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.  

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.

The Science of Inspiration: An Interview with Aubrey Hirsch

by Caroline Horwitz

Aubrey Hirsch taught in Chatham’s MFA program before moving to Colorado Springs for the Daehler Fellowship from Colorado College. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in several literary journals. Two of her nonfiction essays we discussed are “Speaking From the Throat,” on her experience receiving radioactive treatment for Graves’ disease, and “Five for New Orleans,” on five visits she made to the city.

The Fourth River: Your essay “Speaking from the Throat” taught me a great deal about Graves’ disease. Did you have to do much outside research on the subject or did you learn all about it from the experience?

Aubrey Hirsch: I mostly learned from the experience itself. There were some things I had to double-check through research, like the dosage of the radiation I took. But I read a lot about Graves’ disease before I was treated for it. After I had the blood test that showed my thyroid levels were too high, I went home and did a Google search and Graves’ came up. I learned that it’s the best case for high thyroid levels. Other medical conditions that cause them are cancer or a tumor on the pituitary gland, so I was actually hoping it was Graves’. I thought I’d be excited when I was diagnosed with it, since it was the least serious and most treatable condition, but I wasn’t. It was still overwhelming.

FR: I can imagine. How has having it affected your writing? Toward the end of the essay, you state that “this process has taught me that I need to speak up more, ask for help, allow myself to be vulnerable.” Have you continued to speak up more?

AH: I wouldn’t say it’s affected my writing very much. It definitely interfered with it when I was sick. All of a sudden, I had to make a ton of medical decisions at once, like deciding whether I wanted the surgery or the radiation treatment. I was working toward my MFA at the time and didn’t get much writing done.

I’ve always been an outspoken person, but I think there was something about the power dynamic of the doctor’s office that intimidated me. I didn’t want to be seen as an annoying patient and then receive worse care as a result. But after the experience, I can officially say that I am now the most obnoxious, high-maintenance patient.

FR: That’s good. It’s a small price to pay for finding any problems that are potentially there. I also liked your personal essay “Five for New Orleans.” It really shows how much character the city has. I wondered, what made you decide to reverse the order of events?

AH: A few reasons. First, whenever people hear New Orleans mentioned nowadays, they automatically think of Hurricane Katrina. I wanted to give readers the aftermath of Katrina in the beginning of the story rather than have them anticipate it until the end. Also, I wanted to end on an optimistic note. The confusing part of that, of course, it that the audience already knows how it all ends from reading the last event first, but I wanted to convey the optimism of New Orleans itself. The people there know another storm will hit at some point, but they still have hope and joy.

FR: Was it difficult to recount the experience of being robbed and held at gunpoint? How do you usually proceed when writing about times of intense emotion?

AH: It was shockingly easy to write about the robbery, I think, because writing nonfiction requires you to disconnect from the memory and write yourself as a character. However, I once did a reading of this piece and had to stop when I got to the part about the robbery—I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I think that kind of trauma always stays with you in some way, but it helps that something good came of it through this essay.

When writing about intense emotion, I try to remind myself that the reader is coming to the scene with nothing, whereas I already know everything about the experience. I take my time and choose the words carefully.

FR: I know you’re very interested in science, and it comes out in much of your writing. Did you ever consider a science career, or did you always want to be a writer?

AH: I didn’t initially plan to be a writer; my major was chemistry when I started college.   I probably would have wanted to be a writer sooner if I’d known it was a real option, but I think English classes in school tend to give the impression that literature ended with Hemingway. I figured I was too late to be a writer.

I’m especially interested in theoretical particle physics. I can’t do the math that goes along with it, but I find it absolutely mind-boggling. It’s better than any fiction I could create.

FR: You write a lot in both the fiction and nonfiction genres. What’s it like writing so much of both? Do you have a favorite between the two?

AH: Fiction and nonfiction are so similar in certain ways and so different in others. I employ some of the same writing techniques for them but both genres have their own challenges. For nonfiction, personal essays can be difficult to contain. Since I have so much access to my own life, I tend to make my essays experimental.

Nonfiction has a special weight to it because of its truth; even the best-written fiction doesn’t have that. But ultimately my heart is in fiction because it’s more freeing. I have the ability to create a whole new world in service of the story.

FR: How does your research process differ for the two genres?

AH: Most of my nonfiction is personal, so just about everything I do is research, whether it’s horseback riding or going to a bar with friends. Sometimes I have to verify certain facts in order to frame the information. For example, I had to look up the Latin names of some flowers for a recent piece.

I heavily research my fiction compared to the nonfiction. It’s a very casual process since fact in fiction doesn’t have to be airtight. But the research is necessary in order to add detail and build the setting. I’d say about ninety-five percent of my research doesn’t make it into the story, but it all influences the story in an unconscious way.

FR: Where do you look for inspiration when writing?

AH: I don’t know that you can “look” anywhere for inspiration—but it would be great if some inspiration fountain or source existed. I tend to find inspiration in reality. Bits of history, science or news items give me ideas for both fiction and nonfiction. I also find it inspiring to be part of a community of writers. I love reading and talking about writing with other people.

FR: What are you currently working on?

AH: I always work on a few projects at once, usually some short fiction and essays. I’m also working on a series of flash fiction pieces about real and historical figures that I call fictional unauthorized biographies, and I’m writing a novel.

FR: Can you share what the novel is about, or is it too soon to discuss?

AH: It’s too soon. I don’t want to create a lot of hype before I know exactly where it’s going. You never know if something will take a different shape from what you imagined. But the fellowship has been a great opportunity to work on a big project like this.

Caroline Horwitz is a graduate of Chatham University’s creative writing program. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Cover photo is from American Short Fiction’s blog.

Note: since this interview was conducted, Aubrey wrote and published a story collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, which is forthcoming from Braddock Avenue Books.  We asked her a few questions about the process.

The Fourth River: Now that you’ve gone through the process, is there anything you wished you’d known about putting together a story collection?

Aubrey Hirsch: I guess I wish that I had done it sooner. There’s a lot of gloomy talk surrounding the place (or lack thereof) for short story collections in the market. I think I wasted a fair amount of time thinking that I’d never find a publisher for a short story collection. Meanwhile, there are lots of folks out there who love stories and aren’t afraid to take chances on collections they think are worth printing. If there’s any advice I would impart, it would be to encourage people to go for it!

FR: Which story was the hardest to write, and why?

AH: Each of the stories in the book presented their own challenges  “Leaving Seoul,” “Paradise Hardware,” “The Disappearance of Maliseet Lake,” and “Certainty” all have completely different endings than their first (and sometimes second, third and fourth) drafts. I guess if I had to give a top prize for the story I struggled with the most, it would go to “Paradise Hardware.” Finding the right balance between the scenes at the hardware store and the scenes between Clarke and his wife took a lot of patience and a lot of rewriting. Chris Heavener at Annalemma had a hand in making that story what is.

FR: Which story was the most rewarding, and why?

AH: “Certainty” was absolutely the most rewarding story for me. Most of my stories are about relationships that are broken in some fundamental way, but “Certainty” is very much a love story. When I sent it to Roxane Gay at PANK, she remarked that she thought the story was very romantic. That in itself felt like a win for me! I was also really honored to have this chosen as the runner-up for last year’s Micro Award. It makes me feel like the piece has connected with people, and that’s always what I’m trying to do.

Anyone Who Would Talk with Me: An Interview with Julia Spicher Kasdorf

By Amy Lee Heinlen, for The Fourth River

Julia Spicher Kasdorf visited Chatham University as the guest poet for the 2014 Summer Community of Writers (SCW). It was here that I heard Julia read from her enquiring and provocative new project in which she folds language, history, and place into powerful and distressing poems which record the voices of those involved in the Western Pennsylvania natural gas industry boom. Intrigued by her new poems,, I emailed Julia to find out more about her project and this fierce poem.

The Fourth River: At your reading during SCW, you read a series of profoundly moving poems from a current project. Will you elaborate this project?

Julia Spicher Kasdorf: Oh, thanks for saying that you found them moving! The project, which I’m now calling Shale Play, is a series about impacts of shale gas development in Pennsylvania. I’m still working on it, hoping to eventually publish it with photographs.

Last year I was fortunate to have time off from teaching, thanks to a sabbatical from the English Department and a fellowship from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at Penn State. I took 17 or 18 trips to northern PA (Tioga and Lycoming Counties) and southwestern PA (Westmoreland and Fayette Counties, where I grew up). At home and on campus, I learned all I could through print and on-line sources about the history, engineering, and technology of this industry. It can be argued that the current gas boom started at Penn State, with the research of geoscientist Terry Engelder, and that Penn State has shaped state policy and local practices, for better or for worse. Quite a few faculty members in fields outside of geoscience—forestry, agricultural economics, hydrology, rural sociology, landscape architecture and education—do research in this area, too. I will add that the faculty is not of one mind on the issue, despite the common perception that Penn State is in collusion with the industry.

But I really wanted to see what’s happening in local communities. Like Zora Neale Hurston says, “You got to go there to know there.”

I have contacts in western PA from growing up there, and Judith Sornberger and James Guignard at Mansfield University helped me to understand the lay of the land up north. Then I just drove around and sat in diners and talked with anyone I could find who has had experience with shale gas—landowners, leaseholders, workers in the industry and workers around the industry like waitresses, people who live near compressor stations, people who live near wells, an attorney, clergy, activists, anyone who would talk with me. One conversation led to another, and I wrote down everything I could.

TFR: During your craft talk at SCW, you noted the difference between a poet of document and poet of witness. I’m interested in how you think about your role as a poet while you work on Shale Play. Has your view of your role as a poet changed during this project compared to your previous poetry collections?

JSK: This is different from previous collections in that it’s my first self-conscious project of poetry. Sleeping Preacher reads like an autoethnographic project book, but I wasn’t mindful of that when I was writing many of those poems in graduate school. My most recent collection, Poetry in America, makes documentary gestures, quoting voices in my small town during the Iraq war, for instance, and citing historical events. But this is the first Project Book I’ve attempted. It came after teaching a course in documentary poetry: Reznikoff, Rukeyser, C.D. Wright, Mark Nowak, and so on. I’m intrigued by that work, and then we have this industrial invasion happening in rural Pennsylvania that I wanted to understand and record. I’m a poet. I start with language. I’m not an activist who must simplify the discourse. I’m an artist drawn to the complexity and emotional intensity of the situation. I listen. I want to hear how this development will change language along with the landscape. I want to amplify voices—including the voices of memory—that shape experience. That’s how I entered the project, anyway. The more I see and hear, the more I’ve come to identify with those who have been harmed.

TFR: I’m interested to know more about the relationship between the “citizen with too much memory” and the “I” in your poem, “Among Landowners and Industrial Stakeholders, a Citizen with Too Much Memory Seeks Standing to Speak of Recent Events in Penn’s Woods.” What does it mean that she “seeks standing to speak?”

JSK: The “citizen” is the speaker, is the author. The title comes from something I was thinking about. In these Marcellus Shale communities, when there’s a public hearing about something—a pipeline going in, say, or a compressor station venting volatile organic compounds or making a ridiculous amount of noise—there are often restrictions on who has “standing,” which means who is permitted to speak at the meeting. You might have standing if you have a business interest at stake or if you own property within a certain distance. So what qualifies me to speak about shale gas development? This poem is my answer to that question. I guess “too much memory” is a way of saying that I’m a “stakeholder” because of all I carry in my mind and body. My only claim on this place is knowledge of public and private history, how that information comes off the land when I move through it.  

TFR: One thing that struck me is the difference in the tone of the title from the poem itself. I think the title feels distant both because it is written in the third person and because it is explanatory. This has a similar feel to the titles of the poems you read at SCW. How did you come to decide to title this piece and other poems in your project this way?  What work do you feel it is able to do first for you as the writer and then for the reader?

JSK: Yes, this title! Maybe it won’t stay. The poem used to be called “Witness Trees,” but that sounds too much like POETRY, doesn’t it? I’d begun writing these flat titles for the other monologues. The poems are often quite raw, but the titles establish the identity of the speaker with reference to place and often a topic or central concern, for example: “A Student from Tunkhannock Articulates Shale Gas Aspirations” or “A Mother Near the West Virginia Line Considers the Public Health.” The title functions like a handle for the reader to grab onto. This is one of few poems in the series that’s spoken in my own voice, so it seemed only fair to pin that kind of title onto myself, too.

TFR: There is so much history in this piece. It is American history in so many experiences: Native Americans, settlers, the lore of your ancestors, family you’ve known, and your personal ties to the land all show up here. I was struck by the gas company’s invasion of the landscape, most notably in places important to the speaker’s family history, juxtaposed with the early Pennsylvania pacifist settlers’ often violent encounters with the Native Americans. Do you feel that pacifism influences the actions of the people living in these regions today? Or how do you view the juxtaposition working in this piece?

JSK: Certainly for some pacifists living in these regions, that ideal persists and determines actions, and yet one lesson of Penn’s Holy Experiment is that violence cannot be externalized or eradicated entirely.

The piece works associatively, turning from one form of violence to another. You’ll find trees or wood in almost every section. Trees have been associated with human bodies from antiquity—think of Myrrha. Jeff Gundy, a poet friend, read this and said he thinks it’s like surrealism, except that the piece is made of events from memory and history, not imagination and dream. Every statement is factual, as far as I know, except the location of the place where my dad’s feed truck lost its brakes in the 1950s; that happened on another mountain nearby.

TFR: Clearly, you have researched this topic in a variety of ways. What has the process been like as you decide what historic morsels stay in, what gets set aside?

JSK: So much of it relies on the sifting of memory; I have the kind of mind that hoards details and trivia. When people have been able to live in the same place for a long time, stories get inscribed on the landscape the way junk collects in the attic. Yet, places change. That compressor shed at the end of Peight’s lane felt like a violation when I spied it. I was thinking about gas development and suddenly seeing its signs everywhere on the landscape.

I grew up knowing the story of what some people call “the Hochstetler massacre,” but after he was rescued from the river, Jacob had to make a deposition to General Bouquet, so there are records I could read. I researched in various ways, mostly digitally, which felt like such a luxury, discovering all those mostly useless but really interesting details! The corner trees/witness trees turned up in a New York Times piece about forestry studies. Some of the details in the fifth section were passed on from my father-in-law, John Ruth, who’s working on a book about the early history of eastern Pennsylvania, the arrival of the Mennonites, and Penn’s sons and the broken treaties that led to the involvement of Native people in the Seven Years War between England and France.

I wanted to move through time and think about violence in this landscape, but beyond that, intuition determined which details to include.

TFR: This piece explores the complicated, even violent relationship the speaker has to the land she calls home. One of the last sentences of this poem rings with a tension that I have often felt myself, “I drive home and cook my groceries on a gas stove.” What have you found that poetry is able to do when confronted with the dualism of the negative impact of the gas drilling practices on the land and communities close to the drilling versus the modern conveniences most Americans have come to expect?

JSK: Poetry can help us face the facts and feel the grief of this reality. We’re all in it. We’re all implicated. Perhaps there can be hope in that, too, if it means that we can see that we’re all responsible for caring for these places and communities, and for finding sustainable ways to live.

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Amy Lee Heinlen studies poetry in the MFA program at Chatham University where she also works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in The Mom Egg Review, multiple volumes of Voices in the Attic, and The Red Clay Review. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

Telling Two Stories in One Breath: An Interview with Tyehimba Jess

by Jessica Kinnison

American poet Tyehimba Jess entered the MFA program at New York University in 2002 with half of his poetry book leadbelly written. His colleagues knew what he was going to bring to every workshop—another leadbelly poem.

leadbelly (2005) follows the story of Louisiana-born folk singer Huddie William Ledbetter, born in 1885, from Shreveport, LA to Texas to Angola Prison to New York City. leadbelly was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three books of the year by Black Issues Book Review.

A two-time winner of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was Chicago’s ambassador to Accra, Ghana. He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions and Enduring Legacy (2003), and his work has been featured in numerous anthologies. A Cave Canem Alumni, he received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and won a 2006 Whiting Award. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

I interviewed Jess immediately following his reading at the Allegheny County Jail as part of Chatham University’s Words Without Walls Black Writers Series. He visited to tell the story of how Leadbelly’s music lives in each of us as Americans. He says, “At least people are saying his name. They are saying his name.”

.

The Fourth River: Why do you write and for whom?

Tyehimba Jess: I used to write for political purposes strictly. I was interested in writing poems that would inspire people to take political action. That’s what “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” is all about. Those poems were for black people.  But you know you can’t control who reads your work.

So, after a while, I came to accept the idea that I was writing for everybody. Even when I thought I was writing for black people, not all black people agreed with what I was writing. It is difficult to say that you are writing for one particular group of people.  It can limit your imagination. After a while, I was like, “OK, I am writing for the entire world.” I think that later on, it became about writing for me.

The more I write, the more I realize it is about conveying a message. My poetry is pretty clear. Generally, you know what I am writing about by the end of a poem. I try to write that way. But it is working internally, as well.

When I am doing these poems, these syncopated sonnets and all that, I think I am trying to find a way to tell two different stories in one breath. I am looking for metaphors beyond the rhetorical that link into the shape of the poem and [into] the way the poem is read on the page.

FR: What do you think of the academic world as a space for writers?

TJ: I am part of a few different streams of poetry phenomena that are having an effect on the way poetry is being perceived in academia. One is slam: slam was started because of a man named Mark Smith in Chicago who was really disenchanted with the way poetry in academia was presenting itself as a kind of boutique, elite pastime that was not interested in connecting with the ordinary Joe Schmo on the street.

I think that the brilliant thing about Mark is that he was able to start this institution that’s very simple, very organic and really, in a way, doesn’t get the kind of credit in academia that it deserves for its impact on American poetry.

He’s one of those people who deserves a MacArthur grant because he saw a need and he filled it in a very simple way, in a way that answered the call of so many people who were interested. He helped throngs and throngs of people to understand that poetry doesn’t have to be outside of their grasp. It doesn’t have to be something that is performed by other people. They can perform it.

Whatever complaints people may have about slam, it brought poetry to the people and the same with Cave Canem. It’s an institution for black poets started by Toi Dericotte and Cornelius Eady that really eliminated the isolation that so many black poets felt on a fundamental level. The thing about Cave Canem is that it created a connection for black poets nationally and internationally that enabled us to grow at a rate we would not have been able to obtain without that community.

FR: Why did you choose poetry as your form for leadbelly? It reads like a novel.

TJ: First off, I am not as good at fiction as I am at poetry. I seem to be more geared toward saying a certain thing in a certain amount of time. leadbelly is almost all prose poems when he is speaking. Partly because I thought of him in terms of prose, really simply and not all enjambed. You know, it is prosaic and it follows a particular arc. It is linear in that respect. I think those are reasons it seems like a novel, in a way.

FR: Philip Larkin once wrote, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” In your case, what are you preserving in your poems?

TJ: Yes, I guess I am in the business of historical preservation. There were a few things I was trying to preserve. One was Leadbelly’s legacy but also the idea of the work that the old music has done for us.  When I say “us,” I mean nationally what that work has done.

That legacy continues. The thing I think about a lot is the roots of the music, particularly in regard to the African community and the African-American contribution. With this new work I am doing, it is beyond the music. It is about theater and literature as well. When you look at the intellectual property, so much of that property has been generated from the black community.

Paying homage to Leadbelly, trying to present a portrait of his life, to me, meant recalling the pain and the joy that went into making that music. It lies at the bottom of American music. So I guess I’m back where Philip Larkin was: at the bottom of his preservation.

FR: So under everything is the need to preserve?

TJ: Yes, I would say that. Continue that story forward. Just having people say the word “Leadbelly” today in 2013, I am glad to be a part of that. And it’s not just him; it is the story and everything that the story entails, that idea, that aesthetic.

FR: You were a DJ at the University of Chicago for 10 years.  Who were some of the people you played most?

TJ: Man, I played so many people: Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Art Ensemble of Chicago. I think the beautiful thing about Chicago is that they have something called AACM. It is really sort of an avant-garde arts organization.  I was very privileged to see these guys walking around the neighborhood. Overseas, they were superstars. You know, they were just phenomenal musicians. So I got the opportunity to see them on a regular basis. Lester Boyd, Malichi Favors, I got to see Sun Ra a couple times, Fred Anderson.

There was a little bar called the Velvet Lounge. It’s still there. It was the best music in Chicago. It was very cheap. The musical legacy in Chicago was wonderful. Then you also had the blues musicians. So my show started out as all jazz. Then it started to include blues, too. Like I played Muddy Waters, then I’d play John Coltrane, then I’d play some Sun Ra, then I’d go all the way back in the shed to get some Robert Johnson. I’d go back and forth and back and forth. I was playing with what Amiri Baraka would call “The Music,” the idea of the genres of music just drifting together into a continuum, especially with jazz and blues. I loved it. Then I would do interviews with political prisoners, prisoners of war and activists.

FR: I noticed that you use variations on blues phrases in leadbelly like “black snake moan.” Did you put them in while you were writing or did you go back and texturize the piece with common blues phrases?

TJ: It was probably a combination of the two. It’s kind of like the first pass: I go through a poem and have these weak words and stronger words. I take out words that are not contributing to the energy of the poem, and I think about words that could make the poem more active or add to the texture, and I go back and throw in a lot of other allusions. I try to reach in as many directions as I can. Some of them come naturally and those are the ones that I am actually more weary of because they are more likely to be cliché. If they are clichés, I try to come back and change them up a little.

FR: Do you think people who don’t listen to blues would notice blues phrases?

TJ: It’s hard for me to say what people’s perception of blues is. I think partly because I have been listening to it for so long. It is hard for me to detach myself from the lack of understanding regarding blues. If you were to say the word “blues” to most people, maybe one of the words that would come to their minds is “Eric Clapton” or “B.B. King” or “guitar” or the opening of the Dave Chapelle show. So there are a lot of standard images that people come up with. I am trying to write either against that or to deepen that understanding. I think that is true with anybody. If you were to say “polka music,” I probably wouldn’t know that much. I should. I think “accordion.” That is part of my charge to understand how all those musics can relate.

FR: How did your perspective on the book change after you went to Shreveport for the first time?

The most important thing I did there was visit his grave. I also met his grandniece. He is buried in this churchyard that is off of a dirt path that is off a dirt path that is off of a one-lane road. It’s way the fuck out. He died in New York but he was buried down there. It gave me an impression of where he walked. Of course, I was seeing Shreveport past its heyday. I could still see the streets and soak in the atmosphere. It was good to see the places I had written about.

I always felt guilty about the ability to claim that territory. I wanted to treat it with the respect it deserves. I wanted to treat him and the place that he came from with respect. I felt like it was incumbent upon me to give it a visit and say “Hello.” So, in a way, it gave me a kind of permission to continue on that journey of seeking out the details of his legacy.

FR: Is it true your immediate family would not exist without the Great   Migration?

TJ: You could say the same thing for probably at least half of black people in America today. The South was repressive. The North was repressive but in a different way.

FR: Michele Norris said that her parents didn’t talk about the South because they didn’t want to put rocks in their children’s pockets. If they put that anger in their pockets, it would weigh them down. Your parents were active in the community and also in race relations. How did that affect you and your writing?

TJ: It affected me in several ways. One is my dad is an avid, avid reader. He probably had 30 magazine subscriptions and books all around the house all the time. Both of them were very intent on having us read. I have an older brother and an older sister. My brother went to Michigan. My sister went to MIT. I think that my parents’ support and insistence upon college and that exposure to the necessity of reading at a very young age affected me.

As far as their relationships with their hometowns: I went down to visit my grandmother in Greenville, South Carolina when I was a kid. It was like visiting another planet.  This was in the 1970s. Greenville at that time was not the Greenville it is now. It is really a big, bustling city now. Back then, it was not a big place. There was a dirt road in front of my grandma’s house.

My dad didn’t talk very much about (well he didn’t talk that much at all) about South Carolina and his life down there. And my mother would talk about Oklahoma to a certain degree; she still does.

I think that their attitude was similar to what you are talking about. When you look at it, it really was like going from one country to another country. I mean, my dad was in the Confederate state—South Carolina. He still has his high school diploma. The signature on it is Strom Thurmond’s. My dad is 80 years old. It was like an entirely different land of opportunity. There is no way my father would have been able to work for the Department of Public Health in South Carolina at that time. There is just no way; it would not have been possible.

My mother left Oklahoma because she could not attend the nursing schools there. My mom also lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated before those nine students marched up the steps to that high school. Their attitude was the one of most black folks at that time: they wanted to get out.

FR: You changed your name legally in 1999. What did your parents think about that?

TJ: They were reluctantly accepting of it. I was living as Jesse Goodwin before I changed it, formally, in 1999, but [informally, starting in 1992], everybody called me Tyehimba Jess. You will be surprised how quickly you find yourself around nobody who knows your original name. It caught on within a couple years.  By the time it became legal, it had pretty much already happened anyway.

FR: Tyehimba means “we stand as a nation.” What does that mean to you?

TJ: I got it from a book in college. I took a lot of time trying to find a word that would be appropriate. This word, to me, infused the idea of black self-determination. You know, working together to achieve various and sundry goals. On the other hand, I didn’t want to completely abandon my family in that process. I was disturbed by our name being Goodwin because it was passed down from a slave owner. So I decided to keep my first name and make it my last name. My first name was Jesse, and that is my father’s name and his father’s name.

FR: Did your writing change once you changed your name?

TJ: My name came slowly.

FR: The name was your public persona and slowly became your private persona?

TJ: I think I was part of the last generation to change our names to African names. I mean, I don’t know what 20 year-olds are doing now, but I don’t think they are changing their names to African names. Many of the artists at that time were changing their names if not legally, informally. So it was not a unique thing.

The good thing about it is that I did not change my name more than once and I really carefully considered it before [the change]. I waited for seven years before I made it legal. So I had a long time to live with it. The decision to make it legal, to me, meant that I could stop leading a double life. Stop being Tyehimba Jess until I needed a check signed. It seemed inauthentic. I didn’t consider the name inauthentic. I considered the state’s right to claim what my name was illegitimate. One of my questions was whether or not to give the state that legitimacy, but after a while, I knew that, practically, it was the thing to do.

FR: Where did you start on the page when writing the syncopated sonnet about the twins?

TJ:  I started with the middle. I finished the middle because really the middle is based off of another poem I did called “Blind Tom.” It was the first one I made that went down and back. It was about Blind Tom being buried in two different locations. So, when it came to the McCoy Twins, I was wracking my brain as to how to approach talking about them.

I guess the form and the subject matter came simultaneously. I thought, well, I will mimic the shape of their bodies. So how can I do that? I already had the Blind Tom thing, so I thought I could reverse the polarity to have two heads and one middle. Then I can come up and have one head and two middles. So I did one and I did another one and another one. Those things are like a puzzle.

FR: You said that you don’t write in forms, but there are many forms in leadbelly.

TJ: I guess the counterpointes I’m doing are forms. I also call them double-jointed. That crown of sonnets in the book was the first set of poems in form I ever wrote. The thing about sonnets is that they are long enough to say something and short enough to get to the point. At this point in our history, sonnets can be unrhymed and all kinds of stuff. Fourteen lines, oh, it’s a sonnet. It’s got this kind of elasticity to it. And the rhyme scheme can be as strict as you want it to be and as loose as you want it to be. I am going for the story, in particular.

FR: Which professors did you study with at NYU?

TJ: Philip Levine, Marie Howe, and Sharon Olds.

FR: Did any of those teachers give you a major suggestion for leadbelly that you rejected?

TJ: Yes, Phil Levine told me to put the book in third person. I seriously considered that for a long time. And I couldn’t do it. It was difficult. In that class, I agreed with 99 percent of the things he said. He is a very, very sharp guy. It was hard to do that when I first rolled up in there. I couldn’t do it. It was not a physical thing. It was a mental thing. For me, that is the trope of the book. It would have lost immediacy. I love Phil, though. We are both from Detroit.

FR: Do you feel you have any secret or conspicuous flaws as a writer?

TJ: I don’t think I do personal poems very well.  I think there are some things in my aesthetic that may not be in other people’s aesthetic, such as alliteration. Sometimes I just wallow in it, just roll around in it. I have to check myself.

FR: What was the first poem you wrote in leadbelly?

TJ: It was the one where he is in Red River. He’s run away and they send a dog after him. And he drowns the dog. That was the first poem. It kind of came out of nowhere in a way.

FR: What was the last poem?

TJ: After I finished the book, they wanted me to chop off the last section. My publishers did. The very last poem I had written a year or so ahead of time, then I decided [it] was going to be at the end.

FR: Why?

TJ: Because it is positioned at his christening. I think it is interesting to hear him talk about how he got his name at the end of the book. It is about being broken in a lot of ways.  It is a story about coming into one’s identity.

Jessica Kinnison lives in New Orleans, LA.  Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Juked, Cossack Review, Pif Magazine Anthology 2013, and The Southern Humanities Review, among others. Her story “Bone on Bone” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.

American poet Tyehimba Jess entered the MFA program at New York University in 2002 with half of his poetry book leadbelly written. His colleagues knew what he was going to bring to every workshop—another leadbelly poem.

leadbelly (2005) follows the story of Louisiana-born folk singer Huddie William Ledbetter, born in 1885, from Shreveport, LA to Texas to Angola Prison to New York City. leadbelly was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three books of the year by Black Issues Book Review.

A two-time winner of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was Chicago’s ambassador to Accra, Ghana. He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions and Enduring Legacy (2003), and his work has been featured in numerous anthologies. A Cave Canem Alumni, he received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and won a 2006 Whiting Award. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

I interviewed Jess immediately following his reading at the Allegheny County Jail as part of Chatham University’s Words Without Walls Black Writers Series. He visited to tell the story of how Leadbelly’s music lives in each of us as Americans. He says, “At least people are saying his name. They are saying his name.”

.

The Fourth River: Why do you write and for whom?

Tyehimba Jess: I used to write for political purposes strictly. I was interested in writing poems that would inspire people to take political action. That’s what “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” is all about. Those poems were for black people.  But you know you can’t control who reads your work.

So, after a while, I came to accept the idea that I was writing for everybody. Even when I thought I was writing for black people, not all black people agreed with what I was writing. It is difficult to say that you are writing for one particular group of people.  It can limit your imagination. After a while, I was like, “OK, I am writing for the entire world.” I think that later on, it became about writing for me.

The more I write, the more I realize it is about conveying a message. My poetry is pretty clear. Generally, you know what I am writing about by the end of a poem. I try to write that way. But it is working internally, as well.

When I am doing these poems, these syncopated sonnets and all that, I think I am trying to find a way to tell two different stories in one breath. I am looking for metaphors beyond the rhetorical that link into the shape of the poem and [into] the way the poem is read on the page.

FR: What do you think of the academic world as a space for writers?

TJ: I am part of a few different streams of poetry phenomena that are having an effect on the way poetry is being perceived in academia. One is slam: slam was started because of a man named Mark Smith in Chicago who was really disenchanted with the way poetry in academia was presenting itself as a kind of boutique, elite pastime that was not interested in connecting with the ordinary Joe Schmo on the street.

I think that the brilliant thing about Mark is that he was able to start this institution that’s very simple, very organic and really, in a way, doesn’t get the kind of credit in academia that it deserves for its impact on American poetry.

He’s one of those people who deserves a MacArthur grant because he saw a need and he filled it in a very simple way, in a way that answered the call of so many people who were interested. He helped throngs and throngs of people to understand that poetry doesn’t have to be outside of their grasp. It doesn’t have to be something that is performed by other people. They can perform it.

Whatever complaints people may have about slam, it brought poetry to the people and the same with Cave Canem. It’s an institution for black poets started by Toi Dericotte and Cornelius Eady that really eliminated the isolation that so many black poets felt on a fundamental level. The thing about Cave Canem is that it created a connection for black poets nationally and internationally that enabled us to grow at a rate we would not have been able to obtain without that community.

FR: Why did you choose poetry as your form for leadbelly? It reads like a novel.

TJ: First off, I am not as good at fiction as I am at poetry. I seem to be more geared toward saying a certain thing in a certain amount of time. leadbelly is almost all prose poems when he is speaking. Partly because I thought of him in terms of prose, really simply and not all enjambed. You know, it is prosaic and it follows a particular arc. It is linear in that respect. I think those are reasons it seems like a novel, in a way.

FR: Philip Larkin once wrote, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” In your case, what are you preserving in your poems?

TJ: Yes, I guess I am in the business of historical preservation. There were a few things I was trying to preserve. One was Leadbelly’s legacy but also the idea of the work that the old music has done for us.  When I say “us,” I mean nationally what that work has done.

That legacy continues. The thing I think about a lot is the roots of the music, particularly in regard to the African community and the African-American contribution. With this new work I am doing, it is beyond the music. It is about theater and literature as well. When you look at the intellectual property, so much of that property has been generated from the black community.

Paying homage to Leadbelly, trying to present a portrait of his life, to me, meant recalling the pain and the joy that went into making that music. It lies at the bottom of American music. So I guess I’m back where Philip Larkin was: at the bottom of his preservation.

FR: So under everything is the need to preserve?

TJ: Yes, I would say that. Continue that story forward. Just having people say the word “Leadbelly” today in 2013, I am glad to be a part of that. And it’s not just him; it is the story and everything that the story entails, that idea, that aesthetic.

FR: You were a DJ at the University of Chicago for 10 years.  Who were some of the people you played most?

TJ: Man, I played so many people: Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Art Ensemble of Chicago. I think the beautiful thing about Chicago is that they have something called AACM. It is really sort of an avant-garde arts organization.  I was very privileged to see these guys walking around the neighborhood. Overseas, they were superstars. You know, they were just phenomenal musicians. So I got the opportunity to see them on a regular basis. Lester Boyd, Malichi Favors, I got to see Sun Ra a couple times, Fred Anderson.

There was a little bar called the Velvet Lounge. It’s still there. It was the best music in Chicago. It was very cheap. The musical legacy in Chicago was wonderful. Then you also had the blues musicians. So my show started out as all jazz. Then it started to include blues, too. Like I played Muddy Waters, then I’d play John Coltrane, then I’d play some Sun Ra, then I’d go all the way back in the shed to get some Robert Johnson. I’d go back and forth and back and forth. I was playing with what Amiri Baraka would call “The Music,” the idea of the genres of music just drifting together into a continuum, especially with jazz and blues. I loved it. Then I would do interviews with political prisoners, prisoners of war and activists.

FR: I noticed that you use variations on blues phrases in leadbelly like “black snake moan.” Did you put them in while you were writing or did you go back and texturize the piece with common blues phrases?

TJ: It was probably a combination of the two. It’s kind of like the first pass: I go through a poem and have these weak words and stronger words. I take out words that are not contributing to the energy of the poem, and I think about words that could make the poem more active or add to the texture, and I go back and throw in a lot of other allusions. I try to reach in as many directions as I can. Some of them come naturally and those are the ones that I am actually more weary of because they are more likely to be cliché. If they are clichés, I try to come back and change them up a little.

FR: Do you think people who don’t listen to blues would notice blues phrases?

TJ: It’s hard for me to say what people’s perception of blues is. I think partly because I have been listening to it for so long. It is hard for me to detach myself from the lack of understanding regarding blues. If you were to say the word “blues” to most people, maybe one of the words that would come to their minds is “Eric Clapton” or “B.B. King” or “guitar” or the opening of the Dave Chapelle show. So there are a lot of standard images that people come up with. I am trying to write either against that or to deepen that understanding. I think that is true with anybody. If you were to say “polka music,” I probably wouldn’t know that much. I should. I think “accordion.” That is part of my charge to understand how all those musics can relate.

FR: How did your perspective on the book change after you went to Shreveport for the first time?

The most important thing I did there was visit his grave. I also met his grandniece. He is buried in this churchyard that is off of a dirt path that is off a dirt path that is off of a one-lane road. It’s way the fuck out. He died in New York but he was buried down there. It gave me an impression of where he walked. Of course, I was seeing Shreveport past its heyday. I could still see the streets and soak in the atmosphere. It was good to see the places I had written about.

I always felt guilty about the ability to claim that territory. I wanted to treat it with the respect it deserves. I wanted to treat him and the place that he came from with respect. I felt like it was incumbent upon me to give it a visit and say “Hello.” So, in a way, it gave me a kind of permission to continue on that journey of seeking out the details of his legacy.

FR: Is it true your immediate family would not exist without the Great   Migration?

TJ: You could say the same thing for probably at least half of black people in America today. The South was repressive. The North was repressive but in a different way.

FR: Michele Norris said that her parents didn’t talk about the South because they didn’t want to put rocks in their children’s pockets. If they put that anger in their pockets, it would weigh them down. Your parents were active in the community and also in race relations. How did that affect you and your writing?

TJ: It affected me in several ways. One is my dad is an avid, avid reader. He probably had 30 magazine subscriptions and books all around the house all the time. Both of them were very intent on having us read. I have an older brother and an older sister. My brother went to Michigan. My sister went to MIT. I think that my parents’ support and insistence upon college and that exposure to the necessity of reading at a very young age affected me.

As far as their relationships with their hometowns: I went down to visit my grandmother in Greenville, South Carolina when I was a kid. It was like visiting another planet.  This was in the 1970s. Greenville at that time was not the Greenville it is now. It is really a big, bustling city now. Back then, it was not a big place. There was a dirt road in front of my grandma’s house.

My dad didn’t talk very much about (well he didn’t talk that much at all) about South Carolina and his life down there. And my mother would talk about Oklahoma to a certain degree; she still does.

I think that their attitude was similar to what you are talking about. When you look at it, it really was like going from one country to another country. I mean, my dad was in the Confederate state—South Carolina. He still has his high school diploma. The signature on it is Strom Thurmond’s. My dad is 80 years old. It was like an entirely different land of opportunity. There is no way my father would have been able to work for the Department of Public Health in South Carolina at that time. There is just no way; it would not have been possible.

My mother left Oklahoma because she could not attend the nursing schools there. My mom also lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated before those nine students marched up the steps to that high school. Their attitude was the one of most black folks at that time: they wanted to get out.

FR: You changed your name legally in 1999. What did your parents think about that?

TJ: They were reluctantly accepting of it. I was living as Jesse Goodwin before I changed it, formally, in 1999, but [informally, starting in 1992], everybody called me Tyehimba Jess. You will be surprised how quickly you find yourself around nobody who knows your original name. It caught on within a couple years.  By the time it became legal, it had pretty much already happened anyway.

FR: Tyehimba means “we stand as a nation.” What does that mean to you?

TJ: I got it from a book in college. I took a lot of time trying to find a word that would be appropriate. This word, to me, infused the idea of black self-determination. You know, working together to achieve various and sundry goals. On the other hand, I didn’t want to completely abandon my family in that process. I was disturbed by our name being Goodwin because it was passed down from a slave owner. So I decided to keep my first name and make it my last name. My first name was Jesse, and that is my father’s name and his father’s name.

FR: Did your writing change once you changed your name?

TJ: My name came slowly.

FR: The name was your public persona and slowly became your private persona?

TJ: I think I was part of the last generation to change our names to African names. I mean, I don’t know what 20 year-olds are doing now, but I don’t think they are changing their names to African names. Many of the artists at that time were changing their names if not legally, informally. So it was not a unique thing.

The good thing about it is that I did not change my name more than once and I really carefully considered it before [the change]. I waited for seven years before I made it legal. So I had a long time to live with it. The decision to make it legal, to me, meant that I could stop leading a double life. Stop being Tyehimba Jess until I needed a check signed. It seemed inauthentic. I didn’t consider the name inauthentic. I considered the state’s right to claim what my name was illegitimate. One of my questions was whether or not to give the state that legitimacy, but after a while, I knew that, practically, it was the thing to do.

FR: Where did you start on the page when writing the syncopated sonnet about the twins?

TJ:  I started with the middle. I finished the middle because really the middle is based off of another poem I did called “Blind Tom.” It was the first one I made that went down and back. It was about Blind Tom being buried in two different locations. So, when it came to the McCoy Twins, I was wracking my brain as to how to approach talking about them.

I guess the form and the subject matter came simultaneously. I thought, well, I will mimic the shape of their bodies. So how can I do that? I already had the Blind Tom thing, so I thought I could reverse the polarity to have two heads and one middle. Then I can come up and have one head and two middles. So I did one and I did another one and another one. Those things are like a puzzle.

FR: You said that you don’t write in forms, but there are many forms in leadbelly.

TJ: I guess the counterpointes I’m doing are forms. I also call them double-jointed. That crown of sonnets in the book was the first set of poems in form I ever wrote. The thing about sonnets is that they are long enough to say something and short enough to get to the point. At this point in our history, sonnets can be unrhymed and all kinds of stuff. Fourteen lines, oh, it’s a sonnet. It’s got this kind of elasticity to it. And the rhyme scheme can be as strict as you want it to be and as loose as you want it to be. I am going for the story, in particular.

FR: Which professors did you study with at NYU?

TJ: Philip Levine, Marie Howe, and Sharon Olds.

FR: Did any of those teachers give you a major suggestion for leadbelly that you rejected?

TJ: Yes, Phil Levine told me to put the book in third person. I seriously considered that for a long time. And I couldn’t do it. It was difficult. In that class, I agreed with 99 percent of the things he said. He is a very, very sharp guy. It was hard to do that when I first rolled up in there. I couldn’t do it. It was not a physical thing. It was a mental thing. For me, that is the trope of the book. It would have lost immediacy. I love Phil, though. We are both from Detroit.

FR: Do you feel you have any secret or conspicuous flaws as a writer?

TJ: I don’t think I do personal poems very well.  I think there are some things in my aesthetic that may not be in other people’s aesthetic, such as alliteration. Sometimes I just wallow in it, just roll around in it. I have to check myself.

FR: What was the first poem you wrote in leadbelly?

TJ: It was the one where he is in Red River. He’s run away and they send a dog after him. And he drowns the dog. That was the first poem. It kind of came out of nowhere in a way.

FR: What was the last poem?

TJ: After I finished the book, they wanted me to chop off the last section. My publishers did. The very last poem I had written a year or so ahead of time, then I decided [it] was going to be at the end.

FR: Why?

TJ: Because it is positioned at his christening. I think it is interesting to hear him talk about how he got his name at the end of the book. It is about being broken in a lot of ways.  It is a story about coming into one’s identity.

---

Jessica Kinnison lives in New Orleans, LA.  Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Juked, Cossack Review, Pif Magazine Anthology 2013, and The Southern Humanities Review, among others. Her story “Bone on Bone” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.

Where the Lion is also the Lion Tamer: An Interview with Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin

 by Leah Brennan

Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão often writes about the dry, harsh landscape of Brazil’s northeast region where he was born. He credits his love for language to his mother and her support of the poets who traveled and performed around Brazil. Striking images of fire, dust, and the sea keep his work grounded in place, but his work also transcends the physical world. He pays homage to the people of his community, and to communities everywhere, formed by place, language, or love.

Maranhão has won numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious Brazilian Academy of Letters Prize for his collected poems, A Cora da Palavra (The Color of the Word) in 2011. Sol Sangüíne (Blood of the Sun) is his first bilingual collection. An accomplished musician and songwriter for many of Brazil’s most beloved jazz and pop artists, Maranhão infuses his lines with a sense of musicality.

While Maranhão considers his lyrics separate from his poetry, he has had considerable success in both. In addition to his awards, a number of Brazilian artists collaborated to produce a tribute album in 2006, titled Amorogio.

For Blood of the Sun, Maranhão worked with renowned translator Alexis Levitin,

author of thirty-one books, as well as publications in 25 anthologies in more than 200 literary journals. One of the most well respected English translators of Portuguese and Brazilian literature, Levitin translates not only sense, but sound as well. In Blood of the Sun, he incorporates assonance and slant rhyme to convey the rhythm of Maranhão ‘s Portuguese.

Maranhão and Levitin recently met with me at Chatham University’s Jennie King Mellon Library to discuss poetry, translation, music, and love. Please note that when Maranhão is speaking, it is Levitin’s translation that I’ve transcribed.

Brennan: How did you begin working together?

Maranhão: We met each other in 2007 at Brown University. The chairman of the department of Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Brown, Luiz Fernando Valente, brought us together.

Levitin: Valente was already a great fan of Salgado’s poetry and was eager to see it translated into English. He invited Salgado from Rio de Janeiro and me, from Plattsburg, New York, much less romantic, to attend a conference at Brown, intending us to meet and hoping that we would hit it off and work on a book together, which is indeed what happened.

Brennan: So, would you consider this work a collaboration?

Levitin: You could say the translation is a collaboration, because, in the process, I went over everything with him. We read it aloud together, and so on.

Brennan: Would you say that’s one of the greatest advantages of working with a living writer?

Levitin: I always prefer working with a living writer. You can ask them questions, both about meaning and about sound. In other words, about form and content. Everyone understands that you need to ask questions about content, but really you need some help with form as well.

Brennan: In terms of form, are you referring to the way the poems look on the page, the structure of the poems?

Levitin: More than that. Listen to this:

Maranhão: Há que se viver o árido / como se cálido.

Levitin: “One must live the arid / impassioned and torrid.” Arido and cálido: it’s not a full rhyme, but a slant rhyme. Arid and torrid: it’s not exactly a full rhyme, but it’s close. Now, listen to the next stanza:

Maranhão: Há que se viver o breu / como se brio.

Levitin: Again, it’s a slant rhyme. Breu and brio isn’t a full rhyme. I made it a full rhyme, and it’s made richer by saying, “one must live the vile / with valor, with style.” So, we have vile and valor as a slant rhyme, and vile and style as a full rhyme. And Salgado can help point out to me the different things he’s doing in the original, so that I can notice them, especially the different things he’s doing with sound. And here, palavra, larva, alarde. He’s playing with the Ls and the As and the Rs, and I have to be aware of it. I try to reproduce it, or to produce some repetition of sounds in English which will not be identical but will create the same web of sounds.

Brennan: I remember reading that, for both of you, it’s the sound that’s most important. You mentioned these moments of good fortune in translation, of finding the word that fits the meaning and also the sound.

Levitin: Sometimes, it takes the passage of time before you find the right solution. We’ve sat around together in Rio working on a poem and not finding a solution, and then suddenly it appears. Or it may only appear the next day, so it’s as if the solution has to mature.

Brennan: Like writing poetry.

Maranhão: Sometimes, the right word comes a week later. You send an e-mail to your subconscious. The subconscious searches its archives, and a week later it comes.

Brennan: So, it’s more like snail mail than e-mail.

Maranhão: Not always at the time you want it. Poetry is mysterious. Like women.

Brennan: Yes, I would agree with that. Can you tell me how working with a translator affected your writing or your writing process?

Maranhão: Well, it’s had a great effect on me. It opened for me an understanding of the field of translation. I’m basically monolingual, so it’s a field that I didn’t have much to do with before. Although, of course I’d read English and American and French poets in Portuguese. I certainly knew that a poem could be translated into another language. What I didn’t know was the modus operandi. How do you actually accomplish it?

Brennan: That’s the mystery.

Maranhão: I was able to experience the craft of harmonizing the rhythms of one language into another, or harmonically presenting the rhythms of one language in another. I discovered what hard work is involved in finding the right word or the right phrase in translation, but also that it’s a bit chaotic or random. Sometimes it just comes from the air. Now, I realize the importance of the translator. And I’m convinced that they are profoundly underestimated.

Brennan: Alexis, I’ve heard you speak about translation as a moral act, as a way to increase understanding between cultures.

Levitin: Of course. I do think it’s moral, but here’s the deal. Anything you do in life presents a moral dilemma, because you can do it sloppily or you can try to do it well. And to do anything well is in a sense a moral triumph. Obviously, you can trap me with paradoxes; for example, the Nazis did their extermination of the Jews very well, and that of course is not moral, so there are paradoxes in what I’m saying, but in general, to do your work well is already a moral triumph. And then there’s the communication. My sense is  that we’re all islands. The reason John Donne said, “no man is an island” is exactly because we are. And we have to overcome that, and surely translating is one hopeful way to make a connection from one island to another. In this case, not just from one individual to another but from an individual from one archipelago–let’s say the Portuguese archipelago–to those of us who live in the archipelago of Anglo-Saxonic English. And making connections is surely, I think, a moral act.

Maranhão: Translation is a vital act for culture and for civilization itself. The labor of these upstanding people, the translators, has been an enormous contribution to all cultures. Imagine what our life would be like had no one translated the Bible, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and many other books that have made our life so very rich. Even today, in our technologically advanced era, when you can make a translation from Google. You can’t use Google for essential and symbolic language, though. Despite Google and technology, the translator is essential for helping us bring an awareness and understanding from one culture to another through language.

Brennan: It seems especially true for poetry. There’s just no way to use Google Translate.

Levitin: If Google translated a poem, it would be a totally different poem.

Brennan: When I was reading these poems, I noticed that, while a few of them are in first person, many of them are removed from the personal perspective and focused more on observations, especially of the physical landscape. I’m wondering if that is a reflection of, not only a connection to landscape, but maybe also a lack of ego?

Maranhão: Since my story comes from a community, I was never really alone with my ego, so that even when I do speak in the first person, I am carrying along with me a communal sense of things. I bring a community along with me. Even when I speak in the third person, I am still present as a kind of hidden observer. If you read my poetry carefully, here or there you’ll catch glimpses of me, just as you do of Alfred Hitchcock in his films.

Brennan: Alexis, can you also speak about the question of ego from a translator’s perspective?

Levitin: Even if translators begin life as egocentric as anyone else, they cannot very well remain so. The first factor is that they are completely dependent on somebody else. A poet sits down in front of a blank piece of paper, and something grows on that paper because of the poet. I never sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, because I already have a book in my hand that is written by someone else. Second of all, although poets generally do not become very famous in our culture, translators hardly become known at all. Even if you do a good job, you tend to remain relatively anonymous. Third of all, in our culture, most rewards take a financial shape, and obviously poetry by its very nature, in American society, garners almost no financial rewards, and the translation of poetry even less so. If you’re not humble to begin with, then as you live your life as a translator, you better become humble, because that’s what life is telling you. You’re important, but not that important.

Brennan: Speaking about the support for artists in the United States, I’m wondering what it’s like to be a poet in Brazil?

Maranhão: Recently, enormous state enterprises, such as state-run oil companies or electric companies, have begun to support major artistic events such as film festivals and jazz festivals, which are of cultural interest. In fact, they are also beginning to support things that have some pedagogical value. However, poetry doesn’t really interest government agencies because, alas, it doesn’t appeal to great numbers of people. And more and more, these big companies that have money are often being co-opted by political figures, whose real interest is to win votes, and you don’t win many votes with poetry. Politicians don’t have the slightest interest in poetry. Nonetheless, poetry, which is an amphibian creature, survives both in the wet season and the dry.

Brennan: Can you talk about your experience working with jazz musicians and your experience as a songwriter?

Maranhão: My education as a poet occurred simultaneously with the growth of a movement that was both musical and poetic in Brazil called Tropicália. The leaders of this movement were Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Torquato Neto, among others. I was ten or twelve years younger than they were. I had the chance to be friends with one of the leaders, Torquato Neto, and he stirred in me an interest in the vanguardism of poetry, and encouraged me to take part in that world of music and writing song lyrics. Neto was one of the most distinguished writers of song lyrics in Brazil, and he was a close friend of the founders of the concrete poetry movement in Brazil, Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos.

Brennan: So, is working with musicians at all like working with a translator?

Maranhão: It’s a work in metrics, because music is mathematical and the writer has to adjust. If you don’t find the right word with the right rhythm and the right sound, [the song] just won’t work. So, strangely enough, even some very good poets are unable to do [the work] successfully, to write lyrics that work with music. If you’re writing the lyrics first, you have to somehow be foreseeing or imaging the music. A poem has to have a certain rhythmic availability, and even an availability in choice of words, because if it is sung, it is sung for all the people, not only for erudite academics. Erudite poems will not work as song lyrics for the people. And in fact, I do not include my song lyrics in any of my books of poetry, because it’s a different mechanism and a different density.

Levitin: I completely agree with him, but there are people who don’t agree. Back in the 70s, the Norton Anthology included Bob Dylan in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry. I thought it was ridiculous, but they did it. I know Leonard Cohen refuses to discuss the difference between poetry and the poetry of song lyrics, and I must say that Leonard Cohen comes as close as one possibly can in pop music to being a real poet.

Maranhão: Sometimes, a rather fragile, or a slender, slim poem gains great success as a song lyric, because it is anchored on a beautiful melody. There on the white page, that poem is all alone. There, the cruelty of the reader can devour it, because it lies there exposed, and it doesn’t have the music to support it.

Levitin: I think Salgado and I completely agree on this distinction between song lyrics and poetry; coming from him, it’s more significant because he’s succeeded in writing song lyrics, and I’m only an observer.

Maranhão: I am also a cruel reader.

Brennan: I think poets always are. And I have one last question. I’m wondering what the word amoragio means.

Maranhão: I made up the word from two words. Love and another word, something like a surcharge, or the price you pay. If there’s a car that everyone wants, and there are very few of them, the car dealer will raise the price, and that raised price is the agio. After all, the  most expensive thing, in a sense, is love because you pay a very high surcharge in suffering, in despair, in loneliness and loss.

Levitin: He says that [love] is a flame that unties, or unravels the knots in the skein. And easily ignores…I’d want to think about this. I really hate it when he makes me translate poetry in one second flat. The word is good, but it’s also the goods. It ignores the good, and has disdain for truth.

Maranhão: It is a bridge of air.

Levitin: A bridge of air from Eden to insanity. Now, he’s saying that love is a dance before a circle of angels. A dance before a circle of drunken angels.

Maranhão: Where the lion is also the lion tamer.

Levitin: Where the lion is also the lion tamer and who, after rising to the throne of splendor, gives up his own flesh to the hunter. Or, surrenders his very flesh to the hunter. I like that! That’s good. That’s poetry.

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Leah Brennan studies fiction and poetry at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she also teaches ESL and yoga. Her translations of French op-eds can be found at WatchingAmerica.com.

Note: The lines that are referenced in this interview are from parts 1 and 4 of Salgado Mranhão’s poem “Blood of the Sun.”  The cover and interview photos are by Kinsley Stocum.