Warner’s works are always rooted in their settings. Though a wide variety of locales are addressed, from fields in the Phillipines to suburban Pennsylvania, it is difficult (if not outright impossible) to find a weakness in Warner’s etchings of place and time. It may seem like a basic achievement; should poets not all have mastery over their settings? Surely, but few accomplish it to the extent of Warner. These masterful depictions are a necessity for Warner’s work, as it pulls the writer from place to place and from time to time.

Warner’s secret weapon can be found in the lush sensory details that decorate every poem. Though, again, a seemingly ubiquitous tool, Warner proves his skill in piece after piece. The visceral nature of the images appeal in their own unique way and always contribute to, rather than detract from, the lyrical quality. Punches are never pulled, and immersive descriptions are plentiful. Some brief examples come in “Allen the fishmonger”: “You grace the fishhook / out of her neck. …”, and in the title piece “actual miles.”, “The moon is ripe with our fingerprints.” Further, in “Therapist Nightmare #1”: “The teacher / walks between / aisles with tongues dangling / from her belt.” or in “tigers and riffles”: “Chords of flame rosary the throat, / you’ve been swallowing arrowheads / by the pound.” These descriptions are incredible on their own, but what sets Warner apart from his contemporaries is his ability to do so while interweaving pop cultural references. Whether it’s Eleanor Rigby, Hüsker Dü, Ziggy Stardust, Black Sabbath, or even the collection title, Actual Miles, the context of Warner’s poems are rarely without a sonic landscape to complement their settings.

Jim Warner’s work is always a pleasure to encounter. It is equal parts lyrical ascent and pop-cultural roadside attraction. The voice in these poems is coherent and well-formed and thrives in approaching its task of spiraling together the disparate experiences that make up a life—across time, space, worldviews, and referents.

Vince Pantalone: I have been a big fan of Chaucer’s CANTERBURY TALES since I began teaching it years ago.  Each year, my research into the characters made them more and more familiar to me. Since Chaucer never completed his masterpiece, only finishing 22/24 tales out of the 120 tales planned, I began to think what if something “fictionally” would have happened to interrupt the trip to Canterbury?  This notion had been in my mind for years, but when I actually began the project, it took four years to complete.   

CS: Chaucer’s tale is a balancing of a host of stories and perspectives. What challenges did you find in this juggling of so many different sets of eyes and hearts? Did you discover any ties between characters and stories you didn’t consider at first?

VP:  With 30 distinct characters from the “Prologue” to work with, I had to figure out how I was going to use them in my own plot line. Chaucer gives hints that certain characters were virtuous, while others were corrupt. Once I began to separate the “good guys” from the “bad guys”, the task of employing the characters to my plot became easier.  

CS: Your structure is unique in many ways because you know where all these people and stories will end—and your job was to imagine backwards instead of forward. What made itself evident first—the plot arc you wanted to follow or the stories of the characters? Or did they come together in layers of understanding? Did any of the characters’ storylines surprise you with where they went?

VP:  The plot line was clear to me from the beginning: “on the way to the cathedral in Canterbury, a group of pilgrims would experience a kidnapping and a murder.” The challenge was to use Chaucer’s descriptions of the characters and fit them into my plot. I felt a need to mention all of Chaucer’s characters. The tricky part was to determine which characters would be major players in the novel and which would not. Except for the trip to Canterbury, my novel’s plot line varies from Chaucer’s greatly, so I felt a certain freedom to use the characters to fit into my plot.

CS: Since learning of your project, I’ve been finding myself thinking of the pre-story of other books—kind of like envisioning a Godfather 2 for the stories I thought I knew—and the possibilities are really intriguing. Did you consider doing the pre-story for any other works—or was it Chaucer all the way? If you had a crack at another book, what would you like to do?

VP:  My love of Chaucer’s masterpiece made it the only work I wanted to explore. The characters, the time period and the history are elements that intrigue me. The characters come from all walks of life and are unique amongst themselves. I have considered exploring a young Macbeth. It would interest me to explore his upbringing, his training as a warrior and his ascension as a thane,  before he meets and falls in love with Lady Macbeth. After all, he is his country’s hero before he makes the fatal decision to kill his king.

CS: Now that you’ve reached the end of the project, what do you wish you could go back and tell yourself when you first started out?

VP: Writing a novel is like running a marathon. Exploring the research, writing the first, second and third drafts took four years.  It took me two more years to get it ready for publication with drafts four and five.

CS: What’s next?

VP:  I am writing a collection of short stories for young adults. Each story carries the theme of dealing with “bullying.”

***

Vince Pantalone is a retired high school English teacher.  He was inspired to write Incident on the Road to Canterbury after teaching The Canterbury Tales for twenty years. Coach Pantalone has also written, directed and produced eight plays for young adults.  His published play, Wooing the Rich Widow, was co-written, produced, starred and directed by his son, Nick. Nick and Coach Pantalone have also published Keep Moving Forward: A Boy’s Journey Riding the Rollercoaster Called Cancer, a journal of Nick’s fight with cancer. Presently, Coach Pantalone is the Coordinator for Retention Support at Lebanon Valley College. He and his wife, Carla, have five children and five grandchildren. Incident on the Road to Canterbury can be found at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iBooks Store, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

Nathanael Tagg: Thanks, Eliot. Well, I definitely don’t fit the cliche of a writer as somebody who at a very young age started reading voraciously and writing. I spent a lot of time outside. I wanted to be in the NBA. Growing up, I was into sports more than literature. But in college I took literature courses and enjoyed reading that material. Eventually, I took a poetry writing class, and that’s where I started to see that I loved creative writing, especially poetry, since I was sensitive to the sound of language and tended to use images and metaphors.

EW: So you fell in love with the language and the experimentation of what language could do. Did you immediately begin working on publishing?

NT: After that poetry class, I stopped writing poems for a long time. I knew that publishing creative work was difficult. I could see myself as an English professor someday, but I knew becoming one was difficult. So I fell back on my plan B of becoming a high school English teacher. Right before I was about to student teach, I chickened out, and a few professors told me I should apply to grad school. I didn’t feel like a scholar, though. I didn’t know what my research focus would be.

It was about this time that I started to have what you could call a crisis of faith. I’d grown up in an evangelical Christian family, and I wasn’t going to church anymore. So two big issues were kind of plaguing me. What was my research going to be? Was I a religious or spiritual person anymore? Rather than find clear answers to those questions right away, I found myself writing poetry to process my emotions.

I distinctly remember one Easter morning. I saw a crow picking apart some rabbit carcasses. I thought, What an ironic thing to see on Easter morning. So I wrote a poem about that and sent it to a little magazine called Numinous, which published poetry that was spiritual, broadly defined. They published my poem, and I thought to myself, Okay, if I can publish something, maybe I should take my writing a little more seriously. And that’s what I did. During my free time, I wrote and published as much as I could. I had an MA in English, and I was teaching composition part time at several colleges. Slowly but surely, I realized I wanted to go back to grad school and earn an MFA in creative writing. I applied, got in to several programs, and decided on Rutgers. That’s where I wrote my thesis, which after years of revision, became my book.

EW: How formative was the MFA at Rutgers for you?

NT: Earning my MFA was a great experience, largely because of the excellent poetry faculty at Rutgers: Rigoberto Gonzalez, Rachel Hadas, Brenda Shaughnessy, Cynthia Cruz (all poets who had published several books and were active in the literary community). I went to their book release parties and hung out with them and other writers who are well known in New York City’s lit scene. I often crossed the Hudson River to attend events at Poet’s House, the KGB Bar, or one of the many universities there. Each professor encouraged me to try out various things in my writing, to discover what my poetry could be.

EW: How did you get from MFA student to author of Animal Virtue?

NT: The book’s cohesiveness didn’t come right away. For inspiration, I reread Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Thomas Lux, and many other favorite poets of mine, whose work happens to contain a lot of nature imagery. That rubbed off on me. I also watched wildlife documentaries like Planet Earth. Learning about strange animal behavior gave me ideas for poems that would not only describe the animal behavior but turn it into a metaphor, sometimes to help me process my feelings about recent experiences. At some point, I realized there was already so much animal imagery in my poems that I could easily make the book more cohesive by putting animal imagery in every poem. So I did. Animal imagery is just one of many elements I use, partly as a means to an end. I usually try to pose significant questions. I’d rather not beat readers over the head with answers, which I don’t always have. But hinting, hinting toward several possibilities, is something I want to do.

EW: We live in a pretty jaded, cynical time. I think we like to pretend that literature isn’t always, in some way, about figuring out how to live. You could argue that much of literature is trying to explore that issue.

NT: Honestly, when I started writing poetry, I felt a little guilty that I was producing what seemed like pretty straightforward poems about wanting to live a better life. Sure, there’s meaningful ambiguity, but I appreciate when there’s at least one layer of meaning that any intelligent reader can find. I asked myself, Should I be more avant garde? Should this be more obscure? More influenced by language poetry? My professors at Rutgers told me I got into the program in part because they liked that I wrote to communicate, that I valued clarity, and that I was something of a seeker. I was given the green light to write stuff that had recognizable and soul-searching themes.

EW: And that’s the pursuit of an ageless task, right? The pursuit of innovation, new and experimental forms. It’s good to push those boundaries and stretch the limits of language. That’s part of poetry’s job. But the poet’s job is also to communicate what’s in a human heart at the same time.

I want to shift gears and talk about restraint in your work. I agree that you communicate clearly, openly. But there is a strong sense of restraint too. You’re from the Midwest, and there’s the stereotype of the Midwestern reservedness. Don’t over-emote, over-communicate. What do you think about that stereotype? How does it impact, if at all, the formal restraints that operate within your poetry?

NT: Yeah. I am from Iowa, and I have hard-working parents and siblings who can be a little stoic, and maybe we sometimes fit that stereotype of restrained Midwesterners. Like anything else, that can be a blessing or a curse. When it comes to writing, you do have to make decisions. If you compulsively go all over the place with your emotion or with the form, you can fail to communicate or can create other problems.

But I’ve had to remind myself, at times, that poetry is a form of expression. It’s a form of exploration, and I want to write from the full range of human emotion. You can do so, ironically, by using formal restraint to open up the poem. Maybe by writing the poem as a pantoum or by imposing a less traditional structure on it, you can better express intense emotion or generate surprising content. I learned this from Rachel Hadas, my thesis advisor and mentor, one of the best contemporary formalist poets.  

I’ve heard many other writers say that by imposing formal restrictions, they end up saying things that they otherwise wouldn’t. They discover language. Plenty of my favorite writers, including George Saunders, emphasize the importance of making discoveries throughout the writing process. That’s part of why I always write with quite a bit of restraint. It’s generative.  

EW: You mentioned earlier that you’ve always been attracted to the music of language, to what I sometimes refer to as sonic play.

NT: Yes. I come from a musical family. I have three sisters, and they all play piano. My mom taught all four of us to play piano. I’m a drummer too, and I’ve played in bands. I’ve always been instinctively drawn to music, and I see poetry not as music per se but closely related to it. Many poets, myself included, aspire to achieve what musicians have, to make sounds that can generate a heightened state of consciousness, even ecstasy, which may be a quiet ecstasy only experienced by writer and reader in private.

EW: That’s so true. I recently heard the poet David Whyte being interviewed, and he said that “Music is what poetry would be if it could.” Poetry reaches toward the purity of music even though it usually strives to mean something at the same time.

So, another really interesting element of your work is your level of self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness. Your tone ranges from detached observation to more intense hyper subjectivity where the “self” shows up in the work and intrudes to make a quiet revelation, a quiet self-discovery.

NT: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I’m always conscious of it, partly because I am a somewhat restrained person from the Midwest, who doesn’t want to be pretentious or narcissistic or solipsistic or too confessional. I don’t want to wear my self, my head, or my heart on my sleeve. I’m trying to create a work of art, a poem with a speaker, and the speaker is a composite of me and others, real and imagined. The speaker has certain exaggerated traits.

Many times, the self that shows up in the poem is there partly because I’m experimenting. For instance, I might be writing a dramatic monologue, a speech delivered by a persona, like my poem “Billboard Jesus.” The speaker of that poem is a highway billboard of Jesus. The billboard itself is speaking. It’s a composite of an object, the biblical Jesus, an imagined Jesus, and an ideal father. That poem is one of the most personal pieces in the book because the billboard is addressing a boy who’s a lot like the kid I was. The boy is kind of shy and reluctant to speak his feelings in his dad’s presence. He feels a little hurt because he’s a budding artist, and his dad is too worried about finances or whatever to take notice. So that poem shows how formal experimentation allows me to bring out some sense of self. I don’t look in the mirror and record what I see. I shape form and content and tone, and they inevitably become a mirror, among other things.

I’ve heard so many great writers say it’s about finding your voice. But what does that mean? I think it has to do with getting form and content and especially tone just right. That’s one of the most exciting challenges of crafting a poem, answering certain questions. What if the poem has this structure? What if this happens in the poem? What if the speaker says this, in this voice? How would this change the way the poem’s world works? One function of poetry is indirect self-exploration that expands your sense of possible realities. I’m always playing that worthwhile game.

EW: There are a couple poems, especially at the beginning of the collection, that deal with that father-son tension, like “Unloading.” It’s about a father and son running a load of stuff to the dump. Nothing’s really said, but a lot is said at the same time. You have some other poems that hint at relational tension, sexual or otherwise. And in “Unloading” you use the word “cost.” Do you explore the cost of human relationships intentionally?

NT: Not the cost of human connection but the cost of failing to strengthen that connection, the cost of letting things slide, you know, when maybe something should be said or gestured toward, when maybe there’s an opportunity to connect with a family member or significant other. Too often, we have the opportunity to deepen our relationships and choose not to do it. There’s definitely a cost to that. I was thinking about that, but I wasn’t consciously repeating the word “cost.” It’s cool that it happened organically. Ideally, literature takes on a life of its own beyond the author’s conscious intentions. I’m glad you noticed this and found it meaningful.   

EW: I was thinking of the cost of any intimate relationship is like you have to give something to get something, and that’s sort of like the exchange and weighing of who’s giving and receiving what. Does that exchange have equal weight? Or is it imbalanced?

Another relational word that you use, in a number of poems, is “truce.” It’s such a simple, clean word. Are you using that intentionally throughout the collection?

NT: I’m glad you picked up on that repetition too, which was conscious and intentional. I actually had titled one iteration of this book Truce, partly because I’m thinking about what it means to live well within relationships. I’m also thinking about better ways of approaching religion or spirituality, nature or the environment. Also art. Some of the poems are ekphrastic; they function as art commentary. All this involves a kind of truce: navigating differences, finding common ground, compromising, and agreeing to disagree. It’s a give and take.

EW: Right? So there’s both a kind of calm and peace in the idea of a truce, but there’s also a sort of underbelly of unease. It makes me think of matter and antimatter. If they touch each other, they’re both destroyed.

NT: There is a violence to it. You could potentially kill a part of yourself or your agenda. And there is such a thing as too much compromise. There’s a kind of going with the flow for no good reason, and I think my personality causes me to do that more than I’m proud of. So I wouldn’t say “truce” is always a positive word, though it might be positive more often than not in my book.

EW: Earlier, you talked about religion a little bit and your upbringing. In the book, there are a number of poems that explore religious themes. It seems to me that the tone of a lot of these religious poems is really bemused, like you’re just having a good time exploring these ideas. And then other times it feels really uneasy or irreverent. Like it has some barb to it. And I think some of the poems go well beyond mere religion and toward a really rich yearning for a sense of wonder. So, my question is: How has both religion and a desire for a sense of wonder informed your work?

NT: That’s a big question. What’s the difference between those two things? Wonder is one of the best emotions you can feel. It’s a shame if anybody’s missing out on that. And religion is definitely a vehicle for engaging in wonder, or it should be. Oftentimes, it’s not, especially if you’re too worried about getting your dogma “right” rather than experiencing more of the world, nature, community, yourself. You start closing things down when you should be opening them up. Boundaries have their purpose. But so do openness and transcendence. Maybe some of my poems are kind of cynical and subtly or overtly critiquing some aspect of Christianity or fundamentalism in general that prevents openness or transcendence. But I think even in those poems, there’s some amusement, a kind of surprised joy that I can deconstruct the faith system I was given and nothing falls apart. I’m still me. The world hasn’t changed all that much, and maybe as a result of doing that deconstruction, I can be a little more at peace and functional. I can engage in a sort of reconstruction through reading and writing and other activities, many of which, oddly enough, often resemble what I gave up, minus the undue certainty. Maybe I can even inspire other people to do the same.

I also just like the idea of using Biblical allusions in a surprising, irreverent, but deeply spiritual way. I don’t know how well I’ve achieved that goal. I was afraid to approach the topic of my religious upbringing too directly in this book. For my next book, which I’m working on, I’m trying to go there a little more. For some reason, I’m not as afraid of it anymore. Maybe it has to do with having my first book under my belt and seeing that my family and others didn’t have a really negative reaction to it. I guess I’m trying to debunk the idea that an agnostic and poetic viewpoint is necessarily devoid of meaning and purpose and wonder. If you just look at the crazy facts that we glean from science or everyday experience, if you really pay attention, if you’re mindful, you’re going to feel wonder at some point.

A poem of mine that I wrote recently, which isn’t in this book, talks about how there’s a funny resemblance between natural phenomena documented by science and some of the miracles described in the New Testament. Jesus walks on water, and there’s an oceanographer, Sylvia Earle, who walks under water. She has worn a wetsuit and walked the ocean floor to study the life down there. Mary gives birth to Jesus. That’s the virgin birth. And there are documented cases of Komodo dragons giving birth without having sex. In the poem, I connect these births, which seem miraculous, to the recent birth of my infant daughter Jane, the most awe-inspiring experience of my life. “Miraculous” is almost too weak a word to describe it. And I could hardly contain my joy that my book and my daughter, both my babies, appeared at the same time, spring of 2018.

Making such connections between science and religion and personal experience keeps me interested in each part of that trinity, and I never feel the need to grasp for theology or any form of dogmatic thinking. That’s one thing I appreciate most about poetry. To do it well, you need negative capability. You have to sit with mystery and confusion without grasping for an easy answer. Poetry is a mechanism for inhabiting a viewpoint, or a state of consciousness, or an identity, or a personality that I didn’t feel allowed to inhabit as a fundamentalist Christian. In this way, my poetry is about individuation, self-actualization. The poet Rigoberto Gonzalez has called my writing a coming of age story in verse.  

EW: Which poem starts with the line about science and religion?

NT: “Stained Glass.”

EW: Yes, page 59. In thinking about science and religion, both afford you opportunity to experience wonder, and that is the most important thing. The first line here is “science and religion struck a truce.” The poem considers how science and engineering is holding up this beautiful cathedral structure and making the religious experience possible.

To pivot off of this idea, this collection explores the relationship of humanity to the rest of the animal world. If we are we animals, primates, aren’t we therefore subject to the forces of nature? Or are we in some ways special, set apart in some way that elevates us? How do the answers to these questions impact the way we live? In the book you explore the ethical, philosophical, and theological implications to those questions. How does poetry provide you the tools to excavate beneath the surface of those questions?

NT: Great question. We are animals. We’re part of nature just like any other organism. We can seem to have more power and permanence than we actually do. We’re crumbling cathedrals that need reinforcement. We can think too highly of ourselves. We should take ourselves off our pedestal as much as possible. But at the same time, you have to acknowledge that we have huge brains and that we can create technology, which dramatically alters reality. And language is one of the things that sets us apart. Of course, other animals have what you could call language, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t allow them to manipulate reality as much. At least archetypally, the idea of humans being made in God’s image, able to make or speak things into existence (or out of it) makes a lot of sense.

One of the best things about poetry is that it’s an intense exploration of language that can help us see ourselves for who we really are. It can reflect our creative and destructive potential, unmatched by any other creature. When we’re more aware of that, we can become better stewards of nature, heal our relationships, and do a lot of other amazing things. Or at least better understand why we so consistently don’t do them.

EW: Once you mentioned to me that one thing that bothers you is when educated people feel like they know everything and they forget that knowledge is provisional. It’s contingent. It’s fleeting.

NT: Yeah, it’s frustrating to read the news, or have a conversation, or even read literature and see that people feel as though they have all the information and all the answers. There’s too much knee-jerk self-righteousness and outrage out there, not enough depth of thought and grace. There’s a big difference between virtue signaling and true virtue. My book’s title “Animal Virtue” alludes to both, our fake virtue as well as the real deal, which we might just be able to achieve. To do so, we have to bear in mind that knowledge is constantly evolving, and as you implied earlier, language does fail us. And we fail ourselves. And we fail each other. So it’s important to consider the idea of truce, but also humility. That’s crucial. If you want to write a good poem or improve yourself, and us, and the world, you need a lot of humility to do it effectively. So I try to keep my feet on the ground.

The novel is compact at just under 200 pages, inviting an almost binge-like reading experience. And while the length certainly made it easy to say “just one more chapter” before washing the breakfast dishes or running to the grocery store, it’s the story itself that makes it difficult to stop reading.

Kenny grabs her readers from the first sentence, an opening that I will not soon forget: “In that driest season, Cielle’s father hanged himself in the barn. A rope tied to a beam above stacked bales of hay, a wheelbarrow, rusted cans. Cielle found him.” What follows is the story of a young woman trying to understand a world without her father, while also trying to understand her own place in the world.

Her father’s suicide thrusts the reader into Cielle’s world. It is through the lense of this event that we meet Cielle’s mother and her older sister, Helen. Because the story is told in a close third person from Cielle’s perspective, our impression of these two characters is colored by how Cielle perceives them. Her disapproval of Helen’s desire to marry their neighbor Bodie Mitchell after high school graduation. Her confusion at her mother’s behavior—bathing during the drought and refusing to leave the farm truck as a tornado approaches—after her father’s death. Cielle’s relationship with her mother and sister is complex and nuanced, and Kenny skillfully shows how these three women strive to heal in the wake of familial tragedy.

The Driest Season is a quiet novel, largely character-focused, but it is not without tension. In addition to being the means by which the reader meets Cielle and her family, her father’s suicide also serves as a central source of conflict throughout the novel. The reader learns the most about Cielle, about who she is and how she relates to the world around her, as she attempts to understand the events surrounding her father’s death and the broader implications it has on her family’s livelihood. There are other bursts of action throughout, like the tornado that razes the family’s barn and a horse riding accident that injures a neighbor, but the tension is largely anchored in Cielle’s grieving and growth.

The reader has access to Cielle’s innermost thoughts as she grieves, but also as she questions, watches, and observes. When she asks, “How do people forgive and move on? What mattered and kept anyone caring about what they did, how they did it, or with whom they did it if in the end they would die and it would all be over, gone, forgotten, dark, dust in the ground, a name on a headstone?”, we understand that while Cielle is observant and introspective, she is still a young woman trying to find herself. The way she processes her personal tragedy also becomes a way of understanding the larger tragedies that lurk at the periphery of the novel: the drought, the war, and the inevitable passage of time.

It is in these subtle shifts in scope, the personal to the universal, that the novel truly shines. In The Driest Season, Kenny has written a beautiful coming-of-age novel that is also an exploration of how loss and grief affects both families and entire communities.

When: April 4th-6th
Where: The Green Room Theatre and Alumni Writer’s House
Cost: Free and Open to the public
2018 Emerging Writer Festival Schedule

2018 marks the 16th year of the F&M Emerging Writers Festival, featuring five influential writers that are early in their careers, the festival is spread over three days and gives each author the chance to read their own work to an audience, as well as engage in craft talks with faculty, students, and the public. The festival will conclude with a panel discussion at noon on April 6th featuring all five writers, and a ‘Bye Bye BBQ’ social. While F&M puts together prominent literary events year-round, the Emerging Writers Festival is the marquee event for the year and not one to be missed!

Here’s our rundown on Who’s Who at the Emerging Writer:

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus is a poet with a string of international slam poet champion titles to his name. Billed as a poet, performer, editor, and educator Antrobus is working to carve his own style in the 21st century. Known for his poetic monologues, much of Antrobus’ work touches being born in Jamaica and raised in East London.

Antrobus will be the second reader on April 4th in the Green Room Theatre (Start-time: 7:30 PM), and his craft talk will occur at 1 pm April 5th in the Alumni Writer’s House. Any writers looking for tips on how to take the performance of their readings to the next level should make a note to catch Antrobus’ craft talk.

Photo Courtesy of raymondantrobus.com, by Tabitha Austin.

Sarah Gerard

It’d be an understatement to say Sarah Gerard does a bit of everything. The truth is she does a lot of everything, and all of it well. Sarah is the author of the novel Binary Star, the essay collection The Sunshine State, two chapbooks, and co-author of a collage and text collection, Recycle, which just released March 2018. If you thought we were done take a breath, Sarah has also published: interviews, essays, short stories in The New York Times, Granata, Vice, and BOMB magazine. All of that while still writing a monthly column for Hazlitt, and teaching writing in New York City.

She’s second reader on Thursday April 5th in the Green Room Theatre (Start-time: 7:30 pm) and her craft talk is 11 am Friday April 6th in the Writer’s House. Grab a seat and hope some of her productivity inspires you!

Photo courtesy of sarahgerard.com, by Levi Walton.

Chinaka Hodges

Chinaka Hodge manages to bring unique skills to the 2018 Emerging Writers Festival despite a roster of multi-talented peers. Hodge is the only writer on the ticket with a focus in playwriting and a script that garnered accolades at Sundance. Along with her playwriting, poetry, and teaching, Hodge is also a founding member of a collaborative hip-hop ensemble dubbed, The Getback. She leads off the Green Room Theatre readings at 7:30 PM on April 5th, and holds her craft talk 9:30 AM on Friday April 6th. If you’ve got an interest in writing for the stage, the screen, or just trying you hand at script writing find a way to make it to see Chinaka Hodge.

Photo courtesy of chinakahodge.com.

Tessa Fontaine

Not many writers moonlight as a badass, but Tessa Fontaine sure does. Fontaine is a non-fiction writer who performed with the Last American Traveling Sideshow  swallowing fire and charming snakes for onlookers. She didn’t stop her badass streak there— Tessa has also conducted workshops in prisons throughout Alabama and Utah for five years. Her first book The Electric Woman documenting her time in the sideshows releases May 1st 2018. She concludes the reading in the Green Room Theatre April 4th (start-time: 7:30 pm), and holds court for her craft talk in the Writer’s House on April 5th at 2:30 PM.

Photo courtesy of tessafontaine.com.

Mandy Berman

Mandy Berman’s 2018 Emerging Writers Festival experience doubles as a homecoming. With an MFA from Columbia and an undergraduate degree from Franklin & Marshall (Class of 2009, stand up!) Berman published her first novel Perennials with Random House in 2017 and is currently working on her second novel. Berman leads off the readings on April 4th at 7:30 pm in the Green Room Theatre as well as the craft talks on April 5th at 10:00 am.

Photo courtesy of mandyberman.com.

***

Curtis Smith: Congratulations on the new creative writing major you’re offering at LVC. Knowing academia, this isn’t the kind of thing that happens overnight. Can you tell us about the journey that brought this to fruition?

Holly Wendt: Thanks! It’s exciting to actually be at this stage, seeing the applicants for our first group of incoming students. I’m looking forward to seeing the first batch of portfolio submissions for our scholarship, as well.  But I have to say, the process of creating the major at LVC was well-supported from the beginning, and it went more smoothly than I could have hoped for. My wonderful colleagues in the English department had already developed a curriculum that included creative writing coursework, and a prior iteration of the English major offered a concentration in creative writing. Since arriving at LVC in the fall of 2014, my role has largely been to expand those course offerings and formalize that work with the structure of a full creative writing major.

We began the journey, truly, with an expansion of our visiting writers’ series, now named “Writing: A Life,” and with the addition of some creative writing theory courses. Thereafter, we also added workshops in creative nonfiction—as well you know—and in scriptwriting. Given the positive student response to the new courses, a study by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) that highlighted the growth of creative writing programs across the nation, and the need for deft and insightful communicators across all sectors, it seemed like an ideal time to take this final step and launch a major and a minor.

CS: Can you give us a grand view of the major, its areas of concentration and what might set it apart from other programs?

HW: The major is built on a foundation of two courses—Introduction to Literature and Introduction to Creative Writing—and students’ work will branch out from there. It’s an oft-repeated mantra that writers need to read widely and well if they want to write well—for good reason!—and so Introduction to Literature not only exposes students to a wide variety of texts but also to a wide variety of ways to read and engage with those texts. Also, since Introduction to Literature is required for English majors as well—whether they’re focusing on secondary education, journalism and communications, or literature—it’s an excellent place for students to meet each other. The creative writing major is housed in the English department, and one of the hallmarks of the LVC English department is how closely the faculty works to support each other and all of our students; our creative writing major is designed with the same intention for our students.

The Introduction to Creative Writing course is multi-genre, setting students up to enter any of the four workshop courses (in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and scriptwriting), and all students will take two different workshops, in addition to our theory courses, which are also multi-genre. Then, students are encouraged to further hone their skills in an intermediary workshop (and they may take more than one, if they like), which will then culminate in the creation of a chapbook-length manuscript or, for those seeking an honors designation, a full-length manuscript to be presented to faculty and peers. Students will also take literature courses within our varied offerings, and they may pursue independent studies to deepen their knowledge and continue work on their craft. As an example, I worked with a student on an independent study-turned-honors project that investigated young adult literature through the lens of literary criticism and also included creative work on the student’s own novel manuscript.

I haven’t gone through every required course, but I do hope that what I’ve shared here speaks to the varied potential of the major. One of the first things students notice at LVC, and especially in the English department, is that if they’re excited about it, faculty members are going to help them find a way to explore it and achieve it.

The LVC creative writing major is designed to encourage students to take full advantage of all of the opportunities offered within the college experience. Students can easily schedule in study abroad or study away programs, and it’s quite possible for students to take on a second major or two minors without taking an overload, if the student plans accordingly. Faculty, of course, are always on hand to help with that planning and to share information about LVC’s study abroad options.

One of my favorite components of the major—and of the arts at LVC—got its start when we launched “Writing: A Life,” and that’s our writer-in-residence program. In addition to conducting a workshop, giving a reading, and visiting classes, as our three annual visiting writers do, the writer-in-residence spends a week on campus, holding individual meetings with students to discuss their work (which students will have submitted in advance), attending meals with students and faculty, and generally becoming part of campus life. Our inaugural writer-in-residence was Nina McConigley, author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which won the 2014 PEN Open Award.

Another component that sets our program apart is ENG 299, a course in professional development for majors in our department. This course helps students begin the encompassing work of preparing for internships, learn more about graduate school and the various types of programs available, prepare writing samples and clips of work for professional portfolios—ultimately, this course ensures our majors will be able to go confidently from LVC to the next step in their professional and intellectual lives, in a way that’s tailored to the students’ particular needs and interests. The course features field trips and guest speakers, too, and fosters connections with alumni, so that the wide range of potential professional avenues is clear, and we collaborate with LVC’s Center for Career Development, so students receive the full spectrum of potential benefits, from mock interviews to career mentorship from professionals in the field.

CS: I’m imagining a program like this will extend beyond the classroom—and probably grow into its own community. What kind of opportunities are you envisioning for students outside of the traditional lecture setting?

HW: One of the initiatives we’re working on this semester is a partnership with the Lebanon VA Hospital, exploring ways that our campus writers can work with veterans and help them tell their stories. While we’re still in the planning phase, I’m very excited about the potential of such a program.

Students are also able to apply to serve as the assistant director of “Writing: A Life” for an entire academic year. The assistant director helps coordinate advertisement for the series events, including creating materials for our social media feeds and working with our on-campus office of Marketing and Communications. Additionally, while the visiting writers are on-campus, the assistant director serves as a liaison for the writer, guiding them on campus and connecting them with other students. Even more importantly, the assistant director specifically fosters the health of the literary arts via two projects: a formal proposal of writers to invite to campus in the future to be shared with the department and a campus/community engagement project of the student’s own design. This is a key experience for students interested in arts education or arts outreach.

And you’re right about community—there is already a literary community on campus, and the students who come to LVC for our new major will find themselves not only welcomed but in a position primed to thrive. One key locus for that community is Green Blotter, our literary magazine that publishes creative writing and visual art by undergraduate writers and artists around the globe. Students may, of course, submit their work for publication, and they can also take part in the editing of the journal. Our reader board and editors are all students, under the excellent advisement of Ms. Sally Clark, and they collaborate to create a beautiful, full-color print magazine annually, with an accompanying web and social media presence. Not only is this editorial work an excellent step toward future work in editing or publishing, it’s also a clear demonstration of and engagement in literary citizenship, the weave of writers and readers and editors that is such a part of the writing life.

A lively campus writers’ group also exists, wherein students gather to produce new writing in response to prompts and also to engage in additional workshops. The writers’ group has organized write-ins and world-building workshops for National Novel Writing Month, and we have some events in the works for National Poetry Month this April, in partnership with the spring semester poetry workshop, including an open mic reading, and a collaborative reviews series with the campus library.

Further related extracurriculars include Wig and Buckle, our long-standing student theater company, and La Vie Collegienne, the student newspaper, and the whole host of student activities and clubs found at LVC. We directly encourage our students to find ways to build bridges between their interests, rather than try to silo them. In this way, students are always taking their learning beyond the classroom and bringing new learning back—to the classroom and to the page.

CS: More and more colleges are offering creative writing programs—but some students (and parents) worry about what awaits a graduate of such a program. What are the post-college opportunities that some may not be seeing for creative writing majors? And in a broader sense, what are the life-long assets one might find from this course of study?

HW: Becoming a writer isn’t only about knowing where the commas go (though that’s also important); becoming a writer is about being a keen and insightful reader of the world. Writing is about attending to detail and communicating with nuance and adapting to change and finding solutions to problems—ask anyone who’s tried to write a sestina or structure a novel with multiple points of view: writing is all about finding solutions to problems—and those are the skills the 21st century clearly requires of us.

There are careers ready-made for writers of all stripes: positions in advertising and in education, in writing for film and television, and in the ever-changing media world in everything from news and features writing to cultural criticism and sports writing. Creative writers work as editors and copywriters and literary agents and publicists; the world of publishing is much-peopled with writers who aren’t just bringing their own books into the world, but helping others do the same, in the big publishing houses and in independent and small presses. Too often we forget about careers in arts outreach organizations, community arts initiatives, and many positions in the non-profit sector; we don’t always think about how writing (and English) are good complements or precursors to the study of law and medicine because they remind us of the lives in the bodies one might be trying to defend or save. Pairing that creative writing major with another specialization—perhaps another language, or global studies, or digital communications—opens still more doors.

At its core, a creative writing program—and the liberal arts more broadly—is about developing life-long learners. A person who is, as Henry James wrote, one “on whom nothing is wasted,” can become just about anything, and a creative writing major is especially suited to finding value and applicability in all of our experiences and knowledge. Someone well-versed in nuanced writing and in the selection of detail will be able to articulate their knowledge and skills in a way that makes clear their appeal as a colleague and as an asset, rather than simply as an employee.

CS: If you could project yourself forward ten years, what would you like to be able to say about this new program?

HW: While I do want the program to grow—to flourish in its numbers, as well as in its service to our students—I want to be able to say that it still is a close-knit community, that our students know and value each other. That sense of community is a key strength of LVC and one that we’re particularly proud of in our department.  Because it’s such an integral part of who we are, I don’t worry that our sense of community will diminish, but tending that community is a distinct priority. I would also like to point at the shelves of publications our students have created and contributed to and to tell you about how much I’m enjoying reading them.

CS: If someone is interested in learning more, where would you point them?

HW: First and foremost, our website has a listing of available courses and course descriptions, as well as related endeavors, like Green Blotter and La Vie. From there, too, all of the information about Lebanon Valley College is at your fingertips, if browsing is your style. However, I’m also very happy to answer any questions ([email protected]) and to help prospective students get in touch with current students, undertake classroom visits, and share information about our many campus initiatives and opportunities.

The nature with which Alexander treats her subjects is at once intimate and distant; virtually every story in the collection can be thought of as a sort of conversation. One might argue that all literature is a conversation, but though the reviewer agrees with this, it is not the focus here. Instead, the highlights of Alexander’s character development shows itself in small, blunt conversations between central, opposed (and often also simultaneously bound-together) people. The lovers especially highlight this trait in Alexander’s writing; they argue, they light each other on fire, they find disembodied limbs in the garden, and they kick at the ashes of the remains of one another. The language, though curt at times, always serves a very clear purpose. Sometimes the language is comedic and irreverent, as when a woman tells her poolboy matter-of-factly: “That’s what this is about, Tom, you grass fed dildo. Fucking.” At other times, the language serves a much more high-minded symbolic purpose, such as the recurring symbol of the hymen in the story “After Key West,” which operates as an effective vehicle to speak about the treatment of women in the story itself as well as the status of women in general.

Alexander’s writing, though it often leads into the surreal and supernatural, is always rooted in concrete, visceral, and often graphic imagery. Whether the subjects are alive or dead, happy or upset, the body is always central in Alexander’s observations. This is perhaps epitomized in “The Courtly Lover,” where the action of the story is often punctuated with descriptions of the speaker’s body in respect to the speaker’s relationship. “My legs are two dildos, my body is a water balloon, my sickness dribbles,” the speaker asserts early in the story. By the end, “My head is a meatloaf sack, pink slime. … My hands are spaghetti strainers clogged with chicken skin.” In a collection that so often handles metaphysical concepts (love, hate, life, death), the use of this organic, meaty language in such a direct way serves three purposes: providing the reader with a visual anchor for the story, contrasting the non-physical elements, and moving the reader’s attention along so that the reader will keep pace with the story.

Perhaps the most important factor in the collection is the constant pairing of opposites. Real elements versus non-real elements, gory descriptions of bodiless entities, and even contradiction in the title story of the collection (where the “enemy” is a stand-in where “lover” would normally be used) creates a sort of codex for the reader. When this codex is solved, the reader is able to fully realize Alexander’s intention and skill in the realm of the worldly- otherworldliness. Dear Enemy serves as an intellectually stimulating and ultimately satisfying exploration of the strange, contradictory, and fairy-tale aspects of life.

Shameless introspections, outward analysis, as well as gaudy, unfiltered perspectives explode from the pages of NWOL. The poetry is relentless. Its verses keen as a blade unsheathed. Having arrived shortly after the 2016 presidential election, you had better believe there are cutting and saddening references to it in the poems. One poem in particular makes this reality quite laughably obvious. “Steps to Healing,” by Saidi Agostini, comes in the form of a numbered list of a hypothetical therapy exercise. About a third the way through appears a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “positives of the Trump administration” and Pence’s hair being “on fleek.” (There really are some gems in this anthology.) The poem, however, concludes with a dire statement of anguish: “read of the 8 trans people who have committed suicide since the elections.”

The anthology is not all that dark. It is at its core an attempt to humanize an entire demographic of people whom have been disenfranchised in countless respects, and for whom social acceptance is a struggle. (It should also be mentioned that NWOL is an homage to Langston Hughes’ debut novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), a semi-autobiographical account of life for black folks in Lawrence, Kansas during the Jim Crow Era.) In the poem “13 Reasons Why I Love Long John Bottoms,” doaks attempts to present a voice (quite patently her’s) as facsimile of what would otherwise be seen as her opposite—a middle class white woman obsessed with her body. We all have this picture in our heads of skinny barbies constantly looking in mirrors. But here is a black woman talking unabashedly about her undergarments.

It occured to me while analysing this poem that there was a motif throughout the poems at large alluding to the aforementioned classism. There is an overt effort by the authors to place black women (themselves) on the same plane as any other social group. To my mind, that unspoken group is white women, for whom positive body image and prettiness are often default luxuries. This insistence sometimes seems to detract from the more sincere racial and social commentary. The classist tropes seem to be pointed and intentional, though a bit, I thought, detached from the narrative of struggle specific to people of color and LGBTQ individual—which is otherwise the focus of the anthology and, according to its foreword, its modus operandi. Nevertheless, one can see as an informed reader, how class, sex and race are all ultimately entangled.

It might become difficult to mediate the multitudes of viewpoints and experiences in this anthology. After all, it is a collection of poems written by six different women. Despite this, its editor performed her duties quite well. The book is organized into seven self-contained sections, each one an avant garde meditation on a particular idea. For example, the second section is titled, “Our Misbehavior?,” in which there is a poem titled, “Harriet Tubman is a Lesbian,” by Saida Agostini. The poem plays with the idea that Tubman and Sojourner Truth were lovers, and is presented in a refreshing real black vernacular. And the poem after that, “Knowledge of The Brown Body,” by Teri Ellen Cross Davis, refers to the theoretical lesbian love affair with this beautifully carnal line: “…my fingers deep inside the agent that helped break / the back of the confederacy.” (I wrote “wow!” in my notes.)

Not to ruin any spectacular and jaw-dropping surprises, but it wouldn’t hurt to pique a little interest. There truly are too many great poems in this anthology to run out of examples. There is a poem written in the voice of a penis, “Adventures of The Third Limb,” by Saida Agostini; a poem about a pet roach, “Sir Roderick,” by Tafisha Edwards; and a poem enchantingly reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s structure and voice, “What it Takes to Breathe,” by Saida Agostini. The poems “Ars Poetica With Fever,” by Anya Creightney and “Atomic Snowstorm,” by Tafisha Edwards are remarkable—the first for its imagery and what you learn from the second poem about its syntax; the second, for its uncanny structure and play on the first poem. There are also several beautiful poems about Prince. Because… well, he died in April of last year and he was a god. These celebratory and elegiac poems do him abundant justice.

Then there is “Manifesto of a Born Again Internal Organ,” by Katy Richey which is quite literally a poem written in the voice of a vagina. Both striking and relatable in a perfectly oxymoronic way. And, my favorite poem of the collection, the last poem, “Great Granny’s Last Night,” by Saida Agostini—it has a way of placing you there in the heat, and the images of “the great horned thing” sitting alongside god waiting for granny to pass. It is incredibly well-composed and a perfect denouement.

In short, this book is important for everyone to read, and I hope you will see, as I think I eventually did, that the seeming vulgarities and base language (paired with the class-conscious undertones) work to make the poetry relatable. As, in fact, was the effect of Hughes’ inaugural novel, Not Without Laughter. As with Hughes’ novel, NWOL grabs you, sets you firmly in the middle of such disenfranchised lives and their myriad hopes for connection and social value.

Perhaps it could be said this book aims, in a way, to open old scars of shame, guilt and culpability resulting from old socially-entrenched power structures, and by doing so create the opportunity for true healing. This anthology is a salve of salvation, an olive branch of remediation. As celeste doaks writes in her foreword, “this collection is one remedy” to our collective shame. We would do well to take hold of it.

***

The Black Ladies Brunch Collective consists of Said Agostini, a queer Afro-Guyanese poet and social worker, a Cave Canem Fellow, and is currently working on her first collection, uprisings in a state of joy; Anya Creightney, also a Cave Canem Fellow, is a poet, editor and coordinator, and Programs Specialist at the Poetry & Literature Center in the Library of Congress; Teri Ellen Cross Davis, also a Cave Canem Fellow, is on the advisory committee for the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival, and coordinates the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.; celeste doaks, poet and journalist, author of Cornrows and Cornfields (Wrecking Ball Press, UK) in March 2015, and teaches creative writing at Morgan State University; Tafisha Edwards, a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, author of THE BLOODLET, winner of Phantom Books’ 2016 Breitling Chapbook Prize, is an MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale; Katy Richey, also a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Poetry Award, and hosts the Sunday Kind of Love reading series open mic at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C.. Learn More about Mason Jar Press, publisher of Not Without Our Laughter, by visiting masonjarpress.xyz.

At its heart, Central Valley can be read simply as a coming-of-age story about a woman’s experiences during childhood. To reduce it to such a simple statement, however, seems insulting. The work is like a mosaic, a non-linear jigsaw puzzle of memories that have been sewn together to give the reader a glimpse into the narrator’s life. D’Stair’s novel is written in a stream of consciousness; no matter how disparate the thoughts may initially seem between one piece and the next, the reader is nonetheless swept into the swirling stream of the narrative. On this front, D’Stair’s novel is noteworthy for two reasons.

First, the nonlinear structure of the narrative is true to the actual experience of memory; rarely do we think about our childhood experiences, especially trauma, in a cut-and-dry fashion. Rather, we remember them in the way that D’Stair portrays them: sharp, distinct, and seemingly disparate, but truly all interconnected by a single consciousness.

Second, the nonlinear nature of the narrative serves to help distance the novel from a trite aspect of the traditional coming-of-age novel: focus on a single point of childhood trauma. Because of the “natural” inclination of a narrative to reach a single climactic point, it may seem natural to follow that all coming-of-age stories should come to a head with a single dramatic moment or traumatic experience. The idea that childhood contains only a single trauma, or that the threshold between childhood and adulthood is so distinct that a push from a single trauma can cleanly cross that line, is completely absurd. D’Stair’s novel allows for the exploration of several traumas—abusers don’t disappear after a single offense, after all—and the nonlinear nature of the narrative keeps us from assigning a disproportionately large value on a fixed point rather than spreading our attention equally across all given experiences.

The prose of the story itself is positively hypnotizing. D’Stair weaves a story in each chapter with strings of thought; where another author may reserve repetition for special cases, D’Stair is not shy about recycling her words tastefully. An excellent example of this can be found in the chapter titled “Mime (meemee)”, excerpted below:

Mime is a poem herself. A window poem a word of windows a window of words. She has very few words. She has a large window she looks out a long window days spent looking hands crossed before her hands soft that hold my face soft on my cheeks those same eyes now look at me out through the glass surface of my own eyes.

These repurposed words result in beautiful strings of observation that flow in a surprisingly natural manner. They braid themselves together in a way that seems reminiscent of the prose of Gertrude Stein. At its best, this prose is hypnotic; mesmerizing; captivating. All the while, the work continues to explore competently and in complex detail the past trauma and emotional development of the narrator.

If there is a problem with D’Stair’s project, it is in the fact that experimental works are always less accessible than their traditional counterparts. By no means is Central Valley casual beach reading or a waiting room distraction. It is a commitment by the reader to delve into an intricate, emotionally engaging, realistically complex portrait which neither pulls punches nor compromises itself for the sake of the reader’s ease. The payoff, however, seems well worth it. The fragmented and resewn journey of D’Stair’s novel is one that will leave any attentive reader transfixed and enthralled.

Her Body and Other Parties is a powerful, terrifying, and boldly ambitious debut, which has garnered plenty of critical attention, including being nominated as a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. The NBA winners will be announced tomorrow, November 15 at 7:20 pm EST.

Last Thursday, Machado visited The Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, PA to read from her work, answer questions from the audience, and sign copies of the new book. We talked with Machado via Skype last Monday evening, prior to the event.

***

Eliot White: First off, congratulations on being shortlisted for the National Book Award. How does that feel?

Carmen Maria Machado: It feels really good. It was sort of a surprise. I definitely didn’t think my book would get nominated, among other things. I’ve been surprised at every turn. Every day I think, what new magic is going to be in my inbox?

EW: I want to start by talking about Pennsylvania. You’re from Allentown, right?

CMM:  Yes, originally.

EW: Allentown is sort of at the top of Eastern Pennsylvania’s coal country. A lot of that area has a pretty distinctive, run-down, almost gothic vibe to it. How much of this Pennsylvania Gothic, small-town feeling gets into your work?

CMM: I think that Gothic sensibility is pretty prevalent in my work. I spent a lot of time in high school with my friends, driving into nowhere, for our own amusement. Driving through Centralia, and thinking about Pennsylvania as a very interesting, weird, Gothic place. I don’t think I had that word in my vocabulary back then, but I think it was on my mind in some capacity. I’m working on a project right now that is much more actively engaged in that Gothic sensibility. I feel that the landscape and the setting of Central/Eastern PA is very much in my blood.

EW: For better or worse.

CMM: It’s really beautiful. Every time I come back, every time I drive through the state, I’m like, God, it’s so pretty here. It’s prettier than any other place, which is amazing, because I’ve spent time in all these other states, and they’re all gorgeous in their own way. But I’ve always found Pennsylvania compelling. It’s in this weird crisis of conscience right now. I keep thinking about this last election, and how the state went red for the first time in a while, sort of thinking about how that felt to me, as a queer writer who is from PA and now living in PA again. Philadelphia is historically one of the more progressive cities in the country. But, there are these other, rural elements at work too. I get more and more interested in it every day.

EW: I always talk about PA as an in-between state. Its essential being is its in-betweenness because it’s not really New England, it’s not really the South, it’s not the coast and it’s not the midwest. And, it’s a swing state, not fully conservative or fully liberal.

CMM: It’s so true. I’ve never thought about it that way.

EW: I’m interested in some of your childhood experiences too, of how, in some other interviews you talk about being a highly imaginative child and saying you would do things like say “goodbye” to your furniture before you would leave the house.

CMM: I did. Multiple people have described this. I don’t know where I put that quote, but I feel like people have asked about that. Looking back, it’s pretty funny. I did do that, yes.

EW: I feel like there’s another part of your childhood that you’ve covered in several of your essays about being raised in a Christian environment, which is fairly common in Central PA. Does that sort of imaginative state of your childhood relate in any way to your Christian upbringing, as far as seeing the possibility of other worlds or dimensions, spiritually speaking? Is there any connection between childhood spirituality and childhood imaginativeness?

CMM: What’s really interesting is that my religious faith was self-imposed, which was a weird twist. My parents were religious, but not in an imposing way. A lot of the things that I imposed on myself were intense and did not really come from my parents. I wanted to feel strongly, and I felt that was an avenue to the supernatural. If you truly believe in things like God, angels, demons, you believe in a supernatural world, and that’s actually very intoxicating for a lot of people, especially young people.

I feel like there were a few other things at work too. I was an avid reader and I’d say I had a naturally active imagination. But also, I’m sure those things fed this desire to have a sense of something else, something outside of me. Faith and religion kind of fit that mold for me.

I grew up in the suburbs of Allentown, so I wouldn’t even call it rural, but I definitely feel like I had this desire to infuse my world with something more. There must be something out there, a kind of feeling. I still have that feeling of the fragile potentiality of space, but now it’s more of an emotional state and more of an acknowledgment of the mysteries of the world as opposed to God or religion.

I feel like it’s an interesting evolution, but definitely my imagination fueled that. I fell into an evangelical crowd for a while as a teenager, and I remember people would say, don’t you feel it? Can’t you feel God’s presence right here? I was like, yeah I do! I feel like that is imagination at work, right? It’s where you become bodily engaged with what’s happening in your own mind, which is really interesting to me.

EW: There is such an imaginative quality to your work, but there’s also a sort of rich embodied experience that I would like to talk about. You’ve talked with several interviewers about sexuality and the female body and the queering of sexual experience. How did you pull that off? And, why is embodied experience and sexuality so important for these characters that you’ve been crafting over the past few years?

CMM: It’s funny that you say that. Some people do not agree with you and do think it’s overwrought, which is fine. It’s just interesting because when I set out, sex is a very human experience, and I think that one of the reasons that I gravitate to it in my work is that I read writers who use sex in ways that I like and don’t like. An example, I really hate how Philip Roth writes about sex. His contempt for women drips off of every page. I get so much flak for saying that. I have to be careful. Some people get really stressed out about it. But I just don’t like it. …

Nicholson Baker who is a writer I adore, he has a lot of books that are very sexual, but the sex is, it’s not always good sex, but it’s full of joy and there is something that’s very human and real and he’s empathetic about it in a way that’s very compelling. I feel like there are ways to do it well and not so well. There are far more celebrated male literary writers that write sex than female writers, and that really bothers me. So, I was interested in sex being part of my project from the beginning. How did I do it? I guess I just wrote the scenes that I wanted to write. There are some stories that have more than others. Some of the stories like “Inventory” or like “The Husband Stitch” are very sexual. But, it’s not arbitrary. These stories demanded a certain honesty to make them work. Can you ask the second part of that question again?

EW: Sure. I think contemporary literature in general is having a moment where writers are creating characters that are rooted in the body, and bodily experience, as opposed to living so much in the mind. Why is embodied experience valuable or beautiful or important for these characters?

CMM: I am really interested in the relationship between the body and the mind. This is something I’m exploring in a lot of the things I’m working on right now. In some ways, the mind is beautiful and excellent, and it can do so many things, but it also is housed in the body. If my body dies, my mind does not continue. If my mind would die, my body would keep living. So I feel like that’s interesting and worth exploring.

There’s something I’m trying to figure out about how we value minds in relation to their bodies. The way that women scholars aren’t taken very seriously, or non-white folks are constantly being questioned, what their perceptions are and their ideas about the world, how people assume fat people are stupid. There is a very intense connection between the body and the mind in everyday experiences that we’re not quite aware of. That’s very interesting to me also because those things are actually not related. They have nothing to do with each other.

It was important to me to have characters that were embodied in a very specific way, to be housed in different kinds of bodies. People are not floating brains on the page. They are human beings, in the way that we all are. I notice that with some fiction. It feels so floaty. It’s not a craft problem. It’s a perspective problem. That type of work feels like it shows a belief in pure reason, and fiction like that feels like a bunch of dudes having a pure, reasoned argument on the page. That just doesn’t exist. The idea that the mind is separate from the body, like pure reason, that literally does not exist. It’s not possible. There is no such thing as a neutral person. Your body is not neutral. White men are not neutral, for example. Straight people are not neutral. It’s just something that I’m really interested in, and these stories are a manifestation of that interest.

EW: There’s a passage from the story “The Resident” that I wanted to talk about. It’s one of my favorite passages in the whole book. It takes place at the end of that story, where the character is reliving the childhood moment where she sleep-walked out into the woods. It goes like this:

“My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline was evaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed me like the mammal I was. But here, I was just skin, the just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-click-clicking like a car slowly ascending a roller coaster’s first hill. And then I was just a hovering brain, and then a consciousness, floating and fragile as a bubble. And then I was nothing.

Only then did I understand. Only then did I see the crystal outline of my past and future, conceive of what was above me (innumerable stars, incalculable space) and what was below me (miles of mindless dirt and stone). I understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and suffer greatly. I was a creature so small, trapped in some crevice of an indifferent universe. But now, I knew.”

I wasn’t really sure where that story was going, and then it arrived at the character facing this extremely intense realization. Could you talk about that passage and how your characters’ often face that same sort untamed, ominous fear?

CMM: That it is the last story I finished in the collection and it required the most revision of any story in the book. It had never been published anywhere before, and no one had ever really had eyes on it, except one small workshop very early in the process and then later my wife, but that was it. When my editor at Graywolf looked at it for the first time, for the collection, it was in a much different form. He said, I don’t think you know what this story is about. I said, you’re right. I don’t. For a while I really had no idea what I was doing with this story, but it felt important, like it belonged in the book.

Part of the story that I really wanted to write was the sexual discovery. But, I didn’t want the trauma to come across as if it was because she was gay. Instead, the horror is the fallout with her troop, because of the kiss she shares with one of the other girls. When I was younger, there was actually a girl scout in my troop who sleep-walked into the woods and she woke up out in the darkness, in her pajamas. The troop leaders had to go out and get her. Which is terrifying.

So, in that scene in the woods, the girl character has to confront her own nothingness. It’s existential. It’s the feeling of alienation. Once I figured out that scene I realized it was a scene with purpose. I was interested in exploring the horror of nothingness. Once our bodies recede away and evaporate, we are nothing. That’s the trauma, the realization that we are nothing, regardless of whatever lives we choose to lead.

EW: I think the beauty of it is that you don’t approach that big, overwhelming subject head on, but in a roundabout way… it’s been done before so it can feel hard to approach that subject at all.

CMM: It’s a sort of classic artistic question.

EW: It is. It’s central and probably will never go away, but you approached that big, existential idea through the convergence of discovered sexuality and the loss of spirituality and facing fear and owning the body. Anyway, this scene felt raw and visceral. It reminded me of that Stephen Crane poem where the speaker says to the universe “Sir, I exist!” but the universe responds with complete and absolute indifference.

CMM: Have you read Crane’s prose poems? I love the one about a boulder crushing the workmen. Do you know that one? Oh, it’s so good. I don’t want to mess it up by saying this, but basically, these workmen make a boulder and then it rolls and crushes them to blood, but before that some of them are able to scream. And, that’s the whole poem. I have his collected prose poems.They’re so creepy.

EW: Could we keep diving into this topic? The idea of fear, and how fear drives a lot of the characters, or at least is a major part of their experience. For instance, the fear of the plague in “Inventory,” or the fear of losing control of your body, of sexual assault implied in “The Husband Stitch,” or the fear of your body disappearing and blinking away, like in “Real Women Have Bodies.” Obviously, there are many different iterations of this in your work, but maybe you could talk to me about that impulse of fear?

CMM: Sure. I teach a horror class, and I always make my students make a list of a hundred things they’re afraid of, to start off the semester.

EW: That’s amazing.

CMM: It’s really intense. Some of them are like, You want us to do what? I think you can’t really create horror without accessing your own anxieties and fears. You just can’t. The mistake that I see a lot, especially with students who are starting to write horror, is that they’re really focused on the pyrotechnics and are less focused on the existential horror beneath the surface.

For example, I teach a story by Joyce Carol Oates called “Aiding and Abetting” from her I Am No One You Know. It’s a story about a husband and wife and the husband really hates the wife’s brother, who is this ne’er-do-well, swishy artist type who calls the house and begs for money, clinging to her about his life and talking about how sad he is, and she listens very sympathetically and sends money and helps him out. The husband just hates it. So one day, the brother calls when the wife is not home, and through their conversation, the brother says that he’s thinking of committing suicide, and the husband says, yeah, you should do that. Then the brother says, how would I do it? The husband suggests driving the car off the road so that it would look like an accident. When it’s over, he thinks, what a weird conversation we had. A few weeks later, his wife comes home and is like, I ran into my brother, and he’s taking our son to his sleepover. The story ends with him waiting for the phone to ring.

In that story, the horror is purely about “Who are you as a person?” It’s a horrifying idea, right? Basically, I tell my students that you have to write from a place of real fear. You can morph it and change it, add different cosmetic elements, but what you’re really getting at is real concerns about losing control of your body. Or nobody believing you when you say things. Or not being able to move your body, for whatever reason. Or being dependent on someone else. Or that you’re really a bad person. You can’t write horror without being able to access real fears, in all their weirdnesses. If you tap into that vein, it can be pure fucking terror.

EW: I think capturing the strangeness of our fears is a thing you do really well.

CMM: Thank you. I’m a weird person. A lot of this book is not necessarily biographical, but I’m just digging deep. I’m bringing out all the weird shit that I think about every day and putting it into fictional form.

EW: The stories in Her Body, even if they’re not necessarily biographical, feel pretty emotionally vulnerable. Does writing in such an open-handed way wear you down? Do you have to take breaks after you finish a long, intense story? Or, does it fuel you?

CMM: It depends on the story. A lot of people who read the book have said to me that they had to read the stories one at a time, and it was really difficult to just read one after the other because they were so intense. That’s interesting to me. I’ve written these stories over the course of five years. And, there were other stories that didn’t go into the collection. They had natural breaks in between them, where I was doing other things or wrote different stories at different residencies. So I guess I engage with each story in a separate way.

I would say that “Mothers” is very intense. Also “Eight Bites” is another one I was really emotional about. It can be hard to read them out loud because those stories are particularly close to home. Sometimes I’ll take breaks if I’m working on a particularly difficult scene. Really, it all just depends on the story.

EW: “Mothers” definitely messed me up. It is devastating. In a good way, of course.

CMM: Yeah, it felt like I was cutting it out of my body. Writing that story was definitely intense.

EW: You mentioned that you’re working on a few new projects right now. Would you be able to talk a little bit about some of these projects? I think I read that you’re working on a memoir that’s forthcoming.  

CMM: I do. Graywolf bought my memoir. It’s due to them next September, and then it’ll come out in 2019. It’s taking a lot out of me, but I’ll be finishing next year, if everything goes according to plan.

EW: You said there were some things you’re working on relating to the mind and body connection? Are those essays or stories?

CMM: Essays. I have an essay collection in progress, but I write essays very slowly. In terms of essays I would want to put in a book, I write maybe once a year. I also have a YA novel and some stories that I’m working on. I work on a lot of things at once. I can’t focus on just one project. I wrote the memoir while I was editing my collection, in between rounds of edits.

EW: Do find it’s helpful to work on more than one thing at a time? Or do you wish you could focus more?

CMM: I feel like there are two types of writers. There’s the type that I am, and there’s also writers who are super focused on one project. I like having more than one thing to work on. If I get bored, I can take a break and do something totally different.

EW: What are a few great books you’ve read lately?

CMM: I’ve read Lesley Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, which just won the Kirkus Prize, which is amazing. I just read a collection, White Dialogues by Bennett Sims, which is amazing. He’s really incredible. I’ve also read Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang. I’ve been on a real kick. All of these are really good, very different from each other, but very excellent. I’ve read a lot of story collections this year.

EW: So, prior to Her Body and Other Parties, you were already having success publishing essays and stories in major publications, but the buzz that you’re getting now and being shortlisted for the National Book Award really feels like a next-level breakthrough. From your new vantage point in the national literary spotlight, I was wondering if you could tell us about some of the best writing advice you’ve ever received.

CMM: I feel so much writing advice is really subjective. But, I think the best advice I ever got was that you have to read to write. I feel like a lot of people don’t know that or don’t understand that properly. Writing fiction is such a specific thing, and you have to read it to be able to do that. When you’re reading, all the stuff you’re reading is going into your mind-body, your body-mind, it’s going into your head. You’re digesting it, and it will come back later in ways that will really surprise you. It helps to read outside of your normal, comfortable genre, to take risks as a reader. When I get writer’s block, I read. That’s how I unstick myself. Sometimes I start a book and I really don’t like it, but I also like to think about what I’m learning from it, as a writer.

The second piece of advice is, I had a teacher once say to me that you should give your characters a roll in the hay. They work hard. They deserve it. That’s so smart. I don’t think that’s a universally applicable piece of advice, but if you’re feeling stuck, try a sex scene. I also always tell my students to write party scenes if they’re feeling stuck. A party scene throws lots of characters in one place, is really aesthetically interesting and always involves a lot of bad behavior. It forces a lot of character and plot work.

EW: Almost anything can happen in a party scene.

CMM: Exactly. Almost anything could happen. It gives you a little laboratory. That’s some actual writing advice.

EW: Carmen, thank you so much. This has been really fun.

CMM: Good! Thanks for having me.

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Carmen Maria Machado‘s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. She is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, AGNI, NPR, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and Best Women’s Erotica. Her memoir House in Indiana is forthcoming in 2019 from Graywolf Press.

She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, the University of Iowa, the Yaddo Corporation, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife. For more information visit https://carmenmariamachado.com.