The Now and Forever of Luke B. Goebel–An Interview

Luke Goebel’s award-winning first novel, “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours,” shakes and rattles and trembles in your hands. From the first lines, the novel throws story at you, and you’d better watch your head. His voice grabs your wrist and promises everything and nothing. Words fly forward and backward—a lone eagle feather, a lost love, the moon, peyote, blanket flowers, myth, dogs, clouds, cigarettes, girls, chores, America—to speak and shout of loss and heartbreak. The ride is rough, but so is grief, and Luke Goebel, man-boy-kid of giant searching heart, knows how to tell this tale.

KARIN C. DAVIDSON: My first impressions of “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours” result from the telescopic and panoramic storytelling mode. Reflection pours out of reflection, while voice carves language, and lyricism rides rhythm. The rush of words and the nonlinear, bad-ass, spin-and-shoot-the-center-out-of-a-dime directions and redirections send the story reeling. And the impressions keep coming and curling in and fanning out and outright exploding.

There’s a crazy, amazing amount of energy in the writing, a Wild West version of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” John Barth, David Foster Wallace, and Barry Hannah are all nodding. The narrator says as much: “I’m very much here but not, because I buy my own lies. So I need sex and sex and food and cigarettes and hands and skin and arms and the wild look of the words shimmering after not coming back right from being with Natives on Peyote.”

Luke, do the momentum and chase and surprise of these stories arrive in the middle of the night, as a gift of inspiration? Or is there a roll of butcher paper flying around the cylinder of your XE 5200, as you type nonstop, making myth in pica and elite?

LUKE B. GOEBEL: THANK YOU. You know, once you’ve written a book, why talk about it? I’m not being glib. I don’t know anymore. I already wrote it. That miracle of feeling is over. I can mutely point around a little with my hands. Seriously, now it belongs to the readers. I like how you say things—how you can talk about what you feel in the book. I’ve loved books but can’t talk about them that well. All I can say, first, humbly, is I’m very grateful.

The only notion I have is this: I wrote the book in stories, and I worked hard on my words. Then I had a miracle where the stories wove themselves along within my living into a novel shape. I couldn’t have figured it ahead of time. I bought a long RV bus just to have something to do and the next thing that happened was not plan-able.

I don’t get it unless it’s right in my pocket on fire, with something lighting me up. That close to the body. Like smelling something burning like hair on me. Or it’s hell and trying. Because of love and fear and caring too much and being strange, strange, strange, from birth. I’m always nervous and anxious, and that is usable energy. I feel like something is wrong with me in general a lot of the time, except when I’m out traveling free. I’ve always been trapped in the moment thinking it’s all on the line at every moment and it’s now now now now forever and it’s got to make something for itself! Now or never! That’s the feeling when I write. It makes me nuts. Seasick.

Some building pieces like “Boot of The Boot” came to me in streaks of clarity out of the madness with help from editors, like David McLendon, who were spurring me on, but most were a self-struggle to become able to dial a telephone or eat a ham sandwich. It was tiny routine education in letters, I believe. The moments of inspiration were delivery. The rest was bondage.

Then I had, most of them, the stories, fashioned, but a few were not…. Then we lost my brother. You know there are things I can’t say, so I wrote. Then it was true.

One day, on my way to my last editing session with the proofs, a white dove flew up and alongside my truck for so long and it was so gleaming white, heading to Dallas to a hotel to work. Not my brother, but a sign from someplace. Many animals have come to me, as in the story of the book. I worked mostly in hotel rooms on revisions and also on stories. They clear the junk. Hotels. You’re in the communal space. It’s where the reader lives, too. It’s common territory. You can lose yourself.

It didn’t happen by any design of forethought or foresight, the weaving of the stories, the structure of the book. That was just from paying attention. I should give my teacher some credit, my writing teacher. One of them in specific particulars. Gordon Lish. He taught me to train my attention on things that I already knew to train my attention on, but he gave me permission and praise. Just good Jewish and Irish wit to wit. Back in class, with his white peyote hair, and the lines of his face, and his hands out and up like a religious icon, like a child, like a lover, he said, something to the tune of, “Luke, my BOY, your attention is always in the right place. You’re a writer. But you don’t have it yet, so sit down. What you have is terrible.”

As for the XE 5200, that was bought from ACE Typewriter in Portland, Ore., over in St. John’s, and in fact it was given without payment, and without the owner even knowing my name he said, “Just send me a check,” all after I wrote and edited and submitted the final proofs for “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours.” So, I didn’t write that book on that typewriter. I feel like he could tell I wasn’t bullshit about using the typewriter when he let me take it without paying. He could tell I would use it for real good. That felt like a nice gift from the gods of faith.

That day I just talked about when I went in to the shop, bell dings, the owner was celebrating the day of the birth of his father who founded the shop. He had become 93 or 94 or 99. He was in the store, the father, with his cane and his little laugh, and I wished his father a mighty celebratory moment and the old man waddled with his tight little frame and butt in his pants, down away on the street, and the next thing… you know, I had no cash and it was 45 dollars for the unit. He wouldn’t take anything but cash, you know, so… it’s a wheel writer, the XE 5200 series. NOT like a great ball IBM 240 dollar number… and the son said just take it and mail him a check. Months later, went in and gave him cash, just before heading back to Texas. He smiled.

I took the typewriter and used it. We flew to Joshua Tree, Calif., via the Palm Springs Airport, where I got a loaned-out 19.5-foot Buick estate wagon, which my lady friend left for me, which was and is robin’s egg blue with fake wood paneling with no AC and off we all went into the 116 degree desert, not her and me, but only me and the typewriter and the Buick with my dog, Jewely, into a house with no AC in Joshua Tree, and walked around in my skivvies where Mojave Green Rattlesnakes—which are territorial and want to bite your ass and fill your cheeks with their venom, venom that contains blood toxins & neurotoxins both, and will make you require ten times the usual amount of antivenin as regular rattlesnake bites, because these green Mojave bastards are ten times as poisonous, stand four feet up from the ground just to mess you up psychologically, in the deserts sands around the boiling house—were roaming. There, as everywhere, no butcher rolls of paper flew as I kept on the trail of my second book. Which I’m still on. But I wrote. Felt good. Thrill to be trying, asking yourself: Well, do you? Can you? What? What can you accomplish?

Sun of the desert’s red and blonde. Sage, shadow of salt scrub, chaparral—racing through the cholla, saguaro, barrel and yucca and dust.

–Luke B. Goebel

DAVIDSON: Joshua Tree, Mojave Green Rattlesnakes, journey, your pup Jewely, stillness, and place. Out there is the landscape that calls to you. And in this first book, loss and heartache and love and grief create the landscape of the story—the story that is made of many stories. A journey created from past and present takes the narrator, in nonlinear directions, from childhood—lying in bed with his mother on a summer day—to coming-of-age and adulthood, when lying in bed with girls is happenstance. But the heartbreak that comes of great loss—that of his true love and his older brother, the Catherine and Carl of his life—forms the narrator and the narrative. East Texas, Ore., N.Y., Calif., Puerto Rico. The desert, the Tenderloin, the sea. Heart, soul, anguish, astonishment, envy, anger, and joy. Emotion is far from derivative; it loops and spins and takes us hard by the hand, reminding us, yes, there is direction here and it’s spun with emotion, so pay attention and follow along.

Tell us more about the ways in which you explore landscape, whether America the beautiful un-beautiful or an examination of the pancreas or the underside of the heart.

GOEBEL: I did everything you mentioned above. I wrote and went all those places, suffered those ailments, and yet it’s all fiction. And yet it isn’t at all. I felt it directly in living. I went to every one of those places, and I watched every one of those landscapes unfold, and I am carrying every one of those places. I am all the loves of my life, I hope. I love them still more than I can tell. I tried to tell it, the particulars of my love affairs with my beloved ones. And I am not talking about women. I’m talking about blood and family. People who are both to me, here and not here. I cannot un-live the life and its errors and beauties I have lived. I would love to try and go back and fix the mistakes. I am just as locked in and totally free to change as any living being human. The Buddha said we are a fathom high. That’s ninety feet high. Why can’t we get clear and find peace and love? Is that so insane? Once there was a way it seemed to just stop fighting. Now we have got to find love. LOVE. Crazy divining love. Love is the only thing that’s going to mean a thing to any of us.

—out there—the madness in me—and in her—the inevitable end of journey, a moment to rest and sleep like a child overlooking the slamming of sea—you know—to feel, before sleep, the listening, to listen, listen—and see and feel what is lost and cannot be regained, what has escaped the grasp, what every journey feels at the end of a long wild stretch where nothing is held and all is lost and fantastical.

–Luke B. Goebel

DAVIDSON: Yes, love. Love is thick and beautiful in your story, “The Minds of Boys.” A great, disturbing, wondrous story about boys, gone away from their mothers, living on the beach, stealing dogs, staring up at the clouds, dancing with girls. Its beauty is different from the other more structurally challenging stories of the novel, though, like those, it deals with archetype and myth.

Tell us about Keiko, the leader of the pack, and about how this story fits inside the novel.

GOEBEL: That was the one I felt the most like, how does this fit? Quite simply, it’s about the trap door opening and taking the best one away. It’s about my brother, but I wrote it long before then. There are such weird things that have happened in the time of my life. Sometimes it feels like it was always all fated and I always knew this story would unfold the way it has, I mean life. Other times, I just wonder, does anyone know who they are?

The story just makes sense there, I guess, because it brings in the beach, childhood, longing, disaster, losing the big-hearted leader who was never one to fit in societally. Who just was who he was, better than social pressure to conform and fit the times and the mold, you know, the pressure to hate oneself society gives you, this society does. The one who doesn’t need the merchandise to live with his giant heart and unreasonable beauty. The dream to live.

Then it also is where I spent a lot of time. In San Francisco. On the beach. And where I went with the RV to edit the story before that story in the novel and wrote more into the story “Out There,” which comes before “The Minds of Boys.” It’s just how the book came together with the RV trip in the long van with the generator and fans and windows and the world was my oyster where I owned real estate every place I went. I made decisions, and like Padgett Powell said, it came together as a lucky mess that ended up with a work deliberate and accidentally maybe more correct than not in its composition. You follow your instincts and attention to craft and recursion and themes and what delights you as a reader and write from that attention and the parts become miraculously whole, as if the world is alive. Because it is. Alive. Conscious. Working with you.

After rehab. After jail. After love. After the big never ending loss.

–Luke B. Goebel

DAVIDSON: The world—inside and out—is definitely alive in your novel. Mythmaking. Horseracing. Chasing a dream. And then, finally, chores. The “faceless” narrator is “trying to be a real man with a face.” He explains his aspirations in first, second, third person—pushing against identity boundaries—“trying to make something out of yourself, trying to figure out how to present yourself as yourself, making up your myth, finding a way in.” Structurally, this story has found a way into pain, never avoiding its sharpest edges, but leaning into them. Memory isn’t hardened, nor is it sentimental, and there’s regret, but there’s also pushing on into life, washing the truck, writing the stories.

What is the spring that you dip into to find story and structure, truths and untruths? Are there writers, teachers, landscapes, “you’ve been here in the world, have you not?” moments that lead you to understanding to then pounding the typewriter keys to translate that understanding?

GOEBEL: Yes.

Here is a brief list: Grandma, Grandpa, Carl, Marie, Dad, Mom (I’m sorry), Gordon Lish, Catherine (I’m sorry), David McLendon, Jesus, Elvis, John Lennon, Lolita, Barry Hannah, peyote, tears, Jewely, foxes, coyotes, mountain lions, Waylon Jennings, AA, rehab, nicotine, caffeine, the West, mountains, the smell of horses, prayer, church, the smell of high mass, Chanel No. 5, my father again, Wes Anderson, Paul Simon, New York City, Portland, rivers, fish, trout, my luggage, the sky, storms, rain, eating fish, deli food, greens, having a body.

Some building pieces like “Boot of The Boot” came to me in streaks of clarity out of the madness with help from editors, like David McLendon, who were spurring me on, but most were a self-struggle to become able to dial a telephone or eat a ham sandwich. It was tiny routine education in letters, I believe. The moments of inspiration were delivery. The rest was bondage.

Then I had, most of them, the stories, fashioned, but a few were not…. Then we lost my brother. You know there are things I can’t say, so I wrote. Then it was true.

One day, on my way to my last editing session with the proofs, a white dove flew up and alongside my truck for so long and it was so gleaming white, heading to Dallas to a hotel to work. Not my brother, but a sign from someplace. Many animals have come to me, as in the story of the book. I worked mostly in hotel rooms on revisions and also on stories. They clear the junk. Hotels. You’re in the communal space. It’s where the reader lives, too. It’s common territory. You can lose yourself.

It didn’t happen by any design of forethought or foresight, the weaving of the stories, the structure of the book. That was just from paying attention. I should give my teacher some credit, my writing teacher. One of them in specific particulars. Gordon Lish. He taught me to train my attention on things that I already knew to train my attention on, but he gave me permission and praise. Just good Jewish and Irish wit to wit. Back in class, with his white peyote hair, and the lines of his face, and his hands out and up like a religious icon, like a child, like a lover, he said, something to the tune of, “Luke, my BOY, your attention is always in the right place. You’re a writer. But you don’t have it yet, so sit down. What you have is terrible.”

As for the XE 5200, that was bought from ACE Typewriter in Portland, Ore., over in St. John’s, and in fact it was given without payment, and without the owner even knowing my name he said, “Just send me a check,” all after I wrote and edited and submitted the final proofs for “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours.” So, I didn’t write that book on that typewriter. I feel like he could tell I wasn’t bullshit about using the typewriter when he let me take it without paying. He could tell I would use it for real good. That felt like a nice gift from the gods of faith.

That day I just talked about when I went in to the shop, bell dings, the owner was celebrating the day of the birth of his father who founded the shop. He had become 93 or 94 or 99. He was in the store, the father, with his cane and his little laugh, and I wished his father a mighty celebratory moment and the old man waddled with his tight little frame and butt in his pants, down away on the street, and the next thing… you know, I had no cash and it was 45 dollars for the unit. He wouldn’t take anything but cash, you know, so… it’s a wheel writer, the XE 5200 series. NOT like a great ball IBM 240 dollar number… and the son said just take it and mail him a check. Months later, went in and gave him cash, just before heading back to Texas. He smiled.

I took the typewriter and used it. We flew to Joshua Tree, Calif., via the Palm Springs Airport, where I got a loaned-out 19.5-foot Buick estate wagon, which my lady friend left for me, which was and is robin’s egg blue with fake wood paneling with no AC and off we all went into the 116 degree desert, not her and me, but only me and the typewriter and the Buick with my dog, Jewely, into a house with no AC in Joshua Tree, and walked around in my skivvies where Mojave Green Rattlesnakes—which are territorial and want to bite your ass and fill your cheeks with their venom, venom that contains blood toxins & neurotoxins both, and will make you require ten times the usual amount of antivenin as regular rattlesnake bites, because these green Mojave bastards are ten times as poisonous, stand four feet up from the ground just to mess you up psychologically, in the deserts sands around the boiling house—were roaming. There, as everywhere, no butcher rolls of paper flew as I kept on the trail of my second book. Which I’m still on. But I wrote. Felt good. Thrill to be trying, asking yourself: Well, do you? Can you? What? What can you accomplish?

Sun of the desert’s red and blonde. Sage, shadow of salt scrub, chaparral—racing through the cholla, saguaro, barrel and yucca and dust.

–Luke B. Goebel

DAVIDSON: Joshua Tree, Mojave Green Rattlesnakes, journey, your pup Jewely, stillness, and place. Out there is the landscape that calls to you. And in this first book, loss and heartache and love and grief create the landscape of the story—the story that is made of many stories. A journey created from past and present takes the narrator, in nonlinear directions, from childhood—lying in bed with his mother on a summer day—to coming-of-age and adulthood, when lying in bed with girls is happenstance. But the heartbreak that comes of great loss—that of his true love and his older brother, the Catherine and Carl of his life—forms the narrator and the narrative. East Texas, Ore., N.Y., Calif., Puerto Rico. The desert, the Tenderloin, the sea. Heart, soul, anguish, astonishment, envy, anger, and joy. Emotion is far from derivative; it loops and spins and takes us hard by the hand, reminding us, yes, there is direction here and it’s spun with emotion, so pay attention and follow along.

Tell us more about the ways in which you explore landscape, whether America the beautiful un-beautiful or an examination of the pancreas or the underside of the heart.

GOEBEL: I did everything you mentioned above. I wrote and went all those places, suffered those ailments, and yet it’s all fiction. And yet it isn’t at all. I felt it directly in living. I went to every one of those places, and I watched every one of those landscapes unfold, and I am carrying every one of those places. I am all the loves of my life, I hope. I love them still more than I can tell. I tried to tell it, the particulars of my love affairs with my beloved ones. And I am not talking about women. I’m talking about blood and family. People who are both to me, here and not here. I cannot un-live the life and its errors and beauties I have lived. I would love to try and go back and fix the mistakes. I am just as locked in and totally free to change as any living being human. The Buddha said we are a fathom high. That’s ninety feet high. Why can’t we get clear and find peace and love? Is that so insane? Once there was a way it seemed to just stop fighting. Now we have got to find love. LOVE. Crazy divining love. Love is the only thing that’s going to mean a thing to any of us.

—out there—the madness in me—and in her—the inevitable end of journey, a moment to rest and sleep like a child overlooking the slamming of sea—you know—to feel, before sleep, the listening, to listen, listen—and see and feel what is lost and cannot be regained, what has escaped the grasp, what every journey feels at the end of a long wild stretch where nothing is held and all is lost and fantastical.

–Luke B. Goebel

DAVIDSON: Yes, love. Love is thick and beautiful in your story, “The Minds of Boys.” A great, disturbing, wondrous story about boys, gone away from their mothers, living on the beach, stealing dogs, staring up at the clouds, dancing with girls. Its beauty is different from the other more structurally challenging stories of the novel, though, like those, it deals with archetype and myth.

Tell us about Keiko, the leader of the pack, and about how this story fits inside the novel.

GOEBEL: That was the one I felt the most like, how does this fit? Quite simply, it’s about the trap door opening and taking the best one away. It’s about my brother, but I wrote it long before then. There are such weird things that have happened in the time of my life. Sometimes it feels like it was always all fated and I always knew this story would unfold the way it has, I mean life. Other times, I just wonder, does anyone know who they are?

The story just makes sense there, I guess, because it brings in the beach, childhood, longing, disaster, losing the big-hearted leader who was never one to fit in societally. Who just was who he was, better than social pressure to conform and fit the times and the mold, you know, the pressure to hate oneself society gives you, this society does. The one who doesn’t need the merchandise to live with his giant heart and unreasonable beauty. The dream to live.

Then it also is where I spent a lot of time. In San Francisco. On the beach. And where I went with the RV to edit the story before that story in the novel and wrote more into the story “Out There,” which comes before “The Minds of Boys.” It’s just how the book came together with the RV trip in the long van with the generator and fans and windows and the world was my oyster where I owned real estate every place I went. I made decisions, and like Padgett Powell said, it came together as a lucky mess that ended up with a work deliberate and accidentally maybe more correct than not in its composition. You follow your instincts and attention to craft and recursion and themes and what delights you as a reader and write from that attention and the parts become miraculously whole, as if the world is alive. Because it is. Alive. Conscious. Working with you.

After rehab. After jail. After love. After the big never ending loss.

–Luke B. Goebel

DAVIDSON: The world—inside and out—is definitely alive in your novel. Mythmaking. Horseracing. Chasing a dream. And then, finally, chores. The “faceless” narrator is “trying to be a real man with a face.” He explains his aspirations in first, second, third person—pushing against identity boundaries—“trying to make something out of yourself, trying to figure out how to present yourself as yourself, making up your myth, finding a way in.” Structurally, this story has found a way into pain, never avoiding its sharpest edges, but leaning into them. Memory isn’t hardened, nor is it sentimental, and there’s regret, but there’s also pushing on into life, washing the truck, writing the stories.

What is the spring that you dip into to find story and structure, truths and untruths? Are there writers, teachers, landscapes, “you’ve been here in the world, have you not?” moments that lead you to understanding to then pounding the typewriter keys to translate that understanding?

GOEBEL: Yes.

Here is a brief list: Grandma, Grandpa, Carl, Marie, Dad, Mom (I’m sorry), Gordon Lish, Catherine (I’m sorry), David McLendon, Jesus, Elvis, John Lennon, Lolita, Barry Hannah, peyote, tears, Jewely, foxes, coyotes, mountain lions, Waylon Jennings, AA, rehab, nicotine, caffeine, the West, mountains, the smell of horses, prayer, church, the smell of high mass, Chanel No. 5, my father again, Wes Anderson, Paul Simon, New York City, Portland, rivers, fish, trout, my luggage, the sky, storms, rain, eating fish, deli food, greens, having a body.

Karin C. Davidson, NEWFOUND JOURNAL Interviews Editor

As first posted at NEWFOUND JOURNAL - Autumn 2014 Issue

THE FROM-AWAYS - A Novel of Maine

THE FROM-AWAYS - A Novel of Maine

An Interview with CJ Hauser

“THE FROM-AWAYS,” CJ Hauser’s extraordinary first novel, encompasses the relationships of old-timers and newcomers in a small coastal town in Maine. Here, subjects as diverse as historical preservation and economic progress, along with ideas of love and trust, loss and belonging, shift and fit together. From the first scene of setting lobsters free to the final moments of bell buoys and safe return, the novel reveals itself as “a novel of Maine.” Leah and Quinn, two twenty-four-year-old women who write copy and drink whiskey, are “the from-aways”—outsiders, newcomers—to the town of Menamon, looking for their place in the world, and over the course of a year, they learn how much they belong.

CJ Hauser is very aware of PLACE in her writing, as revealed in many of her stories, from “ABANDONED CARS,” the winner of the THIRD COAST’s 2012 Jaimy Gordon Prize in Fiction, “THE SHAPESHIFTER PRINCIPLE” in TIN HOUSE, and “A BAD YEAR FOR APPLES” in TRIQUARTERLY. Place can be as noisy and hot as summer in Flatbush, as undone as the scorched interior of a car, or as in “THE FROM-AWAYS,” it can be as inviting as a Christmas tree lot complete with hot cocoa in hand, as a quilt-lined dinghy rocked by gentle waves. “THE FROM-AWAYS” invites us to know hardship as well us comfort, and does so with enormous expressiveness via the viewpoints of Quinn and Leah.

Lobstah

“I have two lobsters in my bathtub and I’m not sure I can kill them.”

— Opening line of “THE FROM-AWAYS” by CJ Hauser

CJ, I love the first line of “THE FROM-AWAYS.” Immediately, we know where we are—Maine!—and a New York City girl with a large heart is about to set her supper free. It’s like a different version of the scene in “ANNIE HALL.” No chasing lobsters around the kitchen; instead, Leah’s having a beer with a pair in the bathroom. There’s humor and a beautiful introduction of Leah’s relationship with her new husband, Menamon native, Henry Lynch. How did you decide on the opening scene? Were there influences from your own life that inspired you here?

I love that you bring up “ANNIE HALL,” because that scene is so wonderful, and of course was an inspiration to me. But I think that opening truly grew out of one summer when I was a nanny on Rhode Island. I was supposed to cook the kids lobster while their parents were out to dinner…but I’d never actually cooked a lobster before—my father had always done the cooking—and so I had these lobsters out on the counter and the kids were yelling from the other room and I found myself about to cry because I had no idea what I was going to do. Then, this friend of the kids’ parents, a trouble-making, blustery older guy from Mississippi who insisted I call him “Uncle Richard,” came waltzing into the kitchen and said, You’re doing it wrong! And I said, I haven’t even done anything yet! and he said, That’s your problem, not doing anything. 

He showed me how to cook them, a method that involved pots of sea water from the bay, and beer, and lobster-belly tickling, and both of us drinking chardonnay.

The lobsters came out perfectly—but the kids wouldn’t eat them. They took one bite and said lobster was gross and so I made them butter noodles instead and Richard and I ate the lobsters and everyone was happy. Why aren’t you at dinner with the grown-ups? I asked Richard. He said, I’ve never much cared for grown-ups.

“THE FROM-AWAYS” – by CJ Hauser

The structure of “THE FROM-AWAYS” relates to the seasons—the book moving from “Summer” to “Summer, Again”—and relationships—as revealed by Leah and Quinn’s alternating chapters. Leah and Quinn each have their reasons for moving to Menamon—Leah, to become part of Henry’s life, and Quinn, to rediscover the father she’d lost in childhood. What were the reasons for choosing seasonal markers and characters new to the town to tell this story?

Maybe I’m just homesick because I live in Florida now, but up north the seasons feel so important to how we live in the world. Every winter, sometime around March or April I’d start to give up all hope for life and feel like tossing myself from a window. And then every June I’d think everything is so wonderful I might explode and I couldn’t even remember what winter was like. I think New England summer might have the same effect on the brain that the chemical cocktail new mothers get hit with does… You know, where they feel so full of love and happiness that their memories of the pain of childbirth are dulled and fuzzled so they’ll forget the bad parts and remember the good and be more likely to do it all again?

This may sound extreme, but so is a New England winter.

It felt impossible to tell a Maine story without seasons. It was also important to me to show that this takes place over the course of a year because Leah and Quinn both want to make changes in their life so quickly. Leah wants to be a local in Menamon and comfortable in her marriage, and Quinn wants to be grieving her mother less keenly and to form a relationship with her father… But these things can’t happen quickly. There’s a German word I learned by way of Emerson: naturlangsamkeit. It means the slowness of nature. Both women in the book have to learn to let things grow and die at their own natural pace.

Backshore Afternoon – by Joshua Adam

“Because you cannot always know with love.

If we knew how things would turn out for certain,

knew a person completely, that would be far too easy.”

— Leah – “The From-Aways” by CJ Hauser

Relationships, especially occurring in pairs, are central to the novel: Quinn and Leah, Leah and Henry, Quinn and Carter, Leah and Charley, Quinn and Rosie, and so on. Ideas of trust and love, honesty and lying, forgiving and growing up arise within the various formulations of these pairings. Leah and Henry begin and end the book, and it’s lovely how their relationship develops, particularly in that we learn this through Leah’s perspective. How did you discover her sensibility—from her humor and her anger to her eventual understanding of her marriage and her place in Menamon?

Honestly, I think that in the first draft of this novel Leah was a lot more competent and kind and that just wasn’t very interesting at all and I knew something had to give…

I once had a relationship where I just felt like I was failing all the time. Everything I did was wrong. And I learned a lot of things from that. I learned to sometimes stand up and yell I AM NOT WRONG THIS TIME! MOST OF THE TIME BUT NOT THIS TIME! But I also learned that there were a lot of things about being in a relationship I didn’t know how to manage, and that there was a lot of sacrifice and synchronicity required to pull one off.

In the following drafts of the book I gave this experience to Leah in an amplified way and suddenly she was no longer nice or competent. She repeats throughout the book that she is “good at many things,” until it becomes a kind of protest-too-much refrain and we realize that she knows she’s trying but failing to be good, most of the time. As we all are.

Including all of Leah’s mistakes and selfishness made writing her more difficult… but I hope it makes her character more honest too. She is not necessarily a blanket-likeable woman, but I hope that a lot of readers will see the truth in her and respond well to that.

“Totem, Houligan’s Gulch” – by Joshua Adam

The novel’s complications push past individual concerns to larger ones, each piece fitting into the story and then moving it forward. Quinn will eventually meet her father, the famous musician Carter Marks, and discover her own talent for music; Leah will decide where she stands, even if in disagreement with Henry; and the town will gather in the local bar and on the town green to work against the forces that threaten a longtime way a life. When juggling all of the parts that create a whole—in light of character arcs and plot lines, pivotal moments and scenes—how do you keep track?

I cannot tell you how much I wish I were the sort of writer who had a master plan for plots and characters—but I’m not. Honestly? I invented the place and the people and the relationships… seeded some conflicts… and then I figured out how they all worked together from there. Which is to say, it’s like I bought a bunch of ingredients and decided what meal I could cook with them, instead of having headed to the store with a recipe in hand.

I don’t recommend this. I’m trying to be more intentional and scheming with my next project…. but maybe some of our brains just don’t work that way. I’ll let you know how it goes…

“I watch this solar system of tiny revolving bodies orbiting Rosie’s head.”

— Quinn - "THE FROM-AWAYS” by CJ Hauser

Imagery plays a role in terms of the characters. Quinn describes Rosie in a halo of light with moths circling and landing in her hair. Quinn says: “All I want to do is stare and stare at this girl’s face, and yes, I really am in trouble now. Bad trouble, I think as I watch this solar system of tiny revolving bodies orbiting Rosie’s head.” Leah speaks of Henry in similar ways: “the moon” like a marker, “the deep orange color of wild honey,” illuminating their marriage, its brightness “too bright,” fooling them with its reflection. Tell us how you come upon imagery as it relates to your characters.

There are lots of reasons to write, but for me, most things begin with an image. Blood-brown lobsters in an old bathtub. A moon hanging low so it looks like its sitting on a hill. A swarm of moths around a head. Someone fingering a glass taxidermy eye their pocket. These are things I see in my head and I want to make them so that other people can see them too. I used to draw and paint a lot because of this same urge, but GOOD GOD was I a terrible painter. I don’t code images as symbols, and I seldom enjoy work where writers work with images as symbols first and as visceral things second. It’s a gut thing. And if you get it right, the meaning will follow.

           “I’m not really a New Yorker in a dinghy anymore.”

           — Leah – “THE FROM-AWAYS” by CJ Hauser

Belief in belonging is something Leah and Quinn share as “the from-aways,” while trying to find their way in Menamon. Quinn understands this as framed within the family picture, a family perfect in its imperfections. And Leah finds she’s “not really a new Yorker in a dinghy anymore,” how she “may have gotten a late start but it is not too late… to belong to this place.” Is the idea of belonging one you visit now and again in your writing, or is it a newer concern? What are other ideas that call to you and inspire your fiction?

I worry a lot about geography. I grew up in a little New England town to which I very much belonged. I felt at home there and had family ties there back some years. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I’ll likely never live there again, and while it’s exciting to think I could live anywhere, I wonder what I’ll lose by not staying at home. Sometimes I think this means I’ll never get to feel like belong to a place again. When I say belong, I mean you can describe who lives in every house and what the snow there tastes like and you know what day in May the dragonflies will emerge for their yearly insect orgy and that every godforsaken thing in the place you see kaleidoscopically, like it’s shattered into all the different times you’ve seen it over the years and you can see all those times at once. A depth of experience, I guess, is what I’m talking about. But maybe there’s something to leaving all that behind. To starting fresh. It sounds very liberating, actually. And I like to imagine that if I do someday live in a new place, I’ll have to learn all that stuff from scratch. Probably from the people who are from there. I will probably have to learn it through stories those people will tell me. And that, actually, sounds pretty wonderful.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way certain stories resonate through time while others get lost. I’ve been thinking about how stories work with time and what stories might look like in the future. And all this is part of the jumble that I’m working on for my next book, which is going to be an adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s comedies.

Eagle Island Bell – by Joshua Adam

Bell buoys, lobster pots, or coastal carousels?

Bell buoys, forever and always.

Thank you, CJ, for this wonderful conversation! And for all of the readers here, spread the word! “THE FROM-AWAYS” is a beautiful debut novel and even includes Maine recipes, a familiar jukebox playlist, and the more in its final pages.

CJ Hauser

CJ HAUSER is from the small but lovely town of Redding, Connecticut. Her fiction has appeared in TIN HOUSE, THE KENYON REVIEW, TRIQUARTERLY, AND ESQUIRE, among other places. She is the 2010 recipient of McSWEENEY’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and the winner of THIRD COAST’s 2012 Jaimy Gordon Prize in Fiction. A graduate of Georgetown University and Brooklyn College, she is not in hot pursuit of her PhD at the Florida State University. Though ever and always a New Englander in her heart, CJ currently lives in a small white house under a very mossy oak in Tallahassee, Florida.

Images and author photograph with permission of CJ Hauser.

Images of Joshua Adam’s oil paintings, including the feature photo, “Boathouse at the Point,” with permission of artist.

Visit The Adam Gallery in Castine, Maine.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

Fort Starlight: A Florida Story

reading Fort Starlight en route to Prague

When traveling by train from Berlin to Prague, I began reading Claudia Zuluaga’s debut novel, Fort Starlight. Immediately caught up in the Florida tale of lost souls, swampland, and strangely discovered dreams, I was startled every now and then at the sight of cliffs and castles outside the train windows. Perhaps I was missing the sights of central Europe, but this is typical of me—I head off on adventures and find myself longing for home, which means “the South,” specifically the age-old stomping grounds of Florida. And so, Claudia Zuluaga’s words gave me permission to do just that, with a story that calls up uniquely believable characters, a vibrant and true sense of place, and just the right sway of narrative voice to carry the piece from start to finish. Engine Books’ editors, Victoria Barrett and Andrew Scott, have their sights set on fine writing, and Fort Starlight is among their many well-received titles. Curious about the author’s inspiration, the novel’s themes, and the astounding writing that adds Fort Starlight—by The New York Times Book Review’s standards—to the latest shelf of “Southern Literature,” I asked Claudia if she’d consider an interview, and I’m thrilled that she said, Yes!

Port St. Lucie, Florida

“past the beach houses built on stilts”

“Past the Beach houses built on stilts, past the ocean highway that runs along Erne City, past an inlet that is a shade lighter than the ocean, past more houses, past small streets, past the Florida turnpike, past dark clusters of trees, two North American blackbirds, male and female, fly west over the southeastern shore of the Florida peninsula.”-Claudia Zuluaga

The prelude to Fort Starlight—a novel about leaving the familiar and discovering the unfamiliar, about isolation and longing, about desperation and dreams—is one of place, and our first view, reminiscent of Eudora Welty’s opening passages in “A Curtain of Green,” is from above, an aerial shot of that place in Starlight County where the story will unfold.

The wetlands and heat and flat brilliance of Florida’s east coast are familiar to you, Claudia. Could you tell us a little about your background, how you, too, once found yourself in Florida, and why this setting is integral to your main character Ida’s story?

I’m the sixth of seven children. I was born in White Plains, NY. My parents, who had never owned a house, had bought a parcel of land in Florida around the time that I was born. I don’t think it was ever worth much, but the summer before I turned sixteen, when all of my older siblings were living on their own, they traded that plot of land toward the purchase of a villa in Port St. Lucie. At that time, Port St. Lucie wasn’t fully developed, and there was nothing but wilderness to the west of our planned community. Only maybe half of the villas were occupied, and for a teenager, pulled away from her friends and her pedestrian life, it was profoundly disorienting. And the heat. The whole thing felt like a dream. I would try to go for a walk, but five minutes in any direction was just swamp, tall grass, or asphalt, rippling in the heat. I spent most of that summer, after I gave up on the walking, inside the villa, in the air conditioning.

I was only fifteen, and my parents had put everything they had into starting a life there, but all I could think about was that everything I had known, all the people I had known, were gone, and I had to find a way to make something for myself, because I couldn’t imagine anything coming next. It seemed, at that point, impossible. And then, like Ida, I realized it was something I’d just have to survive, and that maybe I’d never know what it meant. But I did find things to hold onto. I made friends. I made it work as well as I was able. It didn’t take away my urge to escape, to undo what I felt had been done to me, but I found beauty there. It is beautiful.

North American Blackbirds

The blackbirds, first introduced in novel’s beginning pages, appear throughout, at first to show us the way and then, more than literary device, more than motif, they reveal their own story. Like the characters of Fort Starlight, they, too, are trying their best to survive the harsh and beautiful wetlands, “a place where anything dripping and new could step up out of the muck and begin its existence.” And inside the act of survival we witness the imperfections and vulnerabilities of the creatures and characters.

Would you expand on the importance of the world here, “the seven square miles of muddy rivers, scrubby trees, swamp, the forest hammock,” in relation to your characters and the intertwining stories?

The world of south Florida, of this wild part of south Florida that doesn’t touch the Atlantic, is something you can’t deny, can’t get away from. There is no ocean breeze to cool you off, no reassuring smell of salt in the air.  It’s something that makes you think, “People probably aren’t supposed to be living here.”

But they are. And they are in Fort Starlight. Nature has pushed (almost) everybody inside to shelter, and inside is where they have to deal with their weaknesses, their problems, their pain. The place makes me think of a sweat lodge, somewhere you go to sit and sweat and suffer, all for the purposes of purifying, of moving forward.

A friend of mine says, “You can’t get away from your shit. It’ll track you down and eventually make you deal with it.” Everybody in Fort Starlight is at that place in their lives. They can’t run any longer. This is what unites all of the characters. This is the basis of their community, whether they know it or not.

“An alligator could snap you up in two seconds”

“the body of… a twelve-year-old boy is guarded by a thirteen-foot alligator”

As I read Fort Starlight, I noticed the idea of imperfection casting itself into the storylines, and in each successive chapter, with subtlety and great care, the perfection of imperfection beginning to fold itself into scenes in which characters interact with each other and with nature. Careful narrative threads, crosscutting, and lyricism work together and create a landscape in which the perfection of imperfection is revealed. Pairings appear: Ida and her long-lost brother, Peter and the memory of his wealthy father, the at-odds gay couple Ryan and Lloyd, the neglected and wandering boys Donnie and Carter, Nancy and her terminally ill great-niece, even the body of twelve-year-old Mitchell Healy and a four-hundred-pound alligator, and yes, the blackbirds.

What might you tell us of the meaningful isolation and imperfection of your characters and of the physical, emotional places in which they find themselves?

I wanted to make Ida stuck, with no easy way out. The only way she is going to grow, meaningfully, is by being stuck with herself. It is so tempting to think that everything will change, if only you pack up and move away from the familiar, if only the background and the noise and the weather are different. Of course, it’s not that easy. The only things that change are the background, noise, weather. As soon as the disorientation has dissipated, you are back where you started.

Despite the difficulties that Ryan and Lloyd are having, that Nancy and her great niece are having, that even the boys are having, they all have each other for support in their journey. Ida has only the imaginary companionship of her brother. Peter has only the memory his father and the illusion of his superior intellect. These two are the most in need of figuring out who they are and how their lives are going to be, and both are brave about it, if a bit misguided. They have to be alone, until they don’t anymore. And I see their relationship—one of parallel growth rather than intimacy—continuing beyond that last moment at the beach.

Florida tree house

Tidal pool, tree house, or a beachside table spread with a sunset supper of cold white wine and deep-fried gator?

I’m torn between the tidal pool and the tree house. When I was in high school, we would go to a beach called Bathtub, and when the tidal pools were full and warm, at night, we’d bring goggles. You could swim in some of these pools in darkness, without having to worry about riptides or sharks. There were these phosphorescent organisms, and if you moved your hands underwater, watching with the goggles, it was like you were parting the stars. Amazing.

One of my brothers moved to Florida for a few years, around the time I moved out of my family’s home, and he and his wife did live in a tree house for a time. It was tiny, dark wood, with bunks instead of beds, no real furniture. Something from a fantasy movie, like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. It wasn’t open to the elements, but it was up in a tree, up over swamp water, cozy. He moved there with his wife, just after they were married.

Florida map

Claudia, you’ve lived in the South, and your writing, so far, concerns the South, a place that for many, including myself, has a mystical, powerful, sinkhole kind of attraction. There are the harsh realities of hurricanes, overzealous religions, and unsettling heat, and then there are the gentler ones of salty ocean breezes, herons in flight, the taste of grilled pompano.

Do you find that you are drawn still to writing mostly about Florida? What is it about this particular setting that inspired you to write the Pushcart-nominated story, “Okeechobee,” and then the much-praised novel, Fort Starlight?

There is something in the very shape of Florida that makes it feel cut off from the rest of the country, the rest of the world. Once I moved there, I never once drove up and out of the state. It just seemed so far. We’d go south, west, east. Never north.

I moved to an efficiency near the beach just before I turned nineteen, and then to Orlando for a few years, where I worked as a waitress. As a matter of fact, I didn’t leave Florida until I was twenty-one and flying out on my very first airplane ride. I’ve never been back to my home town. Not even once. Miami, the Keys a few times, but no more Treasure Coast. This wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t really feel I had roots there, and even my parents gave up and moved back north, because none of their children lived down there.

That isn’t to say that Florida doesn’t have culture or joy or possibility, because of course it does. I think my feelings about that particular part of Florida were really colored by the fact that, when I did live there as a teenager, I was under the thumbs of my strict parents, and I had no car or freedom. I was away from everything I’d ever known and believed the rest of the world was gone; there was no evidence of it anymore. I couldn’t even go for a walk, because there was nothing to walk to. I couldn’t get my bearings, really. All of this combined made me really disoriented and unsure about how to figure out who I was. I fled, thinking I needed the distraction of other people to be able to figure it out. Maybe I did.

Now, I’m a grownup, I can drive, and there’s the magic of the internet, connecting everybody. The place I lived, as I knew it then, doesn’t exist anymore. I wouldn’t experience it the same way.

I didn’t realize I had to get it out of my system, work through what it all meant, until I was in the noise and chaos of New York City. People have described my writing as atmospheric, very setting-oriented. I’m not sure if that is the case in anything I write that isn’t based in Florida. I think I may be done with Florida, but who knows! I have other Florida stories, one called Be Your Animal, published in the now defunct Lost Magazine.

Okeechobee

Trailers & Palm Trees

At David Abrams’ literary blog, The Quivering Pen, you wrote of earning your first paycheck for a story accepted by Narrative Magazine. I love the humor and honesty of this account, and even more, I love the story itself. “Okeechobee” is a sweet, sad short-short about how childhood and family are rough and rare.

Would you tell us something about the narrator, a young girl who notices the world around her—her own version of Florida—in terms of the tension between her parents, the hot afternoon of canned colas and closed trailer doors, curses and class differences and broken-down cars?

Kids take in what they are ready to take in. There is an age when children start noticing the things that are not right about their lives, not right about their families. They start to imagine what their own life will be like someday, and this causes them to notice and judge and long for what they don’t have. My narrator has just begun to have this awareness. She sees the tension between her parents, the lack of joy, affection, spontaneity, and starts to put the pieces together, trying to figure out where it all came from, trying to figure out what it means for her.

My second summer in Florida, I had a boyfriend who seemed to be, at the time, the only thing I had going for me. Naturally, he dumped me. I was despondent, because I had thought I’d found some direction, something to hold onto that made me who I was. If I mattered to someone, then I was connected to the world. The dumping happened around the time my mother wanted to visit her friend in Okeechobee, and though I was a mess, she made me come. Maybe she thought it would cheer me up, or maybe she just was wary of leaving me home alone. We got in the car and drove, meeting her friends at a rodeo (where they did, I think, have warm cans of cola). It was so hot. I thought it was supremely ugly. I sat with my shoulders hunched, too numb to cry.

A bull collapsed. People rushed over, then just stood over it, watching while the beast’s heart gave out. It seemed that there could be no more miserable place on earth at that moment. Hot and dusty, warm soda, a heartbroken girl, a dying bull, all of this happening even closer to the center of the state, where there seemed to be no escape. Why had my mother made me come? Did she not understand my despair? There was definitely something about the disconnect that inspired the story of Okeechobee.

“Small fishes, sand, bits of seaweed, scallop shells, whole and cracked”

And finally, I want to acknowledge the ending of Fort Starlight without giving it away. There are moments of resolution I feared might become too carefully tied, and so I was relieved that the characters and their story lines remain a bit smudged, as well as lovely and imperfect. Ida’s character expands exponentially once she finds the Atlantic, and as in the beginning, she experiences a new place with “tide pools on both sides… the water… so clear… [she] can see the bottom… Small fishes, sand, bits of seaweed, scallop shells, whole and cracked… a stingray in the last… just before the sand bars end and the open ocean begins.” Here, there is a widening, the possibility of moving forward, the moment Ida and all Fort Starlight’s characters have longed for. Is this perhaps where you as a writer also found a place from which to move forward? And from this easterly view, where are you headed next?

Yes!! I am working on a novel right now that goes to an even more challenging place for me, emotionally and psychologically. Before Fort Starlight, I wouldn’t have had the courage to jump into the strange, unknowable thing I’m jumping into now. Now I trust the process of writing a novel and know that it will work itself out, as long as I keep at it. Fort Starlight was a mess for years. I had all of these pieces and had no idea how they connected. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out who Ida was. I would see her doing things and I didn’t know why. All I had was atmosphere, and it took so long for the people to emerge from this atmosphere, and this is echoed in the prologue with the bit you excerpted: “a place where anything dripping and new could step up out of the muck and begin its existence.”

So I’m looking east, yes. At the deepest, darkest, most unknowable trenches of the ocean. With my fingers crossed.

CLAUDIA ZULUAGA

Photo Credit: Christian Uhl

Claudia Zuluaga is an English Lecturer at John Jay College (CUNY) in New York City. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her short stories, which have been nominated for Pushcart and Best American Short Stories, have been published in Narrative Magazine, JMWW, Lost Magazine, and Linnaean Street.

 *

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

First posted at Hothouse Magazine.

The Coastal Concerns of JoeAnn Hart

“While he lamented the shipwreck that was his marriage, he mourned the equally disastrous changes in his old route. It was no longer the road of his blissfully rudderless youth, when this stretch was a wild and untamed curve of the bay, dotted with signs of warning—“Swim at your own risk” and “Caution, strong tides”—which had only encouraged recklessness. This area had once been so sparsely settled that, at low tide, he and his older brother, Nod, could walk the few rocky miles from their house to their dad’s office without ever touching the civilization of the sidewalk. They loved the damp band of earth that was neither wholly sea nor entirely land, a constantly changing landscape that offered their prepubescent souls new, exciting dangers to overcome. Duncan and Nod had felt themselves gifted at avoiding the perils of the seaweed slicks. They had leaped across the cracks and crevices with ease, even grace, and had waded unafraid through tide pools full of barnacles and crabs. They had scratched their bare legs on wire lobster traps and tripped on minefields of trash, surviving to tell the tale. As boys, they were masters of their world, demi-gods of the water’s edge. Now their infinite kingdom was gone.”–JoeAnn Hart

JoeAnn Hart writes about environmental concerns that affect coastal regions, where sea and land meet, and where ecosystems are made even more fragile by man’s irresponsible pursuits. Her characters are observant and engaging, her prose layered with metaphor, her setting lush with realism, and her themes linked to the beauty and tragedy of the natural world. In this interview she speaks of her novel, Float, and the environment, as well as community and collaboration.

JoeAnn, tell us about your background. Has Gloucester always been your home? And how has that coastal landscape influenced your writing?

I grew up in the Bronx, then Westchester, before escaping to the Rocky Mountains, which is where young people went in the 70’s. Most of New York was cavorting about in Boulder, including the man who would be my husband. He was from Manhattan, but had just inherited a creaky house in Gloucester, and so I was dragged, somewhat kicking and screaming, from the sunny mountains to the icy sea. It was January, 1979. The sky was gray, the snow was gray, and the harbor was frozen over for the first time in decades. It was no Coastal Living magazine spread. I was only 22, and I wasn’t sure I had the fortitude for maritime life, but love being what it is, I stayed, and Gloucester became a part of me, and me of it. I didn’t start writing until much later, when the working waterfront had already begun its decline. The fisheries were decimated by the industrial fleet with their bottom-scraping trawls, and plastic debris was becoming the main harvest in the nets. In Float, I’ve tried to come to grips with the crippling of the local fishing fleet, and the ecological devastation of the seas. Most writers attack these problems through journalism and other non-fiction formats, but I am comfortable writing about these issues in fiction. I believe that environmentally conscious fiction can forge a strong connection between the brain and the heart, and become a catalyst for social change.

JoeAnn Hart’s novel, FLOAT – Art by Karen Ristuben / Design by John Yunker

“A wry tale of financial desperation, conceptual art, insanity, infertility, seagulls, marital crisis, jellyfish, organized crime, and the plight of a plastic-filled ocean, JoeAnn Hart’s novel takes a smart, satirical look at family, the environment, and life in a hardscrabble seaside town in Maine.”

I love this description of Float. Would you tell us the details of what inspired you to write this novel? And how you decided on the title and on Duncan Leland, the man whose “infinite kingdom” is facing rising tides, as the character through which the story is revealed?

As with my first novel, Addled, I started out with the title, Float, then dove in to play with all the many different meanings and images. The concept of Float began when I heard a friend tell me what her therapist told her, that she had to learn to float over her stress, that she couldn’t struggle against every crisis or else she would get pulled under and drown. So she learned to just say the word float whenever she was stressed and it helped get her through. I thought that was brilliant, and started building on it. I developed a main character, Duncan Leland, who had both his personal and business life in jeopardy, then I gave him a crazy mother to boot. Through the course of the book, he must learn to float, or sink. I used ‘float’ not just in this psychological sense but also in its financial meaning, as in, to float a loan. Then there are the things that float in the ocean, such as plastic, or dead humans. A float is also a wooden platform connected to a dock by a ramp, and it moves up and down with the tides. Not to mention, floating on air.

Tidal pools, salt marshes, or white-capped seas?

Since I am a total wimp, no white-capped seas for me. I enjoy watching them from a distance, inside. Near a fireplace. And when I think salt marsh, I think greenhead flies, who will rip the flesh off your bones during breeding season. There are a few toe-biting crabs scuttling along the bottom, but you won’t ever find a shark in a tide pool.

JoeAnn Hart with Daisy – Photo credit: Morgan Baird

What has been the most memorable harbor sighting from your dory? And does Daisy, your rescue pup, share these fair-weather outings?

The most wonderful part of rowing around the harbor in a silent vessel like a dory is the seals. They are as curious about us as we are about them, so we – me and my rowing partner, Sarah – always have an eye out for a mammalian head peeking out of the water. It is amazing to think of these large animals, these air-breathing animals like us, living under the ocean’s surface. It is not just a parallel universe to ours, but a completely foreign landscape, and here is an ambassador from that country –  a seal – saying hello. To them, we are a dark lozenge shape moving slowly over their heads. They see the tips of our oars enter the water, then disappear. What are we doing, they wonder. What are they doing, we wonder. Daisy doesn’t come on the dory with us – she much prefers luxury motor yachts with staff – but when I walk her on Brace Cove and it is low tide and the seals are sunning themselves on the rocks, they seem to know one another. The seals arch up, as she goes by, and stare. Perhaps they feel their vestigial leg bones twitch, just a little, as they watch her jump from rock to rock.

You are active in the Gloucester writing community—including the Gloucester Writers Center and the Rocky Neck Art Colony—as well as environmental alliances and animal rescues—NAMA: Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, Save Your Ass Long Ear Rescue, and more. It seems you’ve found a way to traverse the worlds of art and environment. Collaboration is also evident in your choice of artist Karen Ristuben’s cover image for Float, and your partnered gallery reading/artist discussion this September. With your past, present, and future endeavors in mind, is the environmental path of your writing career ever overwhelming? Or does the support of community and collaboration keep you energized and inspired?

In almost all cases, I get back more from an organization than I give. Usually, that pay-back is in the form of satisfaction of having at least tried to make a difference in the world, especially when it comes to the environment. There is also the payback of connection. I’ve met wonderful people working with groups. I’ve also met a few clunkers, but it’s all grist for the mill. Humans just crack me up. We say one thing, and do another, and we almost always work against our own best interests, especially when it has to do with the environment. Here we are, a species destroying our own habitat, and we just continue on our way as if it’s not happening. So I have nothing but admiration for organizations that keep fighting the good fight even as we’re sinking. Especially the arts and humanities, which are too often viewed as if they were an accessory to our culture, and not the defining aspect of our species. Science can make us think, but the arts make us feel, and in order to make the right decisions for the future of the world, we need to use the whole brain, not just half of it. We should all try to approach the world with the wonder of an artist and the curiosity of the scientist. Gloucester artist, Karen Ristuben, who did the cover art for Float, has this sensibility, so I was thrilled when Ashland Creek, who specializes in environmental literature, chose her photographs for Float. We were on a panel together this summer with other environmental artists and writers – Kyle Brown and David Abrams – to talk  about how the arts can be used to enhance environmental action. It was the hottest night of the year in an un-air-conditioned space, and we had a packed house, which demonstrates a great deal of interest in the collaboration between the arts and the environmental sciences.

NAMA is important because they promote local fishing in the same way that the plight of the family farm was brought to our attention. We can fish and save the fish at the same time if we have the right international policies, and if people understand where their fish comes from and how it is caught. And of course, Save Your Ass is close to my heart because we got Abe and Zach from them. We love our donkeys, and we like to think they love us too.

JoeAnn Hart – Photo credit: Brendan Pike

JoeAnn Hart is the award-winning author of the novels, Addled, (Little, Brown) and Float, (Ashland Creek Press), a finalist for the Dana Award in the Novel, and an excerpt of which won the Doug Fir Fiction Award. Her work explores the relationship between humans and their environment, natural or otherwise. Recent stories, essays and articles have appeared in The Sonora Review, Newfound Journal, and The Boston Globe Magazine.

Photos by JoeAnn Hart, Morgan Baird, and Brendan Pike.

*

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.

Brooklyn's Jamel Brinkley

Photo Credit – Keisha Green

“Claudius Van Clyde and I both preferred girls of a certain plumpness—in part, I

think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like, because liking it confirmed

something about us—but he had gotten to Sybil first. So for the moment I was left to

deal with the prophet of the bubble. I was fine with that. I needed a good distraction, and

a good thing about hanging with Claudius Van Clyde was that you never failed to get

noticed. He had come to Columbia from West Oakland with certain notions regarding

life in New York, that the city’s summer heat and dust, its soot-caked winter ice, were

those of the cultural comet, which he ached to witness if not ride. Because of these

notions—which were optimistic, American—he manipulated gestures, surfaces, and

disguises, seemed to push the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his

face, in the flare of his broad nostrils, the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people

go on and on about. Though not quite handsome, he could fool you with his pretensions

and he was gorgeously insincere. Among his implements were a collection of Eastern style

conical hats and two-, three-, and four-finger rings. His pick for that night: a fez,

which was tilted forward on his head so that we, both of us, were emboldened by the

obscene probing swing of the tassel.”

- from “No More Than a Bubble”

by Jamel Brinkley

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Jamel Brinkley and I met at the Kenyon Writers Workshop in 2012, where each day Lee K. Abbott assigned a writing prompt, and the next morning we responded with story beginnings. The prompts were more than good, and the stories we came back with were more than surprising. Out of those surprises came really great complications, enormous wads of southern-style levity, racy descriptions of girls rolling in paint, Pacific coast road trips, Flatbush house parties, and god-like archetypes. A range of work that blew us all away. 

Jamel went on to other workshops and blew away a few more writers and teachers with his windswept street writing, inclusive of junkmen, Jamaican-African-American-Dominican girls, wild dogs, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, fez tassels, and near disappointment. His hard work and words have landed him a place at the Iowa Writers Workshop. No telling what the future will bring, but thankfully, it will include more stories and eventual volumes that bear Jamel Brinkley’s name.

Photo credit – Gya Watson

Jamel, you write short stories and are working on a novel. Could you compare the experience of creating short form vs. writing long?

The first thing I should do is confess that up until about two years ago, I was deathly afraid of writing short stories. The gaps in my knowledge of short stories, which are still significant, were then enormous.  I was all about novels, and in a drawer somewhere I have a 600-page dung heap of a novel that is probably still steaming and stinking things up.  I workshopped part of that novel at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop a few years ago, and I found much to my dismay that I had absolutely no understanding of structure.  What I had written was an incoherent mess.

The novel I’m working on now might more accurately be called a novella, or at least I envision it that way.  I’m trying to be way more modest about the scope and the pages, trying to be more mindful about structure, to exert more control so that it doesn’t turn into a “loose baggy monster” of the worst kind.  I’ve been working more on stories than the novel recently, and my sense is that both forms are difficult as hell.  Stories call for an extraordinary amount of control and efficiency, and in those miniaturized spaces, I find it particularly challenging to maintain the feeling and soul and voice I want while making things happen satisfactorily on the emotional and action plot levels.  I’ve had a hard time ramping up the tension.  I get caught up in sentences, a fact that is bad enough in a story, but imagine 600 pages of that nonsense!

The level of description and depth in your writing is phenomenal. Have you come to this from the foundation of years and years of reading and writing, or as this always been your inclination? Either way, who out in the world are your greatest influences?

Well, thank you, first of all.  I do think I’ve always been drawn to vivid writing, to details and images, the possibilities of rhythm in a sentence and a poetic line.  In high school and college, I fancied myself a poet, and I was devastated when I discovered that there was an unflattering name for what I had been writing: purple prose.  One of my challenges is to avoid layering on images, adjectives, and details in such a way that my writing becomes obscure, muddled.  So while I used to love Nabokov at his most florid, now I try to pay attention to writers who have a firm handle on what sentences can do, who know when to tighten and release the reins.  This wishful list of influences will be necessarily incomplete, but here goes:  James Baldwin (his essays and short stories), the James Joyce of Dubliners, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, J.D. Salinger, Marilynne Robinson (especially Housekeeping), Junot Díaz (especially Drown and Oscar Wao), Charles D’Ambrosio, Barry Hannah, Lee K. Abbott, Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Amy Hempel, Nathaniel Mackey, Tobias Wolff, Gayl Jones, William Trevor, Alice Munro, John Edgar Wideman, Jhumpa Lahiri.  I’ll stop here, with guilty feelings about leaving off so many of the fiction writers I admire, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Q-Tip, Black Thought, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, Ghostface Killah, and MF Doom as folks who inspire and perhaps influence me.  And don’t get me started on jazz!

Lions, tigers, or bears?

Lions, without question.  I spent many years as an employee, undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia, whose mascot is the lion.  I’ve also been called a lion because of my hair, here and there by friends who are adherents of Rastafari, and more significantly by former students who thought I looked like Simba from The Lion King.  There’s not much that’s lion-like about me beyond that; I’m a November baby, and I’m definitely more Scorpio than Leo.

The character, Claudius Van Clyde, in your story, “No More than a Bubble,” comes across as an archetype, a kind of jester, large and laughing, in love with life; yet through the narrator’s eyes, Claudius is truly flesh-and-blood with vulnerabilities and a demeanor that lead him and the narrator to near disgrace. Is this larger archetypal view something you intended, or a natural direction that the story took? Are there Claudius Van Clydes in your life, the kind of magnanimous personalities that beg for story?

I did intend it.  Claudius strikes me a particularly “New York” kind of character, in both the literary and life senses.  There are many versions of Claudius Van Clyde where I live, in Brooklyn.  These are folks who strike me as needing or wanting to match the grandiosity of New York City.  In a place teeming with stimuli, they make elaborate efforts to draw attention to themselves, to make things swirl around them, and I think that they often have fascinating reasons for doing so.  I’ve written about a couple of these character types.  I think they draw my attention because they are so unlike me and because I have such strong and complicated feelings about them.  I guess I’m happy to play Nick to their Gatsby.

How has teaching high school English had an effect on your writing, from managing time to influencing the subject and slant of your writing? The twist and swerve of language in your stories are completely new, utterly unique. Are you inspired by your students’ vocabulary and by the street-speak and sounds of the boroughs?

For me, teaching high school English pulls from the same well of time, energy, and mind that I need to write.  So during the school year, I get very little work done.  If I’m lucky, if there aren’t piles of student essays waiting to be read and graded, I get some work done on weekends.  Otherwise I rely on holidays and seasonal breaks.  Right now I teach in a very traditional independent school, so if anything my work with these students pulls me towards writing that is canonical.  The qualities in my language that you very kindly describe, the vocabulary and the urban rhythm and vernacular, probably come from the way my upbringing, musical influences, more “experimental” reading, and earlier teaching experiences dance with the more traditional and canonical work I’ve been immersed in over the last four to five years.

Exciting times ahead! You’ll be leaving New York, as the Iowa Writers Workshop awaits you, and you begin in the fall, yes? A quotation you gave me from Ellison’s Invisible Man seems quite fitting: “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” What are your expectations, goals, and dreams as you approach the next two years? And beyond?

Yes, this is the first time in my conscious existence that I’ll be living someplace other than in New York City.  I’m nervous and thrilled.  I’m thrilled to have the gift of time, which is something that Lan Samantha Chang, the director of the Iowa program, emphasized to me in her typically generous and clear-headed way.  It seems like such an obvious thing, but when you reach a certain age and have established routines, relationships, a career, realizing how enormous and precious a gift time might require someone like Sam to believe in you and your work enough to force-feed you a healthy dose of clarity and plain good sense.  I’m thrilled to have the time and the opportunity to say “yes” to everything, which was Lee K. Abbott’s advice to me: study with everyone, take poetry classes, read read read.  Despite the suspicion and criticism the Workshop sometimes engenders, it seems like it can’t possibly be a bad thing to spend two years reading and writing in a high-quality program where the very town takes you seriously as a writer.  I want to finish my short novel and build a short story collection, but my real goal is to say “yes” to everything, to throw myself fully into this two-year conversation with brilliant teachers and peers, and into what Charlie D’Ambrosio described as a conversation with yourself “in the solitary struggle of writing sentences.”  Of course, I want to be published someday—what writer doesn’t?—but I can wait for that to happen.  “I want to be an honest man and a good writer,” as Baldwin said, and I think my experience at Iowa will help with at least one of those goals.

Jamel Brinkley is a writer from Brooklyn, New York.  He has degrees from Columbia University and teaches high school English in New York City.  This fall he will begin study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

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This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.