Amy Sayre Baptista Interview at The Conversant

9L contributor and U of I alumna Amy Sayre Baptista was interviewed, along with fellow writer Millicent Borges Accardi, at the monthly online journal The Conversant. Both writers, interviewed by Rosebud Ben-Oni, discuss their explorations of their Portuguese heritage and other influences on their poetry.

Bryan Furuness Interview on Fiction Writers Review

9L editor Philip Graham has a fascinating discussion with 9L contributor and long-time good buddy Bryan Furuness over at Fiction Writers Review. If you haven't read Bryan's debut novel The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson, you need to do so ASAP!

Philip Graham interviews Angela Woodward at Fiction Writers Review

Creative Nonfiction Editor Philip Graham interviews Angela Woodward about her novel End of the Fire Cult (Ravenna Press) at Fiction Writers Review. Excerpts from End of the Fire Cult appeared in Ninth Letter's Spring/Summer 2010 issue.

5 (or so) Questions with Oliver Bendorf

Former 9L staffer Eduardo Gabrieloff spoke with Oliver Bendorf about his poem "I Promised Her My Hands Wouldn't Get Any Larger," which appears in the Spring/Summer 2012 (vol. 9, no. 1) issue of Ninth Letter. They talk about gender, the surreal, and relinquishing control of your poem, among other topics. Enjoy!

Eduardo: "I Promised Her My Hands Wouldn't Get Any Larger" has a wonderful surreal magical sense to it, but I also get a sense that it is entirely factual. To what extent do you try to spice up reality in your work?

Oliver: Ideally, if I'm paying attention, reality doesn't need any spicing up from me. That's the whole thing, right? It's already so bizarre and magical if we have our eyes open. I'm trans, which in some ways is a surreal experience every day. I feel pretty aware of monstrosity, transformation, juxtaposition, feeling like a walking non sequitur... in a way that is entirely factual for how I move through the world. I wrote this poem at a time when my usual desires to able to plan and control were frustrated by just this huge sense of the unknown. I mean, I still don't know whether my hands will get any larger. (I hope my feet don't, because I can't afford a new shoe wardrobe!) So maybe I have no business promising anyone anything, but the desire is still there, for the beast to reassure the beauty. And that feels real to me. At the same time, when I wrote this poem, I remember being intentional about trying to grasp the kind of strangeness I wanted. I had to really work for that "busted headlights" image.

Eduardo: Your gender identity throws this poem in interesting directions. Can you talk about how you feel gender is expressed in this poem? Also, how do you think a person who doesn't know you're trans would read the poem?

Oliver: To me, this poem doesn't actually take on gender so much as the experience of being inside a body at the brink of change. And who isn't inside one of those? We all go through transformations in our body, big and small, and we all watch people we love go through these transformations, be it puberty, illness, aging, pregnancy, a new haircut, someone's kids growing up too fast. When I wrote this poem, I was most interested in the ways we react to, and interact with, those transformations, whether we're excited or scared as hell or uncertain or decide we're going to trace hands to feel better. None of this I think is particular to being trans, or requires knowing that the poet is trans, though of course transitioning can be one of those ways a body changes. I believe in a common denominator here without flattening experience into a universality. This is the first time I've talked about the poem publicly, so I think a lot of people have read it without knowing the poet was trans, and I feel confident that they did just fine. I think poets encounter and connect with the work of other poets all the time without having information about their identity. The hope is that our writing stands on its own.

Having said all that, this poem definitely feels related to gender, to masculinity, for me. The hands are something about power-- who has it, how to wield it, how it shifts. The other week I watched a video of the neuroscientist Ramachandran trying to help a man with phantom limb pain. The guy had one hand amputated and he felt like it was constantly clenched in a fist, but he couldn't unclench it because the hand was gone. So Ramachandran had him put his remaining hand in a kind of mirror device that reflected the hand over to where his missing hand was. And he was able to watch himself unclenching the fist because of the mirrored reflection. My professor Lynda Barry says that that's the same as what images do, in art, in poetry. Not a trick, but medicine. I don't know that this informs the craft part of making an image, but maybe it just happens accidentally, with our obsessions. Somehow hands became for me the mirror box that I kept turning to about gender. 

Eduardo: Let me ask you about the busted headlights image. To me, it helps take the poem outside the weird domestic space of this household and into a bizarre nature when coupled with the last line. You say you had to work for that image. What problems did you have getting to it or getting it to work?

Oliver: The first image I tried in this spot was so forgettable that I can't remember what it was. I didn't even save that draft. My housemate at the time read the first draft and suggested I make that image weirder, and she was right. But then I had to figure out what kind of weird. When I landed on the busted headlights image, I decided to keep it, though I'm not sure I knew why at the time, beyond that it felt right. I liked that it was a gaze both broken and ominous. Now, two years later, I can say things like: busted headlights know something you don't, have seen something you haven't. I can say: it's a power dynamic, it's about agency, who's in charge here? But at the time I was writing, I'm sure I wasn't thinking so analytically. I was coming up with possibilities based on sound and a gut feeling. "All problems are musical problems," said Dean Young. I think that was the case here. So when I landed on the image and it sounded right, I felt like I could move on.

Eduardo: I think this is a common problem for poets: relinquishing control of your poem to the poem and hoping you can hold on enough to understand where it ends up. Did you feel like you had to guide the poem to fit the image? Or did you let the image sit? Is this an issue you face in other poems?

Oliver: Guiding this poem, not really. Maybe suturing, in that one spot. Some poems need more guiding than others and with this one it was more a sense that I ought to get out of the way. I don't always understand how my poems end up where they do, planner though I am. It's too much work to be a completely omniscient poet, and never as fun to read. My first poetry teacher Caroline Manring explained the work of poetry as a "between Scylla and Charybdis" scenario: you have to navigate between two evils, two mythical sea monsters. One is the scattershot chaos that is, to some degree, necessary for generating creative work; the other is the kind of discipline and critical eye applied toward one's own chaotic creation. Ideally it's a light guiding touch. Too much chaos and you're a hot mess. Too much discipline and you're a bore. This is true of being a poet but also specifically for creating image systems. I think once we begin to write a poem, we are no longer in control; we can't be. I think this is why people sometimes compare making art to having a child: your heart is out there in this thing that came from you but that you no longer control. It's a spectacular ache.

Eduardo: I'm a parent currently trying to potty train a 3 year old: I like to pretend I had control at some point. But I just hope for the best and try as hard as I can to at least understand what's about to happen. But then your kid/poem poops on the floor at daycare. And laughs while doing it and you have to reevaluate everything.

You've had a lot of success recently. But with the constant struggle you describe between chaos and discipline, what would you say are the writing challenges you still face consistently?

Oliver: Where do I start? Does it suffice to say "the usual"? I don't take any poem I write for granted; for all the poems I've written, there's no recipe to show for it, no formula that works every time. For every new poem I write, I feel lucky because I wasn't sure whether there was another one coming. I know that sounds melodramatic. I'm a poet: melodrama is another challenge.

But aside from the challenge of actually writing poems, there is that other beast of figuring out how I want to be a poet in the world. I'm at the brink of graduating from an MFA program and living in uncertainty about what I will do next. I recently read John Muir's journals and letters from his Yosemite years and there's one where he's tired of the nomadic life, and he writes, "Last month brought... winter and rain, so a roof became necessary, and the question came, What shall I do? Where shall I go?" I kind of know what he meant. Should I fling myself at every fellowship application out there, chop up my calender into blocks of residencies, apply to things because I feel like I'm supposed to? Or should I stay in one place and start a farm with my girlfriend and our goats while I finish my first manuscript? It's hard sometimes, maybe especially for emerging poets, to see a big picture clearly through all the pieces of fellowships, submissions, Duotrope, deadlines, contests, AWP, etc... and it's complicated by the fact that a roof is necessary. I like writing poems. I like it when people read my poems. I like having time and money to write my poems. So how much am I willing to engage with the poetry business machine? How do I do it in a way that builds good will and doesn't suck my soul away? How public or private should I be? And, back to Muir's questions, what shall I do? Where shall I go? I don't have these answers yet.

There's an interview with Hélène Cixous from 1984 where she's talking about Kafka, and she says, "He is someone who, in the writing/living conflict, honestly said: writing should win, and so I lose my life. It’s true that, knowing writing should win, he laid down his life, he paid with his life, with his flesh, with his body, with his lungs, for knowing it. And what I find absolutely admirable and moving, is that when writing won, he wept bitterly.”

I want desperately to believe that I don't have to choose, won't be made to choose. I want it to be more of a dialectic. I want my writing and my living to push against each other in productive ways; maybe I don't even want to know, at a given moment, which one it is that I'm engaged in. Jack Gilbert won Yale Younger and then he chose Greece, you know? He chose love. He exiled himself from po' biz. But he understood that po' biz was not poetry. I want to write that on my own face or something so that I never forget it.

Thanks to Eduardo and Oliver for such a wonderful conversation! To read "I Promised Her My Hands Wouldn't Get Any Larger," pick up a copy of vol. 9, no. 1 in our webstore. 

5 (or so) Questions with Edward Kelsey Moore

For this edition of 5 (or so) Questions, I had the pleasure to correspond with Edward Kelsey Moore about his essay, "Piaf and Roadkill" from the current issue. Edward's debut novel, The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat, which will be published in March, is a Summer 2013 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. He is also a professional cellist, which we talk about a little bit here. Other topics covered: humor, novels, and the trap of worrying about masculinity. An excerpt from "Piaf and Roadkill" appeared on the blog in December, which you can read here. Enjoy!

  

9L: I loved how the essay is able to deal with some rather big, complicated topics, such as what it may or may not mean to be a “real man” while also maintaining a lot of heart and humor. Was it difficult to find those places in the storyline to contemplate those bigger issues?

Edward Kelsey Moore: No, I wouldn’t say it was difficult.  From the beginning, I approached it as an essay about serious issues.  But it’s my nature to attempt to work through even the most complicated and unpleasant events of my life with humor.  So writing the essay as the tale of a funny and weird thing that happened to me and the story of how I came to more fully understand something about myself was really the only way it occurred to me to write it.  Even when the story about the animal, the old car, the local bureaucracy, and me was just an anecdote I laughed about with my friends over cocktails, I thought of it as a comic take on my unease with the topic of my own masculinity and the unexpected return of youthful feelings of inadequacy.

9L: In the essay, you write, “… as soon as I slammed shut the hood of my car, I had been aware that the revulsion I felt was keeping company with shame.” Ryan Van Meter (vol. 8, no. 1) has said, "to write about shame is to look back at the moment of the intensity of that feeling, and to figure out what dynamics were at work underneath the moment that inspired such feeling." I’ve thought about that statement and your essay a lot in terms of my own relationship to masculinity as a gay man and I wondered if writing this essay helped you come to terms with shame or the uneasiness of your masculinity? It also made me wonder why masculinity or the perception of masculinity is really an issue at all?

EKM: I think that whenever you write something about yourself and attempt to make it as true as possible, you are given the opportunity to understand yourself a bit better. So writing the essay was another step in my ongoing journey toward sorting out my feelings about the issue of masculinity.  

I am a middle-aged man who left the closet decades ago. I’m also the product of a conservative and deeply religious home.  In order to be happy and healthy, I’ve had to think a lot about shame over the years.  If anyone had asked me if I had successfully resolved my feelings about masculinity the day before the incident, I’d have answered yes. By the next evening, after I’d written the first draft of the essay, I’d have answered the question differently.

In addition to being total BS, the idea of measuring your masculinity against some arbitrary standard is a trap, especially for gay men. It’s a rigged game specifically designed to result in self-loathing.  But it’s hard not to fall into the trap when you’ve been spoon-fed certain stereotypes since infancy. I get the impression that younger men struggle less with this. And I hope that’s the case.

9L: Does being a musician, a cellist, have any influence on the way you write or vice versa? 

EKM: I think being a musician has a great deal of influence on the way I write. When I started writing, I found myself creating these wandering, unwieldy stories that fell apart halfway through. Since my musical experience was so much more extensive than my writing experience, I looked to music to give structure to my work. I don’t want to get too music nerd-y about it, but what I did was imagine that I was writing stories in sonata form. It really helped me. 

It’s harder to describe the influence writing has on me as a cellist. Mostly, writing makes me centered and happy and that has made everything easier for me, including playing. Of course, I might have a very different take on how writing influences my musical life after my debut novel comes out next month. That “centered and happy” thing might bite the dust.

9L: Congratulations on your debut novel! What are you most excited and/or nervous about concerning its release? 

EKM: Thank you. It might be a case of ignorance being bliss, but I’m not terribly nervous. I am excited about every aspect of it, though. One of the nice things about this experience coming later in life for me than it does for most debut novelists is that I haven’t the least desire to affect cool aloofness or to act the role of the tortured artiste. Neither of those things is attractive after 40. I’m just damn happy and eager to see what comes next.

9L: What's the last thing you read that you really loved and couldn't wait to tell people about?

EKM: I really loved Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang.  It’s so many of the things I enjoy in a novel—funny, sad, truly original.  I’ve read some fine books over the past several months, but The Family Fang is the one I tell my friends they need to read. 

Thank you very much to Edward for taking the time to answer my questions. To read "Piaf and Roadkill" and all the other wonderful fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in vol. 9, no. 2, pick up a copy in our webstore. 

Place-Making Fiction: An Interview with Ben Stroud

We are thrilled to present the first in a series of interviews Scott Geiger, guest editor of Man-Made Lands, conducted with some of the contributors to this special edition of Ninth Letter. Take it away, Scott.

This Columbus Day I took Ben Stroud and his family through the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland. In the courtyard of Ohio City’s historic Jesuit high school, we recorded the following conversation. The interview looks back on his “The Bandanese Curse,” which I commissioned for Ninth Letter’s first chapbook supplement, Man-Made Lands. We also discussed his unusual travel habits, how to research for fiction, innovation in writing workshops, and his upcoming collection of short fiction, Byzantium, winner of the 2012 Bakeless Prize.

Ben Stroud’s stories have appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Ecotone, Boston Review, and other magazines. He teaches creative writing at the University of Toledo.


Scott Geiger: “The Bandanese Curse” surprised me. The framework we originally discussed, the ideas that became Man-Made Lands, had to do with telling stories about the built environment—buildings, cities, landscapes we inhabit. I hadn’t expected any of the contributors to set their work in the past, as you have. Pretty naïve, I know. What made you choose the history of the Geelvinck Hinlopen House in Amsterdam for your subject?

Ben Stroud:  I found the house by chance through my own lame travel habits. When I’m traveling, anytime there’s someone’s old house that you can go into or a house museum, I like to do it. In May 2010, when we were in Amsterdam, we purchased a tourist pass and there were three house museums included on it. I’m also cheap, so if there’s anything of remote interest on this pass I’m going to do it. So we went to the Geelvinck House. It was probably the most elegant of the houses. It had this beautiful garden behind the house, and it fronted on two different canals, so it was this really beautiful place. It happened that one of the Dutch guides there latched on to us and really wanted to tell us about the history of the house. He mentioned that whatever millionaire owns it now (it’s still in private hands) was very aware of its history, and there were all these pieces there that signal a connection to the slave trade. That’s not in the story itself, but the idea that there was a darker history to the house comes from that. At a certain point he said something about the wood floors and how they were built out of a ship. I found that really fascinating, houses owned by the city’s traders made out of ships. He was even beating on the floor with his foot. This stuck with me.  I had too many projects then and couldn’t find a place for this house,  but I knew I would return to it. It’s a fascinating place, the house and the floors, the world we were part of there.

SG: And it’s one of the more architecturally radical stories in the set, actually. The seventeenth century setting augments that effect. What is history doing in your fiction? Or, what is your fiction doing to history? 

BS: One of the things you’re always thinking about as a writer is, what am I bringing to the table? What am I doing differently? Most historical fiction writers, whether highly literary like Jim Shepherd or, like, whatever bodice-ripper writer, you know, will write about real people,  fictionalize their lives. What’s brilliant about Jim Shepard is that he’ll take people maybe you don’t know about or some corner of history you don’t know about and write about that.  Though some of his things will be major things or events, Hadrian’s Wall, what’s that like? Or he’ll take you on the Hindenburg.  I like to go to more obscure places, to things that I just find fascinating, where there are holes in history and people don’t know as much about it. This gives me a lot of freedom as a writer. I’m not as interested in writing about real people but instead finding fictional people and thinking about the experience of that time. In that way, you can get at what’s universal about that time. We have these wooden ideas of history.

One of the things that’s being discussed in the dinner scene at the end of the story “Byzantium,” and I know it’s very obscure, is the rise of Islam. No one at this point is aware that it’s going to become this epoch-making event.  A touchstone for me, especially when writing “Byzantium,” was a story by Flaubert, “Herodias” in Three Tales. That story has such a magnificent ending—I couldn’t even gesture toward it. The characters in the story have no idea of what’s really going on. The reader notices, and you’re like, Oh…. I’m after these small moments that have something happening beneath them.

On the other hand, those moments can’t be the only thing a story has going for it. It has to give you more.  In “Byzantium,” one of the major notions that emerged in writing it was the moral sacrifice in serving an Empire, a connection that I hope reaches forward to today.  But I’ve always been fascinated by history, fascinated by other worlds. Half the pleasure in writing a story for me is building the world of the story.

SG: Do you research your fiction?


BS: I immerse myself. With “The Bandanese Curse,” I sort of buried myself over Christmas Break with all of these texts about that period of Dutch history and Dutch culture. One of these was great book that ties the history of Dutch painting to international trade. With “Byzantium,” I found a book called Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which had stories about the lives of monks, one of which is referenced in the story. It helped me get a sense of the psychology of the period. I bury myself fairly deeply, but I always try to shake off whatever’s not relevant to the story as quickly as possible. That can be difficult.

SG: Would you ever put together a syllabus around researching for fiction? What would that class look like?

BS: It’s funny that you asked that. Before I left the University of Alabama I had pitched a senior level creative writing course on research and writing. It’s a course that I’m interested in teaching, since it’s a subject a lot of people get scared about.

The way I’ve developed my approach is by asking questions. When I was doing my MFA, I would ask any writer who came through town or any writer on faculty, anyone who did anything historical, how did you create this world in your book? I got a variety of answers, from Edward P. Jones, who said I did no research, to Steven Millhauser, who said I was looking up what kind of lamp posts were being put up in New York City in 1898. Asking questions gave me some liberty, because both of these guys created these beautiful worlds, so anything in between either pole is fine. Now it’s about finding out what helps me.
I had some other good advice from Peter Ho Davies. He told me the only person who’s going to catch you is an expert on the subject you’re writing about, and they’re not going to really read your book anyway. If they do, they’ll be looking for mistakes. As writers, we get anxious about the mistakes we might make historically, but our audience isn’t going to catch them as long as they’re not critical to the fiction.

This year I was teaching The Great Gatsby (not a historical book, I know), and I was reading in the notes about all the logical mistakes Fitzgerald made. If you really look at what’s happening, some of the things Fitzgerald describes are impossible. The same thing with some Sherlock Holmes stories. The solutions to some of the mysteries don’t make any sense; Arthur Conan Doyle is just making it up. There’s one where a snake climbs up a rope, for example.  Then in the footnote the editor says a snake this size couldn’t climb a rope, much less do all these other things Doyle has it doing.  Still, these mistakes don’t take away from the pleasure of reading a Sherlock Holmes novel or the pleasure of reading The Great Gatsby.

Research is in service to story, so for me it’s less about figuring out how to do research than about how to think about the research.

SG: When does structure come about in your process? Like, when did you know that “The Bandanese Curse” would have a frame tale and inset back story about the Walvis? 

BS: I’m sure other people have used the metaphor of a trellis with vines growing around it. Once I know the structure, I can let the story grow. Usually, structure comes really early for me, while I’m doing research.  I care a lot about plot. With “The Bandanese Curse,” I used a horror-ghost story plot. I’ve liked using plotty-genre elements, and part of that has been me trying to figure out plot. When you go to genre you already have plot mapped for you. As I’ve been writing more and more, I’ve been backing away from straight-up mystery, straight-up ghost story, while hopefully still writing interesting plots. Because the can’t be all about the world, which is often my first draw. And then—this will make me sound like a terrible writer—character comes in later. Only once I understand what these people are doing can I figure out who they are.

SG: “The Bandanese Curse,” as a historical fiction, resembles the title story of your collection. Yet that’s not the only kind of story you do. You’ve also published some accomplished, very thoughtful contemporary realism. How do you relate the writer of “The Bandanese Curse” and “Byzantium” to the writer of “Eraser” or “At Boquillas”?

BS: One relationship is that place is key to all of the stories. With “At Boquillas,” I wrote that story while on vacation with my parents and my wife in Big Bend, where the characters are. I drafted the story in the car right after the hike the characters do, I was so gripped by it.  Pretty much all the details, aside from the characters themselves and their problems, were taken from that hike. That place and its strangeness made me want to write about it. The lure to write that story is the same lure to write a story set in nineteenth century Germany. The drive has to do with place.

For me, too, if I keep writing in the same world, I get a little bored sometimes. So I shift, I go to another world.

SG: What’s the proportion of historical fiction to contemporary realism in your upcoming collection from Graywolf? 

BS: There are ten stories, six historical, four contemporary. I first started some of these stories as early as seven years ago, and this connects to my development as a writer. The contemporary stories are either the first stories I wrote or the ones I wrote most recently. The heavy emphasis on the historical mode is sort of an accident. Once I figured out how to write historical fiction, I wanted to keep writing more.  And this was pretty much at the same time I started to figure out fiction (as much as possible—I mean, that’s an ongoing struggle).  So because of this convergence most of the decent stories I’ve managed to put together happen to be historical.  Plust two of these historical stories I took from a failed novel.  

SG: My central inspirations for Man-Made Lands were two studios I had participated in a few years ago. These studios addressed specific subjects—one was strictly architectural, involving sea level rise and waterfront cities; the other was multidisciplinary, and it was about quarantines. I wonder how this focus-format translates to the writing workshop. For example, would you ever teach a workshop on fictions set in Renaissance Europe or a workshop addressing something even more specific, say, faith-healer figures?

BS: I think it would be interesting to teach a workshop where you are that focused. You could have focused readings and focused discussions on problems that arise when you’re trying to write in this kind of world.
Even if you focused on historical fiction or even more finely on fictions set in Renaissance Europe, you still have so many different choices. If you do Renaissance England, you have George Garrett with his Elizabeth and James books, and the Hilary Mantel books. I think Garrett has been kind of forgotten, and that could be a great question: what is Hilary Mantel doing differently from George Garrett? How might that then relate to what I’m doing or you’re doing as a writer.

I think the big thing would be just making sure you have the students who would be engaged. I think it would be hard to teach that kind of class in a university setting. Even at a top-notch MFA program, you might be able to find two people interested in that kind of class. If you were to do that at a conference, though, and attract the right people then that might be a really engaging, interesting course to teach or participate in.

To read "The Bandanese Curse," visit our webstore to pick up a copy of Man-Made Lands.

5 (or so) Questions with Joseph Gross

Recently I had the pleasure of corresponding with Joseph Gross about his essay from our current issue (vol. 9, no. 1), "Picnic Geese." As you'll see below we talked about memory, the 1980s, how to write about emotional moments, and so much more. Enjoy!

Ninth Letter: The essay engages with the idea of memory, specifically how different members of your family remember the events of the essay differently, which is immediately introduced in the opening sentence when you say, "we disagreed how and when we picked up the shotgun the time my dad, younger brother, and I killed two geese in a public park." When you decided to write the essay was the memory issue something you knew up front that you wanted to tackle or did that come about as you wrote the essay?

Joseph Gross: I intended for years to write that story, but I focused on my family’s differing opinions because they simply dominated our renditions. I sought out and taped my brother and dad’s version of events because the events took place so long ago, and because there wasn’t a hell of a lot to the narrative—we drove to the park, shot the geese, and drove back. There was plucking. So the story lay in the details, and the details differed wildly. They differed so much, in fact, some of us felt a little insulted. When you write nonfiction about your family with whom you hope to continue close relationships, some compromise finds its way into your work, and in this case no compromise was necessary, a pleasant by-product of the approach, at least. Pointing out our differences seemed more interesting, too, than rectifying them. I learned more about myself from what I didn't remember. I learned, of course, that my memory makes me look better when it gets a chance, but it’s the memoir writer’s job to scrutinize the way we twist and slide into who we become and how we represent the past.

9L: The narrative and the issues of memory are woven together nicely, so it never feels like, okay we're stopping the story to contemplate the idea of memory, it just happens very naturally. What was the process like of bringing those two strands together. I guess this is more of an actual writing process question. Did you work on both aspects at the same time or did you write out the narrative first and then looked at places where you could address the memory issues?  

JG: Thank you! As I wrote the narrative, most of the reflective writing emerged with it, in part because I tend to write slowly (painfully). I did spend a lot of editing time later balancing how long and how often I split from the action—moving some elements around, shaping or even removing others. The long list of guns on my dad’s bedroom wall, for example, seemed to threaten the narrative flow, but I really wanted it! Thank you, Ninth Letter Editors, for your tolerance. The slow process of interviewing my family and the distance in time of the story provided opportunities for reflection before writing, too. Although that approach might kill some of the wonderful discovery process in writing out a story, I was comforted to have an idea where I was going.

9L: When it comes to writing about family, or really anyone you know, how difficult is it to balance creating them as a character for the essay as you see them vs. how they might see themselves? It's kind of an unique characteristic to nonfiction in that you're representing actual people. That can happen in fiction too, but it's also a little different in that genre. You said you didn't have to compromise for this essay, but in cases where you have, if you have, is that something you worked out on your own as you wrote it? 

JG: Depicting real people, some of whom you love, reveals the blessing/curse at the heart of personal nonfiction. Priceless bits of personality and relationship return from the edge of disappearance! Sense, or at least some kind of redemption is approached from our suffering! But our actual relationships affect the creative desire to shape a character how we’d like, and we have to weigh the emotional consequences of revealing. Creating trust in the reader with honesty can risk loss of trust in real life. Still, I think balancing artistic impulse with real life helps achieve the believability nonfiction requires, and this balancing, this compromise, happens for me during even the initial phases of writing. While I write about them, I imagine my mother or wife reading about themselves. I want them to be pleased and I want to write well, too. If a writer finds that impossible, the subject might not be worth exploring. And, of course, the whole process is flawed as any art:  the character of your father never achieves becoming your father. The character father’s an impostor, trying with all he’s got to fasten your real dad to the impermanent world.

9L: The events of the essay take place in the early 80s and the time period makes it seem like you could get away with shooting geese in a park more easily than if it happened now. Were you concerned at all with trying to capture the spirit of the early 80s as much as telling this family story?

JG: I was really thinking more about the difference between my dad’s childhood in the 1940s and mine in the 80s, but the continuing trend toward caution in childcare does make the action of the story stand out. My hopes were more to preserve my dad’s attitude and sense of adventure than the popular culture of the period. And although I did make some references to the looseness of the era, like the approach to seatbelts back then, I thought making that a distinct thread would undermine the sense of the softness of my childhood in comparison to his. The story might have held up well with more 80s culture included, of course. It would be fun to dress a piece in a polo shirt and skinny leather tie and put it in pin-striped jeans with penny loafers. Maybe.

9L: This question is a little more about the general experience of writing nonfiction. Essentially, how do you handle writing about personal, perhaps emotional things, then sharing that with the world without being able to hide behind the veil of fiction? 

JG: Writing about the personal and emotional as nonfiction just requires a writer who doesn't mind telling everybody he meets about himself. The kind of person you learn a lot more about on a bus ride than you’d hope. And that’s me, I guess. Sometimes a story gets worked out through telling on a bus or a car ride (sorry, passengers!). Then I tell as much as I’m willing on paper, which may still be more than you’d hope. Writing about others, as we discussed, is trickier, but I worry about my fictional characters making inferences to family and friends, too. One problem I do have with emotional nonfiction is that I cry when I read it out loud. I've cried in workshops, at readings. Embarrassing.

9L: The goose you and your family eat for dinner in the essay ends up tasting, well, not great, which makes me wonder if you now have a favorite recipe for chicken or turkey or whatever your fowl of choice might be? 

JG: My fowl of choice has remained decidedly non-gamey. While I like to barbecue, my favorite recipe for chicken is coq-au-vin, which seems to translate directly as "chicken of the wine." I think the name speaks for itself.


Thank you very much to Joe for taking the time to answer my questions. To read "Picnic Geese" and all the other wonderful fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in vol. 9, no. 1, pick up a copy in our webstore.

Micro Interview: Roxane Gay

We'll wrap up our WORDHARVEST micro interviews with Roxane Gay, author of Ayiti. I want to take a moment to thank Roxane and all the WORDHARVEST readers for taking the time to answer my questions. This is going to be a great reading, folks! Okay, let's hear from Roxane.

Ninth Letter: How do you prepare for a reading? Any pre-show rituals? 

Roxane Gay: Sometimes I vomit. Sometimes I drink. Sometimes I just pretend I'm not actually going to have to read before an audience. None of these work very well.


9L: When deciding which material to read, do you try to anticipate or take into account how the audience might react to what you read based on the event or venue? 

RG: I definitely think about audience at readings. Writing should entertain, particularly when being read aloud so I try to blend funny, shorter pieces with my more serious stories so that people can have a good time and not feel like OMG I AM AT ANOTHER LITERARY READING.


9L: What's one of your favorite moments from a reading, either yours or one you've attended?

RG: My favorite moment was at the Literary Death Match 200 at AWP 2012, during the spell off. My friend and I spelled Dostoevsky with an e but the host thought it was spelled with a y. An audience member Googled and found out that the name is spelled both ways and instead of losing LDM, I won! A close second is when I read at Sunday Salon in NYC and read a story about expired yogurt and a woman in the audience got visibly nauseous. Good times. As an audience member, it's always electric to see Scott McClanahan or Amelia Gray read.

WORDHARVEST starts at 4pm on Saturday, September 29, at Cowboy Monkey in Champaign, IL. More details about the event can be found here. Hope to see you tomorrow!

Micro Interview: Jensen Beach

Today is WORDHARVEST eve, so we'll have micro interviews with the two remaining readers to celebrate.  First, we have Jensen Beach, author of For Out of the Heart Proceed as well as a contributor to our vol. 8, no. 1 issue. Here are his responses to my questions about prepping for a reading. Enjoy!

Ninth Letter: How do you prepare for a reading? Any pre-show rituals?

Jensen Beach: Well, I get kind of nervous when I read, so if the reading's at a bar, I'll usually have a drink to loosen up. But I find I can't drink too much or I'll get tongue-tied. Otherwise, I don't really have too many rituals. I try not to think too much about the reading in the days leading up to it. If I do, I find myself planning out how I'll introduce each story and that never really works out like I plan it; so I find it works best for me to just wing it.

9L: When deciding which material to read, do you try to anticipate or take into account how the audience might react to what you read based on the event or venue?

JB: Usually, I'll think of a few options for what I might want to read and make a decision at the reading. I try to read things that feel right for who's there and for the tone or nature of the reading. I usually won't read things with too much sex in them, for example, if my mother or my boss are in the audience. But that rarely happens, so usually I'm comfortable reading whatever. I kind of let my mood decide the first thing I read and then go from there. I'm making it sound way more complicated than it should be.

9L: What's one of your favorite moments from a reading, either yours or one you've attended?

JB: Back in 1999 or 2000 or so I saw Sherman Alexie read at Moe's in Berkley. I don't remember what he was there to read, if he had a  book out or anything, but the reading was great. Sherman Alexie is famous
for being a funny reader a great oral storyteller, and this reading was great. The best part of the reading, though, wasn't him. It was a fistfight that broke out near the back of the audience. These two women got into it over a seat. I was sitting right next to them. First there was some muffled shouting, then it escalated into pushing. Finally, the two started throwing punches. It was pretty surreal. One of the women got her earring ripped out. There was blood kind of splattered down her shoulder. They kept shouting at each other. Sherman Alexie, of course, stopped reading and the audience all turned and looked at the fight. It happened pretty quickly. Someone broke up the fight and one of the woman shouts to Sherman Alexie, "Hey, Sherman, just like the rez, huh?" And Sherman Alexie just said, "No, nothing like that." Then he went back to the reading. It was perfect.

WORDHARVEST starts at 4pm tomorrow at Cowboy Monkey in Champaign, IL. More details about the event can be found here. Check back later today for our next micro interview with Roxane Gay.

Micro Interview: Chad Simpson

Today's WORDHARVEST micro interview is with Chad Simpson, author of the very soon to be released, Tell Everyone I said Hi, which won the 2012 John Simmons Fiction Award. Enjoy!

Ninth Letter:  How do you prepare for a reading? Any pre-show rituals?

Chad Simpson: I usually practice reading to my cat Disco. While I read, Disco purrs and rubs up against my leg. She mewls. I feel like I’m really making a connection with my audience. Mostly, though, I time myself during theses practice runs, to make sure I’m going to stay within my time constraints, so as not to anger either the audience or the people with whom I’m reading.

As for pre-show rituals, I like bourbon. I mean, in general, I like bourbon. It’s not a ritual or anything but occasionally I’ll have one or two before I give a reading.

9L: When deciding which material to read, do you try to anticipate or take into account how the audience might react to what you read based on the event or venue?

CS: I do, but not much. I write mostly sad stories, which don’t go over as well at readings as, say, funny stories. So, really, there’s not much for me to take into account, since I only have certain things to offer. I do, however, write a lot of stories that aren’t very long, so the biggest thing for me to think about is whether I want to read two or three short stories, or the first half of something longer.

9L: What's one of your favorite moments from a reading, either yours or one you've attended?

CS: This is easy: About six years ago, I went to see Tim O’Brien give a reading at Augustana College. I was a huge fan prior to the reading, which is why my wife Jane and I made the 45-minute drive to see him, and his performance just blew us away. He basically told a story for the first half hour of the reading, like we were all sitting at a bar. He didn’t look down at any notes, didn’t flip through the bookmarked pages of some text. He just talked, and it was mesmerizing. He said smart stuff, funny stuff; he juggled tropes. When he was done, he said that the story he’d just told us was the “real” story of what had become the first chapter of his novel-in-progress. Then, to top things off, he read a short piece he’d published fairly recently, “A Letter To My Son,” which was heartbreaking and honest and just beautiful. I don’t think there was a person in the audience who wasn’t crying. And if there was, that person probably has no soul, and is not worth thinking much about.



WORDHARVEST is this Saturday, September 29 at 4pm at Cowboy Monkey in Champaign, IL. More details about the event can be found here. Check back tomorrow for our next micro interview with Jensen Beach.

Micro Interview: Amy Sayre

The next WORDHARVEST reader on the micro interview docket is another graduate of the University of Illinois MFA program, Amy Sayre. Amy's haunting story, "Whatsoever," appears in the current issue of Ninth Letter. You can check out a longer interview I did with her earlier this year about the story. She is also now a playwright. Her play, The Widows of Whitechapel, will open at The Legacy Theater in Springfield, IL on October 13.

Ninth Letter: How do you prepare for a reading? Any pre-show rituals?

Amy Sayre: Preparation includes traveling about my neighborhood on a pogo stick reciting my work. For me the gravitational pull of the pogo while speaking dramatically is challenging, so by default that makes the reading seem quite easy. Pre-show rituals, by that do you mean activities besides tarot card reading, contacting deceased ancestors via Ouija board and wine? I don't know if those count or not. Sometimes, when the previously mentioned fail, I just read my work aloud a few times to a glass of river water. These were all techniques I was taught in MFA by Professor Michael Madonick. He also suggested wigs.

9L: When deciding which material to read, do you try to anticipate or take into account how the audience might react to what you read based on the event or venue?

AS: I don't take the audience into account.I think if someone asks me to read, they understand the darkness they have just invited in their door. But, this is not always the case, a few years ago, at a reading in Pennsylvania, I was describing a character partaking in a ritual that included setting fire to a unicorn's umbilical cord. A woman in the crowd hustled over to a nearby piano and began pounding the ivories to drown me out. She was afraid my work might offend the sensibilities of a group of Catholic seminary students in attendance.  The seminarians, however, gave me a standing ovation. The seminarians were from New Orleans, though I don't know if that had anything to do with their enthusiasm for my work.

9L: What's one of your favorite moments from a reading, either yours or one you've attended? 

AS: Once at AWP (the  best stories all begin this way, right?), Ricki Ducornet began a reading of what the audience thought was a non-fiction piece, then proceeded to break into a totally made-up language which included a set of outrageous sounds and utterances with origins wholly unknown. Slowly, the audience realizes that she is having them on, but she never broke character throughout the entire reading. I loved her work prior to the reading, but after that, I flat adored her. It  was brave and brilliant, exemplifying the artist that she is.

Details, including time and location for Saturday's WORDHARVEST can be found here.

Micro Interview: Ted Sanders

It's WORDHARVEST week! Over the next few days, I'll be posting micro interviews with the readers. First up is University of Illinois MFA alum and author of No Animals We could Name, Ted Sanders.

Ninth Letter: How do you prepare for a reading? Any pre-show rituals? 

Ted Sanders: My major preps are making sure the piece is the right length--which I have down pretty scientifically by now--and then lint-brushing the cat hair off my front. Otherwise I'm pretty anti-ritual. I probably have some displays of fussiness of which I'm largely unaware.

9L: When deciding which material to read, do you try to anticipate or take into account how the audience might react to what you read based on the event or venue? 

TS: Yes, I guess I do, but prefer to read stuff that's totally new. If I don't have that, I pick something that I know is likely to go over well for almost any audience there might be. Readings generally happen either in the quarantined quiet of the bookstore/academic scene or in the greater chaos of a bar. Generally I'd say the thoughtfulness or delicacy of what I choose to read is inversely proportional to both noise and alcohol levels. Bars are more likely to get the cussier, funnier stuff, though I don't always have something like that lying around, so sometimes the bar gets something too pompous, maybe, for the surroundings.

9L: What's one of your favorite moments from a reading, either yours or one you've attended?

TS: Oh, man. Seems like this could get me into trouble somehow, since for me "memorable" usually translates to "cringe-worthy." I'll confess I've not been able to completely shed the sight and sound of Patrick Lane, former grad student in the MFA here, try to read a story while playing his accordion. This was a thematic thing. Like, I think there was ambient accordion music in the story. But he hadn't really rehearsed the multi-tasking, wasn't really prepared for the complexity of the physical deed, and so it ended of being kind of awkward and earnest and plumply sweaty. Which now that I think of it, is probably not a bad thing to shoot for.

WORDHARVEST is this Saturday, September 29 at 4pm at Cowboy Monkey in Champaign, IL. Hope to see you there!

5 (or so) Questions with Amy Sayre-Roberts

It's time for a new edition of 5 (or so) Questions. This time I had the pleasure of corresponding via email with Amy Sayre-Roberts about her amazing story "Whatsoever" from the current issue (vol. 9, no.1). She's one of our favorite people around here, so it's a special treat for me to present our conversation here. Amy has some insightful things to say about Mystery, research, and many other things. Enjoy!


9L: I keep calling "Whatsoever" a history in my head, rather than just a story. It certainly has all the hallmarks of a great story, but the characters, the world they live in are so richly rendered that it takes it takes it to another level of storytelling, where I really felt like you're letting the reader in on some secrets. Was that a goal when you started writing this story? What inspired you to write this particular story?

Amy Sayre-Roberts: Thinking of the story in terms of history certainly speaks to its origin. Two things happened simultaneously that birthed the story, I was researching my parents’ house for an article—their kitchen is what remains of an 1800’s era stagecoach stop— and in the midst of going to the Cass County Historical Society, I found a reference to Whatsoever Circles which were Christian women’s groups who undertook various projects in the community. Around the same time, my father mentioned a cemetery on our property that the previous resident had ploughed under. He said a local historian had been very angry about the dismantling of the gravestones. All that information collided in my brain like a crack of thunder. The characters leapt up and the narrative unraveled quickly. In some places, the narrative arrived so swiftly I had to just write, “and then this happens and then this happens and she’ll say…” and I fleshed the prose out later. The story landed on me fully formed and demanded to be written.

I didn’t start with a goal in mind. I don’t know how to do that. I admire people who can, but I have no talent therein. I get an image or a voice, and away we go, which can mean a tremendous amount of meandering to the final draft. But is there anything better than being in that creative moment? It’s like falling in love.
With that said, I have been writing around the idea of violence against women, and violence against children for a long time. “Whatsoever” was a framework to talk about violence as a historical continuum. Because when a child is abused or a woman is raped, that is not an incident operating in a vacuum, it’s a great and terrible river fed by many streams. I wanted to show the distortion violence creates in a child, and express that from various angles and points of view.  My grandfather, William Wiley, had a saying, “Hunt or sell the gun.”  That’s sort of where I was with writing about sexual violence, I had a ball of fire in my belly and I either had to write it out or shut up about it. So I went into the beautiful madness where art can take you, if you let it.

Lastly, I would say that I adore older women. I worship at the altar of grandmothers.  To me, women over 70 are luminous and fierce individuals. No one has the equal amounts of mercy and steel as women in their eighties.  But older women often disappear in American society; they are poetry in a cult of personality and crap magazines. In my mind, overlooking these women, their intellect and experience is a fatal mistake. I hope the sisters in “Whatsoever” remind folks of that.

9L: Did you ever consider writing the story from the twins’ point of view or did Dickie feel just right given how quickly it came to you?

ASR: Dickie was always the main point of view. Life through his lens was unfamiliar territory to me and I wanted to see the whole picture his voice would paint. Though I did cut about 5 pages from the original draft that dealt more with the twins. Mostly back story. This story is part of a collection of inter-connected tales, and I do have some notes on them as children in the first person.

9L: Flannery O'Connor said something great in her essay about writers of the Grotesque, saying, such writers are more interested in the possible rather than the probable. While "Whatsoever" is certainly very grounded, there is also this sense, at least to me, that at the end of the day the possible would win out over the probable. I guess I mean to say that Mystery is very important to the story. What were the challenges, if any, in walking that line of keeping this sense of the possible/mystery, while also keeping it down to Earth?

ASR: I think you have to follow the logic of a good ghost story.  Never tell the mundane or gory facts of why there is hand hanging from the car door, just show the hand and let the imagination do the heavy lifting. The great challenge for me is always in not telling too much. I culled pages of back story that was essential to have written because the knowledge imbued the piece with a sense of history, but the reader can feel that weight without reading every word. Between what you write and what a reader can imagine is the terrain of Mystery.

It’s sort of like a whistler in the dark. We have one in our neighborhood. It was chilling the first time I heard him. So lonesome and strange having just woke from a dead sleep, and my mind was already forming a picture of the street and the dark figure the sound was emanating from. (In all fairness, he is actually just a nice man who can’t sleep and whistles as he walks, but until you know that, it’s creepy).  My point is that I tried to allow the reader a structured landscape to let loose their own imagination, then all the previous details can become devils. With "Whatsoever," I wanted to privilege the power of the unexplained.

9L: You said that you were researching your parents’ house when you found out the information that would spark "Whatsoever," so how much research did you end up doing for this story? I'm curious if you try to do as much research as possible before starting a story/project or do you research as you go? Any tips for not being dragged down into a research abyss?

ASR: I probably spent two or three days digging around in libraries, talking to people, and walking and driving the old stage coach road. I was entering into a relationship with the information because “Whatsoever” is just one story in a collection I am working on where all the research for each story feeds the other pieces as well. As soon as I had the basic details the voices started talking. Combing through local histories, newspapers, and documents grounded the story and set the tone and context. And my father is like a walking dictionary of local history and folklore, he remembers everything he has ever been told or read so talking out an idea with him is helpful.

I’ve never felt the threat of too much research or a research abyss, and I hope other writer’s don’t either. Research to me is like opening a gift. I guess I still love the Nancy Drew aspect of unraveling a mystery.  I think a writer needs to do just enough research to get the characters talking and then their language becomes the story’s landscape.

Facts are a great springboard for the imagination. I think of facts as a spark and the story you write is the fire that results, an entity all its own that both consumes and transforms the point of origin.  But the balance between research and the actual writing is intuitive. When you have researched enough, the characters start to speak. If they get quiet, you might want to go back over your notes and see what you missed. Or better yet, ask the character what you are missing. They’ll tell you. Characters are just like people, they love to talk. I believe you have to get really intimate with your characters: lay down with them, follow them through the dark places, get up under their skin, that’s where the secrets are, and that is where you find what makes them choose. And ultimately, we are what we choose.  

9L: What's the last thing you read that you really loved and couldn't wait to tell people about?

ASR: Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories by Melinda Moustakis. Brilliant. From page one, I could not put that book down. I recommend you stop what you are doing right now and get a copy. An amazing read: lyric, dark, sometimes funny, and features Malamutes in at least one story. That is an irresistible combination for me.

Thank you very much to Amy for taking the time to answer my questions. I had a blast discussing this story with her. To read "Whatsoever" and all the other wonderful fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in vol. 9, no. 1, pick up a copy in our webstore.

5 (or so) Questions with Monica Berlin

First, I have to apologize for things being so quiet here on the blog post AWP. I came down with the now infamous AWP plague and it put me behind on just about everything. Now on to the good stuff. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Monica Berlin, author of "On Beds or Where We Sleep" from the current issue. Below is our conversation. Enjoy!

9L: The essay is fragmented, telling a few different stories about grappling with change throughout the various sections, but they link together in a kind of Tetris like way. Can you talk a little bit about the process of putting the sections together. Did you always have it in mind to write it in that manner or did that evolve as you worked on it?

Monica Berlin: Hm, thinking about the essay’s structure in relation to how it works to best utilize space in such a way as to protect other later usage of space, to move the pieces in such a way as to not close off any pocket that might be required later, no? I’d love to claim that was a conscious effort, but the truth is, I’m just a remarkably slow writer. In the case of “On Beds,” I worked on it occasionally over a period of about four years. Because I started writing the essay when my son was still quite small, I was thinking about sleep a lot—this thing we have to teach babies to do, and that we have to keep teaching them to do, even as we feel we may never sleep again—at the same time as I was reading a lot about water in that so much of his life has coincided with global catastrophes involving water. Earlier drafts were certainly more linear in nature, but at some point I cut away most of the scaffolding of the piece and was left with these fragments that only seemed to be connected by their thinnest relationship to beds—these strange places where we spend a great deal of our lives, and where our lives also sometimes end. In my own sleeplessness I must have conflated beds with everything. I remember consciously thinking about how “go under,” which we use to describe submersion in water, also describes being anesthetized, also describes financial collapse, also describes grief, also describes how sleep feels sometimes, and I remember wondering if I could make an essay that somehow replicated that—although I don’t know if I actually set out to achieve such a thing or if its ridiculous to think anyone could.

Returning to a draft after having finished a book about the floods in Iowa in 2008, I started thinking a lot about rivers, about what was beneath rivers, about why we call the place where we sleep by the same name as the channel through which a river flows. And then I went back and looked at what I had written, turned toward my research, kept reading the dictionary. I suppose the connectivity linking together the essay’s sections was organic, as in I didn’t set out to organize the essay a certain way, as in as I wrote and re-wrote, read and re-read, I let the essay’s formal gestures instruct what came where, what fell away. Because I believe in making something—an essay, a poem, a story—without knowing what it will find until I find it, in hopes that I might learn something in the act of making that, ideally, the reader may also discover in the act of reading, those gestures also sent me back to exploring how we discover any single thing: how we make room for anything, how time passes, how we sleep, how we live in the places where we live, how we live at all.

9L: I'm curious how your prospective of the essay evolved as you worked on it over that four years. Also, did writing this over years make you write about the characters differently than if you had written it in say a few months?

MB: Some of the earliest sections of this were written when I wasn’t writing nonfiction. I kept trying to make poems about beds, and they weren’t working for me, for themselves, weren’t stable in that genre. First I had to learn how to write an essay, had to read a lot, had to learn how to recognize that sometimes something wants to be a poem and sometimes it wants to be an essay, and I had to figure out how that could happen and how the work would ultimately lead me to discover that. Early on, I set the beds aside to write other essays, to figure out how to write essays. Surely that’s what evolved the most: my thinking about genre, how any one thing can insist upon its poem-ness or its essay-ness or its story-ness, and my discovering that whatever I was writing I couldn’t—at the time—write any other way.

As to the characters, the evolution of characters, I’m not sure how to answer that. My son literally grows while he sleeps and wakes taller, more mature, than when he went to bed, is still at an age when such change is striking, noticeable. How he figures in my work is very much tied up in this fact and in these tender years. My father, on the other hand, is held still in time, will forever be the age he died, will never now change except in memory’s fickleness--there's no new information to draw from, no new memories being made or remembered, and yet how I understand what is there alters based on my own changing and changed-ness. Maybe what I mean to say is that the characters are based on real people, people who, in real life, change every day, who are changed by every day. In that way I guess my sense of them evolved in so much as we are all always the same and always different, right? Like the river. Like the landscapes where we find ourselves. The local, the familiar, is informed very much by the predicaments of our times and the predicament of time, and by every single other aspect of our lives. It’s the same with the people around us, isn’t it? The people who become the figures and fixtures of our writing, whose very presence elicits from us curiosity? Whose very presence, even in memory, allows us to turn inward? They are strangers to us and yet we've always known them, or we've known them their entire lives and recognize them without even needing to look up. Sometimes we are unrecognizable, even to ourselves. Sometimes—in a storm or in the dark or if the road’s under construction—we get lost on the same streets we’ve been driving for two decades. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror and we’re the same we’ve always been. Sometimes we arrive somewhere we’ve never been and it’s familiar. Sometimes we find our way by rote, by memory, through repetition.

9L: As you were working on those early sections and going through the process of figuring out what the material wanted to be, poem vs. essay, were you ever, out of frustration, if you had any concerning that issue, tempted to give up on the subject and move on to something new? If so, what got you to stick with the material?

MB: No, not really. I don't get frustrated with my writing in the way, say, you'd get frustrated by a flat tire. If I'm not writing well, I turn to something else--fold the laundry or read, check something off my to-do list, do my other job. I only get frustrated by writing when I'm not working at all for long stretches, and that frustration has less to do with the writing than with what is keeping me from it or with my own lack of discipline. When something is slipping through or I'm too close to see what the work is performing or not performing, I turn to one of my few trusted readers, someone I know will help me clear away the clutter, as it were. Teaching can help with this, too. Often, the very advice I'm giving to a student turns out to be the thing I need to try, something I can't always see until I'm thinking about it on someone else's page. As I said, I'm a pretty slow writer, so it's not uncommon for me to have a handful of pieces, all drafty, all in various stages, at any given point. Nor is it uncommon for me to walk away from a particular subject or piece that I'm working on for a while, but I'm not sure I've wholly abandoned anything I've been working on for the last ten years or so (though certainly I probably should). Moving back and forth between different genres has been an asset to my writing, in this way. Sure, I cut away things, or tuck deep certain drafts, but I guess more than anything I find I'm always writing the same few thing anyway--just looking at them differently. Which is to say, when I set aside something I'm writing because I haven't yet figured out how to make it, I write other things, try to construct it differently, circle around until I make a discovery, learn something new, see something I hadn't seen before. I'm thinking here of something Bachelard wrote about how the poet always sees the same thing, whether looking through a microscope or a telescope. Sometimes, a wide-angle lens, a long-focus shot, a fish-eye, sometimes a polaroid--that hazy coming into clarity, so quick.

9L: Have you read anything recently that you just feel in love with? Also, if someone asked you to recommend a book or two, what would be your top three recommendations?

MB: It's hard to pick just a couple of recent reads that have knocked me over, as I've been pretty overwhelmed by most of what I've been reading. Off the top of my head, Marianne Boruch's nonfiction The Glimpse Traveler and her unbelievable new collection of poems, The Book of Hours, both published in 2011. I kept loaning The Glimpse Traveler to friends, even before I finished it. I'd read fifty pages and then hand it to someone, and then it would come back to me and I'd read fifty more pages. Etc. I ended up buying an extra copy so I could read it again, and all at once, and my god. Nancy Eimers's newest, Oz, her most perfect book of poems yet. Also, Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda, Peter Orner's Love and Shame and Love, Lia Purpura's new collection of essays, Rough Likeness, and a lot of Dean Young--I've been carrying around Fall Higher since it came out last spring, am waiting very much for another new book of his poems expected out this year. I keep renewing from the library a marvelously delightful book called, Homes for the People in Suburb and Country by Gervase Wheeler, originally published in 1855. For months I kept it in my car and read it when I get stopped at a train, which happens, but then I wanted to read more of it and finally brought it in the house, which Wheeler probably would have preferred. Oh, and the Federal Writers' Project's guide to U.S. 1., and my son and I have been reading Milne's Winnie the Pooh and House at Pooh Corner. My top three recommendations, ever? Oh god. They're all game changers for me. Three? Okay, today I'd probably say: Virginia Woolf's The Waves, everything by Marianne Boruch, and Ralph Angel's Exceptions and Melancholies.

9L: Here's the last question: any advice for poets or fiction writers who are considering starting to work in nonfiction?

MB: As I said, I learned to write essays by reading a lot, and by looking closely at the genre. I was also lucky in that around the time I was doing this enrollment demands in nonfiction at the college where I teach tripled, and so I had to get up to speed very quickly and become proficient in a genre I had only admired from a far. Because I had to feel I was a legitimate practitioner in the genre, too, I started making essays, keeping in mind everything I knew about story, from my years of studying, teaching and writing fiction, and everything I knew about poems, from my years spent in poems. John D'Agata's two anthologies from Graywolf, The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay, were marvelous guides for me, as was the special issue on the lyric essay that The Seneca Review put out a few years ago. Equally valuable was (and still is) looking at work from writers who either work in multiple genres or whose work seems to defy categorization of genre in any strict sense--again, Lia Purpura, Marianne Boruch, James Baldwin, Larry Sutin, Paul Auster, Eula Biss, Jenny Boully, Claudia Rankine, oh, gosh, and Rilke--that lovely newer book out with Godine--The Inner Sky--thinking about his poems along side those prose pieces, sometimes fragments, sometimes whole essays. Oh, I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot here. Forgive me. Reading letters helped too--Bishop's letters, for example--and also, thinking about the letter as a particular kind of place where a particular kind of work might be excavated or a foundation laid.

Around the time that I was trying to teach myself everything I could about nonfiction, I also re-organized all the books in my office. Originally, they had all been shelved alphabetically according to genre, but because I wanted to think about merging genres, bringing all that I loved and knew about each genre together, I spent a month of mornings re-shelving everything so even my bookcases wouldn't distinguish genres. Now, all of Ander Monson's books are together, as they should be. Now Charles Simic's little book of essays on Joseph Cornell is right beside his poems. Woolf's essay are beside her novels, not over in a separate shelf with the other nonfiction. And thank goodness. It probably would have taken less time if I hadn't taken it as an opportunity to open those books up side by side, to think about what choices we make as writers on any given day, to think about how sometimes we don't get to make the choice, to think about the evolution of writers and their craft over time. Finally, I'm also fortunate to have colleagues and friends who work in multiple genres, who move in and out of different genres, and so I could turn to their work and to their generosity in exploring this essay thing. So, my advice: re-shelve your books, read a lot, make friends with artists who work in multiple genre or mediums, look closely at craft--of essays you love, of essays you don't think you can love, of essays you'll never write, of essays you wish you had written--and then be asked to walk into a room where you are expected to be able to talk articulately about nonfiction. Do what the word asks us to do: try.

Thank you very much to Monica Berlin for taking the time to answer my questions. To read "On Beds or Where We Sleep," pick up a copy of the current issue (vol. 8, no. 2) in our webstore.

9L Behind the Scenes: Poetry

First, let me apologize for it being a bit quieter around here than I would like. Instead of giving a list of excuses, let's focus on the good stuff.

You should stop over at the Hayden's Ferry Review blog to see what 9L's editor, Jodee Stanley has to say when asked about the role of small presses.

We're getting closer to the next issue (yay!), so keep an eye out for previews of that issue's fantastic content in December. However, we still have amazing content from the current issue to talk about.

Recently, I spoke with two 9L poetry staffers, Sara Gelston and Max Somers, about their experiences reading poetry submissions for Ninth Letter and about some of the poems in the current issue, vol. 8, no. 1. Let's call this the first in a new blog series: 9L Behind the Scenes. Enjoy!

9L: When making your way through the slush pile, what are some of the qualities about a poem that make you stop and want other people to read it? In other words, what are you looking for when reading submissions?

Sara Gelston: I’d say what I’m looking for changes day to day, but things I’m always attracted to: poems that are risking something; poems embracing mystery, not obscurity; poems resisting artifice. Really, I’m looking for poems that are engaging with something substantial to the poet. I guess what I mean by that is I want to feel a poet’s investment in their subject. A real connection. I want a confident poem. A carefully considered one. A poem that risks revealing too much. These are the poems I want to share. I’m always looking for a poem to be more than a birdcage—more than a “lovely” or “decorative” or “precious” thing—and instead be something with a solid sound, an undeniable pulse, and a real sense of urgency.

Max Somers: More than anything, I’m looking for a distinctive voice. There is a lot of very competent writing in the slush pile; so many poems are well-oiled, tight little machines. They’re tough to hate, but harder to love. What’s rare is wildness.

Of course, competent writing is a prerequisite to making it out of slush and into the editorial meeting, but a certain lack of control is what really gets my attention. This, I suppose, is not just a matter of the poet’s “skills” but also her disposition. What is she doing to me, to herself, to the world? Is she giving something up? Is she imposing on me and my sensibilities? Is she asking something of me? Is she a little uncouth? I hope so. I want a poet who is willing to step on a few toes. Too many poems in the slush pile simply want me to nod my head in agreement and enjoy them in a very vague, forgettable way. Boring.

So, what does this elusive, wild poem look like? I have no idea, it’s different every time. I came across Jenny Hanning’s poem, “Litter,” the other day---from our Fall/Winter 2010-11 issue (vol. 7, no. 2). That poem has it, whatever the hell it is.

9L: As you know we don't put issues together with a theme in mind. However, there often ends up being connections between the pieces. Is that something that happened in poetry for the current issue (vol. 8, no. 1)? If so, could you talk a little bit about how some of the poems might work together?

MS: Once the issue starts coming together--toward the end of the semester, when we've accepted a number of poems--it's easier to see how certain pieces might be working with others; that certainly has some effect our decision to take or "toe-tag" a particular poem. As readers/editorial assistants we don't have a say on the final order of poems, but there are some really interesting connections in this issue. Looking at it right now I see a nice little boy on boy love theme encircling Ansel Eiken's "On Leaving the Boy in the Battlefield" and Matthew Dickman's lively, lovely love poems to the beat poets, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman. Someone was smart enough to put these poems next to each other, let them ping off one another.

SG: As Max said, certain themes definitely emerge as our reading period draws to a close. In this particular issue, we’ve got some real odes to icons running through several poems—Ilya Kaminsky shows up in Scott Minar’s “Reading the Odyssey,” Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman are the headliners in Matthew Dickman’s poems, and then of course we have Maxine Skate’s star-studded “Sirkian.” It’s hard not to sit back at some point and look at the similarities emerging in the accepted poems pile, whether it’s an issue with a surprising number of livestock poems (which we’ve had), or in this case, some heavy names being dropped between the pages.

And really, that’s a really terrific part of our meetings—holding two poems next to each other and hearing some kind of conversation, some kind of echo. It happens whether you’re trying for it or not.

9L: Obviously we can't predict how readers will react to certain pieces, but what's your hope concerning their reading experience? What do you want readers to walk away with after reading the poems in the issue?

SG: I want for readers the same thing I want for myself whenever I open a journal—to find poems that resonate somewhere, make me uncomfortable, rough me up a little. I want our readers to feel that more often than not. I’d like for them to pick up the issue again after a year and remember Scott Minar’s “Pecadillo” or Roy Giles’ “Before I Go to Bed.” Then again, I’d like each time they come back to the issue to be a bit different—for two poems to finally knock together or for an old poem to raise its head and surprise them.

MS: I second everything Sara said and I’ll add just a thing or two. One, we are extremely tough on poems in editorial meetings. Poems that make it into a given issue worked hard to get there, meaning we were floored (in one way or another) by every piece. There’s not too much else to say. I hope our readers like the poems we bring to them as much as we like the poems. I hope they tear a poem out of the magazine and stick on their wall…or at least remember a line or two.

Thanks to Sara and Max for taking the time to answer my questions and for all their insights. To read the poems talked about here as well as all the other wonderful poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from the current issue (vol. 8, no. 1) or from vol. 7, no. 2, head on over to our webstore to pick up copies of the issues.

5 (or so) Questions with Naomi Williams

It's time for another installment of 5 (or so) Questions! This time I had the pleasure of talking to Naomi Williams via email about her story from the current issue, "Folie à Plusieurs." The story, which is part of a linked story collection about the La Perouse expedition, demonstrates the hardships and disappointments of mapping the world. During our conversation, as you'll see below, we discussed the process of putting together a linked collection, ghostly narrators, and discovery. Hope you enjoy it!

9L: One of the things that really interested me about the story was the voice. The narrator is part of the crew, yet knows things about what becomes of the places they visit. How did you go about constructing a voice that can speak from beyond the grave? Any unexpected challenges in using this particular voice to tell this story?

Naomi Williams: I guess I'd say the narrator isn't just part of the crew, but is the crew speaking in a ghostly, omniscient collective voice. I've always been interested in experimenting with point of view, but I didn't sit down and say, Ok, now I'm going to write a first-person plural story. The POV was suggested by what I wanted to explore in the story, which was this idea of a voyage of discovery that ended up "un-discovering" more than it discovered. That seemed to require a retrospective view. And the disappointment around that failure to find new places felt corporate rather than individual, hence the collective voice. The biggest challenge, voice-wise, was to keep it believably 18th-century-ish (whatever that means) while allowing for that after-the-fact knowledge. The original draft had the crew sounding much more contemporary in places. Several of my readers balked at the unevenness in tone, so I worked to smooth it out in subsequent drafts.

9L: Do you consider this to be a ghost story?

NW: I guess you could call it a ghost story, seeing as the narrators are dead. But I feel like the traditional ghost story has the ghost or ghosts interacting with the living, and these folks just talk among themselves. Although I suppose they're talking to the reader, and that's a kind of interaction. So sure--yes, let's call it a ghost story.

9L: Do you consider how a reader might interact with a story when planning or writing a piece?

NW: The short answer is no. Obviously I hope readers--some readers, at least--will find my work engaging or interesting, and in putting together the collection of which this story is part, I've worked in elements--recurring motifs or connected plot threads--that I hope an alert reader will pick up on and appreciate. But while I'm writing, I just do my thing. I show my drafts to a small group of people whose feedback I take very seriously; otherwise I don't have expectations or preconceived notions about how people might interact with a piece once it's out there. Once it's out there, it's out there, you know, and except in a narrowly conceived, legal sense, it's no longer mine.

9L: Can you talk a little about the process of putting together a linked collection? Did you have a certain number of stories in mind when starting out or was it more about exploring different aspects of the expedition to see what stories could hang together to form a larger picture? What has surprised you most, if anything, about working on the collection?

NW: The basic idea for this project came to me quite suddenly almost ten years ago, when I first learned about the expedition, but the overall shape of the collection, the total number of stories, and the kind of stories I've ended up writing have all changed a lot over time. I've thought a lot about both variety and balance as I've worked on it. I've tried, for instance, to tell stories from various points of view--first person, third person, omniscient, limited, etc.--and to cover the expedition's "highlights," if you will, so that readers of the complete manuscript will, hopefully, feel like they've gotten some sense of the voyage as a whole. Perhaps the biggest surprise has been how rich the material continues to be after all these years. Every time I dip back into the primary sources or the research available about the expedition, I come up with a new story idea. Right now I'm planning 14 or 15 stories, but I feel like there could be twice that many.

9L: Okay, last question: is there anything you wish you had discovered or would still like to discover?

NW: Sure. There are still several stories in the collection that I either have yet to draft or remain dissatisfied with, and the obstacles usually have to do with not knowing what it is I'm trying to discover. Right now, for instance, I'm wrestling with a story I want told from the point of view of a truly rank-and-file member of the crew, someone who didn't leave letters or journals behind, someone who was, perhaps, illiterate, and about whom I know nothing besides a name and job title. But I can't decide which of the 200-plus members of the crew I might pick as my point-of-view character, much less what his issues might be on the expedition or what might happen to him in the story. I have a lot of faith in the power of mulling stuff over, however. Something will eventually come to me. I just wish it would hurry up and do it already.

Thank you very much to Naomi Williams for taking the time to answer my questions and for such a great conversation. To read "Folie à Plusieurs," visit our webstore to pick up a copy of vol. 8, no. 1.

5 (or so) questions with Jimmy Chen

A new issue means new installments of 5 (or so) Questions! This time 9L staffer Laura Adamczyk speaks with Jimmy Chen, author of "Again St.," which appears in the brand new spring/summer 2011 (vol. 8, no. 1) issue.

9L: "Again St." includes a lot of very specific details of the characters' home and work lives (from the very beginning of the story, e.g. with the exact date/time/location) and grander views of the cosmos/universe. Did you have a purpose in mind with this minute vs. grand juxtaposition?

Jimmy Chen: I would admit that this was less on purpose than a Joycean impulse, having kind of been hard-wired to see the world that way, especially concerning writing, since reading Ulysses, which I know sounds totally annoying, to answer an earnest question by whipping out Joyce--and this solipsist apology feels rather D.F. Wallace-ish, another writer who does the same micro-macro thing, who I just managed to whip out--but that's the truth. I feel like saying "sorry" right about now.

9L: I know a lot of pet owners who "talk" for their pets. Your story kind of goes crazy with this idea. Do you have any pets? What are they saying to you?

JC: All of my relationships ended badly with a cat being involved more than a standard pet should be. "Again St." is an attempt to trace the downfall of a relationship, using various consciousnesses indiscriminately, one of which includes a cat, based off my actual cat back then. I have the scars to prove it. I think cats are aware of relationships more than other pets, maybe even more than people. I love cats, but I become obsessed by their whereabouts, often searching for them throughout the house for no reason, which drives them batshit. Bats, now that's a good pet. They would just hang out.

9L: Your story is full of these hilarious aphorisms: "Life is a loop, a hula hoop lying around the ankles of the paralyzed"; Humor is a cruelty that besets other people"; "Life is a hairball, to gag on the chronic aggregate of oneself." Which of these rings truest to you and why?

JC: I think the second example verges more on an aphorism than the others. The others seem lyrical at best. As for why, I would say because it's sort of true, which is why we are running in circles, given that we are discussing aphorisms.

9L: A lot of your work seems to combine both humor and tragedy. Do you think funny stories call for these sad/tragic elements? Who are some of your favorite funny writers?

JC: In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alan Alda's character Lester, a deluded self-absorbed ego maniac, waxes didactically about humor for a documentary about him: "Comedy is tragedy plus time," he happily concludes. Lester may be a douche, but he's onto something. Of course, everything that a character says in a Woody Allen movie is Woody Allen himself. I guess what I'm saying is humor, as invoked above, is cruelty plus the time it takes to fully absorb that cruelty, to elapse the hurt, to reconfigure it, to impose empathy, until it seems funny one day, I guess. This is not possible without forgiveness--of the other, and of oneself. Humor then, is both apology and the acceptance of. It may well hold the universe together.

So yes, funny stories cannot be funny without sad or tragic elements, as they are the same thing at various points in time. I can't think of any funny writers that I like now, sorry.

9L: Finally, the protagonist in your story prefers bourbon. What's your drink of choice?

JC: Single malt Scotch, like a nice 16-year old, which sounds like statutory rape, but really, they are relatively old, and so good.

Thanks to Jimmy Chen for taking the time to speak to Laura. To read "Again St." pick up a copy of vol. 8, no. 1 in our webstore. Don't forget we're running a special deal: sign up for a 1-year subscription and get vol. 8, no. 1 for free!