Here are the Seattle-based poet’s remaining works, from the CD-R he gave me before his tragic death at age 38. More on Slash in my first post on him here. His graphic web-based poetry continues to inspire me – both for its raw emotion and for its quietness and grace.

With just two books of poetry, and a third on the way, Peter Davis has already established himself as an innovator with a great deal of intelligence and skill. Modest but assured, he explores ideas most poets would not think to broach and pushes the accepted limits of form in ways that expand what a poem can be.  Whether pondering the heinous mustache of the previous century’s most infamous tyrant, or inventing satirical monologues for real and imagined audiences, Davis knows that in order to break ground a writer must be bold and open to uncertainties: “An artist has to pursue something he or she is unsure of, but then pursue it recklessly.” While these pursuits make great comic shtick, they are only half the story, for Davis’s sense of play services a unique moral vision. The text below is a collation of one face-to-face interview in April 2011 and several email exchanges from April to June 2011. – Tony Leuzzi

What was the genesis for the idea of writing an entire book of poems about Hitler’s mustache? 

Well, I didn’t intend to write an entire book about his mustache, but that’s what happened.  First, a friend of mine mentioned what a great band name Hitler’s Mustache would be, which led to the first poem in the book “The List of Facts.”  But after I was done writing it, something stuck with me—namely that Hitler, our embodiment of evil, was essentially very comical looking.  This made me think that his appearance was obviously very important to him (as it seems to be for many dictators). I also began to think about Hitler the failed artist who, unable to gain respect drawing and painting, decided to then move into politics and, ultimately, world domination.  This made me wonder what similarities the average artist might have with a tyrant. I was writing poems this whole time. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was having fun.

At some point, too, I just thought: How come I don’t hear more about his ridiculous mustache? In addition to all of the major harm Hitler did, he also made this particular style of facial hair un-wearable.  The dude didn’t just ruin lives—he was fucking with fashion, too!  (I almost subtitled the book “An Intersection of Fashion and Fascism.”) Here was a man who was so concerned with the aesthetics of everything, who even was concerned that soldier uniforms look right, and yet that moustache!  There is evidence that some higher ups in the Nazi Party tried to get him to reshape it, but he kept it, thought, “This is a good idea.” He must have seen himself as a dashing figure.

Anyway, so now I was reading about Hitler. Reading about mustaches and facial hair, in general.  Checking out all the beard and mustache competitions, etc. online.  I said stuff to my wife like, “I don’t know what exactly I’m doing with this, but it’s a blast.”  She said stuff like, “You’re a weirdo.”

But here’s another thing: At some point in time I realized that the image of Hitler’s mustache (that black square) and the word “mustache,” in particular, were beginning to dominate my imagination.  The word “mustache” is such a mouthful. The image of his mustache began to seem to me to be a black hole, a square trap-door through which something is always slipping.  Or to say it another way: No matter what we know about something, there is always something that we don’t know.  That hole above his upper lip was a place none of us will ever know or understand.  Nothing is simple.  The end of every answer always results in another question.  Always something unfathomable.

In an earlier discussion you told me you felt that the image of the mustache—or is it the word mustache—  becomes a fascist in the text, taking over, asserting itself everywhere. Could you talk about some of the ways in which this happens in the text? 

The word “mustache” became something I liked lots.  When I was writing and I got to that moment when the writer pauses for a second, in air, and considers the next word—I began to think of that unknown word as mustache.  So that’s what I’d write.  This trick seemed to work for me.  It helped me get to the next word.  So all my poems had the word mustache in them.  I began to see the word as something fuzzy and black as Hitler’s mustache.  It became a barcode that identifies each poem as its own.  This made me think of the Swastika and how the Nazi machine dominated its country with a mark, a symbol, and that symbol was meant to replace everything else: every religion, every idea, every invention.  That Swastika tried to dominate Germany and the word mustache was dominating my imagination, killing off the other words that would come if I didn’t quickly squash them with my black, square mustache-hammer.  And since a word is equal to an idea (at least to me) that means that the word mustache was like a fascist, squeezing everything else to death.  I let it happen, for the sake of the book.  This is most obvious in a poem like “The Short Story” where the words of the narrative increasingly become the word mustache, till, by the end, there is nothing but “She mustached the mustache and with every mustache of her mustache, she mustached.”  Mustache was a censor, a replacement, an etc. for everything else.  As a poet, it was nice to have a safety net word.  The appeal of fascism became more obvious: it erases questions.  Erasing questions can be a very pleasant sensation, which is part of what an artist does (or might do).

Were you concerned at any point that people might think your exploitation of Hitler would be irreverent or inappropriate?  

Yes.  I certainly didn’t want people to think I was making light of the Holocaust or being sympathetic to Hitler.  Although most people interpret the book as comical, there is a lot of serious stuff in there.  I try to have some sort of balance, so the book doesn’t come across as insensitive.  The editing process helped me a lot in this regard.  I wrote a lot of poems, probably 150 more than are in the book.  I cut lots of them.

Some people will probably just be offended by anything involving Hitler. For instance, when the book came out, I was at the annual AWP conference for the release and doing a book signing at the book fair which meant I sat on a folding chair behind a table full of my book and watched people as they milled past the various booths just like the one I was sitting in.  Occasionally, I signed a book, which has a drawing of Hitler’s face on the cover, no words, and, also, Hitler’s mustache is represented as a barcode. Some people would actually turn up their noses when they saw it. They would walk by fast and give me a look like they thought I was a Nazi. It was funny to think about it. Like, I was a Nazi and thought “Here’s how we’ll do this: I’ll write a book of poems and we’ll take it to the annual Associated Writing Programs conference…..Yes, first AWP, then the world…..” Nazis are not generally known for their efforts in contemporary American poetry.

Many of the poems are satires of well-known contemporary poets, such as Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and James Wright. You also allude to Stevens a few times. How does your desire to pay tribute to these writers through satire mesh with focus elsewhere on Hitler? 

To be honest, most of the stuff that happened in the book is in some way or another the product of accident.  When I’m writing I don’t really know what the hell I’m doing.  I try not to think or reflect on my choices until later on.  But as I was writing the book I did discover this strange similarity between artists and dictators—both, I suppose, wanting complete control over their given (or taken) spheres.  That is why the book experiments with different forms:  the idea of conforming to preexisting conditions seemed to fit with the mustache—that tightly groomed square of death.  I also think of the book as being about poetry, as well as about mustaches and Hitler and fascism.  So I imitated some poets who I like and was reading around this time.  I mean, I love O’Hara.  I think James Wright can be very beautiful.  I think Robert Bly can be very fun when he’s not taking himself so seriously.  Russell Edson doesn’t have the problem of taking himself too seriously.  And Wallace Stevens is just really important to me in terms of how I feel about writing and my general thinking about the concept of the imagination.  I wrote other satires that didn’t end up in the final book:  Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot are the first ones I remember.  I have tons of respect for all of these people. I sent copies of the book to the two poets still alive, Bly and Edson.  One sent a nice note and one didn’t respond at all.  In both cases, I can understand their reaction.

Your book features no less than three sestinas—all of them highpoints in the book. What drew you to this form? 

Well the sestina thing goes along with the form thing.  I had teacher who made me write a sestina.  I was told, at some point, that sestinas were one of the hardest forms and thus I felt the need to try it.  I don’t actually feel it’s a hard form to write.  I like it.  The repetition of the words made sense given the repetition of the word mustache (of course mustache figures prominently into all of the sestinas).  I don’t really like reading sestinas, but I like writing them.  I haven’t written one for a while, but they’re fun and a good way for me to step into something different for a day or two.

“Hitler Sestina” was first published on McSweeney’s, back when the only poetry they published was sestinas (one of the weirder submission policies).  Daniel Nester was the editor and he accepted it and I was happy.  But they didn’t actually put it up on the site.  I think I e-mailed Daniel a couple of times over the next year or more saying, y’all going to put that up?  And he’d say, yes, but with no details.  But they did publish it on 6/6/06. 666! I was humbled by their genius and forethought.  Nice work, I thought. Good job.

Many of the poems play with line and form, however the bulk of them are prose poems. Moreover, in Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! all but two or three of the poems are in prose. Why do you feel compelled to write so many prose poems? And how do you see yourself as participating in that tradition? 

I like prose poems largely because I often find myself not being able to justify line breaks.  The poems in Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! were written first with lots of line breaks and extravagant spacing because since the poems were largely about poetry, I thought that doing so would call attention to their “poetry-ness.”  This is, I suppose, how I feel about line breaks.  They call attention to the poem as a poem—which is fine, I just don’t like to do that, apparently.  I think it’s more fun to read something that one doesn’t expect to be poetic (because it looks like prose) and then to find yourself in a world that is slightly different than the normal world of prose.  Even though the line breaks and spacing first used in Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! were done for good reason:  I eventually began to think that they’d be better in prose for precisely the opposite reason—that them not looking like poems paradoxically helped bring attention to their poetry-ness.  So the book is all prose poems.  Also, I like the general weirdness of the idea of prose poems and the reluctance that some people feel in reading them as poetry.

As far as how I fit in the tradition, I don’t know.  I wrote prose poems in college, long before I realized there was a tradition.  Once I learned of its history I felt very comfortable in that company.  Prose poems seem like weirdo poems and one of my favorite things about poetry (and art, in general) is its weirdness.  Certainly those poets who wrote the earliest examples of prose poems were weirdoes, in one sense or another.

Do you identify yourself as a weirdo? 

Most of my life people have, in one way or another, told me I’m weird.  And for a huge chunk of my life I took pride in that.  When I was a kid, I felt like I was the only kid who was breakdancing, and then I was the only kid who was skateboarding, etc.  In my head, I think other people are weird, but when I look around me and read lots of other poetry books, I wonder “How did I become a poet, and why?” It seems to me there’s a whole bunch of poetry that is very serious, often pretentious, and not very interesting to me.  But then, you’re a weirdo in this culture if you’re a poet, period.  You’re already doing something that’s very much so on the margins of what is most people’s idea of what life should be like.  The majority of people don’t care about poetry—so all poets are in one way or another on the margins.

You have a website called Art is Necessary. Is this an assertion that has universal application, or are you saying art is necessary for you?  Or somewhere in between? 

Art Is Necessary is primarily an assertion of my own individual experience. I’ve played music, written, and made visual art for the vast majority of my life. I don’t have a good reason why this is true, it’s just the way my life has gone.  I can imagine what I would do without these things in my life, but I don’t believe I could be at peace with myself or happy.  Why is art necessary?  I really don’t know.  “My love she speaks like silence.”

Each of the poems in Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! is addressed to a reader. How did this concept come about? 

First I learned of the idea of “radical honesty” which posited that we should all be completely, entirely, totally honest all of the time.  The first poem I wrote had no title and was all in caps and read “I AM WRITING A BOOK” and I did want to write a book because that’s one of the things a writer does. Somehow, after writing a few poems, like “THIS IS THE FIRST POEM” and “HERE’S NUMBER TWO” (imagine these poems spread out across a page, with line breaks and spaces). I came to the idea of providing titles for poems. Soon those titles always evolved into “Poem Addressing…” So now I was making up titles too! I just kept going on in that stumbling sort of fashion forward until I finally fell down and quit writing all those poems.  It’s the same way Hitler’s Mustache was written and developed. I just started with something and followed it to some conclusion.  I thought about what I was doing at the time, but also not really thinking. Before I knew it I’d written a ton of shit and then, a bit before I knew, it was time to quit writing.   The idea of addressing something is such a simple idea and once I started, like everything else that’s enjoyable, it became easy.

In terms of a book of poems, it seems long, almost twice as long as most individual volumes of poetry. 

The book is asking for a lot of praise, asking for a lot of attention.  In this regard, its length seemed kind of important: it needed to be twice as long as an ordinary book because the writer—a persona but also an extension of myself—wants twice as much affirmation and praise!  Still, from my perspective, the book is short, since I wrote twice as many of these poems than what went into the book.

Underneath the humorous shtick of many of the poems there seems a genuine anxiety for any writer wanting an audience. 

Most writers at heart wonder, “Why do I write?  What is the point?”  I enjoy the process of making the poem, the creative process, but why then do I make all the effort of trying to put them out in the world? As a writer I want validation and approval.  I want to make connections with people.  I want them to like me on my own terms.  But getting approval through a poem or by making some piece of art is difficult.  For most artists rejection is 90% of what you do.  Even someone like Picasso experiences enormous amount of rejection.  Think of how many people pass one of his paintings each day and say, “That’s not my kind of thing.”

Why the exclamation points in the title?   

That’s the way it first occurred to me. It’s genuine excitement, I suppose.  But then again, it’s also intended to be deliberately silly. I remember writing it in pencil on the wall beside my desk in the basement.  Writing poetry to the degree that it eats up my life is pretty ridiculous.  I do take it seriously, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also silly.

Tell me all about the book you’re working on now. How does this work resemble or connect to the two previous books? How is this new book a departure for you?  

The book I’m working on now (or am almost done with) is called Tina.  It makes a great deal of the use of addressing a single person directly, in this case, Tina.  I mean it’s a lot different to say, “the woods are lovely dark and deep, and miles to go before I sleep” and saying, “the woods are lovely dark and deep, and miles to go before I sleep, Bob.” The name Tina means nothing to me, or, rather, it means something to me but in a way that is so specific to my own existence there’s no use in trying to explain.  (I’ve known a couple people named Tina.  There is nothing wrong with people named Tina.  Most Tina’s I’ve met have been perfectly decent people.) I want to say it’s similar to the other books because I’m similar to the person who wrote those books.  On the other hand, I’m not the same guy I have been (while also always being as close to him as anyone else).  It’s different because these poems, by and large (at least, so far) have line breaks.  They aren’t prose poems.  I wish I could tell you more about it, but I don’t really know much more about it.  I can say that I would like to write books that are different from each other.  I hope it’s a different experience for the reader than the experience of my other books.  Of course, I guess, probably many writers feel this way about their work so maybe it’s not even worth pointing out.  But still, I would like my poems to be distinct enough that, say, a person is reading a poem from Hitler’s Mustache—they know, just by reading that single poem, which book it came from. I don’t want the poems to be interchangeable with my other work.  Why is this important to me?  Well, I guess it’s because I’ve always enjoyed other artists who did that for me.  Of course, all of them sound like themselves all the time, too.

Where do you position yourself in the world of contemporary American poetry? And how does this positioning reflect where you’ve come from and where you want to go? 

This is a hard question.  I don’t know my position and fortunately, or unfortunately, I don’t get to claim that position for myself. Only other people can position me. Me, I just make the work I make and hope that I end up happy with it. On the other hand, if I could put myself in a position that seems enjoyable to me, I would position myself outside of the front door and sort-of halfway on the lawn. I’m a parent and was once part of a parent conversation with some other poets which led to a discussion about how our poetry life has changed since having children—or, how having children changed our poetry. After considering this question for a while, I think the most important thing about being a parent has been that it even further encourages me to be a good person, one who controls his temper, is patient, forgiving, and thinks of others, etc. As an artist what this has meant is that I feel it’s even more important to make work that is somehow bolder than what I’ve done in the past, to be prouder of my instincts and more trusting of my artistic impulses. I want my kids to be happy, to have fun in life and to be decent to others. I think being a good example means trying to make good art. For me, that means art that is advancing forward to something and that usually means being vulnerable and scared. So, I want to be part of whatever world is part of the uncomfortable world. I believe in uneasiness.

To be bolder, for me, means pushing my own sensibilities so that I don’t feel sure of what I’m doing.  I like the sensation when I’m working on something of not being able to decide if what I’m doing is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done or the best. In a sense I’m always out to destroy my idea of a “the poem.” I know there’s no “real” risk involved in writing poetry or practically any other kind of writing, but I like to at least be risking the possibility that I’m wasting my time. Forgive me if I’m repeating myself. Anyway, to get to this place where things are risky but something really great might happen, I think an artist has to pursue something he or she is unsure of, but then pursue it recklessly. When I say “unsure of” I mean something that feels like it might be a huge waste of time. I guess I don’t feel like all artists need to do this, or any of them, but, for good or bad, that’s what I find myself doing. And, I guess, I feel like if I’m going to spend my time working on something like poetry which is a frivolous activity compared to activities like eating and raising children, if I’m going to engage in poetry as a means of helping to define who I am, then I want who I am to be someone who is not afraid to push the silliness that is poetry (and the silliness of the world) to the extremes that I’m capable of. I think silliness recklessly pursued can result in something that isn’t silly at all, but actually maybe very serious and profound. (Not that profundity and seriousness or any better than silliness.) I want my kids to learn this: I’m trying to set a good example. And thus, there’s always a great deal of fear involved because it is not easy for me to live up to the expectations I have of myself, as an artist or as a person. There is always the fear of exposing something about myself that will make others dislike me. Either they will conclude I’m not very smart or I’m mean or I’m thoughtless or I’m boring or whatever. This matters to me because ultimately I don’t believe the work really exists until it’s exposed to other humans. Art is a social exchange and I want people to feel like they got a good deal. The only standard I have to measure whether they’ll get a good deal is by first and foremost deciding it was a good deal for myself. Kurt Vonnegut said art was “half a conversation between two individuals,” if that’s true, then I want my part of the conversation to be interesting. But I never know for sure.  Like now, as I think through this answer, I think I’ve gone on too long and no one will care! I’m thinking, by now, everyone’s quit reading.

When you came to read here in Rochester a lot of students were in awe of your originality, humor, and down-to-earth personality.  You must make a pretty good teacher yourself at Ball State University.  What words would you give to a young student only beginning to explore his or her interests in writing poetry? 

Oh, I’m glad your students liked my visit. I liked it too. Everyone was really nice. There are, as a teacher, a lot of things that I might say to a person beginning to explore his or her interests in poetry. But, I suppose, to be brief-ish, I would say: Don’t think about what you should/or are going to write, just write. Don’t think about whether what you’re doing is good or bad, just try to do something interesting, surprising. The least something can be is interesting. Have fun. If you’re not having fun writing it, few people are going to enjoy reading it. Relax. Don’t think. Relax. Poetry, like other forms of art, should be a real experience (it doesn’t matter whether that experience is pleasant of not, just that it exists). So enjoy it like you enjoy listening to a song. Just see what happens. “Just go on nerve” as O’Hara said. Oh, okay, that’d be something too: I’d tell them to read Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” essay.

You say, “Have fun” and “Don’t think.  Relax.”  Might a beginning writer interpret this as “I don’t have to put effort into the work, I don’t have to stretch myself, I only need to write what I wish and it will be a poem”?   Or are you merely offering them preliminary advice, just to get them started?  I mean, when you were starting out, didn’t you struggle a bit with this new medium, which made demands upon you that you did not anticipate when you first picked up a pen and thought, “I want to write”? 

A beginning writer, or anyone for that matter, might interpret my advice in lots of ways that I don’t entirely mean, but that’s where I’d start.  I don’t recommend struggle to anyone.  If possible, I recommend avoiding struggle.  Nobody needs to teach a person that struggle, in any pursuit, is inevitable.  Life does that.  If a person really wants to write, they’ll learn what’s important for their writing life. If they don’t really want to write, then it really doesn’t matter anyway.  In that case, the benefit of the Creative Writing class they took wasn’t for their own writing, but for their ability to appreciate others who write (or make art, in general). Making people who will appreciate creative acts and the creative process is the largest part of why I think teaching creative writing is a good thing.

You’re also a visual artist and musician. How do these other mediums feed into your poetry?

I was musician and a visual artist before I was a writer.  In fact, writing songs was the first creative writing I really did.  In school, where I got terrible grades and was a very bad student, I only did well in art class.  I continue to play music a lot and to do plenty of visual art.  How do these things influence my poetry?  I don’t know.  It’s a good question and I’ve thought about it plenty of times, but I don’t have a good answer.

Probably the most direct influence these activities have on my writing is that when I’m engaged in them, I’m not writing. So they eat up some time. That’s okay though.  I think of them as essentially all the same.  Like my wife will say to me “Did you get anything done last night?” And if I’ve done any of the three I answer, “Yes.”  I know that some people who like my poetry don’t like my music and vise versa regarding all combos of my work. It’s not like I can maintain a consistent approach through the different mediums because, like everyone, I’ve got tons of limitations in my abilities and so I don’t get to do everything the way I’d like to do it.  I have to compromise with my competency. So, you know, I’m just trying to take all of my natural mistakes and present them to others as something more beautiful than what they seem like to me when I make them.

You’ve mentioned beauty more than once in this interview. I know this is a large question but how would you define beauty?  How is your notion of beauty tied in to your poetry?

It’s pretty weird to me that I’ve mentioned beauty a couple of times. I don’t really consciously think of poetry as a place to make beauty, but maybe, on some subconscious level, I do think that and just haven’t realized it. To me, real beauty develops from some sort of flaw, some sort of limitation that is twisted into something new and surprising.  In Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! I have a poem critical of Celine Dion and the only reason why is she’s an artist who, it seems to me, makes the most of perfection, which I think is really boring. She wears perfect gowns and sings perfect songs with her technically perfect voice and technically perfect band. My favorite singer of all time is Muddy Waters. My second favorite singer of all time is Bob Dylan. My point is that I like art that somehow uses its own flaws to elevate itself—to turn every weakness into a strength.  This isn’t a new idea. I just really, really like that.  Of course, as has been noted by lots of people, art that is really, really beautiful often seems ugly at first.

Aren’t you conflating “beauty” with “perfection”? 

Probably.  I guess I could say that the qualities that I find attractive, i.e. beautiful, would be certain types of flaws, certain vulnerabilities, certain surprises, certain moments that create unexpected happiness.

What kind of poets do you think are Celine-like in their glossy perfection, whereas which kind of poets (or poems) possess the same kind of beauty you find in Muddy Waters?

Well, I don’t have any interest in saying anything negative about any poet. I figure Celine can handle it because she is, after all, very rich and successful. There’s not a poet on the planet that’s near as successful and praised as she is.  But, more generally speaking, a “perfection” poet might seek the epiphany as the perfect gown, Nature as the perfect song, and meter as the perfect band. I prefer poems with rough edges. Emily Dickinson has rough edges. So does Frank O’Hara. So do lots of people.  I like those people.

- – -

Works by Peter Davis
Poetry:

Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!, Bloof Books, 2010

Hitler’s Mustache, Barnwood Press, 2006

As Editor:

Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets On Books that Shaped Their Art, Editor, Barnwood 2005

Poet’s Bookshelf II, Co-edited with Tom Koontz, Barnwood, 2008

- – -

Tony Leuzzi is a writer and teacher who lives in Rochester, NY.  His poems and articles have been published in Arts and Letters, Jacket, Sentence, The National Poetry Review, and elsewhere.  Radiant Losses, his second book of poems, won the 2009 New Sins Editorial Prize. His new book, Fake Book, will be released by Anything-Anywhere-Anymore press this spring.

Here is a video of me talking about some of the stories and images I really enjoyed from Get in if You Want to Live. (I am pretty inebriated, so you may not be able to fully understand me. I do slur [though I never once feel compelled to fucking punch someone, now do I?])

Whoa, Magic Hat! I didn’t expect fruity. What is this flavor? A little lavender and pumpkin pie, a smidgen of doughnut, or is that musk? A hint of buttered popcorn vanilla peppermint cheese pizza roasting meat cinnamon buns strawberry parsley green apple rose Oriental spice baby powder chocolate pink grapefruit cranberry. Just a hint. Interesting. Let me try another one. That first bottle reminded me of the time I went horse-dancing in Mexico. (The riders are usually drunk, the horses are always beautiful, the music is deafeningly loud. All four legs move in time to the beat.)

Well, Paper Darts not fucking around. They make a book now. John Jodzio is fucking around, but he fucks around the way drunken horses dance—it’s damn mesmerizing. Relationships, yes. Sex. Zombies and talking bears (they text too). And did I mention the artists? I think you should check out the artists. I could write about their art, but I could also dance about architecture or get all meretricious about the price of olive oil or swim laps about drug trafficking, but what exactly would be the point? Visual art needs to be visualized. You should check out the artists. (Me? I glowed Missy Austin and Laura Andrews and Sandra Dieckmann, but you can find all the artist here [scroll down: Paper Darts doesn’t fuck around with web pages either—this one be rad.])

Appearance on the Magic hat a good golden copper color and with a moderate carbonation that leaves some lacing. Slightly darker and obviously not as hoppy as true Pale Ale. The head was foamy and about as tall as a tall man if that tall man was really short, like just over two inches, and lanky, with very fair skin, a mustache, black cowboy boots and hat, Levi’s, a short-sleeved sport shirt, and that sudden, flashing smile.

Jodzio is a very imaginative writer. He’s a scenario writer, a premise man, and you have to relish in the pure inventiveness of his mind. (You want to grab him and say, “How the fuck did you think up that idea?”) He’s a comic, with the comic’s keen wit (humor, in any form, takes a great deal of intelligence: structure, timing, recognition of situation, etc.), yet Jodzio takes his scenarios beyond the thin drug of cleverness, into sharpness, into darkness, into absurdity. Every day is absurd. (This might be his thesis.) Let me drop some titles from the book on you, to make my point: “Recently I passed a Kidney Stone that Looks like a Shark’s Tooth”; “I am Committed to Getting You Your Heroin at the Peak of its Freshness”; “The Hookers in my neighborhood Really Love my Chili”; “My Kidnapper Gives a Really Good Backrub”; “James, I Cannot Even Begin to Imagine Who Threw a Bag of Shit into Your Dishwasher.”

See what I mean?

Damn. I just dropped my third Magic Hat and shattered the bottle. Hold up. I was laughing out loud at that dishwasher title and dropped my fucking beer.

How about this opening line?

I found a baby wolf in the woods and I trained him with honey mustard pretzels to do my bidding.

There’s a lot going on in this sentence: Note the elements of humor here. The situational comedy (Man brings a baby wolf into the bar…), the turn with cultural reference and specificity (honey mustard pretzels), the anachronistic diction for the final laugh ending the sentence (do my bidding).

(This story mentions Frisbee golf and that made me happy and sad. Happy because any mention of the sport of gods makes me ecstatic. Sad because, even for humorous effect, we don’t call it Frisbee golf. It’s disc golf! Frisbee golf is like asking a runner if they jog.)

I just realized “I Only have Sex with Ladies Named Jean” is online. Here, read it. A lot of what I’m saying about humor is contained within.

Or:

Last week, I made out with two men — a butcher and a singer in a Zeppelin cover band.

The butcher smelled like meat, like he should have, but the singer smelled way too good, not smoky or dusty like I wanted.

“Why do you keep sniffing me?” he asked.

On this Magic Hat, I’m a bit surprised how popular this beer. I’m barely tasting any hops here, but I do note the alcohol. I feel the whoosh. For just a moment I thought I saw Angela Lansbury but it was only my treadmill. This beer seems to have characteristics that place it well within the bounds of an American Amber Ale or an English ESB.

I’d like to just throw some syntactical lettuce at you:

One September, Uncle Fergus had trouble knocking the donkey out.

Back in the days before cell phones, it was so much more difficult to have a secret family.

This is a pretty understanding neighborhood unless you wear assless chaps after Labor Day.

Like Andie McDowell after a fistfight and too many whippets.

There are a lot of playwrights in my neighborhood and sometimes codpieces and fog machines are very hard to come by.

Lately, I’ve become quite adept at throwing detached arms and legs…

Another beer down. Another. Fog machine indeed. Read the damn sentences! Well, see? I hope you see by now. This book is a pleasurable pleach, a winding of words and visuals and laughs (sometimes human, sometimes a bear or a bed [yes, one story is told from the perspective of a bed]). I like to hold and re-hold it tightly. You might like to hold it tightly, too.

So do.

Cheers.

38-year-old “ironically”/”prophetically” morbidly obese and visibly jaundiced Tao Lin, author of 9 novels and 2 illegitimate “hapa” children, at Columbia University’s Creative Writing 2021 annual symposium “The Otherness of The Other: Other Ways to View Oneself Besides Boring” panel discussion (seated far left, visibly deflated after answering “seems like…I don’t know” to the three questions he was asked) vaguely “squinting” with left (and only operational) eye at group of semi-anorexic ~22-to-23 year-old recent graduates from Sarah Lawrence now fashion bloggers, all of whom he envisions having non-detached relations with, simultaneously, “on” 2x slow-release 20 mg Ritalin tablets, 3-month-expired NyQuil gel-caps, and a “sex swing” adorned with dried eucalyptus leaves imported from Australia affixed in PPOW gallery installation w/ speakers playing koala bear mating sounds. Lin is heard mumbling something about defunct literary enterprise Muumuu house, “needing only 217 twitter followers until [he] reach[es], like, one million maybe” and something about a pâté smootie moments before MDMA-induced seizure, by which gasps of Diane Williams-esque “odd” and vaguely passive-aggressive NOON worthy dialog followed.

Don’t let the cats fool you, João Guimarães Rosa is the man. The man like Mann or Proust or Melville or Faulkner or Borges or Calvino or Joyce…Only, you may have never been made aware of the fact. Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. As a matter of fact: you’re right at home in the United States of America if you’ve never heard of João Guimarães Rosa.

This is the story: in 1956, in Brazil, a forty-eight year old Brazilian diplomat published a singular novel entitled Grande Sertão: Veredas, a 500-page monologue, set in the North-Eastern Backlands of Brazil (a stark contrast to the stereotypical and often sought after clear-watered beaches of Rio de Janeiro, home to Carnival). The novel follows the exploits of a bandit for hire, Riobaldo, as he questions the existence of the devil and his love for a fellow bandit. Deemed one of the most important works of modernist literature in Brazil shortly after being published there, Guimarães Rosa was elevated to stand beside Clarice Lispector as one of the two most important Brazilian writers since Machado de Assis. With the onset of the Latin American Boom in the U.S. in the early 1960s, and with the success of another Brazilian writer, Jorge Amado, in translation in the U.S., publisher Alfred A. Knopf set its sights on Guimarães Rosa and Grande Sertão: Veredas. In 1963 an English translation of Grande Sertão: Veredas was published in the U.S. It’s English title: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. The translator: Harriet de Onís, a very reputable translator of Spanish and Portuguese, but no match for Guimarães Rosa. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands was deemed a sham for its strategic attempt to achieve readability over anything else—which meant eliminating Guimarães Rosa’s linguistic innovations, one of the most significant marks of the novel. You see, Guimarães Rosa had a working knowledge of something like twelve languages, and was as erudite as Jorge Luis Borges. He spun the Portuguese language like Joyce did English, and incorporated everything from the archaic to the invented… So, in the beginning-end, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands didn’t sell well. And since the point of literature for big publishers is the translation of literature into dollars, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands was never reprinted as such. What happened after that? It’s hard to say. The short of it: Guimarães Rosa and his work was relegated to American universities and rarely mentioned outside again. Now, in Brazil, for the last fifty years, Guimarães Rosa has been a pillar of modernist literature. In other parts of the world too, they know it. But in the U.S., us, we’re just now learning…this isn’t the whole story of course. Just pieces of it. Real stories don’t come clean.

João Guimarães Rosa. João Guimarães Rosa. Few people today know the name João Guimarães Rosa, because few people today speak or read or write the name João Guimarães Rosa. I’d like to change that.

I found The Devil to Pay in the Backlands the way any reader finds any book: by pure chance. For years, I puzzled over why the work of a writer who is not just a great Brazilian writer, but a great world writer, is so long out of print.  In the spring of 2010, I established AMISSINGBOOK.COM, an online literary project aimed at investigating the nearly fifty-year absence of João Guimarães Rosa from English literary discourse. For the last two years, I’ve plumbed the depths of the internet, searching for clues as to Guimarães Rosa’s disappearance. The search has lead me to speak with Rosean scholars at several of the world’s leading universities: Brown, Yale, Vanderbuilt, King’s College, and the University of São Paulo.  Most recently, I created a Google translation of the original Portuguese novel in its entirety—excerpts of which can be read in Out of Nothing’s fifth issue. I invite you to visit AMISSINGBOOK.COM to acquaint yourself with an author counted as one of the most significant modernists of the twentieth century.

***

Felipe W.Martinez studied Literature & Writing at UC San Diego. He writes fiction and is also the creator of AMISSINGBOOK.COM. He lives in San Diego, California, where he works in public education.

“Sure, that’d be cool,” Casey replied.

“I guess,” Matt seemed a little distant.

So off Ben went to work, and I hung out in their bachelor pad for a bit. After about 7 o clock, Casey decided some action was needed.

“You guys ready to go?”

“That’s fine by me,” I said.

“Sure,” was Matt’s only reply.

We went to a club called La Maraschino Cherry. We ordered some drinks, and
after a while Casey got a little tipsy.

“I’m gonna hit the dance floor,” he said.

Me and Matt sat and watched him dance for a while. He really seemed to be enjoying
himself. We started chatting about things used for the purpose of keeping conversation, such as the weather, how each of us were, things like that. After a while Matt said something.

“I have to tell you something Ed.”

“What’s that?” I replied not having a clue what was coming next.

“Let’s step outside for a minute.”

I followed Matt out the back door of the club. He started to say something, but
then stopped. He then reached into his pocket, and pulled out one of those electric knifes
that you use to carve turkeys on Thanksgiving. He then continued to stab me seventeen times.

Then he turned it on and butchered my insides, and proceeded my eating my guts. He then
started crying, and he yelled out, “I could have loved you!”

Billy: Grandpa, can you drive me to school?
Grandpa: No, I’m on my way out.
Billy: But it’s on the way!
Grandpa: You need a bath.

Woman: It’s spooky.
Man: What is?
Woman: The current state of our government.
Man: I can’t feel my left toe.

There is no chaos. Nobody knows that it is the first day of the apocalypse. They all assume their daily positions in life.

Mary, a mother, cleans the kitchen after her children have gone to school and her husband has gone to work. THe children had cereal for breakfast, but her husband has insisted on having the same damn thing he has every morning for breakfast. Eggs. The damn things are so easy to make, yet he makes me his bitch and has me do everything. He will make his eggs for now on. She decides this then smiles as she continues to finish the cleaning. She has a long day ahead of her.

Joy is a 17 year old slacker who lives in her mothers basement without her mother knowing. Her mother is catatonic. She is too confused to know what is really going on. Joy knows, though, and she lives off the fact that her mother has problems. Her mother thinks she is dead. Her mother is checked on twice a day by men in white jackets, who give her mother shots. When she was little she wondered what these shots did. She no longer wonders. She has no wonder of anything anymore, she lives in tghe world of narcotics and blackness, a world inhabited my no one other than herself. She, Joy, the 17 year old slacker, is Agoraphobic.

Ben is a movie star who lives in fear of people discovering his biggest secret. Nobody knows what his biggest secret is, but he does. Everybody knows that he has a large secret and they all want to know what it is / the damb bastards, they all want to know too much about me/ they want to discover his secrets.

Day two of the apocalypse begins.

There is no rapture occurring. That would only hapen if the inhabitants of Earth were faithful. No one on earth believes in God. Many pretend to, many even try to make others pretend to, but no one believes in the Supreme Being. THere once was a God, but he died long ago when people stopped truly believing and tried to organize themselves into things called religions / blasphemy, ideas, faits, all ruined/ and made these to seperate themselves from others that they didn’t like.

Since there is no God then many must be wondering why there is an apocalyspe occurring. Blackness flashes, the people scream.

An angel falls from the sky into a small town known to earth’s inhabitants as Normal, Illinois. It is a middle class town with nothing special about it, it just happened to be a good landing spot for the angel who was cast out of nowhere. His wings are alive, but he is not. His soul screams at the inhabitants of this town.

“Look what your faults have brought upon you!”

A baby cries and a mother looks away from the child, the thought of someone pouting all the time turns her on.

“You have lost the beginning of what was good, now what was good is lost. The earth is black and white now, the color is gone.”

[Film turns to black and white, remains so for rest of movie]

Boy, 13, turns on TV in his trailer. His parents have just lost their lives to the man with the sign on his forehead. They told him they would be in a better place now.

He doens’t believe them, he knows that they are wrong, and that they are nowhere now. People don’t go anywhere when they die, he tells himself, as an old Vincent Price movies pops onto the TV screen. He suddenly realizes why the apocalypse must happen, despite the fact that there is no avenging god which is what many people think is why it happens, but he knows that it must happen for another reason. This becomes his biggest secret.

Five seconds of white light flashes on the screen as a mother screams with pleasure while thinking of all the pouting that is occurring in the world at the moment.

An 11 year old girl sits on her front porch in her small town smoking a cigarette. She has nothing but her underwear and bra on, her neighbor had just spent the last ten minutes masturbating while watching her dance / she was just practicing for her father, the damn pedophile/ the smoke is inhaled as she thinks over her pitiful life. She now knows the reason for the godless apocalypse.

Five seconds of disturbing imagery flashes, possibly the inside of a human body.

Day three of the apocalypse begins.

This is when the bodies start to fall from the sky. Nowhere no longer exists, the dead people must go somewhere. This is why the apocalypse is happening. Nowhere is full, and all the dead must go somewhere. Earth, as it is called by it’s inhabitants, is to become the new nowhere.

There is chaos now. For the dead bodies fill the streets, and the surrounding areas. A Jesuit priest prays in his synagogue, the last remaining member of his particular clergy. He prays for forgiveness, for his religion teaches him his fetish for his 11 year old neighbor is wrong. The god does not respond. His faith is gone. He implodes.

Day four of the apocalypse begins.

Joy is on an acid trip when someone enters her mind.

Ben is hiding under his bed when somebody enters his mind.

Mary is attempting to stop the pain her husband brings to her when someone enters her mind.

He is here now. They all say in unison. ALl inhabitants of different areas, all speaking at the same time. There voices echo across the world as the so-called humans quiver and begin to vomit violently.

The people have stopped falling now. Nowhere has been emptied, and now it too must implode.

He who loves the lord above will live his life with him

The remaning clergy of the world chant. Their message is not heard, they too, are gone into the new nowhere-ness.

Day four of the apocalypse has ended. Five seconds of white noise is accompanied by five seconds of blackness.

Dave five has begun.

Then he returns.

God is back. He shows himself to the humans in the form of Jesus. They, being the humans they are, cast him away, and kill him while he is being sent to an asylum.

The asylum turns to rock. God is once again gone.

Muhammed returns. He faces the same state as Jesus, and God leaves once more, for the last time.

As the five who know the truth fight to save themselves by finding the old nothingness, people attempt to find religion again to save themselves from the fate they know they have brought upon themselves. Now they need their gods, now they need their scapegoats.

A camera moves down death row. These people are safe. Since they are to be killed before the apocalyse is over, they will be sent into the old nothingness, which is gone. They all smile and laugh for the last time. The switch is flipped. They all die with a smile. The gaurd is disturbed and goes and jumps off the roof of his night job.

Day six come and goes, with nothing happening at all, it is a day of silence, the first since earth was created by the once true god, for the people know what will become of themselves and have lost their once loved and honored ability to speak.

Ben, Mary, Joy, and the boy and girl meet where the angel fell for the first time. This is their new home. The soul speaks to them, and tells them what they must do to escape what is to become of the rest of humanity.

Zero hour has passed, and the dreaded day seven of the apocalypse begins.

Humanity is frozen. Nowhere-ness is now what it is meant to be, nothing. But in the darkness the chosen five combine into it. It is nothing. They are safe, as were the prisoners of death row. The apocalypse has happened.

Five minutes of blackness follows with a constantly slowing heartbeat, which eventually signals the end of the film when it stops. The movie ends with a woman crying, she was not taken into the nothingness, she is left behind.

One day while Fulton and Julian were walking home from work together, they passed their children’s school. The children were out on the playground, Bob and one of his friends were holding the rope and turning it while Margaret was jumping. She was saying a simple
rhyme as she jumped, and the rhyme went as follows:

I saw a frog the other day,
I then turned to look the other way,
then that frog croaked and flew,
into a nearby pond which was oh so blue,
he landed with a pleasant splash,
that’s when I turned and to my home I dashed,
I told my father of this site,
and I sensed something wasn’t right,
The frog was not a frog you see,
It was what it is that I want to be.

Julian asked Fulton if he had taught her that rhyme, and Fulton replied no. The two partners walked home in awe, as the poem had touched both of them deep inside, though they knew not why. When the children got home, Julian asked them about the curious rhyme.

“Me and your father saw you children playing outside the school today.”

“Yeah, me and Bob were jumping rope.”

“We heard you saying a really interesting rhyme.”

“The Story of Us? About a frog?”

“Yep, that’s the one. Where did you learn that? It was quite nice.”

“All the kids know about it.”

“Oh, ok then, I thought maybe the teacher taught it to you or something.”

“Nope.”

This discussion brought no closure to Julian and Fulton’s delight, so they decided to do some research. The next day, the two dropped their children off at the park and went to the local library to research the poem. Since they now knew the title, they had a better chance of finding out about it.

After about an hour or so of looking, Julian found something in a book called, “King James.”

“Honey, come here, I think I found it.”

“What’s that?”

“Here, in this book, King James, it tells about ‘The Story of Us’.”

Julian began to read the selection of the book, “The story of us was a poem made in the old world, in a time when sin was still around. The frog in the story represents-,” but paused. The rest of the page was blacked out, in what seemed to be a black paint. Julian and Fulton went to the desk of the library to ask the librarian about this peculiar happening.

“Well, I’ve never seen anything like that.” the librarian said.

“Do you think there’s a way we could remove the black?” Julian questioned.

“I don’t think so, that’s a really old book. Any chemical process would probably
ruin the pages.”

“Oh, okay. Thank you.”

Fulton and Julian then left the library with a feeling they had never felt before. A longing. They longed to know what was blacked out on that page. They needed to know what that rhyme meant. They went to the park to pick up their children, and on their way back home there was an uneasy quietness that no one in the family was familiar with.

That night Fulton could not sleep. Something was wrong. He wasn’t happy. He got out of bed without waking Julian up, and he went outside in the darkness. He began to walk around, contemplating something he had never thought about before. His life. He realized that he used to be happy, but this peculiar poem, nursery rhyme even, has caused him a void in his soul. A sadness. He walked to the river that was near his house. He stared intently
into the darkness of the water. He swore he saw one of the fish smiling, but wasn’t sure. Something about the water made him feel good about himself, but he wasn’t sure what. He was tired, so he walked back to his house and got back into his bed.

In the morning, he woke up to Julian kissing his cheek. He smiled. Then the rhyme entered his mind. He frowned. Julian asked what was wrong, and Fulton simply replied, “Oh, nothing that matters.”

At work that day, Fulton was unusually tired. He kept thinking about the poem, the smiling fish, and the feeling the deep waters of the river gave to him. The day seemed to drag on forever, and when he got home, he was glad to go do sleep.

He woke up in the middle of the night, the river was gleaming out of their window. He got up again, and walked to the river. He stared intently down into the dark waters. He got the feeling that he had gotten the night before. The feeling made him happy. He knew there was only one thing to do. He jumped into the water. Fulton was never seen again.

All their arms are set in the same manner. They are all up on the right, the side facing the wall, and all down on the left, the side away from the wall. Their shadows are like a row of German soldiers in the second World War, set to go defeat those who their leader claims inadequate of this life, not set to live here.

Their faces hold no expressions. They are simply there, nothing about them signals that they are alive, nothing about them signals life. They are simply there. Simply, not simply. They were set up very carefully, set up with such skill and grace, arranged in such a manner that one would not expect from he who arranged them, arranged in a manner of precision.

They have no organs, they are all hollowed out, hollowed out so that he may fill them. Not with hopes, despairs, or desires, but with paint, white paint, so when cut open the white paint will drip out of them, causing a violently enjoyable display. This will be his final gallery, this will be his finishing piece, this will make him go out with a bang, as they say.

When he finishes exactly how he wants them to be, he smiles. He smiles at his deed well done. His manniquins made of trefsin display is finished. He then gets ready, ready to enter the white world, ready to become one of his creations, one of his manniquins.

The manniquins themselves are a dark black, so that the white paint will be easily visible on their darkness. He hooks the wires, white, to match their pavement which they rest on, up to the manniquins. He checks all the fuses to make sure they are ready.

His show will be tommorow, and many of his loved ones and others which he knows will be there. He is ready for this, he has been preparing this, planning, ordering, creating, for three months. This will be his greatest exhibit, experiment if you will, ever.

He goes to sleep with a sense of contentment, a sense of completion. He quietly tells himself that tommorow will be a great day. He lays his black suit out, and falls asleep.

The next morning he wakes up in excitement. He is too excited to eat breakfast, so he puts on the black suit, and finishes getting the exhibit ready. His exhibit will be shown at nine a.m.

At eight thirty he sets the timer which is hooked up to the wires, and get in his position, between the thirtieth and thirty-first manniquin. He believes that this is a very good number, and he is fully satisfied with it.

At eight fifty five, all the viewers have arrived. It is almost time.

At nine o clock exactly, the explosions being. One by one, each mannequin explodes in an outburst of white paint. The white on black effect has worked greatly. Once the thirtieth manniquin explodes, he is ready. He then explodes. His dark red blood makes a very visiable make on the white pavement, and his red blood makes a great scene on the white mannequin blood which is no match in consistency of his own. He had died with a smile. He is complete.

Stories in Shannon Cain’s The Necessity of Certain Behaviors pair exhibitionist events and their three-ring tableaus with characters who typify “marginal,” yet who nonetheless surprisingly assert not only their outsider status, often in correlation with their sexualities, but also their complexities—a young lesbian ventures to the set of The Price is Right to meet her father, Bob Barker, only to find not parental but sexual identities challenged; a mayor’s wife endures the scandalizing of her sexuality after she is caught masturbating in the YMCA’s shower room, only to find that her new relegation to sexual deviant has allowed her singular insight into victims of the myriad sexual minefields in her community—the cumulative effect of these stories also achieves a reversal: common notions of taboo or freakishness gain warmth and humanity, while the normative culture unveils its crippling deformities. Cultural critique couldn’t have a more compelling and sophisticated face. In an era often favoring equivocation as a substitute for vision, this collection is clear: take a stand, make it compassionate. Others agree, of interest to note: American Literary Review, American Short Fiction, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, Southwards, Tin House, The O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

***

LS: By way of a more wide-ranging introduction to you and to the body of your work, tell us of your current effort, Tucson, The Novel: An Experiment in Literature and Civil Discourse, and what motivated it. A quiet little project, is it?

SC: Tucson has been my hometown for more than thirty years, so when it came time to write a novel—for no better reason than one must write a novel, right?—it made sense to set the story here. Tucson is a microcosm of the American West: overdeveloped, thirsty, beautiful, harsh, wild, heartbreaking. What else does one do but write about one’s home?

The performance aspect of the project was born of a weird volatile mix of my dogged insistence on using literature to change the world and the Year Four, Draft Nine novel doldrums. I knew—and continue to know—that this is an important project for me, but my energy for it was flagging and my narcissistic desire for recognition and/or need to be heard wasn’t being satisfied. A more generous way to describe this might be that I felt an overwhelming need to start making social change on some level, even though the damn manuscript wasn’t done yet.

And I was a political wife. My partner (we’re divorced now) was an elected official during the time of the Tea Party’s ascendance and the resulting nastiness and incivility in the public sphere. I was just blown away by all that anger and refusal to listen; by the need to shout down democratically elected representatives. What had happened to civil discourse, anyhow?

So I started reading the novel as oral testimony at the Tucson City Council meetings each Tuesday. There’s a part of the agenda, Call to the Audience, in which any member of the public is allowed to speak for three minutes on any subject whatsoever. So I sort of hijacked the podium and am using it for art. In addition to reading about 500 words from the manuscript each week, I allot thirty precious seconds toward reflection on the ways in which public discourse unfolds in that room.

About nine months into the project, the Safeway tragedy happened, which was of course the result of Arizona’s shameful neglect of mental health services, its cowboy-era devotion to unfettered gun ownership, and its amused tolerance—bordering on celebration—of public incivility. The shootings gave the project a new urgency. I’ve been at it for almost two years now, and I’m about one-third of the way through the novel. It’s a story about land development and politics (and sex, of course), with the culminating scene taking place in the council chambers. So my choice of venue does have a certain logic to it. Still, each week I’m met by confused silence from the general public. The mayor and councilmembers are used to me by now. One of the councilmembers made me her Artist in Residence, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts selected the project as one of five statewide for a grant last year. I’ve tried not to allow these gestures of approval from The Man to take the wind out of my activist sails.

The Necessity of Certain Behaviors is sexy in every way: mature, uninhibited, susceptible. Does it make you feel sexy?

Hell yeah! Isn’t that the reason everybody writes? To feel sexy?

So I meant that question as a playful ingress, but I once attended a talk with a famously gay author, and though the novel under discussion did not address the topic overtly, during the Q&A, one affable teenager asked (what seemed to me) rather delicate questions about the writer’s sexuality and life as a homosexual, in an attempt, I’m sure, to access not only the activism behind the work, but the person deeply connected to the activism. And it obviously struck me then, as it strikes me when I read you describe yourself as a steward of culture “to bring about social justice,” and you say, “If there’s any genre or tradition working within my stories, it’s political fiction,” and that, “Every week, I need to reaffirm my commitment to literature as a tool for social change,” how it must feel to be a poster child in some ways, especially when one of those ways is, by necessity, intensely private, and when it exists in a culture often promoting the embodiments of its overdevelopment, as in the case of sexuality (so many celebrities come to mind). Another interviewer asked you, “Is there anything you’d like to ask someone who’s read your collection, anything at all?” And you answered, “Did I go too far?” I’m curious to learn, from a successful writer whose thematic concerns have powerful political resonance, more about how you view the connection or reconciliation between promoting the vision that makes politically relevant creative work possible, and emphasizing what complicates direct message, including artistic vulnerability, whether in the creative process or in promotion and discussion of the work… and, I suppose, for the sake of politico-writers like me, and for the thinly-veiled autobiographers, and for every writer at that, how you protect a personal sense of intimacy.

Probably I was born into the wrong culture. In America we’re confused about the relationship of sex to intimacy. We tend to think that if you crawl into the sack with someone, bingo: you’ve got intimacy. This is silly, of course. All you’ve got is the interaction of body parts. Why is jerking someone off more intimate than gazing into his eyes? Why are we so shamed by own healthy, biological desires? Why can’t we see that so often we use sex to hide from intimacy? There are a million good answers to these questions, and they nearly always end in the political. We share 98 percent of our DNA with the bonobo, those marvelously horny little apes who use sex to resolve conflict, express joy, communicate. Humans are sexual beings, and sex is good. But we’ve come to accept that politics/society/religion should have a place in our sex lives, so it’s no wonder we’re confused.

Frank Conroy of Iowa once told a group of us fledgling writers that he saw no reason to write about “the plumbing.” We must write about love, he said, but we don’t need to write about all those body parts. I don’t fully agree with this—I think a lot of great stuff can be discovered in the miraculous, humiliating and confounding physicality of the sex act—but still, his point resonates with me. So when I ask, “Did I go too far?” that’s a reflection of my writerly worry about sex crossing the line into gratuitousness.

So I protect a personal sense of intimacy by understanding the difference between sex and love, but also the difference between fiction and reality. Like most writers, autobiography is all over my work, infused, steeped, unavoidable. These stories come from my brain: how could they not be autobiographical on some profound level? But I am me and they are they. I am real and they are not. No, I tell the creepy guy at my book signing: the naked woman on the cover is not me. Go fuck yourself, dude.

Once you had the idea for each story in this first collection, what helped you most in your creation and follow-through? 



The active resistance of knowing what comes next. For me, the process of discovery is where the magic lies. Such weird unexpected truths emerge when I try my damndest to not think about where a story is going until it comes out of my fingers.

How would you describe your best or one of your best experiences working with an editor of a literary journal?



Ben George, back when he was the fiction editor at Tin House (he’s now the editor of Ecotone), took a ruthless knife to “Cultivation,” removing a thousand words from the version I submitted. Also he kept insisting on precision of tiny irritating details like time zones and the physical placement of one character in relation to another. I hated him for monkeying with my genius. Naturally the story came out of this process far stronger than how it went in, and naturally the Tin House revision is the one that appears in the book. Working with Ben taught me not only to value the tremendous gift of good editing, but how to be a better editor of others’ work.

What became the salient points of your book production process? What do you wish you’d known earlier about the book publishing world?

Oh, how fabulous. I just discovered a secondary meaning for the word salient: leaping or jumping: a salient animal. When Ed Ochester from the Pitt Press called to inform me that Alice Mattison had selected my manuscript for the Heinz Prize, I was sitting at Ike’s, a downtown Tucson coffeehouse, laboring over some bit of writing. I became unabashedly, publicly salient. Weeping and leaping. It took eight years to write this book. There is no more salient moment in the life of a writer.

As for what I wish I’d known: before I got the call from Pitt, I’d had the great fortune of working for Kore Press, a fierce and scrappy indie publisher with tremendously high standards for both the quality of a piece of literature and the form in which it is housed. Kore (kor-ay) produces the most gorgeous broadsides, chapbooks, audiobooks and trade paperbacks. For four years, I had the privilege and fun of working alongside Lisa Bowden, the publisher and founder, and learned a whole lot about the industry. So I went into my first-book experience very well prepared. I’m no longer a paid Kore employee, but I volunteer as fiction editor and I co-chair the board of directors.

Is there a better cover for any book anywhere than the cover for The Necessity of Certain Behaviors?

No ma’am, there sure isn’t. And there is no writer anywhere who loves her book jacket more than I do.

There’s a marvelous story behind this cover, which confirms the possibility of manifesting desire: ‘way back in 2003 or so, before most of these stories were even written, I was sitting at my desk at Kore Press, daydreaming with Ms. Lisa B. about Some Day. Some Day, I mused, my collection of stories will be published, and Some Day, you’ll design the jacket. And eight years later when the folks at Pitt asked me if I had any ideas for the cover image, I said Nope, but do I have an idea for a designer. And god bless ‘em, they hired Lisa for the job. She knew these stories and their author so well. She understood what they were saying. The photo is by Valerie Galloway, a wildly talented Tucson photographer. When Lisa sent me the cover, I gasped, then wept. Perfect. Perfect.

Writing advice that sucks? Why? 



You must write every day. Worse: if you don’t write every day, you’re not a writer. Note that this bit of advice generally comes from white men. My response: screw you and your entitlement. Come over to my house and do my laundry and make my meals and raise my children while I sequester myself in the attic and write the great American novel and then we’ll talk, you prick.

Where can we read more Shannon Cain? 



Alas, these stories are the extent of my published fiction. Tragically but typically, I spend more time hustling to make a living than producing creative work. I’m a freelance writing coach and occasional classroom teacher. Hire me to read your short story or novel manuscript and you’ll get plenty of my writing in your margins and in long tough-sweet letters about your work.

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Shannon Cain blogs at http://www.tucsonthenovel.blogspot.com/. Find her upcoming appearances here.

Lydia Ship‘s stories have appeared in over thirty journals in print and online. She is the new managing editor of The Chattahoochee Review, which is currently accepting entries for its annual Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction, and caretaker of www.magicalrealism.info.

TCR is accepting entries until Jan. 31st.

“The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a ‘fuckscape’: where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book.” – Johannes Goransson, author of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place

“Pregnancy dream of poetry has this Sean Kilpatrick book by the fist. You learn to signal to others from the woken state, here, line-by-line. Do you have any extra money? Buy this book! If you have to skip lunch, buy THIS BOOK! “I held my breath so hard I ended up in the country.” Some poetry you read is forgotten, and never remembered. Some poetry, this poetry, Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry, is a manual for exciting the engine to throw you out of the vanquished pleasures. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood.” – CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank

TAKE EAT

HTMLGIANT: Was it hard to end this book? I don’t think it will spoil it too much to say that Esther comes through her Weltschmerz a bit, so to speak. That is, she resigns herself to a depressing world where people like Amy and Nate are going to make bad decisions, or be selfish, or whatever. Her final epiphanic (?) act — getting her dad to push her on the tire swing — is her last indulgence before taking a “steady step.” It’s both sad and happy. Right? Everything will be all right cuz life sucks. Is that where you’re leaving us? She’s going to marry Pickle?

LEIGH: I’m going to pretend you asked me the following question, “What’s the most surprising question you’ve been getting about the novel?”

Well, Adam, the most surprising question I’ve been getting is “What’s up with Pickle? Are they going to hook up?” This wouldn’t have occurred to me in 800 years, so I find it pretty hilarious that that’s what people (read: twenty-year-old women, my editor, and you, Adam Robinson) come away with. Pickle wasn’t even supposed to be in the last chapter. Dennis, my editor, said “You have to put Pickle in.” I said, “Why? He’s not even a main character.” “You have to,” he said.

Everyone wants to know who Pickle is! He has a mystique.

(If this were chick lit, maybe Esther would end up with Pickle. How can a book written by a woman have a happy ending, unless her heroine ends up with a guy? Am I right, ladies?)

To me, the book ends on a hopeful note. Not because life sucks no matter what we do, but because Esther feels ready to step up to bat. She can’t control what Amy does with her daughter (and that is tragic) or what Nate does with his life, but she can leave the idea of the wardrobe behind (that there’s a fantasy life waiting for us if we just find the right door) and step foot on earth.

HTMLGIANT: Can I tell you something? Why is the novel so funny? Or, seriously, what was the writing process like? How many revisions did it take to get all the jokes in there? Like, “A small part of me threw up.” Or making a confused facial expression to trick the IPASS sensor, or a mom with a “hairstyle most conducive to storing pencils” instead of one who says “well look at that” when you show her how to enlarge the type in MS Word.

LEIGH: Esther makes jokes as a way of pricking the bubble of despair and stagnation she lives in, because that’s what I do. I wrote a lot of the book while living in Albuquerque on a romantic whim, and I remember going to a health clinic to get anti-anxiety medication (because I couldn’t get an appointment with a real psychiatrist for months), and feeling so belittled and small, that I went home and wrote the scene with Esther at the doctor. She’s making jokes in her head to cover up how bad it feels to be treated like her problems don’t really matter, when to her they feel as significant as a brain tumor. Throughout the book, Esther jokes about her desire to become disabled…some people have read this as insanely self-absorbed, but for a depressed person: there’s no outward expression of how bad it feels inside. You’re not missing a leg. You get met with incredulity constantly. Are you sure it hurts that badly? Actually yes. Yes it does.

Some jokes got better during revisions. I remember meeting with my editor Dennis Johnson before revisions started, and him saying the book was basically in good shape, and that there’d probably only be minor edits. “Like putting in better jokes?” I said. One of the things he asked me to change in the book is the anti-Semitism. Jack, the romantic lead, teases Esther for being Jewish. To me, it’s a consensual teasing. But I added some jokes to buffer it. Like in this scene in the first chapter:

Jack stared at me without blinking. “How much money do you have,” he finally said.
“None. I don’t have a job.”
“Get one, Jew,” he said.
“L’chaim,” I mumbled, celebrating nothing. To Jack, I wasn’t Natalie Wood. I was Yentl. I was the ethnic diversity in the room.

Also, May, the four-year-old, is one of the few characters who is not based on anyone I knew in real life, but I did once have a four-year-old in my drama classes, who I stole the May catchphrase from. “Can I tell you something?” she would say, and then follow it up with another question. She was adorable.

HTMLGIANT: And were you a poet first, or did you just happen to publish poetry first?

LEIGH: I feel like being a poet is part of my identity, and writing prose is just something I can do. Like many young women, I’ve been writing poems since I was 13 but then I just … didn’t stop. Luckily, I got better. I think getting poetry published is easier, because it’s just faster to write and so there’s more of it. You can send 8 poems out to 6 different places, and it’ll land somewhere. But I don’t write short fiction, at least not right now. So it’s a novel or nothing. See you in five years! The sad thing is that the more prose I write, the less poetry I write. It feels like my brain is changing. Or like I can’t tune in to the same radio station anymore.