The Prairie Schooner Blog

Briefly Noted: Swimming in Hong Kong by Stephanie Han

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 20:24:22 +0000

by Jennifer S. Deayton

The weight of expectations is the common thread in the engaging short story collection, Swimming in Hong Kong, by Stephanie Han. Her characters, both local and expatriate, tourist and immigrant, are constantly assessing: not only themselves, but also the people around them. How should a Korean lady act in Hong Kong? What does it mean to be Asian in America? American in Asia? What did I ever see in that guy? And the universal conundrum: is this love?

In turn, the mostly Asian protagonists must grapple with other people’s often-warped perceptions and categorizations. Han tackles the eternal East-West culture clash with sly humor and a sharp eye. Conflicts that could easily devolve in to cheap shots and stereotypes are rendered in living, breathing, hilarious color. Consider this passage from ‘The Body Politic, 1982’, the story of a Korean-American college student falling for a sexy, would-be revolutionary:

I was a member of ASA-Asian Sisters for Action, but participated in the new tri-college offshoot AFCAC-Asian Feminists for Central American Change rally upon the suggestion of Donna Chong, ASA’s president. She had told me I demonstrated potential as a political leader: “You have a loud voice. It’s great for rallies.”

The standout read in the collection is ‘Languages’, which unfolds as a series of diary entries written by a 32-year old Korean singleton. Set in Seoul, the story begins with Miss Lee’s humble observation, “Once again, I am without prospects.”

Suffering awkward attempts at matchmaker and her mother’s constant humiliations, the modest Miss Lee rebels by learning Italian and indulging in a chaste romance with one of her language students, a much younger American named Matthew. Her simple observations and outsider status – at 5’8” she’s too tall by Korean standards - mark Miss Lee as a beguiling, heartbreaking voice. A woman who yearns for so much more but will accept what she can:

I am trying not to show my worries about my unmarried state as I feel that to do so is unattractive. I read that one should take up hobbies and activities and that men, if unable to find a beautiful woman, will content themselves with one who will establish a comfortable home and a stimulating academic environment for their children.

More observational than plot-heavy, Han’s stories revolve around characters who find themselves at breaking points both large and small. And though the protagonists in Swimming in Hong Kong struggle with weighty issues of identity, alienation, consent and mortality, Han strikes a balance between light and dark by varying points of view, changing tone and above all infusing her stories with moments of real levity. Hopes become burdens. Hopes become wings.

It’s fair to speculate that this equilibrium springs from Han’s own experiences. She’s an Asian-American expatriate, a writer and educator, and she divides her time between Hawaii and Hong Kong.

With her first short story collection, Han pushes beyond the typical expat/immigrant narrative of dislocation and discovery to explore universal truths with humor, depth and heart.

6 Questions for Dustin M. Hoffman

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 21:28:28 +0000

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize is in its final week. Meet our fiction prize winner, Dustin M. Hoffman, from the 2015 Book Prize series. Dustin's gorgeous book of fiction, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, is available now.

Can you take us through the construction of one of your stories? Where did the idea to write it come from? How do you write a story--what does it look like, how long does it take?

My stories often start out of a specific scrap that haunts me until it becomes a story. It could be something as small as imagining the frustration of a painter having to set nails for the carpenters—the impetus for “Sawdust and Glue.” Or the story I once heard from an old painting buddy about the killing he used to make collecting cans after a football game, which would inspire “Can Picking.” “Everything a Snake Needs” started with a setting from my childhood. In my hometown, we had this tiny brick and mortar pet store that let you tour the basement for $2. This dark, cramped basement contained dozens of glowing snake cages. I hijacked that setting, and soon the commandment that would initiate all the conflict in the story came to me: “Don’t touch the snakes.” From a creepy setting and a snippet of language, the plot and characters started spilling out. I had no idea in drafting that there would be a snake sex scene or snake corpse puppetry.

But what I’ve described so far was my stumbling through first drafts. The story went through dozens of revisions, and it ended up taking about four years of tinkering until the lovely magazine Quarter After Eight published it, and then later it would appear in my collection One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist. That story especially required a lot of reining in. I’m sure I drafted at least forty pages to shave down to the twelve that exist now. So my process is slow, trudging, and involves a lot of slogging and hacking. But I do delight in revision more than anything else, that moment when a story reveals what it truly needs to be, when it says, OK, time for this character to slip his hand inside the corpse of a snake.

As a reader, who are the writers you return to again and again?

Donald Barthelme and George Saunders are my favorite short story writers, and I get to teach them a lot, so that’s great for me as a writer to get to sit in a room with a bunch of smart young people and absorb their initial wonders at these masters. My favorite novel, the best novel ever written, is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which I reread every year or two. Toni Morrison is a constant presence for me, as well. And then there’s Studs Terkel’s book Working that is always near my writing desk, my bible of working voices.

Is there a story in this collection that feels particularly emblematic of the collection's concerns or important to the collection as a whole?

“Building Walls” was a breakthrough story for me. That story drew a stark line for which stories would make it in the collection and which didn’t fit. “Building Walls” captured the voices I want that were authentic to the working world yet lyrical. The title story, too, “One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist” tightens its grip over the collection. These stories concern community borne through violence, pride in one’s work against certain obscurity.

You painted houses for ten years--were you writing as you did this? What did your transition into academia look like?

I was writing fiction for some of that time, for the last two years or so. Before that, I was in a punk band so I was always scratching out angry, cheesy song lyrics on McDonald’s receipts during fifteen-minute lunch breaks.

My transition was beautifully abrupt. I got accepted to the MFA program at Bowling Green State University. I told my painting boss I was out, and I never looked back. I was completely ready to leave the trades, which were taking a toll on my body already. The housing recession would follow just after I left, and so I was lucky to get out.

I threw myself into teaching, into everything I could do: working on a magazine, running a reading series, writing and reading as if I had an angry boss breathing down my neck. So I suppose the transition wasn’t so clean. I carried that blue-collar work ethic anxiety with me, and it’s served me pretty well.

How did you celebrate your book prize win?

I freaked out when Kwame Dawes called me on the phone. He was so kind and sweet and generous. After the call, I cried and danced around with my three-year-old daughter and screamed plenty. Despite spending many years in a hyper masculine world of construction, I have no emotional control. I’m a crier.

What are you working on now?

I’m eagerly awaiting the summer so I can dig back into a novel project that I thought was done, but it’s been whispering in my ear all its faults and needs. Novels are needy. I much prefer the story form, and I’ve been writing new stories. But this novel demanded to be written. It’s set in my hometown of Alma, Michigan during a few days where it’s too cold to even snow. It’s about three restless kids—Hector, Tack, and April—from working-class families who can’t find their way out of violence and drugs and cruelty and ice. Witness Magazine was recently kind enough to publish one of the early chapters, "In This Room I Make Red," which folks can read online.

Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collection One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He spent ten years painting houses in Michigan before getting his MFA from Bowling Green State University and his PhD from Western Michigan University. His stories have recently appeared in Pleiades, Smokelong Quarterly, Juked, Cimarron Review, Witness, and The Threepenny Review. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina.

Five Questions for Yona Harvey

Prairie Schooner — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:18:50 +0000

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize is in its final weeks. To celebrate, Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid talks to Prairie Schooner contributors about the writing life. This week: Yona Harvey, whose essay "On Literacy" appears in our gorgeous Winter issue.

First, can you talk about the beautiful cover of your prize-winning book, Hemming the Water?

Thanks for mentioning the cover. The talented and generous Maya Freelon Asante kindly permitted the reproduction of her piece, "Us, Me, We" on the cover of my book. She works with large pieces of tissue paper. The title of the piece and the work itself really spoke to me and felt very in sync with Hemming the Water. I'm forever indebted to Maya for the gift of her art.

Your writing is interconnected with music and sound--both in the music you make as a writer in your poems, and in the music that you return to as subject matter. Can you talk about music's importance to you?

I grew up in a musical household and reaped the benefits of having a music-loving extended family. There are no limits to the kinds of music I'll listen to. Music is such a unifying art. One of the most intriguing things to me about people is discovering the kinds of music they love. If my poems can capture just a flicker of some of the great moments in music--the changes, the lyrics, the pauses--I'd be happy.

In your essay "On Literacy" in our Winter issue, you describe the attraction of reading as something full of mystery, secrecy, and at times (though not always) solitude. I was very struck by the two young girls in the essay reading things that were a bit beyond them, and "discover[ing] a kind of unnameable grimness that drew them in" (54). Do you still encounter that mystery when you read?

I do! That's the joy of having bookish friends who recommend good reads.

How did the essay come to you? Can you take us through the writing process a bit?

The essay actually began many years ago as a prompt from one of my Information Science professors, the late Maggie Kimmel. Dr. Kimmel basically asked, what are your first memories of reading? I found the original response--which was only about a paragraph long--and I decided to expand it. Without charting every grade too literally, I just tried working through the "movements" of literacy. I don't often write about growing up and I'm not a very nostalgic person. But I wanted to tap into those moments of deep feeling. Reading--especially reading the works of my choice--was the pathway to independence and later to consciousness as a young woman and as a black American.

Who are the writers you return to again and again in your own reading life, now?

There are too many to name! I often find myself re-reading Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, Jamaica Kincaid, James Baldwin, Toi Derricotte, and Rae Armantrout.

Yona Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has been anthologized in many publications including The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-Garde and Writing Away the Stigma: Ten Courageous Writers Tell True Stories About Depression, Bipolar Disorder, ADHD, OCD, PTSD & more. She is currently co-writing with Ta-Nehisi Coates a Marvel comic, Black Panther and The Crew. She teaches in the University of Pittsburgh Writing Program.

Briefly Noted: Latino/a Literature in the Classroom edited by Frederick Luis Aldama

Prairie Schooner — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 18:50:25 +0000

by Daniel A. Olivas

In this first volume of its type, Frederick Luis Aldama has gathered a broad range of scholarly yet practical essays into a comprehensive guide for the teaching of Latino/a literature. The prolific Aldama is perfectly suited to do so. Aside from being an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University, he also directs the university’s Latino Studies Program and is the founder and director of the Latino and Latin American Studies Space for Enrichment and Research (LASER). The author of nineteen books, Aldama has written not only about Latino/a literature, but also film, theatre, and comics.

The volume’s three dozen essays offer a wide variety of pedagogical methods and approaches to teaching literary and narrative forms from fiction to poetry, plays to film, comic books to children’s literature, and everything in between. The contributors also address issues and opportunities with respect to classroom and textual diversity such as gender, sexual orientation and identity, disability, nationality, and other “differences” that are often ignored or under-conceptualized.

The book also includes fifteen lesson plans on the teaching of specific authors such as Ana Castillo, Pat Mora, Arturo Islas, Andrés Montoya, and other important Latino/a authors.

The table of contributors reads like a who’s who of Latino/a scholarship and includes professors as Sheila Marie Contreras (Michigan State), Paula Moya (Stanford), Randy Ontiveros (University of Maryland), Richard T. Rodríguez (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and Aldama himself.

By bringing together this impressive stable of scholars, Aldama hopes to offer educators a variety of tools in the teaching of Latino/a literature. The result is a book that is as compelling as it is necessary especially, as Aldama notes, in the current environment where there is a “general assault on the teaching of the humanities—and even more so subjects like Latino Studies in places like Arizona....” There is little doubt that this volume will become a mainstay for educators who wish to teach Latino/a literature in today’s classroom.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of seven books including the award-winning novel, The Book of Want (University of Arizona Press, 2011), and Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews (San Diego State University Press, 2014).

He has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, La Bloga (where he blogs on Latino/a literature), and many other print and online publications. He earned his degree in English literature from Stanford University, and law degree from UCLA.

"I look, and love even harder": an interview with Michael Schmeltzer

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 04:27:43 +0000

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize is now open through March 15th. Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson will interview poets and fiction writers throughout the prize period, in celebration of the art of the book. This week, Michael Schmeltzer discusses storytelling as the art of memory, his preoccupation with shadow and absence, and what writers owe their communities.

First, I just want to say that having read Blood Song, I feel like I understand what you were saying in your review about us coming from the same poetic and even familial planet. I think we're both engaged in an untangling of family mythos, and a rewriting of family myth. This didn't start as a question, but now I guess I'm wondering—how do you think about storytelling in your work, or as a poetic tool in general?

Storytelling and memory feel like siblings to me (though it’s nearly impossible to tell who is the firstborn.) Both are fundamentally intertwined and essential to what and how I write, but they are constantly interrupting the other to make a point. For me, storytelling is the means by which memory mutates from micro to macro, from the story I tell myself to the story I tell others. I think of how my mother, a native of Okinawa, and my father, born in Minnesota, reveal themselves through anecdotes. It’s a way for many of us to do the work of radical vulnerability while maintaining a sense of safety. There is something beautiful and alchemical about it all. As a tool I believe storytelling is the “show, don’t tell” portion of memory. I can disclose concerns and perceptions, the very nature of how I think, without the focus being strictly on the self.

And if you imagine storytelling (whether fairytales or myths or oral traditions) as a revelation of collective cultural memory, then it tells the larger narrative of an entire people, a shared history. If there is a better way to show the inherent dignity and humanity of a culture, a family, a person, than through storytelling, I don’t know it. In a time when the NEA is being threatened, we as artists and writers must create and strengthen the connections that are being severed.

Who are your heartpoets or deep influences? (May be poets, may not be)

I tend to follow a book or a single poem rather than poets but there are two lasting exceptions: Li-Young Lee and Louise Glück. I have been reading them for nearly two decades now. Lee’s books (and interviews) taught me as much about writing as any professor. There is also a severity/seriousness to how he views the written word and the life of a poet that I’m absolutely enamored by. Glück’s genius hardly needs explanation. She’s just simply one of the most brilliant poets we have. I relentlessly pursue her craft. If you want to take it even further back, you could say my mother influenced my path toward writing. English is her third language (after Japanese and Okinawan) and in many ways my devotion to poetry is an offering, a means to harness the language she never felt fully capable in.

However, as I get older, as I publish more and embed myself into the literary world, my deep influences become less about the past or who I read and more about who I want to read in my future. There are writers who inspire me with their work and kindness. They are not household names but they are people whose intelligence, humor, and talent influence how I navigate the world. Not only that but who they are–-their loves and frustrations and fears–-makes me want to fight for them, to create something better for them. If I can’t look back on my literary life and say I’ve helped make this space a little nicer for the next wave of writers, then honestly why bother?

I am ambitious; I want to be a great writer and win awards, receive all the usual decorations. I would find it absolutely charming to be someone’s heartpoet, but none of that would mean anything if I didn’t earn it through words and actions. My influences don’t just come from a single direction, it comes from the past, present, and future of the literary community. I may have fallen in love with poetry because of writers like Lee and Glück, but every day some new voice says, “Look, here I am.” So I look, and love even harder.

"Blood Song" is concerned, in part, with the suffering of others, with how to remember it, how to recount it, and what that remembering does. What is the task of memory, in your poems? Has your relationship to memory changed since writing these poems? (I'm thinking of your line that says memory is what "we shackle to the ankle of our futures" p.46)

The more I contemplate the task of memory in my work, the more I am convinced it’s about recognition, the ability to know someone and know oneself. We are the culmination of experiences and memories. By working with my own, I think much of what I ask a reader is the nearly impossible task of seeing me beyond the barriers of distance and time. It isn’t that everything I write is autobiographical, but everything I write is (I hope) a very distinct mode of perception and expression that says something intrinsic about who I am. Through my writing I am introducing myself to a reader. When I speak about the inherent dignity and humanity that is conveyed through storytelling and the examination of memory, it is about being able to recognize people beyond the barriers of the physical, beyond the bias of a hijacked narrative.

I’ve always had a difficult relationship with memory; the painful ones sting while the happy ones offer the quiet sadness of stored holiday decorations. I will say writing these poems allowed for a greater commitment to the past and a better understanding of who I was/am. Writing that concerns itself with the past must also concern itself with the present for the current moment contains all the potential regrets and triumphs of our future selves. In other words, we are living the past we will recall, and that idea keeps me mindful of how I move through the world.

Is there a key poem in the collection that you always read at readings? Do you like reading?

The poems I pick tend to shift a lot from one reading to the next but there are some clear favorites I have such as “Some Nights the Stars They Sour” and “Kite.” Both mix anxiety and just enough autobiography to feel accurate to my inner life. Lately though I read at least one poem that directly refers to my children. In a time of political despair, I find it difficult to add more elegy into the world so I try to pick poems that, as depressing as the tone may be, can be understood to contain the joy and love I have. There is joy in every poem, even if it is found backstage in the making of them. When I read a poem with my children in it, there is a part of me that thinks of them at home. Part of me calls to them, and that gives me a grand happiness.

I do like readings for the most part but only because I like people; I’m not so interested in my work. Readings deserve more experimentation. I wish there was something more informal and unpredictable about them, a little more interactive. I want there to be a connection between audience and reader, to see the reading experience as a collaboration. I’m honored to read, I truly am, but I know what I wrote, and it’s not nearly as interesting to me as what the person in the audience is wondering or writing or going through. An audience member may have come to hear my poetry but I show up because I want to know who they are.

You have a ton of metaphysical imagery in "Blood Song"--things are soaked in shadow and darkness. Do you have a sense of how much of that is personal language and how much of it comes out of the concerns/subject matter of the poems?

There are images and concepts my mind fixates on. For instance, ever since I was a child I heard stories about permanent or nuclear shadows. These are the imprints of people/objects scarred on the walls and steps of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think about this often, how absence can create such a strong presence. I think about the difference between darkness, which is an absence of light, and a shadow, which is an interruption of light. What does it mean to perceive these two things, and how do we experience their differences? I think about footsteps, the difference between one in cement versus one in snow. Does the fact of its melting make the footstep in snow somehow less than the one in cement? Absence, white space, the rest between notes, those things propel me. It’s in that vacuous space I feel grief and elegy exist and those two things feel so urgent to me. I don’t have much sense of how much personal language informs the poetry or vice versa. All I know is I grapple earnestly with absence, with loss, and hope by some miracle the poems I write can give form to the formless.

Home is very important in the collection. Where is home, now? How do you think about home?

On one hand, home is Seattle, where my two daughters climb over me and bicker about who sat on my lap first, where my wife returns from work, exhausted, and drops her shoes (which always reminds me of the brother in Philip Levine’s poem “You Can Have It.”) On the other hand, home is Japan and the Pacific Ocean, the place of my birth and childhood. I often don’t realize how true that statement is until I hear someone speak Japanese or walk into an Asian market. My body noticeably relaxes. There’s a tension I carry while living in the US. I still haven’t shaken it off, even after nearly 30 years of being here.

The question of home is an important one, especially now as we discuss immigration as a country. What does it mean to leave one behind and what is our responsibility in helping others create new ones? Being half-Japanese, the question of home and identity are linked in very intricate ways; I’ve only begun to explore the idea over the past few years. Home encapsulates so much more than geography. It’s location, sure, but it’s also the slow architecture of family traditions, cultural ritual, a sense of belonging. It’s the ice cube within the water, the same as its surroundings and somehow apart. It is not merely a question of where but whom: my parents, my children and wife, the writing communities I am lucky to be a part of. Who I love is my home, and I hope I love well for the rest of my days.

Michael Schmeltzer was born in Yokosuka, Japan, and eventually moved to the US. He is the author of Elegy/Elk River (Floating Bridge Press, 2015,) winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, and Blood Song (Two Sylvias Press, 2016) which was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. A debut nonfiction book, A Single Throat Opens, (a lyric exploration of addiction written collaboratively with Meghan McClure) is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press and is now available for presale. His honors include the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry and the Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize. He has been a finalist for the Four Way Books Intro and Levis Prizes, the Zone 3 Press First Book Prize, John Ciardi Prize for Poetry from BkMk Press, as well as the OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. He has been published in Black Warrior Review, PANK, Rattle, The Journal, Mid-American Review, and Water~Stone Review, among others.

'What is the self and how can I trust it?': an interview with Carmiel Banasky

Prairie Schooner — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 02:36:55 +0000

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize is now open through March 15th. Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson will interview poets and fiction writers throughout the prize period, in celebration of the art of the book. This week, Carmiel Banasky talks mental illness, representation, and the question of accessibility in experimental and popular fiction.

How many books have you published, and where?

The Suicide of Claire Bishop is my debut novel, published by Dzanc Books in September 2015. It has been quite a ride!

Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. Did you plot organically? Did you outline? How did the story come together?

My novel is a two voice narrative, and both protagonists get fairly equal page time. I had Claire and knew her story would take place over several decades, starting in the 50’s. But I only knew I had a novel, the material I would be excited to work with for years, once I had found her counterpart in West, a young man with schizophrenia in present day. They’re tied by a portrait Claire has commissioned in the start of the book, which turns out to depict an image of her potential suicide.

I usually hear a character, start writing in that voice, and keep going, hoping that the character will reveal the plot to me. This tactic invites detours and false leads; it requires a lot of rewriting. I did write myself into a few holes. Of course I now wonder how my experience would have been different if I had outlined. Would I have avoided some false leads and saved time? Would I have also missed some beautiful hidden places and complex character development that I wouldn’t have stumbled into if I’d followed an outline? I did outline, in a way, much later in the revision process when I worked out the logic of West’s delusion. Though it is a delusion, it follows a meticulous logic. He fits or forces the details of the plot and setting into an algorithm. So the order in which I worked it out mimicked the way West approaches the world—but it was also the most difficult way I could have chosen to write!

Wow—that’s so interesting. So you had the sense that your process was, in a very real way, led by your characterization of West. Is this always the way your process works? How does it alter, for instance, when you’re not writing about schizophrenia?

Ha, I like that way of putting it—but it may be a romantic way of looking back on basically poorly laid plans. However, I suppose I wouldn’t change the process if I were given the chance to travel in time (another of West’s delusions) and do it all over again. I learned too much by making wrong turns! (Maybe that’s THE practice—to view all of life in this way, not just writing.) Currently, my process looks very different: I write a whole draft to find the voice and the characters—then I outline and pretty much start over again! So I know my characters well enough to let them define the outline, but it’s still a much clearer, cleaner arc to work from.

I don't know if I articulated it this way when writing The Suicide, but I think theme is what connects the writer and her characters. It is the question that both writer and character is asking. Theme, to me, is not a topic-word like "identity;" it is the Big question the book is investigating. Many books might be asking the same question but attempt to answer it through whatever specifics they explore. Maybe everything I write will in some way ask the big theme-question "what is the self and how can I trust it?" Claire and West go about life inadvertently answering this question, differently from one another, while I attempt to answer it by writing these characters. So hopefully theme always allows for process to be led by character to some extent, though with West it was much clearer how that happened.

Did you notice any writing tics or themes once you’d gotten through a first draft? How did you decide which tics were fruitful (interesting in that they accrued throughout the story in a meaningful way) and which were not?

I had to diligently make sure that Claire and West’s voices stayed within their specific rules and limitations, and that they only shared characteristics intentionally, when they are more joined thematically or when Claire’s mind starts slipping away from her or she is less in control.

How do you prevent yourself from giving in to character bleed? Any tips or tricks?

The language I used in Claire's sections is, hopefully, OF her time, informed by history and the political climate she finds herself in. Same with West, who reads things like A Brief History of Time and works as data miner. His thought processes and therefore language are informed by everything in his life, including anything from terrorist threat level charts and his upbringing in an intensely PETA household--all this insists on a difference in language and style. West is also guided by his schizophrenia, which lends itself to the fanciful and poetic. I tried to keep Claire within tighter language parameters, until she begins to slip into Alzheimer's later in the book.

What was the editing process like? How did you get from draft to draft? Did you find yourself excising large portions? Adding?

As I mentioned above, I took many wrong turns plot-wise, though those places taught me about my characters. I had about 30-50 pages of West in the hospital in one draft. And I researched a lot to figure out how to write that section! But it didn’t make the cut. It wasn’t active enough. All the action and movement of his delusion was taking place outside the hospital. He was trapped in there, just thinking. But I learned more about schizophrenia that way, and how West’s brain works.

When I had more of a bird’s eye view of the novel, I also saw where Claire’s character arc was missing a beat and I added the 1968 section, when she is exploring her sexuality, much later in revision.

How did you decide where to submit the finished manuscript?

I sent my manuscript out before it was ready to a few agents, got a few helpful rejections, then kept revising and polishing for another year. I sent out again to just a couple agents the next round and found my match. I revised with her for a month or so, then we sent out to publishers. I really had imagined all along that my book fit with Dzanc or a press like them, and that’s what happened! They made a lot of sense to me. And I loved working with Guy, my editor.

I’ve recently experienced the joys of having a good editor—what makes the editor/writer relationship productive?

There is a trust there. He wasn't very heavy-handed, but his suggestions and nudges led me towards making some big changes that were bubbling under the surface of the manuscript. He also wanted me to cut my prologue all along. I said no--I was so tied to the idea of teaching my readers how weird this book will get via West's voice in the original prologue--until the very last minute, when I decided accessibility was more important!

What does current-you wish you could have tell past-you about the whole process?

Oh, I suppose just to not fret during the submission phase, that it would all work out one way or the other. To be happy with what was. I now have the same ambitions, but without that feeling of grasping or feeling left out. I did utilize the waiting times to start in on the next project, advice I got from other novelists at the time.

What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?

It really takes a village. It’s not surprising, I guess, how many people are involved in making a book happen and happen well, but I don’t think all those people who believe in the book are given much credit in the final conversation. There are editors, copy-editors, cover designers, agents and their interns, publicists and their interns, friends and family, teachers and readers and mentors, etc., etc. I am so grateful to this community that revealed itself through the publishing process.

It seems like a great gift—to see your work through the eyes of other creatives who believe in it. Did you have any particular surprises or moments of delight in that process?

I mentioned above that I edited for accessibility in my final drafts. One surprise was giving my mother the galley and her loving it in the WAY she loved it. My mom has always been proud of me, but she never connected to my writing or characters in my more experimental stories. She felt those stories weren’t meant for her, too weird, and it made her feel excluded. The way she loved my novel moved me and made me take the idea of a wider audience much more seriously. I had written my first draft with my small literary circle in mind as my audience. But why? I think it was out of fear. Being experimental was always a crutch--I had to show off my smarts in other ways because I was afraid I didn't know how to write a solid story. Was I still leaning on that crutch, I wondered in my last push at edits? And the prologue may have been a crutch, so I threw it away triumphantly. And I'm happy to say I have much more confidence now in my own storytelling ability, through practice, through reading, through studying structure. Now, when I choose to go weird, it is for a very good reason.

What is your favorite part of your first book?

That’s an interesting question! I don’t know—each part was so unique and took a different part of me to write it. I loved researching the sixties and writing about protestors. I loved writing an artist manifesto from the point of view of the painter and diverging in form, inserting an “artifact” in the book. I loved being able to write as truthfully as possible about mental illness and showing what the domestic side of it can be like: when West returns home, I got to explore how his old friends and his family would regard him now that he was “sick.”

Why do you suppose you were drawn to the subject of mental illness? Mental illness and the question of representation are subjects that seem to be uniquely intertwined. What led to the decision to make the inciting incident of the text the visual representation of the character's mental illness?

I had two close friends who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was fascinated by their experiences, which isn’t often represented in fiction, at least not in a non-stereotypical way. And I was fascinated by my own fear of it once it was so close to home. The idea of diagnosis was also a major question for me: is it limiting or freeing, or both? Does explaining one’s experience give one permission and validation, or is it pigeon-holing? To me, a metaphor for this is representation, or rendering. Once an experience is written down or painted, given words or locked into an image or story, does it now feel written in stone, or does that externalizing of it give one the opportunity to let it go? The novel, if it answers these questions at all, shows that it’s a little bit of both, and that it is up to Claire and West to take agency and decide their lives for themselves.

I don’t have anything to add here, except that I really love the answer to this question because it’s both about the problem of categorizing as representation, in the medical sense, and about the process of writing—both create “stable” bodies/artifacts out of a messy, unstable process. That is both a beauty and a grief of art and diagnosis.

Very well put. I have friends, who are all writers of course, suffering from mental illness who are afraid of receiving a diagnosis (will it make it too real? Could they avoid the experience by avoiding a diagnosis?), and other friends who have felt free because of it. A diagnosis might take away some of the blame people place on themselves because it states this thing is hereditary or in some other way not at all their fault. Maybe in making art, using that as a metaphor for this question, there is both a claiming of agency and responsibility, by putting something into words, and a broadening and letting go, as those words may reveal that the story is much bigger than itself.

Carmiel Banasky is the author of the novel, The Suicide of Claire Bishop (Dzanc, 2015), which Publishers Weekly calls "an intellectual tour de force." Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Slice, Guernica, PEN America, The Rumpus, and NPR, among other places. She earned her M.F.A. from Hunter College, where she also taught Creative Writing. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Ragdale, Artist Trust, I-Park, and other foundations. After four years on the road at writing residencies, she now teaches in Los Angeles. She is from Portland, Or.

Briefly Noted: Coming Home from Camp and Other Poems by Lonny Kaneko

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 21:25:26 +0000

by Muriel Nelson

Every poem in Lonny Kaneko’s Coming Home from Camp and Other Poems rewards the reader with remarkable clarity and beauty while expressing a variation on Kaneko’s combination of stoicism and deep feeling. For those unfamiliar with the concentration camps run by the United States during World War II, these poems witness to life in the Minidoka camp in Idaho and its lasting aftereffects. Kaneko’s poems “rope / the quiet progress of [families’] lives / against the ache that gnaws deep.” The child’s-eye views by this poet whose preschool years were spent in the camp are especially heart-breaking.

This collection doesn’t leave readers in that “barbed corral” where lightning “rips the Idaho sky as we struggle / through dust or snow or rain to pee,” or with the cry of “an ordinary man who feels his son’s / fear half a world away.” Instead, among poems of poverty and prejudice after the war is a delightful whirling portrait of “Bad Knees Harry: Japanese Gardner” in his “flurry of motion / guaranteed to look like action / worth $2.50 an hour.” There is a choreopoem, “Sukiyaki Mama,” for the Johanna Weikel Dance Company and a collaboration with painter Camille Patha, You Make My Silence Sing. There are baseball poems, tributes and portraits that capture a variety of voices, meditations, love poems, quirky observations such as “The Pig and I,” and my favorite, the jazzy “Lee Siu Long: Little Dragon Lee.”

We all need these poems. While others like to glorify our “just war” and forget our country’s misdeeds, Kaneko writes of their lasting effects along with resilience and humor.

Muriel Nelson’s publications include Part Song, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize (Bear Star Press), and Most Wanted, winner of the ByLine Chapbook Award (ByLine Press). Nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, Front Porch Journal, Hunger Mountain, National Poetry Review, The New Republic, Northwest Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and Superstition Review, and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Italian Culture published her critical essay on Eugenio Montale. She holds master's degrees from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the University of Illinois School of Music, and lives near Seattle.

Briefly Noted: Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

Prairie Schooner — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 19:58:21 +0000

reviewed by Michael Lindgren

This hybrid meditation from Kansas City poet and philosopher Anne Boyer is a frankly astonishing expression of great beauty, pain, and force. Like all such artifacts, it is extraordinarily resistant to summary; suffice it to say that Garments Against Women is a freewheeling prose poem, written in coolly unspooling paragraphs that are both dense and fluid, that improvises on themes of feminist identity, precarity, illness, the nature of capital, and the twin poles of production and consumerism.

Part of the startling impact of the book derives from the way it combines abstract methods of structural analysis with concrete details. “It is a requirement of the idea of the ‘transparent account’ that someone should steal as an affirmation of the desirability of profit,” runs a line in “The Open Book”; two pages later, an unnamed subject “stopped weeping a little and… found some brown sneakers for $44 on clearance.” The linking of grief and the mechanics of consumerism, of emotional states with tangible things, with production – sewing, writing poems, baking – with self-erasure, is consistent, nuanced, and relentless. Like the poststructuralists, whose vocabulary she has absorbed, Boyer sees depths beneath every surface, signifiers in every object; like the Romantics, whose emotional ferocity and courage she has also inherited, she is unafraid to expose the self to the reader, “stoned and inconsolable” as she may be.

The twin currents of the confessional and the analytic make for a potent voice, and the result is a document of remarkable expressiveness and force, one that combines high intellection with an unsettling sense of being in-tune with the body and the violence that both state and self can visit upon it. In a perceptive review published in the Poetry Project newsletter, the poet Nina Puro calls the book “an affirmation of negation: of removal or de-affiliation, a radical refusal to participate.” Would that all such refusals to participate were so eloquent and felt so necessary.

Michael Lindgren is a writer and musician who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

"Who is American? How do we decide, and who decides?" an interview with E.M. Tran

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 19:38:20 +0000

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

SFM: Why are you drawn to the genre of nonfiction? What about its history or form speaks to you? What compels you to write about truth, history, and your own experience?

I would consider myself a fiction writer in general, but find a lot of my stories in the seeds of truth, altering experiences I’ve had or crafting characters from people I’ve known. However, even though you’re free to imaginatively invent narrative, there’s a lot about fiction that is conservatively tied to convention and form. There is experimental fiction out there, but often it’s difficult to write in the face of overbearing historical precedent and genre conventions. So, entering into the genre of creative nonfiction has been very liberating in the vastness of its boundaries. I’m bound in other ways to “truth,” but what I can do with that truth, how I position it, and how I convey it are so fluid. Because of that formal freedom, writing about my own experiences feels much more authentic, and I am more open as a result with the truth that I know. It also allows me to look outside of myself and explore other possible truths, which I think ultimately can only enrich my fiction rather than remain separate from it.

SFM: Your winning essay, “Miss Saigon,” moves between the story of your mother’s escape from Saigon and your experiences of race and identity. The essay braids your mother’s story with your own, collaging past with present, memory with lived experience, and readers are driven through the piece by your use of form as much as your use of narrative. Why were you drawn to this form? How does the form work with, against, or perhaps because of the subject matter?

“Miss Saigon” was as much about my own experience as it was about my mother’s, and also, as much about larger experiences of trauma for many people. Hurricane Katrina effected thousands and continues to leave a visible mark on the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast despite it having been more than a decade since its landfall. And the Vietnam War, too, has displaced generations of Vietnamese people, the effects of that war rippling into the future in ways that are innocuous and sometimes invisible. Memories around huge traumas like these are so often elided, forgotten, revised, or representative of the oppressor, and as a victim of a trauma, I am also guilty of engaging in this act of false memory. So are all of us. The essay is really an exploration of how trauma interacts with memory and identity, and I wanted the form to reflect that. We remember in bits and pieces, the different parts of our selves materializing around formative events in ways that only mingle and touch when we can stand back and view in hindsight. It was also impossible to talk about my own experience with Katrina and my mother’s experience with the Vietnam War and Katrina as separate narratives that occur chronologically in time, especially considering our own subjectivities as Vietnamese American women in a predominantly white culture. All of these memories and issues of identity enact themselves simultaneously, so breaking up the narrative in parts where the past and present are told outside of chronological time was necessary to the telling of the story.

SMF: In his interview with Prairie Schooner, guest judge Kiese Laymon said, “I love essays that imagine a reader different than the reader we are taught to imagine in so-called literary essays. If you imagine a different reader, you produce a different piece with different rhythms, conclusions and questions.” Who is your imagined reader for “Miss Saigon” or your larger body of work? How does this reader impact your vision and craft?

For “Miss Saigon” in particular, I imagined my mother as the reader. It forced me to render her in complex terms, to be always aware of the dangers of two-dimensional characterization. In general, I often imagine my family reading my work. As a Vietnamese American writer, naturally I write a lot about the Vietnamese American experience. I want it to feel true to any reader, but especially to the people I am writing about. Sometimes the burden of culture can be taxing—like, am I morally obligated to write about Asian people because I am Asian? Am I unable to write different characters? Is it my onus to bear to expose to a mostly white readership that Asian American stories are important and exist? At the end of the day, I write what I write because I find it compelling and important, and I imagine an audience that is both insider and outsider to the subject matter. This vision of readership pushes me to trust my reader in an immense way in the delivery of information and execution of narrative and character.

SFM: Our guest judge also said, “In essay writing, I want to sometimes answer really old questions with different forms in the hopes of getting different answers. The readers of essays are so much closer to the process, too.” Do you see “Miss Saigon” answering old questions? What ongoing conversations is it entering or speaking back against? What “different answers” are you trying to get at in this essay or your other nonfiction?

“Miss Saigon” attempts to answer that question, which I also feel is so relevant in this current historical moment, of who is American? How do we decide, and who decides? I think so often we are bombarded with images of whiteness and inculcated with a fear of the immigrant because the immigrant does not conform to those images of whiteness. My mother is very beautiful, but her beauty has no value in a culture that only praises a particular type of beauty. Those larger questions about what our identities are and how we deal with trauma—the answers to those questions are so dependent on place and our environments.

SFM: Finally, what projects are you currently working on? What can we look forward to reading?

I have been working for the last few years on a novel about sorority women in the south. It is an examination of race and gender when thrown into an environment where standards are often inflexible. Sororities in the south are so rooted in traditions of regional whiteness, and when those traditions are disrupted or challenged, it makes for a very interesting conflict. I also have a short story forthcoming this December in the Iron Horse Literary Review about a young girl and her father building a boat in order to survive a flood in New Orleans.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches and works as Prairie Schooner’s Nonfiction Assistant Editor. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Regenerate: Poems from Mad Women (Dancing Girl Press 2017), Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide (Finishing Line Press 2016), and The Astronaut Checks His Watch (Finishing Line Press 2014). Her work has been listed as notable several times in Best American Essays, and her poetry and prose have appeared in various magazines including Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Fugue, The Los Angeles Review, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, North Dakota Quarterly, Passages North, The Pinch, Puerto del Sol, The Rumpus, Southeast Review, Terrain, Zone 3 and others.

"Too hurt by the light not to write about it": a conversation with Emily Skaja

Prairie Schooner — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 19:15:21 +0000

The Sillerman First Book Prize closes today! To celebrate, Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson talks with emerging writers about the book publication process. This week, award-winning poet (and future winner of the Pulitzer) Emily Skaja talks to her best friend and one-time roommate about Lucie Brock-Broido, how sending out your unsolicited manuscript is almost exactly like sexting, and whether or not the void can be said to GAF.

Dear Emily: Can you tell me about your first book? What's it about? What does it do?

Hello, dear one! Oh, thank you for asking. Brute is the title of my first book. It's largely autobiographical, & it's obsessed with renderings of female history, grief & loss, the surreal unreliability of memory, the effort of reclaiming an independent identity after trauma, & the way power roles gender violence. As a student of feminist thought, I'm interested in how a lived experience gets tangled up with patriarchal patterns of thralldom & control. In my own experience, it was easier to name domestic violence from the other side than to recognize it as it was happening. That's why, in a lot of the poems, the speaker repeats the elements of this history back to herself, to make sense of it & to give it a narrative order.

Do you ever feel uncomfortable about the term "autobiographical"? I only ask because I write largely autobiographical poetry and am wigged out by the way the term feels gendered to me sometimes, though I think I do use poetry the way Frank Bidart says he uses it--to think his life.

Yes, I do feel like it's taboo to admit you're writing about your own life. Maybe that's what everyone else is doing too, except there's the sense that THEY at least have the decorum not to admit it. As if it's dirty, somehow, or low-brow. It strikes me as just another patriarchal anxiety about how to control what women are allowed to say. When a woman says "autobiography," I have noticed that there is a hard science/soft science stigma about it, as if women should aspire to write about the world not as themselves but only as if they are disembodied eyes & hands tethered to a human self as an afterthought, by a 100-foot string or something. Who cares? What must it be like to assume that what I say is not informed by my experiences? I'll never know, since I'm not an old white dude, & thus have no objective self. (What a tragic loss. Daily, I weep into my hands. I can't even get out of bed for want of a poetry phallus.) Also-- & I don't mean to say this is true for everyone-- it feels like there is an escape hatch in silence & ambiguity. For me, it feels braver to say, even if I'm telling it slant, this was my fucking life.

Dear Emily: Why do you think you're a poet? (I think I am a poet because of Li-Young Lee, and because you told me I was one)

The stakes have changed a lot over time, but I think it always seemed like a good art form for someone who was obsessive & emotional & had a record to set straight. What is restless in me now is different from what was restless in me at 19, but the people I knew in college (you, for example) made me believe in poetry as transcendent & redemptive & elemental, right at a time when I was figuring out who I was & what kind of community I could belong to. Also probably because Lucie Brock-Broido wrote the poem "Moving On in the Dark Like Loaded Boats at Night, Though There Is No Course, There Is Boundlessness."

I remember you loving that poem really hard, and there's certainly an affinity between your speaker's use of language and LBB's--there's a sense that language serves the world-building of the poem, and of the speaker, as she constructs and deconstructs the self. There's something interesting that happens in "Moving on", when the speaker is confronted by her father's inert body, she turns to her own, and watches it (or makes it?) become inert, too, but covered in images that transform it. And there's this kind of orienting toward the other, that watchfulness, knowing now that death is inevitable, and being bent on being a vessel for another's death--or something. And the book is itself a weird embodiment of Emily Dickinson. I don't actually know that I understand it, but I love, as always, how LBB gets to a new space using that gorgeous language. When I was 19, the line "Every night I am the same brilliant fluke / Rising from my bed like a cut- // Throat trout listening for Trick" -- something about that experience of loneliness and embodiment and listening felt distinctly a part of female embodiment to me. What about "Moving on" do you think spoke to you so much?

Same, same! I love it for all of those reasons. Oh, to be 21 in that red apartment we shared where all the doorways came off the same little landing by the stairs & to yell at you from my doorway "Why would died once keep on dying off / over & over like a seam in an old velvet coat" & for you to yell back from your doorway "Didn't we have summer to cross?" I have heavy nostalgia, especially in fall, for coming up with you as heady young things too hurt by the light not to write about it. This poem, & all of The Master Letters also, is steeped in that time for me. There's an intoxicating witchiness in the language that I'm drawn to, & the violent shifts between desire & grief are breathtaking. I love the way the speaker in The Master Letters casts herself in surreal narratives, reordering & retelling her history to position & reposition herself against a shifting occult landscape that's like a gothic swamp pulling her into estrangement. That book is haunting.

Anyone else, besides LBB, who is part of your personal canon? Anyone you return to again and again?

I just read a book for Rebecca Lindenberg's manuscript class at the University of Cincinnati that I think will stay with me a long time: Inger Christensen's Alphabet. If I say "it's a list of things that exist," that doesn't really explain why it's so emotional, so you'll just have to trust me. The book is both uplifting & devastating, & it has such a lilting, elegiac quality to it. Here's an excerpt:

"where like a bit of fire the insects' wingless
Nike exists, neither victory nor
defeat, just the solace of nothing;
the solace of names, that nothing has
a name, namelessness has a name"

(Swoon!)

What comes after Brute?

I don't know yet, but I've been walking around all radioactive with the world glowing sharply at me in contrasts so I can tell that there is something new waiting to develop. It's a good feeling. It could be anything.

Do you think our lives are very different or about what we'd thought they'd be when we were 21?

Oh, Schmid. How could we have predicted this? We were such little muffins then. Actually, I'm glad we didn't know, because at the time, if I remember, we didn't have the strength for a lot of bullshit, & we are now entering a high bullshit period. We are the poets of a high bullshit era. Bullshit is raining down on all sides. & at 21 we were like Harry Potter on the brink of wizardhood, wielding a wand with no spells, riding the Hogwarts Express toward our Obama years. We didn't even have a Patronus yet. We didn't know.

Do you have a submissions strategy?

I tend to submit constantly because I believe in maintaining a conversation with the void, even when all evidence might indicate that the void DGAF. I don't believe in waiting for permission & I recommend going for the moon, although I do think it helps to have a poetry friend to whom you can text "The moon is a piece of shit" when the wound is fresh. Recently, I have started to send out my book for the first time, which feels exciting & also a little like sending someone an unsolicited dick pic. Like, does that ever work out for anyone?? Stay tuned for details, I guess.

Emily Skaja grew up next to a cemetery in northern Illinois. Her poems have been published by Best New Poets, Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Devil's Lake, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She was the winner of The Russell Prize for emerging poets, an Academy of American Poets College Prize, an AWP Intro Award, and the 2015 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Emily is the Associate Poetry Editor of Southern Indiana Review. She lives in Ohio, where she is a PhD student in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.

The Prairie Schooner Blog

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6 Questions for Dustin M. Hoffman

Five Questions for Yona Harvey

Briefly Noted: Latino/a Literature in the Classroom edited by Frederick Luis Aldama

Categories:

"I look, and love even harder": an interview with Michael Schmeltzer

'What is the self and how can I trust it?': an interview with Carmiel Banasky

Briefly Noted: Coming Home from Camp and Other Poems by Lonny Kaneko

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Briefly Noted: Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

Categories:

"Who is American? How do we decide, and who decides?" an interview with E.M. Tran

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"Too hurt by the light not to write about it": a conversation with Emily Skaja