The Neutral Ground

The Neutral Ground

An Interview with Annie Bleecker

“As a child of New Orleans, wind is a novelty for you. A couple times a year, a bizarre weather phenomenon might stir the still air of our troubled and shallow waterways enough that a spooky remnant airstream, maybe even salt scented, will blow the hair off of our shoulders. When this happens, you say the word you think means “scared” in your girl-baby voice and pull your fists up to your eyes in an exaggerated gesture of fear. But on this train, the rush of wind delights you. It dries our sweat until our skin is stiff and crystalline.”

–      from “THE NEUTRAL GROUND” – by Annie Bleecker

Annie Bleecker’s essay, “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” reveals a writer who has a keen understanding of place. Her writing is gorgeous, incredibly detailed and textured, full of love and story and sensibility, engaged in all that is sensory. This is the kind of prose that sends a reader straight into the experience. An outing in August in New Orleans becomes a small, but breathtaking adventure. All that heat, then the ride and the wind, mother-daughter moments, the streetcar, the journey, the day.

NOLA Fountain

NOLA Path

Annie, tell us how you came to writing. What is it about creative nonfiction that calls to you? And are there any New Orleans associations that help support your literary life?

I’ve always loved writing, but was too chicken to really devote myself to it. Once upon a time I was a creative writing major—that had always been my intention—but I got tired of being embarrassed about not having an answer to that banal adult question: “And what will you do with that?” So I changed my major.

Writing has been a major focus of most of the jobs I’ve held, but I’ve found the thought process involved in writing advertising copy and copyediting doesn’t feel at all like that of creative writing. I try to look at it positively, as they complement one another, rather than think that one drains the other. I suppose that’s why I went back to school at 32; I felt there was a certain feeling I’d only ever gotten from creative writing that I hadn’t found professionally.

I always assumed I’d write fiction, as that’s what I’ve always preferred to read, and because I didn’t really know what creative nonfiction was. But I’ve found, so far at least, that creative nonfiction is the only thing I’ve been able to write. I tend to take a simple situation and make it complicated, so I really need the boundaries and structure that reality imposes. I get completely overwhelmed by the limitless possibilities of fiction. Also, a lot of writers are experimenting with the genre right now (Elisa Gabbert’s “THE SELF UNSTABLE,”  T. Fleischmann’s “SYZGY,” Katherine Angel’s “UNMASTERED”), so it’s exciting to see how far it can be bent. Collections of personal essays are also becoming more widely read, which seems like a shift. For example, look at how much press there has been around Leslie Jamison’s “THE EMPATHY EXAMS.”  Hilton Als’ “WHITE GIRLS”  also comes to mind. Mary Ruefle’s “MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY” has been like the bible to me for the past year or so. She calls the book a collection of lectures, but that seems a (likely intentional) misnomer.

Here in New Orleans I subscribe to a few literary groups, and it seems they’re doing great things, but I’m too much of a hermit to venture out most of the time. I’ve enjoyed seeing Room 220 grow. I love the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge (I might be the only nerd who drives from New Orleans to attend), and this year was the first time I’d been to the Tennessee Williams Festival, which was fantastic.

Streetcar Interior

Chile Mining Town

In “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” the idea of place is examined from all sides of a mid-morning excursion—from the neutral ground, “the airstrip of grass… the place owned by no one,” to the streetcar interior, “a hollowed and spit-shined redwood… bare light bulbs hang[ing] like inverted ideas.” And from the momentum of the journey, “whizzing past street signs at close range,” to the quiet cool of a fountain, “run[ning]… fingers through the lily pads’ ethereal roots.” What draws you to the specific details of place?

When I started writing, it seemed like a place, and most often an odd place, would typically be the impetus for an essay—the small mining town in the very north of Chile where I stayed for over a week in the hospital with my stepdad, who’d been bucked from a horse and broke his ribs, or the small towns in Mississippi I spent a week driving through with my sister, mother, and two-year-old daughter during a hurricane evacuation. Or it’s a place I love, like New Orleans, or the lake near Tahoe we went to every summer for a week when I was a kid. The problem I run into, the difficult part, is that then I have to build a story to go with the place.

Who are among your literary influences?

Zadie Smith (more so for her nonfiction than for her fiction, but I think her most recent book, “NW,” is extraordinary), Eula Biss (anything and everything she writes, but “THE BALLOONISTS” holds a special place in my heart), Mark Twain and Nabokov for humor and irony, Joan Didion for her writing about place and seemingly endless well of vocabulary and sentence structure, Shirley Jackson for her twisted humor, Nadine Gordimer for the way she writes relationships and subtext… I could go on and on.

NOLA Live Oak

NOLA Moment

Motherhood is also a world in which you live and from which you write. The unnamed emotion that rises up in response to your daughter—“you reach up with one hand and grab a rope of my hair—your instinctual response to worry or excitement”—creates “a rare moment of poignancy that comes on fast and fierce.” Though motherhood can be a defining and sometimes restrictive place in terms of time, do you find it an expansive and inspirational part of your life? Are there any anecdotes you’d like to share? And any material you’re gathering that may lead to future projects?

While motherhood has become expansive and inspirational, it hasn’t always felt that way, and I think that is where this story came from. I wanted (and still want) to believe that our relationships with our kids and even babies can be as varied and dynamic as those between adult, but I found pregnancy and early motherhood to be a time of limited collective imagination. When you’re pregnant, that’s all anyone talks to you about. It has become such a prescribed experience that anything but that norm feels wrong. I remember when my daughter was a newborn, I started to notice that women’s sentences had become a sort of hypothetical call-and-response: “Don’t you just think about her every second you’re away from her?” or “Isn’t being a mommy the best?” Statements for which the answer is either yes (good, normal) or no (bad, weird). Things like that.

I found the instruction books and the limited conversation and the fetishizing of early motherhood to be stifling. I guess I just shut down, in a way. So with “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” I was questioning why I could only experience the feelings I thought I was supposed to feel about being a mother when it was just my daughter and I, on our own time, doing our own thing (though I guess in fairness, I was the one making the plans). I suppose trains are always a form of escape, and especially in August in New Orleans, the streetcar specifically is one of the few forms of non-air conditioning related respite from the heat. The phrase “neutral ground,” I’ve always found curious, and in that instance, it seemed relevant as a “place owned by no one.” It was a place of zero expectation, and that was where I felt comfortable to build a different kind of mother-daughter relationship, though, of course, none of this was intentional or evident to me at the time.

The Aubrey – Dining Room – Santiago, Chile

I understand you’d love to live in a hotel. The Columns in New Orleans, the city you now call home; the Aubrey in Santiago, Chile, a city you once called home; or, like Eloise of the Kay Thompson books and the Hillary Knight drawings, the Plaza in New York City?

Ha, I think this must be common for those of us who were read Eloise. It’s a coincidence that you mentioned The Aubrey, in Santiago, because that is where I had my most Eloise-like experience. My mom and stepdad came to Chile to visit with my husband’s family in Santiago, and then they were supposed to go on to visit the south of Chile. But there was a terrible fire in Patagonia, and all flights were cancelled, so they were “stranded” in Santiago somewhat indefinitely. The hotel gave them a great deal, but it’s small so they had to change rooms every day. As a result, I got to see every room in the hotel, which was a huge treat. The hotel is a renovation of this great old house parked up in a crevice of Cerro San Cristobal, which is this extraordinary park on a hill that rises out of the middle of the city. When I lived in Santiago, I always wondered about that house, which was so lovely but clearly abandoned.

City Park – New Orleans

City Park Lagoon – New Orleans

Has your work toward an MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts added direction and dimension to your writing?

Dimension – yes; direction – not at all. The opposite, probably. My writing is all over the place, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing like I once did.

I know getting my MFA has changed a lot because I was completely inexperienced when I started there two years ago. I know I won’t even realize how huge an impact it’s made until I’m out, because I’m still very much in the thick of it. There are the writing aspects and then the psychic aspects, which for me have been just as important because I needed to build confidence and have the faith to follow random ideas wherever they might go. I never would have done that before. It’s hard work during the semester, but then I get to go hang out with my friends and do nothing but talk about writing for ten days. I heard a graduating student describe the experience as an “exquisite hell,” and I think that’s very accurate. I think of it in the way that babies grow teeth—there will be two weeks of pain and complaining as the teeth push through, but then the growth (and associated pain) relent for a few weeks and you can live off of that previous progress.

NOLA – Walking Back Home

“When our feet make contact with the neutral ground, sadness and regret return with the familiarity of our surroundings.” At the end of your journey in “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” you describe the disappointment of falling back into the habitual, of returning home. But something shifts here. Could you describe this for us?

This goes back to what I wrote before about this odd phenomenon I experienced. It was tied to place for me. In my own home, my role was something else. But on the neutral ground, everything was undefined, and this was a relief. So I suppose the sadness and regret come from stepping off the streetcar and the spell ending. At least that’s what it felt like at the time. I was fascinated by how my perception differed from my daughter’s; how differently we perceived the same block in that moment.

Annie, I’ve learned so much about your writing, from influences and inspiration to perception and process, and how place and relationships play a major role in all of this. Many thanks for the incredible conversation!

Thanks, so much, Karin!

Annie Bleecker

Annie Bleecker lives in New Orleans with her husband, three-year-old-daughter, and overweight pug. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her essay, “THE NEUTRAL GROUND,” is her first publication and appeared in LITERARY MAMA.

All photos permission of Annie Bleecker.

*

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.

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.

*

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.

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.

An Interview with Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer

Most of my interviews have been posted at Hothouse Magazine and then re-posted here. This summer I was approached by friend and writer, Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer, to interview her at R.kv.ry. Quarterly. Ruvanee's prose is elegant, deft, and surprising. Here is a snippet of the interview.

Karin C. Davidson:  Ruvanee, your story, “Craving,” is such a complicated and careful look at intimacy and, in a very restrained way, of sexuality. Sexuality is the theme of r.kv.r.y.’s Summer 2013 issue, and so I love that your story is included here. Would you speak about the origins of this story, how you came to write of this couple, exhausted and overwhelmed by their responsibilities of caring for the elderly, blessed and later unblessed by the presence of the young woman who comes to help them?

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer: This story was influenced by an essay I had recently written, about an elderly relative’s struggle with dementia, but it arose primarily from my feeling exhausted by a set of administrative tasks at work—that had nothing to do with caring for the elderly—and wondering about the very human tendency to want an easy way out, and about the value of service and sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice—with its many negative as well as positive connotations—interests me; it is a theme I explore elsewhere as well.

KCD: “On the day Ivy Auntie went missing, Sriya Polgoda wished, once again, for more help.” This is the first line of “Craving,” an incredible first line in that it is deftly worded, each part so very simple, yet pointing straight into the conflict and the story’s heart. When you begin stories, do the drafted first lines lead you directly into the rest of the narrative, or do you find those intricate beginnings through revision?

RPV: Thank you for the kind words, Karin. There have been occasions when I’ve labored over first lines, revising wording and even the point at which a story begins. Most of the time, though, first lines come to me almost fully formed. Beginnings are much easier for me than endings, with which I struggle, revising over and over until I feel they are right.

Read the complete interview at rkvryquarterly.com/interview-with-ruvanee-pietersz-vilhauer/.