because you have to go to work and make money and things like that. But to me, it’s a portrait of this narrative of really internal stuff happening. But, that being said, I do think that it’s about, on some level, the impossibility of being present—completely present—in a moment. It’s impossible, I guess until you achieve enlightenment. The book, in a lot of ways, is about my struggle to stay present just for a second. And I think a lot of the leaps happen because it’s not possible to do that.

Kristin Griffin: For you, Jessica, I’m so interested about the dual narratives you have in The Convalescent. I was interested in how you came up with the structure for that, and how you worked through it?

Jessica Anthony: I actually wrote them completely separately at first. I didn’t expect them to have any kind of nuance or connection to each other. And I was absolutely delighted when I realized there were all these subconscious connections that I had totally unintentionally written. Pieces just started to snap into place. So, luck?

A fancier answer is to say when I sat down to structure this thing, I was thinking a lot about Middlesex, which is one of my favorite novels. I just really admired how Eugenides was able to shift back and forth between the past and present so effortlessly, and spend such little time in the present and have that past story feed the present moment. That was something I was curious about structurally.

Kristin Griffin: I was really interested, for both of you, what was the greatest pleasure of these projects?

Julia Story: Writing can be really painful, right? I guess what I’ve mentioned about creating these little friends…it sounds incredibly cheesy, but it was such a comfort for me to have poetry in that way. It was cool because, until I wrote this, I guess I would’ve considered the work of other poets to be really friendly and comforting to me, but the fact that I was able to create my own body of work to exist, to help me out—not to say anything negative about MFA programs, but coming out of a program, you’re all going to be out there, trying to get published, and there’s like two jobs for creative writing, so there’s a little bit of competition—and it was really so lovely to write this without thinking about that at all. Not thinking where am I going to send this? Because I used to do that sometimes—I wonder if this would be good for this magazine?—when I’m not even done with the poem yet. It was just really wonderful to get away from that. I don’t know if I’ll ever be there again because I’m not that interested in writing to publish anymore. It might continue to happen, but it was really nice to detach from that.

Jessica Anthony: I had a very similar experience, actually: leaving the MFA, starting to write on your own for the first time, and being able to experience a kind of immersion in your work that is not really always possible in the MFA. I mean, you’re busy in the MFA. You’re doing a lot: you’re going to classes, you’re reading a lot, you’re thinking a lot about your craft, and then you’re alone with your work. And there’s something really lovely about that. My favorite moment of the book was when I was at the Millay Colony. (These residencies are fabulous. You disappear for 3 or 4 weeks and just write.) When I discovered the ending of the story, that was when I knew that I had a direction and there was an end in sight. The ending was actually written. I wrote the first half, then I wrote the end, and then it took me two years to fill in the rest.

Jessica Farquhar: So you mentioned being comforted by other writers; could you tell us who? What books or authors?

Julia Story: I’ve always really had an affinity for Charles Simic, who was my teacher at University of New Hampshire. In a lot of ways this book is homage to him. The World Doesn’t End has really influenced me a lot. I love him. I love everything he’s ever written. And he’s incredibly comforting. I like a lot of Eastern European writers.

Kristin Griffin: For both of you, what is your writing process like?

Julia Story: I don’t know if this is true of all poets, but I work pretty sporadically. When I was working on this book, it was definitely this daily task that I did. It was like a meditation. I guess my usual practice of writing: when it’s time, I’ll write a lot. I’ll write a couple poems a day. Then I’ll usually blurt out one draft, then I’ll go back to it and do some kind of revision an hour or two later. I’m actually going to a writer’s conference in March. I’m nervous. I think it’s a little different writing fiction just because it’s so much bigger and longer. I’m excited, but I’m mostly nervous about these huge chunks of time for writing, because I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. I’m actually in the process of finishing my next manuscript now, and that’s the goal, to finish it. But what if I don’t want to write while I’m there? I definitely go through periods where I’m kind of fallow and I need to refill the well, which for me usually means meditation. I guess “refill the well” isn’t a good analogy, because a lot of times it’s not about putting more stuff in. It’s about emptying out. So it’s sporadic.

Jessica Anthony: I try to write every day if I can. Ideally, I’m working about 4 hours a day, but you know, life gets in the way, it’s hard to do that sometimes. It took me a while to train myself to do it, to force myself to sit down and actually type and be bad—to write really bad sentences and feel okay about it, then go to sleep and get up the next morning and face it again. It takes a while to give yourself the space, free yourself from the guilt of actually having to churn out bad stuff before you can get to the good stuff, but I think it’s absolutely necessary. I don’t know a single writer, a fiction writer, who doesn’t go through that process of writing pages that are never going to make it. I mean, I’ve got about 200 pages of that book that are edited out. I think it’s par for the course, at least it is for me.

Kristin Griffin: What do you do when you’re stuck?

Julia Story: I guess when I feel stuck, to me it’s just a message that I’m not supposed to be writing right then. I’m supposed to be doing something else. I don’t put pressure on myself anymore—kind of trying to let go of my identity as a writer, I guess. I want to be a writer, but I don’t want that to be the thing that defines me. The more I let go of that, the less pressure there is to write. Then I actually write more. So, it’s kind of cool.

Jessica Anthony: I force myself to stay in the chair when I’m stuck. It’s the only way to get through it for me. I just have to keep going. I find in the typing, in the moving of the fingers, you find your way, dig your way out of it, but it takes work.

Jessica Farquhar: How do you hope that your readers will engage with your books? In terms of Julia’s book, it’s more internal. So what do you expect your readers to be able to get from that?

Julia Story: Well, I had an interesting experience yesterday. I spent the day in Chicago which is why my voice is fading from talking all day. [laughs] One of my former classmates at I.U. teaches at Triton College, which is a two-year college in northwest Chicago, and they read this book this term and were asking questions about it. It was really interesting to see what they were getting from it. They were asking really specific questions like, “What does this line mean?” which was really difficult to answer. So I, of course, asked them, “What do you think it means?” I was very moved, actually, at how they responded to it. I don’t know if it’s the way I would have wanted or intended someone to respond to it, but one thing I’m picking up on the feedback from it is the fragmentation of it. The partial narrative really speaks to people in a way, which is, kind of surprising to me, but it makes me really happy because I feel like that’s what we’re doing right now. That’s what life is: It’s not some perfect trajectory, it’s just strange juxtapositions and lots of movement and it’s actually kind of random, and sometimes there’s not a lot of meaning, and that’s okay. It seems to be, I don’t know, comforting to me. To me that’s not a scary notion. I like that it’s comforting to other people too, and not something to be avoided.

Kristin Griffin: And maybe for you, Jessica, what it was like to let your baby go?

Jessica Anthony: It’s really difficult! It’s hard, you know? You spend so much time in this tiny little room for four years with this crazy little Hungarian, you know? [laughs] And then suddenly people know about him, and they’re interested, and they want to ask you questions about him. It’s strange at first. I guess I would want a reader to be entertained, to be immersed, ultimately, to care about the story.

Kristin Griffin: From the time you finished the manuscript to when you actually held the printed book in your hand, what was that journey like for each of you?

Julia Story: My first book manuscript I finished in 2003, and I’ve been sending it out. It was finalist, semi-finalist, and nothing was happening because, you know, to get a book of poetry published you generally have to win a contest. With this, I thought, I’m just going to send it out, see what happens. Then I got a phone call two months later, and I wasn’t ready at all. It was really hard and sad. It was just so shocking. It wasn’t what I’d planned at all. I mean, I’m just so happy with it, I love it, but when I first took it out of the box, it just felt really surreal. It’s still that way a little bit.

Jessica Anthony: So McSweeney’s actually publishes their books quite quickly after you go through a really grueling editorial process. It took about a year to edit the book with Eli Horowitz and we went back and forth quite a bit. There’s actually a funny story. He kept asking me to rewrite this one scene. I gave him six versions of the same scene until finally I thought, the original scene is what’s going to work, so I sent him my seventh version and said, “This is it, this is what’s going to work,” and it was the exact same original scene, and he called me and said, “Jess, you nailed it!” [laughter] After that, it was only four months from the time I turned over the manuscript, which is quite unusual, I think. Most houses take over a year.

Jessica Farquhar: So can you guys talk about sort of what comes next, now that you have your first book out there in the world?

Julia Story: Well, right now I feel really focused on Post Moxie and promoting it. I am working on another manuscript. I’m going to Vermont Studio Center which is in Johnson, Vermont, in March, which is the most miserable time of year to be in Vermont. [laughs] I’m hoping that I’ll finish my next manuscript then. Sarabande will read it. I don’t know if they’ll be interested or not, but if not, then I’ll start the contest process again, which is fine. I mean, I feel okay about that.

Jessica Anthony: I’m just starting another novel.

Kristin Griffin: Is it different, having one behind you? How has that impacted how you’re approach to this new novel?

Jessica Anthony: It’s a challenge, I have to say. People have all these stories about the second book, right? How the sophomore effort is a great big failure. It’s like this is a common story. I don’t know if I believe that to be true, but you definitely have an awareness that a piece of you is out there, so when you sit down to write, you’re kind of rubbing elbows with it a little bit as you’re working, and that can be a discomfiting sometimes. I think it takes a little bit of extra effort to really divorce yourself from the history and create something that feels completely fresh and new, and will feel fresh to the reader. That’s been a bit of a challenge for me.

Kristin Griffin: For a lot of us out in the audience who are working on what we’re hoping will be our own debuts: If you could go back and give yourself some advice before this all got going for you, what would you tell yourself?

Jessica Anthony: I guess I would probably say, make sure you’re writing the material that you would most want to read. If you were to go to a bookstore and pick out a book, it would be your book.

Julia Story: Yeah, it would be sort of similar for me. Just to sort of trust myself. I think it may be just a result of getting older. I’m not trusting that I’m going to write something everybody likes, or something that’s good, but that I’m going to write something that’s honest, and it’s me. What else could I write? [laughs] I’m not pretending to be somebody else, and I’m not interested in writing to a certain genre, or to appeal to a certain audience, and I don’t actually think that was always the case. When I was a younger writer, I was a lot more self-conscious, which I think all students of creative writing are—you imitate. It’s a way to learn. I may be imitating unconsciously now, but I just trust that what I’m doing is what I should be doing.

Kristin Griffin: Can you talk about the move from being an MFA—from studying writing in a more formal environment—to moving out on your own? What observations do you have? What’s out there? What’s new and exciting?

Julia Story: I think at first, I really missed some parts of the MFA program. My whole life was about poetry! And I was around poets and fiction writers all the time like MFA students are here, probably. You guys are in classes together all the time. Everything I did was about poetry. I was teaching, I was talking about it, I was writing about it. I guess there was a slight depression when I finished, and I had a hard time finding work. I still do, especially with the economy and everything, but it was hard to go from this insular, protective world of the poet to sending out all these applications to be a secretary, just do something to earn money and try to keep writing. So that part was sort of hard. I think that the poetry community that I’m in now where I live in Boston, I really appreciate because not everybody I know there went to an MFA program. It’s a really diverse group of poets. I’m friends with people from a lot of different poetry communities, and that’s cool. It’s not all academic which I find a little refreshing. That’s a positive thing.

Jessica Anthony: Yeah, I mean it’s a funny thing to shift out. You have this amazing community at hand every day and then suddenly you don’t. You kind of have to learn how to cope with the extraordinary loneliness. I did that by adjunct teaching. I was just teaching part time in Portland, Maine, and it was actually a nice situation for me because I didn’t have any other duties as a professor. I really just taught my classes and had my conferences, and that time was enough for me. Make sure that you give yourself time. It’s scary. Money, the financial piece of it, can be really impossible, but I guess you have to start learning how to think creatively about how to make money and make time.

Audience: I really enjoyed your book. I actually read it cover to cover in Steak n’ Shake.

Julia Story: Thank you! We don’t have Steak n’ Shake in Boston.

Audience: I really enjoyed it and I want to formulate some questions based on what I struggle with. I’ve been out of the MFA for about three and a half years and had one book manuscript, and the more I looked at it, the more I started cannibalizing it for other things, and now I just have sort of a hot mess. You mentioned that you have another book manuscript that you’ve been shopping around. Do you go back to it, or do you just kind of detach from it and let it go at some point?

Julia Story: Yeah, I don’t feel interested in that manuscript anymore. I don’t know why. I love the poems I wrote at the University of New Hampshire. I started that program in 1997 and that was a long time ago, so I don’t really have a connection to them anymore. I think a lot of the poems in there are really good. I think that it maybe it could get picked up at some point, so I’m not ruling out going back to it at some point, but right now I don’t feel super invested in it. That’s not to say though, that will happen for you.

Audience: I read in another interview that you said that the poems in Post Moxie are pretty much how they came out, both in the order and how they were written in not having a ton of revision, and I was wondering how that has affected your revision process. I mean, with your manuscript now, it sounds like maybe it was a special project, which is something different for you. How has that changed how you approach the revision process?

Julia Story: I did revise a lot before. I was in two creative writing programs and was constantly in workshops, and that’s just what you did. I feel sort of guilty telling people that I didn’t revise these poems because I’m not practicing what I preach as a teacher. Part of why I think it was difficult for me to revise when I was writing this was that there were prose blocks, and I had this set up on the computer, which I hadn’t done before, and basically I felt like I was just sort of pouring the words into the boxes. It just was so organic, for lack of a better word, that it felt like I had no business changing them once they were out. It just felt like a little tarot card, a little printout of what was going on with me when I wrote it and I couldn’t go back and change it because it was so present and immediate. I’m re-teaching myself to write in lines again because I wrote prose blocks for two and a half years and I don’t know how to write a line anymore. [laughs] It’s hard! So now I’m constantly revising, but it’s mostly the line breaks. I have to read it out loud to get a sense of the line. I’m reading and reading and reading out loud; that’s how I revise.
Audience: Did you discard any?

Julia Story: I only discarded one, and I don’t even remember why I got rid of it. I just didn’t like it.

Audience: I was interested in how you felt about [Dan Chiasson’s] introduction to your book because sometimes they can be sort of awkward and reaching, and I thought this was an unusual introduction.

Julia Story: That was on the little postcard announcing the book too, which my grandma got. That word is actually in the book so I guess Grandma’s going have to see it sooner or later. It’s really hard to answer. Dan helped me so much. He actually helped me edit because he lives in Massachusetts. So we met and he had amazing suggestions for edits. It’s funny because a review that was written recently was really harsh about that, and I felt really bad about him seeing that and thinking I had some say in that. The tone is negative toward prose poetry, I think, in the intro. I did talk to Sarabande about that and they said, Well, Dan’s sort of a negative guy. That’s not to say he’s not an amazing poet; he is, and he’s a really great person. It was a little hard to read the stuff about prose poetry because he was sort of negative about it, and I write prose poetry [laughs] and he was using it as a way to say something good about my work. The tone about prose poetry was hard because I really admire a lot of it. Some of it is not good. I can’t say all prose poetry is amazing, but it’s a form I found so interesting. The first time I read this, I thought, Oh, he doesn’t find this interesting, which is strange, so it was hard at first, but he’s the judge, he chose the book. There is a little part of him in this in the intro, and that’s okay with me.

Audience: Can you talk about the things you discovered about prose poetry while writing this book? Can you talk a little bit more about the riches, if you will, in a prose poem?

Julia Story: I guess I just like it for a narrative, and I think, for these poems, the juxtapositions and the leaps from sentence to sentence can be so strange that I think the form sort of helps to glue it together a little bit. I don’t know if that’s people’s experience in reading it, but I do like that with a lot of prose poems, the block, the way it just looks sort of like a window, or, I don’t know, just sort of a cube of language. There’s something about it, distilling a narrative into something that small. Not all prose poems are small, so I feel like I’m not talking about this very eloquently. But I guess I’m just talking in terms of the small prose blocks that I used. They just really distill the narrative down to its essence. There’s nothing extraneous. I guess there’s something messier to me about regular poetic lines.

Audience: You talk about spotting a poster in McDonald’s. Can you talk about the origin of your protaganist?

Jessica Anthony: He actually started out as Adrian Brody. He got shorter as I wrote. What I said before about discovery as you’re writing is, I think, relevant to answering this question. When you begin with voice, the constant shaping of character is your writing. As things happen to his character, and you begin to realize what he’s capable and not capable of, he begins to take a stronger, clearer form in your mind. Did I sit down to write this character? Did I say, oh, I want to write about this near midget? No. I think the near midget was a consequence of the voice choice. This incredibly sarcastic, anti-urgent voice that was resisting, that for some reason became the whole package for me. I started to be able to visualize what he looked and smelled like, and he just became this fetid little creature, and that started to play a whole role in the historical piece, as well. For those of you who haven’t read the story, it’s like this invented tribe, the losers of the losers of early medieval time, and he became sort of the modern manifestation of his wayward, lost people.

Audience: Was it frustrating going back and changing the character, what you already wrote about him?

Jessica Anthony: Not so much because the forward momentum of the book stayed the same so even as I was taking scenes out that weren’t keeping us on that path, I still felt that throughout the process, I was shaping as I went in some weird way. I’ve talked about the wave, and that really is applicable. It’s kind of a hard thing to explain. You lose pieces of your character as you go, but you’re doing that on purpose. You’re shedding the character in order to be able to visualize them better. For me it’s all about the scene, right? Kerouac called it the “book movie.” Who quotes Kerouac? Nobody! But you see it in your mind, and when you reach this place where you can actually visualize this character, that’s where the interest, the kernel of interest sustains you. At least it did for me.

Audience: I’m curious, what were the very first steps in your adult life that you took toward becoming a writer? Did you write mostly for yourself? Did you write for magazines? Was it something you put a lot of work into as an undergrad or did it kind of start with the MFA?

Jessica Anthony: It was a total accident. I was always a reader, and I loved reading ever since I was a very little kid, and then I went to Bates College in Maine, and in my junior year I went abroad to study at the University of Manchester, and I was trying to find a subject to study and I was looking through the catalog and I saw creative writing, and I thought, You can do that for credit? Crazy! This was in 1994. So I wrote a short story and it was terrible, and they took me in the class and I started writing fiction. I also actually studied poetry for a time. Good that I left! I’ve been writing stories for a long time, but I didn’t think seriously about becoming a writer until I was about twenty-four, twenty-five years old and I was at an utter loss about what to do with myself. I’d had like twenty-six jobs, and was basically a vagrant and a criminal. [laughs] No, not a criminal. I was living in Alaska and in Eastern Europe. I was all over the place, and then I asked myself, What’s been the one consistent thing that I’ve done? Well, I’ve been writing fiction, and why? So then I talked with someone about the MFA, and I bristled at first when I first heard about the MFA, you know, I wasn’t sure about it because people have these problems with the MFA, which, I think, is a load of crap, basically. I mean, the MFA is amazing, so I got myself there, and once I was there I started to feel like my roots were there.

Audience: Here’s a question for both of you. I’d like to know what was maybe the most important thing you learned in the MFA program that you really didn’t know before? You might need to compare it to what you learned after the MFA program.

Julia Story: For me, I think I went into the MFA looking for a mentor, sort of a guide who would help me work one-one-one with me with my writing, and I guess what I learned was that I didn’t really need that, or want it. Not to say that my professors at IU weren’t amazing—they were—but to have one mentor and guide wasn’t really what I needed. I preferred to have a community, and I learned a lot more from my peers. They were amazing teachers for me. I didn’t know that was going to be the case there.

Jessica Anthony: Yes, I think that’s really accurate, that’s really true. It’s about the validation. You’re writing stories, you’re creating imaginary lives and people don’t sort of wrinkle their brow and look at you funny. They take you seriously. You start to take yourself seriously. You say, I’m actually going to be doing this for three years, and that’s a pretty extraordinary discovery.

Julia Story: Yeah, yeah. I remember when I was about nineteen, which was about the time that I became really serious about poetry. I was with a friend of my aunt, I think it was in Iowa, and she asked me, “So you’re an English major. What do you think you want to do with it?” And she just laughed in my face. It was so painful. I guess I was supposed to laugh with her. I was really serious about it, I didn’t know it was just a joke, and then when I got older I realized, oh, people think this is a joke. So the MFA program was really affirming, and was like, oh, there are all these other people who want to do this too, and it’s okay.

Audience: How long do you think it takes to keep writing bad prose before the narrative takes over for itself?

Jessica Anthony: That’s a great question: How long does it take to start writing well when you’ve been writing poorly. I think it depends entirely on the story. I’ve got many, many stories that are completely unsalvageable. They’re just going to stay on my desktop, and maybe at some point in the future I’ll find some useful, interesting kernel that will take me somewhere, but for the most part it just depends on the piece I’m working on. In terms of a novel, that’s where I think the voice aspect is important because as soon as you tap into your own voice as a writer in concert with the voice of your protagonist then you’re not going to let that go. That’s going to sustain you, even if you’re writing a scene that ultimately won’t make the final cut, you can forgive yourself because you know that “b” was necessary to get to “c.”

Audience: How do you resist putting too much of yourself in the novel?

Jessica Anthony: For me it’s about making sure that my mind is firmly rooted in fiction, and that I’m not drawing too closely from autobiography. I’ve been talking about the novel, and you’re probably saying, “Not a problem, Jess.” [laughs] But there’s an emotional truth, an emotional, autobiographical truth, of course, that’s carried through in the character, and it can be tricky sometimes, but as long as I continue to return to that fictional place, you know, the bus, the arena, that particular space that this character inhabits, I know that I’m in his voice. I also listen to music a lot when I write, and I’m wearing my Queen shirt because I wrote the novel to Queen. Seriously, there’s something about having that kind of like soundtrack for the book, and if I had trouble getting into the voice of the character, I would just play a little Queen and I was back.

That sounds sort of like a muse, or something that sort of gets you into that space.

Jessica Farquhar: Thank you both so much!

Jim Shepard’s Version of Stretching Exercises: An Interview

Sycamore — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:23:32 +0000

BY CONOR BROUGHAN

Jim Shepard’s new collection of short stories You Think That’s Bad was recently published and Mr. Shepard was kind of enough to take the time to respond to our questions about his new book over email. Be sure to read the full review of You Think That’s Bad in the Reviews section of the website.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including most recently Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize, and You Think That’s Bad, due out in March.

Sycamore Review: In your new story “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” the Frozen Idiots—four men that have volunteered to study avalanche defense measures in the Alps—tell each other uncanny and macabre stories about avalanches while in the midst of an avalanche zone. One of the characters believes “there is much to be learned from such narratives, particularly when the phenomena described have been confirmed elsewhere.” This line reads like a possible manifestation of your fictional project where the stories that you tell are often born of rigorous research and ample reading, if the Acknowledgements page at the end of the book is accurate. I don’t often equate research with short stories. Can you speak about your process when writing stories based on actual events and historical figures? How much liberty do you give yourself to fictionalize in stories based on true events?

Jim Shepard: I think that line that you quote does sound like a manifestation of my fictional project, and I hadn’t thought of it as such. My process when writing about actual events and historical figures is to be A) as faithful to the truth as I can be, and B) to remember that the truth, as historians will remind us, can be a malleable thing. Occasionally, too, I’ll conflate events. If I really believe something to have happened a certain way, though, I won’t change it. Where I find room to maneuver is in that opaque or mysterious area that adheres to most accounts. Which may be why I wouldn’t write about certain historical figures who have had every waking moment accounted for – or who have themselves chronicled their every waking moment – someone like Winston Churchill, for example.

Sycamore Review: Many of your stories in this collection are written in first-person point of view. Do you think writing in that mode offers more access to the characters—whether fully imagined or based on fact? With all the research involved for some of these stories, do you feel like you need to separate yourself from the objective history of the characters and write in 1^st person in order to find deeper emotional truths?

Jim Shepard: I think the 1^st person allows me more comprehensive access to my sense of their voices, which allows me to more fully and rapidly have them cohere in my imagination. I think, too, that the tightrope-walk challenge of the 1^st person allows me in some ways to more fully confront the hubris of what I’m up to: as in, you’re not only trying to write about Aeschylus; you’re trying to imagine his voice.

Sycamore Review: You once said in an interview (and I will paraphrase as best as I can) that writers can only arm themselves with as much hard information and empathetic imagination as possible when writing about real people and historical moments. Do you feel like fiction, whether re-imagined historical lives or fully imagined ones, is more or a less an act of empathy? How does writing from outside your own experience—and from experiences as far-ranging as 14^th century French serial-killers, covert agents in the American desert, alpine research teams, and Japanese special effects gurus—engender that kind of empathy?

Jim Shepard: I do feel that literary fiction at least as I define it is an act of imaginative empathy. And it’s not so much that writing so far outside my own autobiographical experience – at least in terms of events – engenders that empathy as exercises it. It’s like I’m trying to do my own version of stretching exercises.

Sycamore Review: I keep coming back to the story “Gojira, King of the Monsters” and reading it with a certain sense of awe. The director of the first Godzilla movie is amazed at the nuance of the monster’s face, created by the protagonist, Eiji Tsuburaya, and says that “The paradox of fearsomeness and longing is what the whole thing is about.” Many of the stories in You Think That’s Bad follow that very logic. Protagonists—often married men from 1^st person point of view—long to find better versions of themselves, but what they fear is a little more elusive because of what they already have: a stable family, loving wife, children that need their love. Can you speak about this recurring theme of fear and longing for your protagonists and why you are drawn to characters who over a simple meal of boiled rice with vinegar may end up “weeping for all that he’d been granted, and for everything he’d thrown away.”

Jim Shepard: Again, an astute observation: that “paradox of fearsomeness and longing” is what a lot of my stories are interested in interrogating. And that fearsomeness, in the case of a story like “Gojira,” has everything to do with a glimpse of the size of that gap that may exist between who want to be and the way we sometimes behave. No one cherishes his family more than my Tsuburaya does; and yet. And yet.

Sycamore Review: In the introduction to the Ploughshares issue you edited in Fall 2010, you said that your thesis advisor, John Hawkes, reminded you to persistently interrogate the weirdness in your work, and luckily for us you have followed suit. Many Sycamore Review readers are also writers and I hoped that maybe you could let us know a few of the other writers who have influenced your work, particularly your short stories.

Jim Shepard: Oh, I’ve been influenced by huge numbers of writers, the extent of their influence having a lot to do with when I encountered them. In 7^th or 8^th grade, Salinger was spectacularly important for demonstrating to me that someone from a background and/or with a sensibility like mine – someone who wasn’t Henry James, in other words – could aspire to creating literature. Soon after that, Hemingway for what he demonstrated about the unspoken. Soon after that, Flannery O’Connor for what she demonstrated about the need for a certain ferocity and the linkage between the ferocious and the comic. In college and afterwards, Joyce and Nabokov, among so many others, for the exquisiteness of their sentences and the otherworldly perceptiveness of their observational abilities. Etc.

Sycamore Review: Final question: Possibly more for my piece of mind than anything else….Your stories are fearless in both content and style. I always wonder if you have ever come across a person or historical event that fascinated you and occasioned research, but in the end proved to be impossible to write a story about. A part of me—a petty, jealous part of me— hopes that you have, but another part of me is pretty certain that hasn’t happened based on the growing body of your work.

Jim Shepard: Good news. Oh, God, yes: I’ve had lots of attempts not work out. I spent somewhere around 7 years researching and trying to write a novel about Aeschylus, and finally had to abandon the effort, feeling as though there were just too many gigantic areas of his life which I couldn’t reconstruct. I ended up focusing all I had learned through the narrow lens of his experience at Marathon, and got a 12 page story out of all of that material. I also spent about 6 months researching Charles Lindbergh before having to concede that while I felt like I knew him very well, it was the way a historian or biographer would know someone: all of that stuff I had learned had failed to generate that charged sense of an emotional overlap that would allow me to attempt a fictional rendering.

Candy Necklace: An Excerpt and Author Response

Sycamore — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:32:03 +0000

BY JIM DANIELS

Many readers of Sycamore Review are also writers. So we wanted to pose a few craft questions to contributor Jim Ray Daniels that might illuminate his process and techniques when writing his heartbreaking story “Candy Necklace” which can be read in its entirety in Issue 23.1-Winter/Spring 2011.

Shelley bit another hard, tasteless bead off of her candy necklace. A yellow one. It tasted just like a green or red one. The flimsy elastic holding it together stretched across her mouth. Then, she bit off a red one—pink, really—and pulled the necklace back down over her neck. Sticky where other beads had gotten wet with spit.

Her mother, Ginger, sat next to her on the orange plastic waiting room bench in the emergency room at Mercy Shelley pressed a huge bloody mess of towels against Ginger’s arm as they waited to be called—so much blood dripping onto the floor Shelley thought maybe they’d have to cut the damn arm off, and then her mother could never hit her again, at least with her strong arm.

Candy had to look like itself to taste good, Shelley thought. Like candy bars. They were just bars, That was the perfect shape for chocolate. A rectangle you could wrap a hand around. Bite into it. Candy that was supposed to look like something else always tasted bad: Candy cigarettes. Wax lips. Licorice shoelaces. Swedish fish—What made them Swedish? Did they swim with an accent? Sweden—what did she know about Sweden? Her brother Randy said they made porn there. He was seventeen and imagined pornography in his sleep. Shelley called him Porno Boy until their mother slapped her across the face. Randy had left home. No one had heard from Porno Boy in six months. Ginger told the school he dropped out, though he’d made no such official declaration on his way out the door. He’d stolen at least one car, apparently, so there was some interest in his whereabouts on the part of the authorities. Shelley’s father Stoney was mad because in his line of work, any attention from the authorities was not good for business. Stoney was a truck driver who delivered product.

Ginger—Gin, her friends called her, though Shelley didn’t know how many people fessed up to being her friend these days—had an accident with a half-gallon bottle of whiskey. Candy stitches, Shelley thought. Ginger had let her drive to the hospital, though she was only fourteen. Her mother stretched across the seat and operated the petals, groaning through Shelley’s wide turns. Gin Ginny, she wears her tight dress. Gin, Ginny, her hand is a mess. Shelley had never been in an emergency room before, though even she found that hard to believe.

“How come we’re just sitting here? They should have a long sink out here everybody can bleed into while they wait.” Shelley chomped down hard and bit a few more beads off her necklace.

She was a smartass fourteen, which meant she was sixteen in certain states. She thought this might be an occasion to pull out her harmonica and wail some blues, but she thought wrong. Ginger couldn’t hit her without taking pressure off her wound and risking another blood spurt, but she growled at Shelley so viciously that Shelley just blew one loud defiant note and put the harmonica away in the breast pocket of her shirt. The breast pocket—her breasts were a sore spot. Two sore spots—sore, and that was supposed to be a good sign. Something happening there that had already happened to ten or more of her best and worst friends, and it was time it happened to her.

“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped eating candy,” Ginger said.

“Since when is there an age limit on candy,” Shelley said.

Her mother hesitated—it looked like she was going to say something, but then lost whatever it was in the fog of pain. Or, maybe she was just still drunk.

“You look like you’re going to pass out,” Shelley said evenly. She’d witnessed her mother pass out on numerous occasions, though never from loss of blood or shock or whatever her mother was experiencing at the moment that made her pale face wobble and sweat.

“What’s it take to get attention around here? My mom’s bleeding to death. What’s it take to get some stitches!” She shouted the last part at the fat slouched nurse whose uniform buttons were pulling apart to reveal a lime-green bra beneath the white polyester.

Shelley would never wear a lime green bra, she knew that much. Odd lumpy vegetables. The green showed right through the uniform anyway, like the nurse was some superhero with her costume on underneath. If only, Shelley thought. Then, her mother slumped in her seat and tumbled over, her head hitting the tile floor with a disconcerting clunk. At home they had wall-to-wall carpeting, her mother’s drunken falls cushioned into incidental pauses in the angry static electricity of their daily lives. Lives in which Shelley’s father Stoney made infrequent cameo appearances to either drop off some cash or hock some easily moveable item, depending on the state of the nation.

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 23.1-Winter/Spring 2011 today.

Sycamore Review: “Candy Necklace” is told in the close third person from Shelley’s perspective. Did you ever consider writing the story–or did you indeed write a draft–from Shelley’s 1st person point of view? I ask because your skill with free indirect style really give the story a clear and distinct voice, which is unusual in third person story.

Jim Daniels: “Candy Necklace” was inspired by the cover of another book—Jeanne Leiby’s Downriver, an excellent collection of stories that I blurbed. The cover photo is of a young girl with a candy necklace around her neck and in her mouth, and it triggered a whole flood of memories and images of Detroit for me (Downriver is also set in the Detroit area). But for me, the story was always from the outside looking at the photo, the character of Shelley. I never considered first person for this story—I didn’t have the confidence to try to pull off a young female narrator. While I felt like I knew and could identify with Shelley, I wanted to be able to come at her character from the outside in order to bring in an awareness of things that she herself might not be able to articulate in her own voice. Point of view is mysterious. Sometimes, I feel like I can just channel someone’s voice and it comes naturally. Other times, it feels forced, and I have to take a step back and either change point of view, or change the main character—it turns out the problems in narration stem from picking the wrong character. It’s not their story, so they shouldn’t be telling it. For example, in this story, Ginger could potentially be the main character—she’s at the center of the action—but emotionally, she functions more as a trigger for some changes in Shelley. “Candy Necklace” will be in my next book of stories, Trigger Man, (Michigan State University Press, Fall 2011). In that book, there are four first-person stories and six third-person stories, so I guess I move back and forth depending on the character and voice that I think will work best.

Sycamore Review: The narrator describes Shelley as “a smartass fourteen, which meant she was sixteen in certain states…” I love that line and I think it speaks volumes of Shelley, but it is also indicative of the sense of humor the narrator displays throughout the story. Can you talk about your use of humor, and possibly the necessity of humor in a story about a family going through more than a few serious issues? They’ve made it work this far, but it seems like the lives they are leading cannot be sustainable very long. How does humor play a role in their lives and what would this story read like without it?

Jim Daniels: Humor works best for me when it’s unconscious and shows up in the flow of the narrative, so I never try to force it in to lighten up a story. I want the humor to come from inside, to seem spontaneous and natural, and to have an edge to it. I want the humor to penetrate, to hurt a little. For the characters in this story, and perhaps in many of my stories, humor is a survival technique and a protection device. Certainly, the circumstances of their lives are pretty bleak, and laughing about them offers one way of coping, brief respites from despair and the worries of an uncertain, unstable future. I have a dark sense of humor, so I’m sometimes surprised after a reading when someone comments about how bleak my stories are—for many of the people I grew up with back in Detroit, this was just how life was. We laughed while holding our hands over our hearts because they ached.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Jim Ray Daniels is the author of three collections of short fiction, including, most recently, Mr. Pleasant, Michigan State University Press, 2007, Best Regional Fiction Gold Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards. His next book
of poems, Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry, will be published in 2011.

The Audio Files: An Interview with Samrat Upadhyay

Sycamore — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:00:07 +0000

Samrat Upadhyay sat down with Sycamore Review’s Anthony Cook for an interview before a live audience at Purdue University in September. You can click on the following links to listen to audio clips from the conversation. A complete transcript of the interview follows.

Clip 1: Outlines & Superstitions
Clip 2: Short Stories vs. Novels
Clip 3: Exoticization & Paralysis
Clip 4: Writer’s Block: Emptiness is Capacity
Clip 5: Revision: Boil it Down
Clip 6: Translating Dialogue

SAMRAT UPADHYAY was born and raised in Nepal. He is the author of four books: Arresting God in Kathmandu, a collection of stories and a Whiting Award winner; The Guru of Love, a novel which was a New York Time’s notable book; The Royal Ghosts, a second collection of stories which won the 2007 Asian-American Literary Award, the Society of Midland Authors Book Award, and was declared “A Best of Fiction” in 2006 by the Washington Post; and most recently Buddha’s Orphans, a 400-plus page multi-generational, multi-layered novel that Publishers Weekly called “powerful and beautifully told.” The first Nepali author writing in English to be published in the West, he’s been called “a Buddhist Chekov” by the San Francisco Chronicle. He has appeared on the BBC and National Public Radio and directs Indiana University’s Creative Writing program, which is regularly ranked among the best in the nation.

Anthony Cook: Buddha’s Orphans is a really complex novel; it spans generations, dives into several characters’ consciousnesses, and at times digresses from traditional chronology, making big leaps in time forward and backward. And yet I’ve heard you don’t use outlines, and that seems sort of incredible to me. I was wondering if you could talk about that.

Samrat Upadhyay: Well, I did my PhD at the University of Hawaii, where I wrote two novels, and I consulted a craft book. I should’ve known better. I was a PhD student, you know? It was a craft book called The Weekend Novelist, and it was geared toward commercial writers. And so I followed that fairly closely, and it asked that you plot the novel and everything. As a result, my novel suffered. Both the novels suffered. And since then, it almost became like a superstition for me. When I wrote my first novel, The Guru of Love, which was initially a short story. I actually went back to revise it as a short story and then it kept growing. By page 75 I was beginning to think, “Oh, this might turn out to be something else.” My first impulse was to try to plot it out then, but I resisted it, primarily because I was afraid I would fall into the same trap as I did earlier. Now with the short story, I think you can manage without plotting it out although I know quite a few writers who plot out their short stories, too. It was a challenge not to actually sit and write what’s happening with each character and where the story is going to go. I resisted the impulse, but it might not be totally accurate to say that I don’t do plot outlines. I think there is a degree of plot outline that’s happening in my head. All I’m doing is not committing them to paper. I think that’s the difference.

Anthony Cook: Is the reason that you want to prevent the novel from becoming predictable? To keep that element of surprise?

Samrat Upadhyay: Yes. For me, the joy of writing comes from not knowing what is going to happen next. And I know some writers have the same feelings, others don’t. From what I read, F. Scott Fitzgerald heavily plotted even his short stories, and I have a couple of writer friends who do plot outlines, even for their short stories. But for me, when I don’t know where the story is going it seems that I’m pressing against the form, and I really enjoy that. And I like the surprise element of what the characters are going to do.

Anthony Cook: There’s a moment in Buddha’s Orphans that I really like. It’s toward the latter third of the book. One of the main characters is Raja; he was born an orphan and this fact sort of haunts him throughout the book. All that we know at the beginning of the book is that his mother died, committed suicide in a public pond, but other than that we don’t know anything about her. Not until that last 3rd of the book—when we’re following, primarily, the story of Raja’s daughter, a college-aged woman in the U.S. who has disappeared, or so her parents think—that the story of Raja’s mother comes in. First of all, it’s amazing that I was totally willing to read 300 pages without knowing that information. Moreover, it’s fascinating to bring that information in at that point because you’re so far into the book. Can you talk about that decision? Does it have something to do with the trickiness of endings in novels, and trying to sort of introduce a new element in that latter third that can kind of carry us out of the novel?

Samrat Upadhyay: While writing it, I wasn’t theorizing it like that. I don’t use theories when I’m writing; I go by the feel of what’s happening within the story and, in particular, where the characters take me. One of the things that happened with that particular moment…I was quite satisfied with not revealing Raja’s mother’s story. But then, by the time I reached the halfway point of the novel, I started becoming curious as a writer. So what is her story? Why did she commit suicide? I think I had a general sense, but I wanted to explore that further. It seemed like once Raja’s daughter, Ranjana, came into the picture, then I started seeing parallels between her life and Raja’s mother’s life, and the kind of suffering that it entailed. So it just came at the right moment, and I felt like I found an opening. It just seemed like the right moment to do that. It seemed to fit well because her story starts paralleling and so that’s the last leg of the story. I’m really glad you mentioned it because in the reviews that have come out of the novel, no one has touched on this aspect of the novel, which to me, in a way, is central in my attempt to point out the cyclical thing that’s happening within the novel.

Anthony Cook: The cyclical aspect and the back story for Raja’s mother gets at the oppressive environment for women in Kathmandu. There’s a lot of societal norms that are at play and often times the desires of the characters go against the societal norms. Stuart Dybek talks about place and “hauntology,” which is basically the history and unseen forces of a place that act on a character, often times without the character knowing it. It seems like that’s really at work in Buddha’s Orphans. There are literal ghosts, but it also seems like there’s a sort of haunting in terms of place. Is that something you’re conscious of as you write? Do you think about place having these constrictions that the characters are consciously or unconsciously coming up against?

Samrat Upadhyay: I think so. There are two elements here. One is the oppressive environment that you talked about in relation to women. That’s not something I consciously think about it in terms of writing. I’m not saying, “Well, I want to write about how oppressed women are.” But it turns out in this novel that the women’s lives take on central roles. Although Raja starts off as the protagonist of the novel, it became quite clear to me as I went along that it was actually Nilu who was the protagonist, who ties all the elements together. And then there’s a very strong character in Kaki, who raises Raja, and then Raja and Nilu’s daughter who comes toward the end.

But, yeah, in terms of the place and relationship to place, I was born and raised in that city. So, to go back to Dybek’s “hauntology,” that place still haunts me, in a sense, because I have lived half of my life here and half of my life over there. So Nepal and Kathmandu are in my mind all the time. I think maybe what I do, as a writer, is that I play out that reflection within my fiction. But yes, my characters do walk around the city quite a bit. They’re constantly interacting with the city; the city inflicts a certain kind of mood on them and they react to that. In the novel there is a pond, the Rani Pokhari, which was a place of suicide when I was very young. I actually mention that in the beginning of the novel. I remember one childhood story of someone I knew who had attempted suicide there, and so that had remained with me and that’s how the novel got propelled.

Anthony Cook: You mentioned that in Buddha’s Orphans female characters sort of took over the novel. I know that you’ve had very strong female characters in your other work as well. Does it surprise you that females oftentimes become dominant characters in your books, since you’re writing as a male? What do you think is the reason for that?

Samrat Upadhyay: Well, I grew up with a very strong mother. She held a fairly high position as a woman. She was what was called at the time a first class officer in a semi-government corporation. She used to go to work and come home and then do all the household work, too. So, I saw her in both roles. She was very influential in my emotional and my intellectual make-up, and I have a sister who is also very strong. So that could be the reason.

Anthony Cook: There’s a quote from Arresting God in Kathmandu, from the story “Deepak Misra’s Secretary.” Deepak, who is a financial consultant, works at an office and is married to an American woman but separated from her. At one point, his wife says, “Nepali men, you know, either you’re a mother, a sister, an aunt, or you’re a whore.” I thought that was a really interesting observation on her part as a character, but it also suggests something about the environment that women operate in in your stories. I’m wondering if the fact that they’re up against societal expectations—more so than men—if that sense of conflict is one reason women characters tend to be prevalent and very interesting characters in your books.

Samrat Upadhyay: Yeah, that’s possible. To go back to my mother, I remember when she used to come home sometimes and just complain about these board meetings with all men. And even though she was on the same level as them, they were very dismissive of her opinions. Now I don’t mean to suggest that’s how all Nepali men are. And that’s one of the dangers of writing fiction. Also, Nepal has changed quite a bit in the last ten years, certainly even earlier. The transformation has been quite astounding. So the gender roles are actually changing quite a bit.

Anthony Cook: I should say that with Buddha’s Orphans, you’re covering a time span that goes back to the 1960s and 70s, so the environment is obviously somewhat different than what it is now. I wanted to ask about your experiences in writing novels versus short stories. You’ve published four books and have alternated back-and-forth between the novel and the short story form. I’m just wondering if that’s intentional on your part. Do you need a break from one, so you start doing the other? What has been your experience with deciding which form you want to focus on for a year or two?

Samrat Upadhyay: The short story is my first love. I love writing short stories; I think writing short stories comes naturally to me. I understand the form a little more intuitively than I do the novel. The novel I find quite vexing, quite challenging, and it’s exhausting. There’s no end in sight, you know? You start writing a novel, when is it going to end? I’m actually teaching a novel writing class at Indiana University for my MFA students. There’s seven students. To make it manageable, I have said that we obviously can’t write the whole thing in one semester, so how about you just write a short novel? So I called it “Writing the (Short) Novel.” They’re writing about 150 pages of it. They are already beginning to experience the exhaustion of it even in 150 pages.

In terms of the alternation between novel and short story, after Arresting God was published, I was still writing short stories. Then my editor and my agent both said, “Well, you have to write a novel.” I think my first reaction was, “Why do I need to write a novel?” They said, “No, no, you have to write a novel.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll give it a shot.” Then the short story turned out to be a novel [The Guru of Love].

I do find writing the short story a bit of a relief after having written a novel. Actually, right now, I’m focusing on a short story collection yet again. It’s a more joyous affair for me. I know you’re not supposed to sort of favor that, but writing short stories is more pleasurable. At the same time, I’m very intrigued by the form of the novel. And I think, especially after writing Buddha’s Orphans, I can see that, wow, I can do so much with the novel, even though it’s a quite difficult form. I’m already thinking about another novel and the structure and stuff. So hopefully after maybe two or three more novels, then I will feel like this can be as joyful as writing the short story.

Anthony Cook: This is probably a question you’ve been asked many times, but as you said earlier, you have lived in the United States for half your life now, and yet in all four of your books, the primary setting is Nepal. I’m just wondering: Why is that? Is it conscious on your part or is it just where your mind goes when you sit down to write a story? What’s the reason for setting things there rather than here?

Samrat Upadhyay: It’s just the place my mind goes to. I feel like I’m more familiar with my Nepali characters or my Nepali psyche, if you want to call it that. There’s also the attraction of the place. I have discovered I’m a writer of distance. I’m able to write with clarity when I’m a little bit removed from a place. I’m finding that in my more recent writing, it’s changing. That’s why in Buddha’s Orphans, you see a character who actually comes to America. There are scenes from Chicago… I think that I’m slowly moving towards doing more of a back-and-forth.

Anthony Cook: Two of your books—Arresting God in Kathmandu and Buddha’s Orphans—have overt religious references even in the titles. A San Francisco Chronicle review called you a “Buddhist Chekov, who writes about love, not with dark Russian fatalism but with a sense of the cyclical nature of life and its passions.” You mentioned that cyclical nature earlier. I’m just wondering how religion has influenced you in your work, if at all.

Samrat Upadhyay: Nepal is a very religious country. Temples abound. People go to temples. People are chanting…I am interested in how gods and goddesses feature in people’s lives, and how I’ve seen even among Nepali communities here that religious symbols are some of the most easily transferable symbols. So, you go into a Nepali household and there’s Ganesh, and there’s Saraswati, and there’s Lakshmi. But I’m more interested in people seeking transcendence in their everyday lives, and how the physical realities around us can also be opportunities for us to find and discover that transcendence. I’ve been reading a little bit on Buddha’s philosophies, and I’m interested in the whole idea of suffering; and that’s why there’s a crucial moment in Buddha’s Orphans where the main character is reflecting upon the suffering of this one particular character, and I thought that applied to the suffering of all the characters, even those who are not overtly suffering.

Anthony Cook: You are the director of IU’s writing program. Do you feel like teaching aids or hinders you more as a writer?

Samrat Upadhyay: I love teaching. I’ve never been the kind of writer who can take a year off and just be completely engaged with his work. When I’m on sabbaticals I tend to write maybe 10-15 percent more than I do in a regular semester. I find that [teaching] helps a great deal. In this novel writing class, just this morning we discussed Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Just discussing the novel was very stimulating and I wanted to go write a novel. I don’t know anything else to do in this life. I’m not good at anything else except teaching or writing. I think I might be a slightly better teacher than I am a writer, too, so…

Anthony Cook: One often hears some debate around the idea of exoticism. Some writers are accused of perhaps overemphasizing traditional aspects of their native culture. Can you talk about that?

Samrat Upadhyay: I think all writers who write in English about places that are not predominantly English-speaking are suspect. Especially writers who live here and write about there—people are suspicious of them. Writers like Salman Rushdie have been criticized. I think some of that comes partly with the territory…

There is a degree of exoticization going on. But I think some of the exoticization is also in the eyes of the beholder. When The Guru of Love was published the Cleveland Plain Dealer reviewed it. The reviewer was disappointed. Where were the mountains? was basically what was said. You know, If you’re looking for this, you won’t find it in this novel. It’s a very tricky territory for writers. I had one reader in Nepal who didn’t like that the fact I used the word “filthy” when I was referring to the Bagmati River, which is indeed quite filthy now. His argument was that, “Well, we all know it’s filthy. And that seems like it’s a marker for a Western audience.” And my answer was, “Well, yes, we all know it’s filthy but every time I pass by there or even my mom, who lives in Nepal, passes by there, she points to it and says, ‘That’s so filthy.’”

Anthony Cook: I can see how this would be almost paralyzing for a writer if you think about it too much.

Samrat Upadhyay: Yes, you do need a degree of stamina to staunch off these attacks…As soon as you write in English, you are representing the entire country. I think that can be quite debilitating, especially for a young writer. You put in Buddha, why didn’t you put in Ganesh? You put in Mount Everest, why didn’t you put in Ganesh Himal?

Audience: You mentioned that working on a novel can be so difficult. What do you do when you’re stuck when working on a novel?

Samrat Upadhyay: There are multiple strategies. You just have to see which one works at that particular moment. For example, I no longer use the phrase “writer’s block.” As soon as I use it, it becomes sort of heavy and solid and I start imagining a block in my own mind and it becomes a self-perpetuating thing. I see more like good days and bad days in terms of writing. One of the things I do is actually go back and reread what I’ve written so far, and I usually find that there’s a point earlier on where I’ve sort of veered off. And the reason the block has happened is because of that sidetrack I have taken. That usually has to do with a sense of inauthenticity in that particular moment where instead of being true to the character and the situation, I try to impose an idea on it. Sometimes you just need to get away from it for awhile. There’s a famous line from I Ching, the Chinese divination system, that says, “Emptiness is capacity and capacity is power.” I think it’s good to empty your mind every now and then about all your pre-conceived notions of what is happening in your novel and just look at it from a fresh perspective. And that also helps. Sometimes I think just eating good food helps. Something very physical. Food doesn’t demand any sort of intellectual rigor. It’s all about the senses. Listening to music. So, you know, a variety of approaches.

Audience: Have you considered or tried to write any novels in your native language?

Samrat Upadhyay: I used to be good in Nepali when I was attending school in Nepal, but I lost the facility once I came over here. I’ve tried writing in Nepali, but I’ve found the only kind of writing I do in Nepali is journalistic. I have actually have sat down and translated one of my stories into Nepali, and that worked out fine because I knew how the work was in English. But translation takes a long time. I spent a lot of time translating one piece. Nepali is my mother tongue, but English is my first language. By this time, it has become the language of my intellectual make-up and my professional make-up, so it feels as though I can do more with English than I can with Nepali.

Audience: It is obvious that you enjoy your position as a teacher and writer very much. I was just wondering if you’ve had any point in your life that you’ve had a sort of quintessential turning point where you said, “I’m a writer. This is what I want to do.” Is there a moment you can recall that made you want to do what you do?

Samrat Upadhyay: I don’t think there is one moment. I used to write as a child. I remember composing a poem in Nepali about my neighborhood when I was in second grade. But I think I attempted graduate school in journalism because at that point I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be. I thought I wanted to be a journalist, so I attended graduate school in journalism at Ohio University. I ended up taking a creative writing workshop in the English department. That was the major moment because it was also fueled by the teacher really liking my work, which always helps. She said something like, “Samrat, you’re a natural fiction writer.” And that phrase sort of reverberated inside my head like. To that extent, I really credit my teachers for their encouragement. In my small way, I try to be that encouragement for my students. Sometimes it can be lost in our daily bustle that our students are listening to everything we’re saying and they’re paying attention.

Audience: I was wondering to what extent do you think that everyday life experiences add to your writing?

Samrat Upadhyay: I mean, that’s all we can to draw from. I think our everyday life experiences are what we draw from. For me, some of my more powerful images in my writing actually come from my childhood years even though I transformed them into a contemporary setting. But there’s something about childhood. Those memories are still embedded really strongly, and I tap into them. For example, I grew up in a middle-class family in Nepal, and I didn’t suffer. In the 70s bellbottom pants were a big hit and I wanted bellbottom pants and my parents had gotten me bellbottom pants. Then I experienced poverty when I came to America as a student. There was a time when I didn’t have an apartment to live in, and I used to crash in my friends’ apartments for two weeks at a stretch. And that gave me the sensation of feeling poor, and I think I transfer that onto my characters. There’s no equivalency, of course. People in Nepal suffer the kind of poverty that we can’t imagine. But I think, as writers, at least we can try. We can try to feel what other people are feeling.

Audience: Your novel was at a certain point 800 pages or more. Can you talk about compressing from 800 pages to 400 pages? What’re some of the highlights or lowlights of that experience of compression?

Samrat Upadhyay: My first full draft that I wrote once I finished it was 800 pages, but I think compression in short stories might be slightly different in terms of my experience of writing this novel. Because in Buddha’s Orphans, there was one solid digression that had to do with one of the characters that I sort of chucked out entirely. In a short story, you don’t do that. In a short story, you usually do what my teacher used to call “boil it down.” Going back in terms of looking at the sentences, at certain sections. But in this case, it was an entire chunk that I had to throw out. My editor, when she read the novel, made a bit of a snide comment. She said, “It’s a wannabe epic.” I hadn’t thought in those terms. My agent said, “Holy shit, it’s an epic!” But she said, “It’s a wannabe epic.” And then the compression had to with speeding up certain parts of the novel, especially in the beginning. There was a back-and-forth. I argued, “I know you feel that it’s a slow pace here, but I feel that it’s…” We’re very good making the justifications and the arguments for our work, so there was a bit of back-and-forth. It was a bit of a compromise. I listened to her in terms of what she had to offer. With the finished novel, I didn’t know what was good and what was not good. So it was nice to have an outside perspective like that.

Audience: Did you make use of the digression? Did you take it and sort’ve plant it somewhere else?

Samrat Upadhyay: It actually looks like one of the digressions is going to turn into a short story, which is nice, you know? So it’s not gone to waste. But one thing about working on a long novel and throwing stuff out is that you think, Oh, my God, I spent so much time writing this. So much energy has gone into this and it might never be used. And some of the stuff will never be used, I think.

Audience: I’m in the MFA program for creative writing, and recently we’ve been debating how to approach writing in English with characters who aren’t speaking English. And I was wondering how you go about that?

Samrat Upadhyay: If you read my work, there are Nepali words scattered throughout. Sometimes I translate them, but you have to be really careful that you don’t do a really obvious travel-book kind of translation. It has to be seamless. I think you can also try to depict the syntax of the original language while your characters are speaking English. For me, some of the Indian writers have done it well. You also have to be really careful, because that’s when you can also not knowingly exoticize. Every character at every instance talking in atypical ways in terms of English language can also be very odd. You just have to give enough, so that the reader gets a sense and then you move on. I have found it quite refreshing at times to just have one of my Nepali characters say, “Fuck off.” There is no exact translation into Nepali. But what’s important is the emotion, and “fuck off” has a charge that can depict what I’m saying as opposed to “you are a pig’s ass.” You know how it can be. It’s a very tricky thing. You deal with it on an instance to instance basis.