An Interview with Michael Garriga

Born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Michael Garriga comes from a long line of noted outlaws and tall-tale tellers. His whole family’s big and anchored in and around Biloxi. He’s the author of The Book of Duels (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and holds a PhD from Florida State University. Currently, he’s the Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Baldwin Wallace University. He lives in Berea, OH, with his wife of twenty years and two boys and two cats, two of which he really adores and two he’s not really sold on yet.

“The Book of Duels consists of thirty-three short stories, each comprised of three separate dramatic monologues rendered in the final seconds before an ultimate confrontation, and that, when taken together, create a multi-perspective narrative. I often use the term ‘flash fiction’ to describe these works because of the layers of association: firing a pistol (as in most of the stories); a flash in the pan (referring to when a pistol misfires and also to those people quickly forgotten); flash forward and flash backward (two narrative strategies that engage the reader at the emotional level); the speed and brevity of these monologues; and the flash of an epiphany or a moment of yearning in the characters, like a flash bulb going off. That is, Flash Fiction, to me, connotes a moment when characters’ desire for self-knowledge and -awareness dovetails with their epiphany. In one intense moment, who they are, at the deepest level, is revealed or made apparent to themselves or to the readers.” ––Michael Garriga.

Your work often centers around historical or literary figures of the past. What draws you to this kind of subject matter? How do you bring in fresh perspectives while maintaining a relationship with prior texts?

Writing the book was like being a History major but without pop quizzes and tests. I could just languish in the research, but that’s not a good place to stay. Eventually you have to get to writing. Luckily, I’d find a detail or a line or a voice that would set something off in me and then it would go from there. I’ve always loved history, and fiction should be about moments of high stakes and intense drama, I think, and what could be more of that than a duel. Then I expanded them to other stakes: birth, alcoholism, Don Quiote, etc.

I read that you spent half a decade doing research for your flash fiction collection The Book of Duels. What did that process look like for you? 

I often would spend, say, ten weeks researching how Lt. Col. Custer was killed. I did that with Pushkin too, the great Russian writer, and didn’t get a story out of it, but I know a lot more about Russian writers now.

I know you do a lot of work in the flash fiction genre. What about this medium do you gravitate to? Do you think it compliments your individual writing style? 

I have, apparently, intense ADHD, and the quickness of flash fiction works best for my mental space. Also, I write flash in a very similar vein as Robert Olen Butler; he was my advisor/mentor at Florida State. However, my stories consist of three flash pieces—two told by opposing duelists and one by a witness. So, you get three flash fictions that equal to one whole multi-narrated short story at the moment of highest impact. So, I get the flash—like an epiphany, like a flash in the pan, like a light bulb going off—but then get the added benefit of a full story.

Shifting the conversation, you grew up in Mississippi and as I know from taking your Southern Grotesque class, you have a great wealth of knowledge on the southern greats and how each of their unique styles contributed to the genre overall. Do you ever feel pressure to adhere to or continue the literary traditions of those before you?

No, I don’t. I feel the pressure of competition. I try to be as good as them (I am not), but I know the traditions and I try to add to it. TS Eliot said something about the river of tradition, and you just want to add a bend in that river (at least that’s how I remember it). So, I want to take Faulkner, O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and add my rock to their mountain. I know that’s a mixed metaphor, but rivers carve mountains so I’m going to stand by it. 

In that vein, talk about who you feel are some of the biggest influences in your writing life? What are some of their stylistic choices that you find yourself emulating from time to time?

I know Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, and Robert Olen Butler are always in my head. They play with the music of language, they up the stakes, and they always tried to thrill you, give you something you’ve never heard before. But then you have to try to shake them out of your hair and find your own voice, your own way into story telling. You ingest the traditions and they become part of you, and then you have to allow yourself the freedom go forward. Not backward. Same with Toni Morrison and T.R. Pearson. 

I read my work out loud and listen for any stumbling parts, work on rhythm and musicality as much as I do visuals. All these authors are great mentors for these aesthetics. I don’t think much about theme or how a literary critic might receive the work; I’m more interested in entertaining by diving into a human’s yearning and understanding their drive than I am in anything else. 

You’re a person who is fascinated with the complexity and richness of what it means to tell a story. I know this from both your work and the many childhood or family tales you told in my classes with you. What value do you think our own real-life memories bring to our work in fiction?

***Outside of reading a lot, I fall back on my experiences, family and friends and dreams. I dream vividly and write them down every morning before I get out of bed. There’s always an image in there—a secret room in a house, a dog I never had, my father’s hands. I keep them in a little notebook, and I try to meditate on them and see if any of them start to thrum together. I also love that my family loves to tell stories—crazy wild west type stories. They’ll tilt their head and squint and say, “I ever tell you about….” And they’re immediately in story telling mode. And ever since I was a boy, I was just transfixed. I can tell a thousand Garriga boys stories (that’s my dad and his eight brothers—all of whom lived like ten lives—wild men who I loved and who coddled me like a baby even when I was in my 20s. None of them even finished grade school. They were too busy running moonshine and pawn shops.) My uncle Troy, I was talking about grad school, said, “Oh, I remember school: That was one of the best days of my life.”

Do you have anything you are currently working on?

I’m finishing a book of stories that reads as a novel, but no one should care about what I’m doing until it’s published. 

Last but certainly not least: In the current age of social media obsession, constant work stress, and now AI writing, what do you believe is the reason to hold on to literary art? Do you think there is something we can benefit from, as humans, in literary art that we may not find anywhere else?

Someone told me last week, in a kind of pouting way, that audible books are out selling print books. Yes. We’re back to the campfire, listening to stories. I love it. It’s a way we’ve always connected. Literature is a form of magic. I tell you what’s coming out of my subconscious and devour it, recreate it, and it becomes part of your subconscious. You can’t get much closer than that. In storytelling, we’re both agreeing to a kind of contract: We’re both going into a mutual daydream (or self-hypnosis) in which we try, by only language, to share a deep and meaningful experience. Even if it’s just a stand-up comedian. We, as listeners/readers are giving ourselves over to an experience that isn’t ours, but by the end will certainly be.

***

––Meagan Chandler, Mid-American Review

Book Review: On A. W. DeAnnuntis’s Magic for Martians: 49 Short Fictions No. 14

Magic for Martians: 49 Short Fictions by A. W. DeAnnuntis. Los Angeles, CA: Giant Claw, an imprint of What Books Press, 2022. 182 pages. $16.95, Paperback. 

From the first sentences of Magic for Martians, a particularly satisfying combination of personality traits shine through; this collection is delightfully strange, fresh, and, somehow, each piece of fanciful short fiction leaves the reader with a bit of unavoidable, poignant truth. DeAnnuntis has mastered the art of fabricating ridiculousness with relevance. These stories satisfy the craving for literature that feels new and current and will surely retain its contemporary feel in future years. 

Though the beautiful weirdness of these stories gives them the essence of unfamiliarity, many of the characters within reference character archetypes we have all seen before. But we certainly have never met these characters before. Each story is rooted closely enough to reality to be compatible with our reasonable expectations of logic and meaning, but the realities of the works in this collection veer into unexpected versions of those familiar roots. In “Henry and the King’s Missing Army,” the story plays on the familiarity of a fairytale-variety ruler, but the King’s personal concerns about his missing Army are peculiarly, vulnerably human in nature. DeAnnuntis parades the perceptive and kooky truths of bureaucratic power as a monarch deals with the disappearance of an entire military force, writing, “Such a thing had happened before and reflected poorly on him by marking him an object of humorous disdain for every other king. Anyway, besides a castle and a queen, having an army is the main way any of us know we’re king.” 

Like most real human beings, the King, along with the rest of the characters in the collection, has deeply interior personal concerns that engage in conversation with even the most stoic readers’ private issues and insecurities. Even the existential values of nonhuman characters force the reader to contemplate personal shortcomings, egocentrism, authenticity, responsibility, and even larger societal concerns such as bureaucratic institutions and the afterlife.  

In “Jake’s Backhoe Never Had a Chance,” a piece of heavy machinery is forced to experience embarrassment and feelings of inadequacy. Early in the story, the narrator explains why Jake’s backhoe was predestined for ineptitude: “That is, his backhoe would never be recognized by its peers for any of those qualities and experiences by which an inanimate object becomes a celebrity. Sort of almost resembling yourself, but more completely.” The backhoe experiences feelings of guilt for the impact of its deficiencies on the humans around it. Here, readers are curiously gifted with the opportunity to connect with a piece of dirt scooping equipment through one of the most common problems a person can have: a self-esteem issue. 

Each story in Magic for Martians is the perfect length for an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. With forty-nine pieces of fiction, the works are just long enough to fully explore each new and strange emotional situation without feeling heavy-handed. This collection is astute, imaginative, and incredibly fun to read. 

–Meg Sharman, Mid-American Review

Craft Corner: Character Counterpointing

Characters lie at the heart of many great stories. The things that happen to them, or their desires, are often the impetus for plot to take shape. The way we give information about these characters: their wants, their likes and dislikes, their backstories, etc., are all part of characterization. This is the process of making these characters into people readers can connect with. One surefire way to engage in meaningful characterization is to use a technique called counterpointed characterization.

Counterpointed characterization is a technique used by writers that positions two or more different characters against, or, indeed, alongside, one another in such a way that this positioning helps to elucidate aspects of these characters that would not otherwise be clear to readers. In addition to doing characterization work, this technique can also be a natural way to create dramatic tension in a narrative. It is important to note, though, that counterpointed characterization is not the same thing as creating a foil for a character. To counterpoint two characters, they do not need to be opposites or versions of one another. They can be two distinct character types who exist alongside one another and who the writer wants to see what their proximity to each other might yield. 

There are many famous examples of counterpointed characterization that might help make this technique clearer. Jo March is the main character in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She is counterpointed against the responsible, proper Meg, the sickly, saintly Beth, the feminine, sometimes vain Amy, and the rich, aimless Laurie. By putting Jo alongside these characters, Alcott gives the reader greater insight into who Jo is. Readers see what she envies about her sisters and Laurie, and what she judges them for.

Another excellent, and more contemporary, example of this technique is found in Raven Leilani’s wonderful novel, Luster. The novel tells the story of Edie, a 20-something Black woman in New York City who forms a romantic relationship with a man in an open marriage who has an adopted daughter, Akila. While the man and his wife are white, Akila is Black. These two characters are counterpointed, not against, but alongside, each other:

“…I take a moment to really look at her, her shiny brown cheeks, her soft frown and Adventure Time nightshirt, her towering hair and balled fists. Because once upon a time my weird adolescent breasts were subject to the dissection of aunties everywhere, my BMI always a hot topic among the Jamaican deaconesses in our SDA church, I would like to mind my own business when it comes to the subject of Akila’s hair. However, it is a massive, two-foot condemnation of her limp-haired parents, who had clearly made some previous effort that did not pan out.

‘You’re the girlfriend,’ she says with no ire or judgment, which somehow makes it worse.”

This example is so rich and illustrative of how counterpointed characterization can serve a story. The moment above, in which Edie meets Akila for the first time, gives the reader an example of Edie seeing herself in Akila right away. By putting Edie and Akila in this situation, Leilani has a vehicle to weave pieces of Edie’s backstory and emotional landscape into the story with a light touch.

Counterpointed characterization is just one way to utilize counterpointing in general. Though this technique is the focus of this specific post, one might also benefit from seeing what counterpointing can do for other elements of a story. A writer might also counterpoint settings, ideas, desires, and more to see what surprises it might open the door for in their story.

— Debbie Miszak, Mid-American Review

Why We Chose It: “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion” by Alyse Knorr

Mid-American Review poetry staff selected “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion” by Alyse Knorr for publication in Volume 42.1 

In MAR, we gravitate toward poems that create a peculiar and uncanny feeling in the readers. Knorr’s poem was selected for its overall strength, particularly the lyrical meter and cadence. The poem successfully takes on the mystical world of werewolves and holds so much weight in the world being created. According to Managing Editor Mary Simmons, “It’s a short poem, but it holds so much weight.” In poetry, editors look for poems that we cannot get out of our heads. Knorr evokes the unshakableness we aim to capture in MAR. Knorr’s poem elicits the feeling of reading a ghost story in late October under the covers with a flashlight. After reading “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion,” readers are left to contemplate painful bones in a new place where the poet asks, “Will you choose to accept, or will you choose to allow? / The bones will hurt most, and they will not be speedy.” 

“I love that this is a werewolf poem that is so lyrical and subtle. I’m a huge fan of folklore and myth, and the way Knorr weaves that in with haunting imagery and beautiful cadence is particularly enchanting. My favorite thing about this poem is how easy it is to get lost in.” ––Mary Simmons, Managing Editor 2023-2024

“The moment I knew I would fight for this poem was the line ‘You’ve never had enough / legs or teeth.’ Along with the title, I love how Knorr works with the ideas of transitions, the feeling of never having enough (never being enough), journeys, and the inevitable. The line coming after, ‘The less you want to hurt someone, the more likely you will,’ feels like a connection of all those ideas: the wanting to change, the inevitability, the feeling of never being enough (or not quite right). I think this section is so well crafted and thought out. I also love the question of accepting versus allowing; the subtlety in those words, questioning whether actually have agency or just let things happen. The full moon, the wolves, the transitions, the wanting, the allowing. So good.” ––Michael Beard, Managing Editor 2022-2023 

––Elly Salah, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Amorak Huey

Amorak Huey is the author of four collections of poetry: Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021); Boom Box (Sundress Publications, 2019); Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018), winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize; and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress Publications, 2015).

He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) and A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly Press, 2016).

He is the co-author, with W. Todd Kaneko, of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, published by Bloomsbury Academic in January 2018. The pair also wrote the poetry chapbook Slash/Slash, published in 2021. Slash/Slash was the winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and grew up in Alabama. Previously, he taught at Grand Valley State University, and currently, Huey is a Professor of English at Bowling Green State University.

As of today, Auburn’s football team has yet to win a game against an SEC opponent and is 2nd to last in the SEC West. What is your opinion on the current state of the team and their future under coach Freeze?

You’re inviting me to write you an essay about how the hyper-Christian culture of college football is super toxic, especially in the South, especially in Alabama; how Hugh Freeze reminds me of the group of men who came to my house after I went to church at the First Baptist of Trussville with a junior-high friend, and their idea of outreach was to lecture my mother about how irresponsible it was that she didn’t seem to mind that her children were going to hell; how being a professor who cares about universities as sites of, you know, education means that being a serious fan of top-level Division I football is probably one of my most hypocritical traits; or maybe about how I suspect Freeze hired an offensive coordinator and gave him play-calling duties specifically so he could fire him at the end of this always-certain-to-be-a-struggle year and take over play-calling himself; or how nothing from Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side has aged all that well except for the part where Freeze comes across as stubborn and pious, self-righteous and self-interested — but anyway, Auburn has won a couple games in a row since you sent me this question, they should be bowl eligible in two weeks, and recruiting has turned around to keep their blue-chip index numbers acceptable after a few miserable seasons under a coach we don’t talk about anymore, so yeah, things are moving in the right direction.

Sorry for that, I couldn’t resist. On to poetry: Often times, your poems play a sort of balancing act with humor and devastating heartbreak. What role do you see humor inhabiting within your statements about some of the darkest truths of modern life? 

Part of the job of poetry, I believe, is embodying contradiction. Poems reach for language that means more than one thing; words and phrases that evoke seemingly opposing concepts at once. So heartbreak and humor, yes. Not as opposite as we might think. Both essential in our humanity. This question makes me happy, because I want my poems to engage with humor, right, to be funny, or kind of funny, or almost funny, even as they’re also serious, but you never know how that’s going to land. Our senses of humor are so personal, so idiosyncratic; you put the poems out there and hope for the best. Of course, there’s also a long tradition of using humor as a way into the heavy stuff. Many of my favorite comics aren’t exactly telling jokes; they’re exploring really serious stories and subjects and getting laughs along the way. Tig Notaro, for example. One of the most amazing pieces of art I know is this live stand-up act she did right after finding out she had breast cancer, and she’s processing the diagnosis in almost real time with the audience, and she’s also funny, and it’s uncomfortable and terrible and great and amazing all at once. Not that my poems are anywhere near that level. But that’s what I’m chasing. 

In Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy your poems mention the films E.T., Porky’s, Risky Business, Terminator, and reference others. What role has cinema played in the development of your voice as a poet?

Movies have been a huge part of my life. My parents divorced when I was kid, and my brother and I would spend weekends at our dad’s, and pretty much every weekend we went to the movies. Then I was like the exact right age for the video store explosion to be this, like, miracle — it’s hard to explain now, in terms that make sense in the streaming era, how crazy cool it was to be able to walk into a store in some strip mall and have this incredible array of movies available to you. Before we had kids, my wife and I went to the movies two or three times a week. As poets, as writers, as storytellers, we’re always casting about for models, for ways of perceiving, for the possibilities of narrative, and movies have always been a path toward possibility. Poets grab onto the language around them, the language they breathe in, and movies are tied up that language for me. Not just for me. For anyone growing up in the past fifty or sixty years. I mean, that’s also true of music, or TV, or any pop culture, really. Like, you read Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson or Natalie Diaz, you watch Top Gun, you listen to R.E.M. or Guns ‘N Roses or Public Enemy, you watch Game of Thrones or Andor, it all gets into your brain and rearranges you and shapes what you’re capable of making. 

Can you talk a bit about the background and the inspiration behind the poem, “Self-Portrait as an Aging Clown Going for an Evening Run on the Summer Solstice?”

It will never stop being surreal to me that I grew up to be someone with a white-collar job living in a Midwestern suburb, a dad who likes puns and grills burgers and mows the lawn and coaches my kids’ second-grade soccer teams and periodically gets serious about running and losing weight. The very thought is absurd. Yet here I am, somehow. 

Your work with titles always astounds me. My current favorite might be “The Existence of Han Solo Explains the Universe,” featured in your collection, Boom Box. When do you know a title is just right for an Amorak Huey poem? 

Well, thanks. Man, I do love titles. Often in my writing process, the title comes before the poem. Ironically, this one didn’t, not in its final form. The poem was originally published in a now-defunct online journal under the title “Han Solo Explains the Universe,” but what I meant was that, like, the fact of Han Solo explained things, not that it’s a persona poem in Han’s voice or whatever, and so luckily I got another shot when the poem made the cut for the manuscript. How do I know when a title is just right? Definitely more an art than a science — sort of like how you can’t know as a 100 percent objective fact when a poem is finished, but the more poems you read and the more poems you write, you develop an instinct and a trust in that sense. I like titles that give the reader a starting place, a jumping-off point from which the poem can meander in all sorts of surprising directions. I like titles that are funnier than the poem. I like titles that make ridiculous promises. I like titles that offer a jolt of surprise from the very beginning of the reading process. I like titles that invite, that lure, that open a door. And I like the fact that there are lots of different kinds of work titles can do and that you can always find some new rhetorical strategy. Every poem offers a new opportunity.  

How did your time as a reporter and an editor influence your evolution as a poet?

I wrote a lot of headlines in my time as an editor, which I think definitely plays into my appreciation for a good title. Maybe my best headline ever, one I actually won an award for, was on a story about a high school student who got suspended for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt to school on the day some Coca-Cola bigwig was coming to make a donation to the school. The headline was “Student calls Pepsi shirt a joke / but suspension the real thing.” Beyond headline writing, spending more than a decade in newspapers helped me hone my writing to the necessary — gave me practice saying complicated things in clear, concise language. I covered county government and a county-run hospital for a while in Elizabethtown, Ky., and so I’d have write these straightforward stories about sometimes-complicated meetings or legal topics. And of course these stories mattered, right? They mattered to the community, to the people affected by the county’s actions and decisions. Writing for a newspaper, you always had a very clear sense of audience and purpose. There was never anything abstract about the reason you were writing. I like to think I try to bring that same sense to my poems, even though poems do different work in the world than news articles — or maybe they do similar work in a different way. 

I too am a huge fan of Jason Isbell’s music. I was pleasantly surprised when Isbell showed up alongside Leonard DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Killers of the Flower Moon. Like Isbell, have you ever considered pursuing some cross-art-form work in acting, or any other field? 

What’s the old saying about a face for radio, a voice for the newspaper? Teaching is as close as I’ll ever get to being on stage, I think. I can’t sing, I can’t even clap in rhythm, and I can barely draw a stick figure. Pretty sure words are where it’s at for me. Unless Scorsese has a bit part for me in a biopic about T.S. Eliot or something, which I’d happily take on. Call me, Marty! 

What have you enjoyed most about starting River River Books?

Starting this press with Han VanderHart has been an incredibly rewarding experience. We’ve ushered two amazing books into the world already — An Eye in Each Square by Lauren Camp, Bullet Points by Jennifer A Sutherland — with the next two to follow in January. It’s been so much work, but good work, and a pleasure to do it alongside someone who values poetry and community as I do. We’ve learned a lot about the tedious parts and the costs — always, the costs! — of being a small press. We knew it would be hard, and in some ways it’s been harder than we expected, but it’s also an honor to support these books, these poets as best as we can. 

What new projects do you have in the works?

My collaborator Todd Kaneko and I just finished going through the final proofs for the second edition of our textbook and anthology; that’ll be out in early 2024 from Bloomsbury. I have a manuscript I’m circulating. It’s called Mouth. I have a chapbook manuscript I’ve sent to a few places. I have this idea that my next book after Mouth might be new and collected prose poems, and with that in mind, I challenged my friend Chris Haven that both of us should write 15 new prose poems this month, so I’m working on that. I’m also very slowly writing a ttrpg set in a near-future, kind of cyberpunk, climate-change-ravaged, technology-dominated version of Michigan — which as I type that out, doesn’t sound as far from reality as I’d want it to. That one’s mostly just to give me a sandbox to play with worldbuilding for a while. I have no idea what, if anything, will become of the project. As you can see, I’m one of those people who tends to have too many projects in progress. I haven’t even told you about all of them. 

For my last question, I’m going to steal a question from you. If you were going to read a poem, the same poem, every day for a year, which poem would it be?

For sure it’s “Song,” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The heart dies of this sweetness.

***

––Caleb Edmondson, Mid-American Review