Interview with Han VanderHart, On Poetry

Han VanderHart is a queer writer and arts organizer living in Durham, North Carolina. Han is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019). They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast, edits Moist Poetry Journal, and co-edits the poetry press River River Books with Amorak Huey. 

Your book, What Pecan Light, explores the intimacies of a speaker’s long and winding relationship to the American South. It seems that the poems fluctuate between love and criticism quite fluidly while pausing at many different points in-between. What made you decide to write an entire book on this subject? 

I love that you entwine love and criticism in your question—I think of Iris Murdoch (via Simone Weil’s) “just and loving gaze”—there is no love without justice, or justice without love. Poetry does this work so well: holding the tenderness and the anger together (for example, the collected work of June Jordan, which I’ve been reading the past few months). I think the answer to your central question of what made me write a book on the topic of the south and my family’s relationship to it is that I couldn’t not write this book—it is an account-giving, in the old, congregational sense of the expression, where you stand up in front of you community and you tell your story, and where you have come from, and where you are now as a person. 

Coming from a small, rural town myself, I really enjoy the speaker’s fascination with life on the farm. Why do you think your poetic imagination is so drawn to this particular landscape? 

The late Louise Glück wrote, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” That young, pre-frontal cortex is so open to the world—to image, to love, to harm—to learning how to move through the world. Environment ALWAYS gets into our poems, no matter our age, but the growing mind’s early impressions are an Ur-impression of the world—almost a platonic ideal, not in the ideal or positive sense, but in their importance in how we read the world. I grew up in an isolated, rural environment, locked into my mother’s back-to-basics world while my father was deployed overseas. Writing What Pecan Light is definitely a version of Diane Seuss’s “building a bearable myth.” 

 What does your process look like when writing poetry? Do you consistently use a certain space, how many drafts do you go through, etc.? 

Chaotic and varied, ha. I was born under a new moon (Cusp of Energy: Taurus/Gemini), and I am happiest when I bring a variety of energies to my writing. I joke (but it’s a serious joke!) that the best thing you can do for your writing is something else. Go garden. Go spend time with animals, music, baking. The poems will come to you more willingly this way, if you don’t hunt or stalk them. I often write on my phone, in the notes app (this method results in saved poems, as I’m impossible at remembering physical drafts). I try not to be too precious about writing time—I do it when I feel like it! I don’t experience writers block, which I suppose is something writers who force themselves to sit in a chair experience. I don’t think writing should be forced, or painful; I think it should be pleasurable.  

Who would you say are your strongest literary influences and why? 

Like which writers a reader might see in my poems, or who I like to bring up in every conversation? Haha. I adore Iris Murdoch, an Irish novelist, philosopher (and sometimes writer of very mid poetry—forgive me, Murdoch). Murdoch was genderqueer, and deeply invested in human desire and self-fantasy; you know a Murdoch character is intensely in their fantasy-comfort when they quote Saint Julian of Norwich’s “all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Murdoch impresses me by richly detailing the impotence of that comfort, in a human life—no, it will not be well! But we can still “find something good and hold onto it like a terrier” (from her novel, The Good Apprentice). I also love Simone Weil (“it is better to say you are suffering than that the landscape is ugly”), and Wittgenstein (“a word’s meaning is its use in the language”), and basically many of the ordinary language philosophers. For poets, I’m deeply attached to C.D. Wright, Linda Gregg, Carl Phillips, Diane Seuss—all of them paying great attention to both recklessness and restraint. 

 What is the best advice you could give to beginner writers, especially in this unprecedented age of AI and collapsing humanities departments within higher education?  

Find your community; build the spaces you need. Your peers are the support who will keep you going, who will be there for you. The world is big, and various, and having non-transactional relationships where you make art together, at the end of the day, is what will sustain you and keep you going. Isolation is the death of artists. 

How has co-running a press affected your writing? Do you ever feel hindered by having to read so much of other people’s work? Or do you think it keeps you inspired and curious?  

River River Books has brought a greater understanding to my own manuscript submissions—I see my work as one among many. I think more (because this is a never-ending process and cycle in a writer’s life!) about the times I have falsely concluded my manuscript was “done,” when no—it was not. It is hard to be patient with one’s own writing—but you can’t force bloom a book, and you shouldn’t want to. Oscar Wilde said there are two tragedies in life: not getting what you wanted, and getting it. But there is a real inspiration in working with someone you admire and respect, and Amorak Huey is probably the greatest inspiration to me, along with our beautiful press authors. 

If you could change anything about the current professional writing world, what would it be and why?  

Do I have to choose between healthcare, or childcare, or job stability? Doom-jokes aside: we are somehow creating out of scarcity—we are somehow loving each other through forced competition, hierarchy, and gatekeeping. In some ways, we have never had such great access to information and art—think of everything we can stream! from a sonata to a French film to a museum talk or poetry reading—at the same time as such economic stratification and polarization between working and professional and upper classes. We can’t act like these things do not affect our colliding artistic communities—they do, at every level.  Every $30 press reading fee financially prohibits some poets from submitting their work—so let’s start with that: making these fees optional, as we do at River River Books. 

What has been the biggest challenge to your success as a poet so far?  

First, I would ask what you mean by success—a book? A community to make art with? I think the biggest challenge has been the lack of parental leave after giving birth (I was back in class a week or so postpartum, and I should not have been, but the department pressure was real, and birthing bodies are supposed to act like they never birthed) and the lack of care for years as a chronic pain sufferer. Artists are best able to make art when their bodies are cared for and when their bills are paid. 

Why should people in today’s world take an interest in reading poetry?

We see how profit reduces our bodies and our labor to numbers: to hours, to datapoints. Poetry refuses to be reduced: it subverts capitalist values, it thrives especially against censorship and political oppression. I think there IS something deeply populist about poetry, and when the academy tries to rarify it or keep it ivory-towered, they lose the heartbeat of poetry. Poetry is for the people the way graffiti and street music and parks and libraries are for the people. Eugenio Montale wrote that all you need for poetry is a pencil and paper, and he was right. 

What are you currently working on? Can we look forward to seeing anything new from you soon?  

I finished my second poetry manuscript Larks—largely about my sisters, trauma, birds, Ovid’s telling of Philomel—and am mostly finished with my third manuscript, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely—erotics and art and the geneaologies of desire. I’m hoping Larks finds the right press home this year! 

Tell us a little about “Of Poetry Podcast”.

Of Poetry Podcast has been a space of abundance and friendship and craft for me—I began it in summer 2021, as a way of supporting other poets with books published during the pandemic. It has grown and flourished and transformed, and I’m so grateful for the way it expands my own thinking about poetry, and brings the gift of other’s poetry to me. It is a community space in a way I could not dream of, and recently reached 10,000 downloads across listening platforms (Apple, Spotify, Google, etc).  

––Meagan Chandler, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Alisson Wood

I recently got the chance to talk with Alisson Wood about her incredible memoir Being Lolita (Flatiron Books, 2020). The book maps her journey from being a high school student struggling with her mental health to being a victim of grooming to being a woman ready to rewrite her own narrative. During high school Alisson takes refuge in her writing and her English teacher, Mr. North, offers to mentor her. Instead of building a student-teacher relationship built on care and support, Mr. North goes on to exploit her. One of his tactics is to give her a copy of Lolita, framing it as the ultimate love story rivaled only by theirs. In the years after the abusive spiral of their “relationship”, Wood learns to see the truth of both her story and the story of Dolores Haze. Being Lolita is a must-read memoir of redemption, survival, and breaking free of dangerous narratives. 

In addition to Being Lolita Wood’s writing can be found in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Check out her Instagram, Twitter, and website to learn more.

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity. 

Memoir writing is an incredibly vulnerable art form, especially when it involves the topics you address in Being Lolita such as grooming and misogyny. How did you decide you were ready to write and publish this book? 

Memoir is, in my opinion, the most vulnerable art form. So many other mediums such as sculpture, fine art, theater, and music involve working with an object outside of yourself. Writing is intrinsically an attempt at making the internal external. Memoir is particularly vulnerable because it is explicitly centering oneself. When a memoir is circling trauma, or some sort of traumatic experience, that can be really tricky.

My number one recommendation is if you are thinking about or in the midst of a project that involves trauma, is to find a good therapist. Because this sort of work is difficult. It’s not only difficult on a craft level, because just like writing a novel, there are all these things that you need to be working with like plot, theory, dialogue, scene setting. You need to do all of those things, all of that same craft work,  while you are also navigating your own emotional experience, your past, your present, even your future, in a memoir. 

It wasn’t like I decided to write Being Lolita. It didn’t feel optional. This was the book I needed to write. Which I was not thrilled about. I did not enjoy the process of writing this book. I did not experience the writing of this book as an act of catharsis or as any sort of healing experience. A lot of times people expect that. They’ll ask questions in interviews like, Do you feel healed now? And it’s like fuck no. No, writing out my trauma in detail on a page for an audience of strangers has not made anything better. I do think that that sort of question comes from a place of care and from sort of a place of hope. Someone reads my book, and it’s pretty awful at times, and they sort of hope like, oh, this helped, right? I read this awful thing, but you’re better now. Right?  I am better, but that had nothing to do with the book. Writing this book did not change what happened to me. It did nothing to change my trauma. However, work in therapy has done a lot of that. 

Publishing is always a choice. I’m very proud of the book, and I’m very glad that I published it. But there was a lot that I did to prepare myself for publication like therapy, talking and getting support from close friends, and connecting with family. When the book came out I spent about six months talking about my trauma over and over again in readings and on podcasts and in interviews and then in a documentary. So it was something that I had to prepare myself for. Which, again, is why I always recommend therapy. 

Can you share a bit about the recollection and writing process that went into Being Lolita? Was there anything that surprised you when you revisited the memories and archives of your younger self? 

Your own memory can be fallible. There was a very explicit crossing of the line from this man being my teacher to this man making sexual advances to a seventeen-year-old year old girl. There was this moment where my teacher was talking about the size of his penis in a note to me in study hall. In my memory that had happened towards the end of the school year, it had happened like in May or something. I remembered it being close to when I graduated, when I was already eighteen. But when I was going through my high school journals I found an entry referencing it. The entry was from November, so I had known him for at most two months. It was really shocking to me when I realized that my memory was not accurate, in a way that only made things worse. That just underscored how quickly the relationship had escalated from a teacher paying attention and giving me support with my writing to grooming and sexual abuse. 

I still have a box of photographs and receipts from our “relationship”.  As an aside, it frustrates me that there’s no word for what happened between he and I. That just feels like a reflection of the misogyny in our language. He wasn’t my boyfriend. I would prefer not to use the word relationship, but that’s all that we got. But anyways, in the process I kept having to confront the fact that this was actually much worse than I remembered. I had been sort of lying to myself about the severity of how quickly things escalated. There was one experience where I was in the school play. He was directing it and I remembered this moment of him taking a photograph of me backstage in my costume. I remember how it felt to have that photo taken, how I felt sexy and powerful. I was like, look at me, a cute little Lolita, just like you want. Then when I was writing the book I found the picture. I looked so young I could have been fourteen or fifteen. I looked so young and so sad. It wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t some seventeen-year-old girl who looked much older. I was a young girl who looked really sad. That reckoning was hard. 

 My experience of going through my archives, including my high school journals, was both incredibly painful and helpful to the project. I was expecting moments of, Oh, I thought this happened. Oh, that’s not actually what happened. Instead, I found myself more disturbed by people remembering what actually had happened. I was expecting to hear from people from my high school, from my past, from his friends who would push back on my memories. Instead people reached out to me, saying things like Oh, my God! He was so creepy! or I tried to talk to another teacher about this because I was worried, but no one cared or I was a teacher then and I didn’t know what to do or, most awfully, this happened to me too. I also found out that my teacher was still teaching. Until very recently he was still teaching high school. That was particularly difficult, but it also wasn’t surprising. 

I’ve had to read Lolita many times for my own project and noticed a narrative structure similar to your memoir. Can you talk a bit about the structural choices you made and how it does and doesn’t mirror Lolita? 

I very explicitly mirror the structure of my book to the structure of Lolita. Part one in both books is sort of the escalation of this “relationship”, this escalation of the grooming and the abuse. Part two of these books are these kind of extended road trips, trying to not get caught. Then part three is the aftermath, which is where I separate from Nabokov’s structure. Dolores Haze is dead, and her story ends. But unlike Dolores Haze, I am not dead. I get to keep going, which is very nice. 

Nabokov really sneaks in the violence of the book in so many ways. Starting from the first line, readers have the point of view of Humbert: this is love, and so on. But before then we have the opening from the doctor and the criminal charges Humbert is facing. It is just tucked in there that Dolores ends up dead – they use her married name. And the thing is, that’s all at the beginning of the book. Nobody knows who this person is. We haven’t been introduced to this character. We don’t even know that her name is Dolores Haze for quite a bit. Unless someone goes back to the beginning and carefully reads through that opening again, they will miss it. They do not know that she ends up dead in childbirth. She never even gets to complete her life cycle. Her moving from girlhood to womanhood (where she becomes a mother and is no longer a child) is where she dies. I think this is just so reflective of the book as a whole. Those most vital pieces are hidden and hidden in plain sight. That’s very frustrating to me. 

 Mirroring the structure of my book to Lolita was a choice that I made in the editing process, not something I decided at the very beginning. At first I was just writing the scenes that were the clearest in my head. I began with the scenes that were the hottest, and I don’t mean hot like sexy, I mean hot emotionally – the ones that are the most emotionally packed. I made the structural decision later, when it revealed itself in later stages of the book

On the topic of structure, particularly memoir structure, I believe that if you’re going to make some sort of interesting craft choice, like making your memoir non-chronological or from the second person, I deeply believe that you need to have a reason for doing that. Why is this non-chronological? Why should this be the way the story has to be told? There needs to be a good reason, because I really believe that chronology can create empathy. We all love to follow a hero’s journey. To see something happen from the start to the end. And I think that, especially in memoir, it really helps an audience follow the main character to the end of an experience. 

I’m also a big believer in a really strong beginning. A hard truth is that unless you are in an MFA or other writing workshop, no one has to read your book. No one has to read your essay. No one has to read your short story. That can be a big shift for people exiting a writing program. You have to earn your reader’s trust. You have to earn their time. You have to earn their attention. 

The opening of my book is, “The first time he kissed me wasn’t on the mouth.” This was both instinctual and a craft choice: the opening line allows readers to get right into the story. There’s immediately questions. Who is he? If he didn’t kiss you on the mouth, where did he kiss you? What is the context here? Who are you? Opening with questions isn’t always the right choice for a book, but I felt like it was the right choice for mine. The diner scene immediately (hopefully) brings in curiosity and stakes. In the short space of that chapter – it is under 2,000 words – I tried to establish what was important: I’m in high school. This is my teacher. We’re meeting secretly. Lolita is important. Writing is important. There’s also a few moments where there’s this innate reference to violence present, with the slamming of the lockers, with the ink bleeding. 

You spend a lot of your memoir unpacking Lolita, especially when it comes to cultural legacy and the role that it had on your own story. What do you wish was more commonly understood about Lolita, both as a novel and also as a cultural touchstone? 

I wish people took Lolita seriously, in a way. Far too many people see Lolita as a piece of satire, and undercut what is actually happening on the page. Now, I don’t think Lolita should be banned, or anything like that. Books are made to be read, and should be. However, I do think that Lolita needs to be read in context, both in cultural context and in literary context. Lolita has to be read with a very critical eye. Culturally, people don’t think of Lolita as a victim of rape as a child who was kidnapped. We think about Lolita as a shade of lipstick or a makeup line. We think of Lolita as in Lolita fashion: short little frilly skirts and low-cut tops and ribbons in your hair. Lolita is in place of sexy: she’s such a Lolita. Culturally, we don’t acknowledge the reality of Lolita. 

After the first time Dolores Haze is raped, they stop at a gas station. Humbert has this laundry list of things that he picks up for her: magazines, lollipops, candy, and so on. And right in the middle, just snuck in there, are menstrual pads. If you’re not a careful, critical reader, you just gloss over that when the reality is she needed menstrual pads because was bleeding from violent rape. She had a physical injury from it. That’s something that’s hard for readers to acknowledge. It’s much easier to think of Lolita as if she’s a little Jezebel, like some sexy thing. That’s also linked to the fact that, due to patriarchy and misogyny, women are primarily valued on their looks and younger is considered better. There’s all this power linked to being a young, sexy girl. In many ways Lolita is both a reflection of that point of view in our culture and part of the problem. 

Lolita was in my own story from the beginning. Everything in the book connects in some way to Lolita. My teacher gave me Lolita. He read Lolita to me. His favorite drink was one that he made up called the Humbert Humbert. It was gin, and whatever it is that Humbert drinks. He gave me a stamp collection that was all Nabokov butterflies. Even the sections about fairy tales or Greek myths. That’s the kind of stuff that Nabokov loves.

Now, as a professor, I teach an excerpt from Lolita in my course, the opening. But Lolita is always the last thing we read. I found that when we read Lolita in the beginning of the semester, before weeks of practicing critical thinking about literature, people often got swept up in the romance and the lyricism and the beauty of the prose. Contrarily, by the end of the semester, we’ve talked about poetic devices. We’ve talked about choices and point of view. We’ve talked about narrative. We’ve talk about all these things. So they are ready to do the work of critical thinking and come to the text ready to ask questions. That’s the way Lolita should be read. Lolita is a beautiful book. I mean, it is a little bit masturbatory in its excess. Nabakov famously hated editors. I think the book could be shorter, honestly. But there’s a lot of beauty, and a lot  hat is worth reading and talking about. I think that it’s the lack of critical eye and cultural context that lets down Lolita, and lets down women.

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor

Featured Writer: George Looney + Interview

On Thursday February 1st at 7:30pm, Poet and writer George Looney will be reading some of his work for the Spring 2024 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

George Looney has nourished a decades long career as a successful writer, editor, and educator; his career has produced several collections of award-winning work: including, 13 collections of poetry and 4 collections of prose.  

Looney’s work has been published in countless literary journals and anthologies such as American Writers Review and Mid-American Review in 2023 with his book review, Review of Wendell Mayo’s Twice-Born World: Stories of Lithuania and many, many more esteemed publications. His new short story collection The Visibility of Things Long Submerged was published by BOA Editions, LTD in 2023.

George Looney currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at Penn State Erie where he also serves as the Editor of the literary journal, Lake Effect. Looney founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie. For eight years, Looney served as Editor-in-Chief of Mid-American Review after receiving his M.F.A. from Bowling Green State University; Looney now serves as the Translations Editor for Mid-American Review. We are incredibly lucky to have Looney back in Bowling Green this week; he will be reading from both his new book of stories, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged (BOA Editions) and his new collection of poetry, The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible (Cider Press Review).

To find out more information, visit George Looney here:

https://georgelooney.org/

Assistant Editor Elly Salah conducted the following interview with George Looney via email.

Elly Salah: You’ve mentioned that some of the places you write about in your fiction are real places. How do you decide what to fictionalize when drawing from real memories? 

George Looney: None of the places in The Visibility of Things Long Submerged are actual places from my memory, places I have been and am remembering. But some of the places, like Rome, GA and Subligna, GA are real places that I had to use for various reasons. For instance, I needed a small town near the Chattahoochee National Park, as that National Park is a good place to find scarlet snakes, which was important for the story. I did quite a bit of research for both of these towns, because I wanted to have a sense of the places to fit the story to the place and to use the place to create the story. Research is always a two-lane highway in the creative process. 

ES: In The Visibility of Things Long Submerged, your characters go through journeys where they question the role of faith in their lives. Would you mind sharing a little bit about how these character’s conflicts come to be: Does a character’s struggle come before the other elements of a narrative or does the narrative somehow shape the character’s struggle?

GL: In my estimation, plot is the least important element of fiction. Plot is just “this happens then this happens then this happens, etc.” The real question is, So what? And that comes from the interactions within and between characters. Putting characters in a setting and establishing conflict—or at least tension—is for me the genesis of story. 

ES: How do you see poetry and prose influencing the ways in which we interact and create spaces of faith? 

GL: Religion and faith are of course not the same thing. Art—all art, not just literature—no matter how nihilistic, has faith at its core. To make art is a positive act; it implies a faith in there being someone to “read” it, to experience it, to share the experience of it. 

ES: Could you discuss a little bit about what it’s been like serving as an editor in the literary world and also a successful writer? Do those two “roles” ever conflict? 

GL: I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to be an editor, first with Mid-American Review for many years and now with Lake Effect for many years. To get to participate in the shaping of contemporary poetry and prose—which is what literary journals do—is an honor. Editors say, this deserves to be read, this deserves an audience, this deserves to last. As for any conflict between being an editor and being a writer, the only conflict is the struggle for time. Reading the work of other writers—both good and bad—informs constantly my own skills as a writer. The two roles complement one another more than they conflict. 

ES: What was it like to create the Bachelor’s of Fine Arts program at Penn State Erie? What motivated you to start the program?

GL: I was participating in one of those “retreats” to formulate a five-year plan for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Erie, and I, sort of jokingly, suggested we should start a BFA in Creative Writing program. I had already revamped the BFA at BGSU before I left there to take a tenure-track position here (something I was never going to get at BGSU due to the attitudes of a particular Dean), and since we already had a well-funded reading series and a track in the English BA for creative writing, it seemed like a logical possibility. Then it turned out that the Chancellor loved the idea (thinking it would bring more females to a college dominated by males), and so I then had to spend a lot of time and energy creating the program, which I based on the work I had done at BGSU but trying to improve upon what I had done at BGSU. 

ES: Seeing as you are accomplished in multiple genres, would you mind sharing how your process might change when approaching a collection of prose versus a collection of poetry?

GL: The process doesn’t change, exactly. The focus is perhaps different. I agree with Ezra Pound, who argued that good poetry must be at least as well-written as good prose. The sentence is the basis of all good writing. Understanding how sentences function is essential in both poetry and prose. The only difference is in poetry you also have the line, which allows you to manipulate the sentence in an additional way. This does not include prose poetry, of course. But I realize you asked about producing collections of poetry or prose. Every book—whether prose or poetry—determines how it comes to be. The Visibility of Things Long Submerged started from one story—the first in the book—which was written as the result of a challenge like that which led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. There were three of us—myself and two graduate fiction writers—sitting in a bar on Main Street drinking and waiting for a pool table to open up, and I said, in response to something, “Jesus is a shell game,” and one of the other two said someone should write a story with that title, so we all agreed to write such a story, and I was the only one who apparently was sober enough to remember. That was the original title of “What Gives Us Voice.” The editor of New England Review requested the title change. All the other stories came out of the feeling that the characters in that story had more to do, more to say, more to discover, more to reveal. 

ES: As an expert in both poetry and prose, could you share with us a bit more about your process? This week you’ll be reading to us from both your collections of poetry and prose. Do you have any preference when it comes to reading your work? 

GL: I have no preference between giving readings of my fiction or my poetry. But I should admit, even though I’ve published a novel, a novella, and two story collections, I consider myself a poet who has written some fiction. I love reading good fiction as much as I love reading good poetry, and I have fiction writers I feel as passionately about as I feel about my favorite poets. 

ES: Reflecting on your time as an educator of creative writing, what is the single most important thing a creative writing student can take away from a course with you?

GL: A passionate love for language. And the recognition that—as Whitman declared about American poetry—the challenge is to create/discover language to express the inexpressible. To strive for anything less is to cheat yourself and, more importantly, to cheat the art of literature. 

ES: Last question, what was your favorite place to hangout or thing to do when you attended Bowling Green State University for your MFA?

GL: There are several places and things I did, much with my best friend of 35 years who sadly died 5 years ago, Douglas Smith. Playing pool and ping pong at Howards, especially after workshop nights. Playing racketball at 2 or 3 in the morning after writing in Hanna Hall for hours in a court that used to be under the stadium and was always open, and then going to Frisch’s for breakfast, and then going home to sleep. There are others, but I’ll stop there.

***

––Elly Salah, Mid-American Review

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

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