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

Farewell to “The Poppy - An Interview Series”

“THE POPPY - An Interview Series” has come to a close. Hothouse Magazine is ending its time online. Not to worry, though. All of the interviews have been archived here.

I've loved the procession of writers, artists, filmmakers, and dancers who've talked so openly about their work, how the world inspires and distracts, what they are caught up in and look forward to. And so, many thanks to all of them!

Yolanda Franklin, Andrew Lam, Jennifer Genest, Jamel Brinkley, Marlene Robbins, David Covey, Eliza T. Williamson, Matthew Draughter, Sharon Millar, Amy Wright, A.W. Sprague II, JoeAnn Hart, Emilie Staat, Brad Richard, Tim Watson, Brian R. Hauser and Christina Xydias, Claudia Zuluaga, Augusta Thomson, Bich Minh Nguyen, Susanna J. Mishler, Annie Bleecker, Kelly Magee and Carol Guess, and CJ Hauser.

I'll continue working on interviews with writers and artists at Newfound Journal, one or two in each issue - Autumn, Winter, and Spring. On October 1st Newfound's Autumn 2014 issue will be live with an interview with Luke B. Goebel about his novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours. The book is astounding, and the interview is wild, just like Luke. And in the Winter issue John Carr Walker will talk about the stories of Repairable Men, a beautiful collection that closes in on characters and their newly realized desires.

Back when I was a baby girl, just out of college, the chief editor of a magazine in New Orleans told me to go out into the world, talk to some folks, write up the words, and just maybe they'd publish them. I was far too shy and didn't follow her advice. And now, after all this time, look what's happened. I just can't stop talking to folks. Took me a while to find the way, and I'm so glad I did.

THE FROM-AWAYS - A Novel of Maine

THE FROM-AWAYS - A Novel of Maine

An Interview with CJ Hauser

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

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

Lobstah

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

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

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

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

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

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

“THE FROM-AWAYS” – by CJ Hauser

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

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

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

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

Backshore Afternoon – by Joshua Adam

“Because you cannot always know with love.

If we knew how things would turn out for certain,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eagle Island Bell – by Joshua Adam

Bell buoys, lobster pots, or coastal carousels?

Bell buoys, forever and always.

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

CJ Hauser

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

Images and author photograph with permission of CJ Hauser.

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

Visit The Adam Gallery in Castine, Maine.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

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

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

*

First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

The Sudden and Stunning Stories of WITH ANIMAL

An Interview with Carol Guess and Kelly Magee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Together – By Todd Horton

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

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

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

Dreaming from the Bough – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

Quietly Waiting the Morning Fog Lingers – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

Young Fir Listens Nearby – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

Standing Outside Ones Own Dream – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

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

Owl Posse – by Todd Horton

Samish Land – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

Memory of a Spring Flight – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bees in Moonlight – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

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

Kelly: Cichlids, guppies, and goldfish!

Samish Waters Glinting Light – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

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

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

The Silence that Lives Between – by Todd Horton

Mind Like the Spring Moon – by Todd Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly: Thank you!

Carol Guess

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

Kelly Magee

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

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

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

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

*

The Poppy: An Interview Series

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

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

*

First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

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.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

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

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

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First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.