Michael Kimball: I’ve been reading your work for almost twenty years now, and I loved The Secret Life of Objects, but I never would have guessed that you wrote it. What happened?

Dawn Raffel: Thank you—I’m so happy that you liked it, and just as happy that you’d never have guessed I wrote it. I’ve always said that, as a writer, one of the most important things for me is to never write the same book twice. That said, this book was a bit of an accident. I didn’t plan for it, and I wrote it very quickly. The first draft was done in a week, which is about the amount of time I normally spend writing one sentence and crossing it out.

What happened was, I was drinking coffee one morning out of the mug I always reach for, even though I have a cupboard full of mugs. I chose that one because I took it from my mother’s house after she died, and for me it contains a story about my mother and my aunt, whereas for anyone else, it holds only coffee. I realized I had a house full of objects like this—nothing special in terms of face value but full of hidden meaning. So I started writing very quickly about my objects; I decided I wanted to create a record—for myself, because I am already beginning to forget the people from whom I’ve inherited some of these things, and for my children. As I was writing, it felt sort of like painting with watercolor; it needed to be completed quickly and not overworked. I didn’t look back; I kept going like a woman possessed, and was pretty much oblivious to everything going on around me in a busy household and, for that matter, for the need for sleep. It was only when I was done and looked at the whole of it that I realized it was a life story, and that while in some ways—certainly in terms of sentence-making—it’s very different from my previous books, my obsessions—family relations and legacies, the passage of time, the weight of detail—were still there.

Kimball: I think there is some other overlap as well. Even though the sentences are so different, there’s still a kind of quiet tone that lulls the reader into them. And I think your sense of organization or structure is here too. It is a life story, but you still don’t write in chronological order.

Raffel: I don’t think in chronological order. I don’t remember and feel in chronological order. Nothing in my interior life is linear, and I suspect that is true for others as well.

Kimball: You said that you wrote quickly about each of the objects and suggested that you didn’t revise much. What did you recognize in the writing, what did you see that you had captured, that you wanted preserve through not overworking the material?

Raffel: I hope there’s a kind of openness and spontaneity to the writing, that it feels unguarded. Let’s compare the opening sentence to the opening sentence of my previous book. Further Adventures in the Restless Universe begins “After the rains had come and gone, we went down by the reservoir.” That is a sentence that I needed to write aloud, paying careful attention to its inflection and cadence; the intent was to create a rupture, however slight, from everyday experience, as if to say, “We are about to enter into an oddly lit space and I will lead you.” The Secret Life of Objects begins, “Every morning I drink coffee out of a mug that came from my mother’s house.” That sentence is completely without artifice. The message here is, “Come on in; it’s safe here”—although it isn’t, really. The revisions I did make weren’t to the sentence-making; they weren’t at the level of the syllable. They almost all involved cutting.

Kimball: The Secret Life of Objects is deceptively inviting, and the writing is quiet in a way that almost comforts the reader, but it is not safe. I finished reading the book four or five days ago and I still find myself thinking about the objects—the mug, the frogs, the dress, the daughter vase, etc. The book possesses the reader in a way. Now you said that you felt possessed while writing the book. How would you describe that feeling?

Raffel: Thank you. I would describe it as exhilarating. There was no second-guessing, no starting and stopping, during the whole first draft. I hope I have the good fortune to feel similarly possessed by another book at some point in the future.

Kimball: So what’s next then? Are you currently possessed by something or might you be soon?

Raffel: What I wouldn’t give to feel possessed in that same way! I have an idea that has been a little worm in my brain for a few years now, but it still refuses to show itself on the page.

[Michael Kimball is the author of three novels, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”) and, most recently, Us (which was named to Oprah’s Reading List). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Bomb, and New York Tyrant, and has been translated into a dozen languages. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard). His new novel, Big Ray, will publish September 18, 2012 (Bloomsbury).]

The post [Nothing in My Interior Life Is Linear: Dawn Raffel] appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: I’m curious: How did you get the title? That feels like it must have been a key to writing the piece.

Michael Bible: As far as Simple Machines goes, the title actually came to me after I wrote it, but you’re right, it sort of crystallized it for me. I started the manuscript after I read The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed and I was playing around with random sentence generators and ESL textbooks. I love sentences that are used as examples for school. (Has someone written a book of word problems? Also, that would be a good title. Probably somebody’s written it.) There is an oddness to those example sentences that I love, “bad” writing as “good” writing. They have a kind of weird beauty and they seemly have no context but somehow make stories anyway. Simple Machines is also something I learned about in school so it made sense that that would be a good title.

Michael Kimball: I’m thinking that Word Problems should maybe be the next Awesome Machine title? I can already see the weird beauty in that too. But what I’m wondering is how you found the weird beauty in the sentences of Simple Machines. Did you just recognize it in the material random sentence generators and ESL textbooks or did it come from working with material or a combination or maybe something else?

Michael Bible: So much of school was about finding good writing. Or finding out why good writing is good writing. Learning correct grammar, clean syntax etc. This is a great short story because of xyz or this is a beautiful sentence because of xyz. I just didn’t buy it. So I sought out the “worst” writing I could find. I love accidents, malapropisms and slang. And technical writing, random sentence generators, ESL texts, etc. Things that are not trying to be beautiful. My teachers told me not to use thesauruses so I started to collect thesauruses. I like the ones from the early 20th century best. They’re not like thesauruses we have now. They were organized by theme and then under the themes the words were more associative. So it would start with something like “light” then there would be long (sometimes many pages long) entries below made up of words associated with light, not just synonyms. And the words would move with a loose logic. Like the author was riffing off the idea of light but it was supposed to be a technical book. The entries have a beautiful, almost poem-like way about them. The themes were big things like darkness, hate, money, love, death. I found all these things that were supposed to be bad writing strange and wonderful.

Michael Kimball: That movement you describe in those early thesauruses, it feels like the same kind of movement that happens in Simple Machines, though it’s on the level of the sentence rather than the word. That is, I’m wondering how you thought about getting from sentence to sentence.

Michael Bible: When you remove context, the mind tends to fill in the gaps. The thesauruses move thematically and I see Simple Machines as moving formally. Instead of the sentences collectively striving for a story or meaning, I’m trying to create an atmosphere. I’m interested in doing what minimalist music and sculpture does. Stripping things down to simple chunks and putting them together serially. Then the reader can walk into the book like someone walks into a room filled with small simple objects or like someone listens to a repetitious song. I want to let the reader have his own emotional response. I want to show the bricks of a house but not the house. The reader builds his own house in his mind. I’m just giving him the bricks.

Michael Kimball: So how did you know that you had made enough bricks for somebody else to build a house – or, how did you know that you had reached the end of Simple Machines?

Michael Bible: I wrote a lot of the sentences and cut the manuscript major. Then Ian and I cut them down even more. I think it was just a gut thing. I just thought, These are the best ones. This is where it should end.

Michael Kimball: Who’s Ian?

The post A Kind of Weird Beauty: Michael Bible appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: “Pee on Water” was the first story of yours that I ever read and I was so amazed by what you do in it that I wrote you a fan letter. It’s a story of incredible scope—in nine pages, you tell a kind of history of the world—and what I’m wondering about is how you came up with that idea and then how you figured out a way to turn that idea into actual narrative.

Rachel B. Glaser: The idea for the story “Pee On Water” came directly from the story I wrote just before it, “Michael Jordan, in general.” In an early draft of “Michael Jordan in general,” I had one paragraph that was about what happened in America between the time of the first game of basketball played and Michael Jordan entering the NBA. I summed up this time period loosely, with no specifics or dates. For example: “The animals ran to the woods. The woods got cut into pieces.” This paragraph was a fun break from the story, and my friend Mojo urged me to lengthen it. I added specific events, but also things that happen everyday—sort of smushing up culture in a guitar solo of sentences. I stretched this out to a couple pages and it became the main part of the story.

I had so much fun writing that ‘guitar solo’ and knew I wanted to try a story that was a guitar solo from the beginning of earth and into the future. I felt like I could write a story that was a guided ‘vision quest’ of history for the reader, more spontaneous and visceral and unofficial than a history book. I began researching the history of the world, focusing on the materials on our planet and when they were introduced, imagining them combining with other materials. I skimmed a lot of history books at Barnes and Noble and Wikipedia articles, grabbing the parts that seemed interesting to me, and sometimes writing a scene based from them.

The phrase ‘pee on water’ had already been stuck in my mind. The phrase sounded strange to me, yet it was this plain explanation of an overlooked action of many people’s day. I thought the story might track this aspect of human and animal life as it changed through history. “Pee On Water” became a scattered record of human behaviors and trends. Instead of trying to make it sound authoritative and scientific, I imagined a history written by a seventeen-year-old girl, and the difference in perspective compared to the typical historian.

Michael Kimball: I was talking with the great Adam Robinson, the publishing genius, about your stories and I made the observation that a lot of your stories seem as if they must have started with an idea (rather than, say, a character or an image or a particular sentence or a feeling, etc.). I don’t know if that is actually true, but I’m thinking of stories like “The Magic Umbrella” and “The Jon Lennin Experience” and “Iconographic Conventions.” Anyway, Adam suggested that it might be because you’re a visual artist as well as a fiction writer (which is also a way of being a visual artist I think). So I guess this is a two-parter, do most of your stories start as an idea and, if so, does that have anything to do with you being a visual artist?

Rachel B. Glaser: Interesting, Michael! You are right on. At least half of the stories in POW started from ideas, while the others started from characters/situation. All of the stories you listed started as ideas. It is easier and more fun for me to write from an idea. It becomes an experiment I’m trying to pull off. I like the story before I’ve started it. With “The Magic Umbrella” and “Iconographic Conventions,” it felt especially like a challenge. Both times I felt I was working on a ridiculous puzzle. I kept thinking, How can I end this? When I finished “The Magic Umbrella,” I thought it was maybe the stupidest thing I had ever written, but then decided it was the most fun story I had ever written. I sometimes write characters and setting just to get to the idea. I build a story around the idea. This is why some of my characters appear flat and why I usually don’t mind.

I hadn’t connected that way of thinking to my work as a visual artist, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I can see ways in which they are related. For instance, I was working on my final art project at RISD, which had begun from this idea I had of white chocolate Michaelangelo’s Davids melting on a hot plate. This idea changed form, and the project became like an animal. Like I had to learn how to make a crystal elephant spin and that dragged me to Radio Shack, and I had to learn how to create a fountain of ink, and try making a David cast in shampoo, and one in aluminum, and one in ice. It felt like my project was guiding me and making demands of me, and it was exhilarating to follow through and give it what it wanted. That feeling is similar to the one I felt writing “The Magic Umbrella,” “Iconographic Conventions” and “The Jon Lennin Xperience.” I have to write what? I felt at different points, when I found myself writing ridiculous things. These were things I never would have written without the original idea dragging me through new weird territory. This is my favorite feeling when writing.

Michael Kimball: I have a similar response to those stories, but mostly as a statement rather than a question: I can’t believe she just did that—and it worked. So I’d like to take one of those stories and ask you to step us through it. I’m particularly fascinated with “Iconographic Conventions of Pre- and Early Renaissance: Italian Representations of the Flagellation of Christ.” What was the original idea for that story? How did you decide to move from the formal, academic language of the opening pages to the casual description of Christ that compares his long face to a horse’s face. And then how did you get from that to Japanese girl’s essay on Kurt Cobain’s voice and the text from the Kobe Bryant rape trial and finally the Jimi Hendrix postcard?

Rachel B. Glaser: I had been curious about the different voices and tones possible in an essay. A friend sent me a very involved, wordy essay about Renaissance painting he had written years ago for a class. I sort scoffed at it, but also was amazed by it. It was surprising that someone I knew could write as elaborately and scholarly as an art history textbook. As I read it, I started to fool around, cutting out words and paring down the language.

I thought it was funny that a paper on iconographic repetitions was so repetitive. The language of the paper was very authoritative and different than my own. I thought it would be interesting if the formal academic voice of the paper slowly morphed into my voice, or if the paper started discussing off topic, unexpected things. With my friend’s permission, I took the art history essay and went crazy with it. By allowing myself to move associatively from one topic to the next, I ended up talking about things that I often think about. Some of these things I hadn’t realized were related. Similar to my process for the story “Pee On Water,” I stuck researched facts next to my own nonsense and enjoyed how the two combined.

Jesus, Hendrix, Cobain, and Kobe are all male icons with a tragic/dark past, but I travel between them in an indirect way. Since I was working with a shifting narrative voice and creating quotes and references, I found it possible to swim between topics (though sometimes I swam awkwardly). I wanted the essay/story to make the reader feel like this boring, high-toned, complicated art history paper was slowly opening itself into a secret territory of strange truths. The early, casual descriptions of Christ were a sign of the unraveling to come. I wanted to catch the reader’s attention with that inconsistent slip in tone. I wanted to dance all over The Bible/Internet. My goal was for readers to come away from the story in a dreamy, analytical mood that allowed them to make odd connections between things.

Michael Kimball: Sticking with our visual artist theme, I’m wondering if some of those narrative moves come out of your experience as a visual artist—that is, the re-using, recycling, borrowing material from other sources. I’m thinking of all the materials the contemporary artists use to make things and I see you doing it with fiction—using all kinds of words, language from so many different genres or forms. Is there a connection there?

Rachel B. Glaser: I do think some of those narrative moves are inspired by visual arts. I was studying painting and animation at RISD at the same time I was becoming serious about writing. In my fiction classes at Brown, many of my classmates were trying to write a “classic traditional” story at the same time I was realizing that anything could be a story. At RISD I was taking a class called Experiments in Drawing in which the teacher asked us to open our interpretation of drawing. In our most open definition of drawing, the dotted line on a highway is a drawing, a plate of food is a drawing, a layer of dust, etc. Our teacher (Shelia Pepe) pushed us to find things that were just outside of this open definition of drawing. A dance, a piece of sweaty cheese stuck to the wall. This way of thinking did cross over to my fiction. I began to understand the amount of freedom I had when writing. The art world spends more time challenging the expectations of viewers, fighting against what has already been done. This sort of innovation has definitely had a lasting influence on my writing.

Michael Kimball: We’ve already talked about this some, but I’d like it if you talked about other ways that your stories challenge the expectations of readers.

Rachel B. Glaser: I am always interested in ways to challenge the expectations of readers. There seem to be an infinite number of ways. I recently read a short short story by Robert Coover that used time in an insane way. He was able to write sentences that were like M.C. Escher staircases. A character would consider ordering a beer, and have already finished it a few words later in the same sentence, without any mention of him ordering it or drinking it.

One of the ways my stories challenge expectations is subject matter. In my collection I write about a John Lennon reality-video game, the communications of a sign-language speaking chimpanzee, a walking and talking stick creature, and characters communicating telepathically though they have never met. There is so much predictable and familiar fiction in the world that I find I have a lot to work with/against. I have fun presenting a potentially sentimental situation and finding a new way through it.

Though sometimes I enjoy grabbing the reader’s attention in the opening lines of a story, I often try to start a story as traditional-sounding as possible, to lull the reader into an assumption that the rest of the story will follow suit. It is my aim to disrupt this lull later in the story, as one of my favorite elements in art is the unexpected moments in the middle of a piece. For instance, the story within the story of The World According To Garp, the diary sequence in the film V for Vendetta, all of the film Synecdoche, New York, all of the book The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, the drunken singing in Cassavetes films, the games within games in Zelda, Super Mario Brothers 3, and Mystic Ninja. To read a story is already transportive, but to be surprised or amazed within the piece is to fall even deeper in its spell, often shaking the reader/viewer briefly out of the dream before they can sink back into it.

Michael Kimball: Here’s the wrap question. I was going to ask you something about basketball, like who your favorite player is or if you might write a basketball novel, but I have to ask something else. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. The things that you’re doing with stories, can they work on the level of the novel?

Rachel B. Glaser: My favorite current basketball player is Joakim Noah. I love really expressive players with a lot of heart. I also love Derrick Rose, Tony Allen, Ron Artest, Steve Nash, and many more. I grew interested in the NBA through Dennis Rodman and the late 90′s Bulls. I have had a couple ideas for basketball stories, even a basketball screenplay, but none have gotten too far along (yet!).

Your real question though (which feels sort of grave, like the last question in a job interview), is a good question, one I’ve been asking myself for the last few months. I have a notebook that is almost entirely my thoughts on how I would write a novel, and what I like in other people’s novels. I’ve been wanting to start one soon. I think the way I write stories can be adapted into a novel in one of two ways. One, I could write a scenario-based story (like “The Monkey Handler” or one of my other, more plot-based stories) and more fully develop it. Most of my stories don’t fully describe the setting or take the time to fully explain a character (their appearance, their past, their personality, their habits). I sort of breeze by these details in the sweep of the story. I think I could write a story with a slower pace and spend more time with the characters, while still writing in my style.

The other way I see myself writing a novel is to write a more experimental novel, like Barthelme’s Paradise or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams (there are so many!), a novel that creates its own form, or contains stories within stories. A novel that mutates along, and the mutation is its own arc. A third way to imagine writing a novel is in the spirit of Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, which to me is the spirit of ‘just do it!’, a seemingly plan-less, aimless, beautiful mess. All of these ways sound appealing to me.

All said, I do really love short stories. Their form has become very natural and reassuring to me. I think they are slyly ambitious, and humble and pure. They aren’t asking for all of your time. They are trusting you to fill in the empty spaces.

This interview originally appeared in the Charlotte Viewpoint.

Michael Kimball is the author of three novels, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”) and, most recently, Us (which was named to Oprah’s Summer Reading List). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Bomb, and New York Tyrant, and has been translated into a dozen languages. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard). His new novel, Big Ray, will be published by Bloomsbury in Fall 2012.

The post Anything Could Be a Story: Rachel B. Glaser appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: Most video artists just screen their videos on the wall of the gallery. You’re doing that with two beautiful and haunting pieces of work—Dwarfs the Sea and Bust Chance—but you also installed your studio as part of the show. Could you talk about that decision and also tell me what a museum-goer might see through this glimpse into your studio?

Stephanie Barber: My initial desire was to make a video every day of the exhibit—a sort of game and meditation. For many years in Milwaukee, I ran a “Make-a-Film-in-12-Hours” contest—because I started and organized this game I was never able to take part in it, so in a way I am getting a taste of my own medicine. Also, my friend Xav Leplae shot a 35mm film in a gallery and that was an inspiration for this show as well. I was interested in playing a very intense game with myself. Desiring a hyper-focused time that was solely about making new work. The decision to move my studio into the museum was a sort of materializing of this initial concept. The “game” of the game is put on display in an inversion of the usual museum-going experience. The majority of the space I take up at the museum is filled with computers and keyboards and lights and cameras and paper and printers and books and feathers etc.—all the tools of my trade. Then on one wall is a 42″ monitor, which displays the work I have created the previous days. So I think it’s funny, the show is the product—the videos I have created, yes, but, more than that, it is me sitting at a computer editing, animating or writing or asking passersby to read some dialogue or sing for me. It is boring and it is exciting just the way the work of art is. There are heroic moments and there is time spent calculating bit rates. I’m throwing a spotlight on the banality and euphoria of creation.

Michael Kimball: I like the way you talk about your show as a game, the amount of play that can be part of making video art. Elsewhere, you’ve mentioned Oulipo games as an inspiration. Could you talk about how you use those games or constraints in the daily videos that you’ve been making?

Stephanie Barber: The constraints are that I have to make the entire piece in one day using only the materials I have at the museum. The construct of the show is the game. I cannot leave the museum to gather sounds or footage and I can bring in very limited additional material at just a few times throughout the show. (This last constraint was placed upon me by the museum. I need to have a proposed list approved by the board a week before bringing in additional material. My original list of what I would need to work was excised thoroughly, whittled down to a skeletal studio structure.) Also, the galleries in the museum are not wired and so I have no access to internet either–this is another pretty wild constraint.

While this might seem terribly strict to anyone who has ever made a video—even short pieces like mine can take a long, long time—the fact that so much of my work is language oriented has allowed me an imaginative expansion where the visuals are tightly held down by the physicality of the camera. So that yesterday’s video is a slow crane up of a ripped out photo of a grassy field while animated birds fly across it the soundtrack, a dialogue I wrote between two women, read by two lovely museum-going friends, pulls us to the story of where their conversation is taking place. Words are passkeys.

Michael Kimball: I love that: “Words are passkeys.” It makes me think about the title of the show: “Jhana and the Rats of James Olds or 31 Days/31 Videos.” I had to look up “jhana” to find out that it is a kind of meditation based on “profound stillness and concentration.” And I knew James Olds discovered the reward center, but, okay, here’s the question: Could you talk about jhana and James Olds as passkeys to your work, to your approach, etc.?

Stephanie Barber: I’m interested in Jaak Panksepp’s interpretation of this part of the brain (the lateral hypothalamus–what James Olds coined the “reward center” or some people refer to as the “pleasure center”) as actually not producing pleasure but the want to find or seek. This area, he proposes, has more to do with curiosity and want than it does with the satiety associated with “pleasure.” Or it is a pleasure we receive from foraging, searching, wanting. I am foraging through my imagination for ideas and solutions to creative and technical problems each day and the focus and dedication this requires feels akin to a meditative practice. Working this way echoes the drudgery and rewards of meditation, the almost palpable control you can feel yourself acquiring through its practice. Each day has been a miniature intellectual marathon with aesthetic doubts and triumphs and seemingly insurmountable technical issues and the ever-present passing of time. Like meditation, there are invisible battles and symphonies and jokes and tragedies. This state actually, this making state or trying to make or being in the midst of making, is jhana, for me and, really, for everyone in their different manifestations of what they find fascinating to work on, what gets their brainy motors revved up. This is why people write books about “flow” (though for some reason that word and concept embarrasses me) and this is why artists in movies only exist in montage accompanied by music.

Michael Kimball: I like that all of this gets at the idea, the actuality, of the artist working. And I’m wondering if working under your daily constraint, working that quickly, has changed how you think about the finished product, that perennial question of process versus product.

Stephanie Barber: There is certainly a change in the way I am thinking about these videos. Whether this change will apply to future work I can’t yet say. The first day of the show, since I had not yet made a video I constructed a simple, moving, informational animation explaining what I was doing. It said:

Today is the day I begin working in the museum.

Creating a new video everyday.

I will show them on this monitor.

Some will be good and some will be bad.

That is the nature of a project like this.

Don’t worry for me.

Or do.

I think, more than informing the museum-goers about my process, this was in some way a reminder to myself. It has become something of a situational mantra. Because time is so strict I have to really limit my doubt. The day I came closest to not finishing a piece was because I kept doubting an interior I was making in Photoshop to bring into After Effects. The idea for the video and all that needed to be shot and all the sound had been recorded, so it was just this one element and the hang up wasn’t about the coming up with an idea or the making of the image but the liking of it or the letting it go out with or without my liking. I finally had to accept the image, which I still don’t like, and that has been interesting for me as a human, the cringing when I see this one pop up on the monitor. Whether this is good for me as an artist is a whole other question. I’m not so sure I need to learn to accept making art I don’t actually like–or finishing something quickly whether it is “good” or not. For this project it is absolutely perfect, but how will this new muscle be used in my future work, I don’t know. I hope it is not like a giant bully bicep rushing me on saying, “Aaahhhh, don’t worry about it, it’s done, finish, finish.”

I am generally more interested in product and this piece is still, really, about product, but it is also about the recognizing of the process needed to attain the product. About letting that awareness of construct and design seep into the experience of the product. It is perhaps about (or one of the things it is about) sidestepping that product v. process and question and accepting that they are inextricable.

Michael Kimball: If somebody were to come to the BMA and watch you work all day, what might they see that would give them some insight into your films and videos?

Stephanie Barber: What a good and hard question. I guess one aspect of this question is very broad and can apply to all artists. This person who would come and watch me work all day would really be committing to a work of art, and from commitment things just unfurl. When we give time and effort to any work of art, it expands and begins to wrap itself around our larger concerns–the real human concerns like “why are we here and what are we supposed to do with all this time?” and it also simultaneously gets less precious so that we can bat it around like a joke or play with it–stick our arms through sculptures or turn the sound up and down and up and down on our favorite album. Art is one of the ways we grapple and the more we grapple the more we are enriched and the more grapple muscles we develop, so that soon our grappling is the most sublime and amusing play. So staying and watching an entire video be created from initial idea to tedious exports and compressions would be a way of getting to know that piece and getting to really know just one piece would provide the confidence to get down with some of the others. But this is the general answer, which applies to all work.

What someone could learn about my work by sitting with me all day is to read the work as simply pieces of art and erase the notions we have of what a movie looks like or how a poem is read. I find that people are much more moved by my work when they let go of the expectations that medium and genre impose on the way work is received. Almost everyone is ready and open to a joke or a small sad or not sad story. And most anyone can take a few moments to watch a sailboat float around and be erased. Or fly away. What trips people up with art–and I’ve been thinking about this a lot, watching people day after day in the museum—watching how they will or will not approach a piece, will or will not give themselves to it–what pushes them away, I think, is all of the expectations they have been taught to have or taught that they are not savvy enough to have. Many people approach art defensively and this, as we know from all our fraught social encounters, never works out too well. So, perhaps by sitting and watching me work they will hear me giggle when I pet a picture of a cat with a feather and realize, “Oh yea, right, that’s funny, I know funny.” Or read the words, “It’s scary that we are going to die” and think, not––”Oh this is some heavy piece about death” but rather “Yes, that is quite frightening.”

Michael Kimball is the author of four books, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”) and, most recently, Us (which Time Out Chicago calls “a simply gorgeous and astonishing book”). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Bomb, and New York Tyrant. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and he is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard). His new novel, Big Ray, will be published by Bloomsbury in Fall 2012.

The post Almost Everyone Is Ready: Stephanie Barber appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: The Gospel of Anarchy opens with a chapter about David’s telemarketing job, his obsession with online porn, and then a description of a walk through the city. I have been thinking about why you started with that material since most of the novel is about a world of punk-mysticism – and I came up with a couple of possible explanations. (1) The reader sees David as somewhat disengaged in each of those instances, though searching for something too. (2) The opening chapter functions as a kind of prologue and juxtaposition to the body of the novel. Are either of those explanations what you were thinking and, more generally, how were you thinking about the opening of the novel?

Justin Taylor: I think that both of your interpretations make sense. I wanted the reader to meet David first, alone, and to have the chance to become fully acquainted with him, the person he is and the world he inhabits, so that the shifts his character goes through later would register as both authentic and deeply jarring. Chapter one, “The Confessions,” breaks pretty evenly into halves. The first half is modeled on Augustine’s Confessions. David’s confession of his life amounts, basically, to an emptying-out. As he tells these things he rids himself of them, and he becomes an empty vessel, therefore ready to receive something new. The second half of the chapter is about him is finding what the new thing will be.

The porn stuff, in particular, has gotten a lot of attention since the book came out – which makes sense because (a) duh, it’s porn, and (b) those scenes depict a very particular and ephemeral cultural moment that hasn’t been written about in literature before – the AOL message boards, the pic-trading, etc. The language David uses in his descriptions of the photographs is spiritually-charged language, and the word-choice owes something to Harold Bloom’s Omens of Millennium, his book on angels and prophecy. That’s the same book Katy is reading in chapter two. David’s language in chapter one anticipates not only that he will change but also the nature of that change. A believer in an Augustinian conception of prevenient grace could find evidence for its presence in David and his job and his porn. Gospel is very much about secret messages and scrambled transmissions. There’s a lot of call and response between the major events of the book.

Michael Kimball: I love that you pulled the idea of the opening from Augustine’s Confessions and how that fits in with the transformation that takes place in the rest of the novel. And one of the things that interested me about The Gospel of Anarchy was that you are writing about some things that haven’t been written about in literary fiction, not just that particular point in porn’s history but also, generally, the religious punk world that you’ve represented. But I want to ask you about the narration. The first chapter is first-person narration (by David), as is the next-to-last chapter, but the rest of the novel is third-person close narration (from the perspective of multiple characters). How did you decide to tell the story of the novel from those different perspectives?

Justin Taylor: I wanted to start the book with David telling his own story because I thought it would provide a firm ground on which to begin. His voice is trustworthy and compelling, and he is essentially the reader’s avatar in terms of being introduced to the world of Fishgut and the larger ideas that interest the Fishgut-folk. But once inside that world, I wanted the story to have more freedom of movement than would have been possible if I’d stayed inside David’s head.

The transition from chapter 1 to chapter 2 is meant to be jarring. Here you’ve been listening to this guy as he describes these people and places, and then suddenly you’re confronted with a description of him asleep in bed. Then in chapter three, David’s almost a ghost. Thomas sees him in glimpses, but they don’t interact at all and David has no lines of dialogue. It’s almost as if the book itself has lost track of him in the fray. When he resumes narration in chapter five, it shouldn’t be as jarring, because it’s instantly recognizable as a resumption, but his tone of voice and the things he’s now talking about should produce discomfort and/or surprise. In this novel – which is not to say in every novel – the first-person is the voice of the solipsist, atomized and at odds with the world. It pushes against a third-person that strives for immediacy, intimacy, and common cause.

The book takes David very seriously, and feels deeply for him, but ultimately it disagrees with him – his grim conviction, his self-betrayed beliefs – and Anchor’s chapter affirms the possibility of an escape from the fate of those mistakes. Also, it’s worth mentioning that David’s chapters are written in the past tense, while the third-person chapters are all in the present. Whatever David says is already dead in the telling of it, but with the others you are experiencing a world full of possibility, unfolding and un-foreclosed.

Michael Kimball: One of the things that I admire about the narration is how close the third-person close narration is, a kind of omniscience but so individual at the same time. I saw an inverted echo of it in David’s late chapter, which seems omniscient at times, full of prescient visions, a kind of connected mysticism. I feel as if your choice of narrative perspective allowed that transformation and I’m wondering if the narration led you to that or if you had it in mind all along?

Justin Taylor: Once I hit on using the mixture of first and third, I knew that I would use the closest third that I could manage. A close-third can be as intimate and direct as a first-person narrative, and maybe even more so because it is not limited by the narrator’s self-understanding: it can know the character better than she knows herself. I wanted a narrative voice that would be both omniscient and highly individual. Two helpful guides for my close-third were David Gates’s second novel, Preston Falls, and Dennis Cooper’s novel, Try. It’s worth pointing out that both books are also interested in perspective. Oh, and of course Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, even though it’s all first-person interior monologues – the way it handles the handing-off of the narrative from one character to another. Plus if there’s a better book out there about a circle of friends, I’ve never read it.

The third-person in Gospel can jump into any head it chooses, and its choices always amplify/reproduce the relationships between the characters in the given scene. When everyone’s working together, at David’s apartment for example, the perspective moves more or less democratically among the group. In the menage a trois that opens chapter two, the perspective shifts from Katy’s to Liz’s, as Katy’s own focus shifts to Liz, but you don’t get anything from David’s perspective, because even though he’s a participant in the sex he’s not privvy to the emotional/psychic significance of the episode, in terms of the girls’ relationship with each other.

Michael Kimball: Writing a sex scene can go terribly wrong. There are so many bad examples of sex writing out there – Philip Roth in The Humbling, Jane Smiley in Good Faith, Jonathan Franzen in Freedom, John Updike in a lot of different books, etc. So I was impressed when you took on the description of a threesome and I’m wondering how you decided what parts of that action to describe and how you thought about the language choices involved in that kind of description.

Justin Taylor: Of those examples, I’ve only read The Humbling, and that book’s terribleness is so utter and complete that even if the scene had been done well I’m not sure you’d have been able to tell. Roth has written many good books, but that isn’t one of them. The others I can’t speak to. But as far as my own sex scenes go, they’re governed by the same rules as everything else. The threesome scene has to do a lot of work, in terms of the architecture of the novel. It has to start to show the reader what the world of Fishgut looks like, but it can’t extend the “curious outsider”-tone of chapter one, because the people now in our focus are not outsiders. This is their regular life. I wanted the scene to be rapturous, and to fuse the carnal with the spiritual in a way that was true to the nascent belief system at Fishgut. I also wanted it to be less photo-realistic than the descriptions of internet pornography in the first chapter – almost a refutation. I think the most graphic depiction of bodies comes when Liz notes the difference between her own breasts and Katy’s, and the contrast between their bodies in general. The eros in the scene all comes from the extremity of Liz’s love for Katy, how that love is both her weakness and her strength.

Michael Kimball: I’m going to shift topics because I have to ask about the notebook, which is discovered at the end of chapter two and then becomes a foundation document of sorts for the Fishgut world of anarcho-mysticism. In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, you mention that this material is “synthesized (and/or collaged) from a wide variety of sources … [and that] Parker’s politics … owe a great deal to the worlds of the CrimethInc. Collective.” I’m assuming that you were familiar with this material before you ever started writing The Gospel of Anarchy. So what I’m wondering is how much that material influenced what happens in the novel, or, maybe better, if that material helped you to figure out what was going to happen in the novel.

Justin Taylor: A lot of the material in the Good Zine is indeed from sources I was familiar with long before this book ever occurred to me. I read the CrimethInc book, Days of War, Nights of Love as a college freshman and it had a big impact on me. I wanted very badly to believe that the things they said were possible really were, but in the end I was more interested in the fact of their faith – and the languages of articulating/affirming that faith – than the degree to which I could or could not match it with faith of my own. Which, incidentally, is more or less the same way I feel about Christianity, and maybe that helps explain why the Good Zine, or the whole novel, looks like it does. The research materials affected what happens in the novel in the sense that these characters are people who try to collapse the distance between what they believe and how they live – “til to love and live be one,” as Parker says at one point, though he didn’t get that from CrimethInc. – it’s Shelley, from the Epipsychidion. So it’s true to say that the texts shaped the novel, but it would be truer to say that I chose the texts that would give the novel the shape I wanted.

I tried to draw a distinction between works that Justin-the-writer found useful/inspiring and works that would realistically mean something to the characters in the book. I borrowed one line of poetry from Paul Violi and gave it to Parker – but that was with permission, and it’s not a reference to Paul’s work, which Parker would never have read. I asked Paul if I could have it, and he said I could, so it’s meant as an original thought of Parker’s. But apart from that, if a character other than David makes an allusion or a reference or quotes something, it’s because that character has read it and thinks it’s important, even if they don’t cite their source. David, on the other hand, makes all kinds references without being aware of them – he quotes Emerson, models Augustine, and paraphrases Bloom in the first chapter; in the fifth chapter he paraphrases, quotes or borrows from everyone from Derrida to Jabes to the Bible. Of course, one of David’s obsessions is with knowledge, self-knowledge in particular. Ultimately he is overtaken by the unknown known – knowledge he is unaware of possessing, which is Zizek’s re-formulation of Rumsfeld, and something else David unwittingly (and anachronistically – which is perhaps to say prophetically) invokes in chapter five.

Michael Kimball: I have one last question and it’s mostly just because I’m curious about the ways in which authors insert themselves into their work. At the beginning of The Gospel of Anarchy, I read David as a kind of stand-in for you, the author. It eventually becomes pretty clear that David isn’t you, though, and then, reading the last chapter I couldn’t escape the idea that you wrote yourself in as Anchor. Am I way off? And, if I am, did you hide yourself somewhere else in the novel?

Justin Taylor: I think it’s fair to say that David is the character most similar to me, though I also identify very strongly with Liz—more than the book itself lets on. But David is set up as the protagonist, and his first name is my middle name, which is hardly an accident. That said, I see him less as a stand-in than a doppelganger, a daemonic double or a bizarro version. David makes choices – like quitting school, or throwing himself wholesale into politics/religion – that I seriously considered at moments in my own life, but for whatever reason did not make. He represents my attempts to imagine what traveling those roads not taken might have looked like. And that “what if”-ing is supplemented by what I actually know from having friends or acquaintances who said yes to things I said no to, who really did live those lives. All the principal characters in Gospel contain attributes or qualities of real people I knew when I lived in Gainesville, but no single character is based on any single person. Similarly, one person’s various traits and quirks might have been distributed to several different characters. I’ve had heart to hearts with a number of people who recognize some version or fragment of themselves in the novel. They’ve been great exchanges, actually, very heartfelt and intense (and nobody suing!) but they typically start with me saying, “Yeah, okay, that’s kind of you there, but …” Because in the end, all the characters are versions of myself. Open the novel to any page, any line, and you will find me hiding there.

This interview originally appeared in the Charlotte Viewpoint.

Michael Kimball is the author of four books, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”) and, most recently, Us (which the Observer calls “powerful and moving … breathless”). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated into a dozen languages—including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Greek. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), a couple of documentaries, the 510 Readings, and the conceptual pseudonym Andy Devine.

The post All the Characters Are Versions of Myself: Justin Taylor appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: The first things that the reader encounters when they begin reading THERE IS NO YEAR, before they try to read any of the words, are some of the graphic qualities – the big, wide page and the line spaces between block paragraphs – these feel like particular choices about how the text might be read. Could you talk about that and maybe also those gray pages that appear at varying intervals throughout the novel?

Blake Butler: Yeah, I think this is the first text I wrote where I started not using traditional paragraphs and instead let each graph be its own area, putting a blank line between each graph and starting the next graph without tabbing. This came to me naturally as a way to get thoughts down, each one standing inside themselves, independent but also ready to lead into the next. More so than sentences, paragraphs have really been a thing I’ve thought about more and more, how they can work as little machines that stack and contain their own inner logic that then kind of circumvents its energy into the next. Paragraphs do more work than sentences, I think, though sometimes a sentence can be a paragraph by itself, and giving these devices room to breathe both as I made them and as they come across the reader gave me a kind of new terrain to manipulate. It really got me thinking about the way the overall structure can work differently, both in generation and in affect. Later on, as the book gathers more of this kind of momentum, further spatial play in the surrounding white and the alignments and layout allows even further manipulation of this nature, which for me in this book opened a lot of conduits and doors; the book is full of them, I think. Since I’ve started writing this way I haven’t been able to go back, and if anything I’ve gotten more and more interested in ways that open those places in the white, to find ways to fix words to them differently. It’s like playing a video game.

The gray pages you saw in the galley in the final book will be replaced by images, though in many or most cases the images contain the same blanking affect the gray does; they are meant kind of as resets, or pauses in the moving forward, not companions. This too allows, I think, a kind of manipulative motion that connects to the vessels of the words and the space between the words by shaking them up in the way they come on, like blinking between seeings. I want a book to be a kind of vacuum that sucks the head and air around it and eats inside the house whether anyone reads it or not.

Michael Kimball: I like the idea of those line spaces as devices that give the reader room to breathe. I feel as if some processing time is necessary – even if it is just a blink of time as the eye moves across the blank space – to make sense of the narrative, all of the doublings and unfoldings. But let’s talk about the book as a kind of vacuum. Within a few short chapters, THERE IS NO YEAR seems to detach itself from this world and create a space around itself. It insists on being read on its own terms, a kind of extreme internal logical. I’m wondering where that started and how that developed.

Blake Butler: I imagine a lot of that internal affect is a result of the conditions under which the book was written. I wrote the first draft of the book all in 10 straight days of working 18 hours a day, while living temporarily at my parents’ house after my apartment in Atlanta got hit by a tornado. I had just read Jesse Ball’s Samedi the Deafness, and read about his practice of writing books from beginning to end all in one short intense span, and thinking about the act of the writing itself as a kind of performance. One weekend right after I read Samedi I went to the mountains with a few friends, and while driving up to the mountains had the image that begins the book proper, of a man and woman sitting next to each other on a sofa without touching. Not a remarkable image by any means, but there was something in the texture of it, and the condition of my mind at the time, that suggested that behind that image was something else.

So I wrote it down, the image, and when I got home went to my desk and just started writing from it. I was also very aware during this period of what I let in and out of my body: I was very specific in what I watched/ate/read/said/heard during the ten days I was working. I had no plan, it just kept coming on, and I didn’t allow myself to get up from the desk like I usually do frequently while typing: I wanted to confine myself. I wasn’t sleeping well at all at the time, so even when I stopped for the day and went to lay down or whatever, my brain kept going in the machine of the idea, and so I never really felt like I was outside of the air of the book. I imagine that claustrophobia and haunting and series of residues had a tremendous amount to do with why the book seems so contained and of a very specific network of feelings/modes, as I really was kind of caving in and in some kind of zone I’ve only been able to reach a few other times in my life since, though I also find that the more I work to consecrate and attend to the zone of it, the more happy I am in the end, and the less I feel I’ve been the actual creator, but more a conduit for something I can’t name.

Michael Kimball: Sometimes I think that the greatest things are things that we can’t think, the things that we are just receptive to, the things that we let be the thing that they want to be. But I want to get back to the internal mechanisms of the novel. On Page 72, there’s this line: “They put their things where they belonged in this new system.” It sounded like a line about writing the novel and it made me think of other things that lend themselves to the feeling that we’re talking about. What I’m trying to get at is all the doubling in the novel. There is the family and then the copy family, the house and the copy house, the other couple that is buying the house, the email man—all of these things narrative doublings of one sort or another. How about I don’t ask a specific question here, but you still say something as if I have?

Blake Butler: Hmm, yeah I think maybe what you are getting at here makes me think about how a lot of the novel felt self-generative, in a different way than letting sound write the sentences, as I had often been into, though sound is still a function here. I think what I really opened up to as a tool for the creation of the book more than anything here is related to what I’ve been thinking of as inherent logic; that is, a logic hidden in the book before the book is made that you must then suss out by locating it among what comes out of you by sound or naturally. I didn’t really have any idea what I was going to say when I started one scene to the next, and the system that the book works out of, where there are many short individually titled scenes that lead into one another, allowed me to explore the space of the novel as I was making it.

So, the book began with an image, and I wrote a scene from that image, and had a page or two that formed a thing that seemed to work on its own fundamental logic. Then, instead of continuing into a new paragraph, or what have you, the next page is a new image, another instance of an image, related to the first but beginning in approach from a slightly different perspective. A shift of energy, if you will. This made writing the book really infectious in practice and lends itself into the system you are referring to I think; each segment of the telling tells its own thing that then falls into the way around it, and dictates the next.

As this is going on, though, as I was writing, I was also paying attention to how the book was coming out of me from a reader’s perspective. Not a reader as another person, but as myself: a witness to what was coming out not wholly intended, but not wholly without aim either. By watching things unfold, and letting them take on their own space, and then responding to that space by certain logical turns, a kind of narrative begins to erupt out of the space you’ve already encircled. In this book, that function causes the doubling, where the book seems to be folding in on itself, which then dictated ideas as to the larger scope of the thing, the blank at the center of creation, and the unknowing of days, which kind of then proceed amongst itself.

What I’m getting at maybe is that the use of sound, which has been talked about a lot recently it seems, is a beginning, but also fundamental to making the sound become something more than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, or a flood, is working from within the instinct with your own eye’s logic, and analyzing by image or sound or texture or even intent within the book’s body what kind of approach to swing to when you feel the energy of the book in creation wanting to shift. Like putting your head against a massive pillow where air is and listening for something that’s always been right there, which is frightening to discover in itself: that it’s always been right there and you had no idea.

Michael Kimball: The space of the novel, it’s something wide and tall here, and it continues to expand with readerly attention. One of the things that struck me was the possibility for multiple readings. In a sense, in different senses, it is a family story or a domestic novel. It’s also what used to be called speculative and now usually gets called apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. There could be an argument made for it as a coming-of-age novel. We would talk about certain metafictional elements or what some people who still read Marquez might call magic realism. I don’t want to do any of that, but I have to ask you a biographical question. There were these terribly moving chapters where I couldn’t help but see you writing about your father and his dementia. The chapter called “Copy Speech” is what convinced me that this was the case, but maybe I’m wrong?

Blake Butler: I can’t imagine that’s not coming out in the book, though it wasn’t really intentional. I agree that there are many layers and angles, which I think is one of the book’s powers: I don’t even know exactly what is going on inside it fully. Working on the book with Cal at Harper was very interesting in that his original response to the book concerned a layer I hadn’t even really considered mostly, something concerning the relationship between the father and the son. It actually scared me to hear him line up these clues that were certainly in the book in that way, because it seemed very correct, and in some sense the book works as a mirror or film of self: I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone so far who’s had the same concerns about what’s going on, including myself, which to me is a wonderful thing, a kind of warbling mirror.

But as for my own father, and his dementia, now that you say it: I think, yes, it has to be. As I said I was writing the book while staying with my parents after my place got destroyed, so I was around him during this period where we first began to realize that something was wrong, with his memory, and his operational recognition. In early stages it seemed just like he was aging, but the way it comes on is fast. Very quickly he wasn’t able to drive anymore, began to misplace things in the house, think other people were in the house, forget who my mom and sister and I were, ask about his parents who had been dead for years, wanting to go home where he grew up as if it was his current reality still, etc. The field of what is real to him is constantly shifting, and it gets worse as time passes. In some way this seems very American to me, a kind of feeling threaded through all days, even for the unsick. Watching my father emerge into this kind of zombie toddler body with fragments of who he was surrounding even the architecture of where he walks and what he says seems like a fully emerged state of what seems like is touched in all of us to different levels. Perhaps dementia is the person finally returning to true form, a recognition rather than a loss, though from our end it looks like damage. That kind of feeling is certainly in the novel, and I can’t imagine if I’d not been in the same air as him when I was working, that the book would not exist, which is a further comment on the nature of air in the book, and the act of monitoring the fieldwork of your creation and creative time. That scares me more now.

Michael Kimball: As you know, sometimes writing and recognizing what you have written can be terrifying. Usually I move toward that feeling, but this time I’m just going to ask a question about the ending, which does not contain a spoiler. The novel ends in a hallway, at a door. Does this mean there will be a sequel?

Blake Butler: I don’t know what happens after the door.

Michael Kimball is the author of four books, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”) and, most recently, Us (which the Observer calls “powerful and moving … breathless”). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated into a dozen languages—including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Greek. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), a couple of documentaries, the 510 Readings, and the conceptual pseudonym Andy Devine.

The post My Brain Kept Going in the Machine: Blake Butler appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: UP FROM THE BLUE starts with a frame, the narrator Tillie about to give birth to her first child. That frame accounts for just over 10% of the pages in the novel. That is, most of the novel is narrated by the wonderful 8-year-old Tillie, who tells the difficult story of one year in their troubled family. I’m wondering if that frame was part of the initial conception of the novel or if the idea for it came later.

Susan Henderson: When I submitted the book, 100% of it was narrated by 8-year-old Tillie. My editor at HarperCollins, Brittany Hamblin, was the one who suggested a frame story. She thought, and I think rightly so, that there were questions the reader might have that Tillie was either too young to understand or too young to communicate. She told me the specific questions she had wanted more insight into, but after that she left it to me to decide who would narrate the frame story and what the plot of that frame story would be.

Even though I said yes right away, I had no idea what I was going to write. In fact, the first thing I did was Google the term “frame story” because I didn’t actually know what one was. In essence, it means to pan out from the story and look at it from another angle, usually from some time in the future. I watched movies like Titanic, Wuthering Heights, and Crazy in Alabama to understand the rhythm of them. And all the while, I kept my editor’s questions in the front of my mind, and just let my subconscious work with it. A few days later, I realized what a relief it would be to move some of the heavier content into the frame story so my narrator could speak about it with more insight and a grownup voice. I was surprised how much I’d wanted to say, and how emotionally freeing it was to be able to do that.

Though the hospital scene and the pregnancy had never been a part of the original story, it allowed me to go to the heart of where childhood trauma continues into adulthood—the fear that you’re broken in some way, that you’ll be a bad mother, that you’ll always feel like a child when you return to those old relationships. I was also able to tackle some of the issues that happen to trauma survivors—a tendency to develop mysterious sicknesses that no one can find physical evidence of, or to have your concerns written off because you aren’t quite put together. I really enjoyed this extra writing step, but the heart of the story, and the one I absolutely had to tell, was from the child’s perspective.

Kimball: The ending is absolutely crushing, but there is a kind of comfort in knowing that the adult narrator has come through. The frame makes 8-year-old Tillie’s narrative more moving and somehow leaves her with a kind of innocence as well. I feel as if the voice for the adult Tillie must sound something like you (I hear it in your emails), but I’m wondering how you found the voice for 8-year-old Tillie, which is infused with a tremendous tenderness.

Henderson: Tillie’s voice just kind of piped into my head. Sometimes I felt like I was just moving the pen and trying to capture what she was saying without missing anything. Tillie is a very observant kid but kind of in a bubble. She might notice something stuck to her shoelace but fail to notice the conversation going on while she’s focused on that shoelace, and so writing her character was about stepping into a very vibrant but limited world.

That’s an interesting observation you make about the tenderness. There’s something about Tillie where her playful side or her incessant hope and belief in people rubs up against reality, and I think that’s where she struck a real nerve with me. In some ways, that’s what was nice about writing the final chapter in a grownup voice, because it allowed grown Tillie to stand beside the child Tillie and bear witness to her story.

As far as the adult voice goes, the writer Mark Childress gave me some advice based on his experience of writing frame stories for three of his novels (always at the request of the publisher). He said to make sure the narration of the frame story was similar enough to the rest of the story that it didn’t jar the reader. So I took the same basic voice, imagined it as being more guarded, showing life’s wear and tear, but also having more insight.

Kimball: UP FROM THE BLUE is one of the best treatments of depression that I have ever read in a novel and I think it’s the voice of 8-year-old Tillie that makes this possible, her innocent and hopeful descriptions of what is happening. I’m trying to frame a question here, but not exactly sure what it is. Could you maybe just talk about the novel’s portrayal of depression? It’s handled with such care.

Henderson: Thank you. I really appreciate that, especially coming from a writer I admire so much.

I had a lot of input early on from people who tried to talk me out of writing from a child’s point of view. But there’s something fundamentally different, in my mind, about how trauma affects children. I think it actually changes a kid’s wiring. And the trauma is processed without the words needed to describe it or the life experience needed to give it perspective.

So you’re seeing the mother’s debilitating depression through the eyes of a daughter who has very few expectations about how things ought to be, who likes to crawl under the sour-smelling sheets with her and relishes having someone in her life who shows emotion. I don’t think you can reduce this time in her life to anything so simple as a bad year because the trauma is so intertwined with laughter, tenderness, important friendships and crushes.

But this eight-year-old girl is also getting a taste of depression herself, the way it sneaks into a person. She’s starting to lose chunks of time and sometimes can’t make her body move because it simply feels too heavy. She’s also learning the careful social dance of keeping secrets and hiding her emotions.

What I wanted to do with this book was to walk Tillie through the grieving process and see if I might find something hopeful on the other side of it. Her story is like a lot of people’s, in the sense that the trauma has no clear end—there’s no way to change the outcome, there’s no one to confront. And yet, she isn’t chained to that sorrow or to repeating any family patterns. That doesn’t mean she’s come through this without some rough edges, but I feel like the ending reaches for love and forgiveness and new beginnings.

Kimball: I’m really glad that you stuck with your instincts and wrote from a child’s point of view. The story of the novel couldn’t have been conveyed with the same wonder, charm, tenderness, innocence, etc.—and you still capture the things that an adult narrator can capture with the frame. I’m wondering, though, why people tried to talk you out of writing from a child’s point of view.

Henderson: There were lots of reasons, the first being that I’d have two choices—baby-talk or some super-precocious child we’d all grow to hate. But Tillie’s voice continued to pipe into my head with a real urgency to it, and I knew she was the one who wanted the reigns. The second warning people gave me was that I’d be limited in the breadth of the story I could tell. But I have a stubborn streak, and nothing inspires me like someone telling me what I can’t do. I loved the puzzle of figuring out how to tell a story from a child’s perspective without sacrificing the poetry that’s so important to me. And how to stay inside Tillie’s limited perspective and still give the readers more of the information they needed.

The final problem I was warned about, and the one that was not in my control, was that publishers might look at the age of the narrator and decide that this had to be a YA book, despite the rather adult story I wanted to tell. And I simply plowed ahead, knowing I might not sell the book at all. By this time, I felt truly haunted by this child who would wake me up in the middle of the night. It was like she was pleading with me to tell her story and to move her away from where she’d gotten stuck to someplace more hopeful.

Kimball: I’m always surprised when people don’t understand what can be gained from using a constraint like a child’s voice—so much voice and feeling if the material is handled well and follows its own internal logic. And we’re mostly well read enough at this point that the normal way of telling the story underwrites that originality of using a different voice. In a sense, both perspectives get conveyed.

For instance, there is a thing that you do in UP FROM THE BLUE that wouldn’t have been possible without 8-year-old Tillie’s voice (or something similar). After the family moves, young Tillie arrives in the house and her mother isn’t there. Tillie is given a flimsy explanation that is supposed to convince a child, but doesn’t quite. After some youthful detective work, Tillie finds her mother living in a room in the basement of the house and it isn’t entirely clear whether Tillie has actually found her mother in that room in the basement or whether Tillie imagines it as a kind of coping mechanism. Could you talk about how you handled that material and the effect that you were trying to create without, you know, giving it away?

Henderson: One of the unique things that happens to children, besides their young minds trying to process information without the benefit of life experience, is that people try to hide things from them or give them “comforting” answers. Sometimes this is done with the best of intentions and sometimes it isn’t, but the result is that what’s happening around them doesn’t match with their gut instincts. Someone may tell the child everything is fine and not to worry, but she senses the stress. So, as this happens to Tillie, she really enters a foggy state of reality, and she doesn’t know if the things she’s seeing and feeling are true. Add to that the things she knows about herself—that she’s a kid who regularly gets into trouble, and she’s a kid who’s comfortable with lying—and even if something is right in front of her eyes, she’s not at all sure if it’s real.

Kimball: I feel as if writing this novel must have brought you to a kind of personal catharsis and I wondering if parts of UP FROM THE BLUE are pulled from your own life? If they are, could you talk about that—the process of turning life into fiction and have you overcame any difficulties along the way in doing so?

Henderson: I didn’t set out to write my own story. I didn’t even set out to write a novel, not initially. I just felt flooded with images and with this child’s voice; and each time, I’d write the ideas down and then get back to my life. Some of the things I wrote down were true and others weren’t. The best stories pull from everything you know—your own life story, the things you’ve witnessed, the things you’ve learned in the news and in the books you’ve read—all of that becomes paint in the fiction writer’s pallet.

Once I realized these stray images were starting to tell a bigger story, my goal was to always seek out the emotional hot spot. That’s the truest place I know, whether you reach it through fiction or non-fiction—the place of insecurities, fears, grudges, and unexpressed love. For me, that’s the place I guard closely in real life but aim to struggle with on paper. So exposing that kind of emotional truth was a pretty vulnerable process but unbelievably freeing.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”), is now out in paperback. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages and, in May 2011, Tyrant Books will release his novel Us (which El País calls “haunting and awesome … beautiful and intense”). He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), a couple of documentaries, and the 510 Readings.

The post The Fear that You’re Broken in Some Way: Susan Henderson appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: I think of you as a fiction writer first, probably because that is how I first encountered you, but REVOLUTION is a memoir, so I’m wondering about the differences between writing fiction and memoir. I’m asking because there are certain incidents that I wouldn’t have believed if I were reading fiction, but I read along amazed because I’m reading a memoir.

Deb Olin Unferth: Memoir and fiction are very different forms. When I decided to write this memoir, I read dozens of memoirs and autobiographies to try to get a sense of how memoirs are put together, how they have changed over the past hundred years, how I might contribute to the conversation that “memoir” is (a conversation about memory, time, the narrative of the self, and much more). I’d been terrified to write a memoir. I’d told myself this was because I doubted its intellectual validity (ha!), but I see now it was because I didn’t want to deal with the problems memoir presents.

A few of these are: the search for and commitment to factual and emotional truth, the willingness to reveal oneself publicly, the need to settle on one “self” or one interpretation of what happened, the filter — what sort of a filter to use (you must use a filter! you can’t just write every single thing that ever happened to you) and why you use that particular filter, and how to tell the reader what that filter is and what doubts you have about it — the need to resist building an artificial but tempting arc (life doesn’t work as an arc, though almost all our experiences with human-made narrative do), etc. None of these are problems in quite the same way in fiction.

I am now in love with the form, and I’ve written a “memoir manifesto,” where I talk about the development of memoir out of autobiography.

Michael Kimball: This is why I love interviews. Let’s talk about the filter. I think we use a filter in fiction too. There’s a pretty clear filter in VACATION and the filters are even more obvious in your short stories. Can you talk about the particular filter that you used in REVOLUTION and the doubts that you had about it?

Deb Olin Unferth: The hardest part was determining the voice I wanted to use — a voice is a filter. What sort of a stance did I want to take toward this subject? I had many doubts. After all, here I was, an American, turning up at someone else’s war and trying to “help,” and, all these years later, here I was writing about it (and writing about something is in a way owning it or laying claim to it). It takes a lot of audacity to do that. Furthermore, I wanted to have a sense of humor about it, mostly because I feel like I can only speak seriously through a filter of humor. And what kind of a person would write humorously about someone else’s war? It seemed inhuman, and yet I wanted it to be very human, and very respectful. For this reason, I abandoned the book over and over, but it felt urgent to me to finish it, and urgent on many levels, so I kept returning to it. All I could think to do was to integrate my doubts into the text, be very open about it.

Michael Kimball: The voice, the tone of the voice, is one of the things that is striking about the book. Some of what happens in the narrative seems so terrible or so absurd that humor seemed necessary — that is, the narrative would have seemed unbelievable without that sort of temper for it. Said another way, there are places where the narrative seems both earnest and ironic at the same time. Do you think of that as one of the ways that REVOLUTION contributes to the conversation of what a memoir is — or, what a memoir can be?

Deb Olin Unferth: Well, I hope so. I wanted to capture that feeling of simultaneous earnestness and irony. It’s the way I tend to feel most of the time — urgently earnest and yet aware of the absurdity of it. Even then, at eighteen, I felt that way, though the feeling was a little deeper below the surface. I try to get that across in places in the book, such as when I call my family to tell them I’m getting married and I feel a sudden surge of terror that I might not mean what I’m saying and doing the way George does.

I don’t believe irony precludes deep emotion in writing, the way some people say. Irony can indicate deep emotion — pain, fear, doubt, strangling desire. The important thing is not to stop at irony. Let the irony curtain fall around you, then push it away (it comes away so easily!) and look at what it hid.

Michael Kimball: I think that you were successful at doing that in so many places in the book and, that feeling, those multiple emotions, become a sense that underlies the narrative even when it isn’t as explicit. And it is most explicit, I think, in those places where you introduce your doubts into the narrative. Could you give us a short passage where you do that and maybe discuss how you came to introduce your doubts into that particular part of the narrative?

Deb Olin Unferth: Weirdly, as I paged through the book, looking for a passage, it seemed to me as if every page contained this self-doubt. I settled on a passage on p. 40, where I’m describing an encounter we had with some evangelical Christians from the U.S.

[I]t occurred to me that in fact we must have all looked alike to the Guatemalan people watching us. You have to look at a thing carefully to be able to tell it from the others, and you have to know what to look for. Most things are indistinguishable.

Here I’m trying to talk about a certain sense of self-importance and privilege that some people from the U.S. feel or are credited with feeling, going into other countries and trying to “help” the people — this was a very difficult topic for me to write about, but I needed to address it, since I’m hyper-aware of it and I myself was guilty of it, and even at eighteen I saw it and knew it and wasn’t sure what to do with it.

So there we were, George and I, standing there, being critical of these other Americans, and imagining ourselves to be the heroes in this story, but to Guatemalans watching us, we were just indistinguishable blurs, and none of the silliness we were engaged in had anything to do with their lives. We were comedy-relief for the real story, and in the real story, the Guatemalans were the primary characters and the heroes. And in that moment I understood this.

So I tried to achieve this effect by quickly and dramatically shifting the perspective in that first sentence — to the point of view of the Guatemalan people. Then in the second sentence, I try to shift the perspective again, pull back and make a more generalized statement. If the first sentence was political, the second was existential.

Michael Kimball: One of the fascinating things about REVOLUTION is the way that this shifting perspective happens in so many places, on so many pages — and it kind of teaches the reader to read the book in a particular way. This is partly possible, I think, because of the subject matter — we’re given a narrative with a very personal, idiosyncratic story that is set against a backdrop of a narrative that might be told in a history book. What I’m wondering is how you decided to balance these two narratives — how much of the war revolution versus how much of the personal revolution?

Deb Olin Unferth: The book began and stopped in fits and starts over a period of many years while I tried to figure out just what sort of book I wanted to write. I had written drafts of scenes of both the war material and the personal material. I had pieces of scenes and mini history lessons I’d written scattered all over, in different boxes and on scraps of paper, some typed into emails I sent to myself from Central America in the early 2000s, some in notebooks starting with the ones I’d written during the 1987 trip. Because I’d tried so many times to write this book, I’d done a lot of research over the years, also in fits and starts. I’d say there were four distinct periods when I read almost exclusively books about Central American politics, and I took extensive notes and made hundreds of notecards (I’d been taught to do this in eighth grade: when writing a research paper, put all your facts on notecards– probably no one does that anymore, right? why have them on notecards anyway? what’s the point? it’s mysterious).

When I finally realized what I wanted to do and surveyed the mountain of material, somehow the balance came very naturally and organically. I didn’t have that much trouble figuring that part of it out. I did not want the book to be a history book. I did want the political backdrop to be an important part of the book. The challenges were: 1. figuring out how much background information to put in (I assumed a lot was common knowledge that turned out not to be, so I needed to fill it out a little), 2. including the factual information in a way that didn’t lose my voice.

Michael Kimball: The two narratives are seamless and they create a really clean narrative arc, which isn’t always the case for memoir. Thinking of narrative arc, I’m curious about how and why you decided to include the last section of the book, the last few chapters, which are set in the very recent past.

Deb Olin Unferth: Okay, that part was hard to figure out. In early drafts of the book, the recent past material began in the first chapters and popped up again and again throughout the book, so that the reader was going back and forth in time. But with each transition I sensed that the reader was taken out of the story a little, had to regroup and re-enter the story, and I didn’t like that, so I gathered the recent past material into a few major chunks so that the reader would only have to transition a few times. But I kept pushing the chunks farther and farther back and deleting pieces of them because they were still interrupting the story. Finally my editor, Gillian Blake, called me — I was in a hotel room in southern Illinois, I recall — and said, “Move it all to the end,” and for a moment I was horrified, but then relieved.

The very final chapters, about looking for George in the past year, I added them because the book is a quest — not just the 1987 trip, but the writing of the book itself is a quest. I needed to know the things that I learned as a result of writing the book, and I was willing to search for them. And part of that was settling for myself what sort of a person George had wound up becoming.

Michael Kimball: Okay, I have one last question: Are you a fast runner? There are a couple of times when you run away from somebody who is trying to do something terrible and you always get away. I was always relieved when you got away, but I also thought, She must be fast.

Deb Olin Unferth: Ha! I run, but I’m not that fast. In one passage, I mention that a man “chased me through a field with his ‘thing’ out of his pants.” I still remember this vividly. I was on a path in a field (Managua at that time was so spread out, there were often fields of tall grasses between places you wanted to get to, with paths running through them) and I came on a soldier whom I walked by. He called out to me after I passed, and I turned back to look at him and he had his “thing” in his hand and he was running awkwardly toward me. He also had an enormous rifle slung over his back that was bouncing up and down. I imagine it is hard to run that way and the image seems comical to me now. I just took off and left him far behind.

The other place in the book where I mention running away is when I was mistaken for a prostitute and a man tried to offer me money and grabbed my arm and the back of my dress, and I took off running. He didn’t chase me. I just ran. Actually I have no idea if he chased me. If he did, I ran faster.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”), is now out in paperback. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages and Tyrant Books will release his novel US in May, 2011. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), I WILL SMASH YOU, 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES, and the 510 Readings.

The post You Must Use a Filter!: Deb Olin Unferth appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: We’ve known each other for a couple of books now and have been sharing pages for years. Plus, I wrote your life story (on a postcard), so I know that you use a lot of your life in your fiction. Of course, fiction can be about anything, so tell me why you have chosen to use autobiography so much in your fiction.

Jessica Anya Blau: I used to not write about my family or myself at all. Everything I wrote was completely made up. And then I went to a shrink and one of the first things he said to me was, “Tell me about growing up in your family.” And I said something like, “Oh, it was all good. There’s no story there.” Then, the further I got into the therapy, the more things about my family would come out and the shrink and I would sort of crack up looking at this stuff. He continually reminded me of what I had said in the first session. But the truth is, I was happy. I am happy. I had one friend whose mother left her to be the tambourine girl in a band. When she visited her mother, the mother’s various boyfriends and husbands (there were about five) all molested her to some degree or another. That seemed fucked up to me. That seemed like a bad childhood. And I had another friend whose wonderful mother tried to kill herself. That also seemed fucked up. The stuff I lived with—bird shit on the couch, marijuana plants in the backyard, a grandmother poking through my dirty underwear—seemed like nothing. Like life. And in a way the stuff of my childhood and my family isn’t really that strange—or maybe it is—but the thing about my family as opposed to any other strange or crazy family (which would probably encompass all families) is that I’m willing to write about them, and they understand that it’s a fictionalized version of the truth and don’t really care what I put down on the page.

Anyway, you asked me why I put so much of them in my writing and I guess it’s because they interest me and my past interests me. Families are fascinating—just like prisons are fascinating and schools are fascinating. Any place where you enclose a particular group of people is interesting—I love seeing how people play against each other, who has the power, who takes what role, and what people bring out in each other.

Kimball: Let’s talk more about the fictionalized version of the truth. I’m curious about the details that you decided to fictionalize. Why did you make the fictional father a lawyer rather than an English professor, as your real father is? And why did you make your fictional sister an undercover cop, which I assume she isn’t? Said another way, what is gained in the fiction by making these choices rather than using real life?

Blau: My sister was an undercover narcotics cop. It’s funny I never told you that—I feel like we’ve talked about so much family stuff in the past. She went to Bennington, was pre-med, got out and took some money she came into and invested it in a restaurant. The restaurant was really successful, made loads of money and she had a great time working there. Then, at some point she grew restless, as she always does, and she decided to be a cop. She was top of her class, as Anna is in the book. And she went quickly out of uniform and into undercover because she looked very young, like an eighteen-year-old girl. She also looked (and still looks) Hispanic, and they (the police force) liked to play her off as a young, Hispanic girl. So, that stuff is all true. She sent me pages and pages of emails describing her time as an undercover cop and I used information from those pages to create that chapter.

I made the father a lawyer because I wanted him to be a little more conventional in contrast to the mother. My own father always said if he hadn’t become a professor he would have become a lawyer, so I just gave him his alternate career-life. I made it a small firm with three rooms and a single receptionist/secretary so that the family would be in the same socioeconomic tier as a professor at that time. There really isn’t much in the book that is totally fictionalized—it’s more that I rearranged time, compressed events, and moved events into different geographic locations and different years (my brother lost his virginity, for example, in Santa Barbara and not while at Haverford, as in the book). Portia’s husband is mostly a fictional character. There are two reasons for that. 1. My ex-husband is the father of my older daughter and I don’t want her to ever read something I’ve written and to feel like she’s discovering previously unknown things about her father or our marriage. Whatever her experience of her father is (all good, by the way), it belongs to her and shouldn’t be informed by any story I might create from my past relationship with him. 2. The actual break up of that marriage isn’t very interesting. Or maybe it’s just not very interesting to me.

Kimball: I have to say that I still don’t believe that your sister was an undercover cop. I also don’t believe that your divorce isn’t very interesting to you (see your note on your therapist, above). I don’t believe that two people could get married and then divorced and that not be interesting in some form. Or, why would you have the character who is modeled after you, Portia, going through a divorce through after walking in on her husband having sex with another woman? If the fiction can be anything, why make it that?

Blau: Oh, come on Michael, you really don’t believe that my sister was an undercover cop?! She was—it was cool. She has the thrill-seeking gene (there actually is one) and police work definitely satisfied her need for thrills. Now she does hot yoga—it’s a little more tame.

Whenever I fictionalized something in the book, it was because what I was making up was more interesting to me (and hopefully to the reader) than the truth. I’ve thought about my divorce so much that it no longer interests me. There wasn’t much “wish fulfillment” in the fiction. The made up stuff was generated more by things I’m afraid of—I’d picture events and then figure out how I might handle them. I do that in daily life, too. I can’t stand following anyone in a car because I always imagine watching the person I know, and usually love, having some horrible accident while I’m driving right behind them. I tend to go to the worst place, mentally, and then see if I can find my way out of it while maintaining sanity and some sense of normalcy.

Kimball: In a Paris Review interview, Michel Houellebecq described himself as a “realist who exaggerates a little.” Does that describe you too?

Blau: Great description! It certainly describes what I’ve done in DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME. The events in all the chapters (with the exception of two) happened. But if you were to dive into certain details of each chapter, you’d find that many of those details are made up. When I wrote the book initially, I started with the birth of each of my parents and went forward. My mother’s beginnings were story-worthy: as an infant she was left out overnight, forgotten, in an open Buick convertible and almost froze to death.

My father’s beginnings weren’t interesting at all. He was born in Trenton, New Jersey to Orthodox Jewish parents. In order to balance those two chapters, I “exaggerated” his beginnings within the realm of truth. I know that in an Orthodox bris the rabbi sucks the blood from the wound (where the foreskin is cut from the penis) with wine in his mouth and exchanges blood for wine. It happens quickly, most people don’t even notice it happening. My father certainly had an Orthodox bris, so surely the rabbi sucked the wound. In my crazy exaggeration, I imagined a slightly off rabbi, someone perhaps a little drunk, going down repeatedly and happily on the wound. Over-sucking, in a sense. It seemed necessary to the chapter. Something bigger than the standard cutting had to happen to make the scene worth writing. Both of those chapters were cut from the final draft, by the way, although each of those stories is still told at some point in the book.

Kimball: Since we just talked about exaggerating the truth in fiction, let’s turn that around and talk about the next-to-last page of the novel, where Portia, the fictional Jessica, says, “This has to be an honest story.” Why does it have to be, and how is it, an honest story?

Blau: I’m never really sure what I’m thinking when I’m writing. I tend to write in more of a dream state and then when I wake up, I can see what I’ve done. When I look at that line now, I think it was about Portia being able to tell the story of their mother without editing it the way people do in things like obituaries and Christmas letters where they hit on the highlights and leave out all the bad stuff, a lot of the interesting stuff, certainly all the sexy stuff! In fiction, the stuff you want to see is the stuff that wouldn’t make it into the Christmas letter. Fiction is compelling in part because of the truths it reveals about the characters, about life, about the world of the story. And Portia, who had experienced a lot hidden truth in her marriage, wants only what’s real.

Maybe I should point out that I come from a family where the truth is sometimes hidden temporarily, but eventually it is flung around the room like a hacky-sack. If you go to rehab, everyone’s going to talk about your rehab. If you have an affair, we’re going to talk about that affair (or write about it!). When I spend time with other families, I’m often astounded at how much truth can go unsaid. I was once with a family where there was no way anyone would dare bring up what was oozing beneath the plastic exterior (the fact that the father had left for a work trip twenty years ago and never returned, the fact that one of the brothers was keeping a mistress, the fact that the money that was supporting the household was not coming from the person everyone pretended it was coming from, the fact that there really was no money although they were living in a Beverly Hills type of neighborhood, etc.). I adored these people, but I felt like a detective with them and spent a tremendous amount of time digging for the truth, which I eventually pieced together (over years). The funny thing is people sense what they don’t know and when the truth is revealed it’s often more of a relief than an anguish (although certainly there are many, many anguishing truths).

By the end of DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME, everyone’s truth has been tossed out onto the page: we know what Emery and Alejandro want, we know what Portia’s dealing with and what she needs and wants, we know what Anna’s been through and what she wants. Also, we know the secret Buzzy’s been hiding and, finally, we have Louise’s complete story. None of the bad stuff has been expunged. Of course, the characters will live on (in my imagination) and new secrets and stories will occur, and then something new will happen that will blow it all open again. The truth is like battery acid. It eventually burns through and comes bubbling to the top.

Kimball: This is a spoiler, kind of, so stop reading this interview now if you don’t want to know how the novel ends. OK. Why did you kill your mother at the end of DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME? Your real mother seems so crazy nice that I kept thinking that you were going to save her.

Blau: My mother is “crazy nice” to people she likes. She’s a bitch when she doesn’t like you. She loved your book, DEAR EVERYBODY, by the way, so if you ever meet her she’ll definitely be crazy nice to you!

Now for the answer to your question: When I started the novel, I wasn’t going to kill the mother. I was afraid that if I killed her, my real mother would die. That’s totally irrational, I know. So, maybe for about a year into the writing, she was going to live. But then, when I got to the end, it seemed like the right ending for the story. Like it should happen that way. Also, I wanted to bring all the grandparents together because I love the idea of seeing all my grandparents in one room (that never happened in real life; I don’t think they ever met).

Also, I think writing the scene was, in a way, practice for when she really dies. A few years ago, my mother had a massive heart attack like the opening heart attack in the book. We all rushed out there to be with her, just as the kids do in the story. And when I was saying goodbye to her after those few days, I started sobbing really hard. And so did she. I thought I’d never see her again—that she would die before I returned. Well, she didn’t die, but I have worried about it every day since. I call her each morning at seven her time (ten here) and if she doesn’t answer, I start thinking things like, “Oh shit, Mom, you can’t die now, I’m too young to have a dead mother, and my book’s not out yet—you haven’t even seen it, and you need to stick around to see how my kids turn out!” Or some days I’ll think, “Fucking A, man, I’ve got to teach this week. I need to help Ella with all her school stuff. I’ve got a revision to do and there’s no way I can deal with a dead mother now.” My mother is hilariously funny and loads of fun. And she knows I worry about her dying and exploits this fact to make herself laugh. Her latest joke is to call me on the phone, talk with muted, impeded speech and tell me she’s had a stroke. The first few times she did it, I almost vomited I was so upset. Now I just start laughing.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”), is now out in paperback. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages and Tyrant Books will release his novel US in May, 2011. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), I WILL SMASH YOU, 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES, and the 510 Readings.

The post A Realist Who Exaggerates a Little: Jessica Anya Blau appeared first on The Faster Times.

Michael Kimball: The stories and the novel in WORDS are alphabetical. How am I supposed to read that?

Andy Devine: The alphabetical fiction is a way to break away from the restrictive idea of sentences (I usually don’t write in sentences like this), yet there is still an order to the alphabetized words that is instantly recognizable to the reader. We’ve been using it every since we were little kids. Those books for kids that are organized around the alphabet were amazing. Remember that? Don’t you want to feel that again? Once sentences and fiction moves beyond a standard English syntax, the possibilities for story, to name just one element of reading, are staggering.

Kimball: Tell me about how you write the alphabetical stories.

Devine: With the fiction, I feel my way through the language alphabetically. The words scroll through my mind on a kind of ticker. I sound them out until the piece feels full, until I cannot put another word in or take a word out. It becomes a kind of chant. Particular words gain attention through their accumulation or, sometimes, a particular word gains attention because it is singular or because of the way that it fits within a particular string of words.

Kimball: One of the things that happens when I read WORDS, especially the alphabetical stories, is that I become completely lost in the text. I actually do feel staggered by or maybe mesmerized is a better word. But trying to find words to describe that feeling makes me think of the list of words that shouldn’t be used in fiction, the essay that opens WORDS. As I remember it, that was first piece you ever published and I took it for one of early issues of the now-defunct Taint Magazine.

Devine: You were the only editor back then who would publish my work without trying to change it. It was difficult to get people to understand that I wasn’t just goofing around.

Kimball: It was a startling piece then and it still is now. But I have to ask, as your publisher Adam Robinson would say: Where do you get the nerve?

Devine: To be clear, nerve is a word that shouldn’t be used in fiction. Also, I’m not going to answer that question directly. However, I will say that the list started out of disgust for a novel I was reading and grew from there. It became clear that word choice was one of the initial points of failure for so much contemporary fiction.

Kimball: A lot of the words in “Words That Should Not Be Used in Fiction, a Selection” are obvious. They call into question a lot of faux-literary, pseudo-realist fiction that I know sickens you, but I’m curious about words like “aliens … bloodthirsty … castle … dick … dragons … falcon … fangs … grizzled … jackbooted … kidnap … lover … mafia … mystery,” etc. Is the idea that genre fiction can’t be taken seriously?

Devine: Why are you asking me questions that you already know the answer to?

Kimball: So how about the names that are listed in “Words That Should Not Be Used in Fiction, a Selection”—“Barbara … Ivan … Nancy … Julie … Kenny … Lulu,” etc.?

Devine: Why are you doing this?

Kimball: OK, tell me about how WORDS became a book.

Devine: The book started with that initial list of words that shouldn’t be used in fiction, which led to a list of words that should be used in fiction (a kind of solution to the “shouldn’t” list). These lists were both implicit critiques of contemporary fiction, which led to the essays on prepositions and metaphors, which turned into the section called “A Grammar for Fiction Writers.” The jump to the alphabetical stories was obvious after that—the 90K-word novel condensed to 20 pages less so.

Kimball: I gave my mother a copy of WORDS and she said that she tried to read it but eventually gave up. Have you received any reader response to WORDS?

Devine: Some people do find it exasperating, but that’s more about the reader than the writer. Also, apparently, the list of words that shouldn’t be used in fiction made a woman who lives in Maine cry. I don’t know if that has happened in other states as well, but I didn’t mean to make anybody cry. Life is difficult enough.

Kimball: I heard that a clothing company is designing a t-shirt around some of your aphorisms like “Only jackasses use whom.” How did that happen?

Devine: Who wouldn’t want to wear that t-shirt?

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”), is now out in paperback and his books have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. Tyrant Books will release HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS in Spring 2011. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), I WILL SMASH YOU, 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES, and the 510 Readings.

The post Only Jackasses Use Whom: Andy Devine appeared first on The Faster Times.