TIME AS A VILLAIN: A CONVERSATION WITH DANIELLE EVANS

by Bailey Sims

Danielle Evans is a professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the author of two story collections, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and The Office of Historical Corrections. Her writing has won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award for fiction, The Story Prize, The LA Times Book Prize for fiction, and more. Her work has been featured in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Sewanee Review, and other journals, and has been anthologized in four years of Best American Short Stories and in New Stories from the South.

Evans is the 2024 Melanie Brown Lecturer here at Chatham University. On May 18, she performed a public reading, and on May 19, I sat down with her before her craft talk “Past Present Future: Using Time and Tense in Fiction” to talk about her publishing journey, creating characters, and more.

The Fourth River: The first story from Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self was published in The Paris Review when you were only 23. How did the success of this story shape the trajectory of your career and your future work?

Danielle Evans: That’s an interesting question. I’m trying to think back that long ago because I was 23, wasn’t I? When I originally signed with my agent, I said that I was going to finish a novel first and we would wait and go out with a collection and a novel, and I ended up spending that year continuing to work on the short stories instead of the novel. I was avoiding my agent at the time because I hadn’t done the thing I said I was going to do (write a novel), but my boss at the time told me I had two options: tell my agent what I actually had and what work I was ready to send out into the world, or get a new agent, since what I had was a short story collection.

So I wrote to her and sent her the revised collection and I said “I don’t know when I’m going to have a novel, but I have this book and it’s ready to go,” and she agreed that the book was ready to be in the world, but she asked for the summer to try to place one of the stories in the collection in a big magazine to help with pitching it to editors. Only one of the stories had been published at the time (shoutout to Phoebe at George Mason), and I didn’t really have a lot of other publications. It was kind of a bold thing for me to be like, “I, a 23-year-old with a short story collection, am ready to sell this book tomorrow, what are you going to do for me?” But it was where I was and I think whatever the timeline was, I needed to be working on that material and not on something that just wasn’t coming together.

My agent spent the summer shopping the story and one of the editors at The Paris Review really took to the work and sold it to the rest of the team. The major transformation was that it was the

first really rigorous editing process I’d gone through. When I drafted the story I thought it should be about 15 pages, and the story I ended up writing was about 30 pages. I couldn’t see how to cut it shorter, but they cut it down to about 17 pages. For such a major cut, it was illuminating to me how much the story stayed intact, and how much extra I put in there because I maybe didn’t trust the reader to understand the characters or the context that I didn’t actually need. That was something that I took with me from that process. And then my agent sent the book to editors with the copy of The Paris Review, which got it more attention and buzz than it otherwise would have gotten. And then that story ended up in Best American Short Stories, and it had been my dream goal as a baby writer to someday be in that anthology, because that’s what you read and you’re like, of course every label is arbitrary, but “oh, these are the best stories, I want to be one of the best.”

TFR: Oh, of course.

DE: So that was an enormous career boost but also sort of a reset of “This was my lifetime writer goal and now I have to adjust because I’ve hit it out the gate, so what else do I want from my writing life?” That was an interesting recalibration. But in terms of things that stayed with me, the main thing I took from that process was a gratitude for being edited and the ability to see how much good editing can help a story. The story was edited by two different people, both of whom were brilliant, and I learned people can ask for different things, and that made me feel confident taking my workshop filter to decide, “okay, that was useful advice,” or, “that was not where I was trying to go with the story,” and to move forward appreciating editorial feedback and also understanding how to navigate it.

TFR: What makes you more drawn to writing shorter fiction as opposed to full-length novels?

DE: I love a short story. A short story feels to me like a puzzle box, like you’re trying to fit as much as possible into a small space. There’s something about the challenge of that that I find really exciting. I also think it’s really interesting to think about a short story as somehow capturing a moment that has a reverberation in someone’s life. Whether that’s a point of no return moment, or a moment that something didn’t happen, or a moment when they could have seen something but they didn’t. I have a lot of fun playing with the structure of a short story—so much of fiction is subtext, and a short story, because you have less space, relies even more heavily on that subtext and where it flickers to the surface. It’s a pleasure writing short stories because it’s a mystery to me; I don’t know what’s going to appear from under the story until I’m about halfway through most of the time. I also really love a story collection because it lets you do lots of things at once. I was particularly anxious about that in my first book because I recognized that as a young, black, female writer that people tend to read fiction as representative of the author in a way that I was uncomfortable with. I was especially anxious because at the time a lot of that collection was written in first person, and I thought if I wrote a novel in first

person people would think I published my diary. Now I think I’m old and I don’t care, but at 24 I was anxious about that sort of thing. I thought having lots of voices in a collection was a way to confuse people. Aside from anxiety and insecurity, though, a short story collection is a way to think in a complex way about the same question. To answer the same question in different ways and sit those answers beside each other and let there be conversation or even dissonance. That was one of the pleasures of the second collection, which was a lot more thematically connected. I could think in a lot of different ways about forgiveness, about grief, about agency or ownership of a story, and I didn’t have to settle on one answer that I was exploring.

TFR: One thing about writing short fiction is that you have to constantly be creating new characters, and all of yours feel so three-dimensional in the short space of time we get to know them—how do you draw inspiration for writing your characters?

DE: There are so many people in the world—that feels like a thing I have an abundance of. I get nervous about setting sometimes because I haven’t lived in the same place for a long time, so I struggle with command of setting. I know a lot of people, so I don’t get anxious about having enough characters, I just get anxious about having the characters do story things. Sometimes that’s the challenge—less how to do characterization and more how to get characters to be in a story as opposed to just taking over the space with their own monologues or performance of self. Some of that is thinking about the tension between what they want and what they’re doing, or what they’re thinking and what they’re saying. The more I can think about where those spaces are in the story, that’s how I get to the intersection of character and story. Where is the action of the story putting pressure on the character to say something they don’t mean or do something that isn’t what they want or present themselves in a way that isn’t honest? I’m really interested in what pushes a character to lie. If I can find where the lie is in a story, I can sometimes find where the story is backwards, even if I just started with a character.

TFR: Do you ever get really attached to a character and have trouble moving on?

DE: You know, not really. My joke is that I have commitment issues. I think that in a satisfying short story you should be able to imagine the future. So even if I’m tempted to say “oh, that character was fun to write,” if I still want to write more about this character, I didn’t do my job. I should be able to get to the end of the page and imagine the rest of that person’s life. Whatever is ambiguous or unresolved wasn’t the point. I would be more inclined to start over and say, “I’m a different writer now, what would I do with that same subject or theme, than I would to start with the same character. I feel like you get them to the end of the story and you have to let them go. I don’t know if this is scientifically true, but my father used to say that your brain stops developing when you’re 25, and if a relative calls to say something about me, he says, “How old is Danielle? I did my job, if you have a problem with Danielle, talk to Danielle.” And that’s sort of how I feel about short stories: you let them go, they’re out in the world, they’re their own thing, I’ve done

the best I can, and if people love them that’s great, and if people don’t like them, that’s between them and the story. I can have my own relationship with the story, but my investment in other people’s relationship with the story ends once it’s published.

TFR: Your presentation is about time and tense in fiction—could you offer a short version of your insights on this topic?

DE: This is probably not a particularly controversial opinion, but the real villain of all fiction is time. That’s really always what’s creating crisis or tension or grief—the passage of time and people’s inability to stop it or freeze it or prevent it from going in places they don’t want to go. In the presentation, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite short stories, Edward P. Jones’s “The First Day,” which is so short, but so much of the story works because it’s haunted by the future. There’s this clause in the first sentence that looms over everything else in the story, and it teaches you how to read it even though you never see that future on the page. We’re going to think about where the future comes in and disrupts or changes something and how writers use that to create an emotional space that asks the reader to think about the passage of time and where the narrator of the story wants to freeze time. I think that’s often what the future is doing, signaling either “I’m telling this story from this tense because this is where I am, this thing is always happening to me,” or “I’m going back to before the thing happened, and I’m telling you the story from here because I never want the thing to happen.” That’s really interesting to pay attention to on the level of choices about point of view and tense and thinking about what they say about a character's relationship to the passage of time.

TFR: Your work focuses a lot on femininity and racial issues—while I was reading “Snakes,” I could physically feel the tension from this combination of Tara and her white grandmother. In your newer work, these social and political issues seem to be at even more of a forefront in stories like “Why Can’t Women Just Say What They Want” and The Office of Historical Corrections. Do you see your work as a potential vehicle for social change, and how does that play into your writing process?

DE: I think in theory, there’s a possibility of transformation every day you go out in the world. I think if I wanted to persuade somebody of something, I would write an essay. I come to fiction with a question and my hope is that it will then generate questions for the readers. Which questions those are going to be and what answers they come up with is out of my control. You’re leaving a lot of the conversation unsaid, so there should be a lot of space for people to come into it from different places. The release of that pressure of, “I’m not trying to convince somebody of something,” is, I think, important for the work to have breathing room. I don’t think someone is going to read my books and be a different, better, smarter person, but I do sometimes think “maybe someone will read the book and it will generate a question in their own life or in the next thing they read that will open up a possibility.” That, I think, is the best one can hope for from a

fictional standpoint. But I am interested in creating a space for conversation and complexity of thinking and being able to inhabit somebody else’s experience, however briefly. I think all of those things are useful, not necessarily as themselves transformative, but for helping people imagine themselves as people who are capable of change.

But a lot of the time those things are in my fiction because that is how I experience and think about the world, so it’s less an attempt to persuade anybody of anything and more of “when I walk down the street I’m aware of space in a particular way and I’m aware of how people may be noticing me.” There are some things that are about embodied experience of the world, and in order to write a complex character you have to give people some awareness of politics or demographics or their identity in the world, because everything else is in some way related to that. When I think about characters I’m often thinking about which character is trying to perform or which character is trying to convince the other of something. Sometimes it’s just about the dynamic between the characters—who cares more, who has more power in this relationship or friendship—but sometimes it’s also about a power dynamic between the characters that they brought into the relationship. Who has more control or more agency over their own lives, who has been trained to think about what people expect from them, and who doesn’t have to pay attention to that? Some of those things are structural, so it doesn’t mean that every woman or every black person in the book behaves the same way, or has the same set of responses to those questions. But I do think that sense of a male gaze or a double consciousness or any of those conceptual framings that help us understand what it means to be aware of yourself as always being seen is useful in thinking about how a character is going to respond to things and where they are going to lean into it or resist it.

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Bailey Sims is a writer and editor from Pittsburgh, PA. She is currently finishing her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University, where she specializes in fiction and is an adjunct English professor and the Head Copy Editor of The Fourth River literary journal. She also runs an editing business called Lena Creative Solutions (lenacreativesolutions.com). Her poetry has been published in Last Leaves Magazine and The Field Guide Magazine and her fiction is forthcoming in Your Impossible Voice.

Vulnerability and Joy: A Conversation with Ira Sukrungruang

By Malcolm Culleton

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of four nonfiction books and one collection each of short fiction and poetry. He’s a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award. He’s served on boards of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)—and Machete, an imprint of the press of Ohio State University, where he earned his MFA. He’s also the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection, a literary nonprofit organization, and has co-edited two anthologies that examine the fat experience through a literary lens.

Ira is the current Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. He was the keynote speaker and a guest instructor for Chatham University’s 2022 Summer Community of Writers, a ten-day residency for Chatham’s MFA program in creative writing.

On June 19th, the last day of the residency, I sat down with Ira in the cafeteria at Chatham’s Eden Hall Campus. Over the clank and bustle of dishes being cleared in the background, we talked about vulnerability, enabling constraints, and the difference—or lack of it, between genres.

TFR: You mentioned making the final revisions on your recent memoir, This Jade World, here at Eden Hall. You did most of the actual writing in Thailand, though. How does where you write affect what you write?

IS: Right. I wrote the first draft of the book during the trip that it describes, after the divorce. And I think it had to be written in Thailand, because though my ex and I would go to Thailand, and had gotten married in Thailand, our lives together were mostly in America. Everything in America was a reminder of the relationship, so it was harder to write about it here. People say you write the most about home when you’re far from it, right? It was easier to do that in Thailand than it would’ve been in Florida. 

TFR: Sure. I noticed a theme of transience—you’ve lived in a lot of places. Upstate New York, Southern Illinois, Chicago, Tampa… and meanwhile, most of your family live on another continent. Was it a conscious decision to explore that serial dislodging of yourself from specific physical places?

IS: For me, the movement of the book is about state of mind. During the divorce and breakup, my mind was a sedentary, static place. So though I did move around a lot, the book really wrestles with a static self. It’s asking: when do we move? How do we move? Is it possible to move in a different direction when you’ve only known one way to do it, one way to be? This question makes me think about how though the book traverses different places, part of its intent is to ask when this narrator will be able to move out of himself and move on in this new stage of life.

TFR: Yeah. You’ve written multiple memoirs: This Jade World, Southside Buddhist, Talk Thai. You’ve also published fiction and poetry. What helps you match content to form? Why do you keep circling back to memoir?

IS: I call creative nonfiction the Gateway Genre—even though I don’t believe in genre. I started as a fiction writer, but I wasn’t really good at it. Then I took a nonfiction course, and that opened the world to me. I started thinking about my life and the world differently because I had to evaluate questions I’d never asked myself. I was like eighteen, nineteen years old, and in fiction was writing about stuff I didn’t know anything about.

TFR: Sounds like what I did in college!

IS: Right? You just make stuff up and feel like that’s how it should be. Meanwhile, you don’t really know what revenge is, or what heartbreak is, or what suffering is. You either haven’t really confronted those things, or didn’t have the language or mental capacity to really look at them. Nonfiction made me look at language, not just at story. All good writers know that language is vitally important—more so than content itself, honestly. And poetry is an intense examination of language—it’s about pacing, rhythm, mood. But it’s also about shape, which for me as a writer is so important. It tells us so much about what a writer is doing. In my poetry, I’m always trying to get the language of a situation down. I try to avoid story in my poems; I just want to get the musicality of that moment. Or the antimusic, perhaps. I want the reader to leave a poem with a sensation. rather than a pure meaning.

Also, in nonfiction the pronoun “I” is a pronoun of responsibility. I was often asked why my first book, Talk Thai, wasn’t written as a novel—and I said because I wanted to tell about my family, about things that ailed me during my childhood. Not a surrogate child or a stand-in. There’s responsibility in claiming your own story.

In fiction, though, I don’t want responsibility. I often write fiction at my darkest moments. For instance, when the marriage wasn’t going well, I wrote fiction. Because I wanted to put what I was feeling, right now, onto my characters, without having to save them.

TFR: Now that you’ve claimed that responsibility in nonfiction, do you feel that you have a better grasp of fiction as well? Is it easier to see the entire landscape of what fiction can be?

IS: Yes, absolutely. I love creative nonfiction for its amoebic nature—it can do anything you want it to. You can tell a traditional story or be completely fragmented, utilize all these different types of forms. It moves just like poetry. There’s a freedom of decision, choice, and intent.

For a long time, I thought fiction was a completely different animal. But no, it isn’t—it can operate the same way that poetry or nonfiction does. We’re simply dealing with what the characters in fiction know versus what they don’t. In nonfiction, readers witness a character who’s flawed, but who knows they’re flawed. And the book is usually them trying to figure out why they’re flawed. In fiction, sometimes we’re dealing with a character who really doesn’t know that they’re flawed. And that’s the journey.

TFR: We have dramatic irony.

IS: We do! And that’s a different type of engagement. What you’re really talking about is narrative distance and authorial control. There’s a lot of authorial control in nonfiction. In fact, there’s an expectation of authorial control. The author’s expected to come in and say something to guide readers towards subverting our expectations or thinking deeper about a topic. In fiction, though, sometimes all the author needs to do is be present and let the characters do the work for them. I love that dynamic. I see it as one of the only differences between genres, actually.

But I’ve been surprised, too. I’ve seen fiction take the shape of essays. I’ve seen memoirs take the shape of fiction, or feature a first-person voice that doesn’t have all the answers and reads like a flawed character, the way fiction does. These lines are really interesting for me. Part of what keeps me going now, as a writer, is looking at where boundaries have been set and seeing how we can push them, obliterate them, or change them. Looking at mergers in the art of words, not separations.

TFR: That reminds me of how often you’ve mentioned enjoying writing to constraints, and using writing prompts as a teacher. Could you give a few examples of prompts that you’ve found surprisingly generative or useful?

IS: One thing I’ve been talking about in my classes is not planning too much. Allowing the subconscious to do some of the work. For example, today I told my students “Alright, for two minutes, write about weather.” Not a particular type of weather, just weather. Then after two minutes I asked them to stop and write about a particular time in childhood. Childhood is broad, right? But just write the first moment you think of. Then the third thing I ask them to write was someone else’s story—a bit of folklore, a fairy tale, a book you’ve read, a family story told over and over to you. Then we repeated the sequence, but this time did each braid in one minute. There’s no time to think—you have to do do do.

A lot of times, what emerges is something unexpected. As soon as I say “weather”, the brain is already creating a story based on that word. Then when I say “childhood”, the brain is immediately creating a narrative—maybe it’s even cross-associating with what it was just doing, weather. And then when I say “tell someone else’s story”, the brain is already connecting—because that’s what the brain’s always trying to do. It wants to find patterns, to find meaning, to connect. Though I believe in fragmentation, really fragmentation is still another type of storytelling. We take fragments like our memories and try to make meaning of them. That’s how we understand things in life.

A constraint I’ve used is to have students write a piece that employs just one sentence in the density of a paragraph. Or write one sentence for one page. See how they can control language, or rhythm. When are those commas put in? How do you control pace? How do you quicken a long-ass sentence, or slow it down?

Sometimes we go into story with an attitude of “I wanna tell the story of that one time,” or “I wanna tell the story of this.” But now I have to concentrate on language decisions; the story is secondary to what I have. It’s like how one of my favorite poetry forms is the sestina, because there’s responsibility in it. It has six stanzas and has to end with a certain sequence of words. You can never get ahead of yourself, you can only write to that particular word before you think of the next line. We’re often surprised when we rewire our brain to think primarily about the language of the story. To me there’s urgency, there’s more at stake, in a weird way, about that. There are more places for surprise.

TFR: It’s like you’re writing to experiment on your own brain. Dropping the rat into a different maze, every time.

Absolutely. And it’s fun! That’s the other thing that’s important. How do you sustain joy in writing? How do you keep it going for a lifetime? Prompts and silly exercises are ways to keep it fresh.

TFR: On that note—in addition to being a writer and a teacher, you’re also an editor. What are some exciting trends you see emerging across the literary landscape? What’s something new that keeps refreshing your interest?

One thing I notice is how a lot of writers are trying out different structures and looking at how structure mirrors our culture. The other thing I really love is the daring to say things that are hard. Politically, culturally, we’re surrounded by so many things that are wrong, but we’re often silent about them. So when I read something that isn’t silent, that’s loud about what’s happening, it’s thrilling. Here’s someone who’s unafraid to take a risk.

A thing that I’d like to see more of, and that brings me a lot of joy when I do see it, is writers who are unafraid to be vulnerable. In general, I don’t think we ever wanna be weak; I don’t think our culture allows for weakness or vulnerability. So we no longer want to talk to each other, we want to talk at each other. Our culture doesn’t want to dialogue. Vulnerability, though, is about dialogue. When you read someone vulnerable, you enter into a conversation. When I read really great books, like Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, I’m thinking… “Wow. That is exposing something that’s beautifully tragic, but also something I know.” So I wrote to Kiese and said “Oh my God, you just said something I’ve been wanting to say but haven’t been able to. Thank you for saying it.”

Vulnerability is a place to connect, empathize, understand, and see the other side. In my nonfiction courses especially, I notice a lot of pieces of students’ writing that are protecting themselves. Or wanting to sound like someone they’re not. When we become overly intellectual or overly lyrical, those are defense mechanisms that go up to prevent us from getting into what we really need to get into.

TFR: Yeah… I know I’m guilty of that, all the time. Every first draft!

IS: Me too! I’ll be overly lyrical, concentrate so much on musicality and sound. Suddenly I realize I’ve been stuck on this one page for days, or weeks. It’s like, “wow, what don’t you wanna say? What are you afraid of?” Part of writing is identifying those defense mechanisms we use.

So that’s something I look for right now. Vulnerability. Or, something I can tell that the writer got a lot of joy from writing.  I’ll think “Oh man, that passage is great! I can see a writer being really happy about that!”

TFR: Vulnerability and joy, connected.

IS: Absolutely.

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Malcolm Culleton is a writer of nonfiction and fiction and a current MFA student at Chatham University. His work has been published in 101 Words and the Roadrunner Review and has been nominated for an AWP Intro to Journals prize. He lives in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania.

Writing as Quilting: A Conversation with Thisbe Nissen

By Valentine Sargent

Thisbe Nissen, the Chatham MFA Program 2021 Melanie Brown Lecturer, is the author of three novels, Our Lady of the Prairie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), Osprey Island (Knopf, 2004), The Good People of New York (Knopf, 2001), and two story collections, Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night (University of Iowa Press, 1999, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award) and How Other People Make Love (Wayne State University Press, 2021). She has been the recipient of fellowships from the James Michener-Copernicus Society, The University of Iowa, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. She currently teaches undergrad, MFA, and PhD students at Western Michigan University.

I spoke with Thisbe Nissen in September of 2021 to discuss How Other People Make Love and her writing process which she compared to quilting, collaging and yoga.

The Fourth River: What is your process as you arrange real events and characters into fiction? 

Thisbe Nissen: Very interesting…what is my process there? I feel like it’s always different, you know? I have often worked this way, starting with real things and then building them into other things and I think earlier on I was closer to the real events. I think over time I started to forget what actually happened and what was fiction that I added on to it. So I don’t actually really remember anymore what I’ve made up and what I haven’t.  

It's funny because right now I’m in the process of doing that backwards. I’m taking these family stories or observations of my parents that I wrote as fiction. I took an event and used it as the seed. The very first piece of flash fiction I ever wrote I actually wrote as a poem and then I realized that if I took out all the weird line breaks I’d imposed on it, it was just a short story and not a poem at all. It turned into the first piece of flash fiction I ever wrote or published which is called “At the No. 1 Phoenix Garden.” It was a story rooted in a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York with my parents when my dad was in the earlier stages of the Parkinson’s that he had. It was observing how my mother had orchestrated the placement of this dinner, like where people were sitting, where my father was, who could help him and his struggles through the meal, her flirting with some other man at the table. This complex arrangement going on and me observing it. I think at the time my fears were like, “Oh I’m really going to piss my mother off.” I changed a few things. I made the man a professor of Chinese history so he was giving a subject-appropriate monologue that my mother could be commenting on….Things like that, shifting things for the sake of the cohesion of the story as opposed to any allegiance to the truth. I have very little allegiance to the truth. 

Everything always comes back to my mother, it’s inevitable. My mother was an actress in her youth. She was very dramatic, and she very much enjoyed telling dramatic stories and she had absolutely no allegiance to the truth, at all. She’d be telling stories that were mortifying to me and I’d be on the side like, “Mommy it didn’t happen like that!” And she’d be saying, “Shh, shh. It makes a better story this way!”  

But I remember that story, it was accepted for publication, and I was excited but also afraid that it was going to be really insulting to my mom. With great trepidation I showed it to her, and she adopted this idea that if it’s flattering to her, it’s nonfiction and if it isn’t, it’s fiction. Her response was very surprising to me, and it’s stuck with me – I mean, we’re talking about 25 years ago – she said, “I’m so moved that you think about us this deeply. That we are a part of your consciousness in this way.” That was very surprising to me, because I was like, what do you think I spend all of my time doing? But to a nonwriter, to see themselves distilled or turned into something else, it was touching in a way that they were on my mind. That I spent time trying to figure out how they felt about things and what they thought. 

TFR: That’s really interesting, and of course those observations were going to make it into your fiction. 

TN: Yeah, and I think she came to see that and understand that over time. Something that I talk about a lot is that process of taking real life and changing it into fiction – which I think is where your original question started – I think about writing very similarly to the way I think about collaging or quilting. Which is that I’m going around and observing things in the world, and then collecting them. I keep them tucked away. I’m collecting ideas that kind of cohere, or I have little images and I’m playing with them. Like what happens if I stick this anecdote with this anecdote and see what they do together? 

I’ve got a story percolating somewhere about deer in Michigan. I’m collecting all these deer stories and then it starts to be like, ‘okay, how do all of these stick together?’ Is it the same character who hit the deer here who also shot a deer here? What can I draw out of these pieces that connect them in some sort of way that they speak to one another or form a larger picture? Quilt. Collage. Whatever it is. So, I think in that way, there is where the morphing happens. Here is an anecdote someone told me. Then as I start to merge it with another anecdote or an image or a conversation, it inevitably has to change. I have to cut it to fit together with this other thing or shape it to fit together with the other piece or overlap it or fold it over, whatever it is that has to happen. I can’t not talk about quilting.  

TFR: Talking about this type of collaging, I want to focus on How Other People Make Love. Beautiful cover by the way. I love it. 

TN: Would you like the story behind it? 

TFR: I’d love to hear it. 

TN: When the book was accepted for publication and they were asking about ideas for cover art, my wonderful friend, this incredible photographer, Sonya Naumann, who I know from Iowa – I lived in Iowa City for many years – Sonya had done a project after she was married. I had been to her wedding, and she was so appalled that she had spent a thousand dollars for a dress and was figuring out a way to make peace with that. Her idea as a photographer was to see if she could take pictures of as many people as possible wearing her dress. She’d gotten married but had a lot of really complicated questions and ideas on what that meant. What marriage was about, and what she was entering into, and how that related to the reasons other people entered the institution of marriage.  

So, she has been photographing people everywhere wearing her wedding dress. And it's not always wearing it. Sometimes it’ll be some giant football player who will strap it over one arm or something. Because that’s all it fits on. But I think it enabled her to engage in conversations about what marriage and commitment and love and partnership mean to lots of different people. I think it’s been a doorway opening.  

When I knew the book was going to be published, I immediately was like, “Maybe we could put one of Sonya’s pictures on the cover?” So we pulled up different images and there were different limitations on what kind of photo it could be. In the end, totally by chance, the three photos they ended up doing mock covers for were all close friends of mine from Iowa City. There were photos of people from all over the world and the one they ended up choosing was my dear friend Laurel Synder who is a brilliant writer. It was taken years and years ago when she was young and single in Iowa City, and it makes me incredibly happy. They did such a beautiful job with the design. The wall wasn’t actually green behind her, it was a white wall in the original photo. They made it green which is perfect, I think. There’s something that feels so right about it. And such a joy to have a cover that means so much to me.  

TFR: A lot of MFA students, me included, are figuring out what they are writing, what topics or characters draw them to a blank page. You mentioned in previous interviews you focus on intimate relationships – this is obvious in your collection – and that you constantly write about your mother as a character. So my question for you is how and when did you realize these patterns in your writing and how do you embrace them to keep writing new stories? 

TN: It's funny because partly, you don’t realize the patterns until much later. It’s like “God damnit I wrote another book about my mother. I didn’t mean to!” I swear at this point, I could write a story about aliens, and one would clearly become my mother. You know, it’s interesting, the author Kevin Canty of the collection Honeymoon, that I read from [in the craft talk] yesterday, he wrote an essay about coming to write those stories and says something like, “I got this collection of stories and it looks like I’m obsessed with monster movies.” There’s something about taking a collection and saying, ‘huh, what am I obsessed with?’ I didn’t realize I was obsessed with that until it all comes together.  

Early on when I was an MFA student or in college when I was starting to be really serious about writing fiction, there were writers who I discovered that gave me permission to be the kind of writer I wanted to be. It was late in college that I was introduced to Laurie Colwin. Who has become one of my all-time favorite writers. That feeling of like, oh, you’re allowed to write stories about things that interest you? Who knew! I don’t have to be an alcoholic, middle aged man writing about his infidelities to be a writer. I’m allowed to be the person that I am. I can write about what interests me.  

I went to my MFA really early. I went when I was right out of college. I was like, “I can’t stand the real world! Get me back into school!” So I was 23 and it was my second year in grad school and I was in a workshop with Frank Conroy. I always talk about his workshop. It was a terrible experience. I hated almost every minute of it. He made me angry. Yet I quote him in every class I teach. He’s probably the most inspirational teacher I’ve had. I had turned in a story about girls and it was three unrelated vignettes about teenage lesbians…I put it up for workshop and Frank’s response to it - which would be Frank’s response to almost everything I wrote - was, “Really nice writing in here, but who cares about little girls kissing?” It was one of those moments you come into yourself, and I was like, “You know what? I care about all these little girls kissing!”  

TFR: I love this defiance of knowing what’s interesting to you and what you are going to keep on writing rather than caring what other people want to read or being too involved in your audience.  

TN: Yeah, caring doesn’t lead to writing. That just leads to anxiety. I don’t know what other people want to read or if I could possibly think about how to provide that. The only thing I can imagine following is what interests me. If you’re really committing to an artistic practice, whatever that may be, it can’t be in service of something out there. I think we’re lucky in that regard…there’s a place for you and a place for your writing.  

TFR: In How Other People Make Love, I’m really interested in how you create these characters and resist this dichotomy of good or bad. These characters are genuine. How do you do that? Even the electrician in “Win’s Girl” who is supposed to be a villain.  

TN: He’s so fucked up, like everybody! He’s trying to make his way too, like everybody. That’s the great project of life. Trying to figure out why people might do the things they do. Like things I wouldn’t normally understand or have sympathy for, and trying to figure out how does that come about? I think it’s part of spending enough time with your characters – the old creative writing adage “you have to find something to love, even in your villains.” I don’t know if I go about it in that way. But if you spend time with a person or character, even if they do things that you can’t fathom in the abstract….  

TFR: The understanding that people can’t be all bad.  

TN: I think that’s one of the hardest parts for me is trying to understand how people come to beliefs that I find really offensive. I certainly can’t find my way around to understanding all of them but some of them I can, a little bit, maybe. That’s instructive, helpful. Makes me feel a little bit more peace and not hate humanity as much as sometimes fear I do….I don’t have to love humanity as a whole but I can try to understand little pieces of it to make my way in the world. 

TFR: Definitely. In the stories of How Other People Make Love you don’t just focus on these romantic relationships, but any intimate relationship involving love. In “Win’s Girl” Doreen chooses to stand up for herself and that’s an act of self-love. I’m curious, did you write these stories and see how they linked together, or did you have this idea and begin to write toward it? 

TN: I never start with the big idea. The big ideas are worth nothing. It’s all about starting with the little scraps and see what they add up to. I spent my 20s and 30s going to weddings constantly which is what people do, because most people you know get married. So I had all of these wedding stories that wanted to be told. There are some stories in the collection that aren’t wedding stories exactly. I think of Sonya’s thousand-dollar dress project. It wasn’t asking people to tell me about your wedding or wedding dress. It’s about how do you approach intimacies or commitments? So a story like “Win’s Girl” that has nothing to do with weddings still touches on the things Doreen yearns for in her life…. Even those stories that didn’t explicitly have to do with weddings were still about the type of choices that lead people to get married or not get married.  

TFR: You mentioned you write of places, evoking the feeling of each place, but what about writing a place you are currently in. Does that happen or do you tend to need space from that place to write about it? 

TN: I can’t call to mind a time I wrote about a place I am in. Writing notes for later, maybe…. I can’t be in that place in order to access it enough – like internally access it enough. Like you can be in the world paying attention to the things around you but that’s not writing. That for me doesn’t translate to writing. I can’t go from experiencing to writing. Those observations, those anecdotes, those collage pieces, need to go inside and marinate and do whatever they need to do before they turn into something that I can write about. There is an element of time. 

Okay, ready? I’m going to go into my yoga metaphors. So I discovered yin yoga. It’s the kind of yoga that you can do when you have no energy. You basically just have to get yourself into one position and let gravity do the work. When they talk about the principles of yin yoga, one of those principles is you go to your edge and maybe push a little bit against that edge and then time. You have to let time happen. Let time pass. That feels like a big breath of air for me. There is nothing you can do or act upon. You’ll defeat the purpose of the yoga you are trying to do if you try to push past that edge – the only thing that is going to get you where you need to go is if you are still and let time pass. I feel like that has so many applications in writing.  

For me, I can’t take things in and immediately distill them into something literary. I need to take them in and then time needs to pass. I need to let time pass. I need to let the things that are going to happen to those observations happen without forcing them or manipulating them into something. That’s not going to yield what I want. There’s a patience about it, a learned patience. Sometimes you just have to let time do what it does.  

Black Visions: A Jeffrey "Boosie" Bolden Anthology

The MFA Program in Creative Writing at Chatham University and The Fourth River Literary Journal announce the first volume in the Jeffrey “Boosie” Bolden Series with a special anthology call for Black writers called BLACK VISIONS, conceived of and edited by MFA Emerging Black Writers in Residence, Cedric Rudolph and Caitlyn Hunter, as well as alums Samantha Edwards and Nicole Lourette.

Image Courtesy of City of Asylum

“Are you a Black writer, or a writer who is Black?”

Black artists everywhere are all too familiar with this question and label on their work. Why are Black artists always called upon to write about the Black experience, about Black pain? Where are the discussions about craft, form, and futurisms? This anthology was born out of the need to create more space for Black voices; all Black voices. We want to see how your medium amplifies your voice and who you are as an artist, without the limitations of formality, genre, or subject. We are looking for the musicality, depth, and vibrancy that is Black art.

Payment will be 1 copy of the book and a $50 honorarium per writer.

Please see the following submission guidelines:

Poetry:

No more than three (3) poems, or seven (7) pages total.

Fiction:

No more than 10 pages, or 5,000 words.

Creative Nonfiction:

No more than 10 pages, or 5,000 words.

Hybrid:

No more than 10 pages, or 5,000 words.

Visual Art:

No more than three (3) photographs, drawings, or other visual medium. Please submit as .jpg.

Please submit all writing as Word Documents (.doc or .docx).

Work must be original and unpublished elsewhere. We accept simultaneous submissions, but you must notify The Fourth River if your work is chosen for publication elsewhere.

Submissions will open on Monday, May 10, 2021 and close at 11: 59 pm EST on Friday June 18, 2021.

About Boosie Bolden:

Jeffrey “Boosie” Bolden was born in San Diego, CA, but he lived various places over the course of his life, from New Orleans to Tennessee to Hawaii. Bolden was an alumnus of the Chatham University MFA program. During his time at Chatham, he edited for The Fourth River and earned his MFA in Fiction. Boosie refused to write prose or poetry restricted by genre, and instead pushed himself to create hybrid flows fusing prose with rap. His mixtape-memoir Wolves was published by Tolson Books in November 2020. Bolden passed away in June 2020. This anthology, slated for print publication in Fall, 2021, honors Boosie’s legacy of producing the unexpected, fresh, and lyrical.

The Flare on the Page: A Conversation with Hannah Tinti

BY VALENTINE SARGENT

Photo Credit: Honorah Tinti

Hannah Tinti, the Chatham MFA Program 2021 Melanie Brown Lecturer, is the author of the bestselling novel The Good Thief, which won The Center for Fiction’s first novel prize, and the story collection Animal Crackers, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, is a national bestseller and has been optioned for television. She teaches creative writing at New York University’s MFA program and co-founded the Sirenland Writers Conference. Tinti is also the co-founder and executive editor of One Story magazine, which won the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, CLMP’s Firecracker Award, and the PEN/Magid Award for Excellence in Editing.

On January 20th, Hannah Tinti and I discussed journaling, solar flares synonymous to inspiration, and all the tasks Tinti juggles with a sense of ease. Our conversation was held over a virtual call due to the pandemic.

The Fourth River: What was the first story that had a profound impact on you?

Hannah Tinti: It’s hard to say. My mom was a librarian, so books have always been extremely important in my family. It’s hard to think of a first. I was really into Edgar Allan Poe when I was really young, those stories made a huge impact on me and stuck with me. I’d also say Ray Bradbury’s short stories as a kid made a big difference. I think it’s “All Summer in a Day”; that’s the short story that’s about the kids who are on Venus where the sun only comes out once every [seven] years and they lock the girl in the closet so she can’t see the sun. Do you know the one I’m talking about?

TFR: Oh yeah, this sounds very familiar!

HT: Every kid has read it. Every grammar school kid has to read that story, because it’s actually about bullying. It’s actually really good for today. It’s very powerful. It’s very short, too. That one I remember having an effect on me. As any kid does who knows feeling injustice as a child. Which kids don’t quite understand but can feel emotionally. So, I think that was a story I remember that really stuck with me. But yeah, I like the grizzly, Edgar Allan Poe, spooky stuff, because I grew up in Salem, which is where I am now, so Halloween is just in my blood. It’s Halloween 365 days a year here, is what I always say when people ask me “Why do you write creepy things?” and I’m like, “Hey, this is where I grew up, this is my air and water here.”

TFR: I love this strange violence you incorporate in your writing. It pulls you in, right? It’s that similar curiosity of the grotesque that makes you ask, “What’s there?” And I like how you dig into it. I can definitely see that Edgar Allan Poe peeking out.

HT: Yeah, it’s something I’ve always been interested in, which is the line of violence, and what makes some people cross that line and others not cross the line? I was a science major in school, I actually studied biology, so for me nature, animals, all that stuff is a big part of my brain.

TFR: I can definitely see that in your writing, especially Animal Crackers. I’m curious, have you been able to read during this time, and if so, what have you been reading?

HT: I have found it kind of challenging to read books right now. I do a lot of reading. I read all the time because I’m either reading for One Story or I’m reading my students’ work or I’m often a judge for prizes. I just finished reading for this fellowship we just awarded at One Story and we had around 350 applicants who were sending work from all around the world. I’m working on an anthology right now with selected shorts and helping them crawl through all these short stories and put them together in a book that is going to be published next year. So I’m doing a lot of reading for work so when I’m actually taking a break though it’s hard for me. And given the pandemic…I have been more watching television, I will say. In the last eight or nine months I’ve watched more TV – I feel like everybody has though – than I’ve ever watched.

TFR: That makes sense. It gives you that break because it sounds like you are always going, going, going. Especially during this chaotic time you need time to rest.

HT: Yeah, and if I am reading sometimes, I’ll go to my comfort food reading, which is usually classics. So I haven’t really been reading any new books lately. But I’ve been reading a lot of amazing stories and novel excerpts; it’s all stuff that’s unpublished though so it’s hard to talk about it. Because these are all things that are in the works by other people.

Although I will talk a little bit about our new fellow. This is a yearly fellowship we give at One Story that we just announced last week. This is a fellowship that gives to somebody outside of the network of MFA systems, someone who wouldn’t have the opportunity to get an MFA, and whose work relates to bodies of difference. That fellow is a woman named Diana Veiga. She’s a librarian actually in D.C. and she is writing short stories and each story is set in a different part of D.C. She’s giving this really interesting cross section of this place, which is such a weird place. D.C. is so strange…It’s a great collection, I’m really excited. We are going to be working with her and the idea is that she gets a stipend, she gets a year of free classes, and she gets a full manuscript review by me at the end of the year. So it’s really about helping somebody who doesn’t really have the opportunity to go to an MFA program and give them a big boost in their career.

TFR: Oh definitely, because the whole point of an MFA is to make those literary connections. And you basically provide that for these authors.

HT: Yeah, so that’s been really fun and she’s our third fellow. And they are all works that inhabit bodies of difference, so it ends up being a really interesting subject matter that each of these writers has been working on as well. I’m excited to start working with her. We just chose her and announced her last week so that’s some great reading I’ve been doing lately.

TFR: That’s wonderful. And talking about craft, I’m curious, what is your favorite aspect about writing?

HT: I’d say the best part of it is the best part for everyone, which is kind of the mysterious part. There’s the slog where you’re just trying to get your word count in. And then there’s a moment where the slog falls away. I talk about it with my students, but it’s hard to explain. There’s a spark that happens in your brain and you feel a surge of excitement, you know? One way I sometimes talk about it with my students is there’s almost like this long wall that you’re walking along, like the Great Wall of China, you’re walking along this wall and that wall separates your conscious and unconscious mind. And every once in a while, you find a door and when you open that door it’s like sparks and wildfire goes back and forth between those two places. I call them solar flares, like this flare coming out from the side, and then the door slams and you’re like “Oh no” and then it goes away. Then you are trudging along the wall again for a while, but that moment that happens – and it’s very hard to put your finger on exactly what it is. I can’t say oh, it’s editing or oh, it’s first drafts, or something like that. For me, I guess I would say my favorite part are the solar flares.

I think it is something about a connection in your unconscious and conscious mind when that happens, because you feel that surge of excitement, and that surge of excitement is you are able to somehow put into words something that is normally not able to be put into words. You are accessing some emotional truth that you know in your body is true, and that’s what makes you so excited right? Because you are able to actually take something that is usually floating around back here [in the brain] and actually putting it out. You feel that truth in it.

I think what’s exciting for me as an editor is when I’m reading someone else’s work and I can see the flare on the page. I can see where it flared for the author…When you’re reading somebody’s work and there’s a moment like wow, like you almost feel an emotional response to something on the page. Like maybe you get chocked up, or someone writes an image and you can really see the image in your mind and its very very clear, then they’ve usually had a flare there. 

TFR: I’ve read in other interviews that you keep a journal for your daily observations.

HT: I do, yeah.

TFR: What led you to start journaling and putting it into a creative practice?

HT: That all started when I met and worked with Lynda Barry… I had journaled before and usually I would most often journal whenever I travelled. I’d take a book with me and write down things and remember things. And I would mainly make lists of things. The lists really help me, because I found that when I would try to write in a diary or like writing a letter, or confessing, as if someone else was going to read it someday, that didn’t work for me… But what Lynda does, her technique – which you can find online – she does this thing called the five-minute diary…And what it is, is taking a page and you cut it into fourths. You write seven things you did that day – this is supposed to be very fast, the very first seven things that come up from your subconscious mind… Then the other is seven things you noticed or saw. Noticing is different, like I noticed an onion skin on the floor from when I was cooking last night or dust on this window, I noticed the sound of something. Or I noticed I was feeling this way today…it’s more vague or emotional that place. And then the other two things you write is you write one thing that you heard like something someone said or a sound, and the last thing is you draw a picture – a doodle, is what she says.

So those four things, and again you’re supposed to do it very quickly, it usually takes me about five to ten minutes. What’s surprising is it has really created this amazing resource for me to go back and almost grab memories from certain parts of my life and go back and use them.

TFR: In all three of your books, you have this amazing ability to set the scene with your imagery. What is your process? Do you ever draw out scenes before you write them?

HT: Well first off, thanks, that’s very nice of you to say. You start with an image, something you saw or something that’s in your mind that you don’t know why it’s sticking in your mind…For [Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley] I was approaching it with, “What do I want to write about?” And I thought “Oh, I’ll write about the greasy pole.” Because the greasy pole is a real thing, it’s a real event that happens every year in Gloucester, Massachusetts…The greasy pole happens at a festival every year and it’s the same thing like I describe. There’s this crazy pole, about the length of a telephone pole, over this pier that you grease with lard. It’s actually crazier in person…on the first round they all wear costumes which is so weird that I couldn’t even put it in the book. No one’s going to believe those fishermen dress up like chickens and Wonder Woman on the first round. And they are all so drunk. Like really, really wasted. And everyone comes out to watch. And it’s also very macho, like gladiator-feel, they are all stripped down and covered in grease. And they really injure themselves.

So I was just writing about that, exploring it, and I thought about let me focus on one man, let me describe his body, and trying to describe his body I realized he had these scars, “Well what are these scars?” I looked closer and I was like, “Oh wow, they’re bullet holes.” It made me start realizing about scars and how there’s a story behind every scar on your body. Those stories get told when we are in bed with somebody, or they get told to our doctors – people who we are really intimate with.

So my surface level was, oh I like the greasy pole and now I’m already at the storytelling and the scars and the secrets we hold on our bodies.

That’s when I started thinking about how would I write a book that is only those stories? That the only thing you got about somebody’s life was scar stories and you didn’t get anything else? So what I was interested in that book was this idea of what’s hidden?

TFR: Speaking of characters, specifically in Animal Crackers, there are a lot of characters who find themselves in difficult situations whether it be in an affair, dealing with an illness in the family, or changing their career. What inspired you to create this cast of imperfect characters with baggage?

HT: [Laughs] I guess my own baggage! For me, that’s what’s interesting. Kurt Vonnegut has this quote that’s like, “Terrible things happen to your characters so your readers can see what they are made of.”

TFR: In your collection of stories and in your two novels, all your characters have these profound relationships that impact who they are, you often focus on the parent and child relationship. What draws you to this particular bond?

HT: What’s funny about [Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley] is I started it meaning to write a love story and I didn’t think it would end up being a parent child thing, but it ended up being a parent child thing. There’s still the love story as well, there’s two love stories really. But the main thing being this parent child thing and I think it’s our parents end up having a greater effect on us than we think they do…I think one of the reasons I keep going back to this parent child thing is because I think that’s really interesting, what’s told and what’s not told. And you just have a longer relationship with them than you even do with your romantic partner, like that’s a shorter window in terms of time. With parents it’s many, many more years. Many, many more complicated layers to get into. They end up being really profound relationships, which often times aren’t explored in books, it’s more romantic relationships.

TFR:  In your two novels both main characters are scarred physically whether with bullet holes or the loss of a hand. And in Animal Crackers some stories like “How to Revitalize the Snake in Your Life” and “Slim’s Last Ride” focus a lot on the physicality of the body. There seems to be this theme of what the body, any body, can tolerate. I’m curious to know more about your fascination with the physical body.

HT: There’s a book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. His thing is about how we hold memory in our physical bodies. That’s so interesting to me. That makes the solar flares go off.

There’s a great story that I tell to my students. That I also got from Lynda Barry, I’m just going to keep giving her credit. She tells this story about his guy with phantom limb syndrome…This was a guy who had lost his arm in an accident, but he was feeling an enormous amount of pain. He felt like he was basically clenching his fist so tightly, even though the fist was no longer there, so tightly that he was in incredible physical pain. He saw all these doctors, neuroscientists, got addicted to drugs, tried to kill himself, all because of what he was feeling in this hand that didn’t exist. There was this doctor, V.S. Ramachandran, he’s one of these big scientists that is treating phantom limb syndrome. He met with the guy and is treating him and designed this mirrored box. So this is a box with mirrors on all sides…He had the guy stand in front of the box and put his left hand in the box so when he looked down he got a visual of both hands. So it looked like he had his right hand. The doctor had him clench his fists, so it looked like he had two fists. And then the doctor said, “Now unclench your fists.” And the guy opened his left hand, which made it look like his right hand opened and the pain immediately stopped… [The doctor] cured him with an image.

All the things that have happened to us in our lives are like our own phantom limbs. The process of creating art or creating our writing is that we are making the mirrored box that tricks our minds into healing those phantom limbs. It’s about how important and powerful an image can be. An image can heal, an image can shift things, an image can deal with past trauma. But you need to create the image. That’s something I think is really powerful and interesting to think about and in particular, why I’m interested in the body in that way. And plus I’ve got that background in science so that’s always been something I’ve been curious about to begin with, about how things physically work and how they connect.

TFR: In a time with so much division, do you think written stories have the power to connect us to one another?

HT: Definitely. That’s why I do One Story, I think that’s one of the reasons why I started that magazine…The main thing is every year we get these amazing letters and notes from our readers where people are saying, “Wow that story really had an effect on me” or “That’s exactly what happened to me, it made me feel understood.” While I definitely think readership has gone down, like not many people are reading…there’s a lot of other ways stories are being presented in the world, so the plain written word feels like not many people are reading, that said, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. All you need is the one reader. All you need is that one person. All you need is for someone to read something and it has an effect on them. That it makes them feel more understood and less alone. That’s what we’re trying to do if we’re the writer. And if we’re lucky we find a couple readers that read our stuff and feel the same way and that’s success.

The Gray Areas: A Conversation with Aimee Bender

BY VALENTINE SARGENT

Aimee Bender is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award, The Color Master, a NY Times Notable book for 2013, and her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, which came out in July 2020, and was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages.

In October, amidst the pandemic, I interviewed Aimee Bender using a video call platform to discuss her recently released book, The Butterfly Lampshade. As an avid reader of her work, it was exciting to sit down on opposite sides of the coast and discuss magic, fiction, and the gray areas.

The Fourth River: In your last novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, you focus on a mother-daughter relationship as well as in The Butterfly Lampshade. What fascinates you about this relationship between a young daughter and distraught mother?

Aimee Bender: When I think of the two books it does get more extreme in The Butterfly Lampshade. I’m interested so much in the world of the child and the child’s perception of things when the adults are struggling. I think all children are kind of alert to the adults around them and maybe some more than others, but the mother being often the kind of central adult to a child, to see any distress of any level can be disorienting. On an extreme level, how does that reorganize how the child imagines the world or feels responsible? In different ways with Rose and with Francie, both of them are kind of shouldering something unchildlike.

TFR: The Butterfly Lampshade tackles various themes such as human’s obsession with the material, mental illness in the family, childhood memory impacting the lives of adults, time, delineation, could you describe the process of writing The Butterfly Lampshade and the themes stitched within?

AB: I think some of it is this sort of intuitive process, well most of it, is trying to craft movements that feel honest and feel like they make sense on the page. And I think what I’m always searching for in writing short stories or novels is any kind of sentence or paragraph that I want to reread. So for The Butterfly Lampshade there were a lot of these parts where I just felt interested in all those things together, like how are these objects playing a role, how are they relating to this splintered sense of the world that the character is experiencing, how does that relate to her mom’s mental illness, what are these different perceptions that we’re all kind of living in our own sense of things and how does that affect the way we live and the choices we make, and the options available to us? And this was true of [The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake] too, wanting people on different parts of a spectrum of perspectives. A sort of fracturing perspectives. And for [The Butterfly Lampshade], this sort of permeability between reality and fantasy. What are the ways that is joyful and interesting and magical and what are the ways that’s unwell and dangerous, and what are those lines? And I think I’m just very interested in those gray areas.

TFR: When Francie builds a tent to use as her sacred place for remembering the magic and trauma she experienced as a child, it reminded me of psychedelic therapy, but without the psychedelics. Was this tent inspired by these explorative therapies?

AB: I know a lot about therapy therapy, but even as I was writing the book, I was aware the tent is very different because it’s not doing anything. It’s just a space. And I’m interested in meditation as well. I honestly don’t know, and I’d question it a little bit and think: is it okay that it is an inanimate space that she’s sort of filling with something? But somehow it felt kind of right, and it also parallels the writing process. It feels like all of those things: a kind of therapy, a meditation, a kind of creative process, and a magical space. There’s that point where they dust the tent with the rose that her cousin has and maybe that invokes the psychedelic piece that you’re talking about. Like something otherworldly. 

I think I am very interested in small spaces. What happens when you expect to delineation and the sense of what happens when you separate yourself out from something. What can you then focus on?

In real life I don’t think our memory and our thinking work so smoothly as it does for her, but I sort of bought that it would for her.

TFR: The scenes on the Coast Starlight reveal more about Francie as a child and explore the beetle incident and how Francie was “chosen” to experience the magic. The two characters that the steward and Francie see are real, but also not, as they disappear. This seems to be a point about what is real, a hallucination, or magic, and sometimes we don’t get to know all the answers. Could you expand upon this idea?

AB: These were scenes I actually wrote pretty early on. I was sort of thinking about the book and looking back at the scenes, they fit in a way that kind of surprised me. I tend to shy away from thinking about meaning, particularly while I’m in the middle of writing, to try to let whatever feels right more than any sort of intellectual understanding of what it is, but I think that as the book is out in the world and as I think about it as a book and I’m separate from it, I get a little more space from it. There’s this line toward the end when she’s talking to Vicky and Francie says “No, I live here now.” And it goes back to this idea of perceptions and this sense of – there are things that are in different planes. And here are these two different people who live in different planes, who seem to live in a different world than everyone else. And Francie is a bit of a go-between and the steward is not. Like he can see them but he doesn’t interact with them. He finds them strange and Francie doesn’t so she’s permeable in a way the steward is not. And so seeing them, yes, as some type of missives in another realm and I don’t know what that means. If they would’ve wanted to take her with them, if they were just letting her know that she had an access point? The access point was something both beautiful, but also unsettling to her. And that ultimately, she’s not going to go to that place. It’s not clear that her mother lives there. I do believe there are so many ways that people’s minds work. That they are stacked in this way of viewing things. There isn’t some sort of standard to fall on. But that’s a moment of permeability for her.

There’s a hope in me that the images are unsettling enough that you can just live with them and not know what they mean. And that can be frustrating a little bit, but also at some point there will be an experience in your life, and you’ll be like, “This feels the same as the moment with Francie on the train.” The meaning can slowly unveil itself. It can be resonant without full understanding. And I find that territory interesting.

TFR: There is a part where Francie is sitting with her uncle outside the school, waiting for the babysitter. During their wait, Francie watches the children rush to their designated cars. This leads to a disassociation where she must find something to ground her immediately. I was so struck by this moment, because as a child, I would experience this often and never knew how to explain it or if anyone had ever experienced it as well. How did you come up with that moment, is this a personal experience or was this something someone told you about?

AB: I think that’s my hope, that something comes to light about our experiences that may be so connected to who we are, so that makes me happy to hear that. That feels like part of my project as a writer.

I didn’t feel this particular moment as a kid with the pickup line, but I did feel this type of moment where things abstract a little bit and there was a disassociating feeling. I think what I really wanted to do in that scene is lean into that really directly and apply it to the pickup line. It was interesting because I didn’t particularly need this scene plot wise, but I kept feeling like this scene was incredibly important in the book and it’s letting me get to know Francie. There’s just something about that feeling of an observant kid, and I was an observant kid, when you sort of lose yourself in the observation and maybe there’s something going on that’s hard to bear emotionally. The observations becomes enlarged and overwhelming and the cause and effect starts to separate a little bit. It can be very anxiety invoking or it can be very casual. I think for her it becomes increasingly scary because she’s about to have this major change and she’s going to be away from her mom, and suddenly all the kids are getting picked up and she’s not. It really is a potent moment in her life.

TFR: You write strictly fiction, does the personal ever intermingle with the fictious?

AB: All the time. And I think it’s Elizabeth McCracken who said, “When they say write what you know they don’t mean from the events of your life, they mean emotionally.” That always made so much sense to me, which is that any emotional state, like what we were just talking about, that dissociative state, feels familiar to me but then it was placing it inside someone else. Then I feel much freer to explore it and to change it. I think when it’s my own life it’s too familiar, I have no distance from it, and I don’t know how to write about it with any clarity. The element of imagination and sort of all these other things that my mind can play with gives me a job to do, and then the emotional stuff can flood in. But I really do believe that if you feel anything as a reader of a book, it means the writer has felt it in some way. I just don’t think we can convey on the page stuff we haven’t in some way empathically or in our own life experienced.

TFR: The world is impacted by a pandemic, climate change, and a slew of other problems that make it feel like we are in a science fiction novel. What role do you think fiction plays in society right now?

AB: So many roles! For one, it needs to reflect what we are experiencing, because we need help thinking about it. I can’t process what’s going on simply with my own scattered thinking and art is a way that something is beginning to be processed. At various stages, right? There’s art of right now, there’s the art of one year, there’s the art in ten years, and it all give us a way to think about something and feel about something.

So, fiction does that. Fiction allows space for the internal experience and the external experience, and for time to jump around. Fiction is so gymnastically able to move and that is really helpful. A lot of art forms can’t do that. Also, I think sometimes, we need a break. We need to be reminded of other things that are going on in our lives. Sometimes we just need something that is a delight. Ice cream and a really beautiful sentence that makes us happy. Sometimes that’s nourishing in a whole different way. As you talked about empathy, we need to jump into the lives of other people and see what that’s like. Sometimes we need to look at characters that reflect ourselves, in ways we didn’t know. This is all very good for us.

TFR: You mention pretzels in your writing often; do you like pretzels?

AB: That’s so funny, I have no awareness of that! Yeah, I like salt. I like salty foods. And maybe because their shapes are so fun, the little salt crystals. Yes, I do like pretzels quite a bit. As an item and a food.

This Writing Life: What We're Reading & Looking forward to reading

Happy October!

We love reading and talking books! Here's a roundup of what the editors of T4R are reading and recommending monthly. 

I gasped! I love a fractal, interruptive, interrogative scream. There’s something magical about what can be accomplished in a long poem and Olivia Cronk’s Womonster is such magic! I adore an intertextually-centered approach that unfamiliarizes the familiar—run don’t walk to this book!

I’m looking forward to spending time with Kazim Ali’s newest book The Voice of Sheila Chandra.

Aimee Bender's The Butterfly Lampshade is magic and reality intertwined. A beautiful book that focuses on the notion of presence and holding onto the body you are in while the world dissipates and rearranges constantly. 

“Bro!” Bro!! OMG the newest English-language translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley is a feminist respawn made fun, metal, and so full of play I’m beside myself with excitement! I loved The Mere Wife, and after reading and totally loving Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, I couldn’t help but return to Beowulf. If you’re looking for a book to read socially distanced or over the internet with your friends, read this one! Read it out loud!

I love decomposition and fester! I love lyric. Choi Seungia’s Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong is lyric nature writing put under pressure! If you’re feeling a post-climate apocalypse, these poems are for you.

Alyse Bensel’s Rare Wondrous Things just came in the mail! Look at that cover! I’m so excited to read this poetic biography of Maria Sibylla Merian.

Lucia Estrada’s Katabasis, translated by Olivia Lott is the first poetry collection by a Colombian woman to be translated into English—and it is coming out so soon! You can pre-order from Eulalia Books right now.

Find the Places Where the Mind Catches: A Conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Thomson

By Anna Butler

Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, editor, and the author of multiple books including: Half/Life: New and Selected Poems from Alice James Books (October 2019), the memoir fragile, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University.  He also directed Chatham University’s creative writing Master’s program from 2000-2005, and he founded and served as the first Editor-in-Chief of The Fourth River. He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

I spoke with Dr. Thomson after he was featured in a reading at Chatham University in February (one of the last the MFA program hosted before the pandemic). As an editor on The Fourth River team, a beneficiary of Dr. Thomson’s travel additions to the curriculum, and a reader of his work, I was pleased to learn more about his poetry and his contributions to Chatham University.

The Fourth River: What surprised you when you were compiling Half/Life?

Jeffrey Thomson: A lot of things. That book is basically 26 years of my publishing life—which is not my whole writing life. I hadn’t gone back to my first or second books in a long time. The violence, history, sexuality, birds…there’s a way to which I have approached the subjects that’s the same.

Also, fallen angels. I was surprised by how much I write about that concept. I’m interested in liminal space. Fallen angels are between the divine and human. Why are they fallen? People are so fascinating that the angels give up the divine to help us out. Why? People thought that it was because we were so interesting, that this was why it happened, but we’re also so helpless.

TFR: How long did the writing take?

JT: As I said, 26 years. The unifying took about two years. I wrote a bunch of new poems. I was writing up to 2016, so within the lifetime of this presidency.

TFR: Half/Life has very strong, seemingly disparate themes: history, mythology, science, pop culture. Were you concerned about tying these interests together? How did you balance the composition?

JT: I’d think it starts that way [disparate], but I’m just writing poems on what I’ve read about or care about. You get 80 pages, and then put them together. You just follow your interests and desires, and when you get a critical mass you see what this book is about. You see places to fill in 60-70 more pages of book. The instigating process follows where my brain goes.

TFR: I’m curious about your science interest, because I’m a scientist as well as a writer. Do you have a background in science? What do you read/consume that feeds that interest?

JT: When I started college, I was a biology major, so I’ve always been interested in birds and nature. Then I came to Chatham in 2000. There was a program for Chatham sophomores to go abroad. They were going to Costa Rica. I’d taken a trip to Costa Rica when I was 22, so I went with the education faculty. This is the most interesting place I’ve ever been. In the tropics things are so dense and so rich: 900 species of birds, 12 different major ecosystems. I was just chaperoning that trip, but I came back really charged up. I started studying the tropics, etc. The interest followed from there.

Also, a lot of my history poems stem from things I’ve seen in Europe, Italy, the States. I read omnivorously, and find the places where my mind catches on something. I’m not a scientist or historian, but I find things that are worth investigating. You can find so much information on anything. Two books came out of Chatham.

TFR: What did the writing program at Chatham look like before you arrived?

JT: It was a Master’s of Arts; Chatham had just started the program. It was a strange little hybrid MA in Nature Writing and YA, with Kathy Ayres in charge of the YA. When I came, maybe 20 students were enrolled, mostly local people, some community members. When I was interviewed, I was asked, '“How do we grow the program?” I said, “Make it a MFA, a MA is unclear.” And they told me, “Good. Do that.” So I proposed bigger credit and adding travel and poetry and fiction—the demand is higher than nonfiction. They said ‘yes.’ So we did that. The adjusted program grew pretty quickly. Soon we had 60-70 students. I left in ’05. And of course Sheryl St. Germain [next MFA Program Director], added pedagogy to the program.

TFR: Why the travel component?

JT: The travel component fit into Chatham’s model of ‘World Ready Women.’ Getting students out, abroad, even just for two weeks—it’s useful for being a writer. When you’re abroad, you pay more attention to things; you feel safe here. When you’re in an unfamiliar environment, you’re more attuned to the days. You’re paying attention. You can turn on that.

TFR: What led you to start a literary journal at Chatham?

JT: I was specifically hired to create a literary journal because the program didn’t have one. I served on The Missouri Review, and that experience was pretty important. After seven years I had risen to Poetry Editor. I knew how you put one together. So we put out a call for writing. We had to think of the name. We developed the nature-based environment brand—but Pittsburgh; urban space is natural space too. When we started it was just print. Print had authority.

TFR: Do you have any memories you’d like to share from your time with The Fourth River?

JT: We did an early conference based on urban environment and writing. I was convinced we were going to have no one show up. I was talking about it with Lynne Bruckner [former professor in the writing program at Chatham]. She walked away, and came back with a sign that said, “Come To Our Fucking Conference Or Else.” People showed up. It all worked. I feel lucky it did. It helped me just take a deep breath.

TFR: You wear a lot of writer-ly hats—poet, nonfiction writer, editor, translator—how do you balance these? How do you choose what sort of artistic project you will embark on?

JT: I’m not doing all of these things at once. The subject matter chooses you. It fishhooks you and won’t let you go. Bad writing starts with answers. Good writing starts with questions. I listen to the material.

I went to Ireland with a book of ideas. The poems weren’t any good. What was I going to do? I had to tell the narrative. I wasn’t listening to my own material. So I started working on a novel. Same thing with my memoir. It was a long lyric poem. I had to go back in and teach myself how to write. You have to persist with attention. The reader has to be signposted when you switch genres. I learned to listen. I understood how the pieces were connecting. That only happened through my material, not trying to force it.

TFR: What are you working on right now?

JT: I was in Italy teaching at a conference, and I discovered the Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, which contains objects burned by the souls of purgatory. Things like a shirt with hand print, a book made with candle and wine corks. I’m intrigued by this idea of magical objects with a story: Christian relics, Han Solo. Did you know you can buy a full size carbonite statue? I’m not Catholic, so I had no experience with that kind of relic. And that was the hook. So that’s what I’m researching: magical objects.

Call for Submissions: FUTURE(S)

For our fall, 2020 digital issue, we want to see the futures you can imagine. The ones you worry about, hope toward, prepare for.

Is it a dark place? Is it light? Is it eight minutes from now or six decades off yet?

We want to see what happens after the precipitating incident that brings change, whatever that may be.

Imagine us into/through/out of whatever happens between this now and all of the possible thens, and show us what our world might look like. What we could look like living in and on it.

We are leaving this category intentionally broad, but here are some terms to help you get there:

Sci-Fi

Cli-Fi

Solarpunk

Hopepunk

Afro-futurist

Speculative

Magical Realist

(Eco)Fabulist

Atopia

Dystopia

Utopia

and

Realist

Here's a great article in Lit Hub that explains some of the terms above: "Hopepunk and Solarplunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse," by Alyssa Hull.

And here are just some writers/humans we invite you to think about as you write/submit: N.K. Jemisen, Carmen Maria Machado, Matt Bell, Amber Sparks, Margaret Atwood, Emily St. John Mandel, Dave Housley, Greta Thunberg, Rachel Carson, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Jules Verne, JG Ballard, Octavia Butler, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Benjamin Percy, Molly Gaudry.

Wherever you take us, we are looking for a deeply considered, thrillingly imaginative, highly literary experience that keeps in mind the confluence of place, space and identity as all work published in The Fourth River does.

Note that we are unlikely to publish what might be considered strict genre writing.

We accept all work only via SUBMITTABLE.

Announcing the 2019 Folio Prize in Poetry!

We are delighted to congratulate Patricia Clark, whose selection, "In Praise of the Dickcissel" has been selected by esteemed judge Allison Joseph, as this year’s winner!

About Patricia’s work, Joseph says:

It was my keen honor and pleasure to select Patricia Clark's poems for the Fourth River Folio contest. As a self-avowed "hater" of "nature poetry," it took a voice as persuasive and heightened as Patricia Clark's to make me drop my short-sighted preconceptions about what poems about the natural world can do. Clark's poems are lively and exact--sparse when they need to be, more voluble when the occasion demands. Her vision is painterly without being stodgy, and her poems make vivid word-portraits in the reader's mind without giving in to undue sentimentality. Her language is that of an artist--small strokes at times, but often those small detailed strokes add up to an entire world in a poem. This is a poet who loves language, and that love and inherent trust in what language can do makes me drop my inhibitions and immerse my self fully in her work.

Watch for Patricia’s work in our fall online issue, due out in November, 2019!

Runner up:

Karen Holmberg’s "Everything Is an Instrument and Gives Its Own Song”

Finalists:

Rosemarie Donbroski
Danielle Dubrusky
Katy E. Ellis
Maggie Hess
Kathleen Kirk
Susanna Lang
Bronwyn Mauldin
Marjorie Stelmach
L.J. Sysko

---

About our winner:

Patricia Clark is the author of five volumes of poetry, including most recently The Canopy (2017) and Sunday Rising (2013). She has also published three chapbooks: Wreath for the Red Admiral and Given the Trees; a new one, Deadlifts, is just coming out from New Michigan Press. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Slate, and Stand.From 2005-2007 she was honored to serve as the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is Poet-in-Residence and Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

About the judge:

Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University.  She serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review.  Her books and chapbooks include What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand Press), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon University Press), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press), Worldly Pleasures (Word Tech Communications), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon UP), Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press), My Father's Kites (Steel Toe Books), Trace Particles (Backbone Press), Little Epiphanies (NightBallet Press), Mercurial (Mayapple Press), Mortal Rewards (White Violet Press), Multitudes (Word Poetry), The Purpose of Hands (Glass Lyre Press), Double Identity (Singing Bone Press) Corporal Muse (Sibling Rivalry) and What Once You Loved (Barefoot Muse Press). Her most recent full-length collection, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman was published by Red Hen Press in June 2018 and is the Gold/First Place winner of the 2019 Feathered Quill Award in Poetry and is a nominated work for the 2019 NAACP Image Award in Poetry. She is the literary partner and wife of poet and editor Jon Tribble.

Holding a Flower Out in Front of You: A Conversation with M. Evalina Galang

By Dmitra Gideon

M. Evelina Galang is the author of Lolas' House, a work of nonfiction documenting the stories of sixteen Filipina women who were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during WWII.  Her other works include the short story collection Her Wild American Self, and novels One Tribe and Angel de la Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery. She is also a co-editor of the anthology Screaming Monkeys: critiques of Asian American Images. She is the recipient of the 2004 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Prize for the Novel, the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award, the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights, and a 2002 Senior Research Fellowship from Fulbright. Galang directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and board member of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation.

Galang spoke with The Fourth River during her participation in Chatham University's fall 2018 event, Dialogues: Writing from the Global South.

The Fourth River: In Lolas' House, the landscape plays an integral role as a keeper of the Lolas' stories. This is particularly striking when you take the Lolas to their abduction sites. I'm thinking especially of Lola Cristita Alcober. When you take her to Tacloban, you note that she is “not the same Lola Cristita as in Manila.” Then, as she tells her story, and as you move through the spaces her story inhabited, her body and her words begin to become a part of the landscape.  Why was it important for you to revisit the sites of the Lolas' abductions? 

M. Evelina Galang: I was given the opportunity through my Fulbright grant to take some of the women back to their abduction sites. The women who are participating in Lolas' House in Manila are from all over the Philippines, so when they had the opportunity to go back home, they wanted to go home just to go home. But they were also bound and determined to give their testimony. I don't know if they always knew exactly what to expect once they got there; they just knew they were going home.

For me, the importance was to inhabit that landscape as a witness. It was important for me to go and stand in the space where their homes once stood as a way to say, “Yes. This happened. Yes, I have the evidence firsthand.” That's what the whole book is about. And, for me, firsthand means to stand in the spaces where their houses once stood, or to stand in the civic center where they were all held, and  to be able to look out at the landscape to see what they might have seen. It was such an interesting thing to walk with Lola Cristita down the path that they would have taken on their way from San Jose to her home. The house wasn't standing. There was a thing that looked like a house, but it was burned, and she said, “My house used to be there.” That was a way of gathering evidence.

TFR: In that scene, you write, “The story was in the trees, in the grasses, integrated in the sands on the beaches, but never spoken out loud.” How do you think violence and trauma, particularly during wartime, alters our relationship with nature, or alters nature itself?

MEG: I go back to Lola Carmencita, who was in Bulacan. She was held in that mansion surrounded by a beautiful landscape. I feel like the land bears witness to what happens in trauma, but also not in trauma – in the way we go back and forth on the street. There is a way that the land bears witness. For the Lolas, being back in that space automatically triggered all kinds of reliving. It's not triggering memories; it's reliving. It's like a re-enactment, especially in those spaces.

Space is really important. I remember when I was doing some of my research early on; I talked to a psychologist who had done some work with the women. Different Lolas responded differently post-war. Lola Narcisa was one of the ones who did really well, and her story was pretty horrific. The psychologist said that there are certain things you can do to heal, one of which is to take the person out of that space. When Lola Narcisa meets her husband over by her house, she's not herself yet, and her sister's not herself yet. He takes care of them because his own sister had the same experience. He nurtures them back to health. When he falls in love with her, he does many kind things for her. He takes her away from Abra and brings her to Manila, and they begin their life anew. So there's that, but at the same time, she wanted to go back. So, I think it was really important to visit those places when we could. It was interesting to see how different women responded once we were there. They weren't all the same.

TFR: When you said that the land bears witness when we walk back and forth on the street, I thought, “Yeah, every time you step on the ground, it changes a little.”

MEG: It does change a little. In pre-Colonial, pre-Spanish times, there was a strong feeling throughout [the Philippines] that the earth is inhabited by spirits, and even now you don't enter a space without asking permission from the spirits of the land. You are respectful because the ancestors are there; they are the earth. You don't take it for granted.

TFR: The way violence is held in the Lolas' bodies and, later, in your body, seems central to the reader's understanding of the long-term effects of trauma, the consequences of silence, and the power and burden of witnessing. It seems like the Lolas' stories have to enter your body so that they can move through your hand and onto the page. How much do you think writing or telling these stories helps to relieve that physical burden?

MEG: It's absolutely everything. They offer these stories, and the words and the stories enter you when you hear them, and you hold them there. I worked with several students throughout the time of this project, several young women, and I always told them, “You have to take care of yourself. You have to be cognizant and take care of yourself at every juncture.”

While I was working, a friend of mine in Miami said, “When you are listening to these stories and transcribing, you should imagine that you are holding out a flower in front of you, and that the stories pass through the filter of the petals so that you don't take them on.” You're not actually experiencing what they're experiencing; they're filtered. And you in your body understand that they are filtered. They are painful, and you can feel that pain, but it is not your pain. There's always that understanding that this is not you. That was a really helpful thing, and it's also why the book is structured the way it is structured – with constant moments for reflection, or taking a break, or maybe meditation – a little distance away from the stories, a breath. You need to be able to have those filters. Otherwise, it can be a negative thing. I can sit down for an entire weekend and write fiction and never get up. I will forget to eat, forget to shower, and just be in that world continuously with all kinds of energy. But, when I was writing this book, I would write for an hour and then feel fatigued. My eyelids would get heavy and I would have to stop. And that's why it took so long for the book to happen, because I had to take these breaks, I had to listen to my body.

You can even see it in the way I was interviewing. The second time around I was trying to keep my distance. After the last one, I had a fever and I was throwing up. It was like I was expelling and expelling, and I think the writing was the final expulsion. Writing the story, writing trauma, releasing the narrative, vocally or on the page – in a poem, in a song, in a dance – becomes a way of healing.

TFR: Vocalizing trauma is a release, but it also requires you to re-live it, and once you've told your story, there can still be shame I think. I'm wondering if any of the Lolas ever wanted to take it back or felt regretful that they'd spoken.

MEG: I can't speak for them, but I know them pretty well. Each of them thought carefully before they came forward. And once they committed to coming forward they were going to fight to the end, and they did. All the women except for Lola Narcisa have now passed away, and their children and their grandchildren have now taken up the fight for justice. I would say, knowing them and having spent so much time with them, that they are not regretful. In fact, they are defiant. I remember Rechie Madura, their coordinator, said the Lolas went from being victims (that's how I met them, as victims) to survivors. Through the years of working on this campaign for justice, they went from being survivors to heroines – these superheroes, these models for feminism. They're  in the crowd, holding up placards, and they are not backing down. To this day, they are not backing down. They are somewhere in the other world, and they are not backing down.

At some point they actually became people who were saying to volunteers, who were also survivors, “This is not your fault. What happened to you is not your fault. You should not be ashamed. You should be strong. You deserve justice.” I witnessed them saying these things to young survivors, and they believe it with all their heart. It's just how it is. So, knowing what I know, I can't speak for them, but I can safely, almost positively, say that there's not a single one who regrets it. What they regret is that they weren't alive to see justice.

TFR: I mentioned that your physical experience as a witness is part of the book, and one question I've heard from others is why you chose to put yourself and your experiences in the book.

MEG: I didn't want to put myself in at all. But you couldn't have sixteen trauma stories in a row. That just re-traumatizes everybody. Also, it diminishes the singularity of the experience for each woman, because each woman's experience was different. So, the structure of the book was another thing that kept me from getting the book out faster. A friend of mine, a writer, said, “You need to be in this book more, because you are the witness, you are the narrator who is actually there in our stead.”

As these things are happening to the Lolas, and as they are giving their testimonies, and as I am sitting in the room reacting, the question becomes: “How is somebody going to imbibe these stories one after the other?”  So you have this person, this guide, this narrator, who will stop action and say, “Okay time to take a breath.” And I was trying to figure out how to do that. During that Fulbright year in the Philippines, I had learned from the last time that I had to take care of myself. So I would go to church, I would go to meditation centers, and I would see my family. Those were the moments when I re-calibrated, so that I could enter the stories again. When I remembered that, I realized, “That's the way you structure the book.”

I was hesitant at first, but I was told, “You need to do it more, you need to do it more, because people need the breath, and they need to know the context of the stories and how they were given.” That's why I did it that way.

TFR: Judy Grahn was telling us that she uses lines as anchors when writing about something difficult, and in this case you are the anchor. And you're also the vessel through which the reader can enter the stories.

MEG: Right.

TFR: In your role of vessel, you discuss the difficulty of translating the Lolas' stories, especially because they tend to slip into local dialects when they describe their most painful and horrific experiences. Language becomes almost another character in the story. You talk about having to use a lot of non-verbal language to comprehend the full weight of what they're saying, and about the need to couch their words in context, because straight translation does not convey enough. Do you think the language barrier allowed you to experience each other on a more visceral level? What might have changed, for instance, had the Lolas been native English speakers?

MEG: It would have been done sooner (laughs). I could have told the story simply for the Filipino people, in the Philippines. If I had been a fluent Tag-a-Log speaker writing in Tag-a-Log, or if had written completely in English (because English is the mode of education in the Philippines, so everyone speaks English there), that would have been one thing. In hindsight, I think the purpose of the book is to speak to non-Filipinos as well as Filipinos. My discoveries, as a Filipina American, of language and translating, and translating culture (because it's not just translating words; it's really translating culture) were an important aspect of the book. People outside of the Filipino community could understand and discover the stories in a very heartfelt way, a very visceral way. I think it has created a situation where you don't have to be of Filipino descent – you don't even have to be a woman – to get it. Because the act of the narrator in Lolas' House is to discover, and to make some of those cultural faux pas, or to miss a translation.

It's not in the book, but there was this moment when I was using a translator, a Filipino speaker. I asked a question of a Lola, he translated it, the Lola answered it, and I understood what everyone was saying. When he translated it back to me, I said, “That's not what she said. Ask the question again. Ask it this way.” I changed the question around, he asked the question of the Lola, the Lola answered the question, and he turned around and looked at me and was like, “Oh.” So I got it in a way that he didn't get it. That was when I realized I didn't need a translator. It's like subtitles for a movie. I'm watching and hearing in a different language, and I'm reading these subtitles, thinking, “That's not what they said.”

TFR: Another use of the body in both One Tribe and Lolas' House is in dramatic reenactments of history. In Lolas' House, you and the Lolas perform their histories in very visceral, violent role plays. In One Tribe, Isabel teaches Filipino history through creative dramatics. In these scenes, the lines between present and memory – or history – disappear. The characters' bodies become other bodies, or even sometimes the ocean or sky. Why do you choose to tell these stories this way?

MEG: Because it seemed right (laughs). The backstory for One Tribe is that I was a drama teacher at one point. I worked with children. I loved it. When we did these creative dramas, they owned the story. Children are so fresh; their imaginations have no limits. They become the story – they are the bird. They take liberties that we, as adults who have shoulds and should-nots in our heads, won't allow [ourselves] to do. I liked that whole practice. And then the question was: what if that practice were married to teaching Filipino American history? And it's Filipino American history month right now, by the way, so it's very appropriate that you asked me that question.

In that novel, the question is really: who is Filipino? Are you Filipino enough? Are you part of our tribe? I think the answer to that is: everyone who is of Filipino descent has their own way of being Filipino, whatever that is, and that is always Filipino enough. But sometimes the community has certain expectations of how you're supposed to be. Not just the Filipino community, obviously, but that's what I focused on in the book. [The main character] Isabel is really trying to figure out who her tribe is, and how to be in a tribe. The way she does it, and the way the Lolas express themselves in the dramas we do with them, releases the story and honors the experience.

It's a horrible thing that happened to [the Lolas], but it also happened to them. When they re-enact these stories, they are owning those stories, telling them from their perspective, which is a highly different version from the story the Japanese government tells. So I think it's a way of owning your story and telling it, just like those little kids.

There's that moment with Lola Prescila, when she becomes the Japanese soldier. It was so weird for me to see that transformation. I had no idea! There was a kind of release, and it was also a way to empathize. A way for her to actually be in the role of the soldier. For me to be in her role, and to imagine what that might have been like. When your body is on the ground and there is somebody on top of you like that, there's no imagining; it's happening. Even if it's play-acting, it's happening.

TFR: It's so powerful. And I love that you said, “owning your story,” because I have issues with the word “survivor.” I want it to become something like “author” or “owner.” It's your story now, and you can do whatever you want with it. You can turn it into a different story, you can tell it exactly as you remember it...

MEG: You can get revenge. The best thing about fiction is that you can write the same thing that happened to you, and then you can have a different outcome.

TFR: You can go in and rescue yourself!

MEG: Yeah.

TFR: So, you brought up empathy and taking on the role of the Japanese soldier, and I can't remember which Lola said, “We need these stories so the Japanese can heal...”

MEG: Lola Cristita.

TFR: ...Right. And I'm wondering if you ever considered looking at the other side?

MEG: Certain men in my life have suggested that. It's interesting. They're men I respect. But, you know, we've been hearing from men for a long time. They have occupied a lot of space on the page. And in the government. And in the world. And if they want to tell their story, they can tell their story, but my focus is on the women. There is another side to the story, I'm sure. But do I empathize with them? No.

I know a while back there was a soldier who came forward and apologized personally, and I'm sure he's not the only one. One would hope that, as we age, we kind of see who we were and who we are and who we can be, and we understand our humanity a little better. So I would hope that others could rise up to that. But as far as where my energies go as a writer and as an activist, I would say that I'm with women, I'm here to tell their stories. There are only so many hours in the day, and I want to spend them telling their stories, and the stories of other Filipina Americans, other women, other Americans. I have whole slew of nieces who are coming up, and I want them to be powerful young women. Their stories matter. Those are the ones I want to spend time with.

TFR: In One Tribe, Isabel wonders “why so many people related fixing a problem to dwelling on the past.” Those of us who write about collective trauma, racism, sexism, etc... often come up against this issue. Many people have difficulty understanding that past injustices and silences build upon each other to construct the current state of affairs, that the present cannot be understood without understanding the past, that in fact the past is alive and present for people who have been violated and dehumanized. You speak to this also in Screaming Monkeys, stating that we cannot move forward if we “ignore the need to scream.” Past silences must be redressed by speaking the truth not once, but repeatedly. Why do you think some people have difficulty understanding this, and how can we as writers help them to do so?

MEG: I think that has to do with people who come from a place of privilege, of not ever needing to empathize or see another perspective. It's not their fault – lucky them –  but they've never had the opportunity to experience the things that happen to people who don't have money, that happen to women, that happen to people of color. Did I just describe the white male? I might have (laughs). It's not their fault, but they have this way of acting in the world, and it's the only way they know. There's this lack of empathy, and this lack of understanding that the past creates the future, the present operates because of the past, and to change the things in the future, you have to understand the past.

This seems to most of us to be a natural way of thinking, but it's not. When your life experience has been one where you can just walk into a room where other people are standing in line, and right away it's, “Yes sir. What can I do for you sir?” (I've witnessed that); when you have not been the only woman at the table in a meeting, expressing what you think the next thing should be, or what the next choice should be, and it gets completely ignored until a man says the same exact thing; when you have not been in the place of the person who's being erased or unheard, it's hard to imagine that anyone would have a hard time in life. It's hard to imagine the things we are going through (see, this is me being empathetic).

So, how to address that, how to bring them over? I say, write really good fiction. Write really good poems. Make really good films. I say, give the microphone to a woman. Give the microphone to a person of color. Give the microphone to the Lolas. Let people start to tell their own stories, really good stories, or give them spaces in which to tell those stories, and then you catch them when they're not thinking. You catch them in their most human moments. You catch them in the act of watching a story unfold and getting interested in the characters and the choices the characters are making. You fool them into caring about characters and wanting the right things to happen for the right reasons.

Sometimes we have misconceptions and misinterpretations and, when we're caught in the spotlight, we would be the last people in the world to admit that we were wrong. But, when we are listening to a story, or watching a movie, it takes the onus off of us as observers. We might walk away from a movie, or a conversation, or whatever, and something someone said stays with us. We think about it, and then  come back and say, “Yeah, you know, back in the day when I was in high school and I pinned you down like that, that was bad.”

Art is such an integral part of how we become, how we change, and how we understand who we are. It's not the STEM whatever; it's art. It's when we can see people as people, and that happens in a good story. So my answer to that question would be to write. The trick is, you have to get them into theaters, you have to get the book in the hand, and that doesn't always happen. But, you know, the tide is changing. The votes matter. In the U.S., the population is changing. That's why there's so much fear. That's why there's so much resistance. That's why the white men are acting out these days, right? They're afraid. And with good reason, because they're not going to be in power much longer. And good.

Yeah, actually when you were saying, “This is how you make them understand,” I thought, “Well, or we don't care that you don't understand and now we're in control.”

Yeah, there is that. There's a lot of that in the way I operate on a day to day basis. Not everyone cares, and you can see it in our court system and on television every day.  Like, Christine Ford is our superstar. She's standing in for all of us. She's standing up and doing a very elegant and dignified thing in telling her story. She's not telling it because she wants to get anything back. That is abundantly clear. She's doing it so that we make the right choices, because the past matters. If this man can act in such a way back then, and then respond to it the way he is now, now you have the information to make a choice. You don't need an FBI investigation to figure that out, right? So we're seeing it every day. I think we're seeing that they don't care.

What I'm trying to say is that – and maybe it's because I'm getting older, I'm in a good place, and I now have earned privilege of my own – I don't give a flying f––  sometimes. You can get me or you can not get me. You can understand me or you can not understand me. But here are the people I'm working with; here are the people who are getting my attention. They know what's going on. Those small interactions that I have with young women, and especially young women of color, that's the thing that matters. When I see them out in the world, doing their thing, that's what matters.

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Dmitra Gideon lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she is actively involved in sex workers' rights and environmental justice advocacy. She is an MFA candidate in Chatham University's Creative Writing Program and a 2019-2020 Pittsburgh Schweitzer Fellow. She also has a dog.

AWP '19 Observations: Fabulist Fiction for a Hot Planet

Eco-Fabulism: 5 Years Later—A Guarded Update

by Damian Dressick

Five years ago, at the AWP conference in Seattle, Washington, five panelists sat down together for a session entitled Fabulist Fiction for a Hot Planet. This year’s AWP, again in the Pacific Northwest, brought together those same (for the most part) panelists to take stock of the landscape of Eco-fabulist literature at the present cultural moment.

The panel was moderated by Erin Stalcup, a faculty member in the Writing & Publishing MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and author of the eco-fabulist novel Every Living Species as well as the editor of the literary journal Hunger Mountain.

Stalcup began with a brief discussion of the initial panel—its attempts to formulate a definition for eco-fabulism as well as one of its essential questions: to what degree can art to help fight ecological catastrophe. Stalcup also stressed the urgency of the ecological situation, describing the increasing number of extinct and soon-to-be-extinct species as well as the approaching reality of an ice free artic.

The first panelist was E. Lily Yu, winner of the 2017 Artist Trust/Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award and a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. In her presentation Yu put two ecologically-engaged novels written 30 years apart in conversation. Both Australian novelist George Turner’s 1998 Drowning Towers and Kim Stanley Robinson’s more recent (2017) 2040 describe worlds in which rising sea levels have brought about large-scale changes in the social structure and humans are forced to live in high-rises in flooded cities. Yu discussed common thematic choices in the two novels written decades apart.

Matt Bell, Director of Creative Writing at Arizona State University and author of novels Scrapper(2016) and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods(2013) and the story collection A Tree A Person or A Wall (2016) discussed his class Climate Fiction, Eco-Fabulism, and the New Weird at Arizona State. Students in the class read seven books, all from the genre of climate fiction. Bell talked about his own preparatory reading in science, environmental philosophy and history, as well as his desire create a course friendly to students often more inclined toward the production of genre fiction than literary fiction. Bell also talked about his success engaging his students with a project that asked them to craft artifacts from various imagined futures and put them on display in a “marketplace.”

Megan Cass, associate professor of English University of Louisiana-Lafayette and author of Range of Motion, took over for Christian Moody. She discussed how eco-fabulist stories can serve as calls to accountability for their readership.

Assistant professor at the University of Maine at Machias and author of Lungs Full of Noise, Tessa Mellas spoke about the last five years being particularly dark in terms of environmental impact due to ecological policies currently being pursued. Mellas suggested that the difficulty in understanding our ecological role starts when we “put nature on one side and human beings on the other.”

The panel’s overall conclusion seemed to suggest that while the road may be long and dark in terms of art making a meaningful difference in the planet’s outlook—and even though folks may see themselves as sometimes preaching to the choir—what writers can do and what writers must do is write about the things that matter to them.

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Damian Dressick is an American author from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was nominated in 2009 for the Pushcart Prize for short fiction. He is the winner of the Spire Press 2009 Prose Chapbook Contest for his collection Fables of the Deconstruction. In 2007 he won the Harriette Arnow Award for short fiction

AWP '19 Observations: “Surfing the Green Wave: Engaging Environmental & Social Issues for Young Readers”

by Tanya Ward Goodman

Panelists: Shanetia Clark, Todd Mitchell, Eliot Schrefer, Sherri L. Smith, Cecil Castellucci

I went to the AWP 2019 Panel, Surfing the Green Wave: Engaging Environmental & Social Issues for Young Readers because I thought learning “how literature might engage a generation that is inheriting global problems on an unprecedented scale” might help me navigate this difficult and continuing conversation with my own teenaged children. I came away with new tools to deepen my writing as well as constructive ways to address my worries about the state of our world.

“Stories shape the way we think and act,” explained moderator, Shanetia Clark. She asked us to look at how literature changes to address new problems and wondered what might lie beyond apocalyptic fiction. She’d gathered four writers, Cecil Castelucci, Todd Mitchell, Eliot Shrefer, and Sherri L. Smith, to muse on the central question of “what now?”

By defining books as “conversation beginners,” Mitchell encourages his readers to think beyond the text. “What does this book ask you to do next?” he wondered. All four writers agreed and talked about the value of showing the effort of moving toward Utopia.

Writing from a “post crisis point,” Castelucci explained, makes the story about hope and offers a chance to re-build. She’s especially interested in showing what she calls “agency in the face of crisis.”

Smith, whose novel was inspired by post-Katrina New Orleans, offered her take. “In times of crisis,” she said, “it’s often the communities who help, rather than the establishment.” She asked us to look at the ways calamity can be a uniting force.

Schrefer broadened the idea of community to include the natural world. After researching the Bonobos ape, he was inspired to write a quartet of books. “I want the reader to think, I’m linked with this creature,” he said. In pursuit of emotional connection, he edits much of his research out of the final draft, relying instead on character and story to convey truth in an entertaining way. “I write sad books,” he said. “I need to steer this car as much as I can in the other direction.”

Castelucci finds that the world of comics gives her a broader path to tackle uncomfortable topics. “People who are resistant to climate change,” she said, “Are a lot more open when you have Wonder Woman doing something.” She believes deeply in the relationship of science and science fiction. “It’s a circular system of inspiration,” she said. “Part of our job is to inspire new inventions and encourage the pushing of boundaries.”

Smith agreed. Her recent work on the Avatar comic book series, has blended fantasy with reality and helped her understand the importance of re-orienting ourselves to nature. “Spreading our empathy to every living thing means we care as much for the planet as we care for ourselves.”

In order to avoid being preachy, Mitchell often puts what he really wants to say in the mouth of the villain. “Let the humanity rise to the surface.”

Putting character and emotion at the center of these big stories establishes a comfort zone for readers that can ease recognition of larger truths. Zombies can stand in for real-world threats. Using issues of class, social status and economic imbalance as plot points help readers connect to their own experiences and envision real life solutions. “Write to see what you don’t know,” reminded Mitchell. In this way, reading becomes a kind of practice for turning anxiety to action.

Panelist Books Discussed:

Todd Mitchell, The Last Panther

Eliot Schrefer, The Ape Quartet: Endangered, Threatened, Rescued, Orphaned

Sherri L. Smith, Orleans

Cecil Castellucci, Shade, The Changing Girl

Panelist Recommended Books:

Feed by M.T. Anderson

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Dry by Neil Schusterman.

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Tanya Ward Goodman is the author of “Leaving Tinkertown.”  Her essays, short stories and articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, OC Family, Luxe, Alligator Juniper, Perceptions: A Magazine of the Arts, the “Cup of Comfort” series published by Adams Media, Literary Mama, The Huffington Post, Brain, Child and as a blogger for TheNextFamily.com