The Prairie Schooner Blog

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many books have you published, and where?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you decide where to submit the finished manuscript?

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

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

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

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

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

What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?

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

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

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

What is your favorite part of your first book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Muriel Nelson

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

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

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

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

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