I am beyond thrilled to announce that the anonymous (and awesome!) Appalachian street artist FINAL GIRL has graciously agreed to allow us to illustrate our April WOMEN issue using her fantastic images.
As for her art, she says, “I have to do it or I’ll die.” You can read a brief manifesto (of sorts) here and view many of her images at her Tumblr page and Like her on Facebook.
And stay tuned for the April issue!
Allison Hrabar: Tell me about why you first started writing.
Annie Bolger: I think I started writing from a young age. My parents always encouraged me to write, and they’ve kept copies of a lot of my earliest work, including one poem called “Frog of Thunder.” I’m pretty sure one of the lines — I was thinking of this earlier today — was “he’s evil but charming! He’s one alarming frog.” There’s a couple of other gems there — I wrote one about bourgeoisie cookies. I just sort of went crazy with a rhyming dictionary, and I thought that was poetry.
So that was me as a kid, and I think I got self conscious as I got older, so I stopped. I wrote occasionally through high school, and then in college I started writing again because I took a course on poetry and stories told through verse. That really inspired me: “oh, there’s a thing in my life! I want to write a sonnet about it!” And so I did, and it was a really fun, validating way of expressing myself. So I took a couple of classes in creative writing, and that was that.
AH: How was writing in classes different than writing on your own?
AB: When I’m not writing in a class, I only write when I’m inspired. “Oh, this really dramatic thing happened to me, I must write about it!” Then I’ll sit down and rhyme through it. And that’s kind of interesting, because there’s usually something that’s important enough to me that forces me to sit down and work through it through poetry, but the problem with that is that I only write poems on those certain sets of experiences, and those don’t happen very frequently. When I’m in a workshop, I’m obviously forced to crank something out. So if I’m having trouble, I have to go different sources of information and find different ways of approaching something. It forces me to stretch my brain and stretch my writing in ways I don’t always do outside of classes.
AH: And has writing so constantly changed your perspective or style?
AB: Yeah, it really has. It’s made me be a bit more disciplined writer. It’s made me realize that you don’t always have to wait for this inspiration, that sometimes it’s better to just sit down and try to write something. Even if nothing’s coming, just try it for like five, ten, fifteen minutes. I’ve gotten more used to that process of being stuck and having to write through it.
AH: Is there a particular topic you write about a lot?
AB: I guess I write a lot about connections and relationships. I like to analyze moments of my life a lot. Something will happen, and I’ll attempt to examine it from many angles.
AH: Go into that a little more. Why do you like to write about those things?
AB: I think I like to write about them because I like to think about them, and I also don’t really like to act on things. Sometimes I think poetry is a bit of a way of dwelling on something without actually having to take action on it, which sounds bad. But I think it’s a way of also working through things and trying to see them more thoroughly. How would I tell this in a sonnet form, how would I tell this in free verse. How do I make this experience rhyme?
AH: So poetry has become a way for you to process things?
AB: Yeah, definitely. And then I can look back and look at a collection of work that I’ve made and say, “Wow, I was feeling these feelings at a time.”
AH: What does it feel like to look back on something that you felt very strongly about?
AB: I would say my attention definitely goes to different things. When I’m very much in the moment, I’ll be focused on a certain line and think, “That line was so powerful,” and I’ll focus less on lines that are just trying to get on their way there. So I’ll be revisiting a poem and think, wow, that line doesn’t quite make sense. Or, that line is kind of funny. That’s where this poem ended up. It’s always a new experience, because I’m much less in the heat of the moment, so it’s a little clearer to see how that experience was communicated to someone who was not in it like I was.
AH: Is it hard for you to, especially in class, to share what you’re still processing? Has that become easier as you’re writing more?
AB: Well, everyone is class is very careful about not saying, “Oh, you say this,” or “You said, ‘I am really sad right now’ in your poem, you should say that in a different way.” Instead, people make a point to say that the speaker said this or that, sometimes to a funny extent. I think that when I start pulling out poems that are more personal, it’s been towards the end of a workshop when I feel like I’m surrounded by this community of people that are supportive and know my work. They might know me a little bit, but not too well, so I feel safe sharing those poems. We’re all there with the understanding that we’re all poets, so we can share things, but we want feedback on our work.
AH: Is there any advice you’d give to other young poets in college?
AB: I guess I would say that you’re probably going to write a lot of bad poetry. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable to write it, and it doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile to do it. I very much have a fear of writing bad poetry, or not writing good poetry. And so I think getting past that has been really important to me as a writer. And don’t necessarily look for validation outside for your work. You can seek that, but it can also come from within.
AH: Tell me more about your collection.
AB: So, I recently wrote and published a handmade collection of books entitled Dated. It’s a pun: it’s about the classical world and romance. I am a classics major as well as an English major, so it combines my love of Greek and Roman and old stuff with my feelings about love. It was a really fun exploration of this academic side of my life and this intensely personal side of my life. It was really validating and fulfilling being able to combine those in this creative project.
AH: What was it like physically making your own books?
AB: It was very meditative and obviously very hands-on. It was very gratifying. I had to teach myself how to make the books. How to do pamphlet style, how to stitch it. I went through a couple different versions of the books, and I actually individually tea stained and poured salt on all of the pages. I was able to survey each and every single poem in each and every single version of it. Each book in the collection has turned out a little differently because of that. I think that that has given me this physical, tactile relationship with my poetry that I had never really experienced before. It’s much different than printing out twelve copies and handing them out to the class. When I hold my books, I’m holding on to my poems, and I can see my life’s work right there.
Allison Hrabar is an Honors student at Swarthmore College studying political science and film. In addition to working tirelessly as News Editor for The Daily Gazette, she is a producer at War News Radio, a Swarthmore project dedicated to covering international conflict. She spends her spare time convincing people to watch The Americans (Wednesdays at 10pm on FX) and dreaming of writing for The A.V. Club.
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?
Growing up, we had a shelf in our den full of beautiful old books that had been in the family for a long time. Like most book nerds, I loved opening them gently, turning their pages, and of course taking in that old book smell. But then I started reading them, and one in particular. It was James Whitcomb Riley’s Afterwhiles. For most of fifth and sixth grade, I returned to it every day for one poem, called “A Scrawl.” I just loved it. In sixth grade I started writing my own poetry. Funnily though, it took me a very long time to encounter contemporary poetry. It wasn’t until I was an undergrad that I knew people still wrote poems. I took a writing class and was assigned Sharon Olds’ The Gold Cell. That was a shock, to say the least. Of course, the best shock ever.
Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?
Only in the past year or so do I really have a writing routine. I try to get up a couple of hours before I need to work so that I can write in the morning. And “writing” at that time can mean reading poetry, drafting new poems, working on old ones, or reading things I’ll find inspiring, like Astronomy Magazine or flipping through a coffee table book of paintings. If I’m reading, I always try to draft something or other on what it is that day, but it also seeps into my writing later. For a long time I resisted having a set time to write every day, but I realized I just had to suck it up, because it’s too easy to let it fall through the cracks, and too upsetting when it does.
Where do your poems most often come from—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?
My poems come from a lot of different places. From images, from phrases, yes. I work with a poet (Alice Kociemba) who makes a distinction between “head” and “heart” poems, and my poems are very much heart poems. My poems aren’t always entirely straight forward, but they are never coming from a place with the goal of making someone think. I love poems that evoke a feeling, a sense—to me, the beauty of a poem is making you, in one small page, feel something that you wouldn’t have felt that day, something that someone else has felt.
Which writers (living or dead) do you feel have influenced you the most?
Poets would be Sharon Olds, Eavan Boland, Natasha Trethewey, Mary Oliver, Rumi, Walt Whitman. But also Louise Erdrich, Geraldine Brooks, Megan Marshall, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Shelley. And the faculty of UNH’s MFA program, Mekeel McBride, David Rivard, and Charles Simic, had a huge impact on my writing and on the way I think about and revise a poem.
Mary Akers: Thanks for agreeing to talk with me about your wonderful collection The New Testament. I enjoyed this collection so much, Jericho. It has stayed with me for weeks, much like your other collection Please did when I first read it. In fact, I would say you write the most haunting poems–in the best sense of the word “haunting”–the specter of them hovers, they follow me around, hang about, shimmer. It’s probably a personal thing, but what do you think makes a poem “haunt” a reader?
Jericho Brown: Thanks so much, Mary!
This is very hard to narrow down. But I think being haunted means to be very aware of a presence we cannot see or touch. I guess all good poems are haunting then, because they ultimately put sounds and images in our heads that are nowhere but our heads. The poems themselves are only ink on a page. So I’ll go with music and image as an answer for now.
MA: I like that answer–and now I’m thinking it could apply to all forms of writing. The term “Poetry of the Body” comes to mind when I read your work. I’ve heard several poets employ the term lately, so I googled it and came up with a page that declares, “Poetry should be read aloud, tasted on the tongue, felt in the blood and heart.” I agree, but I wonder how a poet who writes work as somatic as yours feels about that definition. What do you think it means to be a poet of the body?
JB: The “poet of the body” is one who reaches for revelations that are made in and through the body before they are fully understood in the mind. I want to believe that poems ask us to make use of our instinct and intuition, that they create feelings in us similar to hunger or to an itch. When we get these feelings, we know we need to eat or that something could be crawling on our skin.
MA: Yes. Beautiful. So…bearing in mind that artists and their work can fit into many different categories, would you place your own work in the category of Poetry of the Body?
JB: I don’t try to do any categorizing of myself. It would take all the fun out of writing if I bothered to place myself in such ways. And because I’m so skeptical of my own habits, it would lead me to writing against something that may well be the thing that makes my poems particular.
MA: Reading your wonderful collection also had me thinking about form. You manage to create work that feels simultaneously structured and free, precise and ecstatic. I really admire that. It’s like watching a potter throw a pot–every precise, practiced movement combines to create this fluid dance of hands on clay that looks effortless. Eventually that fluid clay becomes a hardened, finished vessel. Magic. So…structure and freedom: how do you strike these contradictory notes so beautifully in your work?
JB: Thanks, Mary. Some of this happens simply because I’m bold enough to believe that it’s there. Some of it happens because I revise until my eyes hurt. I like things that look effortless, which is why I like listening to people like Brandy Norwood and Cindy Herron and India Arie and Lalah Hathaway. But I also love to hear a good deal of effort from time to time, which is why I’m attracted to Karen Clark Sheard. I try to be open to anything happening when I write a first draft, and I start pushing for something greater than that so-called freedom while revising.
MA: One of my favorite poems in The New Testament is the heartbreaking ghazal “Hustle.” (If I might stay with the question of form a moment more.) When I was in art school, if a professor told me to create whatever I wanted, I would often freeze up–too many possibilities! But if I was told “Make something this size, using this medium, etc,” I found that the constraints actually freed my mind and I was able to be even more creative. It was as if the fences helped me wander. Do you find creating art that sticks to form to be a freeing experience? Or narrowing?
JB: Form is often the best thing that’s ever happened to me because it asks me to search myself for words and rhymes and rhythms I may not naturally fall into. This pushes me to say things that I don’t expect myself to say. And of course, that’s the joy of writing a poem.
MA: You have three, related and untitled poems in the center of the book. Five, actually, but the three are directly related and the other two inform them. I have to say, this sequence totally sneaked up on me and by the last one I felt like I’d been gut punched. So powerful. I’m curious, did you always envision these poems working together in this way, or did that only come about in the process of organizing the book?
JB: Oh, I actually think of “Motherhood” as a poem in five parts with each part on a different page. I didn’t want it numbered because of the narrativity I thought the prose parts would already gesture toward. And, I thought it important that the parts in lines work as a kind of foundation that gives rise to what goes on in the prose poem parts. I’m glad to hear the poem is of use to you.
MA: Ah, okay. That makes perfect sense–form is the answer!
A recent reviewer had this to say about your work: that “…the same words and phrases, and ultimately, the same speech, can be read as either erotic or political or religious…” That speaks so succinctly to one of the things I love most about poetry in general and your poems in particular. They get AT so much with precise but also duplicitous words. Have you always loved words? If not always, then when do you remember feeling that love for words develop. Can you point to a specific memory?
JB: My grandmother used to say things like, “You ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.” I imagine growing up around people that talked that way all the time taught me that language had fabric. I always wanted to hear older people talk because the way they talked was in and of itself an experience; an experience even greater than the information of the stories they told. When I think of what I want to do as a poet, I think of that.
MA: As a fellow southerner, I hear and respond to that rich fabric of language in your work. And as you know, I edit a recovery-themed journal (in which some of your wonderful earlier work appeared). I’m fascinated by both the idea and the mechanism of recovery. It strikes me that a great deal of the poems in your book have some aspect of recovery in them. So what, would you say, does “recovery” mean to you?
JB: It means: everyday I understand that the wound can lead to anything other than pain is a day I’ve survived even my own worst fears about the wound.
MA: Yes it does. Thank you for this discussion and for your wonderful work, Jericho. It enriches my life.
Jericho brown is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe University for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry and Nikki Giovanni’s 100 Best African American Poems. Brown holds a PhD from the University of Houston, an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and a BA from Dillard University. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament, was published by Copper Canyon Press. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta.
(Jerri Bell) Tell me about how you chose to start writing.
(Emily Rich) I went through a really rough period where I had two chronic conditions before I got cancer. And then my mom got cancer, and that just brought up a lot of memories I needed to deal with. I am not somebody who does well in therapy, so I started taking classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, just as my own therapy to work through stuff, and I got the bug. I started doing workshops and I loved it. And it helped me deal with what I was going through.
(JB) What part has writing played in your own recovery journey? How specifically did getting it out help you?
(ER) Most people will tell you that it’s not healthy to keep things bottled up inside. My mother was the champion of that, and I learned a lot of those behaviors from her. When something’s going wrong, you don’t talk about it. You just keep it hidden. Writing has forced me to confront my own demons. What helped me the most was the process of having to be very careful and think through things as I put it on the page. It clarified the trauma and my response to it. I’m a big blocker-outer, so I had buried a bunch of stuff. Just working it out on my own was very helpful.
(JB) How did you choose the specific incidents that you were going to use for “Malignancies?” What about those incidents made you choose to put them together for a piece to submit to r.kv.r.y quarterly?
(ER) Once I started thinking back on it, this incident when I went home for my mother’s first diagnosis captured our family dynamic. I had always set out to write about my mom and my relationship in the last few months of our relationship – dealing with flashbacks and unpleasant memories. And yet…she was dying. I didn’t want to be cruel. I certainly wasn’t going to bring up all my resentment, at least not to her, at that point.
(JB) Did writing about the childhood trauma trigger anything? How did you deal with it, when it brought up something that you weren’t quite done processing?
(ER) There’s a Robert Frost quote that I kept in mind when I was writing: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” I cried a lot when I was writing some of those scenes. Sometimes you can work through it, and sometimes you have to step away until you calm down. On the other hand, if you hit a vein and you’re really feeling something, sometimes it’s good just to get that out.
(JB) A while back, we both read Alison K. Williams’s essay “Don’t Be Brave” in Brevity. She talks about approaching “difficult material” in a constructive way, and I think you managed that brilliantly in “Malignancies.”
(ER) She writes about dealing with the drama of the moment, not just the drama of the situation – putting people in a scene, and letting the scene represent the larger situation. As an editor, getting lots of submissions, I wish I could send that quote out to people. They talk about trauma in generalities, and it’s very hard for the audience to relate to that. It helps to slow it down – to put the trauma in a scene, and to focus on the action. It makes a greater connection with the writer when she doesn’t tell you how to feel, or how to react.
(JB) And she talks about ending on a moment of empowerment. You start “Malignancies” with a question: will I let my mother visit so soon after my own cancer diagnosis, or not? Then you take readers on the journey of what happened the last time your family was in this kind of stressful situation together, so we understand why, at the end of the essay, you choose a different path for handling your own diagnosis. That decision was your moment of empowerment. As an editor, I see that as the kind of resolution that readers need to feel that they’ve been taken somewhere good.
(ER) I wanted to show myself in what I think is a true light – not just as an innocent victim. Going through traumatic events is confusing. Especially as a child, you just go along with a lot of what happens. That’s why I put in the scene with the dog. I feel guilty that I took my kids to that house, at a stressful time when I knew my dad wouldn’t be able to control himself. Even as a child, I never had the feeling that I deserved my father’s abuse – I never blamed myself in that way. But I did inherit the family response of burying stuff that needed to be dealt with.
(JB) Have you shared any of your writing with your family?
(ER) My husband’s family is a big cheering section. But it makes my husband uncomfortable to read my essays – I think that he doesn’t like to think about me in that way. All my kids have read some of the essays, and my daughters have both read my draft memoir. I think it has been great for them to be able to see where their mom is coming from. It was strange for them that we were so close to my husband’s family when they were growing up, but we never saw my family. So this explains a lot. And I’ve shared some essays with my younger sister. We had both buried a lot of stuff, so this has brought it up in the open and brought us closer. Now we can talk about it.
(JB) Tell me about some of your favorite memoirs, and why you think they’re good.
(ER) This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff; Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller; and The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls. I still have a tendency to look back on myself as a little kid and feel sorry for myself. But I don’t get that feeling when I read those memoirs. When you’re with the protagonists in those books, even with the traumatic things that happen to them and the bad situations they’re in, you’re still with that little kid. Even when you’re experiencing something traumatic, you’re still just a little kid, having your little-kid thoughts, dealing with things in your own little-kid way. Those books capture that well. I’d love to be able to get in touch with that side of my past. Another memoir that I enjoyed is Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. She’s so honest about her own shortcomings, and her struggle to overcome them. I think that’s why so many people have responded to the book.
(JB) What advice would you have for other writers who are just starting to explore trauma through writing?
(ER) If you’re going through that trauma in the moment, if you’re dealing with your own illness or that of someone you love, or God forbid, through some sort of domestic violence, do write it all down. But know that you may need to step away from it for a while. When it’s so fresh in your mind, it’s hard to step away and see the bigger picture, or to bring a reader in. You’re so much in your own head dealing with it. When I first wrote about my cancer, I put in every detail of every medical appointment, every test, what it felt like to be on the phone. There’s just so much stuff. And you think you’ll remember everything – but you won’t.
(JB) How do you define recovery for yourself – both physical recovery, and psychological or spiritual recovery? Which was harder to write about?
(ER) Physical recovery is so much easier. When you’re recovering from a disease, there are certain milestones that you look for. I recovered from the surgery. I recovered from the chemo treatments. The hair grows back, your energy comes back – it’s easy to quantify that. And you’ve got the doctors, they’re always telling you yes, you’re making progress. So it’s easy to watch your own recovery from something physical that has an end point, though of course it’s different if you’re dealing with something chronic.
(JB) And psychological recovery from a childhood trauma is a different process?
(ER) Much different. It’s so nebulous. You don’t know if you’ve reached it, or if you ever really will. My sister, who’s in the story, just emailed me an article from the New York Times – “To Stop Violence, Start at Home” by Pamela Shifman. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/opinion/to-stop-violence-start-at-home.html) Both of us are still dealing with the issues from growing up. She said, “I cried, and then I thought how amazing it is that you and I both managed to break the cycle…not to have our sons and daughters grow up thinking that home violence is normal.” It made my day when she sent me that message. My dad’s mom was an abusive alcoholic – he grew up miserable, and then he made his own family miserable, and I think it’s a measure of my emotional recovery that my dad and I went opposite ways.
Jerri Bell, a retired naval officer, is the managing editor for O-Dark-Thirty (www.o-dark-thirty.org), the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project. VWP founder Ron Capps realized that writing was key to his recovery from severe post-traumatic stress that nearly cost him his life. He created the Veterans Writing Project to bring no-cost writing seminars to veterans across the country, give them the tools to tell their stories, and publish their work.
Keith Leonard: One of the many things I enjoy about “Bathing my 20 Year Old Son After He Has Broken His Arm” is how it moves through both action and meditation, and yet, the poem is never confusing despite a volleying of those two registers. Could you discuss your relationship with clarity in your poems?
Cecil Sayre: The most difficult aspect for me in writing my poems is accurately presenting the emotions of the moment, and I suspect that might be the more meditative parts of the poem. The physical, the action, is much easier to convey; that’s the concrete and almost simply becomes a reporting of the ‘facts’. I struggle with honesty, that is, finding the words that express most truly how the speaker feels. This usually requires the most revision and maybe that constant revision leads to the clarity that you are asking about. I know when it scares me in its truthfulness I have it right.
KL: How has parenting influenced your writing?
CS: Parenting forces me to accept my age, while at the same time remember and re-examine my childhood, albeit from a new perspective. I’ve become more aware, each and every day, of being a parent and a child. My work almost always focuses on the relationships we have and form with each other, and the duality of parenting, being both a parent and a child, leads to all sorts of revelations about the self.
KL: Speaking of “childhood,” can you talk a bit about how you were first introduced to poetry?
CS: By the age of nine I was writing prose, poetry came later and I kind of fell into it. By my preteens I had discovered the Doors and was captured by Jim Morrison’s lyrics, which are poetry. Reading about Morrison’s life I learned he read Rimbaud and the Beats, they were his inspiration, and so I began reading them too. The fact that poetry could have such a strong impact with so few words just knocked me out, and I began reading whatever I came across, both the good and the bad, trying to figure it out.
KL: This poem pays particular attention to the body, describing the son’s age as evidenced by his long hair and broad back. This is a broad question, but could you discuss your understanding of the relationship between the body and poetry?
CS: The body is poetry. It is poetry, it is music, it is art. It is the one thing we can know without doubt. It is the most consistent concreteness we have access to. The death of poetry is abstraction so we must write from the body and of the body. Once we have established the body in poetry, in words, then we can allow in the abstractions, the thoughts about the body.
KL: Can you think of any other poets who seem to share your sentiment about the body in poetry? Who do you turn to for inspiration?
CS: The first two poets I read, devoured, were Charles Bukowski and Adrienne Rich. Their work is very physical, especially Bukowski’s, he is all about the experience of the body, but so is Rich, particularly her book Dream of a Common Language. Lately I’m enjoying the work of B. H. Fairchild.
KL: What are the particular difficulties with writing about family? And besides family, what are some themes or subjects you find yourself writing poems about?
CS: There is a thin line to tread when writing about others, especially family. As a rule, I try not to write about them, or their experiences, instead focusing on my experiences, even though it may, and often does, concern an event we shared. All I can do is be as honest as possible about what I think/thought and felt and at the same time be respectful of the other person (or persons) involved. A difficulty is the form. Some things must be changed to fit the limits of a poem. Hopefully what does become changed, or omitted, is not that relevant. And ultimately what it is all about is the creating of a poem, a work of art, something made up; it is not a factual report of the event.
Most of my poems are about relationships, and specifically family relationships. Some deal with my immediate family, while others tackle family history, and in those instances the family history may serve as more inspiration than anything.
KL: This poem take a wonderful turn at the end when the father’s frustrations are turned back on himself as he realizes his impatience is the failure of the situation, not the broken arm and anger of the son. What is your understanding of failure/mistake in poems?
CS: That’s an interesting interpretation of the poem’s conclusion. I don’t exactly see it as a sense of failure on the father’s part, but maybe more one of resignation, perhaps a failure in general but not one assigned to either party. I feel the poem concludes with more of a feeling of hopelessness. There is some mutual understanding gained by both the father and the son, but not one that seems to solve any issues or even brings them closer. And interestingly it is through the son’s own innocence and naiveté that the reader is offered this insight. So perhaps in that respect there is a failure on the father’s part, an inability to acknowledge the totality of the situation.
Keith Leonard is the author of a forthcoming poetry collection, Ramshackle Ode (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, spring 2016), and a chapbook Still, the Shore (YesYes Books). He has held fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Indiana University, where he received his MFA. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, and Gulf Coast. Keith is a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Indiana University.
Our wonderful January illustrator, Randi Ward, is also a talented poet with a forthcoming poetry collection, Whipstitches. Here are some links to more of her fine poetry:
Thrush Poetry Journal and also here.
The Enchanting Verses Literary Review
And also links to her fine photography:
The Stockholm Review of Literature
Whipstitches will be released by The Operating System in Brooklyn later this year.
R.G. Chandler interviewed Matthew S. Rosin about his flash fiction story “Hope,” which appears in the Winter 2015 edition of r.kv.r.y. quarterly. Rosin and Chandler met when they worked for the same education non-profit. They eventually got to know each other as creative writers and are now part of the same writing group.
Chandler: “Hope” is a powerful story. After reading it, I had to wonder: where did the story originate? The metaphor of the sand and the bucket is so vivid and so alive that it must have a back story.
Rosin: “Hope” is the story of someone seeking treatment for mental illness: depression, anxiety, what have you. I’ve dealt with these challenges — first depression, and more recently anxiety — for all of my adult life.
The story sparked one morning while I was driving. I had just dropped off my child at daycare and was heading to my favorite coffee shop to write. It had been a rough morning, and my anxiety level was still rising. Fast.
Then, while stopped at a traffic light, I suddenly noticed my body. I was hunched forward at the steering wheel, my neck crooked, as if struggling to hold up a weight.
In that moment, through stepping apart from the sensation and trying to understand it, the energy that had fueled my anxiety made a sort of creative pivot. By the time I got to the coffee shop, the sand and funnel imagery that became “Hope” were calling me to write. Two hours later, I had a relatively tight first draft.
I think that’s why the story packs a punch: it contains the urgency of a man writing his way out of an anxiety attack.
The details in the story are fiction. But the metaphors and the phenomenology all came from my noticing and trying to express in words what anxiety was doing to my body.
Chandler: What made you chose to write “Hope” in a second person point of view? Did you start off writing the story in second person, or was that something you shifted to?
Rosin: I did it intuitively from the outset. But the second-person point of view stuck around through all the revisions because, when combined with the imagery, I think it pushes the reader to find solidarity with the protagonist.
For example, my goal with the opening lines was to place the protagonist’s burden — the weight, the need to make sense of what’s happening and find some kind of equilibrium — immediately upon the reader.
Chandler: There are lines in “Hope” that I find fascinating because of the word choices you made, such as: “The doctor does not wear a white coat, but all the possible names for your struggle listen on a shelf behind her, inside a book as heavy as the sand in your skull.” What made you choose the word “listen?”
Rosin: The book in question is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which is the manual that mental health providers use to categorize mental illness. It gets revised periodically, and the boundaries between old and new disorder categories — and between disorder and the ordinary difficulties of everyday life — shift around. Those shifts have consequences for people’s lives.
I described the DSM as “listening” because it’s not an inert tome on the shelf. By entering a psychiatrist’s office and asking for help, the protagonist’s troubles will be absorbed into a set of categories for making sense of mental struggle. Insurance payments and, in the case of the story, medication that might help will follow.
I’m not criticizing this, by the way. My own life is more livable for it. Diagnostic categories, whatever their truth, bring a language for making sense of your struggles. You can move beyond your inchoate fear of going crazy. With help, you can learn to objectify what’s happening to you, recognize its movements and moments within you, and act in the world to counter it.
Chandler: Every single word in “Hope” seems to have been specifically and carefully chosen. It doesn’t feel like you dropped any word in by accident. So again, in reference to the previously-quoted line, you write that “the doctor does not wear a white coat.” Then, when you describe the pharmacist a few short lines later, you state: “the man wears a white coat, but he is not a doctor.” What’s the deeper meaning behind this contrast? What’s the significance of the white coat?
Rosin: One thing I wanted to show through the story is how new hope sometimes takes its first breath in response to small things vested with symbolic weight. Like the couch in a doctor’s office. Finding a name for your struggle. A pharmacist’s white coat. Mapping out future events in your cell phone’s calendar. Little capsules and pills.
Only a few days ago, I was picking up a prescription at my pharmacy, and the woman behind the counter wasn’t wearing a white coat. I’d seen her in the store before, so I wasn’t totally put off by it. But still, I felt slightly anxious until she reached for her white coat and slipped it on. I guess she’d just arrived at work or returned from a break. Somehow, that coat transformed my perception. It affirmed my trust in her.
But I don’t think I’d want to walk into a psychiatrist’s office and be welcomed by a white coat, despite the fact that white coats symbolize all the responsibilities and trust we grant doctors in our culture. You’re there to treat your body, sure, but it’s not a room for physical examination in the usual sense. It’s more intimate than that. It’s a place to tell ever-truer stories about your vulnerabilities, wrestle with them, and plan new responses. You’re there to prepare your spirit for the road ahead.
My own feeling is I’d rather the symbols of medical authority — the diplomas, the DSM — hold up the walls and the shelves. Then, in the space they hold open, I can take the risk to spill some of my sand before another person — one who listens and helps interpret the patterns on the floor.
Chandler: Your style of writing mimics that of a poet. “Hope” seems more “linear” in nature, compared with the longer paragraphs usually found in prose. Also, it distinctly follows Coleridge’s description of poetry: the right words in the right order, with each line building on the line before. You’re very good at leading up to and then packing a powerful punch into very few words, such as: “Like dad did.” Considering this, I have to wonder: what is your poetry background? What other forms of writing do you engage in?
Rosin: Poetry is important for how I think about writing fiction, especially flash fiction.
My dad, Gary S. Rosin, is a poet. He’s long been active in the Texas poetry community. As a kid, I attended his poetry readings — at least the ones before bedtime — and proudly put a copy of his first chapbook on my bookshelf. Now, my dad and I talk about writing all the time, and he’s been steadfast in supporting my turn to fiction.
One thing I got from my dad and his poetry readings, I think, is a feeling that written language wants to be spoken. That feeling also comes from my being a songwriter and musician. Most of my own poetry is used as lyrics, which means I’m always concerned with the sound, rhythm, flow, and cadence of the words I write.
When I revise a piece of fiction, the process always includes reading aloud. If I trip over a sentence, or if it feels awkward on my tongue, I rewrite. I tweak the placement of paragraph breaks with speech in mind, too. In the case of “Hope,” that meant short, spare paragraphs.
My dealings with poetry and songwriting have also given me a desire to pack the most power into the fewest words, with the right image at the right moment. I aspire to that, anyway. Flash fiction is a great context for that because you’ve only a limited amount of real estate to get your point across. The words need to cut, bloom, explode.
Chandler: I know that you were previously an education writer. How does nonfiction writing differ from fiction for you personally? Was this a difficult shift, or do both of these writing personae come naturally to you?
Rosin: The audiences and their goals differ. So do the means by which you interrogate reality: creative use of metaphor only goes so far in an education policy document before data and charts come calling.
But my transition from nonfiction to fiction has gone smoothly, on the whole. Ultimately, the goal in both contexts is to tell a worthwhile story well and invite your readers to wrestle with ideas and themselves — and to become the kind of writer who can pull it off. That’s the common calling.
Chandler: I really enjoyed “Hope” and other pieces of yours that I’ve read. If someone wanted to read more of your work, where could she find it? What can we expect from you in the future?
Rosin: “Hope” is my first published piece of short fiction; other stories will hopefully appear in the future. In the meantime, I will publish a novelette — a fable called The Honeydrop Tree — this year. And I publish periodic “Reflections On Fatherhood” podcasts and other writings via my website, www.matthewsrosin.com. I welcome everyone to visit, read, and listen!
* * * * *
R.G. Chandler is a Bay Area, California writer and poet. She has been described as “the voice from the curb” because her words turn the forgotten — the homeless, the alcoholics, the drug addicts, those who suffer mental illness — into real human beings. Chandler has published a novel (Surviving Xcarion) and several poems and short stories, and she has three screenplays out for consideration. You can find her on Facebook.
Photo of Matthew S. Rosin by Todd Rafalovich.
Randon Noble: I love the immediacy of using the second person. What made you decide to use “you” instead of “I” for your essay Fifty-four Weeks?
Annita Sawyer: I decided I wanted to experiment with point of view, just to see what I could do. It was my idea of daring. I’ve wrestled with my relationship with my younger self for as long as I can remember; if I were to identify my emotional unfinished business it is allowing myself to risk feeling compassion for the girl I was in the hospital.
The psychological testing experience had always remained vivid in my mind, and I remember my amazement, and relief, when I found a reference to this particular event – his question and my incorrect answer – in the hospital records. I’d described the scene with myself struggling to answer the psychologist’s question in the memoir, but I wanted to expand it. Addressing my younger self from the present proved more intense than I expected. I actually began to care. Once I had those feelings and began to respond in my older, wiser present voice the essay took off.
RN: You have a memoir coming out in June — Smoking Cigarettes, Eating Glass: A Psychologist’s Memoir, which was selected by Lee Gutkind for the 2013 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards nonfiction grand prize. Very exciting! But it can be difficult for a memoirist to decide what stories to tell and what stories to keep private. Can you tell us a bit about your process?
AS: The book grew from the experience of reading my hospital records and finding myself thrown back into my past. What I naively thought might take a few months – “I’ll be done by the end of the summer,” I said in April, when I decided to send for the records – dominated my life for a number of years. With significant support from a skilled and experienced therapist I gradually extricated myself from the scariest depths. I emerged with insight about trauma, which was a relatively new area of research and treatment in 2003 compared with what we know today, and I felt an urgent need to pass on what I’d learned.
The process involved two books, in effect. I signed with an agent early, before I knew much about writing or memoirs. She had read only an initial collection of perhaps twenty scenes or stories centered on my hospital experience. She felt changed by what she read, and encouraged me with her enthusiasm and gave me a few ideas about what it needed to be complete. I’d say that in general she was pretty hands-off, but she believed in me, which was huge. Of course, I was delighted to have a respected agent, but I was completely out of my depth, and too inexperienced to really appreciate that. About a year and a half later, I’d completed a simple version, all in the present tense. Present tense made the hospital scenes powerful, but it didn’t include the perspective people wanted from the psychologist side of me. Although my agent received many “rave rejections,” as she called them, after more than a year of sending it out, we both knew the book had to be revised.
Meanwhile I was developing as a writer. I understood that to be viable the memoir required more depth. During the next few years I think it had at least five different titles, illustrating the fact that I hadn’t yet quite found my way.
As a writer, I tried hard to give myself at least an hour every morning to write, but I often failed. I was also working full time in my psychology practice. Most solid work came during residencies, where there was time, inspiring settings, and generous artists and writers (like you, Randon!) who gave me advice and encouragement. Kit, my agent, had often told me not to focus exclusively on the book but to write essays and stories, to try out all sorts of writing. After a zillion tries I finally had my first piece accepted, a narrative essay about getting shock treatment as a nineteen-year-old.
For chapters and essays the process remained consistent: I’d have a picture of an event or an interesting piece of information and I’d write about that. I took early drafts to my writers’ group and their feedback essentially taught me how to write – how to have my stories not sound like a clinical report! As I expanded the memoir, the middle years especially, my group gave me further ideas about what needed to be included – or discarded. I grew more discerning about what was helpful and what wasn’t. Between the writers’ group, writer friends who read it and commented, and my own literary education it gradually came together. Occasionally, I’d suddenly recall a scene that might capture an aspect of my experience that was important (for example, my first date with a man I met in the hospital). Several months after my 50th high school reunion I realized that this experience would make a straightforward last chapter. I continued to fiddle with pieces here and there – I could fiddle indefinitely – but eventually it felt complete. I was done. This doesn’t mean it couldn’t be different or better, but it touches on all of the points I think I’ve wanted to make – necessary and sufficient pieces. Some readers want more sex or family history, or information about ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), but I can see that this just means that there are more books to write!
RN: I remember learning year ago that Amy Bloom, the author of one of my favorite short stories “Love Is Not a Pie,” was also a therapist. I was both surprised and not surprised. Later I read a New York Times article, “Therapists Wired to Write,” that made me see how closely the two practices – therapy (on either side of the couch!) and writing – can relate. (How) do you take inspiration from your clinical work? And (how) is your clinical work influenced by your writing?
AS: My mentor Daniel Miller was a master clinician. He taught us the importance of being direct. Yet, if the truth you are dealing with is painful, the way you address it is critical in how it is heard. Unless you’re careful, the person you’re speaking to won’t hear it, and you won’t accomplish anything. I watched Dan use metaphor to communicate these messages. Metaphors speak the truth but leave some room; one can connect them with oneself or not, or hold the image and make sense of it later. I learned to consider the impact of every word I might say. I realize this is what writers do, too. And yes, there are unimaginably complicated stories from real life, which have helped me keep my own stories in perspective. I’m also inspired by how hard my patients work. I say to myself, if they can demand so much from themselves, I need to do the same. So I take more risks in my office and on the page.
RN: I love that r.kv.r.y pairs a piece of art with each piece of writing. Sometimes the art is representational, sometimes abstract. What did you think of the painting paired with your work?
AS: Initially, the piece paired with my work made me think of a frozen waterfall – ice and snow on piles of rock. It felt cold. After I read your question, I looked more closely. I saw faces among the rocks. Above the faces I saw branching lines and lighter patches that changed the snow into wet packs and ECT. It still felt cold, but now more dangerous, more ominous. I felt more isolation and fear than I had wanted to imagine.
RN: Is there a question I haven’t asked that you wish I had? Is there a question I asked that you wish I hadn’t?
AS: I like your questions, Randon. I love to ponder new things. I’m especially intrigued by you asking about the artwork and my associations when I looked closely. I’m impressed by its impact. Given my feelings around the essay, I can’t say how much of my reaction comes from my own projection, and how much others would see (or, more likely, feel) the same way.
RN: And finally, what does “recovery” mean to you?
AS: If you had asked me a dozen years ago, certainly fifteen years ago, I would have said recovery is when you have put your disruption and pain behind you, and you’re able to “be yourself.” But I would have meant “return to normal.” I used to believe that good enough therapy would heal anything.
Now I respect that there is no “normal” – we’re all lumpy and imperfect in various ways, which is not necessarily a problem. But with trauma especially, although we can grow and change, we don’t undo what has hurt us. Now I see “recovery” much more often as “gaining useable substances from unusable sources.”
My goal in clinical work and in writing is to enable myself and those I work with to find understanding and compassion for ourselves and one another, to respect what harm has been done, to recognize the ways this might show up in everyday life, yet to come to terms with it and move forward nonetheless. Harm can be mitigated, but it’s never completely undone; we’re never “good as new,” we’re different from what we might have been. However, with increased insight and greater emotional depth, we just might be more interesting this way!
RN: Amen! Thanks, Annita!
Mary Akers: Hi, April. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today. I’m so excited to discuss your forthcoming collection, The Poor Children. First of all, wow. Let me just say that your stories are so unsettling—in the best way. I do like a good, dark, freaky story, and I’ve often wondered what in my formative years made me this way—did I come out of the womb primed to love Poe and Plath? What were some of your earliest influences? And I’m talking about before you even conceived of being a writer yourself. For the sake of a concrete number (and so none of your current literary heroes can be jealous), let’s say the age of twelve. What were you reading when you were twelve?
April L. Ford: Thanks for inviting me, Mary! Since this is my first experience having a book published, I feel soothed being in your company—like a little girl grabbing onto a grownup’s shirt hem, pleading, “You won’t let them hurt me, right?” Which is strange (or maybe apt?) of me to say, I guess, given the nature of The Poor Children.
Age twelve, eh? Well, I was a late bloomer in terms of “real” literature; I was still reading young adult novels about horses. I was an avid horse-lover (still am!), and until seventh or eighth grade, I refused everything that wasn’t about horses. I must have read Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion series, all twenty books, cover to cover a dozen times by age twelve. I could also recite Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty from memory. The scene in the novel that drew me back time after time was where Black Beauty sees his old carthorse friend Ginger being taken away:
I was rightly horrified, imaging any horse I loved ever dying, but there was something about that scene…a connection I made to reality and the things beyond my control. I wanted to understand. I became obsessed with understanding.
MA: I’m curious: Why children? Why troubled, disadvantaged, marginalized, sexualized children? I don’t mean that as a glib or disparaging question–I find the subject compelling and fascinating and delightfully taboo, especially in today’s child-centric society, and I’m guessing I will find your answer equally compelling and fascinating.
AF: The short answer could be that I’m stuck somewhere in my teens, emotionally, although I was never that terrible. The more comprehensive answer includes facts like, I was an only child with a limited social circle, so I had lots of time to watch other kids and make inferences. Also, I hated being a kid. I felt chubby and awkward and weird, and I wanted to crawl out of my skin at the first chance. By adolescence, after I toned down on my horse books, I picked up VC Andrews and suddenly people became interesting. Parents were evil, siblings were malicious, and everyone did all-around terrible things. I loved it! Beneath those terrible things, there were always explanations; people were the way they were because of circumstances, and those circumstances made the characters in the novels more…acceptable, I guess. I would root for the evilest of the characters, because somewhere in the stories, they would be redeemed, even if only for a paragraph. Those redemptions helped me understand people weren’t only good or only bad; people—children included—made choices that often reflected their situations before their personalities.
In the last year and a half of my teens, I lived in a group home with seven other kids. Those kids had all come from severely deteriorated family situations, whereas I had come from a relatively stable upper-middle class environment that sort of fell apart at the last minute. So suddenly I had seven new siblings, boys and girls, and they were pretty dangerous creatures—drug dealers, violent, etc. Take a kid with a curious mind from a very sheltered life and plunk her at the center of constant danger and chaos, well, it was like living in a human library! I made friends with some of the kids, while others didn’t want anything to do with me. In a sense, the group home was where I learned how to make friends, socialize, behave with my peer group. Other kids my age had been either uninteresting or mysterious to me before then, so the world of the group home, and the community around troubled youth, cracked open a whole new compelling purpose for me.
MA: Wow. I sensed that there was some lived experience behind your characters—they felt so real!—but I also know (intellectually) that fiction is made-up-shit. I mean, I really am an author. I know this. But I still get sucked in as a reader (and I hope to never lose that). So…(no segue intended)…do you think writers write from their obsessions? (Spoiler alert: I do.) If so, do you think that the writing is one way we tame our obsessions? If not, what the hell DOES make us write?
AF: Definitely! And I think obsessions vary from project to project—we can be obsessed with a particular theme or idea, or a character, or we can fixate on syntax as a way of telling a story. When I wrote “A Marmalade Cat for Jenny,” I was obsessed with the Southern accent—you know, that overused Texas drawl? I had just watched Million Dollar Baby on the big screen, and I wanted more than anything to sound like I was from the South—which was a totally bizarre thing to wish for, since I was a French-Canadian who had lived in Quebec her whole life. Anyway, that obsession with the sound of language, and dialect, drove me through the first draft of the story. And what a mess it was. No “g’s” on words ending in “ing,” “w’s” after every end vowel I could get away with, “your” spelled as “yur,” “for” as “fer.” I even read the opening scene of the story at an open mic in dialect! Oh, man, what was I thinking? I mean, the narrative itself was in pretty good shape, but more than one person told me to tone it down with the visual spelling. Years later, I submitted a cleaned-up version to The Missouri Review. An editorial assistant wrote back and asked for a revision. The readers really like the story, he said, but something wasn’t quite right…maybe the dialogue? By then I had limited the dialect to direct speech, but even that proved too heavy. And who turns down a request for revision from TMR? The Journal didn’t accept my story, finally, but I still consider that exchange an exciting and defining moment along my way as a writer. I might have pressed the handwritten note from the editorial assistant between the pages of a favorite book, the way a person presses a first rose from a lover for safekeeping….
MA: Pressed the handwritten note—I love that. The things we cling to are things no non-writer would ever understand. Speaking of clinging to things, I loved your story “Isabelle’s Haunting.” Such delicious details, such a strange Miss Havisham-type setup (minus the cobwebs and wedding cake). I’ve had occasion of late to consider what makes a work “haunting.” You might even say I’m obsessed with figuring out what makes a particular piece of writing haunting. So…what, for you, makes a story “haunting?”
AF: Oh, great question! Here, I would say less is more. Part of what makes something haunting is the mystery that surrounds it, and the suspense of not knowing whether we’ve drawn the right conclusions. Little nibbles along the way to help us build a picture in our minds, but an opaque picture—an impression. When we’re kids, all sorts of undefined things frighten us; we see something vague, like the silhouette of a sock on the hallway floor at night, and then we form a concrete explanation for it, the sock is really a snake, and that explanation haunts us. When I started “Isabelle’s Haunting,” I had no clue where the story was going, and I didn’t plan for it to be a tale of haunting. After romance, horror is the genre I have the least experience with as a reader. I just know I liked the idea of never fully explaining what happened to Isabelle, and in order to pull that off, I had to deny myself certain concrete facts about Fancy. Maybe that sounds weird, so many writers say they make all kinds of character or plot notes before digging into a piece, but I wanted to feel the tension as I wrote the story. I wanted every new scene and development to surprise me as much as I hoped they would surprise readers.
MA: I think that’s a brilliant response. The unknown is definitely haunting…and our empty assumptions often even more so. You’re so smart.
Now, indulge me if you will, and take us forward to a packed room where you are giving a reading from The Poor Children to an eager and attentive crowd. First, what are you wearing? (I never know what the hell to wear and usually spend the last two hours before a reading trying on and tossing a mountain of clothes before giving up and going back to my original outfit.) Second, how are you pronouncing your title? I know the many inherent meanings are part of the joy of a good title, but I want to know how you say the title when speaking to your audience. The POOR (poverty-stricken) Children? The Poor (non-adult) CHILDREN? THE (one-and-only) Poor Children? The Poor (awww!) Children? Come on, spill.
AF: Your question is timely, Mary! Just yesterday I was at the mall with my spouse, trying on a variety of dresses I might wear to a reading. I left the mall empty-handed and dispirited, though, and unless I find something spectacular between now and March seventeenth, the date of my first reading, I’ll likely appear in a swank pair of Montreal designer jeans, a button down, a blazer with slightly too-long sleeves, my awesome high-heeled Doc Martens, and a fanny pack of nerves.
You are my new favorite person for asking about pronunciation! Back when I came up with the title, which involved a lot of me spouting possibilities to my spouse and asking his opinion, I really-really wanted something that would fit every story in the collection and also suggest how I feel about the characters. I wanted something literal and sarcastic. When I spouted, “The Poor Children!” my spouse and I looked at each other and knew, we just knew, that was it. There’s poverty throughout the collection, and I wouldn’t wish any of those characters’ experiences on a real person. And then there’s the reality of those characters: they’re bright, they have agency, and they believe they know what they’re doing (which is a universal flaw we all share), so should we really say, pityingly, “Oh, those poor, poor children”?
MA: Even with my high tolerance for characters who have grim life prospects, I found one of your stories so dark and unsettling that there were times when I had to look away from the page. I felt complicit somehow and it made it hard to go on reading until I talked myself down with the “It’s fiction, silly!” pep talk. I’m guessing you know which story did that to me (cough-cough-MarmaladeCat-cough-cough). I do appreciate stories (and all forms of art) that make me squirm. I wonder, though, do you squirm while writing them? Do you ever have to look away? And a related question: How do you know when/if the reader’s line gets “crossed?”
AF: I expected that story would be forever archived on my hard drive, in a “Stories You Should Never Write” or “Stories You Should Never Tell Anyone You Wrote” folder. I knew, while I was writing the opening scene, which came to me fully and lucidly one night while I was waiting for friends to join me at a restaurant, no one would pat me on the back for it. Readers, if the story ever made it to that point, would judge me based on that opening scene, and I might get labeled as a certain kind of writer. But I went forward with the scene, and with the rest of the story, because I had to. I had to get into that world to understand why in hell anyone would do those things. In the same way I kept rereading the death scene in Black Beauty to fathom death in a world where I had never experienced any, I had to cast aside my biases and judgments to get into the world of Scott, Jenny, and Mark, and give them a chance to show me why they lived that way.
It’s not an easy story to read, I’m well aware of this, but then I didn’t write any of the stories in The Poor Children with “easy read” in mind. Returning to the idea that no one is only good or only bad, I wanted this to be a major question in the collection. As a reader, you might hate Scott, or Derrick, or Madame Jasmin, but are you able to investigate their situations before passing judgment? Are these characters gross magnifications of ourselves? So what if they are? Better to read it in a novel than to live that life. I mean, we watch or read about horrific world events all the time, and then we squabble about them on Facebook like they’re nothing when in fact they’re huge things: they’re people’s lives. Someone once accused me of punishing readers with my stories, and I will defend myself tirelessly against that one. I’m not trying to punish anyone, not even the characters who meet unpleasant ends. My only goal is to tell stories. Difficult ones, yes, but reading them doesn’t make us any more or less complicit in tragedy than when we watch the six o’clock news, or Google the latest stats on Ebola. I’ve certainly felt offended by fiction, and like anyone, I’ve had knee-jerk reactions of anger toward authors for their work. That’s normal; it’s the mark of effective writing—writing that makes us think a little more with our hearts, if we’re willing to go there. And if we’re not, it doesn’t mean we’ve failed as readers or the authors have failed as writers. Some days, all I have the appetite for is a Peanuts comic strip re-written with song lyrics from The Smiths.
MA: Yes, effective writing for sure. Also affective writing (in the psychological sense). I love your answer.
And finally, because I adore this question and because everyone’s answer is so different and because it makes a damn fine final question especially for the author of The Poor Children, What does “recovery” mean to you?
AF: “Affective,” indeed!
The Poor Children stories are about people who don’t, or who can’t, recover. Their worlds are severe, and the consequences of their choices are unforgiving. It took me eight years to put the collection together. I wrote other things during that time (poems, essays, a novel), and they tended to be much lighter, to the point of goofy, because I needed balance—it wasn’t a conscious decision, “Now I’m going to write a comedy piece about a woman coming to terms with her hemorrhoids,” it was my psyche screaming for fresh air.
Last June, when I received a galley of The Poor Children to approve, I thought my writing career was over. My own work looked entirely foreign to me. It was my first time seeing the stories in book format, snappy cover image and all, and I didn’t know how to react; I knew I should be somersaulting with joy, but until that point I had thought of the stories as separate parts, and seeing them neatly bound as one, all these “big ideas” compressed into a book I could fit on a dinner plate, terrified me. “Here’s your son, ma’am. Best of luck.” I was responsible for something I had created, cliché though it sounds, and I felt the impulse to throw it in the trash like that six o’clock news mother who abandons her newborn in a dumpster. I didn’t, of course, but it took one week, plus a long telephone conversation with my publisher, and then my copyeditor, and then a friend who had been through the whole first-book experience, before I was ready to read The Poor Children the way readers eventually would.
Since then, my recovery from The Poor Children has involved relinquishing control over what happens to the collection next. I’ve had to let go of those characters and worlds I carried inside me like organs. Now, reviewers and critics have to say, “We’re going to build the book up this way,” or, “We’re going to tear it down that way,” and readers have to say, “Let us have our turn!” Meanwhile, I’m saying, “I can’t believe I’m here. I don’t know why I’m here. The ground could drop out from under me, but until it does, I am here.” Like that teeny-tiny point on the solar system we’ve all been told we are? You are here.