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

An Interview with Marisa (Mac) Crane

If you’re looking for a beautifully queer abolitionist novel that isn’t afraid of asking hard questions, Marisa (Mac) Crane’s debut I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is for you. In the world of this novel people who commit acts considered punishable by the government are assigned an extra shadow by The Department of Balance and forever labeled a Shadester. Shadesters are publicly shamed for their actions, watched by the state, actively discriminated against, and harassed. We follow a Shadester named Kris as she navigates life as a single mother to her daughter who was given an extra shadow for “killing” her wife Beau in childbirth. In order to do this Kris must learn to live with her grief over her lost wife while also establishing a new understanding of love in an authoritarian state which denies both her and her daughter humanity. Throughout the story Kris encounters challenges making us consider complicated questions of addiction, family, betrayal, and, perhaps most importantly, forgiveness. 

Crane’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Joyland, The Offing, No Tokens, The Florida Review, TriQuarterly, Lit Hub, Catapult, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. An attendee of the Tin House Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well an American Short Fiction Merit Fellow and Sewanee Writing Conference fellow, they currently live in San Diego with their wife and child. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is their first novel and it was a January Next Pick and New York Times Editors Choice. 

They were kind enough to answer a few questions for us here at MAR. Please note Crane uses they/them pronouns, so take care to use they/them when discussing them and their work. Thank you! 

Gen: One of the many things I admire about your novel is the depth and intentionality you bring to your world-building. How did you come up with these ideas for shadows and “Shadesters?”

Mac: Thank you, that means a lot to me. About eight or nine years ago, when I struggling with a lot of shame, self-hatred, and regret, I wrote a short poem that read, “If the shadows of everyone you’ve ever hurt followed you around, day in and day out, would you still be so reckless with people’s hearts?” I foolishly thought shaming myself would help me avoid hurting people, but it of course did not. Years later, the first line of the novel popped into my head: “The kid is born with two shadows.” Eventually, I connected this line to the earlier poem I wrote and soon was able to build a world that runs on shame and punishment, a world, much like our own, that is racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and beyond, a world that is the very antithesis of healing and growth. I wondered, “Even if the government abolishes the prison-industrial complex, how can they still manage to mess it up? How can they still foster a harmful and punitive society?” I was really interested in the intersection of shame, oppression, parenting, queerness, and the power of community.

Gen: What stood out to you in the process of writing about parenting?

Mac: It was incredibly hard because I felt like I was method acting as a widow grieving her wife, because I had to lean into the trauma of that, into the pain and fear of the unknown around raising a disenfranchised kid under an oppressive government. And also the everyday fears of parenting: Are they happy? Am I a good parent? Am I failing them? Will I mess them up? How do I keep from messing them up? How do I give them a beautiful future? It was emotionally trying and draining, especially because I was more or less writing into many of my own fears. I wasn’t a parent yet when I started drafting the book but my wife and I had just begun talking about family planning. Attending seminars, learning the ins and outs of fertility treatment. I was scared for a thousand reasons, and I used those fears to channel some of Kris’ experiences, in order to access a deep and painful part of her.

Gen: Though your book is a work of fiction I’ve found myself thinking of it as an abolitionist text which is able to use dystopia as a platform to discuss questions of surveillance, marginalization, shame, and punishment. What role do you see dystopia having in the examination of social issues?

Mac: It thrills me that you think of it that way because that really was my intention. Honestly, maybe I’m biased, but I see dystopia as the best way to examine social issues. Octavia Butler, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, George Saunders, George Orwell, Jessamine Chan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Aldous Huxley, Lois Lowry, on and on and on—writers that I admire the hell out of, writers who have written stories with staying power, stories that touch and move people, that force them to examine the world we live in. With dystopias, the unfamiliar (yet familiar!) setting provides a necessary distance to get readers to pay attention, to engage with the text. I mean, I know that realism can and does provide social commentary as well, but sometimes, I think, if it isn’t done expertly, it can feel too much like hammering readers over the head with ideas. I view dystopian work as an act of distancing in order to close the distance.

Gen: Can you share a bit about your writing process for this book? Did it change in any major ways after finishing it?

Mac: Yeah my writing process changed considerably in that…I will never write a book the way that I did Exoskeletons ever again. I was on unemployment and basically racing against the clock to get a draft done before I got a new job. Which was fine for what I needed at the time, but it meant I had to do countless drafts afterward, which felt very daunting. And it didn’t help that it’s written in about a million fragments because I wound up moving the fragments around obsessively like a puzzle until they clicked. I’m such a brat about revision. I really don’t like it. Nowadays, I spend a lot of time thinking and brainstorming and writing notes before I ever actually decide to write a story, essay, or novel. Once it takes shape in my head, I sit down and write very slowly. The resulting draft is much much stronger and something I feel confident I can polish and fix up without blowing it up. Plus, I’m a parent now. A lot of the “writing” has to happen in my head when I’m doing other things. The most generous thing I ever did for myself was to view everything as writing. Living is writing, doing the dishes is writing, rocking my kid is writing.

Gen: Do you have any advice for novelists starting out?

Mac: Oh goodness, I am always hesitant to give advice because it tends to feel so prescriptive and well, through the lens of what works solely for me! But if I have to give advice, I would say: Don’t forget to play and delight in your work. Take risks, throw yourself into whatever your obsessions are, and be unapologetic about it. 

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor

Interview Bites: James O’Bannon

James O’Bannon’s poems “Naming” and “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It” were published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI. In the spring of 2023, James agreed to answer a few questions by associate editor Christopher McCormick on his poetic work.

.

Your poem “Naming,” (after a poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen) which appeared in Volume XLI of Mid-American Review, utilizes non-sequiturs and surrealistic elements, as in the unforgettable line “If there is a child who is dead there is a bird alive somewhere,” yet a firm wisdom seems to underpin the entire poem. Can you tell our readers a little bit about what you sought to achieve with this piece?

“Naming” is written after the poem “Grief Logic” by Diana Khoi Nguyen. In her brilliant poem, she utilizes hypothetical syllogisms to explore grief as well as other ideas. For “Naming”, I wanted to maintain the sense of logical leaping employed in Nguyen’s poem, while using the image of a bird to symbolize a child in sort of a spiritual sense.

I found myself thinking about the language used in the death or incarceration of Black children and how that differs from the language used with white children. Considering that dehumanization, I wanted a poem where Black children could exist/stay alive in perpetuity, hence the “If the child stays alive” line’s repetition. Lastly, in all of my work where a god figure is mentioned, I think of it as a means to wrestle with an aspect of faith and hopefulness in a world that consistently contradicts those beliefs and antagonizes them. 

.

In your poem “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It,” you write “I’d like to live / in a world where there is a god / who calls my name.” What role does religion and spirituality play in your writing? 

In being raised in a Black, religious household, participation in church and other aspects of Christianity were expected. I went to Sunday School, Bible study, participated in sermons, etc. As a child, you are never really allowed to interrogate your inherited belief system. As I got older, I found myself questioning many of ideas I was taught. Christianity felt too idealistic to me, and it excluded too many people I loved. 

In my writing, I see god as a figure used to interrogate those difficult questions.Much of my poetry deals in the questioning of how one could believe in not only a god-figure, but a god that is unquestioningly good, when so much of our world fails us in so many ways. 

.

Your poem “and now the doctor asks if depression is a family,” published in Waxwing issue XVIII, speaks on subjects such as race and self-love. Can you talk about how those subjects have been an influence on your journey as a writer?

​I wouldn’t really call my relationship to these ideas an influence. Race is definitely embodied in my writing because as a Black person in America, it is tied to every part of your being. You wake up Black, you breathe Black, you sleep Black. In this particular poem, I chose for the relationship between mental health and Blackness to be overt because of the ways it is stigmatized. There are so many negatives poured onto the waywe view the mental struggles of Black folks; even medically. So, I would say my goal in marrying these concepts would be to allow people to see the struggle I’ve dealt with (and still deal with) in its most open and bare form, hopefully, as a means for people to embrace the humanity in that struggle. 

Interview with Jeff Fearnside, On Poetry No. 5

Jeff Fearnside, author of Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air, A Husband and Wife are One Satan, and, most recently, Ships in the Desert, is a writer of fabulous range and grace. After his poem “What We Call Home” was featured in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI, Jeff agreed to speak to a few of our curiosities around his poem, his award-winning short story chapbook A Husband and Wife are One Satan, and the subjects of his work. Many thanks to Jeff Fearnside for sharing his thoughts and for making this interview a genuine treat.

—Mays Kuhail and Samuel Burt, MAR

Your poem “What We Call Home,” which was just published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI, is a terrific celebration of belonging. Notably, this poem does not follow any specific speaker. However, the poem’s questions and attentive quality suggest that the poem comes from a place of deeply contemplative observation. What role does the natural world play in your writing life, and what has spending time in nature meant for you as a person?

Nature has played an extremely important role in my life ever since my earliest memories. I grew up exploring the fields and woods behind my childhood home, climbing trees, bushwhacking through sumac, searching for arrowheads in the sand. Those were much different times. It wasn’t unusual at all then for us kids to head out after lunch and be gone until dark. Usually it was me and my brother though often just me alone. I had an extremely difficult relationship with my father, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that nature saved me in many ways. Being in the outdoors was one of the few places where I felt like myself and free—there and in the world of books. So it’s not surprising that the two combined and nature has played such a prominent role in my writing. It’s not something I consciously think about. It’s just part of who I am.

Adrienne Rich wrote in her essay “Someone Is Writing a Poem” that to write a poem you must believe that “an ‘I’ can become a ‘we’ without extinguishing others,” and that “a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images.” This quote came to mind at the “We” in your poem’s title. As you entered this space of universality, what were you hoping the strangers who come across your work would find?

Those are beautiful ideas from Rich, and I completely agree with them. The “We” in my poem’s title certainly is meant not only to reflect all of humanity but also to invite everyone into the worldview of the poem and experience its sense of belonging, its sense of home. Its setting is a natural place. So the “We” is intended to include even more than just humans. It also includes the blackbird who is the focus of the poem and by extension all animals. It includes the cattail-lined water spot where the blackbird lives and by extension all of the natural environment.

This may seem like a lot to divine from such a short poem—it’s an unmetered sonnet with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, so everything occurs in fourteen lines—so I’m glad you earlier mentioned the lack of any specific speaker in it, for that highly detached point of view emphasizes the scene playing out. This is about putting the reader right there with the blackbird. That’s where the connection is. That’s not just the world of the poem. That’s our world. Humans and nature are one.

As a writer, you work in many genres. Your poems have been published widely, your short stories collected in A Husband and Wife are One Satan won the 2020 Orison Chapbook Prize, and you’ve recently had a book of essays published by the Santa Fe Writers Project, titled Ships in the Desert. What is different for you, in terms of your process, feeling, and state of mind, when you sit down to write a poem like “What We Call Home” versus a short story like “The River?”

The feeling and state of mind remain the same no matter the genre I’m working in. There’s always a spark, an enthusiasm for an idea, that drives me to write anything, and I always write best when I allow myself to fall into that feeling and write uninhibitedly, without overthinking it.

However, the process for each genre is a little different, because there are different reasons to write in each. For me, poetry is best for those crystalline moments we encounter in life, where it’s more about image and feeling. The basis of a poem can come to me quickly, though it often takes many days to get everything just right. I usually write first drafts of poetry longhand. There’s something about producing work by hand that way, physically putting pen to paper, that seems to connect me to deeper parts of my subconscious. Scientific studies have shown that students remember more when they take notes by hand as opposed to typing them, and I sense something similar occurs in my writing, with writing and memory being so inextricably linked.

Stories lend themselves better to prose. Which stories move me toward fiction and which to nonfiction depends entirely on whether they would be better served by use of imagined details, in which case I generally opt for fiction, or a grounding in realistic information, in which case I generally opt for nonfiction. That’s not to say my fiction can’t be realistic and my nonfiction imaginative. It’s more about the mode of storytelling. If a story is better served in third-person omniscient point of view, for example, then I would be tempted to render it in fiction. But many others writers use third-person omniscient to great effect in their nonfiction. John Hersey and John McPhee immediately come to mind for this with their reportage or literary journalism style. Being a former newspaper journalist myself, I also sometimes employ that style in my nonfiction. So it’s not cut and dried. I don’t follow a formula for anything. I trust my gut feeling about each idea and allow it to lead me. Once I settle on a prose genre and begin writing, I typically use a computer, even for first drafts. It’s a simple practical matter in this case: While it’s easy enough for me to type a poem based on a longhand draft, it’s too time-consuming for me to do so for longer prose pieces.

Editing is the same for everything I write. After completing a draft—and in the case of poetry, typing it on a computer—I print it and go over it on paper. I can do some editing on a computer, but it’s a lot easier for me on paper. This is an important part of my writing process. This is where I try to understand what a piece really wants to say. I’ll go through many drafts, adding, cutting, rearranging, refining. When I get to the point where I begin putting back punctuation I removed earlier, or vice versa, then I know I’m done.

Your chapbook A Husband and Wife Are One Satan is a rich collection of stories on culture, history, and quotidian life. How do you capture the setting, in this case Kazakhstan, and all of its particularities in a way that’s almost familiar to readers who have never been there?

I strongly believe that underneath the cultural apparel we wear, humans are fundamentally alike. So the best way to make a foreign culture familiar is to expose the similarities that are right there already. We all love, hate, feel crushing disappointment and rising joy, take pride in our work, mourn the deaths of loved ones, and so on. No one culture has a monopoly on any of these universal feelings. So making a particular culture seem real involves tapping into the commonalities we share while at the same time rendering the culture as accurately as possible in its details, which comes from observing those details in real life, really paying attention to and absorbing them. It’s probably obvious, or at least should be, but it can’t be stressed enough: Being a close observer is essential to a writer.

Despite the stories in A Husband and Wife are One Satan tending to be short, your characters come across as complex and three-dimensional. How do you develop vivid characters in little page space?

I’m happy you feel this way! I don’t know if there’s any trick to it other than simply remembering and having curiosity about people and their behaviors. For example, many of the epithets the couple of the title story exchange with each other are real phrases my wife’s grandparents sometimes used with each other. I loved the vividness of these epithets and the richness of Russian idioms in general. It was that interest in language that prompted me to write that story.

But those two characters are otherwise nothing like my wife’s grandparents were! The story isn’t anything I had heard or witnessed. It all came out of those phrases, which led me to the further idea of a bickering couple who also cared for each other more deeply than they realized. That’s where the universality of human feelings comes in. There’s often a thin veneer between love and hate. So I just followed that. And I peopled the world of that story with composites of those I knew or had observed while freely imagining the details of their lives. For all of the stories in that collection, even the characters with some basis in reality are 90 percent invented.

Earlier, I said it’s important to have curiosity about people instead of an understanding of them because I don’t think understanding is necessary. Can anyone really know the heart of another? But in being curious about others, we want to reach out to and connect with them. So that’s also essential, not just to a writer but to anyone who wants to get along in the world.

In this short story collection, we got a variety of full-bodied stories revolving around such subjects as normalized wedding rituals in “Accomplices to a Tradition,” or metanarrative storytelling in “The River.” How do you decide which stories are worth telling, and what challenges do you face in making these narrative decisions?

I’m very much an intuitive writer when it comes to those kinds of decisions. I always try to get a sense of what the story wants to be, not what I think it should be. Certain stories seem to demand certain perspectives. It just seemed clear to me that “Accomplices to a Tradition” had to be told from the first-person point of view—the story essentially demanded that the narrator take part in what was happening, however reluctantly, for as the title alludes, our societal traditions are collectively built, not just by those who actively do so but also by those who remain quiet about their dissent.

In “The River,” the first-person is working much differently. There, the point of view highlights the element of unreliability in a distinct way, which is important to the metanarrative you mention, the nested cups of stories within the overarching story. I don’t plan something like that as much as feel my way through it. That I can to do so undoubtedly stems from my having read a lot high-quality literature and absorbed the techniques used. That and a lot of practice.

As to challenges, the main one is remaining open to possibilities. A story can go in any direction until you put words on the page, and then it becomes committed to something, and once that commitment is made, we as writers can be reluctant to go back and play with other possibilities. I’m not immune to that any more than anyone else. I can feel stubbornly wedded to my own ideas, my “darlings,” as Faulkner called them. But we have to be willing to give up on any idea, no matter how much time has been spent on it, if it isn’t working. We have to be willing to get it right.

At one point in “A Husband and Wife are One Satan,” the character Raim greets a Muslim customer, Murat with “Assalamu alaikum,” then welcomes a Christian customer, Kolya, in Russian, shaking each of their hands in accordance with their respective cultural customs. How else does your work reflect the cultural diversity and pluralism of Kazakhstan?

My most recent book Ships in the Desert has a section devoted to just this idea. The book is a collection of essays about different subjects, from the environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea to my host family during my first months in Kazakhstan, but the most relevant essay in relation to your question is “The Missionary Position.” The United States has often been called a melting pot or, more recently, a salad bowl, to better represent how cultures here both integrate and remain distinct, but we’re far from the only country that has embraced multiculturalism. Kazakhstan is home to more than one hundred different ethnic groups. My students there came from many different backgrounds: Kazakh, Russian, German, Uzbek, Korean, among others. This reflects how the country and Central Asia in general is a literal crossroads between Asia and Europe. It’s been an important region economically and strategically for centuries. In fact, it and not Europe was the center of world power in medieval times. The Great Silk Road facilitated not only the trading of goods but also the trading of ideas, fashions, and religions. It wasn’t and still isn’t a homogeneous region. I talk about all this in more detail in “The Missionary Position,” but really, anything I or anyone else writes about Kazakhstan or Central Asia has to reflect cultural diversity and pluralism if it wants to be accurate.

The title of this collection, and of one of its stories, A Husband and Wife are One Satan, is a translation of the Russian saying “Муж и жена – одна сатана.” How else does your knowledge of Russian, Kazakh, as well as other languages influence your writing in English?

I have to give a big thanks here to my wife Valentina, for I rely on her a lot to help me work through understanding many things about the Russian language. I’m not fluent in it. I can follow it pretty well in normal, everyday circumstances. Just don’t ask me to translate War and Peace from the original! But I studied it and used it a lot while living overseas. I studied Kazakh as well, though less intensively, and I used it far less often. Both languages helped me understand my own language better. I taught English overseas, and my students constantly asked me questions about things I as a native speaker had simply absorbed at an early age. My students’ questions forced me not only to analyze what I had absorbed but also to compare it to their native languages. I had studied other languages in high school and college, mainly Spanish but also some German, but that kind of classroom experience is very different from the immersion experience I had in Kazakhstan. It was there for the first time that I fully understood how we actually have to think differently when speaking another language—and how it works the other way around, too, that another language can change the way we think.

How that plays out in my writing is subtle, but it’s there. Even though my dialogue is overwhelmingly rendered in English, I’m always considering whether it sounds right to the way certain characters would think and speak in their native languages. In my mind, I try to hear them in their native tongues, and if I don’t know exactly what that might be like, I ask my wife, at least for Russian. Then I try to get the feeling of that into English. It’s a lot like translating.

Still, even though our different languages suggest differences between us, just as our cultures and traditions do, these differences are essentially cosmetic. I believe strongly in the underlying unity of humanity. So I try to write characters that behave true to their own humanity. To achieve this more believably and consistently is an ongoing, lifelong task. There’s always more for a writer to do. The work is never finished.