The Sudden and Stunning Stories of WITH ANIMAL

An Interview with Carol Guess and Kelly Magee

“When she learned that the baby was human, she felt disappointed. It rattled inside her, fearless and furless, alphabet of bones and thumbs.

An animal pregnancy was all soft tongues, lapping; pink silk and decoration. Multiples, so they took care of themselves. They nested inside each other, fully formed at birth.It wasn’t her fault, her husband reminded her. His DNA decided things. He was the carrier; he was the mail. Still, she talked to the baby animals. Named them as if she might keep them.

Of course mothers could only keep human infants. Baby animals were whisked away. Her first three pregnancies were bundled in yellow blankets and disappeared down the hall with the nurse. Of course they reassured her that her kittens, puppies, and pandas were loved; cuddled and coddled. Of course she didn’t look at the smoke that flew over the hospital, crooked gray birds.”

— from “WITH HUMAN” – by Carol Guess and Kelly Magee

 

The stories in Carol Guess and  Kelly Magee’s co-written collection, “WITH ANIMAL,” (forthcoming from BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS in 2015) are sudden and stunning, leading us to a place of relationships, tracing intimacy and birth, difference and understanding, all colored with quicksilver, reflecting the allegorical phenomena from which they were conceived. Distinctive narrative voices carry each story, and suspension of disbelief allows entry into their worlds, which cross from modern to fairytale, real to surreal. A woman in line at the P.O. births killer bees; sadomasochistic sex can lead to litters of kittens; scorched bed sheets are signs of a pregnancy with dragon; stung by jellyfish, a girl becomes a breeding ground for jelly babies; vying for love from her hybrid twins (one human, one horse), a mother realizes they will always love each other more.

Todd Horton, the Washington State painter, and cover artist for “WITH ANIMAL,” describes his work “as leading the viewer into the great unsaid… [with] attention to the wonders of the natural world, the signs of the precariousness of life in all living things.” This statement and the selected images of his paintings complement not only the authors’ responses in this interview, but the stories of “WITH ANIMAL” as well.

Together – By Todd Horton

Kelly and Carol, as co-authors, what is your collaborative process in creating stories? How do vision and voice, storyline and structure, fall together so beautifully?

Carol: Thanks for giving our work such a careful and generous read! Kelly and I came to this collaboration with different strengths, but similar interests. I’m a poet, focused on sound and musicality; my weakness as a writer is that I can’t construct a plot. Working with Kelly allowed me to experiment with moving a story forward in innovative ways. By the time we finished the manuscript, I felt as if we’d each grown a great deal as writers. Our process was simple: we each wrote half a story, then passed it along to the other person to finish. This meant matching or complimenting the other person’s voice, so imitation and influence emerged organically.

Kelly: First off, thanks for the kind words! I’m glad you think these things do ultimately fall together. I can say that, from my end, I didn’t often feel as if I needed to work to match Carol’s style or voice – it seemed to happen naturally by channeling the characters she’d created. Initially, this was the fun of collaborative writing. Later, it became exciting not to so much match the writing/voice I was given, but to see how leaps and shifts would take the stories in new directions. I loved when Carol would take the stories I sent her in a direction I never would have expected, but which was always the perfect place to take them.

Dreaming from the Bough – by Todd Horton

Carol, you come from a background of poetry and short prose, and Kelly, your work has concentrated more on stories of depth and length. How has this influenced your work together on this collection?

Carol: I’m suspicious of stories where something happens. Fiction is most interesting to me when it focuses on character, and when sound does the work of conveying emotion. This project was a huge challenge, because I needed things to happen in order to start or finish the stories! I had to ask a question I never ask: what is this piece about? Writing with Kelly forced me to face my anxiety about the role of narrative in my work: how much, how little space it needs. I’m so happy with how this book turned out, and I hope to use what I learned in forthcoming projects.

Kelly: I think of myself as a slow writer. My process is to let my imagination go crazy, then spend weeks, months, drafts, reigning it back in so the story makes sense. But with this collection, the pace was totally different, and in many ways, liberating. I haven’t written on a deadline in years, but Carol and I had a particular day of the week on which we exchanged stories, so I had to let the story go at that point, despite my love for (obsession with?) revising. This taught me another way of working that I’m very pleased to know. Starting a story, I could go a little crazy with the beginning and pass it on. Getting a story start from Carol, I’d work first to figure out what the underlying themes were, and what the threads were that I could weave through, and go with that. It was a really productive way of working, and something that I’d love to do again and highly recommend to other writers.

Quietly Waiting the Morning Fog Lingers – by Todd Horton

In the stories of “WITH ANIMAL,” playful and serious elements are at work, not necessarily at odds, in terms of storytelling. Lyricism, even cynicism, shapes the pieces. Would you talk about the use of language?

Carol: My favorite unit of meaning is the sentence. I think it’s useful to figure out what unit of meaning you’re attracted to. It’s like your sexuality as a writer. You just gravitate. I love sentences so much, and I move poems, stories, and novels forward sentence by sentence, always trying to link the next line through sound. This comes from my training as a poet, but it’s also about wanting to be surprised by my own work. I never know where a piece is going when I start writing. The shape emerges sentence by sentence, which leads to lyricism. Holding the pieces together is harder, which is why I often impose structure or constraint on any long project.

Kelly: I’ve admired Carol’s work for a long time, so I was intimidated to begin this project, and the playful elements in Carol’s story starts helped me to loosen up. Some of her lines made me laugh out loud. I also learned a lot about economy in writing from working with someone who’s drawn to poetry. My own use of language tends to be voice-driven. I can’t write until I’ve found a voice that interests me, and once in a while, interesting story ideas have fallen by the wayside because I can’t find the right voice. But once I do, the story always takes off.

Young Fir Listens Nearby – by Todd Horton

Difference plays an enormous role in these stories. It arises in terms of gender, species, and relationships and is filtered through individual perspectives and societal expectations: what it is like to mother a dragon; how arachnid adoptions are difficult; who is chosen for immaculate conception; why hybrid twins are inseparable; where a woman, pregnant with fish, disappears when engulfed by parenthood. Tell us more about the ways in which difference is employed in this collection.

Carol: One intriguing fact about our collaboration is that Kelly is a fabulous parent to two great kids, while I very deliberately chose never to have or raise children. The magical realist themes in this book allowed me to imagine myself as a parent without sounding polemical or digressing about politics. I see a real connection between “WITH ANIMAL” and my second novel, “SWITCH,” which was published in 1998. In “SWITCH,” I wanted to explore gender and sexuality, specifically my own attraction to masculine-identified women, as well as my frustration with passing as straight because of my feminine gender identification. Rather than preach, I created characters who pushed all kinds of boundaries, including a woman who transformed herself into a cat. I’ve always loved using the theme of transformation to talk about difference in subtle ways. Beyond that, I’m bored with the assimilationist branch of the LGBT movement. Queer sexuality and gender play deserve more than matching cake toppers. I’m not downplaying the significance of equal rights for all people – I’ve literally put my life on the line for LGBT civil rights, as well as other forms of activism – but the current movement has sold out the needs and desires of non-mainstream humans. Let’s celebrate pleasure; let’s celebrate uniqueness; let’s create new forms of kinship beyond marriage and monogamy. That’s where I am now, and this collection allowed me to think these things through using non-human animals as the central characters.

Kelly: Like Carol, I’m drawn to the idea of transformation, of boundary-crossing, of gray areas. One of my favorite writing assignments is to take two completely different objects, ideas, or characters, and try to make them work together in a story. This is the analytical part of writing: making sense, making story, out of something random. I bristle at the kind of rhetoric that seeks to erase difference and make everyone appear the same: genders, races, sexualities, abilities. There was a video circulated on social media a while back, a young man defending his family – which included his two queer moms – in court, and while I admired his bravery and ambition, the gist of his speech was that his family was just like non-queer families, and I thought, No! Your family is beautifully different! I think the order of the day is not to point out all the ways people are the same, but to find the logic, the story, in how we are different. The fiction in this collection, for me, sought to do that through the mechanism of species, but this impulse permeates all of my writing.

Standing Outside Ones Own Dream – by Todd Horton

How do you strike a balance between realism and allegory in “WITH ANIMAL”?

Carol: So many good questions! Now I have a confession to make: I live in my imagination. I mean, I stop at red lights and obey the speed limit, but in many ways I live in the world I create. I assume that people have secret lives; animals, too. Certainly secret to us! So the magical realism in this collection didn’t feel allegorical to me. I never use fantastical elements for their own sake, only to highlight the fantastical in the everyday. As I mentioned earlier, I’m resistant to an assimilationist path and resistant to conformity. Ultimately, I think most people walk around with secret wishes, hopes, and fears. It’s my job as an artist to make that shadow life visible.

Kelly: I love stories that can be two (or more) things simultaneously. The more layers, the better. So I’m always conscious of not only what the story I’m writing or reading is, but what else it could be.

 All writers do this, probably, but there are certain stories that do it particularly well: the work of Kelly Link comes to mind. A story like “STONE ANIMALS,” one of my all-time favorite stories, is both an allegory for a fading suburban family life, and a great haunted house story. It’s not one or the other; it’s both, simultaneously. So in “WITH ANIMAL,” I tried to create that same effect by privileging the story at hand – these people really do become pregnant with animals – but being alert to other stories going on in the margins, between the lines, and in the subtext.

Owl Posse – by Todd Horton

Samish Land – by Todd Horton

“WITH HUMAN” alludes to an authoritarian world, in which human babies are allowed, but animal babies are whisked away somewhere unknown and final, a world from which mother and child attempt escape. The tone, the language, the images all give the piece a futuristic feel and, at the same time, call up historical notes—though, I may be overreaching here. This piece is intensely poetic and has an eerie depth, the idea of oppression as undercurrent and a mother’s love as all powerful. Was there intention in terms of the allusions and the careful language?

Carol: Thanks for your kind words! This was one of the first stories we wrote. It’s the companion piece to “With Dragon,” since Kelly wrote the beginning to that piece and I wrote the beginning to this one. “With Dragon” was Kelly teaching me how to write fiction, and “With Human” was me teaching Kelly how to write poetry. Here I was still focused almost entirely on sound and musicality. It was so exciting when Kelly finished this story, and I finished “With Dragon.” I knew the collaboration would be a success, because it was clear that we were both capable of moving outside of our comfort zones.

Kelly: I’m so glad you brought this up, and I don’t think it’s overreaching at all. The historical notes you mention – YES. As a queer mom myself, I am privileged to live in a place and time where I can be fairly certain my children won’t be taken from me because of my sexuality. That’s not the case for everyone, though, and the thought of children being taken from their parents because of their parent’s sexuality, or their race, or their culture (I live in Washington state, which was the first state to establish “Indian boarding schools”) weighed heavily on me when I wrote this, and other, stories in this collection. That said, Carol mentioned that this story was her teaching me how to write poetry, and I totally agree with that. I got the beginning of this story and had to just sit with it, read it out loud, retype her words before I was able to figure out how to keep going with it, and her poetic style and careful language certainly influenced the way I proceeded.

Memory of a Spring Flight – by Todd Horton

“People live in rooms I’ve lifted. Walk on beams I’ve flown through air. Every day I climb 150 feet above concrete and steel, all the lights of my city. Alone in my crane I’m pregnant with buildings. But sometimes the view seems to beckon me down. When Chrissy died, I thought about jumping. My depression was gravity; I knew it could kill me. Raising buildings was part of staying alive. If I could bring buildings up to meet me, there’d be no jumping and nowhere to fall.”

— from “WITH RACCOON” – by Carol Guess and Kelly Magee

“WITH RACCOON” is quite different from the other stories, in that understanding is born out of loss and grief, but none of the characters take on the parenting of another species. The narrator is a crane operator, whose sense of the world comes of compassion and staying on task, raising buildings so as not to fall into sadness. The raccoons here create mess and menace, but also act as a reminder of family. Pregnancy, defined differently here, becomes metaphor, as in the other stories in the collection, but opens up in another way. Was the process for this story unlike that of the others, from onset to outcome?

Carol: That’s really intuitive. Yes, the process was different because “With Raccoon” started from nonfiction. Almost all of the other stories begin and end in imagination, but I started this story while I was living in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, a few blocks away from a construction site. A crane operator really did find raccoons at the top of his giant crane; they had to halt construction while everyone tried to figure out what to do. Mysteriously, the raccoons disappeared overnight. It was a striking story, and I wanted to include it. We ended up sending “With Raccoon” to the construction workers and they liked it!

But there’s a sad side, too. My little dog Theo got attacked by a raccoon in my backyard in Ballard. I made the difficult decision to set out a trap for the raccoon. It was really aggressive and had taken over my yard; I literally couldn’t let my dog go outside, couldn’t walk in my own backyard. I feel awful about this, though. I can’t really think about it, I feel so guilty; maybe I did the wrong thing. It was the raccoon’s backyard, too. Such a hard decision, choosing between my safety and my pet’s safety and the life of this beautiful, wild creature. I hate thinking about it. So that sense of sadness and loss made its way into our story, too.

Kelly: This story was tough for me. Though it’s told from the point of view of the grieving father, the mother who has lost her child was central for me, and something I had to work around and through as I was finishing it. One of the great pleasures of collaboration is being pushed out of your comfort zone, called to write things you haven’t considered or that you’ve avoided. Since having children, I hadn’t written about the death of a child. It seemed too hard, too close, too gratuitous in a way. Then there she was, the mother I’d avoided writing about, losing her sanity in a way that seemed entirely authentic but also terrifying to me. Focusing on the raccoon family helped, but this was still a hard story for me to finish. Interestingly, in a previous draft (I hope this isn’t giving too much away!), I wrote that the father dropped the baby raccoons over the edge of the crane, essentially killing them. A journal editor suggested I change the line because it made him too unlikeable a character. I found it interesting that in a story about a dead child, it was the death of the animal that offended the sensibilities. There’s a way in which contemporary readers have become desensitized to human death in a way we haven’t for animal deaths. I’m interested in challenging that response… but I did end up changing the line.

Bees in Moonlight – by Todd Horton

“That night and the next I lay awake while she slept, watching her stomach as she tossed in dreams. In the dark of our bedroom her belly lit up, transparent. I could see tiny shapes moving in circles. An aquarium where her roundness should be. Even a castle, green seagrass like glass. A faint sound of gurgling.”

— from “WITH FISH” – by Carol Guess and Kelly Magee

I am completely taken with this story, given the straightforward, yet evocative perspective, voice, and imagery. The viewpoint of “WITH FISH” is that of a woman, who relays the tale of her girlfriend’s pregnancy and reveals her own feelings of ambivalence, concern, helplessness, and love. Realism slips into magical realism. I could ask about the drafting stages of this piece and how the final version came about. Instead I’ll ask this: cichlids, guppies, or goldfish?

Carol: Kelly will have to answer that one! I’ll just say that I loved the concept of this story, because it allowed us to write about queer sexuality without writing about identity politics. That was one of my aims with this collection: to capture something about queer lives, specifically queer sexuality and kinship structures, without preaching or talking directly about politics. It’s really my anti-assimilationist manifesto, but minus the manifesto part.

Kelly: Cichlids, guppies, and goldfish!

Samish Waters Glinting Light – by Todd Horton

“Once, a woman fell in love with a snake handler. She drove out to the country to visit him in a church that was a trailer. There were fire ants in the driveway, mannequins in the yard. The handler was the only one inside except for the snakes.”

— from “WITH SNAKES” by Carol Guess and Kelly Magee

“WITH SNAKES” is one of my favorite moments in this collection, especially because it slides into the place and passion of all that’s Pentecostal. From the first line on, the stories of Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty come to mind. The progression of woman to man to congregation to snakes is extraordinary, each astonishing, each opening into the next. Was there forethought to the four-part structure here, or did it arrive first-class, a sweet surprise?

Carol: Great question! The structure of this story came from an obstruction. I wrote the second half of the piece, and I had trouble matching the very distinctive voice Kelly created in part one. She crafted such a unique, authentic sound and I couldn’t imitate it. Rather than try to match her voice, I shifted perspectives. As I approached the ending, I began thinking about the cruelty involved in keeping pets that must be fed other live animals to survive. I knew I wanted to end the story by shifting the reader’s attention onto the complex lives of snakes and mice, and away from humans and religion. Ultimately much of this collection highlights beliefs I hold dear as a vegetarian – I’ve been vegetarian for over 30 years – and animal rights activist. That shift in perspective was very deliberate.

Kelly: Sometimes I get locked into an idea of what I’m doing and lose that sense of possibility, and often Carol’s ending would remind me of the huge range of technique available to writers. I think the first time she shifted perspective was with “With Sheep,” and I thought – oh right! We can change point of view! I love writing with multiple points of view in my solo stories, but I’d been so focused on finishing Carol’s stories with her characters intact that I sort of forgot about that. When “With Snakes” came along, I loved the way she’d told and retold the story, and had another one of those aha! moments.

The Silence that Lives Between – by Todd Horton

Mind Like the Spring Moon – by Todd Horton

“In this version she’s not a virgin, so the immaculate conception is harder to explain. The difference is that she’s only ever been with women, and though she’s participated in plenty of original sin, it hasn’t ever, to her knowledge, involved sperm. But these are lingering doubts…”

— from “WITH ANIMAL” – Carol Guess and Kelly Magee

A retelling of the immaculate conception, the title story, “WITH ANIMAL,” involves a single woman suddenly giving birth in a petting zoo to a babe who’s “a cross between a pit bull and a baby panda.” This story is wildly funny and magical and intensely hopeful. Anything you’d like to tell about how you decided to enter this world, and what you learned along the way?

Carol: This is my favorite story; I had so much fun crafting the ending. I challenged myself to write past what I could imagine. At first I worked on a very different narrative, in which the suitcase opens to reveal stairs leading into a secret tunnel. This ending felt forced, so I was thrilled when the character seemed to speak from nowhere and tell me what she saw inside the suitcase. It really came from her; she seemed real to me, and the new ending felt perfect.

Kelly: I’m obsessed with the idea of immaculate conception, so it just seemed natural to write this alternate Second Coming into the book. I love writing versions of existing stories, where you have a framework in place and can be imaginative with the details. This story was just pure fun to start: finding all the strange and funny ways to pair the Biblical story with the modern world. This is one of those stories (“With Unicorn” is another) that I sat giggling to myself while I was writing. I hope everyone finds a story like that at some point.

Thank you so much, Kelly and Carol, for this great conversation!

Carol: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be asked such great questions!

Kelly: Thank you!

Carol Guess

Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include collaborations with Kristina Marie Darling, Kelly Magee, and Daniela Olszewska. She is Professor of English at Western Washington University.

Kelly Magee

Kelly Magee’s first collection of stories, Body Language, (University of North Texas Press) won the Katherine Ann Porter Prize for Short Fiction.  Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Literary Mama, The Nashville Review, The Tampa Review, Diagram, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, and others. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

Author photos – with permission of Carol Guess and Kelly Magee.

All other images with permission of Todd Horton, painter and cover artist of “WITH ANIMAL.”

A selection of online “WITH ANIMAL” stories: With Human – Juked / With Dragon – Smokelong Quarterly / With Cat – Word Riot / With Fish – Passages North / With Horse – The Adirondack Review / With Jellyfish – Sundog Lit / With Me – Communion Literary Magazine / With Spider – Jersey Devil Press / With Locust – Spittoon / With Snakes – Front Porch Journal / With Raccoon – Animal Literary Review

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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.

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First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

INSIDE TERMINATION DUST

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSANNA J. MISHLER

“So much of the day consists of arcs induced

between separate planes—

hand to doorknob, or a trumpet solo

and an ear

pressed to the door.

Which is more beautiful,

The thing vaulting from one side to another

or the dark rift beneath it?”

— from “KNOCK ON WOOD”

— “TERMINATION DUST” — by Susanna J. Mishler

 

Susanna J. Mishler’s poetry collection, “TERMINATION DUST” (RED HEN PRESS, 2014), casts a wide and well-stitched net over arctic ice fields and southwestern deserts and across abstractions of perspective, identity, geography, and childhood. The broadest scope of “FLYING OVER BUCKLAND, ALASKA” is met by the close-up moment of “WHAT FITS NEATLY IN A HAND,” all with a deft, deserving sense of lyricism and surprise. Language meets landscape, “learn[ing] to dub fall snows termination dust”. This life, the afterlife, and beyond are examined with curiosity and an unsullied, inventive way of seeing.

 

Susanna J. Mishler – photo credit: Christina A. Barber

Susanna, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I’m so happy for the chance to learn more about “TERMINATION DUST.”

In “WEEKDAY IN SPRING” the human condition is laid bare by way of waxwings and communication, chaos and entropy, Barbie and blueprints. The speaker has ‘the sense of living under a vault, inside one of those snow globes except it isn’t snowing.” Would you tell us about your process of examining nature while tipping human understanding on its side?

“Weekday in Spring” came from a prompt to write a poem about sequencing the human genome. It takes rooms in a house, and houses in a neighborhood, as loose parallels for genes and chromosomes. The poem ended up with themes of information and loneliness—we have the human genome sequenced but we don’t know which genes do—we are inundated by information, yet don’t know what to do with most it or know what most of it means. Which is a little like living in a suburb: I know the street names, but many of my neighbors and their lives are hidden. It’s amazing how isolated one can feel in a suburb during the Information Age. I want to call it a “watershed poem” because the form is stream of consciousness, which pulls from all kinds of sensory input. And so, “Weekday in Spring” is a watershed poem of an Alaskan neighborhood in the 21st century.

 

The strength of nature is striking in many of your poems, and is present in the form of fauna—from whales, blue sharks, shrews, and Arctic terns to wolves, caribou, vermillion flycatchers, and ravens. They appear in metaphorical form, “bar[ing their] teeth,” in “AFTERLIFE: URSUS ARCTOS;” as image, “running toward us in the summer dusk,” in “CARIBOU;” and in actuality, “at night, walking/on the ceiling,” in ‘WESTERN BANDED GECKOS.”

Observation and perspective are keen in these poems. How do you discover your subjects and decide your focus?

As an undergraduate in Washington State and working on a school project, I spoke with a landscape architect who had worked in Alaska. He said he felt that being in Alaska—even urban Alaska—felt fundamentally different from being almost anywhere else in the nation, because wild lands elsewhere exist as islands in a sea of human endeavor, whereas human settlements in Alaska exist more as islands in a sea of wilderness. Even in Anchorage, one’s sense of place in the order of things, wild and human, is turned inside-out. The presence of wilderness, animals, weather, light/darkness, and season are keen. The solstices may pass unnoticed in San Diego, but in Alaska they’re a big deal—we don’t have such a steady upper hand on our environment. When I write about animals and weather I’m writing about what’s in my daily life, which has elements of both the urban and the wild.

I think, too, that telling stories about animals is one of the oldest human pastimes. We know what it is to be human by contemplating animals. Curiously, when we apply human imagination to animals, we also connect to ourselves as animals.

 

University Lake, Anchorage, AK with Termination Dust on the Chugach Mountains – photo credit: Susanna Mishler

Would you discuss how content, especially in the poems concerning wildlife, suggests form? For example, how “CARIBOU” includes two sextets followed by two quintets, ending with two quatrains.

Form is a constant question when I compose—often a vexing one. I try to treat each poem as something that has its own kind of volition, as something that has a preferred form, which by listening and experimenting, I help it to achieve. That form could be anything from a sonnet to a lyric essay. A form is the poem’s structure for thinking. I cultivate a variety of ways of thinking—it’s part of why I write poems.

“TERMINATION DUST” as a collection reflects this taste for variety in form and in subject. It ranges from unrhymed couplets to a ghazal; a prose poem to short-lined tercets; roving, single-stanza meditations to short, syllabic lines with fictional characters. I wanted to make a robust collection, one that has themes and obsessions but does not simply feel like different incantations of the same poem. A poem should surprise a reader in some way, as the reader moves through it. So, too, should a book of poems.

“CARIBOU” proceeds from sextets to quintets to quatrains as it moves from an outwardly descriptive poem to a more internal lyric. Shorter stanzas mean more caesuras, giving the poem’s progressively internal content more space. In this case, it has the effect of slowing the poem down, and gives extra room for reflection on the action in the first two stanzas.

 

“Silas digs a motocross pit in his backyard

for Hot Wheels. The sun on his back and the humid earth

are like Hell, he thinks. Silas knows about Hell

from two Sundays in church with his friend, Jesse—

Hell is uncomfortably warm. He knows, even,

that Hell is capitalized and so is Lord

because they are proper nouns like

Tennessee and Ferrari—things

you can touch or be inside of. People

are a special category, but he’s not sure

if people are special things or special places.

He feels like he’s inside himself, mostly, but

he could walk to the edge of town

and be a different place and maybe

a different thing.”

—   from “REVELATION” – “TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler

Some of the pieces in “TERMINATION DUST” are about a young boy named Silas. “REST STOP, WILDLIFE VIEWING,” “ASSURANCE,” “REVELATION,” “THE IMAGINATION AS A HEDGEHOG,” AND “THOUGHT POLICE” reveal this child from close third viewpoint and at times as if from the perspective of an older sibling. There is a sensibility concerning family and siblings, identity and discovery and loss, possibility and fear in these poems. How did Silas come to you? What did you realize in creating his character?

“Thought Police” was the first poem in which Silas appeared. He’s a mysterious boy. It was challenging to write both convincingly and compellingly from a child’s perspective. He brings another distinct voice and perspective to the book. His poems are woven through the five parts. Silas’s voice brings a kind of vulnerability and a kind of thinking to a subject that an adult character can’t. In trying to make sense of the world, a child’s logic can go surprising places for an adult audience. It was tricky to conjure that kind of logic without either making a parody of it or making it seem merely quaint or nostalgic. Kids are trying to understand the adult world around them with limited information—they draw lines between things that seem unrelated in the adult world—and this is a legitimate way for a poem to move. Through simple, direct association, to see where it goes and how it lands, like a monkey brachiating from one branch to another.

 

“TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler – Cover Image: “STORM BIRDS” – by Christina A. Barber

Bobbin, weathervane, or flip-flops in paradise?

Flip-flops in paradise, of course! The bobbin and weathervane are sunning themselves in adjacent chairs.

 

As an electrician by trade, do you find inspiration in the workings hidden behind walls, pathways that others take for granted and rarely know?

I think it’s interesting that writers use the language of craft to describe what we do. Visual artists have “studios” and “critiques;” whereas, writers have “workshops.” We are wordsmiths who talk about crafting things as if we’re constructing a three-dimensional object. William Carlos Williams famously said that a poem is a machine. If we’ve created this kind of language for ourselves, maybe it’s not so surprising that a poet would also feel drawn to work with her hands, to build systems and machines.

The hidden aspect of the work of an electrician also has similarities to the crafting of a poem. As an electrician, I had to learn the aesthetics of the industry. For electrical installations to look professional, they should be unobtrusive. A conduit run, for example, should not be irregular with regards to its surrounding lines, and it should appear uniform and deliberate. It needs to appear deft and effortless. This is an aesthetic I recognize from crafting poems. A poem should be an experience that does not draw unnecessary attention to its craft, just as a room should not draw unnecessary attention to its electrical system.

 

“The mind flaps between

shade and glass,

tangles in drawcords,

gnaws thirstily at

ice on the sill.”

—   from “(1/5) JANUARY CROSSING” – “TERMINATION DUST”

– by Susanna J. Mishler

“JANUARY CROSSING,” a stunning series poem, is a log of January contemplations. Winter, the arctic, the General, the girl, love, death, enclosed spaces, endless spaces, anatomy, identity (confused, mirrored, unknown), shapes, ice and snow, waking, and memory are revealed in its twelve sections. You’ve paid tribute to Anne Carson’s “BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND” in this comprehensive, thoughtful piece. How did this series come to you and then evolve?

Years ago I swapped a much earlier version of “TERMINATION DUST” with a manuscript by poet and friend Melissa Koosmann (part of which became the chapbook “ENDINGS,” published by Flying Guillotine Press in 2008). I had Melissa’s poetic voice in my head when I wrote “JANUARY CROSSING.” In her manuscript she was working in short, terse lines, packed with layered meaning and dry humor. I was also looking to tie together some of the many themes in “TERMINATION DUST” in a longer piece. I’d never written a poem more than three pages before and was curious to see how that feels, what opportunities it presents. January and February are long months in Alaska when the cold weather and darkness take on the tedium of a military occupation. It can be a very introspective time, when one sifts through memories and examines events with an edge of cabin fever. A long poem consisting of fragmented recollections and meditations seemed like a good formal fit for the subject and state of mind it attempts to render.

In subzero weather, all animal life feels borrowed. I appropriated Anne Carson’s line, “To stay human is to break a limitation,” from a tortured love poem. The context of her line implies that a hidden, internal limitation is overcome, an emotional one. I mean it more as an external limitation—a marvel that we don’t freeze or starve or lose all shreds of civil society.

 

“The days are bigger—I wake and am falling

inside them. The cups and clocks open their eyes and are falling.”

— from “LAKE CABIN” – “TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler

Influenced by Li-Young Lee’s “SEVEN HAPPY ENDINGS,” you wrote your poem, “LAKE CABIN.” The idea of psychic and emotional spaces, as well as enclosed and anatomical spaces, is beautifully imagined here. Do you find that poetry aligned with the natural world is your best inspiration? Tell a little more of your process and what this holds for your literary future.

Sometimes I can’t get a good line or stanza of poetry out of my head. That’s how it was with Li-Young Lee’s “Seven Happy Endings.” I kept thinking about how it would be to open my eyes and find objects around me falling, and for the objects themselves to know they are falling. This image was the seed of “Lake Cabin.” The word, “falling,” became the refrain in a ghazal about falling out of love (Lee’s is about falling in love).

It was since pointed out to me that “Lake Cabin” can be read both ways—as a poem about falling in or out of love—and I like that discovery. That the poem has a flexibility of meaning, yet also has specific sensory details.

The seeds of poems come to me in all kinds of ways. While “Lake Cabin” came from a published poem I admire, I recently wrote a poem inspired by a RadioLab broadcast. Sometimes an image from a dream will stick with me and that will be a seed, or an encounter at work. Finding the subject or seed of a poem makes me think of water-dowsing—as a poet I walk around with my dowsing rod and when the rod inexplicably plunges toward the earth, that’s where I dig for water/poetry. Why does the rod dip where it dips? What force grabs and pulls it? How does the seed of a poem announce itself to the poet? I have no idea—I’ve only learned to feel it, follow it, craft it, and anyway, if I did know it might not be good for the poem. The following comes from a figuring-out, a pursuit and discovery, the suggestion of a mystery or of something much larger than it appears.

Susanna J. Mishler – Photo Credit: Clark James Mishler

Susanna J. Mishler’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as THE IOWA REVIEW, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, and KENYON REVIEW ONLINE. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The University of Arizona in Tucson, where she served as a poetry editor for SONORA REVIEW. She’s the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship in Poetry at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop. In addition to her literary pursuits, Susanna is an electrician by trade. She lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska.

All photos permission of Susanna J. Mishler. Credits to Christina A. Barber, Susanna J. Mishler, and Clark James Mishler.

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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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First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

Points of Connection

A Conversation with Bich Minh Nguyen

“In August 1965 a woman named Rose walked into my grandfather’s café in Saigon.

That much is known. My grandfather would say that’s the beginning of this story.

My mother would say I should have left it at that.”

 

So begins Bich Minh Nguyen’s much-praised second novel, “Pioneer Girl.” As in her memoir, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” and her first novel, “Short Girls,” thematic points of connection–places of origin, family relationships, and comforts of food–are laid out before us, each influencing the next, each as important as the others. These points are textured by differences between the first and second generations of immigrant families, the feelings of belonging and not belonging, and the weight of lives that lead from east to west, all the while anchored in both places.

These points of connection are exactly what I love about Nguyen’s books. There is the sense of geography, which spans from Vietnam to the Midwest to the West all the way to the Pacific, which leads back to Vietnam. There are the relationships, close and distant, caring and complicated, between sisters, grandmothers, fathers, uncles, grandfathers, mothers, brothers, and friends. And then there is the food: from all-you-can-eat childhood comforts to the more mature market-grazing of peaches and oysters, white wine and lemon-lavender cake, and throughout the years, the love of banh mi and cha gio and pho and, ultimately, the shared love of eating.

Nguyen approaches these elements with the consideration and concern of a scholar, yet invites her readers in with the ease of a storyteller, her intricate narratives threading through terrain that is as tough as it is touching, revealing characters we come to care about.

“Pioneer Girl” by Bich Minh Nguyen

Thank you, Bich, for agreeing to this interview. You’ve had an incredible year, what with the publication of “Pioneer Girl,” moving from your longtime home in the Midwest to the Pacific Coast, and joining the MFA in Writing Program faculty at the University of San Francisco. Do you see a parallel between your own move to the West Coast and the travels of the narrator, Lee Lien, in “Pioneer Girl,” as well as those of Rose Wilder Lane, the mysterious subject of concern in the novel? 

Thanks for inviting me to do this interview!

I wanted to write a book that brought together some of my enduring obsessions: the immigrant experience in the United States; the “Little House on the Prairie” books; and bad food in small towns. In “Pioneer Girl” the city of San Francisco becomes hugely significant to more than one character; it was also the place where Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter and editor/co-author, became a writer in the early 1900s. When I wrote “Pioneer Girl,” I’d been living in the Midwest for years. I also grew up in Michigan and have spent more time in the Midwest than anywhere else. I had no idea I would leave. But by the time the novel was finished and edited, I had accepted a job in San Francisco. I think what I share with Rose Wilder and Lee Lien is a sense of restlessness, or at least an understanding of that feeling. Neither Rose nor Lee wants to “bloom where they are planted”; they want to roam. They feel the tug of family obligation but also the longing for adventure. I felt many of these complications myself, growing up in a small city in Michigan in the 1980s.

The Midwest

For some, small-town America, as in Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” generates a feeling of distress, of feeling trapped and wanting to escape. Your novel, “Pioneer Girl,” and your husband Porter Shreve’s novel, “The End of the Book,” in a way a sequel to Anderson’s book, approach this idea of entrapment with the sensibility and firsthand knowledge of town life in the Midwest.

Lee Lien, of “Pioneer Girl,” questions her family’s choice to remain in the Midwest, once they settle in the Chicago suburbs and open their own café, after years of moving from town to town through a series of Asian buffet jobs. In “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” you wonder at your father’s strength in bringing your family to the Midwest after the Fall of Saigon and at his decision never to leave. Do you think the Midwest will always inform your writing?

It’s true—Porter and I both wrote novels that deal with real-life literary figures, family duty, and the Midwestern feeling of isolation. We didn’t read each other’s work until we had pretty solid drafts and even then, it took us a while to realize we were on similar thematic tracks. I think it must have been because we were both in the midst of questioning where we were, geographically. We had ended up in Indiana for academic jobs and we had two young kids. We’ve both moved quite a bit, but having kids made us more anxious about where we wanted to be. The back-of-the-mind questions became daily ones: Are we going to stay? Do we want to live somewhere else? Where? What are the risks, gains, and consequences of leaving and starting over? Inevitably, these questions also came out in our writing and in our characters.

I’m sure the Midwest will always inform my writing because I am essentially Midwestern; it’s where I grew up and it’s what I know. One of the aspects of geographical identity I wanted to explore in “Pioneer Girl” is how our childhoods are made by other people. As children, we have no control over where we live or where we grow up. But it informs so much and, as adults, we contend with it. Lee contends with it against her mother’s expectations. Rose Wilder hated growing up in Mansfield, Missouri and couldn’t wait to leave. My father gave me and my siblings the best childhood he knew how to give, and it started with his decision to leave his world behind and start over in the United States. No move I make could ever be so bold and brave. Now that I have kids, I am even more in awe of the burden and responsibility involved in his decision.

Bich, Anh, and their dad – Grand Rapids, Michigan – mid-1970s

In “Pioneer Girl” you have created remarkable moments between the first- and second-generation members of an immigrant family. You’ve shown the conflicting sense of guilt and sense of responsibility, as well as the loyalty and memories that bind one to family. The daughter Lee’s relationship with her mother is seemingly no-win, the mother always disapproving, criticizing. Yet Lee tries to imagine why her mother is this way, and generosity, understanding, and compassion rise above feelings of shame, anger, and guilt. The grandfather, Ong Hai, is nonjudgmental, always understanding and optimistic, always caring and loving without agenda. His is true unconditional love. And the brother, Sam– first-born, the son, “spoiled”–separates himself from family by disappearing.

Could you comment about these relationships, how you found a way to describe them so deftly, focusing on each character, keeping their wants and needs distinctive and yet tied together, so that family remains the true collective sum of its individual members?

I wanted to explore the way people take on certain roles in a family and how sometimes those roles are given. You know—that’s the artsy kid, that’s the athletic kid, that’s the good one, that’s the wild child. These identifiers can be only partly true because they’re too reductive. But once they get made they can be hard to shake; they can end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Yet everyone has a secret self, a set of secret beliefs and feelings: this is who I really am, and no one else knows it. Lee feels this for herself, but it takes a while for her to realize that’s true of everyone else in her family too. She thinks she knows her mother so well, but there are, of course, hidden wells. The same goes for Sam and Ong Hai.

I also wanted to explore the way families make their own myths. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder did that through the “Little House” books—and they fought quite a bit while working on them. Most families have internal and often passive-aggressive struggles for power: who gets to control the narrative of the family story? In “Pioneer Girl” Lee’s mother seems to be in control, but Lee begins to question that. She does and does not want to be the good daughter. Obligation is inescapable in most families, I would guess, and not just Asian ones. And it’s a major factor in the conflict between the first and second generations in immigrant families. I wanted to find ways to show that conflict emerging, not just in big fights, but in everyday interactions.

Bich and her sister, Anh

“Short Girls” by Bich Minh Nguyen

Early in your novel “Short Girls,” the chapters alternating between two sisters’ viewpoints, the character Linny has a moment of understanding and empathy for her older sister, Van. She “thought of her sister driving through her subdivision in Ann Arbor, decelerating, directing the car into the driveway. She pictured Van just sitting there, almost unwilling to move. How well Linny knew that feeling… a mixture of relief and dread. Now I have to get out of the car, she thought at those times. And she always did, even though she dreamed of driving on without a map… For the first time, it occurred to Linny that maybe her sister had fantasized that very same thing.”

Would you speak about your process of approaching the tougher, more emotional concerns of relationships, especially between siblings?

Fiction writing requires empathy and understanding. In many ways, that’s why we read and why writers are born out of reading: we want to understand the lives and experiences of other people. “Short Girls” was partly inspired by my own relationship with my two older sisters and partly by Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” (a book I’ve loved since high school). My sisters and I aren’t much like Marianne and Elinor, or like Linny and Van. But we had, as those characters do, our ups and downs, our arguments and resentments. I remembered always trying to figure out my sisters when we were growing up. Why won’t they play dolls with me anymore? Why are they listening to that same Led Zeppelin record over and over? How do they know how to behave as girls? Do they like me? Are we going to get along today? I wanted to apply these feelings toward Linny and Van. They have to figure out how to see each other not just as sisters, bound by the common, irrefutable bond of a shared childhood experiences, but as people who are in some way essentially unknowable. By the way, I should say that my sisters and I get along great; it’s just much more interesting to explore the conflicts!

Noi and her sons

Bich, Anh, and their grandmother, Noi

Food, family bonds, and identity are recurring themes in your writing. One example of how these themes come together, and in which you pay beautiful tribute to you grandmother, Noi, is in the chapter “Cha Gio” of “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.” When Noi prepares the ingredients of cha bio for Tet–the grated carrots, fish sauce, black pepper, mung bean noodles, the ground shrimp and pork–you recall the “forkful of filling on a triangle of banh trang spring roll wrapper,” Noi’s laughter and how later she would “pluck the cha gio from the frying pan,” and “the first anticipated bite, the sweet and peppery flavors of shrimp and pork and fish sauce weighted against the delicate crunch of the fried wrapper.” In Noi’s cooking there is love, as seen in the lines: “I ate slowly, trying to memorize the flavors, trying to know what my grandmother has always known: this amount of pepper, this amount of fish sauce. She had always been there to show me this world without measurements.”

Would you tell us more about how the world of tastes and meals, both Vietnamese and American, was influenced by family and friends, creating new ties and strengthening or complicating old ones, and how all this shaped your identity?

Food keeps appearing in my work because I think about it all the time! Don’t most of us? What should I have for breakfast, lunch, dinner? What’s in the refrigerator? Where should we eat? What should I make? I love thinking about food and reading about it; I love fulfilling a craving. I think I ended up writing “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” because I realized that food was an expression of longing in my childhood, a marker for cultural and social contexts. At home, we ate Vietnamese food. Out in the world of small town Michigan in the 1980s, no one was eating that; they were eating peanut butter and jelly, Chef Boyardee, Hamburger Helper, and casseroles. So much of my experience growing up was about trying to figure out where I fit in as a child of immigrants. I felt totally American, yet could never “look” American enough; I was also Vietnamese, yet knew almost no Vietnamese at all. My relationship with identity became very complicated, but somehow my relationship with food did not. I loved Vietnamese food; I loved American food. No matter what else was happening around me, as long as I had the right food at the right time, then everything was going to be at least a little okay. I credit my grandmother Noi for instilling in me a great appreciation for good food. She truly enjoyed it—the process of cooking, the art of opening a pomegranate, the daily ritual of dinner—and so I did too.

“Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” by Bich Minh Nguyen

“Throughout my childhood I wondered, so often it became a buzzing dullness, why we had ended up here [in Grand Rapids, Mich.], and why we couldn’t leave. I would stare at a map of the United States and imagine us in New York or Boston or Los Angeles… I was convinced people were happier out on the coasts, living in a nexus between so much land and water.” – from “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner”

Bich, now that you’ve landed decades later with your immediate family in San Francisco, a city on the Pacific Coast, do you feel a sense of happiness and possibly a connection—geographical, spiritual, or otherwise—to the distant coast of Vietnam?

I probably felt that way, growing up, because when you live in the Midwest you’re always being told that you’re in the middle of nowhere. Flyover land. But the Midwest—Michigan, Indiana, Illinois—is where I’ve lived the most, and it wasn’t my life’s goal to move to New York or San Francisco. When the opportunity came up, my husband and I really debated it. It freaked me out, really, to imagine living on the west coast, in the Pacific time zone, far from everything I’ve known. Now we’re here in the East Bay and I’m still getting used to it in a sense—getting used to the fact that I chose to change my life. And that our kids are going to be Californian, which seems so strange. I wouldn’t say that living here gives me any particular connection to Vietnam or anything like that. But I do feel more comfortable, by which I mean normal.

Lemon-lavender cake, Twinkies, or a Top Pot hand-forged doughnut?

Lemon-lavender cake. I do love doughnuts though, and almost all kinds of homemade cakes. I love making old-fashioned bundt cakes and layer cakes.

And finally tell us something you’d like to be asked – from inspiration to breakfast to bliss!

Why the obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder?

When I was a kid I read those “Little House” books until I practically memorized them. I loved the descriptions of food, the cozy evenings, the ongoing battle of farmer versus nature. When I reread the books as an adult, it occurred to me that maybe I loved them because the experiences of the Ingalls family—pioneers moving westward, homesteading, in the 1870s—was not unlike the experience of immigrants moving west to America. They’re parallel stories of heading out to unknown places and starting over. Though Laura and I had nothing in common on the surface, I felt a kinship with her. She knew what it was to be restless, to be shy and bookish, to want to stand out while also wanting to hide. She had longings for certain foods and material comforts. She had a great frenemy. She had secret rebellious thoughts. When I started researching the origin of the “Little House” books, I learned that her daughter Rose had heavily edited, perhaps even co-written, the books. Rose is an obscure figure now, but once upon a time she was more famous than her mother. And late in life she went to Vietnam, as a journalist, in 1965. When I learned about that literal connection between the “Little House” series and Vietnam—this was probably twenty years ago—I knew I would one day write something about it. I just didn’t know what it would be.

Bich Minh Nguyen

Bich Minh Nguyen’s most recent novel is “Pioneer Girl.” Her novel “Short Girls” was an American Book Award winner in fiction and a LIBRARY JOURNAL Best Book of the Year. Her memoir-in-essays, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” received the PEN/Jerard Award and was a CHICAGO TRIBUNE Best Book of the Year and a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. Nguyen received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue University and the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. She has also coedited three anthologies of short stories and essays. She and her family recently moved to the Bay Area. 

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All photographs with permission of Bich Minh Nguyen.  

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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.

*

First posted in the ARTS section of Hothouse Magazine.