Slightly, Briefly Illumined

Thanks, Collagist!

2011-11-21T10:38:00.000-08:00

Apparently I had a lot to say about lawns.

Interview With Kyle McCord and Jeannie Hoag!

2011-10-31T13:15:00.000-07:00

Kyle McCord and Jeannie Hoag's collaborative collection, Informal Invitation to a Traveler: Letters between J.R. & Miss Kim, was released by Gold Wake Press in May 2011.

James Haug says of Informal Letters: "Alternately spare and lavish, a ghost narrative emerges of correspondences, echoes, and distances-raising questions of travel and renewal, home and seasons, abandonment and flight. With charm and intelligence, Hoag's and McCord's poems speak to each other, at each other, with and without each other. They are lively, keen, restless."

I talked with Kyle and Jeannie via email about collaborative challenges, evil Iowa winters, Bert and Ernie, and what happens when your poems are narrated by a bird.

MM: Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to collaborate and how the project came to be? Did you set out to write a book together?

Jeannie: Kyle came to me with the idea of the collaboration—basically an exchange of letter-poems between two characters. Not long before, I had collaborated on a play, but the circumstances were very different. I was really interested in the characters Kyle had proposed, and it seemed like a nice experiment.

Kyle: Interestingly, I think even before we started writing, both of us were committed to the idea that the exchange was going to be book-length and that the book had to, for the most part, be written in order. I’m not sure how you felt, Jeannie, but I’d never before come to writing with the knowledge that not only was the poem I was working on definitely part of a particular work, but also that it had a particular location within that work.

Jeannie: For me the order was an aspect that, once we started, I tried to ignore. It's a lot of pressure to put on each poem, and I tried to keep my focus on responding to Kyle's latest. I agree that responses tie the poems to one another, but in order for me to write I couldn't think about the future. How much was it a focus for you, Kyle?

Kyle: Coming into this, Jeannie and I talked a good bit about stretching the idea of what constituted a response in the mind of the reader. That’s why many of the connections between the poems are on a sonic or thematic level rather than just on a content level. I’m in accord with Jeannie that it’s often hopeless to anticipate the shape of a book as you’re writing it, especially when another voice is often complicating and challenging your vision as you move. Watching those spirals of action and reaction is a significant part of what Invitations is about.

MM: Were the letters in conversation with one another throughout the process? Or how did that work?

Jeannie: We had a work plan of sorts. Kyle and I decided we would take turns writing these poems, and we had an informal deadline of two weeks per poem. The idea was to send each poem to the other, who would in turn write a poem that somehow responded. Kyle was definitely far better at meeting the deadlines than me.

Kyle: It was a challenging year for both of us: Jeannie in an intensive academic program, me dredging through a particularly vicious Iowa winter. One of the things the book doesn’t show is our personal exchanges as we went through the various stages of production. The conversation often came to mirror the distress and delight you can find in the work.

Jeannie: The topography of the poems changed—we started the project in Massachusetts and ended up in different states by the end, and you can see elements of those moves throughout. I wonder now if the short emails we sent along with the poems informed the responses—maybe they gave directions for how to read the poems.

Kyle: I think topography is an insightful choice of words here. In Greek, the word literally breaks down to “place” and “write.” I think our respective environments directed some of the work. I also feel like our email exchanges cast a vision of to how to read each piece. It makes it a little tough to argue for “the death of the author” in the poetry when there are two voices capable of giving cues to the reader about how a poem should be read and related to the larger work.

MM: What was it like to write a book in this way? How was it different from working alone? What did you learn from each other? Were there any challenges that came up?

Jeannie: Much of the time during this project, I was preoccupied with a library science program, but even under the best circumstances, I'm looking for ways to avoid deadlines. Comparatively, Kyle is much more productive, so we were a bit like Ernie and Bert in that respect.

Kyle: Bert and Ernie is somewhat apt, but I think of it more in terms of an approach to language. Bert is a man of few words, while Ernie is sometimes unbearably loquacious. My poetry tends to be dense and large on the page. When Anne Waldman took a look at the book, she said, “I wouldn’t want to be on the page next to you, Kyle. So many words!” I feel like J.R.’s brevity and even zones of silence are a good match for Miss Kim, though. Jeannie taught me a good bit about the boundaries of narrative in poetry.

Jeannie: That's funny, because from my perspective, I had so many possibilities to choose from. Some of my poems were a reaction to just one phrase of Miss Kim's, and the sparseness of J.R.'s poems must have been a challenge to respond to. My writing's not always so vacant, but I imagined that J.R.'s world had been mostly emptied, whereas Miss Kim's world was quite populated.

Kyle: Even writing this, I’m reminded how open the idea of response leaves the writer. I actually did the same thing as Jeannie mentions: I would often attach to what I saw as the emotional or imagistic crux of her poem then respond to that. I actually think that’s how most communication happens. We tend to move in patterns where we gravitate toward what seems most imperative to our ear in a work no matter the brevity or lengthiness of a response. This creates an interlacing of values and reactions that become the conversation.

MM: How did you work on revising it, or move from the initial draft to the later ones?

Jeannie: A few months after we finished exchanging poems, Kyle came out to Buffalo, and we spent a few days arranging the manuscript and editing the poems for cohesiveness. At that point, we each had poems we wanted to work on more, but I think that in-person meeting was crucial to getting the book together.

Kyle: I’ve heard of poets completing a collaborative work without ever meeting, but I have no idea how they could do an arrangement of the work unless one of them just laid out a road map. Isn’t arrangement such an enigmatic art? It’s tough with one person, but with two people who aren’t even sitting in the same room? I’m not sure how any collaboration could fix on the best version of the work without a face-to-face meeting.

Jeannie: In a way, working on the order in person was a reward for all the distance work, too. It was sort of grueling—I'm not sure how many times we read the poems out loud—but it was necessary to really internalize all the poems. And by the end we had addressed our doubts and personal readings, and I don't think that could have been done from a distance. You can't be too polite over email.

Kyle: I don’t know about you, Jeannie, but I can still hear the end of each poem in Invitations as I begin reading it. I must have read and re-read my first book aloud nearly forty times when I was editing it for release, and I don’t know that I hear the rhythms from that book as clearly as I can hear the voices of Miss Kim or J.R. It’s so strange and intriguing to know so fully two different voices, neither of which fully captures you as a speaker.

MM: One thing I love most about the book is how different the voice of each speaker is from the other: J.R.'s voice is so spare; the poems themselves are short and spare and he rarely asks a question. Meanwhile Miss Kim is much more verbose, lyrical and questioning. Could you talk a little about either how these characters/voices emerged? Are the voices in this book typical of how each of you usually writes, or did you find yourselves writing differently than usual?

Jeannie: As J.R., I took to heart the original character idea—that J.R. was a bird—and tried to imagine how a bird might think about things. From the way they move, birds seem to have very short attention spans, which I think affected the length of the lines, and the poems in general.

Kyle: I don’t know about Jeannie, but I’m not sure I could recapture Miss Kim’s voice again. It’s a bit of a sad thing, but the tone, density, and emotional conceits were very entwined with that space and time. I very much became a student of what that voice could do. I can still hear Miss Kim behind some of the lines I write, but some of that irony and winding density was unsustainable after Invitations. Jeannie, I’m curious if there are parts of J.R. you feel you left behind after the book?

Jeannie: I hear some of J.R. in my poems, too, and when I catch it I try to take the poem in a different direction, but for me it's more a matter of not wanting to bring back J.R. than not being able to. I think the sparseness of J.R.'s poems worked for the project because it was still engaged as a response, but on its own, a J.R. poem is too isolating. Still, it's hard to escape from.

Kyle: My interaction with Miss Kim very much mirrors Jeannie’s relationship with the J.R. voice: I tend to turn away when I hear that voice creeping back in. Maybe I feel like I gave the fullest expression to that voice I could in the book, and I’m ready to write something in a different palate than I utilized here. I think as writers we tend to shed one set of filters and put on another whenever we write. Miss Kim was just such a distinct set of filters that it would be tough to return to with a fresh lens.

MM: How did you find Gold Wake Press? Why did you decide to send there?

Kyle: I’m going to take this one solo since the connection started on my end. I’m a big fan of Kristina Marie Darling’s work, and her first book Night Songs (and now her third book) came out with Gold Wake. When she was in town, I mentioned that we were looking for a publisher for the book. She mentioned that Jared Michael Wahlgren was a great editor (which proved to be true). She put the two of us in touch, I sent the manuscript his way, and the rest was history. It was really an ideal fit for the book. We’ve both been really delighted with Gold Wake.

Jeannie Hoag is author of Informal Invitation to a Traveler: Letters between J.R. & Miss Kim. Jeannie was born in Wisconsin and is currently a librarian in Buffalo, New York. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her chapbook New Age of Ferociousness was published in 2010 by Agnes Fox Press.

Kyle McCord is the author of Informal Invitation to a Traveler: Letters between J.R. & Miss Kim. His first book, Galley of the Beloved in Torment, was the winner of the 2008 Orphic Prize and was released by Dream Horse Press. He has work forthcoming or published from Boston Review, Columbia: a Journal of Art and Literature, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Volt, and elsewhere. He’s worked for The Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, and The Nation. Kyle currently lives in Texas, but previously resided in Des Moines, Iowa where he coordinated The Younger American Poets Reading Series.

To order Informal Invitation, click here.

Some Readings in October + Kristi Maxwell Is Awesome

2011-09-24T07:15:00.000-07:00

My friend Kristi Maxwell is awesome. She invited me to go on a road trip/book tour with her and it's coming up in October! Kristi's new book, Re-, is out from Ahsahta. I am excited to read it aloud to her over and over again during our trip. Here is a poem from it.

The real point being: I am not an organized person, and am also a promotion-phobe; it would never occur to me to plan a book tour. But Kristi is my literary guardian angel--actually, I hate that phrase. GAs are something students and old people believe in and write about. Let's just call Kristi my guardian poet, because she makes me read things out loud and attend things and promote things. Thank Jesus for guardian poets - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't write at all if I didn't have a bunch of these.

This is our schedule in case you live in one of these cities:

Oct. 2, 2011: Literary Lounge @ Studio Roanoke, Roanoke, VA, w/ Kristi Maxwell, 8 p.m.

Oct. 3, 2011: Chop Suey Books, Richmond, VA, w/ Kristi Maxwell

Oct. 4, 2011: Yes, Reading! Series @ the Social Justice Center, Albany, NY, w/ Kristi Maxwell and Peter Edwards, 8 p.m.

Oct. 5, 2011: The Small Animal Project Reading Series @ Outpost 186, Boston, MA, w/ Rob MacDonald and Kristi Maxwell, 8 p.m.

Oct. 6, 2011: Moonstone Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA, w/ Kristi Maxwell and Natalie Lyalin

Dis- and Re- Appearing

2011-09-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

Sending things out is hard and exhausting for me, which is true of every tiny thing in my life. Like planning and making dinner, or playing "string" with my cats, or hanging art on the walls of a new apartment, or watering things in my apartment. Sometimes even reading a whole book is hard and exhausting. And putting away laundry. Larger things are easy. I'm pretty sure if I wanted to run a marathon I could do that more easily than any smaller thing in my day.

That means I send out stories twice a year in bulk. And then suddenly I have a million things in the universe! And then for the next six months I disappear entirely like I've never written anything at all. This is the same way I live, by dis- and re-appearing, answering my phone always and then never, inviting you to things always and then never. I kind of want to throw up on writers who are published in every single place ever and put this in their bios. Don't they do anything else with their days than write and send? That seems boring to me. Probably that's what makes me disappear.

Some things I've written will be appearing in a few places in the future. I will be appearing in some Eastern places on a book tour with my friend Kristi Maxwell in October. Here is a recent appearance in Hobart. I love all of the things by the other writers in this issue - especially this story "The Cage" by Robert Hinderliter - because it reminds me of Georges Perec.

Some New Stories

2011-08-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

I have some new stories in the most recent issues of The Collagist and >kill author. Whenever I have the option to record audio, I always do it but then refuse to ever listen to it. So I can't make any sort of recommendation on whether or not you should listen to the audio.

Review at decomP

2011-07-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Spencer Dew and decomP for your thoughtful review.

Sparrow & Other Eulogies

2011-04-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

My first collection of hybrid things, Sparrow & Other Eulogies, was just released by Gold Wake Press. You can find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.com.

Interview With Melanie Westerberg

2010-12-12T07:43:00.000-08:00

Melanie Westerberg’s first book, City in the River, City in the Forest, was published by Hag’s Head Press in 2010.

The novella takes place at a lodge in the Amazon, where the protagonist Mary works as a tour guide, falls in love with a local, becomes immersed in the region’s folklore and gets caught in the crossfire of rebel warfare.

The book is suspenseful, surreal, and beautifully written; what I love most about it is its ability to remove me, as a reader, from the minutia of daily life, transport me elsewhere, and remind me of my connection to the larger world.

Peter Orner says: “Melanie Westerberg has written a wondrous first book. The writing is unique and brave, and the story is as engaging as it is harrowing. It’s the sort of rare, completely original book I am always looking for and never finding.”

Melanie and I talked over email about the importance of stories, travel, human-animal hybrids, and how to write a gorgeous sentence.

MM: What's it like to have your first book published? City in the River, City in the Forest was published by Hag's Head, an Irish Press. How did you come to work with them?

MW: The process was fairly unusual, and it’s given me so much respect for independent publishing. I’d met Marsha Swan from Hag’s Head Press when we studied abroad in Ireland. She continued to live in Dublin after that summer; she worked in literary publishing and started Hag’s Head, which began publishing books in 2005. She found me on the Internet in 2006, at which point I brazenly asked if I could stay with her for a few days in Paris. There and in a series of long e-mails, we discovered we had a lot of the same ideas about writing; she’s one of the few people whose book recommendations I consistently love. She decided she wanted to publish a series of novellas and asked if I’d write one of them. We got together twice to work on drafts. Literary journals have pretty much accepted my stories as is, so it was both exciting and nerve-wracking to work so directly with my publisher and editor on something, to have that close level of insight on shaping a piece. We’d read and commented on each other’s work before that, so I trusted her eye and she trusted my occasional refusal to change something. Ultimately I wrote eleven drafts over a year and a half, though some only contained minor changes. The covers were printed by hand on a letterpress, which is so meta I get excited whenever I think about it.

I’m really impressed by how serious the Irish media is about books. My first bit of press was a blurb I was asked to write about what I was reading for a paper that’s available free in pubs. I did a radio interview at 6:30 a.m. since the host has studio time at noon in Dublin. My book was reviewed in the Irish Examiner, a major paper--small press books (much less those by little-known foreigners) are so rarely reviewed in U.S. newspapers.

MM: What inspired you to write the book?

MW: I had a few scenarios--cutthroat quilters, Terry Gross interviews with underground rappers, and a woman working in the Amazon who falls in love with a man who might be a dolphin--in my head that I wanted to juxtapose into a single novel. In 2007, I did National Novel Writing Month and tried to make that happen, but the resulting 50,000 words were dreadful and I ended up scrapping everything then rewriting the Amazon story mostly from scratch a year later. I was already kicking around the idea of writing a book like this when I visited the Peruvian Amazon in 2007; I wanted to write something nuanced about tourism. I had read about encantados in my Peru guidebook and really latched onto it--I’m a huge sucker for human-animal hybrids and transformation tropes. The characters came later.

MM: Stories are really important to many characters in the book. The protagonist Mary and her lover Hector are constantly reading and discussing literature. Other characters rely on local folk tales to explain some of the difficult experiences they’ve had. I especially love the story you mentioned above, of the encantados: “enchanted creatures who shuttled between land and water. They lived as dolphins and barba amarilla snakes in the Encante, a beautiful city at the bottom of the river with houses and markets like the human cities of the forest…They came to the villages disguised as attractive men or women; they took human lovers and then led them to the underwater city.” In the book, you allude to the fact that stories and folktales are disappearing all over the world. What did you hope to communicate to readers about the value of stories?

MW: All of us construct and inherit explanatory narratives to help ourselves understand the world and our place in it. I wanted to play with that and show different ways people construct those narratives without passing judgment or suggesting that one form is more valid than another. I’m interested in what happens to traditional explanatory narratives--myths, folk tales, religious beliefs--when the culture that formed them begins to be influenced by outside ideas, be it through colonization, immigration, access to foreign media or pop culture, tourism, etc. Stories tend to evolve. Catholic iconography is very different in the Peruvian Andes than it is in Spain, for example: the Andean peoples adopted the religion, but incorporated their traditional symbols, visual language, and landscapes into their religious art. In my reading and conversations about encantados, it became clear that some people very firmly believe those stories, while others have more of an attitude that they wouldn’t be surprised if they turned out to be true, or that they don’t not believe them. Others are extremely skeptical or simply don’t believe them. It made me think about my own confidence in beliefs that might seem cuckoo to someone from a different background. We’re all so confident about our personal narratives, and they’re often so radically divergent, or they directly conflict--I wanted to explore the ways we negotiate those differences, and it was important and a fun challenge for me to try not to give primacy to any one system of belief. That’s also part of why I love traveling and reading so much--immersing myself in the unfamiliar, letting go of my expectations.

MM: The book also focuses on the extinction of other parts of our world. Mary and other characters refer to the extinction of certain species; the Australian tourist Laird Beetle works to preserve dying languages. How do you see these very different extinctions as interrelated?

MW: They’re interrelated because we’re all culpable at some level in contemporary species extinction, language death, the mutations or endings of old stories. Some is natural, but some we helped trigger. These extinctions have advanced so far and become so entangled and complicated in many cases that there’s little we can do. This depresses me, and as writers we’re able to make art with our horrible feelings. Species are disappearing at an accelerated rate; the least I can do as a writer is to name them, like the printmakers in the story who memorialize the dead and then are themselves memorialized by Hector and his obsessive art friends.

MM: What was it like for you to write about a culture outside of your own? I always feel really scared to do that--I feel like I either don't know enough, or somehow that it isn't my place to write about cultures that I'm not a part of. How do you approach it?

MW: I feel really uncomfortable writing about cultures outside my own for both the reasons you gave, and I constantly doubted myself, thinking my depictions were inauthentic, possibly offensive. I negotiated that by researching different Amazonian countries so I could construct a world that hopefully feels true to the region without being specific to one particular country. A friend was willing to talk to her family living on the margins of the Colombian Amazon about their dialect--I literally gave her a list of words for them to translate--and to her family’s housekeeper about encantado stories she’d grown up with. I looked at political and innovative art from various South American countries and read lots of books by South American authors. I read academic books about Brazilian transformation myths. I’d seen the landscape of the Peruvian Amazon and spoken with people who work in tourism there, but I was only there for five days, so much of the setting and all the characters were fabricated. The political situation was the most challenging thing for me to write about: the more I learned about the recent histories of those countries, the more difficult it was to invent. For me, writing is about invention and juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated things; it’s typically not fun for me to write about what I know, so I try to be respectful and to do my research when addressing cultures I’m not part of. Which I suppose is what people who do fictionalize their life experiences and closely base their characters on people they know do as well.

MM: Only five days in the jungle? Wow! I didn’t want to ask you upfront how much of the book was based on actual experiences you had somewhere, but the story feels so authentic, like you must have lived it. I was completely convinced that you’d spent years in the Amazon, dodging bullets unbeknownst to me…I wonder if you could talk a little about your interest in tourism. The tourists in the book are really entertaining: they're often well-meaning, but at the same time have simplified ideas about what it means to be part of the larger world. I’m thinking about Laird and Emily Beetle, Australian tourists and the first tourists we meet. Emily speaks in generalizations and later the protagonist, Mary, is accused by the owner of the lodge where she works of ‘Turning into that Australian woman.’ Anyway, what about tourism interested you?

MW: I wanted to write about a developing tourist economy from a few different perspectives, perhaps in hope of getting a little clarity on my own place in it. I’ve been hooked on traveling a long time--like since we were in Ireland in 1999 and I traveled on my own for the first time--and now I’m able to go abroad for a few weeks or a month every year and I’ve been going further and further afield. So I want to call myself a traveler instead of a tourist because I carry a big backpack and decide every part of my trip on my own, and I study a bit of the language and read books by authors from the country I’m visiting. But my mere presence affects places that are transitioning into a tourist economy--all my good intentions aside, in many ways I’m a tourist like everyone else. I even own a pair of zip-off trousers like the Beetles.

I’m interested in that transition: what is preserved (and what is no longer relevant within a culture but is preserved specifically for tourist consumption) and what is lost. Ecotourism can preserve ecologically rich land that might otherwise be converted to a plantation or a hydroelectric project, ideally keeping the land and its tourism profits in the hands of those who traditionally worked it, but maybe the people who hold that land want to develop it and modernize. I don’t know the answer; I can’t even fully articulate the question. I want to be as non-paternalistic as possible in my opinions about how people in developing economies manage their land, especially because a lot of bad land-use practices directly serve my own consumption, but part of me is still distressed when conservation isn’t at the forefront.

MM: You mentioned the landscape of Peru—the descriptions of so much of the natural world are so heightened that the landscape feels surreal to me. And then there are other places in the book that are completely surreal, like where Mary enters the river and actually sees the underwater city described in local myths. I know surrealism often plays a role in your stories, too. Could you talk about how you created the landscape in the book, and also about what part surrealism plays in your work in general?

MW: Surrealism has always played a role in my stories. My relationship to it is always evolving. Right now I’m into meshing surreal events or landscapes with an otherwise everyday world, coming up with rules for each story that contextualize the surreal elements and make them feel natural. I want everything to be possible in the worlds I create. A lot of the details in the book about the animals, landscape, and architecture were things I actually saw, or embellishments on them. Anna (my travel companion in Peru) is very interested in botany, so I paid more attention to plants than I normally would have. The river--a tributary of the Amazon--has always been the center of life there, and felt like I had to ride in boats on it, swim in it, and watch local people use it in order to write about it convincingly. Proximity to the river gave me permission to imagine those dolphins and the underwater city. The visible density, diversity, and interdependence of animal and human life there was important to see firsthand. I better understood the complexity behind development and management issues: for the first time, I saw slash and burn farming as practiced on a subsistence scale by individual farmers, for example.

The physical effects of that kind of landscape on people who are new to it seemed important to convey. The psychological effects of that kind of discomfort. Anna and I had heat rash, lots of bug bites, and we had to shower a couple times a day. I developed a horrible breakout on the side of my face, probably from rubbing a soft baby possum against my cheek.

MM: How did you go about creating the characters in the book? Where did they come from?

MW: Characterization is something I really have to work at, and this book was a turning point for me. Working in a longer form forced me to create interesting characters who were relatable, idiosyncratic, flawed, and often irrational--somehow I’d gotten away with not paying so much attention to character in my earlier writing.

There are parts of myself and people I know in Mary, Hector, and Pilar, but mostly I made them up. Some of their physical quirks, like Pilar’s raising of a single eyebrow and Hector’s laugh, come from friends. Some of the people at the lodge are loosely based on the lodge workers I met in Peru, though now my memories of them are hopelessly conflated with what I made up. Anna and I made up stories about them even while we were staying there. The Beetles’ adorable qualities are semi-based on an Australian couple Anna and I trekked with, while their provincial and sanctimonious qualities are a conglomerate of people I’ve met while traveling and people I encountered in Berkeley.

MM: There are so many gorgeous sentences in the book - reading it was like reading a novella-poem or something. Do sentences just come out of you, or do you spend a lot of time crafting them?

MW: Thank you! Sometimes the sentences just come out that way, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how to be as precise as possible. I’m a meticulous reviser, and I learned from poets to read everything aloud before I consider it finished. Lately I’ve been trying to push the limits of punctuation, seeing how far I can take a sentence through space or time while still keeping it tight. It’s tangling up with my job as an editor. I had to photocopy style guide sections about correct comma usage and hang them in front of my face at work.

Typically I start with a few images or concepts I can’t let go of, and the earliest part of my process is figuring out how they’re linked. I realize a lot about the story I’m telling and its characters as I write them. I want to be able to write in longhand as a generative practice, but I always write on my computer. I guess my brain associates longhand with the fairly factual journal entries I keep while traveling or the notes I take about research or organizational things in stories. I think what generates or clarifies ideas for me is taking walks, and sometimes in yoga when you’re not supposed to be thinking about anything. I just started a new story, and there’s so much anxiety in writing a first draft--I always forget about that feeling because I’m such a reviser and not very prolific. Where does that anxiety come from? Surely other writers must have it, and I’ve talked to visual artists who feel the same way where they walk into their studios to start something new.

MM: What are you reading these days? And what are you working on?

MW: Right now I’m reading The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud and Crime and Punishment. I’m nearing the end of a month-long residency at Jentel in northern Wyoming, so I’ve been reading the books around here, too: Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro and Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, which I found in my studio. It’s all these little drawings and diagrams and notes on physics, anatomy, and line. I read On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardener, which the other writer at Jentel loaned me because we are becoming novelists by any means necessary. I’m reading My Horse and Other Stories by Stacey Levine, which I accidentally left at home. To prepare myself for Wyoming, I read Rising From the Plains by John McPhee. It’s about the geological history of the state. I feared it would be boring, but it was one of my favorite books I read all year.

I’ve been researching and thinking about and making character sketches for a novel about silk-weaving. Half takes place during the silk-weaver revolts in Lyon, France, in the 1830s and the other half is a speculative fiction thing set in the near future. Mainly I’ve been writing stories. I realized I need to finish my short story collection within ten years of having started it, or else it’ll be hopelessly uneven.

Melanie Westerberg's short stories have appeared in Third Coast, Mid-American Review, Torpedo, and the Best New American Voices 2006 anthology, edited by Jane Smiley. Her work has been translated into Czech for RozRazil Review. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Click here to purchase Melanie's book or read about Hag's Head Press.

Interview With Sarah Eaton

2010-10-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Tough Skin, Sarah Eaton's first collection of poems and prose, was released by BlazeVOX [books] in January 2010.

Michael Martone describes Tough Skin as a "hyped-up hypnotic gross anatomy of grammar, syntax and sass." Kathryn Regina describes it as "an invention of glittering grotesqueries."

Sarah and I talked over email about the weirdness of publishing your first book, what it's like to make things that are not quite poems and not quite prose, how to make Poets throw up, and 100 year old monkeys.

MM: This is your first book. What's it like to have a book in the universe?

SE: I think there are stages of publication, like there are stages of grief. At first you're elated, and then you feel like a total turd for a long time because it is very difficult to get other people to read your book. I don't think my mom has read my book, for instance. Maybe I shouldn't say that. My dad is totally going to google-stalk this interview--hi, Dad! There are just so many other choices. Why is your book any different? Why should anyone care about your book? But then, relentless promotion of your book makes you feel like you are doing something even though much of it just lands in an endless pile of everyone else's promotion. Lots of people say nice and encouraging things, and lots of other people don't say anything at all. Eventually you emerge into what's hopefully the final stage, which is where I am now: liking your own book and feeling good that it exists as an object in the world. I can pick it up and look at it, and that's nice.

MM: So, Tough Skin is sort of hybrid-y. I mean, there are things that are clearly poems, but then there are other things that are...I don't know what they are.. What do you call the pieces when somebody asks you about genre?

SE: I call them “thingies.” I love the word hybrid though. You know how some people identify as queer rather than gay or lesbian or bisexual? Hybrid seems like the equivalent of queer to me in writing. My writing is part apple, part pear. It’s papple. I don’t mean that as any judgment on people who write poetry or fiction, and just call it what it is; it’s a different approach, and one that I’m not very good at, frankly. Frankensteinly. This is a weird answer.

MM: Your style is really different than anything else I've read. Do other writers influence your style, or are you immune?

SE: Aw, shucks. Thanks. I teach a whole class on influence and inspiration, and I really like the idea that other writers’ voices can accumulate in your head and turn into something that’s completely different from what went in. My students use a recipe analogy a lot—you put in flour and water and get paste; you put in flour and water and sugar and baking powder and get a pancake. I like reading, in general. I will read just about anything, and I think everything influences me somehow. In the last month I have read “A Choir of Ill Children” by Tom Piccirilli, “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami, “Vanishing Point” by David Markson, and a couple of plays by Sam Shepard. My two favorite books are “Two Serious Ladies” by Jane Bowles and “The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter. There are some writers’ voices that I feel like I have to shake off, and I don’t write at all when I’m reading them—like Stacey Levine. Her voice gets stuck in my head, in a really good way, but I don’t want to write while I’m reading her work, because I don’t want to poorly imitate her voice inadvertently.

MM: There's a lot of gore and a lot of disgusting imagery throughout the book--parasitic twins, gnawed nipples, oozing pimples, leaches, lots of blood and brains. I felt like I was going to faint the first time I read it. I have a bunch of questions about that: where does your fascination with the grotesque come from? Did you consider how the imagery would affect your readers, or...how did you hope to affect them?

SE: I…don’t know. That’s a really good question. I’ve always had a bloody imagination, like I remember writing a story where the main character got eaten by a shark in seventh grade, and my teacher telling me that probably the other characters should be sad about that and thinking her idea was stupid. The blood arc was the important part of that scene. I distinctly remember rolling my eyes, then drawing an arrow insert and writing “And then they all cried.” My favorite book series as a child was Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Detectives. I loved The Haunting of Cassie Palmer on Nickelodeon. I just like weird stuff. It surprises me. Being surprised is my favorite feeling when I’m reading, and so I try to make readers feel that, too, whether it’s through grotesquerie or odd phrasing or whatever. Part of my goal in writing this was to make people feel kind of like they wanted to puke while they were reading it. I was interested in the idea of physically affecting someone with words alone, and it’s very gratifying to hear from people that I’ve done it, whether they consider it a good or a bad experience. Not that it happens to everyone who reads it, of course.

MM: What's up with the references in the first section of the book? The footnotes mention forceps, practice golf balls, mop wringers, and a food safe.

SE: They're from patents in the public domain. This actually started out as an idea for a collaboration, and it wasn't even my idea--it was Kathy Regina's--but I was the only one of us who ended up pursuing it. Looking at the language in the patents made me instantly think of mad scientists, something I spend maybe 20 percent of my day thinking about anyway, and the old-fashioned phrasing acted as the framework for the character of the time-traveling inventor, and once he existed, there was no going back. I went through the patents and looked for phrases that were interesting, vocabulary- and structure-wise, and that could change with context, and I ordered the phrases like a poem, and then wrote around them. I do a similar exercise with my students now because it’s a great device for when you’re feeling stuck, like a voice in your brain telling you what the next line is.

MM: The time traveling inventor is a pretty despicable father figure. He lovingly refers to his daughter as "a beakless chicken," "a worm," "seafood salad" and "my stinky pile." I don't want to ruin the first section by giving away what happens. But: do you have any favorite despicable characters? Did you have any of them in mind when you wrote him, or how did you come up with that character?

SE: To me, if a character isn’t a little bit despicable, it’s sort of boring. I feel the same way about people, too--because then, what are they hiding? I figure everyone who isn’t a little bit mean every now and then is probably secretly Charles Manson. I’m not saying that the time-traveling inventor is a marshmallow or anything, but he does have his kindnesses and his regrets. The inventor character grew out of the patent language, and I wanted him to be a father, paralleling creations, who wanted the most for his child/invention, but I wanted the child not to be able to live up to any of his expectations at all, be a disappointment in the most disappointing way, and it just got more and more extreme because I didn’t want it to be sentimental. Who would expect a pile of miscarriage to be capable of anything? Maybe I’m just obsessed with Frankenstein. The more I think about these questions, the more it seems likely.

MM: Sometimes I hate reading and writing poems because they don't have interesting characters. Or in my case, all the characters are me. But your poems, or "thingies," have really great characters. How did you develop the characters in these pieces differently than you do in your fiction?

SE: I often dislike reading poems for precisely the same reason. In the poem-thingies I wrote, the characters are more under the surface than when I write fiction, and the more poem-y the sections are, the more hidden the characters. The voice behind the poem-poems, as it were, in the second section, was the real character, like the girl who knows the drunken uncle and the hundred-year-old monkey and the gynecologist. I actually felt like an asshole with every line break I made in that second section because it seemed to make it Poetry, whereas the other work could just be whatever it was--like clearly this stuff isn’t really Poetry, and The Poets are going to puke all over this, and not in the way I want them to. This goes back to the surprise thing I was talking about. Line breaks can be used as trickery, to get someone’s brain going in one direction at the end of one line and then derail it with the beginning of the next. So, ultimately, that’s why I went in that direction for that section despite my intimidation by Poetry.

MM: Who is the 100 year old monkey, really? I know you love this character, who appears several times in the poems in the title section of the book. What do you love about him?

SE: My girlfriend’s family had this cabin in the woods that they shared with other relatives, and they’d go there to stay during part of the summer. In the cabin was a book that everyone drew and wrote in during their stay, so each time you went there, something new had appeared. There were a lot of weird noises in the woods, and the uncles—who, for real and for true, are named Tom, Dick, and Harry—created these characters to explain away the noises and frighten the youngsters. One of those characters was The Clicker, who has a ladyhead and lobster claws, click click click, and another was the Mayor with the Stretched Neck, from hanging, who wailed. When Abby was telling me about this, she also told me about the hundred-year-old monkey, and I thought that was the most terrifying character of all. A hundred-year-old person wandering around the woods is pretty scary, but a monkey? Holy shit. No one else in her family remembers the hundred-year-old monkey. It was a false memory. And I liked that, as well—because where did he come from then? I love the hundred-year-old monkey because I imagined that he kept learning and became more humanesque as he aged. I thought of him as someone’s poor pet who overstayed his welcome on earth. Nobody wants a hundred-year-old monkey. Clearly he would become a little bit off, sort of like the creature in Frankenstein. He needs a companion. He won’t leave my brain until I give him one.

MM: The last section of the book, "Rattlesnake on the bed," arose out of a collaboration with me and Kathryn Regina where we all plagiarized each other's work. What was it like to collaborate?

SE: For some reason I always thought I was terrible at collaboration, and that I needed TOTAL CONTROL, but that was just stupid. Collaboration is great. It made me write better because I wanted to impress my collaborators, and they gave me ideas that I stole gratefully, and they stole some of my ideas, and that made me feel happy, and it was great. The best part about it was that we didn't critique each other's work like we were in a class. We just giggled a lot and made up pretty stories. It was like playing Barbies.

MM: I really like the art in the book, by Sarah Jackson-Moore, who did the cover and also the drawings throughout. The art fits so well with the disturbing gruesomeness or your prose and I love how mad-sciency it is. How did art become part of the book?

SE: I love the art in the book. I asked Sarah Jackson-Moore if she would do the cover because I think we share a lot of sensibilities, and then she sent me this whole series of work that almost made me cry I liked it so much. I like that it's tangential instead of literal. I didn't explain anything to her or request anything of her. She just did it, and her artistic interpretation fit perfectly, in my estimation, at least. I think she's just amazing.

MM: What do you hate most about writing? This is my favorite ever question to ask other writers. I think it's funny when people assume that writers actually enjoy writing. Most writers I know really hate it at least half the time.

SE: When I forget it’s fun. When I think about it as labor, or as a career, or as something that I have to do. I hate when people say you NEED to write every day to be a writer, or do this or that to be a writer; discipline makes me feel dread. If I open a document and feel dread, I close it back down immediately and do something else.

MM: What are you working on now?

SE: I’m working on a series that are more short story-like than hybrid-like. One of them is about a little girl who marries a soldier who beats her with his silver tongue, and another is about a woman who nurtures her husband’s tapeworm like a child and lets it feed off their human baby. Clearly I’m still kind of in the same place. In fact, one of the stories is titled, “Gazelle Boy and the Hundred-Year-Old Monkey.”

Sarah Eaton hates bios because everyone always tries to sound sooo clever in them. She lives and works and teaches in Bloomington, Indiana, at IU, specifically, except she doesn't live, like, in a dorm room. She lives in a house in another part of town. Look for upcoming work in NANOfiction. Buy TOUGH SKIN from Small Press Distribution. Hooray!

H_NGM_N postcard

2010-04-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

There is a postcard I wrote on H_NGM_N 10. There is an unheard of number of Meg(h)ans in H_NGM_N 10.

Ten Tales of Domestic Disturbance

2009-06-19T13:50:00.001-07:00

10 Tales of Domestic Disturbance

Deconversion

God has his eye on the cherry chocolate cupcake. This is why I make a break for it. Blessed is the gal who shoots chickens and leaves them in your backyard.

Just Married

Home is where the night bleeds. You feast the front porch I’d dreamed of for so long. The tides cannot help themselves, but after dinner there will be a little light again, a little crème fraiche from a box.

Promise

I returned to the tool shed, but only to steal all the screwdrivers. I know we’d said we’d meet there if we turned 67 and neither of us was divorced yet, but. I leave six teeth in the box of nails: countless things I’ve held onto all these years.

Fantasy Vacation

A family travels ten hours from the Midwest, having won the Total Ocean Immersion Package. The children wanted volcanoes, although they’ve never seen the sea. A mother’s thighs laid waste under anemic sun; a father pats the left one before disappearing under a wave.

Diet Season

The teenagers are funoodling around in the attic so the whole household can hear. Bellies flop and slip. Pleasantly. Like vegetables I make a wish.

Scarlet Letter

There was some desire milling about the barbeque, so I brought you up to the roof with me, where we could see everything at once. I wore a mask, and you: waders. The sprinkler scattered burning liquid over the universe of lawn.

We

2009-04-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

flew off the roof holding hands

weeded oceanward, forgetting to hold our breath

scraped each other into bloodshed via thorny bouquets

fell under the aspirin’s spell into the tub (my soles pillowed your cheek as I flubbed)

climbed into the backseat: exhausted, mouthlocked, scavenging the pipes for ______

guzzled that gasoline like beers. The police found you facedown in peanuts; me heaped under the table

hung like matching chandeliers in the library, relieving ourselves on the rug. (I could not make out
your last words; locked inside your stubborn throat.)

[I am sorry I did not suck the venom out of your hand. I am sorry you did not bandage the papercut that split my thigh wide and gangrenous.]

fed one another TNT by the forkful because you said it was wheatgrass

dragged daggers along snow-white throats

had not planned on bludgeoning each other with The Unabridged Tolstoy

had a blast with grandmother’s shotguns, twinned sparkling bloodmasks: fit for a ball!

crawled into the abandoned cellar, then into the core of hot, wet earth.

‘d known it was arsenic, known it was quicksand, known there was no

followed our ragged petals over the

were uncertain who went first

2007-10-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

Conversation Between the Lovelorn: an Attempt at Something New. (An Excerpt)

(Enter CHERYL and STEVE, stage zero. STEVE lifts CHERYL’s finger via her wrist via her elbow via her shouldersocket. STEVE looks underneath the air.)

CHERYL: Hardy har. I tricked you! You thought you would find the enmagicked word, and what is there but the nauseated cotton candy of regret?

STEVE: Why did she go away after all, after I left her on the prairie roadside?

CHERYL: I made a little pick-a-nick for us, see? Something is growing out of the ground and we shall eat it and it shall take us over.

(CHERYL unfolds picnic blanket full of holes and lays it on the ground in ditch next to I-90 W.)

CHERYL: See, Steve, how the sky is wrapping around itself in preparation for our divine pick-a-nick?

STEVE: Warping, you mean. Warping around itself as we do, spending its bones. I thought you were bringing boiled chicken, my favorite, but now I see this was just another womanly ploy.

CHERYL (pulling Steve onto blanket, awkwardly straddling him): Wasn’t there more underfoot, underhand, then? Wasn’t there “transcendence”?

STEVE: I thought she meant to pull me up by the bootstraps into glee. It is our human responsibility, isn’t it?

CHERYL (staring off into traffic while grinding on Steve): He acted like my father sometimes, like when he’d upend all the furniture in the night and I wanted to stab his eardrums. You will certainly be the same. You were certainly separated from him at birth.

STEVE (staring off into ditch of impotence): What was her name anyway?

CHERYL: The quilt fell away in the night. The cold put its spell on my lips. Nobody was there in bed with me.

STEVE: The guilt? Prairie roadside is not so bad—do you think?

CHERYL: Listen. The treetips sound so distressed and unruly now.

STEVE: I am waiting for something again. Stupidly. And I do not know what it is. Therefore someday I shall purchase a condominium. Someday soon. It will have no shutters, as condominiums refuse all resemblances to Home. I will live alone in the condominium of grief for all eternity.

CHERYL: That cannibal on the news ate his victims in order to make them part of him, you know. To make them the closest ever. It makes me feel that I, too, could be a cannibal, and proudly. What a strong identity: Cannibal!

STEVE: Someday soon I shall purchase a condominium by the sea and someday later I will die by getting swept out into it.

CHERYL (sobbing into Steve’s armpit): I am getting to be an old woman. Creatures and people in movies, they mate and go out and get their condos. I do not. Therefore, I am not people. Why gingham? Why romance? No, I am not people anymore.

STEVE (petting Cheryl’s ribcage): I spent 98% of myself on her. Now nothing makes sense except waterfowl and artificial ginger-lemon tea.

CHERYL: She was a cunt. He was a cunt. What else is left to say? C-U-N-T. We have got to move out into the shine—it is waiting for us to stop repeating ourselves.

STEVE: Someday soon I shall…

CHERYL: The treetips sound so distressed and unruly…

(TRAFFIC NOISE enters stage right, louder and louder and broken-sounding. STEVE and CHERYL keep lying in the ditch as RAIN moves in.)

excuse the draft

2007-10-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

Therapy-Story, Revised

Time up and quit me. Meats hung stranded in the windows. I reinvent paper dolls out of disappointment: for Gary: the therapist. His idea. You can imagine the satisfaction.

EXHIBIT A: Paper Discoball

Medium: inside-out feathers, soaked in blood and lumpy Hollandaise X made each springtime, while en route to Tasmania for the air-guitar playoffs.

Description: X could not follow recipes, and preferred the imagined sound of the air guitar to notes of the actual instrument, which he played sloppily and with so much melodramatic grief. My discoball does not shine, is not mirrored, and bleeds all over Gary’s carpet, which is gray as X’s sensual demeanor. Gary examines his fingernails. It is a general rule that all X’s prefer the wrong thing.

EXHIBIT B: Paper Kittycat

Medium: Oceanfall, together they made a pain in my throat, ash saved from hundreds of cigarettes I smoked at four in the morning, waiting for X’s return.

Description: Did you have pets at home? Gary inquires, mistaking kittycat for koka nut. Bats, perhaps, or silverfish like those your mother squashed in childhood? No, Gary, there were no pets. He demands names and shoe sizes of the pigeons that roosted on the el stop outside our bedroom window, of the cockroaches that lived in our dishwasher. “Pet,” like everything else, has limitless definitions, says Gary. But I do not believe he understands the infinite combinations of ideas the universe births for no reason, all those accidental conceptions. X, for example, birthed by sixteen-year-old mother. Gary says: yes, I can see how important those pigeons were to the two of you. How you ingest cockroach residue at each meal because it is so impossible to fully cleanse the palate of longing.

EXHIBIT C: Waddedloveknotofpaper, exploding out of Paper Molotov Cocktail, followed by abstraction of paper peace.

Medium: Shards of plump red heartbeat: mine, spattered on bedroom wall. Residue of accidental appearance of stranger in my bedchamber.

Description: I do not mention X and Heloise out on the lawn before our window, “necking,” or any of the others. I recount The Stranger’s overall perfect genetic makeup, residing most especially in his seashell-like toenails. Is he a robot? Gary says. If he is a robot, this is fabulous. A robot is what you have needed for so many moons. Yes, Gary, he is a robot. Oh yes, I am drowning so deep in the blameless, predictable quicksand of robot-love.

EXHIBIT D: Consecutivelinked3-Dquestionmarksofpaperechoingwaythefuckoutinto…

Medium: Unknown.

Description: Campfire love, kitchen table love, drunken love out on the balcony in front of the neighbors. When it was so easy to achieve whatever I desired? How is it so easy to lose?

EXHIBIT E: Paper Magic Wand

Medium: Purchased at discount magic shop across the street, while Gary takes an “emergency call” from X. The wand is transparent as childhood, so full of water and purple glitter.

Description: I plunk Gary in the head, hoping to turn him into anyone who can tell me how to exist. Gary says: ooh, can you turn me into Neil Armstrong, floating weightless and untethered around the moon? Can you turn me into Sacajawea? Make me famous, and loving, and kind, and not-myself? Yes Gary, yes I can, I say, and he morphs into Liberace, Julia Child, and his biological mother before my eyes. Later, I will plunk my robot repeatedly while he sleeps, plunk him human, plunk him flawed and understanding. And Heloise, repeatedly, as if with a lead pipe. I will plunk X into his best self, which existed so deep below the surface that nobody but me could see it. I will plunk myself into somebody blank and whole, who has known no grief.

hey, i wrote something today

2007-10-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

My Guru

This morning my horoscope advised me to look at the world as it is, without imposing my beliefs on it.

A man stands on the streetcorner, chewing glass like candy, blood waterfalling out his mouth. Arms of steel: literally. Sign says: Guru of Blood and Pain.

I am no revolutionary, I say. I’ve just been feeling unbearably sad lately.

Hong Kong, he says, and tickles my left armpit with a metal hook, draws blood.

When I’m not looking, he pushes a clawful of bloody glass toward my face.

I would really rather have a cookie. A nice soft cookie full of peanut butter, or Minnesota, or nothing.

Pretend it’s a cookie of glass.

I don’t believe in cookies of glass.

Then don’t pretend.

He opens my jaws wider, wider yet, so wide I’m not sure whether I’m screaming or swallowing myself whole.

Later, in bed with my guru, I have a lot of questions. He allows me no bandages, no aspirins. He is cruel, my guru, cold and silent, but my guru can fuck. My mouth is an open wound, and I write questions for him on a chalkboard.

WHY THE FUCK WOULD ONE CHOOSE TO EAT GLASS?

Because one has lost his arms.

WHY THE FUCK HAVE YOU LOST YOUR ARMS?

Since childhood, I’d wanted a hook for a hand.

THAT STORY IS BULLSHIT. TELL ME ANOTHER.

Gurus do not have stories. I will tell you someone else’s. Once there was a woman. Once there was a man. Etc.

A WHOLE STORY!

One night the woman cut the man’s arms off while he slept. She ran off with them, and buried them in the core of the earth. The man wandered the earth, searching for his lost arms. He never found them again.

WHO WAS SHE????

She liked to wander the markets with beetleshells in her hair, with fires writhing underskin. In other words she was a cunt.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MAN?

He got distracted. He got distracted again. He forgot he’d ever had arms, or a woman. He became a guru, because gurus have no stories. Now shut your mind and go to sleep.

FUCK OFF.

I am trying to make my guru jealous by telling him a story about a dream I had about another armless man.

In the dream I was the only woman allowed to touch the arms. I removed them, and rubbed a golden ointment into the shoulder sockets.

In the morning his arms had branched and bloomed. In the morning he had soft flowercups for hands, and their petals stretched like fingers to receive my softness. Each time he touched me, petals fell off, so delicate he was. But at night they grew back again, even softer than before.

My guru said I told too many stories that weren’t true. He told me to go to sleep and have a different dream.

But my dream was always the same. What I did for him in the dream was the only thing I had done for anybody in such a long time. I was in awe of my facility, my strength, my faith.

I awoke to my guru touching me, to cold metal on my back, cold metal deep inside me. It was not just the arms: my guru’s whole body was like metal.

That bullet came a century ago, said my guru. Yet you still hold it in your heart. Get over it!

Why don’t you reach for it? I said. For me? Why don’t you try saving me with some wisdom like every other guru?

He shot me in the foot and whistled himself deeper into the woods. He was always whistling Schoenburg, my guru, so that I wanted to tear open his throat with my hands.

The night I was ready to leave, I tugged at my guru’s arms in his sleep. We had supped on whiskey and stale bread and he belched in his sleep without flinching.

The arms were fused to stubborn tendon, hard bone. They would not change, the arms. They would never be the arms he was born with. I would not remove them. I was capable of no salve. They could not save me.

At that moment I fell in love.

remedy 2

2007-10-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

Typed meditation. Cereal meditation. Off-the-hook telephone meditation. Meditation of bloodletting, loss-of-marbles, soufflé. (I have burnt the edges off this one, burnt em clean off.)

Molly would say I am making a meditation out of a moleskull, but her Larry meditates only on fishhooks; lover Reynaldo on discoloration of elbow.

Clothespin meditation? I-love-my-mother-in-law meditation. Meditation via harassment via diabolical dogtooth.

Stranger X, of course, did not meditate at all, thinking it tyrannical and too trendy.

I have always wanted to slash Larry’s jugular meditation. Meditation-in-peaces while driving off that (stranger X enters, stage left, wearing holy mittens, hands more brutal than any I remember) cliff again.

The grand idea of meditation!

Ommmmmmmmmmmm.

Stranger X has always been an asshole and always will be, therefore I love him all the more; therefore I behead the paper dolls for him and him alone.

If only the world were disinhabited entirely, meditation could be such a jiffy! I weave a meditation out of tinfoil and leave it in the street for somebody else to weather.

Betrayal-Story

2007-09-28T14:10:00.000-07:00

True: my brilliantine laugh pirouettes autumn-leaflike through midair, but I was never a geometrical numbskull nor a harpsichord wizard like the rest.

Across the table there is nothing to say. Later I whip myself silly over it out behind the shed where you chopped our cherrytree with plump neighbor Heloise, sharing cherries until all hours of the afternoon, staining your mouths by the facefull.

Run a-sea with me? you said at dinner. Run amok?

The uncertainty of your chewing motion promised we would never again love each other like we had at noon sharp the day before.

Problem: I've forgotten the correct dimensions with which to construct a tear. (I believe Mother used romancenovel-cornstarch-laced-with-celebrity-obituary. But hers turned out flat and unintelligible as razor blades.)

You come outside, wrap yourself around myself like a string around a finger, rope around Joan of Ark--depending on who's doing the telling.

I'm doing it.

Solution: the scars will go on being hideous; the moon doesn't illuminate anybody's mistakes.

2007-09-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

For whole swaths of day I lay in the memory-nest: tearjerked, unmoving.

I stitched feverweed into my scalp like the medicine-woman said. But I have never believed in medicine-people.

I thought of the faces of people you see after highway accidents. (They all held X’s features.) I did not feel the arms but they were there.

How does one rhumba again with all this soapscum clogging her stockings?

There is a red box in each of us raising heaven, he said.

And when there’s not a needle in the haystack left to pine after?

Leaven.

He raised a lopsided handstand. I collapsed into sleep.

Across the street of dream was sun on water. One hundred years of winter and I would hear it rushing.

Self Portrait in 4 Stories Which Are Really the Same Story

2007-09-12T11:13:00.000-07:00

1. Angelina

Angelina, walker of tightropes in glittering corsets and feathered parasols, dreamed at age 8 of disorienting all of human grief via brain surgery, understanding even at such a young age that the purpose of human existence is to alleviate grief; to reduce the frequency of pain’s appearance in the universe.

As a child, Angelina’s mother made it a point to remind her daughter often of the meaning of her name: messenger, angel.

Backstage, Angelina alleviates Ted’s pain by shoving her nipples into his mouth until he can’t breathe.

Afterwards the audience is distracted out of their pain into wonder.

They do not appreciate Angelina for it in the least, but she’d never know it. Smiling a mammoth smile, she thinks she sees Ted way in back—erect, overflowing with ovation.

2. Peggy

Peggy, having just discovered she is going to die within the month of an as-yet-undiscovered disease, drives herself home from the doctor’s office, stopping completely at all the stop signs.

She eats from the jar of storebought cookies while thinking absentmindedly about the doctor’s words.

Most things in her life she has done absentmindedly. She has gained a lot of weight, gotten married, had babies, buried her mother, and won and lost money gambling in this way. She has never murdered in this way, but were she a murderer, she would.

My husband is fucking that tightrope walker behind my back, Peggy thinks, eating. These cookies are bad, she thinks.

The Children will be home soon, and The Husband. She sets out the bad cookies for them, and the milk, and begins thawing the chicken; chop-chop-chopping the taco-lettuce.

3. Ted

Somebody else might compare it to the food chain, is how Ted justifies. True, I am a liar and a thief, yet every morning I smile at the elevator-operator: fully, with freshly-brushed chompers.

Ted is not aware of his own pain, among other things.

Before Angelina’s show is over, Ted and Rudolfo go downtown for stale beers, which are just fine, they say.

At home Ted drunkenly eats Peggy’s tacos with gusto, says: Delicious!

Sons Georgie and Ted Jr. mimic their father.

Peggy smiles without pride and says: Guess what, boys?

4. You and I

...the quiet miracle of the hairdresser’s fingernails shampooing my “flaky” scalp… I am stalling again, waiting for the shampoo, which smells of fresh air, to change my story.

At home I try to repeat the hairdresser’s magic on you. It seems to do the trick: afterwards, you are kind and gentle for eight hours straight

This is fabulous! Next time I will apply it full-body! I think.

Within seconds I am certain I will choose the wrong shampoo. All the hair on your legs will fall out. We will have to apply the prayer-salve each night. We will have to wait and see.

3.

2007-09-09T15:17:00.001-07:00

I have burnt up our story in the hot August night, Dear; scattered it along the trail like bread, so nobody can follow it home later.

It fell apart as soon as we crossed the equator; we didn’t feel it for a long time.

I forgot. Then I saw it: splintered off inside my hand.

It tracks me through the house: snickering from behind the soupcans, from behind the plants like a spy. (A faultline.)

It is restless, insomniac. Some nights I put it on like a negligee, the way a ghost puts on a body of sheet. For a minute I am myself. Then I hide under the desk for weeks.

There is nothing uglier than the story that disintegrates along its spine, guts unraveling all over the room. Scotch tape don’t make a narrative, baby.

A story unhinged: is it still a story? All the pieces are there, dysordered, masked, refantasized, dispersed like seeds…the bandage of white space...stories too deep to be ordered in rational landscape…

A story without a narrative; a ghost without a sheet; Iowa subtracted off my maps.

A story failed.

Read: palm of broken rivers.

2.

2007-09-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

She had been saving up the tiny beetles for some time.

She found them under grocery-shelves or her bed, or kidnapped them while they slept in underground fields. She swallowed them down into herself one by one like slick black airplanes.

She learned to suck them in with grace, so as not to disrupt their dreamings. Inside her they scattered like a dish dropped; broken.

She clutched them into her stomach, into silent, unified sleep.

A great sense of nobility and wholeness arose: the conquering of a world.

If anybody punched my stomach, their hand would shatter, she thought.

Later (for no apparent reason) one caught in her throatskin.

She choked him down.

Another broke into bitter liquid on her tongue. Others began to die inside her.

1.

2007-08-30T13:50:00.001-07:00

A door shut—a door shut in me.

De-synchronization of watches, library, picture-book, letter-drawer. Of wardrobe into mismatch, potatoes into trash.

…the bombing of Macchu Picchu…kindlings of the brushfire that will render all Nebraska’s grasses speechless, grotesque, and impotent…

“Life is an absurd wound,” said the tango artist.

(I wanted the story that goes off without hitch or ripple. Title: Midwest.)

The story changed mid-story and I was out in a field, listening to children scream through summertime; standing there listening.

I buy big earrings like I never wear, keep walking around the block, circling the house, circling the house, circling the.

Here Lies My Book

2007-08-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of listening to myself. Sometimes I will post pieces of my book. Right now it's called "Instructions on What to Do." I don't like that title, just the idea of it.