The Prairie Schooner Blog

"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.

Three Questions for Bryan Allen Fierro Regarding His Debut Short-Story Collection, Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 09 May 2017 19:06:24 +0000

by Daniel A. Olivas

Bryan Allen Fierro earned an MFA from Pacific University in Oregon. He grew up in Los Angeles but now splits his time between L.A. and Anchorage, Alaska, where he now works as a firefighter and paramedic. Fierro is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in Fiction, as well as the Rasmuson Individual Artist Award for literary and script works.

Fierro’s debut short-story collection is Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul published by the University of Arizona Press in the press’s Camino del Sol series. In truth, these stories will fill your soul: Fierro’s characters and their very human frailties ring true, and he presents them with just the right doses of humor and affection. Fierro kindly agreed to answer a few questions for Prairie Schooner about his first book.

Choosing a book’s title can be a tricky—and for some—painful process. Why did you decide to title your collection after the story, “Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul”?

It’s funny to me that this question leads many of the interviews I have done, not in a negative way, but as if my explaining will help with the reader’s ingress into the work. Believe me, I did my best to change the title in the early stages, but the magicians at the University of Arizona Press politely insisted that Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul will stand the test of time.

I have been looking at this title for so long that I thought a change might be refreshing for me, as to how I envisioned the collection as this enduring love letter home. I had suggested Shangri-LA and Fortress of Solitude as possible substitutions but they only captured the spirit of a few selected stories, whereas Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul embodies the work on a level that speaks to how I feel about my own ingress into my community, or rather, my return. The notion of the Dodgers has always been my connection to the Latino community I grew up in. My grandparents spoke Spanish in the house, as did other relatives of their generation. The gap came with my mother and subsequently kept language out of my mouth.

The one constant in the greater Latino Los Angeles (San Gabriel Valley) community was always Dodger baseball. You could share the love for Vin Scully and the 1970’s infield that always played ball with me in my head growing up. I used to sit on the patio with Tata in Monterey Park listening to Dodger games on a transistor radio. The static forced you to pay attention, to recognize and understand the stakes in the game. It is device well suited for opening doors when language is not available. You can share a game, break bread, and eventually begin to share stories in varying and dynamic ways. The Dodgers appear in my stories in light brushstrokes—whether someone is wearing a Championship t-shirt, the critical game playing on the radio, or the team making their move into Chavez Ravine [from Brooklyn] for the first time [thereby displacing a well-entrenched Mexican-American community].

I am aware of the sordid history and also the unconditional love for the organization. It is a high-wire act to write about Dodgers history and Latino community. There are many Angelenos who still will not attend a game or show any sort of support since the decade long Battle of Chavez Ravine. The story is fascinating and necessary. I am ashamed that I did not know about it until I was an adult. And it seems as though every year it dissipates a bit more. It was the reason I had wanted to change the title to Fortress of Solitude, the title of the last story in the collection, which takes place in 1959 Chavez Ravine, when George Reeves—Superman came to the barrio. A community in need of a hero. I was hoping to point to that Los Angeles historical shift before I applauded any sort of lasting successes by the organization. The Los Angeles Dodgers time stamp specific peoples and very specific place, and the interpretive vision of both.

In “100% Cherokee” and “Las Palmas Ballroom” (which appear back-to-back in the collection), you humorously but with great sensitivity delve into how people confront family members’ disabilities. Could you talk a little about your literary approached this issue?

Beyond those two stories, disabilities run through the entire collection, which was surprising to me when I first spoke to my editor, Kristen Buckles at the press. Aside from the deficits that accompany any developing character running their course along an arch, many of mine were missing a leg, or milky-eye blind. In the story “Homegirl Wedding,” the sickly-looking girl quite honestly just appeared on the sidewalk with the perfectly healthy girl standing next to her. It was these peripheral characters that lifted much of the weight and responsibility in the collection, pointing to the much larger and debilitating deficits in the protagonists. Some were more successful than others, but in case, when they appeared, I did not fight them off the page. Instead, I asked, What is it you want me to see? In “Homegirl Wedding,” I never intended the upstairs scene at the wedding reception between the astronomer protagonist and sick girl, but it ended up being the scene I most enjoyed writing in the collection.

Disabilities will peel back the layers of those around you, revealing their true nature and inabilities. Working as a paramedic for twelve years, it made sense that disability would find it’s way into the work. I don’t always deal with what I see or do in my fire department environment for various reasons, but I am certain it rises up as my way of having to look it in the eye and recognize that there’s much to wrestle with. I imagine that is where many of the ghosts come from. Writing fiction is the place where I can be at my best as a person. That doesn’t mean my characters are exemplary citizens, but it does mean that I have the space to practice the most important gift in fiction—the greatest martial art of them all: compassion.

Growing up, I had a grandmother who told me to always give to those less fortunate, to always show compassion and help others. This woman was the left hand of God. Once I told a nun at a Skid Row soup kitchen that I wasn’t poor because I wore a Member Only jacket. I even pointed to the label and urged her to move along and find another sucker to scoop soup. My grandmother materialized from thin air. She pinched my arm and guided me out the front door back to the car. We drove a mile or so before she pointed out the homeless person that I would have to forfeit my jacket to. These are the lessons of compassion, the lessons that steer a young boy into the life of public safety. It really seemed like the obvious choice, aside from priesthood, which I had considered for some time (I am clearly NOT priest material.)

Aside from employing the page to work for me to help people, it also allows me to know them, to spend time with those in the caretaker role. Trust me when I say the caretaker role has built in its own impossibilities and pain—it’s gut-wrenching to watch someone you love physically change and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. I don’t care how much schooling you may have had on how to fix people, how heal people, how to advocate. When you can’t alleviate the pain and deterioration of a loved one, and all the five-year plans disappear, and you forget who you are because every part of you is cold to the touch and only a distant memory that disappears like a finger of smoke, you begin to question just how good of a person you are. As a caretaker, you replace much of who you’ve been with the guilt of being healthy—that is its own disease.

I think that is why you see the characters in my story “The Healing Caves of Marrano Beach”—the shameful badge-wearing protagonist who is trying to navigate his poor decisions and orchestrate his own redemption, if it really ever ends up being important enough that he finds redemption. Sometimes guilt is enough, especially when the only medication to take is a bolus of forgiveness. It’s clear to me now that my disabled characters are heroic in their own right, or at the very least, teachers.

Several of your male characters are “pochos”—somewhat assimilated Chicanos who, while proud of their heritage, struggle with the Spanish language and Mexican cultural touchstones. It seems to me that this circumstance is making its way more often in literature written not just by Chicanos and Chicanas, but also writers from other ethnic groups. Thoughts?

I feel like this is the place where I have to qualify my experience. I must admit that when I saw the word, pochos, I had to reach out to some other Latino writers to ask how they felt about the term. Some objective, Chicano culture historians understood its origin, and that the word resides along side Chicano. Some Latino writers embraced the word as a pillar of power, that somehow being pocho is unique—it’s our own experience within the experience. Another fought it off with her heart outside her body, that’s the N-word for our people. It certainly was not a word I thought about in any way when putting together my collection. Its direct translation is actively rotting and discolored fruit. This does not sound anything close to what I wanted for my characters. I made many conscious decisions about my protagonists based on some of my own cultural deficits. My protagonists don’t speak Spanish simply because I do not. I wanted my characters to be proud of the touchstones they did have, however faint or distant. They do not lay claim to Aztlán, but they are from somewhere.

Perhaps that is the Dodger Blue in it all for me. It is my stake in place and person. I remember sitting with Rigoberto González in a New York pie shop, and how he said that my voice is a unique and necessary presence in the letters. That was a pivotal moment for me, a permission slip of sorts to walk through the door, that though my experience had been a splinter cell of sorts, it was important to record as a component to the complete story of us. Simply, my stories will provide ingress for another group, another experience.

I guess it is ironic that I did not know the term pocho, but it seems like a subcategory to the Mexican-American experience. If I had to counteract it, I’d say it’s another example of internalized oppression within a group, especially when it becomes widely accepted as moniker to divide a people within a people. It’s funny, even now, writing pocho, my software underlines it in red. I keep right clicking to “ignore,” and not to “learn.” I remember reading Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere and David Bezmozgis’s Natasha, thinking that these were two books that informed me about my own culture in how I was to approach story. Both works seemed to observe from a place that was patient but not always a safe perch. I returned to those books a few times when writing Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul, not just to read the words, but to hold on to the feel of the book, listen to its sound.

So when people tell me that they can hear my collection when they read it, that it has a snap to the sentences and music, that deeply satisfies me, that the experience was full for the reader. I recently had the opportunity to lecture and read at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Professors, Emmy Perez and Britt Haraway, were teaching Dodger Blue in the undergrad and MFA creative writing programs. It was easily the single most rewarding experience I have had to date as a writer. First generation Latina/o students coming up to me after class to thank me for giving them permission to write about a world and experiences they thought no one cared about, changed how I perceived my own work. It didn’t even seem real to me that my work could prompt them to account for all the beauty in their lives, that we were together in this great effort to preserve story.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of seven books and editor of two anthologies. His books include the award-winning novel, The Book of Want (University of Arizona Press, 2011), the landmark anthology, Latinos in Lotusland (Bilingual Press, 2008), which brings together 60 years of Los Angeles fiction by Latin@ writers, and Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews (San Diego State University Press, 2014). His forthcoming books are The King of Lighting Fixtures: Stories (fall 2017, University of Arizona Press), and Crossing the Border: Poems (Pact Press, 2017).

Briefly Noted: Swimming in Hong Kong by Stephanie Han

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

by Jennifer S. Deayton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Questions for Dustin M. Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you celebrate your book prize win?

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

What are you working on now?

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

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

Five Questions for Yona Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Daniel A. Olivas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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