The Prairie Schooner Blog

So You Wanna Win a Book Prize?

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:27:48 +0000

In honor of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (open now!), we've revived our interview series about publishing the first book. This week poet Stephanie McCarley Dugger, winner of the 2014 Vella Chapbook Contest, talks about letting go of deadlines, dashes vs. white space, and the importance of feeling connected to a larger writing community.

How many books have you published, and where?

I have one full-length collection, Either Way, You’re Done (Sundress Publications), and one chapbook, Sterling (Paper Nautilus Press).

Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. How did you conceive of ordering the collection?

It took me about ten years to write the poems for the collection. I didn’t write with the manuscript in mind; I was just writing poems—most during my grad programs. Once I had enough to consider putting them together, I went through countless drafts. I landed on the poems that became Either Way, You’re Done, but struggled with ordering them. Nearly every friend I have has had these poems strewn out over their living room floor at one point or another, us shuffling and reshuffling and scooting around on all fours to reach this paper or that one. Eventually, I realized the poems were about journeying; that was the lightbulb. I was able to see the two sections clearly (“home” and “leaving home”), and then the order came fairly naturally from there.

Did you notice poetic tics once you’d put the poems together? How did you decide which tics were fruitful (interesting in that they accrued throughout the collection in a meaningful way) and which were not?

I did! I’m sure there are many that I haven’t noticed, but one that I found pretty early on was an overabundance of dashes. There must have been at least three or four in every poem. I figured out that I was using the dashes as space filler, indicating some pause or deep breath. Once I caught on to that, I replaced many of those dashes with white space, which helped me better understand the form for the poems. There are still a lot of dashes, but I cut them down quite a bit.

Someone pointed out that several poems had qualifying phrases associated with voice/speaking (“I should say…,” “What I should have said…”). At first, I tried cutting those phrases, but they were necessary to many of the poems. Once I realized how much the collection was about voice—about needing to speak and not being allowed or able—I decided to go with it. I also ended up mentioning a lot of kids’ games in the book, which wasn’t intentional. I still haven’t completely worked that one out.

How did you decide which poems to include in the collection?

That was one of the hardest parts of putting together the manuscript. I had this vision of what I wanted to include, and it certainly didn’t turn out that way. I was having trouble finding cohesion in the poems. I shifted the order around over and over, kept writing new poems, but I couldn’t find the thread. Then I decided on a whim to enter a chapbook contest. I think it was helpful that I hadn’t planned it and didn’t have time to obsess over it. I picked a handful of poems that I thought spoke to each other and worked to create an arc. Once Sterling was published, I realized I actually had two different arcs—one larger (that became Either Way, You’re Done) and one smaller (the chapbook). For the full-length collection, I pulled out the poems that worked with the larger narrative, wrote some new poems, and that became Either Way, You’re Done. It broke my heart because I had to cut some poems that were important to me, but they served a better purpose in the chapbook, and I’m happy with that.

How did you decide where to submit the collection? How many places did you submit?

I have two very different experiences with submitting. Sterling, the chapbook, was an anomaly. I sent it to two contests; it was a finalist in one and won the other. But I submitted the full-length collection to almost 50 presses (most of them contests) for about 5 years before it was really ready. I submitted to the presses that were publishing my favorite authors, publishers that I knew from submitting to journals, and any press that offered free submissions (submissions are expensive! Especially for students). Once the chapbook was published, I heavily revised Either Way, You’re Done and then only sent it to a few places. It was a finalist in a contest, but ultimately it wasn’t through sending it out that the book got published. After I had given a reading one evening, an editor at Sundress approached me and asked if I had a manuscript. I sent it to them, and they decided it was a good fit.

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

I’d tell her to be patient. I spent so many years thinking I had to get a book out right away (and it had to be done a certain way), that I was running out of time. Maybe it’s because I’m older and came to this whole process later in life, but the closer I got to 40, the more I felt like I had to catch up to something (I don’t know what). It was only after I decided to be slow down that things finally came together.

And I want to tell her to trust her voice. I struggled (and still do) with understanding if and where my work fits in with the larger writing community. I think much of that comes from where and how I grew up, and it’s something that can paralyze me—has sometimes kept me from writing, submitting, or reading, even when I was feeling pressure to beat that ridiculous self-imposed deadline. But then an editor heard my poems, found value in my work, and published the collection. That was a dream-come-true (I know that’s cliché, but it’s accurate), and it was very far from the rigid process and timetable I was imposing on myself. And it proved that I was part of this community that I so fiercely admired. I wish I could tell the younger me that there is a magical outcome to all that work.

Has publication of individual pieces in the collection changed your writing or manuscript construction processes?

Yes. I have done some of my best (and most aggressive) revising after publishing a poem in a journal. I might be the worst person about revising. I have a hard time knowing when something is finished. I think it’s done, send it out, and then it goes live or arrives in print, and I suddenly find all sorts of problems with it.

But as true as that is, I also think it undermines the purpose and joy of publishing. I do love publishing individual pieces and it’s a very important part of the process for me (outside of revision). Getting to read a poem of mine alongside other writers’ and artists’ work gives me a new perspective on my own work. I can see where a poem might move within a manuscript or where it might help another poem in the collection. But I think more importantly, it helps me see value in my poems. It took me a very, very long time to call myself a writer. It’s something that was so far out of my reach when I was younger that I wouldn’t even consider taking on that label, so I often have a hard time believing my poems have value to anyone other than me. Publishing individual pieces reminds me that this work is part of something much bigger than my own writing space.

What did you do when you heard it was accepted?

It’s all a blur, but I had several celebration dinners over the next few days. The first was with my friend, Susan, who was in the office with me when I found out. She’s the one who got to see me nearly fall off my chair. There was an email that included a list of comments the editors made after they read the manuscript. They were encouraging and uplifting and all-around beautiful, and I remember thinking that I would need that list in the coming months to remind me that this was actually happening and that the book really was deserving of publication. I read those comments to Susan and we gushed about them, then I printed the list and used it as my tether for the next year while the book was in the editing phase.

Stephanie McCarley Dugger is the author of Either Way, You’re Done (Sundress Publications, 2017). Her chapbook Sterling (Paper Nautilus, 2015) was winner of the 2014 Vella Chapbook contest. Her work has appeared in The Boiler Journal, Gulf Stream, Heron Tree, Meridian, The Southeast Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. She is an assistant professor at Austin Peay State University and is Assistant Poetry Editor for Zone 3 Press.

So You Wanna Win a Book Prize?

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 19:41:34 +0000

In honor of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (open now!), we've revived our interview series about publishing the first book. This week poet Ángel García, winner of the 2018 CantoMundo poetry prize, talks about resisting the expectations of the first book, the usefulness of self-imposed limitations, and eavesdropping on your own poems.

How many books have you published, and where?

Teeth Never Sleep is my first book, forthcoming from University of Arkansas Press in the Fall of 2018.

Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. How did you conceive of ordering the collection?

The manuscript has changed dramatically over the years. With every contest cycle, something about my editing process has changed. But when I graduated with my MFA, my thesis was a mess. It was just poems I threw together, to be honest, without much thought about its sense. I knew I would do this work after graduation. But because I hadn’t thought too deeply about it, I didn’t know how or where to begin. I kept expecting something magical to happen, like I would wake from a dream and the structure would appear to me. For many years, I fluctuated between stagnation or mostly tinkered with poems. But really, I didn’t know how to do to work. Most of my educational experience has been to make and think about singular poems. But a manuscript was foreign to me. It wasn’t until I realized what kind of narrative I wanted to tell that I begin to arrange poems. Essentially, the order of the manuscript starts at the end and ends somewhere in the middle. I didn’t want to rely on the arc of birth to death (even though I’m clearly alive). I wanted to start somewhere else. Really, I wanted to fight against the narrative(s) and expectations of the “first” book. I wanted to think about my manuscript as different or new. But this too was a myth I had to dismantle, and it wasn’t until I was able to do that that the manuscript became more realized.

The tics helped me think more deeply about the manuscript and what eventually gave me some order or sense of what the manuscript would be. I made lists of tics or threads. While writing through some of these threads, I found that some were going to work while others weren’t. But the poems revealed this for me. I set up a criterion, initially, of writing ten poems in a series. It was an arbitrary number, but it was a good starting place. Depending on how these poems worked together or how they worked in conversation with each other, I’d keep them. If I could only write one or two poems, I’d abandon the series. But this really helped me think of poems in partnership, or how they converse with one another. I have a series of mirrored poems, and this was another way for me to recognize patterns and order poems.

How did you decide which poems to include in the collection?

This was one of the more difficult challenges I faced. I kept thinking about revision not as a process, but as a way to save the poems I “liked.” I would highlight titles in red, I would put them in separate piles, I would tell myself over and over again that I would make certain poems work. Eventually, after I had a mentor read the manuscript, he made suggestions for initial cuts. That made it easier. He told me this poem or that poem don’t really work. But so often, this was something I already knew or suspected. But trusting myself is something I had to learn how to do. Slowly, I began to take out more and more poems because they just weren’t doing enough work in the manuscript. It became easier to omit than try to save a poem. The poems that are in the manuscript now (possibly with a few exceptions) don’t need me to save them. They are doing just fine on their own or in conversation with other poems. I’m now just that person eavesdropping, knowing they can hold their own while speaking for themselves. Because I’m empowered, I think the poems too, are empowered.

How did you decide where to submit the collection? How many places did you submit?

The main (but not the only criteria) I had for submitting the manuscript was to submit to presses that made beautiful books. But the more I learned about the process and the more I read, the more presses I included. More presses; more money. After years of submitting, I began more and more to send to first-book contests, and only submitted to a few “open” contests. But again, I was considering what press, what kind of books they made, and what contests are advocating for or are open to underrepresented populations. Since the Fall of 2015, when I began seriously submitting, I’ve probably submitted to more than 40 contests.

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

I would tell a past me to be more patient and more deliberate. There was this sense of urgency to make a book happen—a mixture of getting older, feeling like I had nothing or little to show for years of work, and a sense that everyone and everything was passing me by. But had I had a book picked up in 2012 or even 2015, it would not have been ready. I’m certain of that. While there is still doubt about the current manuscript, and I think there will continue to be doubt, the book is better because it’s more realized. I’ve made deliberate choices and deliberate moves to create a whole. More importantly, though, I would tell myself that the process of the book becoming more and more real is an emotional process. I've spoken with other poets like Sara Borjas and DaMaris Hill (whose books are coming out soon) about how emotional (fluctuating between depression and anxiety and a slew of other emotions) the realization that a book will be out in the world can be. I don’t know that I had ever heard anyone talk about that, or at least talk to me about it. As elated as I am, I’ve had to deal with doubt, fear, insecurity, etc. and that has been taxing. It’s labor, of an emotional sort, that I wasn’t really prepared for.

Has publication of individual pieces in the collection changed your writing or manuscript construction processes?

The most useful thing to think about when individual poems were published was to think (even just initially) of those poems as “done.” It cleared my mind to work on other poems and to keep making new poems. Eventually, most everything has been revised, but in my mind it helped me compartmentalize work and keep pushing forward.

What did you do when you heard it was accepted?

I took the call when I was in my TA office, so there wasn’t much room to celebrate. I did get emotional and while walking home I made calls to my partner and then one of my best friends. As great as it was to hear and share that I had won a prize and that my book was going to be published, the elation lasted only for a short while. As usual, shortly after, the fear and worry began to settle in. But there was something too about not being “home” to share and celebrate with other friends and family. This past December my brother, Juan, hosted a dinner and that was special. My family (not all) and friends (not all) were there. That resonated more closely to heart. Later, we went out and I drank and danced in celebration and that, or the hangover, was when things felt realized.

Ángel García is the proud son of Mexican immigrants. Born in Texas and raised in Southern California, he is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, recipient of the 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize which will be published by University of Arkansas Press in the Fall. His work has been published in The American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Huizache, among others.

So You Wanna Win a Book Prize?

Prairie Schooner — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 01:13:45 +0000

In honor of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (open now!), we've revived our interview series about publishing the first book. This week poet Kristi Carter, author of Cosmovore, talks about the importance of becoming familiar with the agendas of presses, wearing out your obsessions, and the surreal feeling of having two books picked up in the same month.

1. How many books have you published, and where?

I've had two collections published, both in 2017, Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem (Porkbelly Press) and Cosmovore (Aqueduct Press), and one that is forthcoming this year from dancing girl press.

2. Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. How did you conceive of ordering the collection?

Cosmovore was the first and the ordering was something I returned to about six times throughout its gestation. Perhaps there were even more that I'm forgetting! In the beginning, it seemed logical to focus on the relationship between the ex (a triangle-playing "you") and Cosmovore (the speaker of the poems shares her name with the title). However, as I went down the line the priorities of the manuscript shifted in such a way that while the weight of the ex-partner's abuse didn't become unimportant, poems that seemed more wistful about that failed relationship took second-place to the hateful thunder of the others, as those poems are where you really see what Cosmovore is capable of.

3. Did you notice poetic tics once you’d put the poems together? How did you decide which tics were fruitful (interesting in that they accrued throughout the collection in a meaningful way) and which were not?

Us poets, and all writers and artists, are a really obsessive bunch. It was liberating for me to learn during grad school to lean into those obsessions, to really wear them out. Because Cosmovore is so transparently about consumption and reproductive rights, there was a pull toward the litany form that isn't as obvious now as it was during the construction. The use of dry humor was another concern, and when I re-read the manuscript I think it gets buried because of the rage that dominates the louder poems.

With Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem, the voice of the speaker was a major preoccupation. Since that manuscript isn't constructed around the use of a persona, like Cosmovore, the tics I noticed were some I hear about from many writers, mainly trimming the bookends of the poem. That and finding ways to make sure the reader knew who the poems were addressed to, without brow-beating it into them, were formal concerns I returned to consistently.

4. How did you decide which poems to include in the collection?

For Cosmovore, it was very simple which to include as the poems erupted in a short amount of time and were so clearly demarcated from the other things I was writing which weren't in the voice of that persona. I did also try to create a mirror series of poems from the perspective of Celeste, Cosmovore's opposite of sorts, but that didn't pan out.

It was a different story with Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem. I was working on a few different series during that time so I had to consider which poems should be kept separate and why. This was difficult as DSSBA carries that tradition of many poet's first books in that it functions somewhat like a poetic (auto)biography. I'm obsessed with the body and the confines of gendered experience, but what made poems ready for DSSBA was if they were about motherhood or daughterhood in some regard. Many of the poems that do this but didn't make it into DSSBA are in the full-length unpublished version (wink) or in the chap coming out from dgp later this year, as those focus on sexual orientation and gender performance.

5. How did you decide where to submit the collection? How many places did you submit?

Oh my. Well, embracing uniqueness and the reinvention failure can provide, here are the statistics as my best record-keeping seems to depict, with the inclusion of withdrawals, presses folding, etc. Cosmovore was sent to 14 places over the course of 5 years, with a submission hiatus of three years between 2013-2016, which I get into the why of in the answer to the following question. DSSBA I sent to 29 places over the space of ten months.

As for how I decided, I always look at the mission and the track record of presses and contests with attention to diversity and description of aesthetic agenda as well as artistic politics. It's no small accident that all three of my manuscripts got snatched up by feminist presses. I consider it an honor to participate in the continuation of those establishments and all the productive disruption they continue to bring.

I am also really excited that both manuscripts were embraced by presses that had interest in the content as part of their specialties, again that whole matter of aesthetic agenda as well as artistic politics. Porkbelly Press is feminist and queer inclusive with interest in the mythical and the body, so DSSBA made sense to Nicci Mechler (the editor there). Cosmovore plays with reality a lot, so Timmi Duchamp and the other editors saw potential in that aspect within the context of the press's other titles.

6. What does current-you wish you could have told past-you about the whole process?

Keep going! I got some interesting ink on Cosmovore that discouraged me at the time before it found a venue with Aqueduct Press. There are more than a few peculiar things about the book, editors would respond to them while also telling me some form of "we don't know what to do with this," and those often felt more like setbacks than flags of interest cropping up. I returned to it when I started working on DSSBA because the spark was reignited plus it was fun to alternate between two very different manuscripts. I started getting ink and tiered rejections on DSSBA much sooner, and I'm glad I trusted the encouragement that lent me. As of now the extended version is getting personal rejections, finalist positions and that sort of thing too, so I'm persisting as best I can.

7. Has publication of individual pieces in the collection changed your writing or manuscript construction processes?

This question is cool and pretty necessary in the recent streak of politically themed call for work. Political as I am, I have been so refreshed seeing that movement grow after surviving many experiences with the guard that wants to pretend art and life do not overlap. It's always encouraging to have an individual piece find a place to fly its flag out in the world before the manuscript it belongs to is published. I'm always writing about a lot of things, so sometimes the thematic calls get a faster response. That said, getting any acceptance is important to the continuation of the production at some point—writers don't write in solitude in that sense. All I can say is I'm grateful, and luckily, stubborn.

8. What did you do when you heard it was accepted?

Quite freakishly both of these collections were taken in the same month, though submitted at different times, frequencies, and far apart. During that time my partner and I were both navigating the last throes of our PhDs (I do not recommend this), so there was a sense of being stunned, a surreal sort of detachment that the acceptances forced me to look at. You see, when you're toiling day in and day out like that then someone comes and says, "Hey great job, we think this is pretty much done," you feel some sort of opposite pull is happening. Because of that, I did not know how to promote myself and my work, nor did I make the time to do so I wish I had. The books landed and everyone around me said, "What? You had a book taken—wait, two!?" So don't do that; instead blast it to the world that someone wants to make your book real. As soon and as much as possible, to bearable extents. The community-building most writers are participating in online makes this possible, but it requires good judgment and manners.

And of course, more than anything, before and after I shared the news, I was thrilled and honored.

9. If your book was a landscape, what would it be? How would people navigate it? [Editor's note: As a former Prairie Schooner Book Prize Coordinator, Kristi used to conduct this interview series. As part of our interview, I asked her to choose a question she used to enjoy asking other writers and this was her choice!]

With Cosmovore there is obviously the galactic element, but there is also a rapid-fire vacillation between urban and suburban ruins as well. It isn't that the book is set in a dystopia, it's just that the feminist themes allow regular dystopic tropes of everyday life to shine through! Like many books, it forces the reader to trust the poems, but I know it comes on more hot and heavy even in a predictable aspect of the reader-writer relationship like that.

As for DSSBA, there are so many trees. Yew, birch, unnamed—all those trees create this dark, intimate space that's scary as well as nourishing and full of potential, much like relationships, such as motherhood. I would recommend entering the darkness of that forested area with a strong stomach and hungry eyes to get the most out of it. Maybe the reader can find there's a clearing with a fire somewhere inside.

Kristi Carter is the author of Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem (Porkbelly Press) and Cosmovore (Aqueduct Press). Her chapbook Red and Vast is forthcoming from dancing girl press. She holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA from Oklahoma State University.

On The Winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 20:47:13 +0000

by Katie Pryor

When I started Susan Gubernat’s The Zoo at Night, I felt naïve. I felt young. Facts about American history, Irish legends, and words I did not know gathered in the drain of my mind and I embraced it. I embraced it because sometimes Twitter exhausts me, sometimes the weight of my desire for youthfulness disgusts me. The truths of Gubernat’s collection are blunt and revealed slow. They take time. They have taken time.

Mary Ruefle, commenting on our obsession with talking about poems instead of reading them, says that no poet can teach us anything until they’re dead. I would argue, perhaps, that no poet teaches us anything until they are older, until some time has passed. I don’t mean to undermine the young; I am twenty-nine years old. What I mean to say is that I needed Gubernat’s longer view, I needed her to confound me, to further me along past the current limits of my senses.

The sounds Gubernat makes in this book do not scream. They come from the lower register. They haunt. They are formally astute. The second section called ‘Analog House: A Cabinet of Curiosities’ is made up of 19 sonnets—a collection of objects: the washboard, a piano bench, a meat grinder, over which I stumbled because it is night time at this zoo and most of the lights are off. This invitation to stumble and wander is the book’s power. It proves there is no other way through memory. Take, for instance, “Spirit Level,” one of the sonnets, assumingly about a father’s death. Here is the whole poem:

Spirit Level

What could we do but measure ourselves
and be found wanting? The straight shall be made
crooked. But I was a cock-eyed optimist
for a time, convinced the air bubble would hit
the exact spot: equanimity. Souls
can do no better. You only needed
tools, and we had them. Voices and minds, willing.
Place it down on the cold ground, in the midst
of a city crowd, a slick corridor
of power. And it will list and founder. Try
again: it will disappear. Off the chart.
He had a roomful of tools that couldn’t
save him in the end. My father rode it
like a dolphin and drowned. Mind over matter.

What is the it in this poem? The air bubbles of a level? It evades me and grips my shoulder gently. We cannot will what we love to stay here forever. Our minds do not conquer matter. Gubernat grew up in a working class Catholic family; she is also an opera librettist, which means she writes operas.[1] At times, the journey through this book, this memory, feels baroque—we’re walking around a cathedral with only a flashlight and the permission to touch everything. Here, we’re in the father’s room full of tools, just another corridor to the spirit level.

Gubernat is funny; we’re given dark humor in this church, after of course we’ve survived our mothers. In a poem about JFK’s assassination and affair with Marilyn Monroe, she ends with, “Go on, honey, blow.” But let’s see the whole thing, because she successfully weaves together two metaphors, a device that often makes a poem feel crowded:

I Was in Gym Class When Cronkite said They’d Shot Him

Last night the party boat blazed in Reynold’s
Channel, like the birthday cake they spent days
decorating for JFK, and then,
when the waiters carried it out on a huge tray,
wobbling between them, all you could think is
oh god, they’ll drop it—the way you feared
Marilyn’s dress would split open at those straining
seams he must have run his finger down. “Well,” as
students say when they take up a topic
reluctantly on the page, they’re both reruns
anyway: The drawbridge cranks open
every night for the gamblers’ homecoming,
win or lose. The ship glides through, still lit
up. All a little silly really, faux naïve in its
moue of girlish expectation. Go on, honey, blow.

This poem gets at how history does and does not penetrate us depending on where we are at the time of a significant event, pun intended. It gets at the guise of propriety, our ghoulish desire all caged up in a cake and a dress, excited about the idea of devastation. We hear her biting humor again in “Day Lilies,”

But in a vase
the next day they seize up like insects
the spider has sucked dry.

What am I doing here but arranging for death?

Gubernat’s sounds—the formal qualities and tone of this book—communicate that the aches one feels in youth, though transformed, remain aches. We do not want to accept this about life. Thank God Gubernat has. Thank God she wrote the poem “Our Road,” which chronicles one person taking their hands off the steering wheel with a beloved in the car: “…when you take your hands off / the wheel, with me beside you, // you take me down too, and I’m not yet done / with this imperfect life.

[1] See her major work, Korczak’s Orphans, written in collaboration with composer Adam Silverman.

Katie E. Pryor is originally from Atlanta, GA and holds an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College; she received her BA in Spanish. Her work has appeared in The Rio Review and Prairie Schooner and is forthcoming in Five Points (as the recipient of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry) and Southern Indiana Review. She was recently recognized with a 2017 Fall Fellowship at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her academic interests include 20th century American poetry, translation, borders, and gender.

"We’re all constantly messing up and all constantly changing": an interview with Andrea Gibson

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 22:31:33 +0000

by Ilana Masad

Andrea Gibson’s newest book, Take Me With You, is a pocket-sized collection of one-liners, couplets, greatest hits, and longer form poetry. Reading straight through it will fill your heart to the brim, while taking it slow will provide droplets of necessary insight and humor into otherwise gray days. Andrea Gibson was kind enough to speak to assistant nonfiction editor Ilana Masad about their work. Click here to buy Take Me With You.

Ilana Masad: Because your poems often include a musical element, a rhythmic element, but also work on the page, written down, I wonder—what is your writing process like?

Andrea Gibson: You know, that’s been a process I’ve learned more about over the years, because when I first started writing spoken word poetry I was writing so much for sound and so much for rhythm that it was really difficult to get those poems to live on the page in a way that I felt represented them. And then over time, just having done enough books at this point and learning the editing process, it’s actually changed my writing. I think there are ways that I write maybe similar to a songwriter—I know the sound of the poem before I even know the words to it. But over time I’ve gotten to marry those elements a little better, learning how to have them live in both places and be powerful in each.

IM: You’ve come out publicly as genderqueer recently, and spoken about the power of language and labels for understanding ourselves. How do you think coming out has had an effect on your recent work?

AG: You know, it’s wild, because I think that I wrote my first genderqueer poem maybe eight years ago, and five years ago I started using nonbinary they/them/theirs pronouns publicly. But I think a lot of people have been experiencing that it’s a recent come out, and I think it sort of is—I don’t think there’s ever one coming out moment. But I think that with the new poem, “Your Life”, I went into it a little bit more deeply than I have in the past and so there’s just been new talk about it. That’s what folks are talking to me about when I’m at live shows and meet people.

I think one way it has [changed my work] is it’s almost impossible for me to not bring gender or gender identity into nearly every poem I write now. I can feel its presence every time I’m writing, and that conversation feels relevant in literally every other thing I’m talking about. For a few years I noticed that Jesus had made his way into nearly every poem I was writing, and these last years I feel like gender is one of the more pressing things on my mind and it’s just popping up everywhere. But I’m also in a different place with it where it’s more fun for me to explore. There was a time when I was existing in my gender in a more painful way, and a more oppressed way, and since I’ve gotten to a different place with it, it feels more like fun and celebration. I’m also fueled by the idea that I’m not at a landing point with it; I think it’s something for me that is constantly evolving. I have no idea where I’ll be in my gender five years from now and it’s exciting to be curious about what that will be. At this point for me it can be a fun process of figuring out.

IM: I saw this very interesting argument recently on Twitter—someone was talking about how they’re scared that destroying the gender binary before we destroy the patriarchy will somehow mean that we don’t discuss the patriarchy anymore. I don’t think I agree but it was an interesting concept, and I wondered what you thought.

AG: You know, I think about that all the time because a lot of my community where I live in Colorado is a generation older than me and there can be a thought that goes around that nonbinary and trans identities are against feminism. I feel like something’s been set up in that whole conversation that is misleading, because today all of those things can exist at once. I also think it’s not about saying that gender doesn’t exist. It’s also simultaneously really important for me to be really celebrating the voices of women and understanding how important that is, because patriarchy is still this ugly monster in our culture that comes into everything, that comes into homophobia, and I think it’s also the main thing hating on genderqueerness and trans identities. I think we can be working for it all at the same time—to bring down patriarchy and also to be lifting up folks that don’t exist in our cultural boxes of gender. I’ve had some conversations in the past where folks were assuming that because I identify as genderqueer that I have this desire to do away with the concept of men and women and that’s not at all the case and also that can often be harmful to trans people who very much want to identify as one or the other.

IM: Your new book, Take Me With You, includes fragments of poems, couplets, and drawings. Are the drawings your own?

AG: No, I wish! They’re drawings by an artist friend of mine in the UK named Sarah J. Coleman and I’ve loved her work for a long time and she’s just a wonderful person. I really wanted to collaborate with a woman artist on that project and so I loved doing it with her. That’s the reason why I started reading poems to music, I think—I always prefer to be making art with other people as opposed to by myself.

IM: What was the process of having your poems broken up this way, made into small bite-sized pieces as they are in the book?

AG: The book is made up of a lot of things. If I’ve had ten different people come up and show me the same tattoo of a particular line that they’ve gotten tattooed on their body, I would think, you know, let’s include that line in the book even if it’s from an older piece. And then I was just looking through everything I’ve ever written. Half of [the book] has been previously published somewhere, and the other half might just be lines I wrote for the book or lines from new poems that aren’t published.

I was looking for things that were inspiring on their own. I have this thought about myself, and I don’t know if it’s true, but I think I’m a better writer if I’m only writing one line at a time as opposed to a full poem. I can point to every poem I’ve written and think, that line right there is the heart of that poem.

I wanted [the book] to be something where if someone was having a hard day they could just flip to any page and maybe something would spark their creativity or make them feel more hopeful or more awake or more inspired. And that was sort of a response to—do you have a phone where the news is coming in on your phone like every five minutes, you’re getting bad news popping up everywhere? So it was sort of in reaction to that—I wanted to make a smaller book that someone could carry in their pocket and maybe a few times a day instead of opening to the awful news coming in on their phones, they could take out something different that might make the day better.

IM: “I hope never to be an honest poet. I hope to always forgive faster than I write.” This is one of the fragments in the book, and it’s one of the ones I’ve found most puzzling. What does it mean to you?

AG: Oh gosh, I’ve been thinking about that all the time. That line was actually sort of heavy for me. To be honest, it was specifically about my experience with writing about my family. It’s a tricky thing too, because spoken word is a really vulnerable art form known for being really willing to just put all the truth out there and I love the art form for that reason. And I also want to be careful with how I’m speaking about people who may have hurt me in my life. I don’t love the idea of putting things down in stone when we’re all constantly messing up and all constantly changing and learning. I have friends whose poetry I love, and whose character I really respect, and they’ll just write anything about any experience that they’ve had—and it’s different for me. I don’t know if it’s just that I grew up in such a conservative home and conservative town where you don’t really talk about people… I don’t know. Some of that is dangerous, and I’m certainly willing to talk about, for instance, the man who sexually assaulted me. That’s something that I wouldn’t censor. But if it’s about my mother or a relationship that I had that was painful—I do, I want to give some space before writing that down and so that’s what that line is about.

IM: In another poem, you tell the story of how you learned that Gandhi said women shouldn’t fight off their rapists, and you write, “I believe there is such a thing as a nonviolent fist.” This feels incredibly potent to our time, to the idea of resistance, to the #MeToo movement. How would you define a nonviolent fist?

AG: I haven’t, since I heard that [about Gandhi], been able to stop thinking about it. The idea that it would be violent to protect yourself—I don’t get down with that, for myself or for my community. I can respect people’s decision to be pacifist, but I also think you can be a pacifist and punch somebody off of you. And so I’m just thinking about what’s been called violence that doesn’t resonate with me as violence. When I’m watching folks in the Black Lives Matter movement get called violent, none of that is resonating as violence to me—it’s self-defense.

Andrea Gibson is a spoken word artist who regularly tours, performing poetry which focuses on gender norms, politics, social reform and the struggles LGBTQ people face in today's society. A devoted fan base sees Gibson's work as a rally cry for action and a welcome mat at the door of the heart's most compassionate room. Born in Calais, Maine, Gibson now resides outside of Boulder, Colorado.

"That writing should challenge readers with the most difficult truths": An Interview with Heather Johnson

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 19:22:49 +0000

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Heather Johnson is the winner of our 2017 Summer Nonfiction Contest for her essay "Nowhere Place," which is forthcoming in our Spring Issue. Click here to subscribe to Prairie Schooner today.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery: Your essay, “Nowhere Place,” describes both a literal space, “a nowhere place surrounded by mesas, embedded in a valley of sand and weeds,” as well as a mental space, a “sense of unbelonging even to my own self.” How did you go about writing about the Navajo Indian Reservation and dissociation? What freedoms and challenges did each present?

Heather Johnson: I didn’t necessarily choose the subject of dissociation. Rather the topic, as with my most powerful writing, insisted on itself. What I mean is that there is a deep emotional urgency to what wants to be written—when I started free-writing this essay, I was struggling with mental dissociation and had been researching the clinical symptoms and experiences of other people who cope with it. At first, I resisted writing about it, because it’s difficult to engage in that depth of self-analysis without triggering traumatic memory. But it was something that needed to be written, that needed to be recorded, because mine is not a singular experience, but rather encapsulates the experiences of many Native American children who grew up in a Western educational system.

Also, what helped me to overcome my reluctance to write the essay was recognizing that most people don’t want to acknowledge the sources of psychological dissociation, the trauma, because it makes them uncomfortable: that recognition was a direct challenge for me to write. In fact, I wanted my essay to point a finger back at the reader to force them to acknowledge how, as a society, they participate in that silence around survivors of abuse. I didn’t want to perpetuate that silence, that avoidance, and I’ve always believed that writing should challenge readers with the most difficult truths.

So, practically, writing about my mental dissociation lead me to the metaphorical dissociation I navigate within the classroom environment: my dissociation is a result of trauma and some of the trauma I’ve experienced has happened in academic spaces. That was the lead I followed. Indeed, the academic classroom is still, at times, a loaded, hostile space. I still struggle in it because it’s normally in conflict with my identity, my values, my sensibilities, as a Native American woman from the reservation. It is still a dissociative space.

SFM: This essay, along with your fiction and poetry, examines surviving personal and historical trauma. How does the genre of nonfiction allow you to explore these complexities? How do you approach these subjects in fiction and poetry?

HJ: Before this essay, I hadn’t written much nonfiction, except for my poetry, although my fiction can be described as thinly veiled nonfiction. I think I first needed to write about personal and historical trauma obliquely, through poetry and fiction, before I was ready to write something like this essay. As an artist, a writer, I realized I was limiting myself by not writing nonfiction. I was not doing justice to my own lived experience. Nonfiction has been a more natural, more intuitive, form for me to use as an artist. Its elasticity, its malleability, allows me to delve deeply into the complexities of trauma in a way that I’m not able to do as effectively within the constraints of fiction’s traditional form. I’ve found that with nonfiction I am better able to organically reflect the dissociative nature of trauma in the essay’s modular and associative forms. Also, with nonfiction, there is greater allowance, greater range and opportunity for reflection and commentary than what I’m able to do with my fiction.

With my poetry and fiction, or, more generally, with all my writing, I let the subject matter choose me. I let what feels most urgent manifest on the page. And trauma is something I continually live with—I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and it affects my day-to-day living and my traumatic experiences are still vivid, still deeply felt, so that it is what carries over into my writing. My former nonfiction professor described my experience best: “layers of trauma”. And it is these layers that I’m always able to access, that feel most immediate, most compelling, for my writing.

SFM: In the essay you write, “When I learned to read in the first grade, there were no stories of people like me.” How does this essay and your larger body of work allow you to write the stories you were missing as a child?

HJ: My writing tends to be critically conscious and that itself was something I was not given the opportunity to read as a child. Writing that critically examines the systemic ways in which society perpetuates bias, prejudice, and power over marginalized populations was always conspicuously absent throughout my education, until I came to college. I was a critical theorist even as a child in first grade and I didn’t know the word for it until my first intro. sociology course. As a writer, I must be a truth-teller, so I can’t allow myself to write what is convenient, what is easy, because that has not been my experience. I don’t write to assuage or placate the collective conscience or easily satisfy sentiment. I hope that my writing will one day be widely accessible so that it can help fill the gap of those missing stories. I want my writing to represent those marginalized voices and experiences.

SFM: What other writers tell the stories you were missing as a child? What writers and pieces speak to you?

HJ: Sherman Alexie is one of my favorite writers. I enjoy his narrative poetry and appreciate the critical lens he applies in all his writing. I’d say his memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, of all his collected works, has resonated most with me. Kiese Laymon’s book, especially his title essay, How to Slowly Kill Yourselves and Others in America, is a powerful, pull-no-punches read. I also enjoy ZZ Packer’s short stories and Joy Harjo’s poetry. Other writers who have influenced how I explore the intimate nature of personal trauma and the complexities of mental health are Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Robert Lowell’s books of poetry, Life Studies, The Dolphin, and Notebook always leave me stunned and have profoundly affected the lyricism of my prose.

SFM: Finally, what are your current projects? What writing discoveries or challenges are you working through right now?

HJ: Currently, I’m writing a novel about a homeless 15-year-old prostitute who was kicked out by her mother for having a homosexual relationship with her girlfriend. The book is my critical commentary of our society, especially how it treats people who occupy several marginalized identities simultaneously: the main character, Jane, is half Native American, half Hispanic, bisexual, female, and from a lower socioeconomic class. Her life reflects my own experience as a former child protective services social worker working with unwanted teenage foster youth. It’s a difficult book to write simply because of its subject matter. Because of how the book directly addresses trauma, I have to intermittently take breaks and turn to other projects, like my short stories and essays. I’m also working on a book of poetry.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she has worked as Prairie Schooner’s Nonfiction Assistant Editor since 2011. Her memoir, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, is forthcoming with The Ohio State University Press, and 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 2017), 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, The Normal School, Passages North, The Pinch, Puerto del Sol, The Rumpus, Southeast Review, Terrain, and others. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University.

"Amid all the dreams and anxieties": A Debut Novelist Roundtable, Pt. 2

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 18:46:49 +0000

Our Debut Novelist Roundtable, much like the new Justice League film released today, is a powerhouse collaboration between a handful of superheroes that will be enjoyed by tens of millions of people around the world. That's the goal anyway. The second and final installment of this conversation focuses more on the nitty-gritty details of writing a book, getting it published, and staying committed to the project as the months and years go by. If that's not super heroics, I don't know what is. Enjoy!

Ted Wheeler: How long did it take you guys to write your novels? Did they come out basically fully formed or, like mine, did it take a few shots to figure out how the book should be written? How many pages did you write to come up with the end product?

Devin Murphy: The Boat Runner had many names and incarnations before it found its final shape. All told I worked on it for about eight years, though it took me about twenty if you factor in all that time I spent studying and learning how to write fiction. I have no idea how many pages had to be written to get to the final version but I do remember having to cut the first 101 pages of an advanced draft because the story started on page 102. That hurt. I also remember UNL Professor Jonis Agee reading a draft and saying, “I like this ending, and this one, and this one.” I’d overdone it so had to trim away again.

SJ Sindu: It took eight years from the conception of the novel to when it came out (Devin and I started around the same time, in the same class at UNL, and our novels were published within months of each other). But the bulk of the writing took six years. Mine, too, like Devin's, went through many names and incarnations before something clicked. I don't know how many pages I wrote ultimately, but I ended up throwing away the entire first draft and starting over, so that was at least 250 pages that I cut. And then I ended up throwing a lot more away with each draft and writing new scenes, so I think in the end, the deleted pages are somewhere around 300.

TW: There are so many cautionary tales out there meant to ward off what can be a disappointing and relationship-straining experience for probably most debut novelists, as all that cutting speaks to. But, going the other way, what about the process was heartening? What's been the most pleasantly-surprising aspect of the publishing process?

DM: Discovering how many wildly talented people get involved in the lifespan of a book has been wonderful. My agent and editor poured their great creative energy into the book. The art department read the book and came up with amazing images to try to capture the essence of the story I wrote. There are people behind the scenes in publishing that do miracles for sales, marketing, and publicity all for the love of books. Then there are people who still love and are hungry to read new novels. To have people read my book is still a shocking and exciting experience.

SJS: I'll second Devin that it's been amazing to see the creative energies that everyone brought to this book, especially my editor and cover artist. It's also been so heartening to see that, contrary to my fears, many people do care about this book. The amount of support I've gotten from friends, my writing community, and complete strangers is so, so cool. Plus, it's always pretty cool when your friends text you pictures of your book in the wild.

TW: That’s so true. Amid all the publishing dreams and anxieties, I kind of forgot that normal everyday people would be picking up my book in a store or on a Kindle and reading it. Like, people who haven’t ever heard of AWP or royalty structures.

DM: What mindset are you in now that your first book is out of your hands? Do you use your efforts to push this one along or do you try to shift gears toward a new project?

SJS: As soon as this book went on submission over three years ago, I started writing my next one. So in the time that it took for the publication process, I've been working on the next novel and many short pieces, and at this point, I'm very much in the mode of trying to finish up the second novel. But I'm still devoting some time to pushing this one. I'm not a very good multi-tasker, but having my book come out has forced me to juggle my projects.

TW: I was pretty lucky in that I had a draft of my next novel finished before my first even came out. A couple years ago I wrote most of a literary crime novel while on a summer-long fellowship in Germany. That being said, it’s been so hard to get into revision because I’ve been busy with promotion. Two different minds are required to write a book and then talk about it’s theme and context. Switching between the two is difficult, and trying to hold on to the voice of the new one has been difficult.

SJS: What are some hard-earned pieces of advice that you'd give to writers who are trying to write their first novels? What were things you wish you'd known before starting the process?

DM: I would say that life never offers up uncontested time slots for drafting novels. You always have to make the effort to braid that time into your daily existence. I’d also say be prepared for false summits. A time will come when you think you’re done, only to realize you are far from it. This is okay. This is part of the process. You have to fight for more time to keep going. I wish I was kinder to myself when I was immersed in this process. Next time I will be.

TW: The false summits advice is good. My advice is always similar, to take your time and plan on writing the book several times before it’s really done. Giving a story or a book “drawer time” is so cliche, but so true as well, as I think we all need some help to see through the tricks we’re trying to get away with but aren’t. Beyond that, celebrate your successes as they come (both on the page and on your CV) and use them as an occasion to push yourself harder and do something more significant. Chuck Palahniuk told me that after my first short story was published and it’s something I’ve tried to remember. Not the most profound advice, but it’s simple and vague, so it works.

Devin Murphy’s book, The Boat Runner, is about a Dutch family trying to weather the morally complex realities of WWII and the idea of redemption in the wake of such a disaster. He’s been working on it steadily since he left Prairie Schooner, but also took a post as a Creative Writing Professor at Bradley University and had three children, so busy, busy, busy.

SJ Sindu’s novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, is about a Sri-Lankan American lesbian who is in a marriage of convenience with a gay man so that they can present a heterosexual facade to their conservative families. It's her late-in-life coming out story, dealing with issues of family dysfunction, immigration, racism, and homophobia. Since Prairie Schooner (when she was getting my BA and then MA), Sindu has gotten a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University, and is now a faculty member at Ringling College of Art & Design.

Theodore Wheeler’s novel, Kings of Broken Things, follows a group of young immigrants in Omaha during World War I and is set around the true events of a race riot and lynching, with the initiation of the main characters into the criminal underworld of Omaha braided with the history of the city from that time. In the five years since he left PS, Wheeler received an MFA from Creighton University and also published a collection of short fiction called Bad Faith. He’s also worked as a journalist for ten years and recently began teaching creative writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Nick White’s novel How to Survive a Summer centers around a young man from the American South who must come to terms with a summer he spent at a gay-to-straight conversion camp in Mississippi. When the novel opens, he is living in the Midwest and has tried to suppress the trauma of that time in his life, only to have it resurface when he learns that a slasher flick based on his experiences at that camp is being released in theaters. I worked on Prairie Schooner as a senior fiction reader during my years as a Ph.D. student. I now teach creative writing at The Ohio State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.

"The truth, but not the whole truth": A Debut Novelist Roundtable, Pt. 1

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 19:56:07 +0000

Prairie Schooner is widely known for featuring up-and-coming writers within the pages of our magazine. What isn't so widely known is just how many talented people have been invovled with our editorial team over the years. Four such contributors-- Devin Murphy, SJ Sindu, Theodore Wheeler, and Nick White-- all had novels come out recently, and exchanged some ideas over email about the strange work of becoming a debut novelist. This is part one of the conversation, stay tuned for part two!

Theodore Wheeler: So I’ll get us started. All our novels can be called topical in one way or another, which can shape the way the book is framed in the media and determine how readers approach the text too. What has the experience been like for you all to be batched in with similar books, whether that be LGBTQ or historical fiction? Personally, it can be kind of a conflicting experience, as it feels like I spend more time talking about Omaha race riots than I do my characters. Of course they're intertwined to a great degree and Omaha during World War I is a topic I love to talk about, but something feels off or unfulfilling. Maybe it's my vanity as a literary writer showing through.

Devin Murphy: I’d like to say that it is just you and that I’ve handled this whole process with grace and aplomb… But, it did take a bit to understand why books need to be batched together. When the larger book industry gets involved it is a good strategy to reach wider audiences so I’m now grateful for that aspect of the process. I also find the larger cultural context of my book allows for a greater platform to connect with readers and then branch out to the more nuanced aspects of why I wrote the book I did.

SJ Sindu: I have that same vanity. I spend a lot of time telling people that I am not my protagonist, and that although I used elements of my own life, this is not my thinly veiled memoir.

I'm curious if you get that question, Nick? I feel like it's often asked of writers, but is particularly a pernicious question when it comes to writers who are marginalized in some way or another.

Nick White: Sindu, YES. I get this question a good bit, but - most of the time - it comes from a good place, from people wondering if I had experienced the trauma that my narrator has. I like to position the novel as an “alternative history” - a term I think I got (but not sure) from comic books. The kernel for the book began with my wondering how my life would have turned out had I been outed, or realized I was gay, as a teenager. I am sure there are several answers to this, but the one that frightened me the most was how I would have responded. I know I would have done anything and everything to break my body and mind, to destroy myself, in order to be more pleasing to the Southern Baptist version of god I was raised to believe in.

Sindu, one thing (among many things) that I loved about your novel was your ability to close a chapter and leave me wanting to keep turning the page - I was wondering, in crafting your book, how you came to structure. I am currently teaching a class on queer narratives (and your book is on the list!) and one of the questions for the class is, Does queer content affect the form of the story, the way that it is told, and if so, how? I know that’s a large question, probably one for a dissertation, but I would LOVE to hear how you put your book together.

SJS: It took a long time for me to come to the structure of the novel. And I think, absolutely, the queer content does affect the structure. I wasn't sure how to organize the novel for a long time, but I did have a vague idea that I wanted it to take its cues from John Rechy's City of Night. Finally, because of so many people assuming my novel would be like a Bollywood movie (because I'm South Asian and so is my main character), I decided to turn that assumption on its head--I did structure it like a Bollywood novel, but only superficially in that it starts with an engagement and ends with a wedding. But at every turn I tried to subvert the Bollywood tropes (I wrote more about that on Lithub). I was, in essence, trying to queer the Bollywood narrative, not just by having queer characters and queer love as the focus, but by having my characters play with and subvert common tropes.

NW: Ted and Devon, I was wondering if you could chat about how (if) (when) research affected the story - either content wise or structurally.

TW: Research definitely shaped the structure and content of my book, which starts in the spring of 1917 when the US made a formal declaration to enter World War I and ends with the Omaha Race Riot of 1919. I spent a lot of time reading old newspapers on microfilm, so it was a lot of fun to see how events I discovered altered the path of the fiction I was writing. Like how there was something called the "Kick the Kaiser" parade in downtown Omaha in 1917, or that Knute Rockne brought his Notre Dame "Irishmen" football team to Lincoln for a Thanksgiving Day game in 1918, or that there was an annual baseball game that pitted a team of black players from the north side of the city against a team of white players from south side. All this made it into the novel, and the last one turned into a major set piece and turning point. Two months before the riot and lynching of Will Brown, there was a huge melee on the field during the interracial game that almost broke out into a riot, provoked when there was a collision at first base. I was six years into Kings of Broken Things by then, struggling with a third draft--the one that would ultimately be published--and was blown away by this discovery, as it encapsulates the amity between races and different working-class groups amid this great backdrop. I researched throughout the entire writing process, and that habit turned out to be a real stroke of luck.

DM: Research became the lifeblood of The Boat Runner. Finding little facts about what kind of music, food, and clothes were popular at a time I was writing always helped. What was essential however was finding historical moments I could hold up and imagine my characters alive within. If I could find an event that brought my character’s inner lives some conflict then I could write a substantial scene to help propel the plot along. It was a wonderful surprise to me that research could serve as such a driver of plot.

Now that my book came out I’m getting lots of questions about my research methods, and many of them lead back to personal events that sparked an interest in doing research in the first place. I’m finding that I have to emotionally brace myself for random questions touching on those raw parts of my own inner life that I’ve kept private or masked by fiction. Is this something you three are having to deal with as well? How are you coping?

TW: This hasn't really come up for me. Kings isn't really all that personal, though it was more of an issue last summer when my short story collection came out. Bad Faith features a couple stories that are deeply personal. I usually read from the story "The Missing" at events and it deals with fatherhood and mortality in a transparent way. Nobody ever asks me questions about that aspect of the fiction, but I often get these knowing, empathetic looks from an audience when I read about the main character's daughters. Truthfully, I wrote the story in a confessional way and choose to read it in-person because it's engaging on that level. Most writing somewhat involves the telling of secrets to strangers, so I try to not be self-conscious about.

SJS: The telling of secrets has really come up for me in a big way when I do readings, mostly because of the nature of my subject matter. People assume all the time that my novel is my own personal story--that it's autofiction or fictionalized memoir. And people do ask me strange personal questions like how my family responded to my coming out, or whether I've had an arranged marriage (and the worst is when they assume I have). But I knew that would happen--I'd braced myself for it, considering the subject matter of my book. I tell them the truth, but often not the whole truth, just small bits of my own personal story that will satisfy their questions.

"Be patient. Keep working. Be persistent.": An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang

Prairie Schooner — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 18:15:08 +0000

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Our annual summer nonfiction contest is currently open to all types of creative nonfiction essays up to 5,000 words. The entry fee is $20 and includes a copy of the Spring 2018 issue of Prairie Schooner, in which the winning essay will appear. Our guest judge, Esme Weijun Wang, will name a winner and finalist. The winner will receive $250 and publication in our Spring 2018 issue. Below is an interview with Wang that touches on the art of writing, both fiction and nonfiction, living with chronic illness, and more.

SFM: The Border of Paradise is your debut novel, and your second book is the forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. How did you arrive at each of these projects? Do your writing processes and practices differ depending on genre?

EW: The Border of Paradise happened in a fairly mundane way: I needed to whip up a thesis project for my MFA in Fiction, and beginning a novel was the most obvious way to go about meeting the requirement. Prior to starting The Border of Paradise, however, I’d finished at least one full novel draft that ended up in the trash. And the project that became Border went through all sorts of dramatic changes before it turned into its final incarnation.

Arriving at the essay collection was a much stranger process. I’d taken a single nonfiction class in graduate school, but never saw myself as much of an essayist. It wasn’t until my first published essay, “Perdition Days,” came out in the Toast (RIP) and saw a fairly remarkable response that I began to wonder whether essays could be a form to explore as I tried to find a home for Border. Eventually I had enough essays to think about a possible collection, which led me to submitting a book-in-progress to the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.

SFM: Tell us more about The Collected Schizophrenias. What was it like to win the 2016 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize? What has the writing process been like since then? What writing joys and struggles have you faced with this project?

EW: Winning the 2016 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize was one of the most incredible experiences of my life to date. I found out I’d won only two months after my first novel came out, which meant that I quickly had a second book to think about—Steve Woodward, my Graywolf editor, called to tell me I’d won, and I was so shocked that I just repeated, “What? What?” for what seemed like forever.

Prior to 2016, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize had required a full manuscript. By the time I submitted to the prize, the requirements had changed; Graywolf wanted a work-in-progress of at least a hundred pages, and the winner would be working with a Graywolf editor to finish the book. I found out I won in June 2016, and my contract for The Collected Schizophrenias stipulated that I'd submit the final manuscript in August 2017. Steve and I have been sending one another notes and documents ever since; I write this in early July, with approximately two more rounds of edits left before the book is finished.

The biggest struggle in writing The Collected Schizophrenias has been something that isn't fully relevant to the book—it's been trying to write a book that I can be proud of while living with disabling chronic illness. I was diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease in 2015 after having been mysteriously ill for three years, and Lyme has taken so much from me, including the ability to sit at a laptop for hours at a time. Because the disease has impacted my brain, my cognition is also affected. I've had to go about writing in a very different way because of the limitations of my body.

SFM: In addition to your writing, you also cultivate supportive online spaces for other writers with “Encouragement Notes” and “Resources for Ambitious People Living with Limitations,” among other things. Why did you start this work and what do you hope it will accomplish? How does this work speak to other kinds of literary activism and advocacy?

EW: Yes—that's the work I do with my site, The Unexpected Shape (http://www.theunexpectedshape.com), which was borne from my own needs as an ambitious person living with limitations (chronic physical and mental illness, in my case). My deep hope is that it helps others in similar situations. In terms of other kinds of literary activism: I try to be a good literary citizen, which is something I am constantly learning more about, and The Unexpected Shape, which an unusual form of advocacy, is a part of that.

SFM: You’ve been very open about the process of getting The Border of Paradise published. What advice do you have for writers working towards first (or second or third) books? What tips do you have for writers facing the long road to publication?

EW: Be patient. Keep working. Be persistent. There was a time when I thought I'd never get published. As you mentioned, the process of getting Border published was horrendous (it was rejected 41 times, and my agent had given up on it when I finally submitted it myself to Unnamed Press). If not for my stubbornness and bizarre faith in my own writing, I would've ditched it all.

SFM: Who are the nonfiction writers you love? What voices should we be listening to? What books should we get our hands on?

EW: I love this question. I also find questions like this paralyzing, because I know I'll forget someone. Andrew Solomon, although there are always things he says in his books with which I vigorously disagree; Eula Biss; Dani Shapiro, whose recent book Hourglass is a treasure; Yiyun Li; Porochista Khakpour; Mark Nepo. Jen Percy's Demon Camp is so good—it kills me that it's not more known. Many of those writers are also brilliant fiction writers. James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Joan Didion feel like obvious mentions, but there you are. There are up-and-coming writers who don't have books out yet, but whom I admire greatly; writers with gorgeous TinyLetters include Brandon Taylor and Helena Fitzgerald.

SFM: Along those lines, what nonfiction submissions grab your attention? How do you approach editing? What principles guide your practice?

I'm a sucker for good prose, but good thinking is just as essential. This is also how I approach my own work: write beautifully, write intelligently, and write like your heart is on fire. I want to feel like all three of those things are happening when I read nonfiction.

SFM: And finally, in addition to The Collected Schizophrenias, what other projects do you have on the horizon? What other work can we look forward to from you?

EW: I expect that my next book will be a novel, which I've already begun to sketch out. I look forward to working on fiction again. The Unexpected Shape is growing and changing; I hope more people find it and make use of it. So: I'm working. Keep an eye out for more.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she has worked as Prairie Schooner’s Nonfiction Assistant Editor since 2011. Her mental health memoir is forthcoming with The Ohio State University Press, and she is the author of the poetry chapbooks Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women (Dancing Girl Press), Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide, and The Astronaut Checks His Watch (both Finishing Line Press). Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays, and her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Fugue, Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, Passages North, The Pinch, Puerto del Sol, The Rumpus, Southeast Review, Terrain, and others. She is Assistant Professor of English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

A Portrait of the Essayist as a Middle-aged Man: An Interview with Patrick Madden

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 17:12:01 +0000

by Ryan McIlvain

When Patrick Madden speaks of his chosen genre, he often calls it “the essay,” according it the respect of the definite article and the weight of tradition. It’s a long, wide, deep, endlessly variable tradition, though lately it’s been flattened out, rather commandeered (I don’t think I exaggerate Pat’s view) by writers with little real analysis to offer, and less insight. Here was the bender to end all benders . . . How I survived my baroquely awful Wall Street job . . . A year of eating only peaches . . . A year of following all speed limits, on all surfaces, in all weathers. (I hope that last memoir/adventure essay really exists somewhere. The others I’ve skipped or abandoned halfway through.)

In a Patrick Madden essay, very little of the exceptional happens. Pat’s daughter spits on him by accident, and he thinks about it. Two more of his children wander away from the house and panic the neighborhood, then turn up. Pat thinks about it. Or maybe the essayist has a birthday (time moves normally, unspectacularly in a Patrick Madden essay) and he decides to think about that, too. Longevity statistics, Psalmist sayings, Dante in the middle of his own life's journey, Montaigne on the essential moderation or middleness of the essayist's method—all this and more fills up Madden's head. "I am thinking about my life," he writes in "In Media Vita,"

my prospects for sticking around, my character and my temperament, my successes and failures, my quest to find peace and contentment, which, I suspect, lie somewhere not only in the midst of life but in its middle.

This is nonfiction writing in what Phillip Lopate calls the “analytic” mode, a tradition within the tradition that goes back at least as far as Seneca and Plutarch but perhaps finds its fullest expression in the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne appears early and often in Madden's work, a sort of patron saint of the essay in general, Madden's essays in particular. Here is Montaigne on the epigraph page of Madden’s new collection, Sublime Physick: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my physics; that is my metaphysics.”

Madden’s metaphysics too, no doubt. And perhaps the essay’s too, its higher purpose, its métier.

I find that I’ve taken to referring to “the essay” myself, still drunk on Pat’s influence, a former student of his, current friend, and avid reader of his work. One day in his office he told me—was there a provocateur’s glint in his eye?—that the true essay cannot be reduced to a mere story, nor to a programmatic thesis statement. It’s too wily a thing for that, too slippery to be held to either of those poles. This has been an important idea for me ever since—in writing and in life—and it pleases me to think it was contained in one of Pat’s wry but basically earnest assertions of the essay’s “true” calling, its Montaignean mantle of pure blue thought, wide open, high up.

RYAN MCILVAIN: Not just in "Independent Redundancy," the long essay at the center of your new book, but really throughout your work you acknowledge and think about your influences so deeply that it becomes sort of radical, an implicit rebuke to the idea that our ideas come to us ex nihilo. Aren't you a little like an academic essayist in this sense? I know you're allergic to what Joyce called "the true scholastic stink" of academic essay writing, but it does strike me that so much of what you do is cover the pre-existing "conversation"—

PATRICK MADDEN: Wait, Joyce said that?

I'm pretty sure. Nervous now that he didn't.

OK, I’ve just looked it up. It’s from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen and Lynch are shooting the breeze about beauty and literary forms, and Stephen shares some of the hypothetical questions he’s posed to himself in order to explore a theory of esthetics. After he asks “If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?” Lynch, amused, laughs and offers this bit of praise: “That’s a lovely one. … That has the true scholastic stink.”

So I think that’s a different stink than the one you and I dislike (the passive-voiced, preposition-laden, impersonal, pontificating academic tone [and note how we may have to revise even that term, pontificating, given Pope Francis’s preference for personality and humble clarity!]). I quite like Stephen’s/Joyce’s little koan. Is it a koan? Perhaps it’s a koan adapted to the sensibilities of someone like me (and you), with a kind of osmotic understanding of Western philosophy?

I don’t think I’ve quite answered any question yet, but it is worth noting that Stephen’s question is exactly the kind of thing I’d like to explore in an essay! Must “art” be intentional? Intended as art? What role may accident (or, perhaps, inspiration?) play in the creation of art? If we allow for small accidents, then might we accept completely unintentional art? Is “nature” unintentional art? This feels like it parallels some of my considerations in “Independent Redundancy,” the essay you began your question with, where I’m wondering about originality (arguing against the oversimplified version we sometimes believe/sell).

I'm glad I have a chance to congratulate your Googling, Pat. I think I picked up "true scholastic stink" from a James Wood introduction ("qtd. in Wood," etc.) and hadn't actually remembered it in its original context. You're a pretty big researcher, aren't you?

I suppose I am a pretty deft Googler, and maybe a lazy researcher, though not as lazy as some! One of my main motivations in writing essays is to learn, to think beyond what I’ve known and thought in the past. I find it impossible to simply sit down and write things that already occupy my brain (whether memories of experiences or received notions about the way the world works). I always want to discover something new as a result of my writing, and, like so many essayists before me, I want to create associations among seemingly disparate things. I want my mind to be active while I’m writing, and since so much of what goes on up there is hazy and peripheral, research helps me give concrete form to things I think I’ve heard or things I only vaguely know. As Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I want to surprise myself at every turn in writing an essay.

Yet you also maintain an adversarial relationship with mere information, don't you? At one point in your new book you call Google "The Great Arbiter of Uniqueness," tongue firmly in cheek. Is there a can of worms you'd like to open?

I can understand arguments against the facility of access to information (and the possibility of misleading or false information), but on the whole I find the Internet to be a tremendously useful tool. I have read quite a bit, and I remember some of what I’ve read, and I know how to borrow books from the library and read them, but I’m grateful for the quick access I have to vast stores of knowledge via the Web. But because I’m trying to write literary essays, not reports, not encyclopedia articles, I am less interested in facts for their own sake than I am in how facts generate interesting frictions when rubbed against each other, or how I can make associative leaps between facts that bring them into new and interesting light. So I think the Internet is like any tool; it can be had for good or for ill. As Eric Clapton says, “It’s in the way that you use it.” I try to use it as a help, though I admit that it’s also a tremendous distraction, too.

I really see that in your work—the wonderful associative pressure you place on your facts. You want them to do things for you. I wonder (meta moment!) if you think of interview answers in the same light? Is an essayist's interview a kind of essay?

I’m sometimes fond of the tautological idea that (to adapt the saying to our present conversation), an essay is whatever an essayist writes, so that, yes, an interview with an essayist is a kind of essay. I’m also fond of noting that when the poets or the novelists want to write about their forms, they write essays. When the essayists want to write about their form, they just write more essays. It seems like the essay, then, is the ur-genre. And by an interesting sleight-of-hand logic, then, everything is (can be?) an essay. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Can you tell us about your experience interviewing your beloved Eduardo Galeano?

Ah. My first interview-essay! In late 2001, I was visiting my in-laws in Uruguay, and I noticed that Galeano’s books were distributed by a bookstore on the main street of downtown Montevideo, so I called them up and asked if he’d be available for an interview for an American literary journal. Simultaneously, I was emailing Robert Root at Fourth Genre, asking if he’d be interested in publishing such an interview. I had to introduce him to Galeano’s sizable and significant body of work and convince him that Fourth Genre readers, although most would likely not have heard of Galeano before, would enjoy an interview with him. In effect, I was playing both sides, allowing Galeano’s distributor to believe that the publication was already committed to publishing the interview, and pretending to Fourth Genre that I’d already secured the interview. Meanwhile, the distributor gave me Galeano’s fax number, and I wrote him a letter of introduction. But when I tried to fax it from the local Telecentro, it wouldn’t go through. After a few attempts, I gave up, but I still had the fax in my backpack when, later that evening, I was visiting Arturo Dubra, in the office of Senator Eleutorio Fernandez Huidobro in the Legislative Palace. During our small talk, I mentioned my frustrations in trying to send the fax, and he asked who I was trying to send it to. When I said “Eduardo Galeano,” he said, “Oh! Eduardo! He’s an old friend of mine. We grew up together.” So he called up Eduardo, told him that a gringo wanted to interview him, and got the correct fax number. We sent the fax from the Legislative Palace, Galeano agreed, and a few days later, I met him downtown at Café Brasilero, Montevideo’s oldest cafe. Meanwhile, Fourth Genre also agreed, so everything worked out.

I should say that I went to the interview very nervous. I prepared a list of 63 questions ahead of time. But Galeano was so kind and generous that our conversation veered immediately away from my script, and we talked comfortably and naturally, in a back-and-forth that, ultimately, got to only two of the questions I’d brought with me. Among the several insights that Galeano shared with me that day was the idea (new to me at the time) that literature is itself a creation, and that reality also contains literary works of the imagination, and that even nonfictional events must be translated into the imagination and then into words and then into a reader’s imagination, too.

I grew to love Eduardo Galeano, and I saw him most every time I returned to Montevideo after that, mostly at the Café Brasilero, but also in the feria near his home in Malvín. Once he visited me at BYU, giving a reading in May 2006. He ate dinner at my family’s house and played with my children, and he and I hiked up to and through Timpanogos Cave, which I think he quite enjoyed. He translated that experience into one of his brief vignettes, “Caves,” in the book Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. Galeano died in April 2015, and I miss him deeply. When I returned to Montevideo this July, I got his last book, published posthumously this year. I have begun to read it, but I’m taking it slowly, fearing, I think, that when I finish it, he’ll really be gone.

Beautifully said, Pat. Your essay on Galeano in the new book, "Empathy," is one of the best. It's also one where, like in the story you just told, you show off your narrative chops. Gloves coming off here— Aren't you more of a storyteller than you let on? And some of your models, too: Galeano, Brian Doyle. In "Entering and Breaking," you tell a terrifying and very taut story about the disappearance of two of your children, narrating and meditating in alteration. Whence this idea that storytelling comes at the expense of essaying?

By predisposition, training, and lack of skill, I have found my niche here in the essay world, which includes storytelling but doesn’t rely on it or develop it fully. Montaigne said “There is nothing so contrary to my style as an extended narration,” and I sympathize. I don’t think I’m a very good narrator. As soon as I get telling a story, I start looking for a way to break out into some analysis or thinking. But notice that Montaigne modifies narration with extended. He does tell stories sometimes, but he finds it difficult to sustain them. Similarly, Theodor Adorno thought that “the bad essay tells stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand.” I don’t hear in Adorno a necessary criticism of story itself so much as a desire to see the genres as different. Of course, there’s all sorts of overlap and blending, haziness at the borders, but Adorno (and I) wants to recognize an essay as an elucidating (“idea-driven”) thing. In any case, my point is that I’ve never mastered the art of writing a story.

I freely admit that this is a fault, a deficiency, in me. I quite enjoy stories, whether written or shared orally. And because I’m a twenty-first-century person, I tend to write out of stories, events, happenings that I want to share. (If there’s one easily identifiable shift in the essay form over the decades, it’s the increasing prominence of narrative.) Galeano and Doyle are, in large part, listeners, attentive to the stories of others, absorbing details and passions and translating them into words. It’s a great skill. And sometimes they seem to be just sharing what happened and leaving interpretation to readers. But they do this less often than you might think. In subtle or extended (and explicit) ways, they also enter into their stories and engage with meaning(s) directly, not usually in definitive, didactic ways but in destabilizing ways, ways that show their process of thinking from multiple angles.

As for “Entering and Breaking,” you’re right that it hinges on the story of the day my sons went missing, but I felt dissatisfied and unable to write about it until I’d found a secondary, metaphorical overlay, which came to me as a gift in a faculty seminar I was taking around that time. The subject of the seminar was evolution, but one day a stray question led to a physics professor talking about indeterminacy and quantum entanglement. This hummed in harmony with the ways I wanted to think about how I’d felt during the two-hour disappearance, so I felt inspired and enabled to write in associative, non-narrative ways about the experience. If you think that the piece displays some storytelling chops, then I’ll gratefully accept the compliment and hope that it means I’m still learning and improving my writing.

It does indeed display them, Pat. And the stops and starts, the meta interludes, serve to heighten the narrative tension all the more. I want to say, related to this, that I love the self-consciousness about form you often bring to your work. At one point in this new collection, that being said, you call yourself "painfully metaliterary." What's painful about it? And painful for whom, do you think?

Ah. There I am semi-channeling Charles Lamb, who says in “New Year’s Eve,” speaking of himself/his persona “Elia”:

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective—and mine is painfully so—can have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia.

He follows with a list of humorous insults (mostly asterisked out) to himself. I recall very clearly an epiphanic experience during my first year of doctoral studies at Ohio University. I was critiquing my friend Mike Danko’s essay, and I advised him, gingerly, to cut out the talking about writing, to stop breaking the spell of his narrative to comment on his process. I wanted to live in his past moments, not in his writing moments. I cringe now to recall my naiveté. Even during that workshop session, but certainly afterward, I began to see that the meta-literary moment is essential to the essay, its key component, its defining characteristic. After several more years of intense study and instruction in the art of essay writing, I feel exactly opposite the way I felt then. Now I love and expect to read an essayist writing about essaying. When I read a good essay, I envision the writer sitting in her chair, thinking through writing. So the comment about being “painfully metaliterary” is a dig at myself and my tendency to write in such a way. But it may truly be painful to some readers: those who are naturally inclined to want escape through literature, to experience vicariously other places, other times, other lives.

While searching for that phrase, “painfully metaliterary,” I noticed that I channeled Lamb more directly later in the book, saying that “the painfully introspective mind wanders beyond the limits imposed by circumstance to wonder what’s beyond or before.” This reminds me that the pain may also be felt by the writer, by me, at certain darker times. Sometimes I wish I could turn everything off and simply be, present in a moment, unmolested by worries or even associations in my mind, considering the lilies, taking no thought for the morrow, etc. But soon enough I return to essaying, with its tangled web of interrelations and layers of metaconnections, and my soul is filled with joy as exceeding as was my pain. (I’m quoting without quotation marks passages from the New Testament and the Book of Mormon here; I mention it just in case anybody gets upset at my “plagiarisms.”)

A nice segue into my last question, Pat. Could you talk a little bit about how your life and your essaying inform each other? Strange question to ask, perhaps, since the essays and books themselves provide ample answer. It just occurs to me, in Sublime Physick, that the line between living and essaying is becoming more and more porous for you, and in really beautiful ways.

This is a great question because it notices the results of my conscious effort to essay in life as well as in writing. I probably first came to this notion decades ago, reading Phillip Lopate’s Introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, which includes a section on “The Personal Essay as a Mode of Thinking and Being.” The idea is deeply appealing to me, especially because there are not really any formal characteristics by which one can definitively identify an “essay” as distinct from other literary forms. So I’ve taken to thinking about the spirit of the essay, to looking at what an essay does, what it essays. This almost necessarily gets at authorial intent, or at least positioning, which I understand is verboten in much contemporary literary criticism, but I consider it all the same. An essay, for me, then, really comes from a deep place of curiosity and attention and uncertainty, in fact a dissatisfaction with or disbelief in the kind of facile certainty that pervades so much of modern life. Montaigne’s tower rafters bore the inscription “I do not understand. I pause. I examine.” His goal in writing was to probe the question “What do I know?” An essay is a humble, grateful way of apprehending the world, a recognition of our vast ignorance, a demonstration of love (real love) for life. A written essay can (should) be a distillation of the essaying process by which one lives. Or an artful representation of that process.

Nietzsche, in one of his fragments, reveals his revelation that “life [can] be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge.” Life is life, I know, and others’ lives cannot be metaphorized the same way mine or Nietzsche’s can, in part because of questions of privilege and opportunity, but this sentence rings true for me. Ever since I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, I’ve been experimenting and seeking knowledge. I feel outrageously, undeservedly blessed that I have been afforded such wondrous opportunities.

And as I say in the book, when Eddie Money was sent by the universe to sit next to me on a plane, thus completing my essay “On Being Recognized,”

I am constantly preaching about how when I’m “in” an essay, my life seems to align itself to the essay, offering up quotations and memories, experiences old and new, in service of the idea I’m exploring.

I’m also very fond of paraphrasing Paul, who, for our intents and purposes, said to the Romans that “all things work to the good of them that love the essay.” I realize that I am being winkingly naive and selective, thinking magically, and you can’t quite tell if I really mean what I say, but why not? I believe that’s true.

Ryan McIlvain’s debut novel, Elders, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. His other work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Post Road, Tin House online, and other venues, and has received honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. A former recipient of the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, he currently lives with his family in Los Angeles, where he is at work on his second novel. Click here to read McIlvain's review of Patrick Madden's Sublime Physick, originally published in the Spring 2017 issue of Prairie Schooner.

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