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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Luke B. Goebel

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

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

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

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

–Luke B. Goebel

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Luke B. Goebel

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

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

GOEBEL: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Luke B. Goebel

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

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

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

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

–Luke B. Goebel

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Luke B. Goebel

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

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

GOEBEL: Yes.

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

Karin C. Davidson, NEWFOUND JOURNAL Interviews Editor

As first posted at NEWFOUND JOURNAL - Autumn 2014 Issue

The 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.

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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.

six - plus ONE - things about me

1.  The one and only time I tasted coquina stew was at New Smyrna Beach in 1965. Salt and sand.

2.  In 1968, I'd ride my Schwinn through the cemeteries in New Orleans, already knowing enough about the dead not to be scared.

3.  I still love to wait for parades. There aren't enough parades in this world. Obviously, I need to move back to New Orleans.

4.  My father, like Popeye, was a sailor man.

5.  Fluid in the ear is no joke. I now know why babies with earaches cry and cry and cry. 

6.  I love words more than fallen leaves.

and because in NOLA we love lagniappe - a little extra:

7.  I'm looking for a coastline to call home.

DOMA and the Arts

Several weeks ago the Supreme Court heard challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The argument is that DOMA, by singling out certain types of legal marriages for unequal treatment, violates the constitution’s “equal protection” promise. Hothouse Arts Editor, Dan Szymczak, proposed that I interview writers and artists about the effect a ruling could have on their lives and on the arts. Gathered here are the responses of six women and men, gay and straight, and all active in arts and education.

In considering how a ruling by the Supreme Court, declaring the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as unconstitutional, could affect the lives of so many couples, in terms of strengthening families and communities, what are your thoughts, specifically on the decision’s possible outcome in the area of the arts – creative writing, dance, film – and arts education?

Shannon Cain: I’ll speak only for myself, as a queer artist who draws upon movements for social justice as her inspiration and her creative fuel. I expect the passage or failure of DOMA to have exactly zero impact on my work. The shamefully overdue institutionalization of equal rights for an oppressed minority does nothing much to inspire me, and the legal oppression of same is a story I’m not much interested in telling. Other artists and writers are covering that ground, and I’m grateful to them. Still others are inspired by official recognition of what we already know is true, and I’m glad for that, too. But the current American version of democracy is too polluted by money and fear to hold much meaning for me. I vote, of course. But I have a hard time celebrating victories or worrying about defeats within a system that doesn’t represent me and what I care about, and probably never will. I admire those who work for change within the system, but I’ll always be the writer in her garrett, seeking not to shift institutions but to tell stories that open hearts and minds… which, in the end, is the only way to achieve true and lasting justice.

Shannon Cain’s short story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for 2011. She teaches MFA students at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Visit her at www.shannoncain.com.

Tim Watson & Brad Richard

Brad Richard: At my K-12 public charter, an assistant principal successfully lobbied for domestic partner benefits so she and her partner could afford to have a baby. One of my best students, terrified of coming out to her mom (one of our administrators), has been suffering a slow-moving nervous breakdown. At work, I don’t broadly share news of my recent collection of gay-themed poems from a well-regarded LGBTQ press. My partner and I would love to be legal husbands. This is New Orleans, the most liberal spot in Louisiana.  However SCOTUS rules on DOMA, the joy of meaningful change here will come only from further struggle and pain.

Brad Richard is the author of Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011) and Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans.

Tim Watson: I’ve often questioned whether the government should provide marriage benefits to anyone, as it seems to violate the equal protection clause of the constitution, putting every unmarried citizen at extreme financial and other disadvantages. (Not having mandated benefits would force the marketplace to adjust, distributing costs of living more equally among the married and the unmarried). But for now the government does subsidize people who are married, and a world that includes married gay couples with reduced per-person living costs would have more artists; more people could pursue generally lower-paying (unfortunately!) arts-related careers, instead of having to find non-arts jobs strictly for the higher pay.

Tim Watson is a documentary film editor, writer, and producer in New Orleans.

Photo – permission of Amy Davis

Judith Mayne: DOMA is a ridiculous law, and its repeal might indicate that the LGBT community won’t continue to be easy scapegoats for the haters. As for gay marriage, I hope it’s soon available to anyone who wants to be married. For many people I know, both in education and/or the arts, gay marriage is a conservative idea, not a radical one. But beyond the realm of ideas, gay marriage means a level of financial and legal security that we have as much right to claim as anyone. As for me, I’ve been with my partner for 28 years. If gay marriage is legalized in Ohio by the time we reach 30 years, I think we might go for it.

Judith Mayne is a retired college professor.

Photo – permission of Marlene Robbins

Marlene Robbins: As the dance specialist in an informal K-8 school, I’ve experienced heartbreaking situations, working with children whose parents’ relationship is not defined as a legal marriage. What happens when a child is sick and one of the parents can’t go to the hospital and be the legal guardian for that child? How are children expected to identify their parents when the legal system won’t recognize two mothers or two fathers? These parents want to act in a responsible way for their children, and our legal system doesn’t allow this. How in any universe is that defined as okay? A universe in which unfair laws are struck down, and these families are treated as true families.

Marlene Robbins is the dance specialist at Indianola Informal K-8 in Columbus, Ohio. She has a BA in Dance and MA in Arts Education from Ohio State, worked as a staff member of the Ohio Arts Council, and received the 2013 Ohio Dance Award for excellence in contribution to the field of dance education.

David Covey: As a gay artist and professor, I am perplexed why DOMA is an issue being decided by the Supreme Court. In my world, love prevails and freedom to be yourself is the only truth. If the Supreme Court can’t understand that, then what purpose do they have to rule about anything?

David Covey, a professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance, serves as Production Coordinator and teaches dance lighting, production and composition. His research interests include lighting, choreographing and various aspects of visual arts. He received a BESSIE award for lighting BAM Events choreographed by Merce Cunningham in 1998.

Photo – permission of Amy Davis

Many thanks to all of the contributors, including Amy and Beth Davis for their recent wedding photos.

In conclusion, I’ll add my own words: Recently in The Nation, Melissa Harris-Perry asked, “What difference will marriage equality make?” To me, a straight girl who grew up in New Orleans, raised by gay and straight grown-ups, I think it does matter. All couples should have the right to marry and to the laws surrounding marriage. Because the LGBTQ community has been disenfranchised for so long, they have built into their lives relationships beyond those of the typical family, and this shouldn’t change. Instead, the change should lie in the acknowledgment of what is fair and equal. When all couples are allowed the same economic protection and cultural privileges, families and communities are strengthened. And literature, film, and art respond to cultural change. Think of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a 1967 film which focused on interracial marriage. That same year the Supreme Court ruled against anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. Marriage equality has once again come to the attention of the highest court in the land, and whether or not DOMA is struck down, there is a sweeping movement in support of same-sex marriage.

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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.

*

This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.

Karin Cecile Davidson

Apr 22, 2013

Thank you, Lisa, for adding your voice to the conversation!

Lisa Sanchez

Apr 21, 2013

What a great group of interviews. The opinions are so diverse. The issue is so much more complicated than many people want it to be. Honest and courageous opinion from Shannon Cain, from everyone really. Often, like Tim Watson, I have thought about how all unmarried people are disadvantaged, while at the same time wanting to support the LGBT community in their efforts, and also listening to the cautions of those who don't want the courts to be deciding. When I was still teaching, there was a law professor, Martha Fineman, who had an idea that marriage should be a private act or one people make in conjunction with religious and social beliefs. She wrote several articles and books on the matter, suggesting that the tax laws and government intervention should occur at the level of caregiver and dependent, with a caregiver being someone who cares for a child, an elderly parent, a disabled person, etc., and a dependent being someone who cannot care for him or herself, such as a child, elderly parent, etc. Via tax law and other programs, states and federal government would be set up to support the need for one able-bodied adult to care for these people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Obviously, if a dependent needs full time or even substantial care, that limits the caregivers ability to also work outside the home. How rational and refreshing, I thought, knowing I was in the minority. When Professor Fineman lectured on this, she used to say that she didn't expect her ideas to be realized or enacted into law in her lifetime, at which point, everyone would laugh. But it's something to think about. As an artist and writer who has experienced the darker side of politics, particularly during the early years of the war, when many professors were given sideways glances, I have gotten to the point where I simply don't want to deal with politics in my writing. It's not that what I write is without depth or social and political content. It's just that I want it to be judged on an artistic level. As I said, it's a complex issue. Thanks for doing these interviews, Karin Davidson, and to all the participants for responding.