Ten Questions for Francesca Ekwuyasi

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Francesca Ekwuyasi, whose debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, was published yesterday by Arsenal Pulp Press. In Butter Honey Pig Bread, estranged twin sisters Taiye and Kehinde reunite in Lagos to visit their mother. As young children they had been inseparable, but a traumatic event created a fracture in the family that, left unexamined, expanded and festered over the years. Shifting between various time periods, the novel also tells the story of their mother, Kambirinachi, who had her own complex childhood. An intergenerational saga frequently enriched by the language of food, Butter Honey Pig Bread is a poignant tale of familial love and hardship. “Ekwuyasi’s sensuous prose, deft plotting, and keen insights into human nature combine to form a vision that feels like peering deep into the souls of a trio of dear friends,” writes Kai Cheng Thom. Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer, artist, and filmmaker born in Lagos. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Brittle Paper, GUTS, Transition, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 BrooklynWinter Tangerine Review, and the Malahat Review. Butter Honey Pig Bread was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. 

1. How long did it take you to write Butter Honey Pig Bread? 
I started writing it in 2013 and worked on it on and off over six years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The most challenging thing was cultivating the discipline to finish it, as well as the discipline to “kill my darlings,” as they say during the editing process.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
The answer to this has changed and is likely to continue changing frequently, ha! I write in my bedroom, in the studio, in the kitchen, on my work computer at either of my day jobs, in my journal, on my phone. Sometimes, during my more disciplined periods, I write as soon as I wake up. Other times I record voice memos of ideas, plot, or dialogue on my phone while I’m walking or running errands. Sometimes I write every day, other times only a few times a week. Like I mentioned earlier I’m really working on that discipline thing!

4. What are you reading right now? 
Right now I’m reading a few things. I’ll list the last three I opened this week: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, Luster by Raven Leilani, and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. I also thoroughly enjoy audio books—provided I dig the reader’s voice and cadence. I just started listening to The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Ooh this is a tricky question because my answers will be biased to my own tastes! I genuinely believe that any writer who is committed to their craft and doing the work with integrity deserves to be read by folks with whom their work resonates. 

6. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Butter Honey Pig Bread?
I was surprised by how much agency my characters seemed to have; the imagination is wild and impressionable. I was also surprised by my commitment and passion for the story. I didn’t expect it to mean so much to me, but it does.

7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book?
Reading was crucial, as well as indulging in many other forms of art, music, fine art, and performance. Talking to friends and peers, working out dialogue and ideas with them. And other forms of research!

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I don’t believe I know enough about this to have opinions on what needs to change really. I think the writing community and publishing industry exist in the larger context of the world, which is rife with inequity and brutality, crumbling under the pressure of late-stage capitalism, the horrifying symptoms of climate change—you get the gist. Anything that I think needs to change within writing communities and the publishing industry is inextricable from that. For example, the stories that we write and reward are not apolitical, nothing is, but that doesn’t mean they have to be didactic. So perhaps that’s my answer. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My friends and my editor!

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
“Read more than you write. In expressing the ambition to be a writer, you are committing yourself to the community of other writers.” A quote from Teju Cole I found via the Aerogramme Writers’ Studio. 

Ten Questions for Zeyn Joukhadar

11.24.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Zeyn Joukhadar, whose second novel, The Thirty Names of Night, is out today from Atria Books. In The Thirty Names of Night, a young Syrian American trans boy seizes an opportunity to investigate the mystery of his mother’s death. Five years ago she died in a suspicious fire shortly after she came across an exceedingly rare bird nesting on an old tenement building in Manhattan she was trying to protect from demolition. Everyone doubted the discovery; most ornithologists simply did not believe the species existed. Even the narrator doubted his mother, until now, when he comes across a tattered journal belonging to a long-disappeared Syrian American artist named Laila Z, which also makes mention of the bird. With his mother’s ghost frequently by his side, the narrator seeks out answers about the mysterious species and, along the way, makes unexpected discoveries about his family history and the queer and trans histories of his community. Zeyn Joukhadar is also the author of The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone, 2018), which won the Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Salon, Shondaland, PANK, and Mizna, among other publications. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Thirty Names of Night
Three years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Trying to put experiences that are inherently wordless—particularly around desire, embodiment, and existing outside of binary (cis) gender—into words. So much of who we are—and I use “we” here for all of us, including cis people—and how we experience the world and ourselves is touched by the language we have for gender. One of my main questions in the writing of Thirty Names was: When you exist outside of the cisgender binary and, by extension, live your life beyond that framework, how do you convey your experience of yourself? I think there are many answers to that question, some of which include visual art and the sacred. I explore both in the text. I wanted someone still in those early phases of self-discovery, when language is often fraught, to be able to recognize themselves.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
While I was writing Thirty Names I was nomadic, which for me meant that I moved every one to two months for over three years. Being on the move constantly meant that I had to be ready to write anywhere—on planes, on buses, at friends’ dining tables or spare-room desks, or on my laptop on someone’s sofa. Sometimes I’d jot down a scene using the notes function on my phone. I generally write every day for one project or another, and my best hours are often in the morning, though I’ll write at any time I can.

4. What are you reading right now? 
We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Rickey Laurentiis, the author of Boy With Thorn, which won the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2016 Levis Reading Prize.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The three years of housing instability I experienced following my transition made it extremely difficult not only to have the physical space to write, but also the emotional and mental space to focus on my work. The logistics of navigating life as a trans person of color re housing, documentation, immigration, lack of access to health care, and physical and virtual safety are ever-present impediments to my creative projects. I often think of the economic and logistical hurdles other trans creators of color in my life face, and all the incredible work that we’re losing as a result, and it makes me sad and angry at the high costs of cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, ableism, and racism. If we are invested in the kind of radically innovative art and literature of which we, as a society, most certainly have a desperate need, we have to better support queer and trans creators of color, especially Black trans women and transfeminine people, and we need to dismantle the systems designed to silence, incarcerate, and kill us. There is no other way.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I remember my editor told me after reading one of the middle drafts of Thirty Names that she felt she understood something about the experience of being trans that she had never quite understood before. And what stuck with me was the fact that I had put into words a very specific experience of transness and of gender, maybe one of an infinite number of different experiences of transness, and it means something to me that both cis and trans people could identify with that experience and feel connected to it. There is no one single “trans novel” and there is no one single “trans experience,” just as there is no one single “gender experience.” Conceptions of and experiences with gender shape all of us, without exception.

8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Thirty Names of Night
I’ve always drawn and painted—my father was a visual artist, so that was a big influence on me growing up—and I’ve always been particularly interested in nature art. During the writing process, I spent a lot of time drawing birds to explore the character of Laila Z. The team at Atria ended up turning one of my drawings—the yellow-crowned night heron—into a poster that we sent to early reviewers. It was wild seeing it on people’s Instagrams.

9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? 
I really loved writing the historical scenes. In 2019, when I was an artist in residence at the Arab American National Museum, I spent hours listening to the oral histories of Arab autoworkers in Detroit. It was one of the most moving parts of the research process. I felt connected to all the Arab Americans who had come before me and all the different lives they’d led. Knowing that there were queer and trans people in every time and place is also comforting for me. We’ve survived so much, have loved each other through so much, and I wanted to do justice to that history in The Thirty Names of Night.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
You have to become the person who can write the book you’re working on.

 

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the protagonist of The Thirty Names of Night identified as a trans man. The narrator is trans and nonbinary.

Zeyn Joukhadar, author of The Thirty Names of Night. (Credit: Neha Gautam)

Ten Questions for Simon Han

11.17.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Simon Han, whose debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened, is out today from Riverhead Books. Recent immigrants from China, the Chengs are attempting to settle into their new lives in an affluent suburb of Dallas, but find themselves drifting further and further apart in the process. Early in the novel, after a long day at her tech job, Patty Cheng wonders, “Who were these people she lived with, and what did they do when she was not there?” Her husband, Liang, is privately wrestling with his past while running an ailing photography business and caring for their children: eleven-year-old Jack, who keeps to himself, and five-year-old Annabel, a “Problem Kid” at school and a serial sleepwalker. For a while each individual’s troubles and alienations hang in a delicate balance, but then a misunderstanding involving another family in the neighborhood shatters any semblance of stability. A stirring family saga, Nights When Nothing Happens examines both the fragility and strength of the most intimate bonds. “Achingly tender and emotionally devastating,” writes Charles Yu. “A stunning debut that will stay with me.” Simon Han won the 2020 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for Fiction from Poets & Writers. He is also the recipient of awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Vanderbilt University, where he earned his MFA. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Guernica, and the Iowa Review, among other publications.

1. How long did it take you to write Nights When Nothing Happened?  
About six years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Understanding that it didn’t have to be, nor should it want to be, other books I love.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
In a different year it would be every other day or so. I try to go for two- or three-hour blocks to build momentum, to forget, even for a minute, that I’m writing at all—but that’s a luxury. Another luxury now: to write anywhere other than at this desk where I’m sitting at the moment. I miss writing in libraries so, so much.  

4. What are you reading right now? 
A. Kendra Greene’s The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. It’s about Iceland’s museums, the people behind them, and so much more. And Siamak Vossoughi’s A Sense of the Whole—a book of flash fiction. It’s so good! 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I finished Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel Dragonfly Sea recently, which hadn’t crossed my radar when it came out last year. It’s great. It’s about so many things—among them China’s entanglement with Kenya on a national and personal scale. And it rewired for me how language and rhythm can work on the page. Also Colleen Abel, who has a poetry collection called Remake that explores the body and the domestic space and it’s stunning. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The people who gave Edward P. Jones’s books two stars on Amazon. Also Amazon.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
My editor was really good at helping me build my authority as a writer—on and off the page. To say things simply when they needed to be said simply, for example. To know that subtlety can be a form of authority. 

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Depends. Workshop isn’t for everyone, but it was amazing for me, as someone who hadn’t known much about the literary world, to be in a space where people took my made-up stories seriously. I think I needed that to take myself seriously. I know that’s not everyone’s experience though, and an MFA is a big commitment. With the pandemic there are more and more options out there too, including affordable and accessible virtual workshops. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
That’s a tough one. A lot of readers helped my book to be what it is. I will say that around my wife, I get the chance to work through images and situations and characters in their rawest form—basically, she lets me vomit out my ideas to her in a completely judgment-free space. That’s pretty special.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Lorrie Moore said not to write from the assumption that you’re better than your characters. That one’s always stayed with me.

Simon Han, author of Nights When Nothing Happened. (Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh)

Ten Questions for Ellen Cooney

11.10.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ellen Cooney, whose latest novel, One Night Two Souls Went Walking, is out today from Coffee House Press. The unnamed narrator of One Night Two Souls Went Walking has always ruminated on existential questions. She recalls asking her parents at an early age, “What is a soul?” Now in her mid-thirties, attending patients as an interfaith chaplain at a local hospital, she contemplates the same question, turning it over and over and finding new angles. Accompanied by a dog who might well be a ghost, she makes the rounds on the night shift, uncovering new truths about her patients and herself in the process. “This book will grab your heart and not let go,” writes John Grogan. Ellen Cooney is the author of nine previous novels, including The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (Mariner Books, 2015) and Lambrusco (Pantheon, 2009). Her stories have also appeared in the New Yorker, Ontario Review, and New England Review, among other publications. Born in Massachusetts, she lives on the Phippsburg Peninsula in Maine.

1. How long did it take you to write One Night Two Souls Went Walking?
I think about four years. Of actual writing, I mean. There were lots of drafts, each wildly different. It was such a long time coming. I’d had the main character in mind for ages, also the idea of a novel in some sort of medical setting. Why? I was the daughter of a nurse. In my teenhood I worked in our local hospital. As a mom I was in and out of hospitals all the time with my special-needs child. I’m a very ordinary fiction writer in that everything in my life is material. It’s mostly an issue of when to use what, and how. Which can take ages to become known to you!

2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book?
The earliest are many and all about flying, or at least being up in the air and sort of floating around, looking at people and stuff below: memory fragments and vivid scenes involving a small me and that powerful, terrible desire to be like a bird or human kite. Terrible because you have to get it in your head that it’s a desire that will never come true. But then, for me, I was so lucky. I was a child poet. And also a playwright and a story writer. 

Writing is like flying. Well, kind of. My personal greatest fortune is that I know how it feels when a paragraph or a sentence, after many, many tries in the creation, comes out right. Absolutely that’s a desire fulfilled.

3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Not losing my nerve. The form is a tricky one that needed to look so simple; it all just sort of happened. Also, not settling for a draft that was good, merely good, when it nagged at me that I could make it better, even take it to another level.

4. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I only write in my writing room, which is small, and except for bookshelves, blank on the walls. Every day I come in here and write, and either it gets thrown out immediately, or saved for future deletion, until something starts working and a novel is happening. I try to keep a routine about it. Failure all the time! Once I get near what might be the end of the first draft, I have to be reminded to eat and sleep and like, show signs I am a normal functioning human being.

5. What are you reading right now?
I always have a thing going on with some Italian poet from another age, which is my way of staying the grandchild of Italian immigrants—a part of me is always in their other-country of a home, with another language filling the air, always as poetry, even when members of my family were screaming insults or threatening to cause great harm to each other. “My” poet right now is Giuseppe Ungaretti. I am going through a dual-language edition from Archipelago Books of Allegria.

Never, though, am I reading just one thing. For stories I’m in and out of three collections, in daytime only, as these are works that delight me but also in different ways baffle me, scare me, and freak me out: The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark, and Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson. For evening reading I just started the novel River by Esther Kinsky, and I’m slowly absorbing the poetry-like Annotations by John Keene.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I don’t think I’m sure what “wider recognition” means. But like lots of people, especially old-time English majors and getters of graduate degrees in lit, I think about the thing called “the canon,” especially, lately, in terms of American works and writers. You can think, for example, you know something about fiction of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and then one day in a used bookstore you happen upon a Dover Thrift Edition of something called American Indian Stories and Old Indian Legends by someone called Zitkala-Sa, and how come you didn’t know about these pieces? I do not think you can just blame yourself for not knowing such a thing before.

7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Impediments change from life phase to life phase. For me right now it’s all about energy and physical stresses, as I was very ill for a couple of months and while I’m fine now, more or less, I have to learn to live and work—which often mean the same thing—with limitations. I hate it that I can’t go strongly through a long writing shift, and I have to take naps like a toddler. But! I’m still around and still writing!

8. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of One Night Two Souls Went Walking?
Two of my favorite stories are by Gabriel García Márquez: “Eyes of a Blue Dog” and “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” In my novel there are no obvious indications of either work. Because isn’t that the best thing about inspirations? You steal and conceal. 

Somewhere around Draft Number Eight, I realized that an element of each of those stories made it in, morphed of course into my own way of doing things. I was reminded of that angel and those dreamers in my own prose. I loved the surprise of that.  

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I’ve had the same three first readers for ages and ages, and apart from them, I do not show manuscripts to anyone outside the publishing process. Of those three—son, wife, dearest old friend—the number one is my son. I was a teen mom, and for a long time it was just him and me. Which is to say, we go back. He is fifty. I’ve been reading to him his whole life. Lately, since we live on different coasts, him west and me east, we’re on the phone or videos. I read him the rawest, most vulnerable-making early drafts. He never has to use words to tell me when something is off or way less good than I could make it. He can grunt a certain way. Or breathe. Or make a face that’s sort of, “Meh.” Although he is not above outright letting me know something like, “The description of the guy in the next-to-last paragraph kind of sucks, Mom.”

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I really heard this, because it came from myself: a rule, from a time when I needed it, laid out by the me of that present to the me of any future. “Do not write in your head.”

Somewhere in some anthology or collection of stories by Patricia Highsmith, there’s one about a fiction writer, writing fiction. Really actually writing. Punctuation and everything. The reader becomes a peeper, a spy on a creative act, and it’s thrilling and very intimate, and then whap, you find out the writer was imagining the writing, was doing the piece without writing it down, and whap again, the piece will never actually exist. Please if anyone knows what this story is or where it is, do not tell me; I never want to see it again. It’s too horrifying. I know exactly how it feels to sit down to write something I had planned out in my head—when finally in my day, or more likely my night, I had time to work—and nothing came, because I already wrote it.

Ellen Cooney, author of One Night Two Souls Went Walking. (Credit: Greta Rybus)

Ten Questions for Valzhyna Mort

11.3.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Valzhyna Mort, whose latest poetry collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is out today from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Employing various poetic and musical forms, Mort searches for a genealogy in the labyrinthine history of Belarus. With the legacies of various catastrophes looming—from World War II to the Chernobyl fallout—she zooms in on private scenes that are at once gentle and violent. One poem, a lullaby, begins, “Snow glints and softens / a pig’s slaughter,” and throughout the collection there are many such striking contrasts. The cumulative effect is symphonic, generating a “music which, over accordion keys, / unclenches the fist of ancestry, / loosens fingers into rose petals.” Valzhyna Mort is also the author of Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). The recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Amy Clampitt Residency, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, Poetry, and the New Yorker. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she writes in English and Belarusian. 

1. How long did it take you to write Music for the Dead and Resurrected
Ten years of writing—four of them, intensely. What’s impossible to count are the years of lived obsessions that explode into a book. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Knowing that, despite small victories of finishing poems, you are going to fail to capture that thing with words. That thing being the reason why you are writing in the first place. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Where, when, and how often does a religious person worship? My Muse is with me always, everywhere. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I got this wonderful anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry in the Russian translation, and I’m savoring it by reading two poems a night before bed. Also on my bedside is Moyshe Kulbak’s novel The Zelmenyaners, which I open at random and read a few paragraphs at a time like poetry. The Zelmenyaners reminds me where I’m from. I’m also reading From Moscow to the Black Sea, Teffi’s memoir of traveling through Russia and Ukraine after the 1917 Revolution. My former student’s book of poetry, The Understudy’s Handbook by Steven Leyva. More new poetry books: Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral, Obit by Victoria Chang, In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché, The Dyzgraphxst by Canisia Lubrin. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
What is wider recognition, I wonder. Perhaps it’s when an author’s language becomes part of the cultural code? I come from a country where people do not read more than Americans do, but literature is a part of our cultural code. At the Belarusian protests against the authoritarian regime that is currently illegally holding onto power, you can see people holding posters with literary quotes, literary puns. There are books that are a part of everybody’s vocabulary. In the United States, even the “widely recognized” authors aren’t a part of a public vocabulary. Sports and TV shows are. As a result even a literary giant like Gwendolyn Brooks deserves wider recognition. Let’s try to connect to every American household right now and see how many of them have volumes of Emily Dickinson and Gwendolyn Brooks standing somewhere between a TV and a Crock-Pot. I don’t think that we’ll record any wide recognition. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
People who don’t read poetry. 

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Yes, but I don’t agree with this formulation. You pursue poetry, not an MFA. The goal of an MFA program is to provide you with mentorship, community, along with space, time, and money to grow, write, and think. It provides you with access to amazing libraries. It’s a utopia: two years of poetic self-care. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Music for the Dead and Resurrected, what would you say? 
Take another ten years with it? It’s a good thing I cannot go back in time for this. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
A translator. Nobody else has a reason for a reading so obsessive, so slow, so attentive. There’s only one committed literary relationship: between poems and their translator, and trust is at its foundation, especially if the poet is not familiar with the target language. A real translator is not a traitor, but somebody who gives up their lung for your work. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
James Baldwin’s “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”

Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected. (Credit: Tanya Kapitonava)

Poet Valzhyna Mort: An American Debut

Follow our cover subject, Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, on her recent
trip to New York City. From a Ukranian diner in the East Village to a
conference hall in midtown, Mort shares her poetry and talks about the language and people that inspire her work.

Ten Questions for Erica Hunt

10.27.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Erica Hunt, whose latest poetry collection, Jump the Clock, is out today from Nightboat Books. Collecting new and selected poems from the past four decades, Jump the Clock is a wide-ranging yet focused examination of the mechanisms of language. In the first poem, “Preface,” Hunt proposes, “We could eliminate the ritual of walking around ourselves, meet head on.” Here, and elsewhere, the poet models how to speak directly, honestly, and without foregoing complexity. She observes and speaks of body language and grief, love and justice, in scenes that feel at once surreal and hyperreal. Reinventing itself at every turn, Jump the Clock is a master class in attention and engagement. “These poems are embodied,” writes Yanyi. “They are meant to be savored and thought with the heart and the mind; they exist in our world.” Erica Hunt is the author of several previous books of poetry, including Local History (Roof Books, 1993) and Time Flies Right Before the Eyes (Belladonna*, 2015). Her poems and essays have also appeared in BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Poetics Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She teaches at Brown University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

1. How long did it take you to write Jump the Clock?  
Jump the Clock assembles selections from five books of poetry written over a span of almost forty years. There are a few poems, never gathered in a volume and unpublished, but the majority passed the “would I read this poem more than once” test.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging aspect of assembling this selection was suspending my inclination to look for a single integrated through line in the work and accepting that the through line is about the operation of multiple time signatures in poetry. By multiple time signatures I mean the time encapsulated in the poem, the “snapshot”; the time a poem prolongs as feeling or experience; that time contrasted with the time of reading the poem; and then the present time—the poem’s appearance here, early twenty-first century, amidst crumbling structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, maldistribution of wealth, and so on.

Many of my poems seek to invent a language—as if to break out of conventional usage, illuminate the sand pits, and find open paths to emancipation. Meaning binds the generic to the situation-specific, and readers use intuition and reason to see past language’s strictures on thinking and feeling and imagining. That sense of orchestration between our language for mediating the world and our social apprehensions is the book’s through line.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write almost every day, though when I was working full time and raising a family, that was not always possible. When I was working full time and parenting, I sometimes managed the exercise of writing one computer page a day, and many of those pages turned into poems over time. With that said, I have been writing for many years, keeping a journal practice for forty-eight years.

Often I write in response to art, a gallery, or museum show. I will write in the dark while watching a movie, what I see and hear, answers and questions to the scene unfolding in the intimacy of a theater, which is like writing after waking from a dream. I will write in response to newspaper articles, particularly outrageous reports—the strong emotion is an impetus to write my scorn or resistance. I will also write to music, especially music without words, though the soundtracks change from very abstract soundscapes and jazz improvisations to beats.

I am never without pen and paper.

4. What are you reading right now?
Like many writers, I read several books at once. Right now, I am enjoying Ossuaries by Dionne Brand, {#289-128} by Randall Horton, and Numbers by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. I am reading them as book-length poems, though their strategies for achieving a “rested” but still mutable cohesion are different.

Increasingly I am interested in literature working across media and genre that incorporates the visual—DuPlessis, for instance, works with poetry and collage. I am also interested in how writers manifest their work through performance in the reading itself. Julie Patton, Tracie Morris, and Douglas Kearney are brilliant innovators in that realm.  

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are many poets who have received attention and then fallen out of fashion. In this group I place Melvin Tolson, Lorenzo Thomas, and Larry Eigner. Other writers deserving “wider” recognition are Wilson Harris, Carla Harryman, and Sarah Schulman. In poetry, Julie Patton, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Impediments are shape-shifters, different at different times. Time and money—and the apparent lack—are constant. I am also a person who keeps busy: I teach, I am a community activist who is also attentive to care for family and friends. Sometimes I am the “impediment” and have to remind myself that a “no” is a “yes” to the chunk of time required for writing about difficult subjects with complexity, resistance, and seeing beyond the despair of the present.  

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I participate in multiple writing communities, and they have provided different kinds of sustenance to me as a creative artist: Cave Canem, the Poetry Project, Belladonna Collaborative Language Poets, and the Naropa Summer Writing Program all have provided “homes” for my writing and thought. When I teach poetry, I urge my students not to get hung up on the “schools” and to be sure they sustain multiple sources for their work, and just as importantly, to participate in and outside literary communities: to be a part of multiple social worlds. The experience of working in community settings in a workshop, in a voter drive, in planning a demonstration, any volunteering or listening, provides material for one’s work beyond oneself.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Jump the Clock, what would you say?
Trust the process from notes to draft to next draft. From reading critically to reading out loud. From performing to listening again. From redrafting to reframing. Books are not monuments but are particular instances for conversation and thinking through with readers.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
The poet and scholar Tonya Foster, who is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and my partner, the composer and performer Marty Ehrlich.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
From Elizabeth Alexander: As a poet, “Write—and publish—one piece of critical appreciation of another poet per year.”

From Rachel Blau DuPlessis in “Statement on Poetics”—paraphrasing now: A poem is “bottomless,” “intricate,” and “tangible” in detail. I like thinking this is true regardless of “school” or length. Here is what it has helped me to appreciate: A poem is a work made through language that bears rereading, to discover that difficulty is never without love.

Erica Hunt, author of Jump the Clock.

Ten Questions for Khaled Mattawa

10.20.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Khaled Mattawa, whose fifth poetry collection, Fugitive Atlas, is out today from Graywolf Press. Early in Fugitive Atlas, Mattawa poses the question, “How to stop thinking of bodies / as worth extinction, worth eating or enslaving”? Examining both ancient cruelties and contemporary social, political, and environmental crises, Mattawa exposes how humans have become desensitized to suffering, and searches for a path forward. Employing inventive and various forms—one poem, for instance, adopts the structure of an index to break down the language of military occupation—Mattawa reckons with what it means to be human in a troubled and troubling age. “These are poems of exceptionally real human and political consequence, filled with news that the news does not speak,” writes Alberto Riós. “Khaled Mattawa’s Fugitive Atlas is a work of uncommon, poignant character, of resonance and depth.” Khaled Mattawa is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Tocqueville, and the translator of nine books of contemporary Arabic poetry. He received an MA and an MFA from Indiana University, and earned his PhD from Duke University. 

1. How long did it take you to write Fugitive Atlas
Nine years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Settling on the core themes of the book and how best to represent them. For the first five years I did not think I had a book. But once the central sequence of poems emerged, it was a matter of creating a mural where all the parts fit to tell a kind of story.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write mostly at home. I begin with an idea and set it aside, but depending on how I’m drawn to it, I might or might not go back to finish the poem. I think that’s what happens. But in reality, writing seems like a dreamy activity to me. Fugitive Atlas has a sequence of haibun that I no longer recall how and when I wrote. The process must have involved being ensconced at my desk for several days. I realize that sounds torturous, but given that I have no memory of it, it was very likely an ecstatic experience. I don’t go on residencies because my schedule is never that open, but a ten-day residency at the University of Arizona Poetry Center was a very productive time for me. But there too I don’t remember which poems were written during that residency. Written in the sphere of the imagination, poems perhaps seek to be their own beings, not attached to us or to the time in which we wrote them.

4. What are you reading right now? 
The Devil’s Pool by George Sand.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are so many. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Time and everything else. I am engaged in so many extracurricular activities—editing a journal, translation, arts activism, administration—that keep me from writing. But the truth is I need them to stay away from writing, or to refuel my mind for writing. After finishing a book, even if I have a project in mind, trying to write can be demoralizing. The new book project is insisting that it be new, that you renew yourself, which means you have to teach yourself how to write again. I don’t know if that’s an impediment. Maybe it’s just the enduring challenge of the process.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
My editor said, “This is your best work,” which made me feel very good about the book and about my career as a poet.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Fugitive Atlas, what would you say? 
I hear you’re working on a series of poems about Greek myths told from a postcolonial perspective. Good luck with that!  

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
The editor I’m working with. I sought help from several friends with Fugitive Atlas, which I don’t do normally as I think it’s such a big imposition on one’s time. But I did this time and received excellent feedback. However, a book gets built and rebuilt in the editorial process, and for that the editor you’re working with is important. I very much enjoyed working with Jeff Shotts at Graywolf who read and reread the book several times.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Don’t ever find your voice.

Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas. (Credit: Khairy Shaban)

Ten Questions for Destiny O. Birdsong

10.13.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Destiny O. Birdsong, whose debut poetry collection, Negotiations, is out today from Tin House Books. In Negotiations, Birdsong pulls no punches. She exposes and writes against tokenization, fetishization, anti-Black violence, and liberal complacency. On voting, she writes, “we all take the sticker; we all / brag of our civic duty, gliding home / on a wave of solidarity that feels / like kinship.” In another poem, she throws back racist comments at a man: “I hope someone tells you / everything your culture made / is meaningless: Stonehenge, democracies, and you.” Each line in Negotiations is this fierce and truthful. Whether addressing sexual assault and illness, or self-love and community, Birdsong maintains this intense and intimate register. In one poem, the narrator addresses her child self, imagining if only she could tell her, “she was right / in her utter belief she could build a world / and live in it alone.” Negotiations is a whole world of its own, a revolutionary manifesto and love letter. “These poems are desire, survival, the body, rage, vulnerability,” writes Jaquira Díaz. “A fierce celebration of Black womanhood.” Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and MacDowell. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she earned both her MFA and PhD from Vanderbilt University. 

1. How long did it take you to write Negotiations
Though some of the poems in the book date back to 2015, I started writing it in earnest in 2017, and it was a complete accident. That April I did my first 30/30 challenge—thirty poems in thirty days—in hopes of finishing another manuscript, but when I turned back to these poems during a residency later that year, I realized they were talking almost exclusively to each other, and doing something entirely different from the manuscript I’d intended to add them to. I wrote the last few poems to round out one of the middle sections in October 2019, after the book had been picked up. So in total, two and a half years. The other manuscript, which is more than a decade old, still isn’t finished. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The most challenging thing hasn’t happened yet, which is my mother, my family, and a few other folks who are close to me reading the book. There’s a lot in it they don’t know about me, and my biggest fear is causing them pain when they find out. I hope that’s not the case, but that would be incredibly difficult for me. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I don’t write things for public consumption every day, but I do journal most days. I believe that it clears my brain for the writing I do later, whether it be the same day or the following year. Sometimes it offers me a phrase or idea, a concept for a poem, or space to map out revisions for an essay. My writing times depend on the genre: I tend to write poems in the middle of the night, 2 to 5 AM; fiction in midday, from 2 to 5 PM; and essays whenever I have a block of time to work on a draft. I write where I live because I have trouble concentrating when other people are in the room, so coffee shops have always been off-limits for me. If the subject matter is heavy, I write in bed—that’s my safe space. Otherwise I’ll write on the couch with the TV on but muted, so I have someone to look up at every now and then, but not be bothered by the noise. If it’s nice out, I journal on my patio. 

 4. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished a collection of essays called Like Love by Michele Morano, and it was such a fascinating read. The book’s premise is about unconsummated romance in all its forms: with friends, complete strangers, parents, children. It confirmed much of what I’ve been feeling about my own friendships: There can be deep and sometimes even romantic love that just is and doesn’t have to try to be anything else—not sexual, not more platonic—and I can lean into it, flourish in it, give it back, and not feel weird or guilty for doing so. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Tara Betts. She really is a trailblazer for me when I think about the Black women who came before me, who write about what I write about, and who are still out here, doing all kinds of work, both on and off the page. Give her her flowers! 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Right now? Money, which ultimately means time. I spend a lot of time—not to mention energy—doing stuff to pay my bills. I’d love to live at least for a little while not having to worry about that at all, and just writing. 

 7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
A couple of months ago, my agent, Kiele Raymond, told me, “Presses promote books; writers shape careers,” and that was such a helpful way to think about the bigger picture. It reminded me that: 1) A book is not an entire career, and 2) I can—and should—always be thinking about my writing life as a whole, and continue to work toward everything I want even as I prepare for the publication of my first collection. Her advice has also made it easier to pursue other passions right now, like writing essays and fiction that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the book. 

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
The contest model for poetry book acquisitions and unpaid journal publications. Sorry, that’s two, but they both operate on the same conceptual economy of lack that tells us we should be grateful for whatever we get because getting chosen is so hard. And that may be true, but it shouldn’t have to be. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My friend Claire Jimenez. She’s an amazing fiction writer and essayist—and poet, too, but that might be a secret. I’ve learned so much from her, but the trust really comes from the fact that she’s a friend of my work, and I’ve only recently realized how important that is to me. I’ve had experiences where people tried to shape my writing to fit their own agendas or soothe their own egos, and she doesn’t do that. I know I can get an honest read from her. Plus, Claire is scrappy. When she believes in what you’re doing, she’ll fight for you, even if she has to fight against your own misconceptions about the quality of your work. I really admire that about her, and I try to give it back whenever we’re reading each other’s manuscripts. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
My best piece of writing advice came from the poet-scholar Chiyuma Elliott at a Cave Canem workshop back in 2009. I was a baby poet who loved grand finales for my poems, and in her feedback, she said very gently, “At the end of a poem, leave the door open.” I’ve spent every day of my writing life since learning all the ways you can leave a door open: unlocked, cracked, off the hinges. There are so many ways. 

 

Correction: An earlier version of this article was incorrectly edited to state that the 30/30 challenge involved thirty minutes of writing a day for thirty days. Birdsong clarified the challenge she was referring to was to write thirty poems in thirty days.

Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations. (Credit: Hunter Armistead)

Ten Questions for Heid E. Erdrich

10.6.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Heid E. Erdrich, whose latest poetry collection, Little Big Bully, is out today from Penguin Books. Witnessing the country in crisis—the decimation of wild bird populations, the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women, the endless land theft—Erdrich asks readers, “How did we come to this?” Often beginning with personal memory, she writes with an eye for detail and an attention to how language can both reveal and conceal truth. In a world where the bullies increasingly demand, “Avert your eyes / not so you do not see / but so you are not seen,” Erdrich’s poetry models how to stand, see and be seen, and resist. “This book broke me open,” writes Amy Gerstler, who chose the collection as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series. “It electrified me and made my hair stand on end, tingling on my head like a mob of hypersensitive antennae.” Heid E. Erdrich is the author of several previous poetry collections, including Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (Michigan State University Press, 2017) and Cell Traffic (University of Arizona Press, 2012). She has received fellowships and awards from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Bush Foundation, and Loft Literary Center, among other institutions. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

1. How long did it take you to write Little Big Bully
This book came pretty quickly—it was a deep dive and a shock, really. Most of the poems were completed in January 2019. A few poems are from before then, and one or two are from 2020, but most of the work came in a rush during the polar vortex of 2019. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Considering the personal when I generally write critical analysis through the second person or a kind of poetic persona who can stand for a lot of people as well as Native women like me. What I was trying to understand in writing Little Big Bully is the mechanism of abuse that puts all of us at risk. I had to write about my life, the events and abuse inflicted on me as a girl and adult, and worse, what happened in front of me as a child in a world beyond my family where I witnessed brutal misogyny. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
My writing practice is not disciplined. Sometimes I am in my unruly garden, or on a walk, or staring out our porch windows, or doom scrolling. I may look like I am not writing, but I am. I do have a study full of books and curious furnishings in vintage green colors I favor, and I go there most days. But mostly I try to catch a poem in the pool of my life—not unlike someone with a rod at a pond. If you look at them on a day when they don’t catch anything, you would not say they are not fishing. You may not see it, but I am always writing. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
The Old Road by Staci Drouillard, a family story about an Ojibwe community along Lake Superior; Apple (Skin to the Core), a memoir in poems written and illustrated by Eric Gansworth (Onondaga); and my sister Louise Erdrich’s new novel in manuscript draft. I read a lot of titles at once and I don’t finish a lot of books, which I’d like to change. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are many great writers who don’t get enough attention who happen to be Native. Maybe their work is not so Native-forward that it can marketed that way, so publishers take a pass. Of course there are dozens and dozens of Native poets who should be better known. You can find many in the new Norton anthology of Native Nations poets edited by U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo.

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Well, we’ve been saying how male and white it all is and are starting to say how rich it is too. It’s all so mysterious what people get paid for books, what the process is for publication, who decides what, how to get into the biz, how people get prizes or notice or reviews. There’s a lot I don’t know after thirty years. From my time working with visual artists and performers, I don’t think other fields are so closed-mouth. I’d love to see publishers and literary organizations be more up front about who they are and how they support Native and Black writers in particular. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I don’t have an agent—another thing that baffles me as, primarily, a poet. But my editor Paul Slovak and all the folks at Penguin really helped me to accomplish my vision in every detail from revision to design. It’s not what they said, it was that they did not say no. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Little Big Bully, what would you say?
Don’t be too subtle and do read a bit more about narcissistic abuse before you hand off the book. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My sister Louise. She pays a lot of attention to the overall shape and impact of the poems in total. She never suggests an edit or ideas or anything substantive, she just gives me her reading and if it matches what I wanted to say, I know I’m on the right track. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Ah, go on. You’re living your life”—said to me by Grace Paley when I was not writing every day. 

Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully.

Ten Questions for Cicely Belle Blain

9.29.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Cicely Belle Blain whose debut poetry collection, Burning Sugar, is out today from VS. Books, an imprint of Arsenal Pulp Press. Writing about place, art, and memory, Blain is a perceptive traveler of both time and space. Though their observations often begin firmly rooted in the present, each scene quickly spirals outward, resonating across various geographies and eras. In a series of poems titled after cities around the world, Blain notes the idiosyncratic details of contemporary life while equally shedding light on each location’s complex history—too often saturated by violence against Black and Indigenous peoples. Listening for those lost voices, and following in the footsteps of other activists and civil rights leaders, Blain models how to remember everything and envision a more just future. “Burning Sugar is a vigilant time marker and vivid place maker,” writes Amber Dawn. “The bearings of colonial violence and of Black resistance are physically present on every page.” Cicely Belle Blain is a Black/mixed, queer femme writer. They are the founder of Black Lives Matter Vancouver and the founder and CEO of the diversity and inclusion consulting company Cicely Blain Consulting. They live on the lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. 

1. How long did it take you to write Burning Sugar?
Burning Sugar had been an ongoing project for a while. I had several notebooks full of poems inspired by random places or events and when I saw the call for submissions from VS. Books, I brought a lot of it together in a way that made sense. From there, it took about two years to come to the final product.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging part for me was how personal poetry is. It’s definitely a detour from my usual writing that is more political, formal, and educational, whereas Burning Sugar exposes a lot of my inner thoughts and personal experiences. I still feel a bit nervous that it’s out there for people to read!

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write anywhere and everywhere. In normal, non-COVID times, I like to travel and write about the places I visit. I also love to write in art galleries. Now most of my writing is 2 AM notes on my phone. 

4. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and loved it. I definitely prefer it to the TV version but I do love seeing adaptations. I also just started it was never going to be ok by jaye simpson and I’m so excited to dig in. I’ve shared community with jaye for several years and have always been inspired by their work.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This is such a hard question. Any young, queer person of color who has published a book in the midst of a global pandemic.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. Even though I am now a published author, it’s still hard for me to unpack the narratives I’ve internalized that writing is a hobby or less important than other parts of my work. My hope is to be more intentional about carving out time to give my writing the care and attention it deserves. 

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
From what I’ve witnessed so far, it is like many other industries where there is a bit of an old boys’ club and a “who you know” environment. I am so lucky to work with VS. Books and Arsenal Pulp Press because they have experience supporting and uplifting marginalized writers, and that really helped me overcome a lot of the imposter syndrome that I experienced. 

Before landing the opportunity to publish with VS. Books and Arsenal Pulp, I felt so intimidated and demoralized by the rejections I received. So if I were to change one thing I would encourage publishers to provide more opportunities for young people of color—who feel a lot of fear and anxiety engaging with big, white-dominated institutions. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Burning Sugar, what would you say?
Embrace the process, trust your instincts, make the most of the opportunities presented to you, and feel proud of yourself.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
It would have to be Vivek Shraya, the founder of VS. Books. I really felt like she had my best interests at heart and wanted to see me do well. She not only provided her editing skills but also unique advice about writing and publishing on the whole.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write with yourself and your own healing in mind, before you think of anyone else.

Cicely Belle Blain, author of Burning Sugar (Credit: David Markwei)

Ten Questions for Juan Felipe Herrera

9.22.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juan Felipe Herrera, whose poetry collection Every Day We Get More Illegal is out today from City Lights Publishers. In Every Day We Get More Illegal, former U.S. poet laureate Herrera collects scenes and reflections from his travels across the nation. In one poem, the narrator is interviewed by a border machine; in another, an argument unfolds between the speaker and a nameless figure who claims, “you are a paid / protestor.” Excavating American institutions, Herrera forces a close examination of the roots of the nation—“a crust of war operations”—and begins to prepare the earth to heal. With hands firmly rooted in the soil, he reasserts the value of individual lives and stories, including his own. “First I had to learn. Over decades—to take care of myself,” he writes. Sweeping yet precise, Every Day We Get More Illegal is an intimate and urgent call to collective action. “In ways subtle and sometimes proudly loud, this book makes it clear exactly why Juan Felipe Herrera continues to be recognized and sought after for his work,” writes Jericho Brown. “You hold in your hands evidence of who we really are.” Juan Felipe Herrera served as the twenty-first U.S. poet laureate from 2015 to 2017. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has published more than a dozen poetry collections in addition to short stories, young adult novels, and children’s literature. He lives in Fresno, California. 

1. How long did it take you to write Every Day We Get More Illegal
A year and a half. Briars and brambles—it contained cartoons, an excerpt from a new young adult novel draft, and many of the poems in this new book. Filtering out dry branches and thorny sketches and strengthening the remaining pieces with new work was the task. I was used to creating a collection in no more than three months. This new work was a grinning rebel—pounded its fists on the desk and stomped its feet calling for more depth and interrelationships within the flow of the poems. My editor at City Lights, Elaine Katzenberger, liked the original and also cut about forty pages. Mostly the cartoon section—what can you do? There comes a time when you realize that there is much more work ahead on a project you thought was complete. Elaine was meticulous—certain terms were questioned, lines and chapter arrangements were discussed. Back to the infamous chalkboard. I pulled back and noticed she was right at every turn. We worked together and there it was. Letting go and finding new routes and allowing the poem more space and more momentum was key. The cartoons, well, next time—on a parallel table.

2.  What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The time the book required. Allowing insights regarding the work and particular poems to expand and mature was key, most important when you are used to a sizzling pace. Waiting while not stopping was the way of this book. It kept speaking; some lines were tinny, and I had to wait for the right word, just one term. It took months then blam! Other poems looked a bit dusty and not as tuned as the others. Not a big issue. They were comfortable. I left it at that. There are so many layers and voices within the voices and energy tributaries that flow across the book. As long as the circulation of words, lines, stanzas, speaking, force, and depth are moving through the entire system of the book, good. One of the most important aspects is the depth. This collection called for multilayer poems. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
As often as possible, daily. On whatever material is on hand. Eighteen by twenty-four newsprint is most liberating these days. Two desks, one of old wood from an antique store here in Fresno, California. The other, from a used sundry story in Redlands. Of course, Tombow pens, fountain pens, kindergarten green pencils, soft lead, Japanese quill pens, and India ink, photos, ceramic figurines, little karate kids, bills to pay, and an incredible scribbled sheet that claims it is my calendar facing tiny trees by the street. Daily energy is a key ingredient. At the 1985 Bisbee Poetry Festival, John Ashbery mentioned the he wrote once a week. When the poem throttles your innards, that’s when you got to hit the paper and arpeggio the keys—it’s up to you.

4. What are you reading right now? 
Orientalism by Edward W. Said, a book of the late seventies that still provides templates useful in these times. Critiques of power and culture are most relevant in examining notions of how descriptions, narratives, and summaries of our identities and ethnicities are central to our social being and senses of humanity. The other book is Purity and Danger by anthropologist Mary Douglas, a book from the sixties. It is related to the ol’ cultural views of “pollution.” That is to say, who is “dirty,” versus who is “clean” and “pure.” Think about our ideas regarding nation, race, color, identity, borders, genders, sexual orientations—cultural, social, and political assignations are some of the most violently contested conditions facing us today. As writers and thinkers, it is most beneficial to have various ways to analyze our human predicaments. Poetry does this and it can be fortified as well. The deeper the lens, the better our discoveries and more incisive our views and language.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Every author. Poets abound. Every high school seems to have a poetry club and stage-ready mic. We need to promote the new generations, in particular women, trans, and LGBTQ+ poets. Expanding our notions of the definition of “poetry” beyond its institutions is also relevant—Raymond Williams, pioneer of cultural studies, discusses this in his investigations regarding the influence of power in literature, authorship, and the institutions of genre. Marvin Bell, one of my professors, always said before and during his readings at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, “No one knows what poetry is.” I love all of my poetry professors and mentors. They inspired my joy of writing, thinking, and being a poet. Back to the point: We do not have to respect the divisions of human “progress” that differentiates “savages” from “barbarians” onto the “civilized,” a caste-like social segment marked by its development of “literary products,” as Henry Lewis Morgan (“The Father of Anthropology”) wrote in his book Ancient Society in 1877. We are all authors. Let us acknowledge everyone.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Writing. Writing is more than writing. It is more akin to what Lu Chi, the great Chinese poet and literary critic of the third century, called a “delight” in his essay on the “Five Delights of Literature.” What drew me in was the “delight” of “tasking the void.” It took a while for me to unravel this joy. At one of my readings in L.A., I asked the members of a local high school poetry club the question: “What does Lu Chi mean by ‘tasking the void’?” A teen twisted his body and flapped one arm toward the walls as if throwing a discus. “That’s what it means,” he said. An appropriate Taoist response. “Ahhhh, yes! Moving the universe!” The “impediment,” then, is to be unaware of your “task.” That is, when your writing is “just writing” devoid of its quantum relationships with the ever-changing flows in the “audience,” society, and all things. At the ground-level, the need not to write gets in my way. There is more going on than “talking to yourself while you are putting words on paper,” my worried mother told me in a shivery voice decades ago in my Mission District apartment on Capp Street in San Francisco.

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
It’s already changing. The mega-wave of magnificent works by Latina writers and writers of color has encouraged an increased attention of publishers and the scope, story, and text of the book. In 1992, Roberto Trujillo, one of the head archival librarians at Stanford University’s Latin American, Iberian, and Chicano Collections, wrote in the San Francisco Examiner that in the past hundred years there had been about one thousand novels by Latinx writers, some of them “Chicanesque” authors, that is, Chicano-like texts. Today, that is no longer the case. The volume of Latinx novels expands daily. On the other hand, just maybe publishers could have direct lines to MFA programs and multicultural community centers throughout the nation and merge works with Latin America and the Caribbean—a more global body that needs a dynamic, collective forum. The entry into multilingual texts is also another opening publishers are welcoming. The time is right.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Every Day We Get More Illegal, what would you say? 
You are doing great, Juan Felipe. Keep it up. I really like your writing while you are walking bit. And those yellow, legal-size paper pads are hilarious. And those red ink Schaeffer fountain pens, make sure you have the right side up in your white shirt pocket. Last time, when you were shopping for Susan Sontag books at the University Bookstore in Seattle, you literally painted your shirt crimson. Jeez. By the way, maybe you should take a poetry class once in a while—deeper sources, more possibilities. You’ve taken German literature in translation, Buddhism, printmaking. Focus, Juan. They got everything at UCLA, I know, but, come on! I like your writing—just organize it, okay? Get a folder! Good seeing you again.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
Bad habit, good habit: I rarely share it. An ancient pattern of mine. Sometimes I share some of the poems with my wife, Margarita. She is incredible and keen. Sometimes a poem or two, with one of my grad Laureate Lab poets, Anthony Cody, for example, or a good chunk of the text with the rest of the lab team. They are luminaries. I trust them all equally. My children’s book agent, Kendra Marcus, is magnificent, and my editor at City Lights, Elaine Katzenberger, does not hold back. The outcome: serious, unexpected evolution. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Hay que saber luchar!” My mother would always say this, “You have to know how to struggle, fight, survive!” She made it through the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, all the way through the migrant farm working fields to San Francisco. Remember it is art. If you are not enjoying jotting words on scraps of paper, tapping Jazz-like onto the keyboard, noticing tiny realities appear out of the blank universe, the breath of it all, the bounce into the world, the odd-angled something talking, the various stops, pauses, silences, emergence moments, revelations, the gripes, the stubborn figure you’ve become, the ecstatic face you generate when you are “done,” the funky cohort you apparently have joined as you continue, the voices you throw out when you read your work, the variety of printed-out sheet stacks on your desk, this odd plankton you have become swishing toward the oily surface of brilliance at the very top edge of the murky waters, then maybe you got to loosen up or move on to fiction or a “real job.” How about painting?

Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Everyday We Get More Illegal.

Ten Questions for Fariha Róisín

9.15.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Fariha Róisín, whose debut novel, Like a Bird, is out today from Unnamed Press. Growing up in the shadow of her elegant older sister, Taylia Chatterjee always felt invisible to her family and to the world. In the first line of the novel, she reflects: “To be a person was a great mystery to me; even at a young age I felt heavy with the weight of dissatisfaction.” And after a violent sexual assault by a family friend, Taylia is further exiled; she’s disowned by her parents and forced to move out of their Upper West Side apartment. Adrift in New York City, she finds work at a café and searches for community, understanding, and a clearer sense of both the past and future. Precise and intense, Like a Bird is a record of the imperfect and ongoing process of survival and a tribute to the lifeline of chosen family. “Like a Bird is such a generous text, teeming with layered and beautifully living characters,” writes Hanif Abdurraqib. “A flaw of so much book praise is the quest to make every book universal. This book sings, specifically, to a people, while leaving the door open wide enough for anyone else to walk through.” Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. She is the author of the poetry collection How to Cure a Ghost (Abrams, 2019) and the guided journal Being in Your Body (Abrams, 2019). Her writing has also appeared in Al Jazeera, the Guardian, the New York Times, Vice, and the Village Voice, among other publications. 

1. How long did it take you to write Like A Bird
I’ve been writing it for eighteen years. More than half my life. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I think everything about writing a book is challenging. To be read is embarrassing and terrifying. Then to do it in book form and know it will be read in a tangible way by strangers across the globe…that’s wild. It’s a privilege, of course, and I wish I remembered that as I wrote this novel. I’m a Capricorn, so sometimes I can take my own work too seriously. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write every day I’d say. Or almost. It’s one of my favorite things to do in the world. I always write at tables for sustainable, ergonomic reasons. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I read a few books at once. I don’t know why. My girlfriend thinks I’m not gaining any information by doing that, but I disagree. My favorite balance is juggling nonfiction, fiction, and a book of poetry. It’s a delicious balance. Right now I’m reading: Sex and Lies by Leila Slimani; Winners Take All by Anand Giridaharas; She, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo; Funny Weather by Olivia Laing; and She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Etel Adnan. Also I wish Toni Morrison had more of a readership outside of America. She deserves to be read everywhere and to be revered everywhere. 

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

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I just really appreciated my editor Olivia’s assurance that she loved the book. I really need that validity from an editor because I can get in my own head and be very hard on myself. So it was valuable to have someone say, “No, this is good. I’m proud of you.”

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Like A Bird, what would you say? 
You’re going to be alright. You’re going to have the life that you wanted.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
Oh shit. I don’t know really. I have a newsletter that I write almost on a weekly basis—the summer has been hard though—and whenever a close friend tells me about a specific issue that they read and it resonated, I’m always moved. People who read everything I write have a special place in my heart. Especially friends. It’s such a gift to hear that you’re being devoured.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Take a break and then edit. 

Fariha Róisín, author of Like a Bird

Ten Questions for Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

9.8.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, whose debut poetry collection, The Life Assignment, is out today from Four Way Books. Writing in both English and Spanish, Maldonado roams from Puerto Rico to New York City while navigating questions of home, family, and belonging. At times the narrator cannot find peace in his own body—“mad to be in my flesh for one last / minute,” he writes—yet the speaker always presses forward, finding multiple pathways, and embracing a full spectrum of emotions, from love to rage. Revisiting, revising, and playing with memories and moments, Maldonado offers a model for a polyphonic existence. “The poems in The Life Assignment dare to rest in the discomfort of displacement—of the self, of the heart, of literal location,” writes Lynn Melnick. “I don’t think I’ve read a book like this before.” Ricardo Alberto Maldonado is a poet and translator from Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Colaterales/Collateral (Akashic Books, 2013) and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queer/Arts/Mentorship, and CantoMundo. He lives in New York City, where he serves the managing director at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Life Assignment
Ten years. More? The bulk of it: on and off for a decade. The fifteen or so poems in both Spanish and English were written after María made landfall in Puerto Rico. The heart of the book, as I see it: close to three years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Knowing that I could see myself and whom I love, my country, as being legible to the poem, a poem, my poem, even to myself—I had to learn how to do that. Learn the labor of seeing when one is looking that way: toward the homeland. A line from García Lorca’s “The Child Stanton” comes to mind as I try to answer this question: “vete…para que aprendas, hijo, lo que tu pueblo olvida.” Greg Simon and Steven F. White translate this as: “Go to learn, my son, what your people forget.” Who can I call my people? What do they forget, how can I learn and relearn it, and why?

I want to see in my book something I have to affirm—something I am more interested in thinking and talking about: If a (any) narrative arc is worthy of our consideration, it is that the book serves as an act of reconciliation between the body in/of the city and my home language. By which I mean, in the language of the diaspora I could find my assignation. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Often is an uncanny word to think about this year. Where? In the kitchen, between acts, in bed. I have fifteen poems in as many weeks. The apartment is home, therefore: everything. I wrote a poem with words my nephew used on WhatsApp, a poem about insomnia, poem that for lack of effort I titled “For Lack of Effort I Title This Poem New York: April 24.” I told Timothy Donnelly I would title a poem “Dick Loves Me.” Twitter has me writing poems on prescription bottles, poems around the room, poems on graph paper. Poems used to take time to write—but all things I cannot see sing now. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
Been reading and rereading Svetlana Alexievich for some time now—in print and audio. The world coheres because of her. Other things I’m reading, of equal urgency: I just reread Diana Marie Delgado’s Tracing the Horse and found it extraordinary. I am always reading Gwendolyn Brooks. Always, it seems, for the first time, even when it’s not the first. At the start of the pandemic, the Poetry Project released a reading by Ntozake Shange and Gwendolyn Brooks. Quit this interview and head there for it. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I will celebrate the work of Caribbean and Central American writers—those working in and against vocabularies of empire—including Merle Hodge, Edwidge Danticat, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Jamaica Kincaid, Yara Liceaga Rojas, Manuel Ramos Otero, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Tiphanie Yanique, Esteban Valdés, Camille Rankine, Raquel Salas Rivera, Sheila Maldonado. Some emerging, some not. The list is infinite—may it continue to be. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The fear that I may render in my poem a life—my life—illegible to others and to myself. I’ve been living with a thoracic injury for some time; with bad posture, muscles swell, such that every day I ask myself, What are you to do for words? 

7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
I see them often, publishers of renown, celebrating the symphonic sweep of a welcoming American. Yet in whom they publish, one sees a Republic of Persistent Occupation. One could quote the president: “We speak English here.” Choose the bilingual, the multilingual, and the polyglot. The one who translates for another is beloved.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Life Assignment, what would you say? 
This as kindness and mercy: Be with your home language, sooner. There, in that part of your body, is your beginning. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
I want my nephews to find affirmation and corroboration in my poems, to discover something about me and themselves. Doesn’t that make them, in theory, my most trusted readers? But to answer: I use voice memos to send a few trusted poets recordings of new work. I write for them, too. Initially. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
When writing a poem, spend good time moving beyond plain structure and plain fact. 

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, author of The Life Assignment (Credit: Eric McNatt)

Ten Questions for Marie NDiaye and Jordan Stump

9.8.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Marie NDiaye and Jordan Stump, the author and the translator of the novel That Time of Year, which is out today from Two Lines Press. In a remote village in the French countryside, a vacationing Parisian named Herman becomes distressed when his wife and son do not return from a trip to purchase eggs. This was meant to be last day of their vacation, and Herman was eager to return to the city after the idyllic weather had abruptly given way to a chilly rain. Anxiously traversing the community in search of his family, Herman suddenly finds the once amiable locals unnerving. They reply to his urgent queries with vacant smiles, that “time-honored duty to treat visitors courteously, overlook any offense…despite what they might be feeling inside,” and Herman’s mission and resolve appear increasingly fragile. First published in French in 1994, That Time of Year is an eerie literary thriller about conformity, social stratification, and otherness. “Marie NDiaye is one of my favorite living writers and That Time of Year is yet another shape-shifting masterpiece,” writes Laura van den Berg. Marie NDiaye is the author of more than fifteen novels, short story collections, and plays. Born in Pithiviers, France, she has received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, the country’s highest literary honor. In addition to That Time of Year, Jordan Stump has translated numerous other works by NDiaye, including Ladivine, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2016. His other translations from French include books by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Eric Chevillard, and Claude Simon. 

1. How long did it take you to complete work on That Time of Year?
Marie NDiaye: It’s difficult to remember exactly because it’s already been twenty-five years since I wrote this book. I believe it took me about a year and a half. That’s the amount of time it took me in those days, and the amount of time it still takes me, to see a novel through to the end. 

Jordan Stump: Probably about a year, but not a year of solid work—I was translating other books while I was doing this one, and I also have to fit my work as a translator into my teaching schedule.

2. What was the most challenging thing about the project? 
Marie NDiaye: At the time I’d recently moved to Cormeilles, a village in Normandy that gets a great many tourists from Paris and Great Britain in the summer. I had to learn to live in that village after the summer was over, after the bustle and the sort of artificial but still agreeable cheeriness that visitors bring with them. The idea of the novel grew out of that experience: How does one live in a village when nothing comes in from outside to provide some sort of diversion? This was long before the internet, so distractions and ways of escaping the little world of village were much more limited. 

Jordan Stump: NDiaye’s writing is so beautiful, so distinctive—when I first tried to translate one of her books, years ago, I gave up in despair after a few pages. I just couldn’t figure out how to write her voice in English in a way that sounded like her voice. I kept trying. In the end I think I more or less learned to translate her writing, but that doesn’t stop every new book from confronting me with the same challenge as that first one: How to duplicate in a second form something that is so entirely and so magnificently itself alone?

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often do you translate?
Marie NDiaye: I write in an office I’ve set up for myself—a little room in the house where I spend most of the year, not far from Bordeaux. I write starting in the late afternoon from about 5 PM to 9 or 10 PM every day.   

Jordan Stump: I try to translate every day, even if it’s just a few lines, or even if I’m revising more than I am translating. I probably spend ten hours revising for every hour I spend actually turning the French into English. I work wherever I can: at home, or during office hours at the university, or on airplanes—back when people took airplanes.

4. What are you reading right now?
Marie NDiaye: An anthology of contemporary French poetry. At the same time, a rereading: E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. And also—I always read several books at a time, at different times of the day or night—Lydia Chukovskaya’s journal of her conversations with Anna Akhmatova.   

Jordan Stump: In all honesty, I’m just finishing up reading the books I’m teaching this semester—I like assigning books I haven’t read before. I’m doing a class on contemporary writing in French by women: Just now it’s Celles qui attendent by Fatou Diome.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Marie NDiaye: Hélène Bessette, a postwar French writer whose prose, at once concrete and lyrical, produces in the reader a delicious feeling of suffocation.

Jordan Stump: Well, Marie NDiaye, since you ask. At least in this country.  

6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry?
Marie NDiaye: I don’t know. 

Jordan Stump: I don’t really have any complaints—I think there’s far more openness to translated works and to adventurous writing from the non-English-speaking world today than there was even just ten years ago, and I see that as a glorious development. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Marie NDiaye: There wasn’t anything like that. 

Jordan Stump: No one thing, but I’ll be forever grateful to CJ Evans at Two Lines Press for his enthusiastic embrace of writers like NDiaye and for his unfailingly sensitive and thoughtful editorial suggestions.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life?
Marie NDiaye: Social life, going out to see people. I always have trouble working after I’ve spent a long time in conversation.

Jordan Stump: Time.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
Marie NDiaye: Jean-Yves Cendrey, my husband, a writer himself. He’s always the first person who reads what I write. His feel for language and his perceptive sense of the “outline” of a novel, possible weaknesses in the plot, are remarkable. I always make some fundamental changes to my work after he’s read it. 

Jordan Stump: My wife, Eleanor Hardin. She always reads my translations before they’re published, and I’ve found that her ear and her eye—for both what’s right and what’s wrong—are simply without peer.  

10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? 
Marie NDiaye: When I was twelve years old and my French teacher, after he’d read my composition, told me, “You’re going to write books, I’m sure of it.”

Jordan Stump: “Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage” —Nicolas Boileau, L’art poétique (1674) 

A very elegant sentence, more or less impossible to translate—it plays on two senses of the word ouvrage—but the meaning is at once simple and profound: Constant revision and rethinking are the key to artistic creation. You’ve got to “put your work back on the table twenty times” before it’s done.  

Editor’s Note: Marie NDiaye’s answers appear in translation from the French by Jordan Stump.

 Marie NDiaye and Jordan Stump, the author and the translator of That Time of Year (Credit: NDiaye: Francesca Mantovani)

Ten Questions for Joshua Bennett

9.1.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Joshua Bennett, whose second poetry collection, Owed, is out today from Penguin Books. In Owed, Bennett covers immense territory in precise and nimble lines. Experimenting with the resemblances between images and words—“owed” and “ode,” for instance—he constantly discovers new angles to his subjects, whether tokenism, police violence, and reparations, or barbershops, school buses, and the plastic cover on his grandmother’s couch. Each object, place, or history is always more than itself, and Bennett models how to revel in the joy of that multiplicity. “How good it feels,” he writes. “To see this many people dancing / in a city best known / for its casual indifference.” Each poem in Owed is a prism for both truth and transformation. “This book is part of a breathful, bodied fight for Black life,” writes Aracelis Girmay. “I am emboldened and sharpened by Bennett’s genius and by his love made plain across each of these shimmering pages.” Joshua Bennett is the author of a previous poetry collection, The Sobbing School (Penguin Books, 2016), and a book of literary criticism, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020). He holds a PhD in English from Princeton University and an MA in theater and performance studies from the University of Warwick. He teaches English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.

1. How long did it take you to write Owed
I wrote the bulk of Owed between 2016 and 2019. I was finishing graduate school at the time and had just started a three-year term at Harvard in the Society of Fellows. The book is primarily the product of those years spent traveling between Cambridge, New York City, and various venues across the country, reading poems at middle schools, high schools, and colleges, trying to stretch my voice a bit. I was finishing another book at the same time—Being Property Once Myself, which was published by Harvard University Press earlier this year—and I wanted the poems to reflect the energy of the Black social life I theorized in that book, though in what felt like a very different register. I didn’t want to lose any of the music in the dance between poetry and theory.  

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Probably putting together the “Reparation” sequence. Doing so required me to spend real time with matters that I have explored elsewhere, though not quite with the same level of intensity. Writing on my father’s battle with stomach cancer, for instance, demanded I revisit one of the more difficult times in recent memory. The collection, in a sense, begins and ends with him. He both appears on the book cover and within the world of the final poem. So consciously meditating at length on that period—as well as the question of what calling a poem about the experience “Reparation” meant for the stakes of the collection as a whole—was complicated. Is it clear what I mean? I had to sit with the fear and let it talk to me. And talk through me as well. Then I had to realize that that thing, that fear, wasn’t going to go away without some more work, and that I still had to get on with finishing the book. All of the poems in that sequence are like that in one way or another. Writing about reparations, my time in therapy, my mother, my father’s illness, required me to stay still and not run from the occasion that brought me to the page.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day. Not always poems though. Fairly often, at present, I’m mapping out ideas for new research projects, editing talks in progress, and working on this pair of genre experiments that have been on my mind for years now. I used to write each morning at the dining room table, but recently promised my wife that I’m going to stop doing that, so I’m going to stop doing that. In an effort to break the habit, I bought a desk earlier this summer and look forward to building up a routine of writing there. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
Cheryl A. Wall’s On Freedom and the Will to Adorn. This alongside Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron and James Baldwin’s One Day When I Was Lost

Additionally, a week or so ago I picked up Corduroy by Don Freeman for my son who’s on the way and thoroughly enjoyed rereading it. I hadn’t held a copy of that book for well over two decades. It now holds a place of prominence in our home. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I always answer this question with some variation of “June Jordan,” because it’s true. But I’ll also add to this list Christopher Gilbert, Conrad Kent Rivers, and Wanda Coleman—both her poetry and her prose.  

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
I’m not sure that I have any worth mentioning. My own vulnerability to distraction, perhaps. I’ve written for as long as I can remember and in all sorts of situations. I can write in a window of several minutes or an afternoon where there’s not much on the immediate to-do list—however rare as of late. I’m thankful to have this sort of space. I do my best not to take it for granted. 

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? 
Rigor. Imagination. Thoughtful, meticulous, courageous editors are a dream. The best ones I have ever worked with have always taught me something new about myself, about my habits of mind or unknown strengths. My collaborations with them have been nothing short of transformational in this way. Gifted editors are also educators of a certain kind, is what I’m trying to say. They open windows in us. 

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
I’m not entirely sure what constitutes a writing community for your readership; mine is mostly friends I made in school, at poetry slams, and via sharing videos on the internet. I love those people and wouldn’t change anything about them. My experience with the publishing industry is fairly limited, but what’s clear to me, even at this early stage, is that there are very few Black agents, editors, and decision-makers more generally within it. Ever since I started out, I’ve found this fact to be rather startling. That won’t change without a prolonged, good-faith commitment at every level of the industry. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My most trusted reader of my work is probably my friend, Jesse. He’s not a liar.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Greg Pardlo told me: “Don’t be afraid to use of all of your Englishes.” Saidiya Hartman said “You must listen to the language that Black people have used, historically, to describe ourselves.” At Princeton, Imani Perry and Eddie Glaude once enjoined a room full of us to commit to the beautiful sentence. Whenever I sit down to write, these pieces of wisdom are working through my mind. They are my armor and incantation. 

Joshua Bennett, author of Owed

Ten Questions for Daisy Johnson

8.25.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Daisy Johnson, whose second novel, Sisters, is out today from Riverhead Books. In Sisters, a single mother and her two teenaged daughters upend their lives in Oxford, England, and move to an isolated home at the edge of the sea. The girls, July and September, had been struggling in school; July was mercilessly bullied and September was growing increasingly volatile as she fought on her sister’s behalf. In their new environment, the siblings are even more friendless and dependent upon each other than usual. Their bond becomes increasingly intimate and troubled. In one passage they narrate in a conjoined voice: “It would have surprised neither of us to have found, slit open, that we shared organs, that one’s lungs breathed for the both, that a single heart beat a doubling, feverish pulse.” An eerie psychological drama, Sisters wrestles with the most extreme of family ties. “A taut, disturbing, and brilliantly written psychological drama of the first order,” writes Jeff VanderMeer. “You’ll read for the quality of the prose, but also the amazing depth of characterization and mystery. Another great book from one of our finest writers.” Daisy Johnson is also the author of the short story collection Fen and the novel Everything Under, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018. She lives in Oxford, England. 

1. How long did it take you to write Sisters
It’s always hard to say as the glimmer of an idea appears in my notebook long before I begin writing. I think it was probably about two years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I wanted it to be a long book, but the book knew itself and understood it was always going to be short, and we fought for a while about this. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write at my desk or in a café or on trains or at the pub or on holiday with friends. When I am working on a draft I try and write Monday to Friday and have weekends off. Having those two days off is always really important for me; I come back to the book on Monday with much better and clearer ideas. I try and write a certain amount per day, and on good days I finish that by the morning, but some days are slower and I’m still staring at the screen by the end of it. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m finding it difficult to settle on one book at the moment. The pile I have by the bed includes Mariana Enriquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, and Magma by Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I don’t meet enough people who’ve read Helen Oyeyemi. 

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My dad calls it the monkey on your back, the fear or paranoia or anxiety that weighs you down. I think my monkey is comprised mostly of guilt and panic and some days it is a very heavy monkey. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
My editor often asks me to slow down in particular scenes and this is something I keep in mind while I’m writing—where do I need to linger more, am I carrying the reader with me—and also probably in life. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Sisters, what would you say? 
Oh, she’s so different I don’t think we’d be able to hold much of a conversation. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
There are a couple of people who are vital in my writing. My agent and editor are both fierce and tough and truthful. I also have three friends who read my work and who have been reading it for long enough that they know what I want to achieve even if I haven’t managed to achieve it yet. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I was recently reading Helen Garner’s diaries in The Yellow Notebook and there was a brilliant line that went:

The beginner will cling and cling to her thin first draft. She clings to the coast and will strike out into the ocean only under extreme duress.

I know that feeling in every draft where you must strike out into the ocean, and this quote gives me courage. 

Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters (Credit: Matt Bradshaw)

Ten Questions for Khadijah Queen

8.18.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Khadijah Queen, whose latest poetry collection, Anodyne, is out today from Tin House Books. Anodyne is a salve for disaster, in which Queen makes room for joy without denying grief. The first poem, “In the event of an apocalypse, be ready to die,” begins, “But do also remember galleries, gardens / herbaria.” In the second poem, Queen reflects on a loved one’s battle with depression, but also how she can make him laugh, how she’ll fight for him: “I would move the fucking universe for you,” she says. Meditating on family, history, landscape, and many other subjects, Queen always summons a diverse chorus of emotions and forms. In the darkest hour, there is always a “but”—always a capacity for transformation. “This is a powerful and dazzling collection, filled with wisdom and experience,” writes Ilya Kaminsky. “Anyone who reads Anodyne will remember it for a long time.” Khadijah Queen is also the author of Conduit, Black Peculiar, Fearful Beloved, Non-Sequitur, and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Fence, Tin House, and American Poetry Review, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder and in the Mile-High MFA at Regis University. 

1. How long did it take you to write Anodyne
From the time I decided it was a manuscript through to completion, about two years. But the poems range in age—some were first composed a couple of years ago, most between 2016 and 2019, and a few more than a decade ago.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I wrote much of it in the year after the 2016 election, so the most challenging thing was, and continues to be, living through the difficult sociopolitical circumstances we find ourselves in as a nation. I also felt torn at times between making the more fragmented poems narrative and letting them breathe how they wanted to. I chose the latter.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I have had different habits over the years. One thing I did during the process of writing this book is allow my writing practice to change with my abilities and responsibilities. I used to write every day—I did that for six years straight until 2015, when I had emergency surgery and had to recover. Now I tend to write in concentrated periods of time. That varies—weekends, a week, several weeks—depending on the project and what life has in store.

4. What are you reading right now?
I just taught Toni Morrison’s Sula and A Mercy, so those are still sitting very close to me. I am about to teach Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, so I’m just starting to reread that. On my e-reader: Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, John Freeman’s The Park, Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris. On their way to me: Erika T. Wurth’s You Who Enter Here, Nate Marshall’s Finna, Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory, francine j. harris’s here is the sweet hand, Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, and Monika Sok’s A Nail the Evening Hangs On.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Ruth Ellen Kocher. Divya Victor. Karenne Wood. Yona Harvey. Simone White. Kate Durbin. Ashaki M. Jackson. Bettina Judd. Sarah Gambito. I could go on—so much brilliant work continuing to be made.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
I try not to think in those terms. Life has endless complications, obstacles, responsibilities, difficulties. Over the twenty years I’ve been writing poetry, I’ve tried to use them all in the work, even if I don’t get to the actual writing part until later. I think about what happens in life as part of the writing process, because it is—writing is part of my life, and life is part of my writing.

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

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
I think everyone has to make that choice for themselves. I value my MFA and I do think it was worth it. I wanted professional training and I got it. I wanted a community of writers and I got that too. If I’d chosen a different path, I am sure I’d still be writing, but I don’t know if I’d be writing books or teaching, and I wanted to do that. I’d say to be clear about what you want from an MFA program, weigh the pros and cons carefully, and do your research on the programs you’re considering, including talking to alumni and current students. Don’t be shy about that. How they talk about other students, colleagues, and other writers says a lot about the culture. Reach out to faculty, too. All institutions come with challenges and issues, though, and higher education is in flux. But in any decision, I’d say to keep your unwavering focus on the work you want to do and make. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? 
I would love to witness the professionalization of care and generosity in both our field and in the world generally, and I don’t care if it sounds Pollyannaish. In her poem “Paul Robeson,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote: “we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” I believe that it heightens the professionalism of the workplace to care about how you treat other people, how your actions and words affect them, to value humanity over profit and fame, and I try to behave and make choices accordingly.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
It wasn’t so much advice as a statement. Chris Abani was one of my mentors in grad school and I remember someone at an event asking him to talk about which genres he wrote in. He writes in all of them, so he said something eschewing the urge to think in terms of genre. He said, “I write books.” I remember thinking: Yes. I want to do that

Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne (Credit: Michael Teak)

Ten Questions for Shruti Swamy

8.11.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shruti Swamy, whose debut story collection, A House Is a Body, is out today from Algonquin Books. Set in the United States and India, A House Is a Body features a diverse cast of characters who are struggling to make their way in the world amid mental health crises, loss of loved ones, and extreme wildfires. In one story, a woman repairs a burst seam on a coat that belongs to a dead friend, “Why bother?” she wonders. “But she must bother.” Later, she observes, “What a violence mending does, the needle piercing and piercing.” A House Is a Body is filled with such tender yet sharp observation. The characters always “bother”; their actions brim with humanity even as the world moves to take it away. “There is nothing, no emotion, nor tiny morsel of memory, no touch, that this book does not take seriously,” writes Kiese Laymon. “Yet, A House Is a Body might be the most fun I’ve ever had in a short story collection.” Shruti Swamy’s writing can be found in the Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Kenyon Review Online, among other publications. A Kundiman fellow, she has also been awarded residences at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Hedgebrook. She lives in San Francisco. 

1. How long did it take you to write A House Is a Body
I wrote a draft of the earliest story in the collection in 2008. The bulk of the book was finished by 2015, but I worked on the manuscript again with my agent in 2016, and then again with my editor last year. So I think it’s fair to say ten years—give or take.  

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Story to story, I had many moments of challenge—often related to plot, which is not my strong suit, or simply keeping up the momentum and courage to push through to the end. But as a whole, one of the challenges I faced was making the stories I wrote into a cohesive collection, one that was not bound by location, shared characters, or even a single common theme, but rather a voice, perspective, and sensibility. I guess what I mean is the challenge was finding the larger picture, how the stories spoke to each other, and what they were trying to say. It changed quite a bit over the years—often it was the help of an outside perspective that allowed me see what I was trying to do and to shape the collection accordingly. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
In the corner of my bedroom I have a very, very small desk that was actually called a side-table in its Craigslist posting, upon which I did very little writing before the pandemic. I use it much more now. With noise-cancelling headphones on, I try to imagine I’m shutting a door to the outside world, though the headphones don’t really cancel much noise. I try to reserve the afternoon hours while my daughter is napping for my writing, but I am generous with my definition of “writing”: reading, writing in my journal, and meditating—but not napping!—all count. I completed a major revision of my novel during the first month of the pandemic this way, running on the world-ending adrenaline of it, maybe. Now I am not as focused. But I have been through fallow periods before so many times that they don’t worry me so much. Something will come again, if I am listening. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished Renee Gladman’s Houses of Ravicka, the conclusion, I think, to her dreamlike and disorienting series of novels that center on the invented city-state of Ravicka. I wouldn’t like to live in Ravicka, whose customs and language are so obscure and subtle to outsiders that they are close to nonsense. Still, inhabiting it for a time was an escape for me from the surreal nonsense of our current reality. Also, with the rest of America, I am reading Brit Bennett’s riveting The Vanishing Half. What can one say about it, except that it is a perfect novel. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Ambai, who writes in Tamil, but is readily available in translation in English. I’m still in shock that I learned of her work so late, with the publication of the excellent A Kitchen in the Corner of the House by Archipelago Books last year. Each story in that collection is a marvel, communicating so much about human nature—grace, violence, humor, connection, and distance—through the smallest moments.

Another author is Vandana Singh, a science fiction writer of short stories. The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet was excellent, but her more recent Ambiguity Machines is even better. She’s a worthy heir to Ursula K. Le Guin, whom she studied with. Her ability to imagine other worlds and ways of being is astonishing, and her stories are rendered in graceful prose. 

By some lucky coincidence I wound up reading both of these authors at once and felt like my understanding of short fiction—especially fiction by and about the South Asian diaspora—beginning to crack open.

6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
I think it depends on what they wanted to get out of it. The most valuable thing I got out of it was the introduction to the books that shaped me as a writer and as a person. More than anything, I learned how to read: deeply and carefully and slowly, which is not my natural mode. I still don’t know if good writing can really be taught or learned in the classroom, perhaps not directly. But learning to read well, and also being a kind of editor for the works in progress of peers, can be enormously useful in one’s own writing life. I don’t think that an MFA is the only place to learn those things, though, and there are a lot of other means to becoming a good writer. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Rather than any one thing: After years of feeling very outside the publishing industry, it was tremendously moving and inspiring to me to have two people I admired so invested in my work. In a funny way, I think that it has made me bolder as a writer.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started A House Is a Body, what would you say? 
I don’t know if I have any knowledge that will help that younger me! I had a strange sense of belief in myself in those days, which I didn’t yet deserve—my writing didn’t yet deserve it, because nearly all of it wasn’t any good. Somehow, after years and years of work, it got better—maybe I simply believed that it could, that I loved writing and I could get better at it. If I had known just how long it would take to get a book into print, I might have despaired, but now, having waited and worked through those years, I’m glad for it, in that I know that this is the best this book could be without becoming a whole new book. Because I had written so many stories by the time I sold the manuscript, I had some freedom in putting the collection together. Ultimately, there isn’t a story in the collection I don’t feel proud of, even though they were written by a younger, wilder writer who had fewer tools and less life experience at her disposal. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
I am lucky to count many good and generous writers as my friends, who have read so many versions of my stories and novel. But most of all is Meng Jin, whose beautiful first novel, Little Gods, came out earlier this year. Meng has not only a great eye at the sentence level but also a kind of genius for structure—she’s able to see things buried in the text that I didn’t even notice were in there and help me tease them out. Over the years of our friendship I think we’ve come closer and closer in our taste as readers, and though our writing is different, it also seems to be interested in similar ideas and ways of seeing. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Shamala Gallagher, the poet, essayist, and also my brilliant best friend, once told me, regarding a piece of dialogue that wasn’t working: “I think your characters understand each other too well.” People misunderstand each other more often than they understand each other, and for all sorts of reasons—they miss each other’s subtext or don’t have enough context or are lying to themselves or are being lied to. And actually that can be true of the internal experience of the character as well—we often say or do things without a perfect understanding of why we did them. We’re lying to ourselves, maybe, we’re overwhelmed with emotion, we have hidden motives that lie underneath our explicit desires. People understanding each other too clearly can also be, for me, a symptom of me trying to control the story too much, an attempt to “get to the point,” which comes at the expense of actually listening to my characters.

Shruti Swamy, author of A House Is a Body.

Ten Questions for francine j. harris

8.4.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Cherie Dimaline

7.28.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Adrian Tomine

7.21.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Kendra Atleework

7.14.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Ryad Girod and Chris Clarke

7.14.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Andrew Durbin

7.7.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Sophie Mackintosh

6.30.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophie Mackintosh, author of Blue Ticket

Ten Questions for Kyle McCarthy

6.23.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Emily Temple

6.16.20

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Temple, whose debut novel, The Lightness, is out today from William Morrow. High up in the mountains at a place known as the Levitation Center, sixteen-year-old Olivia is searching for answers. One year ago, her father, a dedicated Buddhist, traveled to the center and never returned. Olivia knows he’s probably long gone—off at another retreat or temple or community—but she enrolls in the center’s special summer program for teens all the same. “I thought that if I learned this place, I would also learn him,” Olivia says. “That I too might be transformed. Into what exactly, I didn’t know. Something new and pink-skinned, fresh and holy: a girl worth coming back for.” Shortly after camp begins, she bonds with a trio of girls—Serena, Janet, and Laurel—and the four set out with unique determination to learn the elusive skill of levitation. In tracing their pursuit of this perilous practice, Temple tells a mercurial tale of girlhood, love, and faith. “This remarkable novel is made up of equal parts desire and dread; it constantly surprised me, eerily outpacing my expectations,” writes Garth Greenwell. “The Lightness is a glorious debut.” Emily Temple’s fiction has also appeared in Colorado Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Indiana ReviewNo Tokens, and other publications. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Virginia, she is the managing editor of Literary Hub and lives in Brooklyn. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Rachel Eliza Griffiths

6.9.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Seeing the Body

Ten Questions for Ilana Masad

5.26.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ilana Masad, author of All My Mother’s Lovers

(Credit: Joshua A. Redwine)

Ten Questions for Kate Zambreno

5.19.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts

(Credit: Heather Sten)

Ten Questions for Cooper Lee Bombardier

5.12.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooper Lee Bombardier, author of Pass With Care

Ten Questions for John Elizabeth Stintzi

5.5.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments

(Credit: Melanie Pierce)

Ten Questions for Rufi Thorpe

4.24.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rufi Thorpe, author of The Knockout Queen

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Frances Cha

4.21.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Time applied equaled work completed.” 

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

Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face.

(Credit: Mia Jang)

Ten Questions for Ho Sok Fong and Natascha Bruce

by

Staff

4.14.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Questions for Krista Franklin

4.7.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Krista Franklin, author of Too Much Midnight

Ten Questions for Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

by

Staff

3.31.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, author of Hex.

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Marianne Chan

by

Staff

3.24.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marianne Chan, author of All Heathens.

(Credit: Clancy McGilligan)

Ten Questions for Paul Lisicky

by

Staff

3.17.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

Ten Questions for Carolyn Forché

by

Staff

3.10.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Don J. Usner)

Ten Questions for Jordan Kisner

by

Staff

3.3.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Ebru Yildiz)

Ten Questions for Kawai Strong Washburn

by

Staff

3.3.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Crystal Liepa)

Ten Questions for Nancy Krygowski

by

Staff

2.25.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nancy Krygowski, author of The Woman in the Corner.

Ten Questions for Brandon Taylor

2.18.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life.

(Credit: Bill Adams)

Ten Questions for Mark Bibbins

by

Staff

2.11.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Bibbins, author of 13th Balloon.

(Credit: Rex Lott)

Ten Questions for Gabriel Bump

by

Staff

2.4.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Jeremy Handrup)

Ten Questions for Charles Yu

by

Staff

1.28.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown.

(Credit: Tina Chiou)

Ten Questions for Danez Smith

by

Staff

1.21.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danez Smith, author of Homie.

(Credit: Tabia Yapp)

Ten Questions for Meng Jin

by

Staff

1.14.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meng Jin, author of Little Gods.

(Credit: Andria Lo)

Ten Questions for Anna Wiener

by

Staff

1.7.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Author: squong

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Date:
  • November 30, 2020
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