SYCAMORE REVIEW

Wislawa Symborska (1923-2012)

Sycamore — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:54:32 +0000

By Elizabeth Petersen

I take Szymborska’s lead when I say the hardest sentence of an elegiac blog post is the first. Well, now that one’s behind me.

In many cases, when a poet passes a small part of the world mourns. This little world of poets and poetry readers feels a tingeing of their hope, but soon a this too shall pass sigh becomes a sort of resolution, and they (we) try to carry on. Szymborska, though, feels different. After decades of remarkable work that spoke both to the social issues many poems fear to enter and the weird wonderment that many poems fail to achieve, I realize, in a childish way, that I never thought Szymborska would ever leave the world, that she was too good, too smart, for anyone to pull a fast one on her. And part of me thinks such thoughts would make her grin.

Coming from the movement of Polish postwar poets, Szymborska made a way for herself among the dark, the guilt-ridden, the exiled, and the reactionary to create poems that meant something to everyone who read them. Her poems grew to take up the whole world, and the world noticed, offering her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, a prize that was difficult for her to make sense of. Her translator Clare Cavanagh said in a recent interview, “Her friends called it the Nobel Tragedy…It was a few years before she wrote another poem.” Which I think just attests to what a genuine person she must have been.

From the title poem of her latest book, Here, she wrote, “I can’t speak for elsewhere, / but here on Earth we’ve got a fair supply everything.” And ain’t that the truth? Because that’s the thing with Szymborska, she says it before anybody else could—about pierogies and cultured microorganisms and the words we think we know. She was the best sort of riddler. As Charles Simic said, Szymborska was “[n]ot only one of the finest poets living today, but also one of the most readable.” Readable but layered, her images simple but expansive.

Which is why I am happy we got one last book, one last morsel to save in our cheek. Szymborska is the poet I save for bad weather—so that I can coop myself up and spend the day staring first at her words, then the ceiling, then the window.

In her book, Monologue of a Dog she has the line, “When I pronounce the word Nothing, / I make something no non-being can hold.” Give it to Szymborska to make nothing into something, literally, abstractly, literally. She inspires me to try and do the same.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Petersen is a first year poet in Purdue University’s MFA Program.

Congratulations to Greg Schutz!

Sycamore — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:03:23 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

We here at Sycamore Review were honored to publish Greg Schutz’s beautiful story “You are the Greatest Lake” in Issue 23.1, so we are thrilled that the story has been selected for New Stories from the Midwest 2012 (Indiana University Press), guest edited by Rosellen Brown.

The forthcoming New Stories from the Midwest 2011 will include contributions from Charles Baxter, Christine Sneed, Dan Chaon, Rebbeca Makkai and Anthony Doerr. We think Greg’s story will find a nice comfortable spot in equally good company in the 2012 edition.

Order a copy of Issue 23.1 for a look into some great writing from the Midwest and beyond. Take a look at an excerpt of the story and a short interview with Greg Schutz if you need any more convincing.

...MORE

I Am Not What I Once Was: J. A. Tyler’s A Man of Glass and All the Ways We Have Failed

Sycamore — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:08:43 +0000

By David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

J. A. Tyler has quite an astonishing number of works out recently, including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON, which was recently excerpted in PANK magazine, In Love with a Ghost, and, among other works, two chapbooks, and has no fewer than three books due out this year. What I’ve read of Wilson’s work focuses on the fragility of self, its parts, its dismantling. His most recent book A Man of Glass & The Ways We Have Failed shares this theme. “I remain, remainders,” the speaker in INCONCEIVABLE WILSON says, “the parts, pieces. I am dismantled. Tools and instruments and me taken apart.”

Even the genre Tyler writes in—he terms his longer works novel(la)s—dovetails with that sense of fractured identity. A Man of Glass… centers on one character’s point of view like a novella. It has stanzas instead of paragraphs, and is it lineated like poetry or not? A Man of Glass… can be seen as a novel planted in the unsteady ground between novella and poetry. It’s an interesting form that we’ve been seeing more of lately: in addition to Tyler’s works, other works in this form include We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry and Culture of One, from the ever-prolific Alice Notley. In all of these, identity never strays from the center of the frame.

In A Man of Glass…, something is wrong; the love’s gone sour between the unnamed man and woman. The man still loves but now, it seems, she does not. She washes her hair with cherry shampoo up above him in her apartment while he stands there, dejected, in the street. The stage, surprisingly, is then set for scenarios that remind me of the sonnet cycles of the 1600s. In fact, this book follows the same fever-chart course some of those poem sequences do, with rising and falling levels of desperation. There is denial: “You see now what you have done to me…how you have made me so different that I can’t even exist anymore.” But has she done this? The same accusation is leveled in Michael Drayton’s Idea, a sonnet cycle from 1593: “My heart was slain…who should I think the murder should commit? …It slew itself…”

The tension ratchets higher. The man alters himself to bring her back. She doesn’t speak. He changes, again and again and again, to get her attention, to perhaps rekindle her attraction to him. He becomes a string of beads, a spotted egg, a wineglass, a rainbow. Through a bewildering series of changes, the main character tries to metamorphose to win her, and each metamorphosis is inadequate: “Mourning is a river that never changes, but always changes and never cries itself out.” In many ways, the situation is more heartbreaking than that of the sonneteers who tried but never won. The speaker in Drayton’s sonnet cycle realizes his folly early: “Upon your lips the scarlet drops are found/ And in your eye the boy who did the murder.” In J. A. Tyler’s latest book, the main character teeters closer to the edge. In off-kilter and lacerating language, Tyler’s A Man of Glass… follows the track of a man who had won but now has lost.

A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed

Fugue State Press

ISBN 978-1-879193-24-6

112 pp.

$12 paperback

BINOCULAR VISION a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle fiction award!!!

Sycamore — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:02:49 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

It’s been exhausting trying to keep up with Edith Pearlman lately. She contributed a wonderful story, “Last Words,” in issue 23.1 before publishing her collection of new and selected stories Binocular Vision. After receiving the Pen/Malamud Prize for short fiction, she was nominated as a National Book Award finalist. The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced this weekend and guess who is a finalist: Edith Pearlman. Pick up your copy of issue 23.1 today and read “Last Words” to see what all the fuss is about.

If you live within shouting distance of West Lafayette, be sure to join us on Tuesday, March 27th when we’ll be honored to have Edith Pearlman on campus for a reading and Q&A session. I have a feeling we’ll have a lot to talk about! Find a preview of the conversation with our review of Binocular Vision and interview with Edith Pearlman from last year.

Alice Notley’s Ghouls: Reclaiming Myth

Sycamore — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:46:33 +0000

by David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

My strange reading coincidences continue. Wayne Miller’s wonderful poetry collection The City, Our City (a review of which appears in our most recent print issue) was part of an uncanny string of books I was reading that had to do with the formation and destruction of cities. The very next two books I picked up after writing that review continued the trend. It was a bit spooky, to be honest.

With a title like Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, it might at first blush appear as if the release date (at the beginning of November) of Alice Notley’s latest book might be part of a Halloween-themed publicity campaign. But considering that few poetry books get a publicity campaign of any sort, and in spite of ghouls and blood-sacs (more on that anon) and scattered bones and such, we are dealing with something as epic—literally—as Notley’s other monumental works.

Derek Walcott, among others, noticed that Helen of Troy, the cause of the war in Iliad and Aeneid, is only a shadow in the famous story. She doesn’t even have any direct dialogue—all of the words she supposedly said are spoken for her by men. Back in the late 80s, when she was working on her now-classic book-length poem The Descent of Alette, Notley saw the epic up to the present as a form exclusively in the purview of the Masculine. She wanted to write a feminine epic. The result was dazzling. What we have in Songs and Stories of the Ghouls is essentially a continuation of that work. Here, she moves to women as they are portrayed in existing Classical texts—no less than Medea and Helen of Troy, one a murderess, the other portrayed as the cause of Troy’s fall. What’s at stake here is taking these stories back. Regarding the accepted story of Medea, Notley makes it clear: “the purpose of the story: to establish as reality, that a woman of power can only be evil.” “Nothing is unchangeable,” Notley says in the opening pages of the book’s second section, “except for a myth—let’s change that.” In a combination of prose and poetry, the women of these long-established tales are brought forth and are given a voice. They speak from their own mouths.

Notley said in a brief conversation with me after her recent reading at Notre Dame that she was tired of politics, that Alette was her overtly-political poem, that what she writes these days isn’t concerned so much with the political. But much of this new work is political in various ways. In the well-known story Medea has power, but always used it to help Jason. And why is the established story told in such a way—a woman of power who kills her brother and children and poisons another woman? To “establish as reality that a woman of power can only be evil.” “No one really believes in her power,” Notley writes, “She is only allowed it as an adjunct to her passion. She can’t just have it. No woman is as yet allowed that.” We move from gender politics to political demonstration: “When you protest, you’re no/ longer a civilian: they can kill you.” The ghouls here, reduced to sucking on blood sacs for sustenance, are the women suppressed in such a scheme.

Even more intriguing is the kinship this volume has with, not only Classical epics, but also with H.D., whose Helen in Egypt I just by chance happened to pick up next. In both books we have a sense of a feminist retelling of the stories that concern women, but which have been only voiced by males. The two books could be considered sister texts; they resonate with each other in complex and astonishing ways; their aim is to reclaim the Feminine in these epics. There is quite a bit more here to explore than can be included in a book review, but suffice it to say that Notley’s oeuvre is a rich field for exploration, and—along with Descent of Alette—The Songs and Stories of the Ghouls is a wonderful place to start.

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls

Wesleyan University Press

205 pp.

ISBN 978-0-8195-6956-1

$24.95 Hardcover

“surrounded by cannibals who are nice”: Ron Padgett is cooler than you

Sycamore — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:30:13 +0000

by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry

Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:

There’s not a lot of time to think
when one is assailed by activities and obligations
and even less time to do it
when one is free of them
because then one spends one’s time thinking
about how little time there is.

Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast). This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the difference between Karen Volkman and Susan Wheeler, between C.D. Wright and Elaine Equi, between Alex Lemon and Zach Schomburg, between Ashbery and Koch, between—shit—between the Beatles and the Stones, Ghostface and Raekwon, Joni Mitchell and Townes Van Zandt.

Point being, Ron Padgett is in both categories, comfortably. He takes a nap in one, wakes up, makes Earl Grey in the other, splatters brains on the wall, and goes back to sleep. The poem above, titled “Thinking About a Cloud,” from his 2011 collection, How Long, continues: “That’s what it’s like to be in America / early in the twenty-first century” and I really believe it, because Padgett writes with the kind of innocent brilliance, the childlike wonder, at—brace yourself—“The Everyday” that we’ve become too cynical, too esoteric, and too distracted to appreciate in contemporary poems. That poem is an existential conversation between the speaker and—yes—a cloud.

Like Johnny Cash, Padgett defeats irony. The prevailing theme here is death, which strikes Padgett as funny, without cynicism—“The Death Deal,” a catalogue of possible options for the poet’s end, ends:

I’m oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.

Are we allowed to have this much fun in a book of poems? Who cares. Read Ron Padgett, and age with such grace.

How Long (2011)
by Ron Padgett
Coffee House Press, 91 p.
$12.50

“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.

At Home in America: A Review of Shannon Cain’s THE NECESSITY OF CERTAIN BEHAVIORS

Sycamore — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:09:07 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

Thursday, December 1st, Shannon Cain will be taking part in the Purdue Visiting Writers Series on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. Please join us at the Krannert Auditorium, Room 140 at 7:30. Shannon Cain will be reading from her debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors. The event is free and open to the public.

Jane, the protagonist of “This is How it Starts,” the first story in Shannon Cain’s debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from University of Pittsburgh Press, is a girlfriend to both a married lawyer, who happens to be man, and a doctor, who happens to be a woman. She is also an artist living in her family’s rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan who paints on panes of translucent glass. In order to create a textured still-life or landscape or a portrait, Jane must paint backwards: “she must paint her foregrounds first, top layers before bottom.” Like Jane, Shannon Cain has put considerable effort into “planning her layers” and in each of the nine stories in her debut he has created textured moments of beauty, stark landscapes and a stunning collection of uniquely American lives.

The textures in Cain’s stories are built upon familiar themes that are juxtaposed to one another in idiosyncratic ways. Sexual identities are challenged, hearts are broken, parents struggle to care for their children without letting go of themselves, and children are left to confront a world changed after the death of their parents. These textures can take a tragic or humorous turn depending on the story, but Cain’s tone is always sincere, honest and generous to her characters that seem to make and get into more trouble in this collection than most writers could manage in a full career of books.

A young woman moves to L.A. to connect with her father, who happens to be Bob Barker from The Price is Right, and finds unexpected love and the truth about her childhood. The wife of a mid-size city’s mayor is caught masturbating in the steam room of a local gym and she must confront not only her vulnerabilities, but those of her husband and their daughter, who has been damaged in ways the mother had never taken the time to notice. “The Queer Zoo” is the story of a heterosexual man working at The Queer Zoo, “home to the world’s largest collection of homosexual, bisexual, and transgender animals.” The Queer Zoo is not only the second busiest attraction in Arizona, behind only the Grand Canyon, but it is also forces the protagonist, Sam, to ask if he has ever really been free.

In the O. Henry Prize final story, “The Necessity of Certain Behaviors,” Lisa escapes from the city on an eco-tourism trip and finds herself in a mountaintop village where she no longer has to “identify” as straight, gay or bisexual as she did in the city and is “thrilled by the jolt of it and by her own desire.” Lisa stays in the village indefinitely and “she no longer knows the difference between lost and found.” She finds contentment, not confusion, in the village that has “made itself available to her.”

All of the stories in the collection call into question the necessity of certain behaviors that the characters act upon in order to find freedom, love, or redemption. More often than not, the behaviors the characters believe are necessary are misleading, if not self-destructive. In the end, Cain forgives the bad behavior of her characters, but she never lets them off the hook. Charlie, the protagonist of the standout story “Juniper Beach,” abandons her longtime girlfriend after her parents die in a tragically silly car accident. With her inheritance, Charlie buys an old RV and searches for a sense of purpose and herself on American highways, documenting sites of other horrific automobile accidents. In the middle of a strip mall parking lot at sunrise, Charlie admits to herself that “she expected to feel different. She expected to know more about where she was going.” In that way, she is not different from the rest of the characters in the book or from those of us lucky enough to read this collection who are trying to “feel at home in America, rootless yet ensconced, held in place by her movement across strips of landscape.”

The Necessity of Certain Behaviors
Shannon Cain
University of Pittsburgh Press – September 2011
144 pages / $24.95

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.

Grotesque and Lovely: A review of Bonnie Nadzam’s LAMB

Sycamore — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:04:05 +0000

by Conor Broughan

When your kitchen is a mess—a plates-piled-high-in-the-sink, socks-getting-stuck-on-sticky-spots mess—how do you react? If you’re anything like me, a messy kitchen means that you clean up the coffee table in the living room or pick up clothes that have collected at the foot the bed. Rather than tackling dirty dishes, the grime on the sink, or whatever it is that has been growing behind the stove, I project the mess onto other portions of the apartment, allowing me to clean a minimal amount while still feeling accomplished for tackling a chore.

When we first meet David Lamb, the fifty-four year-old protagonist of Bonnie Nadzam’s beautiful, unsettling, and stunning debut novel Lamb, he has just buried his father, has recently divorced his wife, and has been forced to take a leave of absence from his job because of an affair he can’t seem to end with a younger colleague. In a word, David Lamb is a mess—a plates-piled-so-precariously-high-you’d-be-better-off-buying-a-new-set-of-dishes-at-K-Mart mess.

Early in the novel, when David Lamb’s work partner, Wilson, tells Lamb that he’s “kind of made a mess of things here,” Lamb acknowledges as much by saying “it’s been one thing after another.” To say that’s an understatement is an understatement. With a seemingly endless stream of manipulations and self-delusions, David Lamb has created an epic and unfathomable mess of his life. Rather than try to clean it up, he projects that mess onto someone else, so he can clean up her mess and accomplish a chore, a good deed. Enter Tommie.

Tommie is also a mess, but she hasn’t made one of herself. She is an unattractive and unpopular eleven-year-old. Her mother works all day and she doesn’t get along with her stepfather in their small suburban Chicago apartment. When her friends dare her to ask a stranger for a cigarette in a liquor store parking lot, and that stranger happens to be David Lamb, a strange, manipulative, unnerving and oddly genuine relationship is born: “Scrawny white arms and legs stuck out of her clothes. The shorts hung around her pelvic bones and her stomach stuck out like a dirty spotted white sheet. It was grotesque. It was lovely.” Nadzam not only has an eye for perfect though unflattering descriptions of her characters, she also possesses a keen eye for beautiful, lush descriptions of the natural world, especially after Lamb convinces the impressionable Tommie to join him on a week-long trip to his dilapidated cabin in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Just as Lamb convinces Tommie that the trip will let her into “this country’s secret heart,” Nadzam invites the reader to look into the country’s secret heart with lines that describe an America that is disappearing: “Outside the truck, before and beside and behind her, an endless span of blond grass and silver bitterbrush and greasewood and sage.”

Lamb abducts the willing Tommie and they strike out west. Outside of her dysfunctional home, Lamb believes he’ll show the self-conscious Tommie her own worth: “It was like he found a loose bolt out there in the world and had carefully turned it back into place.” The tension inherent in a story about a fifty-four year-old manipulating an impressionable eleven-year-old on a road trip builds as they drive further and further west of the Chicago suburbs: Will Lamb take the relationship too far? Will they be caught? Will Tommie realize the trouble she is in and find help? But Nadzam doesn’t rely on external tensions or melodrama to drive the momentum of the novel; rather, she lets the conflict between Lamb and Tommie, and Lamb and himself create tense scenes where by and large nothing really happens.

One of the most memorable aspects of Lamb is the sometimes obtrusive, always observant, and downright beguiling narration. In an interview, Nadzam herself has described the one-of-a-kind third-person narrator as more of a distant first-person point of view. The narrator introduces Tommie as “our girl,” David as “our man” and invites the reader to “pause” in order to contemplate how Tommie’s parents and friends are reacting to her disappearance. This manipulative narration—not so unlike the hyper-observant narrators in Terrence Malick’s films—may open up too many distracting questions for some readers who will wonder just who the narrator is: is it Tommie years later? Lamb himself? But for me, the narrator does not to distract; it adds a new layer of tension that implicates the reader in the action of the novel, becoming less a voyeur than an accomplice in the backseat of David Lamb’s truck.

With more questions than answers, Lamb demands a second or third reading to take in the lush descriptions, striking dialogue, and multiple layers of tension. As unsettling, terrifying and uncomfortable it is to be a willing participant in the backseat of Lamb’s truck while reading the novel, the view is undoubtedly amazing and worth revisiting, “all of it vast and unchanging, as though Lamb and the girl were at rest and not rushing west, a diffuse and unmappable destination.”

Lamb
Bonnie Nadzam
Other Press – September 2011
275 pages / $15.95 Trade Paperback