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

Featured Writer: Charles Fort + Interview

On Thursday October 26th at 7:30pm, Poet Charles Fort will be reading some of his work for the Fall 2023 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.

Charles Fort has preserved a decades long career that has produced 16 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry which include: The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrews Press) and We Did Not Fear the Father: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press). Fort’s poetry has appeared in countless literary journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2001, 2003, and 2016 and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout his career. During his time as a professor of poetry and creative writing, Fort held the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Poetry at the University of Nebraska-Kearney where he is now Distinguished Emeritus Endowed Professor. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University.

Fort’s poetry becomes a response to his lived experience and at times seemingly addressed to someone specific, as if the epistle is holy, or, perhaps, he makes it the holiest form in which his poetry can love. In “Prose Poem for Claire Fort” from The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrew’s Press), Fort addresses his daughter, remembering her birth. The poem opens with the date and time placing us into his world at 3:23am. Fort writes, “Winter brings my wife a child and your birth arrives with the morning tide like wings alive in a jar.” Fort’s poems feel like song, like something that must be taken care of, protected. A theme throughout many of Fort’s poems is family or parental figures. In his poem “We Did Not Fear the Father” from The Best American Poetry 2001, Fort explores a more complex relationship to parenthood and family dynamics. In the final line, Fort writes, “We did not fear our father until he stooped in the dark.” His work examines the complex nuances of these relationships and peels back the layers to understand each as honest and complete as any great poet does.

To find out more information, visit Charles Fort here: https://www.poetcharlesfort.com.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

Assistant Editor Christopher McCormick conducted the following interview with Charles Fort via email.

Christopher McCormick: You famously wrote 300 villanelles. What was it that drew you to the form? Can you share any insights or discoveries you made while completing this project?

Charles Fort: I have now completed 500 villanelles. I believe I am finished. I started writing them 10 years ago. The subjects include: Stravinsky, Hendrix, Beethoven, Duke Ellington, Van Gogh, Beatles, Motown, Miles, Coltrane, Pinter, Manson, Charlie McCarthy, Robert Johnson, Woodstock, Coleridge, Little Black Sambo, Knucklehead Smith, Bergman films (complete catalogue) the Inferno, the ancestral Fort journey on the ship Golconda––A Villanelle Vérité Redoublé––On May, 14, 1868, the ship Golconda set sail from Savannah, Georgia to Liberia. The journey of 7 generations of Fort ancestors starboard…There is a city named Fortsville, Liberia, Stephen Hawking, others…

I was a member of a well-known weekly workshop in West Hartford, Connecticut (via Northampton, Mass. and Cape Cod) led by the former President of The Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, once called the friends of Wallace Stevens until one member noted his scarred writing/comments on race. I credit Stevens for allowing me to disregard Ashbury and the Ashbury Jr’s that walked the halls of Bowling Green in 1975-1977. I introduced a new villanelle to workshop each week for years. The group nearly asked for reparations.

CM: “We Did Not Fear the father” is driven by two seemingly contradictory emotions: love and fear. Does contradiction play an important role in the shaping of poems?

CF: Was it Vonnegut who said writers observe the terror and absurdity in the world. I might add beauty to that paraphrase. Love, fear, and the fear of love. In an early draft of “We Did Not Fear the Father,” I called my father the scaremonger! I changed it to the honorific term: our provider.

CM: “Prose Poem for Claire Fort” begins and ends with the image “wings alive in a jar.” In fact, repetition appears throughout your work in very interesting ways. How does repetition factor into your creative process?

CF: I want repetends to dissolve the rivets of poetic forms. No matter the form, I want to alter tradition in subversive-hidden ways. At times, I create a narrative thread that allows for a contemporary sensibility inside a vessel overflowing—shipwrecked with coal and precious stones.

CM: Some of your poetry touches on personal loss, most notably your wife, Wendy Fort who passed from Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. What does it feel like to release such intimate work into the world?

CF: I wrote poems about my wife immediately after her passing into everlasting light. I felt guilty and torn between being a husband and father with two daughters. I was ashamed I was a poet. Had I taken advantage of such grief? I had to write about my experience and reveal it to the world.

CM: You seem to be equally comfortable writing in free verse, form, and prose. Are any of these favorites?

CF: In my Graduate Workshop and Seminar, in the first half of the semester, I introduced the sonnet, villanelle, sestina (using the six images within the line), prose poem, and a form I created I called a medievalist-echo-verse. The second half of the semester the students wrote whatever form or free verse they wished.

The aleatory nature of the creative process in the arts and sciences, the sullen craft. I paraphrase Stravinsky: The more one toils with the creative process, the more one is set free.

Typing poems was like playing my silver clarinet as a lad for ten years and a tenor saxophone for one. I remember the exact moment I went from writing in longhand in large artist sketchbooks to a computer. First drafts to eternal final drafts. One of my professors at Bowling Green spoke of the three conditions of language: Educated—job interviews, speaking to your parents, grandparents, asking for money: Colloquial—capturing the linguistic nuances of your birthplace: Jive—the polyphonic, street wise, warnings, and when to run fast. The writer might want to learn to master all three levels of language and write them into their work at the same time, following physics into the past, present, and future at the same moment.

CM: Do you approach writing free verse, form, and prose differently?

CF: No. I first begin all my writing in prose. As a lad, I wrote up to fifty pages on single-spaced 8 x 14 legal pads. I would capture the images, phrases, and lines that caught my eye, ear, and heart. The fifty pages might become one sonnet or many other forms. 

I write blues, jazz, poetry of witness, pastoral poetry, etc. I admire Hopkins and Etheridge Knight.

CM: What is the single most important attribute of a good poem?

CF: Tear away from the historical and cultural definitions of poetry until the center falls apart. There is good poetry and bad poetry. One needs an hourglass, compass, and the heart’s metronome to locate the best words in the best order.

CM: You have multiple poems that share the title “In a Just and Miniature World.” What is it about that title that captured your imagination? 

CF: If I may say so, I love its musicality and lyricism. I think of the child who walked into the wilderness and came upon a poem nailed to a birch tree. The poem was Loveliest of Trees. The child became a poet. I wrote In a just and miniature world decades ago in a poem titled “The Writer at His Desk” now called “The Writer”—the poem won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize judged by Fred Chappell. I read the poem outdoors wearing my father’s very old shark skin suit in front of the Jarrell or was it the O. Henry Sculpture? Maxine Kumin was the main speaker. I felt like Robert Frost reading trying to read against a strong wind. 

CM: Many of your poems combine images of the natural world with intimate scenes of family life. Does this suggest a special connection between the natural world and the human world?

CF: Yes! I attended the first Earth Day. As a lad, I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Observe and remove environmental racism! Save the birch trees! Save us from war!

CM: What role does American history, world history, and personal history play in your poetry?

CF: It is difficult to escape history. I try. Imagination is central to my work no matter the subject. Kafka knew there was no escape.

CM: You, along with your late wife, Wendy Fort, staged a performance, Afro Psalms: a Special Showcase in Ekphrastic History, with Charles Fort and Wendy Fort, that combined poetry with visual art and dance. How did you find these three mediums worked together to create an experience for your audience?

CF: I collaborated with my late wife with the dance she choreographed to my poetry. I wrote a libretto that was set to full choir and orchestra at Thalian Hall in Wilmington, NC. The poem went on to win the Poetry Society of America Prize for poem best set to music. I stayed at the Gramercy Hotel. The ceremony was hosted by George Plimpton across the avenue at the National Arts Club. Denise Levertov was the main guest. I sat in a rather elegant leather chair that once sat JFK. I sipped the rarest single blend scotch I could find.

I have read my poetry accompanied by nearly every instrument in the world. Violin to Piano to Double Bass to Saxophone. When the saxophonist was not available, I became the saxophone!

***

––Christopher McCormick, Mid-American Review

Interviews with Robert Anthony Siegel and Raza Ali Hasan on Setting

Robert Anthony Siegel is a writer and writing coach. He is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed, and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, among other places, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Robert taught in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington for 22 years, helping students write and publish their first books. He has also taught at Hollins University in Virginia, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, and is a regular at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a BA from Harvard. You can reach him at robertanthonysiegel@gmail.com. 

Sheeraz: Your story “Flight” brilliantly uses setting—doors, borders, roads, tree branches, air, water—as metaphors of fluidity, abandonment, and departure. It also juxtaposes two spacetimes, one in the close-up of Violet’s basement defined by its slow, careful motions, while the other in the narrator’s mental long shots of speedily changing places as he imaginatively follows his father driving from Buffalo to the Canadian border, “eating packets after packets of peanuts” in a plane, sitting on a bench overlooking the sea in Tel Aviv, looking at his passport. What is the magic that layers the setting into the architecture of a story like “Flight”?   

Robert: If I’m understanding you right, Sheeraz, you are asking what makes the setting important to the emotional movement of a story like “Flight,” which is about growing up while your family is falling apart. Maybe the best way to answer that question is to go back to first principles for just a second. A fiction writer’s most basic task is to show what a character is feeling without explicitly stating that feeling. One of the most interesting ways to do that is through character perception, by which I mean revealing what a character is feeling by tracking what they are seeing. Instead of saying “I’m sad,” your character glances outside the window and notices the bare branch or bedraggled patch of old snow (apologies for the cliché, but you see what I mean.) In “Flight,” doors, roads, borders are all images of loss. 

Using perception to reveal emotion does all sorts of interesting things to a story, recasting perception as a form of expression, and making setting into a mirror in which a character’s feelings are reflected. There is nothing artificial about this; it is true to the way we experience life: when I’m happy about something, the bare branch just looks austerely beautiful.  

Sheeraz: Irene in “The Silver Door” lives in an old-age home and doesn’t like its silence at night, “the way the tree outside her window threw shadows on the wall,” and “the residents—shrunken, hunchbacked, tremulous, hard-of-hearing, foul-smelling, caked with rouge.” At the same time, she is haunted by the fear of being sent to the memory care unit, where every door is locked with a key. How does our memory define and decide our relationship with a place? How does a place—despite all its silences and shadows—become a character’s desire? 

Robert: Place and desire are intertwined in wonderful ways in fiction. In “The Silver Door,” Irene looks down on the other residents at the old age home, in large part because they remind her of her own vulnerability. The problem is that she is losing her memory, and she doesn’t want to be transferred from independent living to the memory care unit across the courtyard because that building is locked; she won’t be able to go outside anymore. In a sense, the geography of the story is the story: two buildings staring at each other across a courtyard, one of which represents life and the other loss—loss of freedom, loss of memory, loss of self. You can’t live in the first building without staring at the second. But what Irene learns by the end is that you can stay in life just a little bit longer if you open yourself to the people around you and accept their love. In that moment, the victory feels total, even if it is short-lived. 

Sheeraz: How would you define the setting in creative writing? Your award-winning story, “The Right Imaginary Person”, is set in Japan. In what ways can a writer’s firsthand experience of a place be beneficial? Is there anything like knowing more or knowing less about the setting? 

Robert: For me, direct personal experience of the place I am writing about is crucial. The more I know about the place where my story happens, the more lines I will be able to draw between the character’s emotional experience and the details of the character’s physical environment. I spent three years as a student in Japan, just long enough to feel myself a kind of intimate stranger there, speaking the language but not of the language, full of a yearning I couldn’t quite define. That is the feeling I tried to capture in “The Right Imaginary Person” by evoking my memory of the place as accurately as possible. 

At the same time, I know that many other writers work differently. I’m rereading The Ambassadors, for example, a wonderful book that left a big mark on me when I first read it, and I’m surprised to see how little time Henry James spends on the physical reality of Paris, even though Paris as a place of personal transformation is crucial to the story. What matters to James is what people say and don’t say, and what they think about each other. 

One last thing—it’s humbling to be read with such close attention and generosity of spirit, and to be asked such deeply considered questions. Thank you, Sheeraz, I’m truly grateful. 

Raza Ali Hasan, the Pakistani-American poet, earned a BA and an MA from the University of Texas, Austin, and an MFA from Syracuse University. The published collections of Hasan’s poetry include Grieving Shias (2006), Sorrows of the Warrior Class and 67 Mogul Miniatures (2008), which loosely follows the Urdu poetry structure of musaddas. Ali currently lives in Boulder, where he teaches at the University of Colorado. You can reach him at ali.hasan@colorado.edu.  

Sheeraz: Your musaddas poems in 67 Mogul Miniatures successfully invoke far-flung places and different historical periods. How does a poem shape its landscape and history?  

Ali: Each musaddas poem in 67 Mogul Miniatures is only tangentially (not by subject or place or historical context) related to each other via a narrative questioning arc about the state of the global south, and the urgent answers sought and found. And so the places and history and times all change from poem to poem. Different landscapes are hinted at in each six lines of poem, but cannot be built over a set of poems. Thus the formal constraints of the architecture of my book’s borrowed from the great Pakistani (South Asian) poet Muhammad Iqbal’s “Shikwa” and “Jawab-e-Shikwa” leave little room for anything other than clay models for larger unwritten versions. With such a tight space for words, pictures of different places and occasions are made with as few words as possible. A description of musical night out, in poem no. 3 in the collection, to see a Qawwali concert starring Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, does not even have enough space to spell his name out. The whole thing is evoked with “Khan”, “Karachi”, “tabla” and its “unsteady beat” and a “harmonium” and its “wheezing.”  A poem about Prophet Muhammad’s companion, only has two words that set up the historical context for the poem: the name of the companion, “Bilal,” and the hyphenated word “crescent-world.”  Sometimes literary landscapes are invoked by just two names, “Qais” and “Leila,” or the cinematic world with “Zeba” and “Waheed Murad,” or the Iraq War with just one word, “children” and one line, “unburied littering its smudgy, tar highways.”  

Sheeraz: Most poems in Sorrows of the Warrior Class are set in the Cold War. What is the process of giving a clear sense of time?  

Ali: The Persian poet Ferdowsi’s epic poem Shahnamah, or more accurately, the miniature illustrations of its heroes (Alexander the Great, Sohrab, etc.) and stories serve the role of antiquity in my poems here. The 1950s and 1970s are evoked via American movies shown in Pakistani Cinema houses and by the poems on the ouster of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in the fifties and the coup and hanging of Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. For the first half of the American Cold War, the tropes of heroism, valor, dignity, and hope from Shahnamah still seemed timeless. 

Sheeraz: How do you conceptualize the role of setting in poetry?  

Ali: For my work, the setting (in place, in culture, in history) of my poems, however achieved, with much labor or just a word or two, is crucial. My serious, somber poems, have to announce their origin and their place of denouement. A perfect example of that is my long poem “In That Part of the World,” published in my first book, Grieving Shias, whose very title alerts the reader to its crucible, its location: Afghanistan.   

–Muhammad Sheeraz Dasti, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Gabrielle Bates

Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a New York Times ‘The Shortlist’ pick and a Chicago Review of Books ‘must-read’ book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and teaches occasionally through the University of Washington Rome Center and Tin House Writers’ Workshops, among other universities and arts organizations. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @GabrielleBates

We published your poem, “Monologue with a Flat Hand,” in vol. XXXVII no. 1 in the Fall of 2016 which eventually appeared in your debut full-length collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023) under the title, “Should the First Calf of Winter Be White, You’re Going to Hate.” The poem changed quite a bit before the recent publication in your collection. How do you negotiate that need for revision after initial publication?

That poem tortured me! Before Mid-American Review published a version of it, and for years afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the poem had a lot of potential, if I could just figure out what it wanted to do or say—something about it was eluding me. I wish I could pull that issue off the shelf and compare the two versions, because I don’t remember exactly what all I changed between the journal and the book publications—I know I changed the ending (and the title obviously) but there are other moments too, I’m sure, that are different!—but I’m house-sitting right now, so I don’t have access to the original. 

It doesn’t matter if a poem has already been published or not; if I sense a way to make it more alive and resonant, I make those changes. Just because I’ve published a poem doesn’t mean the poem has found its most energetic language or form. In fact, it’s often only after I’ve published a poem in a journal that I see places where I could cut back and release more energy into the poem. 

You have a very extensive list of publications in the acknowledgements of Judas Goat. When do you know a poem is ready to go out as a submission to literary magazines/journals?

My approach throughout my twenties—the decade I was working on Judas Goat—was “throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.” I’d write, workshop, revise, and then send a poem out to journals in a fairly speedy cycle. Sometimes way too speedily: I’d write a draft and send it out almost immediately, awash in the creation afterglow, though I always regretted that later. In general I thought: If an editor thinks it’s good enough to publish, it must be. Who am I to say or know when a poem is “done” or “good enough”? In my early twenties especially, I was anxious for others to tell me about my work and its worth. I believed myself too ignorant to perform that role reliably for myself. And because I was a young, unknown writer from Alabama, who didn’t go to NYU or anything like that, I felt like I could trust editors to judge my work on its own merits. I don’t feel that way anymore (I have trust issues!), so I haven’t been submitting much at all since I finished Judas Goat. I’m trying to slow down and hone my intuition about when poems are ready to live in the world outside of me. 

When do you know a poem needs to stop being submitted for publication?

If I’ve pushed a poem as far as I can, and I believe in it (a rare occurrence), and a trusted friend has read it and told me they love it, then I will never stop submitting it. Otherwise, I tend to stop submitting a poem once I’ve realized it’s not done or alive enough to be worth putting out into the world. 

How do you find the final shape a poem aches to be?

Oh, I love the verb “aches” here. So interesting—poem framed as a living being, capable of ache. I try to find a poem’s most-alive shape by employing an alchemy of time, reading aloud, and sharing with trusted readers for feedback. Often the first interesting sentence or line of a draft will carry a clue for me in regards to how the poem as a whole wants to approach lineation and stanza, like a blueprint.  

The writing and publishing process takes time as we published your poem in 2016 which then later appeared in your collection in 2023. How long did the process take from the moment you realized you had a book, to submitting your manuscript for publication?

Someone advised me to start submitting my first-book manuscript before I thought it was fully ready, so I did that for a few years, using contest deadlines as a prod to try and wrangle what I had into book-length shape. I felt close to having the manuscript done for years, but it wasn’t until after I had the book deal with Tin House, and after I’d gone through some final editing rounds with my editor Alyssa Ogi that I actually felt the book was ready to publish. 

Some of us are, pathologically, never content with what we’ve made; it’s a constant push and pull between honoring the hopes and standards we have for art, while not becoming overly precious or private about it. 

What most surprised you after your debut published?

Anytime a person I don’t know posts something insightful about Judas Goat on the internet, I’m shocked. I’m like: How did the book even find its way to you?! The population of people who buy and read contemporary poetry collections in the U.S. is fairly miniscule, compared to other genres especially, and yet Judas Goat has ended up in places I never expected—It’s all very wild and surprising to me. The most surprising moment was probably when Jorie Graham said kind words about my book on Twitter. I’ve never met her and had zero reason to believe the collection would be on her radar at all. Still doesn’t feel real.

How has your relationship with Judas Goat changed since first holding a copy of the book in your hands and seeing it out in the world?

The book publishing process, like any major life event, is full of emotional vertigo, moments where you think you’re supposed to feel one way, and you actually feel another way. I panicked when I saw my book in person for the first time, I’ll be real with you. I thought: This is it? and then: WHAT HAVE I DONE. I don’t feel that way anymore, luckily. Friends and generous, thoughtful readers have helped me step into a more celebratory mode around the book. I wouldn’t say I feel detached from it now, but I feel more detached than I did when I held it for the first time—in a healthy way.

The first poem in Judas Goat titled “The Dog” is shocking with its unforgiving portrayal of the violence we cause. The poems in the collection keep returning to this motif of violence and ruin; however, there are also intimate moments within the collection like in the poem, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” What is the relationship between the violence and the more intimate moments within the collection?

I’m interested in what happens in the small theaters of life, where there are very few witnesses; when private, intimate moments and conversations are imagined or dramatized and made public, through art, that’s really interesting and evocative for me. There’s an inherent tension. In juxtaposing or otherwise engaging aspects of violence and intimacy, I think I was trying to understand something about my relationship to vigilance, abandon, and risk. 

Many of your poems reference mythical, fairytale, and religious figures such as Eurydice, Gretel, and Mary all of whom you give voice or space within the collection. How have these women impacted your life and your writing?

I’m interested in the ways stories shape our lives. Fairytales and myths from various traditions have always haunted me, particularly the stories about young women in danger, which felt designed to teach me something about what it meant to be a young woman in danger. 

Judas Goat is such a stunning collection full of poems that are both inviting and frustrating which, I feel, the best poems usually are. What makes a poem for you?

What makes a poem, for me, on the most basic level, is a surprising and evocative progression lines. My favorite poems impart both clarity and mystery—Reading them, I feel something intense, but I also don’t quite know exactly what just happened to me, or what I’ve taken from it. I love that tension between vividness and endless interpretation, vulnerability and privacy. “Both inviting and frustrating”! I love that you said that. There is an element of frustration, isn’t there? Frustration keeps me alive, keeps me writing. It’s a form of closeness, and a kind of belief.

***

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor