Poet Kenneth Goldsmith has said Place’s work was “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today,” and poet Rae Armantrout has remarked, “Vanessa Place is writing terminal poetry.” Bebrowed’s Blog said Place is “the scariest poet on the planet.” Anonymous on Twitter said, “Vanessa Place killed poetry.”

–Radio Break

"Roll over, dear Whitman," says Susan McCabe in her Introduction, "Here's our new original."

V.P. (right) Teresa Carmody (left) photo by Harold Abramowitz

Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994; cut paper on wall; 15 x 50 feet; installation view

If art is what humans feel about themselves relative to objects, then the objective is what art feels about humans. Walker’s objects are abject because they force their subjectivities upon us: art dislikes the mewling, vomitous sticky self. Weiner’s objects are object because they erase the signs of us: art enjoys the airy impersonal fact of material and its movement.

– “I am not content: Kara Walker/Lawrence Weiner: Identity as Language/Language as Identity”

Hanne Darboven, Wunschkonzert (Detail), 1984. Ink on paper, collaged greeting cards; 1008 pages and 1 index sheet; 11.69 x 8.46 in. each.

Time, like Number, like History, is Concept. Concept can either be or not be. Darboven meets Schopenhauer, Hegel, Sartre, Heine, Kant, and Kitsch at the place where mirrors face. Her work is terminal realism insofar as the mirror interrupts the real while being itself part of the refractured u reconstituted real.

– “Hanne Darboven”

–official website
–Audio @ Penn Sound
–Vanessa’s Twitter

Recently released from Octopus Books, Christopher DeWeese’s The Black Forest is a slim, refreshing volume, intent on bending time and expectation in language carefully measured, calm and clear. It was described by James Tate as such: “These poems sock home truth and enact poetic somersaults that leave me out of breath. It’s a pleasure to recommend them to anyone brave enough. Chris DeWeese is the real thing, a poet true to his calling.”

BB: The Black Forest is your first book, while also one of many you have written over the years in coming up to it. Did you know this book was a specific project when you began the poems in it, or how did it come together as what it is?

CD: For three years while I was getting my MFA I only worked on this one thing, a sequence of poems called The Confessions. When I started that project, I had just been blown absolutely away by Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Berrigan’s The Sonnets, and I had this feeling that maybe writing a book-length poem was the solution to all of my problems. I remember at the time being very confused about how to write poems: before grad school, I had been writing pretty much on my own for a few years, and the poems I wrote were not very good, and all of a sudden I was around all of these people who seemed to already have really confident, singular styles, and I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing or (more importantly) even what I wanted to do in writing poetry.

The most helpful thing about just writing this one project for so long was that it gave me a stable architecture of form to write into. And that was huge for me, because I felt like just starting to write an individual poem was a process weighted down with huge decisions, decisions about form and content that needed to have complicated rationales lurking behind them. So for three years, I didn’t have to worry about that, because I was totally committed to just working on this one thing. And by the time I finished working on it, I was ready to realize that the way I had thought about the process of making poems before was actually totally wrong (for me at least) and that one good and valid way of composing poetry is to just start writing and to see what happens. So when I started writing the poems that would eventually compose The Black Forest, there were no ideas about the poems going together or belonging together as a certain project: there was just this feeling of freedom, and a desire to be loose and wild with my imagination. I had just started running when I began to write these poems, and a lot of the first lines would occur to me while running, and then I would spend the rest of the run saying the line over and over to myself to try and remember it, and by the time I got home the line would have achieved this power, this importance borne of repetition, so I’d write it down and often the rest of the poem would come out very quickly. And over time, I did realize that a lot of the poems I was writing belonged together, that they shared a lot of language and concerns, and it felt good to realize that the consistency of the book had come together in a fairly organic way.

BB: That you began running during this time is interesting, as I thought the use of motion and propulsion in the book was so strong. Many of the poems I felt had an interesting interchange between really stark imagery, such as bear suits or pretzels, interspersed with a more dreamy, logical monologue voice that seemed to carry the opening forward, almost like a mathematical proof, though with all the actual math deleted. It’s both scientific and dreamlike. I wonder what you would say about the use of logic in your poems, versus perhaps the use of dream material, or the image of a tree.

CD: I really like that you used the phrase “dreamy, logical monologue voice.” I think that’s a perfect way to describe the mechanism that powers the poems in The Black Forest. To me, each poem in the book is a narrative monologue, and what powers the narratives is not plot so much as discovery: the speaker of each poem is discovering the way they exist in the time and space of language. And for me, that’s where a lot of the excitement of writing poems comes from. So a lot of the spine of these poems comes from that generative impulse. At the same time, though, I am a huge reviser of my own poems, and over time I like to interject shifts and stoppages inside them to complicate and compliment their basic shape. In this impulse, one very important influence on my work has been Dan Bejar/Destroyer. I really love the way his songs interrupt themselves to suddenly proclaim things like “it was 2002,” or “Thursday, 10 PM” and it’s like oh yeah, it’s good that all of a sudden in this song about something else entirely now we know that it’s 2002, or now we know that it’s Thursday at 10 PM, because this information is totally crucial and completely irrelevant at the same time. And I think maybe that’s the case with a lot of the “stuff” inside my poems: the pretzels and bear-suits gain a certain power because they are the only things in the poem-rooms each voice inhabits. I like how naming them makes them so important, so for example that pretzel becomes sort of the realest thing in its poem, the center around which the terms of the narrative space of the poem flexes and distorts. It creates space by filling it. It absorbs light.

As far as dream material goes, it’s tricky because there are so many easy connotations that go along with that: the Surrealists went all in with their dreamy ways, and Breton was way better at PR than anyone ever, and now it seems like as soon as a poet gets equated with dream material or dream logic, they are automatically lumped in as some poor copy or iteration of the Surrealists, and it’s like, hey go wear this Snideley Whiplash mustache and stand outside with all the other boring re-enactors. It almost feels like (for its detractors) the idea of Surrealism has become the poetic equivalent of Swing music: all quotes, no fun. And I have already gotten called a Surrealist, and I do understand why, but there are other movements and poets that I feel much more in concert with. I mean, I really would like to believe that The Black Forest is very much in the Cubist tradition of Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose poems are extremely awake and caffeinated and yet still have a kind of dreamy logic to them, specifically the weird logic of what happens when you realize you’re dreaming, which can lead to feelings of extreme power over space, time, and reality, but can also lead towards ridiculously absurd logic. Here’s an example: I recently had a dream in which I had an amazing idea for a poem to write. After I had the idea, I realized I was dreaming. I decided that I really wanted to figure out a way to remember this idea after waking, because it was probably the best idea I had ever had. And so then the dream turned into this extremely involved and stupid quest to try to find a cell phone, because it made total logical sense to my lucid dreaming self that if only I could find a cell phone, I could text-message my idea to my own phone number. Now, obviously this was insane. But I am very attracted to the certainty of that kind of logic, and I think most of the poems in The Black Forest are about the process of a voice/character looking for logic, and through that logic (though it may be flawed) attaining a kind of recognition, though it may be flat or small or un-epiphanic.

BB: I think all of what you are saying here is well reflected in the book, and strengthened by the motion of the three sections: The Forest Fire, The Hidden Forest, and the Black Forest. Would you talk about the decision to split the book into those sections?

CD: When I first started putting the book together, all I knew was what I wanted the first and last poems to be. Other than that, not much was clear at all. I did have a sense that in some way I wanted to make the book grow more interior as it progressed; for the nature of the reality the poems inhabit to cast longer shadows. Looking over The Black Forest now, it seems to me that the first section is full of poems that look outside themselves at the action of the world, the second section is full of poems looking back at the histories that have led to their current realities, and the third section is trying to solve the question of what happens after a poem has become cognizant of the world it is in and the history that informs it.

As far as naming each section, for a long time, they just had numbers. But when Zach Schomburg was editing the book, one of the questions he raised had to do with sections and section numbers, and being tired of section numbers, and wondering if there might be any other way of organizing or shaping things. It took a while for me to come around to that, but then one day I was looking at the poems and I realized that the last section in the book should really be called “The Black Forest,” like that name could be a flag they all huddled under, and from that it was pretty easy to come up with names for the other sections. I am really happy with what the named sections do: they provide little hints of context, establishing mood and situation without overly determining the reader’s experience of the book as a book. To me, that seems friendly.

BB: Another thing I found very interesting was how time seemed really strange in the context of the references and sometimes the way the speaker talks: there is so much nature and exploration of feeling that seems timeless and pervasive, almost fabulist maybe, and then there will be a way of speaking or a reference to something very modern, such as rating things “Hot or Not” online, or “I’m not joking when I say / they called my mom the Cannon.” I think it further adds to the dreaminess of it, and I wonder how important time was a construct for you in both writing the poems, and maybe in organizing them later?

CD: I wanted to experiment with time with just as much freedom as I was trying to think about space: as I was writing, I hoped to remain open to the possibility that just as each poem might discover the space in which it was located, they could also discover where they were (or weren’t) in time. There are so many wonderful gradations to this: a poem can realize that it is 3 PM, or “evening,” or Winter, or “back then” (which could mean anything) or the Dark Ages, or 2004, or anything. I think reading Tomaž Šalamun was extremely instructive for me in this regard; I love the way the time stamp or dates in his poems can sometimes actually function as the centers of reality from which everything else radiates outward, and it’s amazing, really, how little it matters of those times are “true” or not, but what does matter is what they allow the poet to build around them.

Sometimes before I start writing a poem or working on revising a poem, I like to sit in the study and read other poems for a while, which helps me remember what good poems do. In The Black Forest, there’s a poem called “Heart of 5000 Bear” that I had been sort of stuck in the middle of for a couple of weeks, and I was sitting down one Saturday with the intention of reading for a while and then working on trying to figure out the second half of this poem. That day, I read a Šalamun poem from 1984 called “Sonnet About Milk,” which contains the sentence “Today is Friday, March 7.” I felt excited, because on the particular day when I was reading the poem, it was Saturday, March 8. Even though more than two decades had passed between the day when he wrote the poem, I felt connected through time (or despite time) with its existence. I wanted to mark this somehow in my poem, so I wrote the lines “It’s March 8, a Saturday./ I’ve been sleeping in this poem/ for several weeks,” which carried me towards an ending I wasn’t expecting at all, but that I am very happy with.

In terms of organizing the book, I think the first section introduces a fictional present, an assumed now that hopefully feels “real” enough to hold all the dreaminess you mention, in which the world of the poems as well as the time they take place in becomes increasingly confusing/confused. I begin the book with the poem “Beat the Ranger,” whose first line is “I am from extremely real streets” because I want it to be clear that there is reality at the core of this entire book, that for a world to be dreamy, someone needs to be dreaming it! I also hope that the book’s epigraph, a quote from Shackleton about the difference between perception and reality unfolding over time, helps to suggest this idea.

BB: Any closing feelings on the process and/or feeling of finishing, sending out, and publishing your first book? Any word for the future?

CD: It feels good to have The Black Forest out in the world.  I think it’s a lucky thing to get to work on putting a book together with people who care about the poems and who also happen to have good ideas. Looking back over the book, I know it wouldn’t have turned out nearly as well if Zach hadn’t been my editor or if Drew Scott Swenhaugen hadn’t designed the book itself. They both did phenomenal work on making the book as sweet as it could be, and I love the way it turned out. I love the texture of the cover, the French Flaps, the quality of the paper: everything.

Before the book existed, I didn’t really think very much about giving readings, but there’s something about having the book to read from that I think has suddenly made me better at reading out loud, which I find interesting. It’s like each poem has more gravity now that they are sewn into this physical thing with real weight to it, or maybe it has to do with my desire to lead everyone who is there in the room on a path into the world of the book. Whatever it is, it’s made me excited to take the book out on tour, and I’m hoping to put together a few readings this summer and fall.

As far as the future, I want to try to avoid writing the same poems over and over. I’ve been thinking about this guy named Ted Serios who was a Bellhop in Chicago in the 50s and 60s who claimed to be able to make photographic images appear using only the power of his mind. He called it Thoughtography. I’ve been thinking about trying to make poems happen using only the power of my mind, and I’m not sure exactly what I mean by that.

- – -

The Black Forest is available now from Octopus.

Excerpts can be found at Chris’s blog.

Sheila Heti is the author of five books: the story collection, The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s Books); the novella, Ticknor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); How Should a Person Be? (Henry Holt); and an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse (McSweeney’s McMullins) featuring art by Clare Rojas. With Misha Glouberman, she wrote a book of “conversational philosophy” called The Chairs Are Where the People Go (Faber), which The New Yorker chose as one of its Best Books of 2011. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer, and has contributed long interviews with writers and artists to the magazine.

Michael Kimball: I feel as if I should know why the collection is called The Middle Stories, but I don’t. Tell me?

Sheila Heti: I had been writing these short stories for a few years, in my early twenties, not thinking they would end up as a book, so the stories came first. Then the manuscript. Then I had to think of a title. I spent a lot of time on this, consulting a thesaurus and drawing little book covers in my notebooks. One day between classes (I was university at the time) the title just came to me: The Middle Stories. Pretty instantly I felt a kind of relief and pleasure. I liked the way it sounded. It made sense to me. It was one of those situations where you make your brain work really really hard on a puzzle, then the solution comes from some other-brained place. I recall trying it out in phrases, “Have you read The Middle Stories?” — imagining writers I knew saying it.

Kimball: So let’s talk about how your brain works on a story. I’m most interested in what I think of as the startling aspects in your stories, the things that jolt the reader in different ways. So just to take the first story in the collection, how did you come up with the idea to write a story about a princess and a plumber (and also include a frog in the story, but not let that frog be a prince)? And how did you decide to start the story with that great scene where the princess is tanning in the garden outside the castle and the plumber tries to talk to her. And how did you come up with a line like, “Still, what did a frog know about love?” And what about that scene on the bus where the little girl claims to be “in the middle of a very bad nightmare” (within another characters reality)? Feel free to pick and choose.

Heti: Something funny about this story is that years later, I realised that the video game Super Mario Bros. is about a plumber trying to save a princess. I played that game a lot as a kid, so obviously somewhere in my subconscious was this thing about plumbers wanting to save princesses. But at the time of writing the story, I was not thinking about Super Mario. And you know my story which is a love story between a boy and a monkey? Just recently I was talking to a friend about that ridiculous tale we were taught in school in the ’80s about where AIDS came from (they said a man had sex with a monkey) and I wondered, “Is that where that story of mine came from?”

So I don’t know how the brain makes stories, but it must have to do with deep memories or deep symbols. Certainly when I was writing The Middle Stories there was no conscious deliberation — it was just one sentence following rather quickly on the heels of the previous sentence. I was trying to write as quickly as possible at the time, like to make myself into a kind of writing machine, where I was at once very alert and very exact, trying to write these stories that would come out perfectly, and which I wouldn’t have to edit. So I was training myself to do what felt right in each moment. In some way, it felt like dancing. There’s brain-thought when you’re dancing, but mostly it’s in your body — your body decides your next move. In the case of writing, I think it’s as much in the fingers as in the head. Maybe the fingers get you deeper than the brain does.

Kimball: Yeah, Super Mario Bros, I didn’t even think of that. I wasn’t very good at that one, but maybe the video game is why the story resonates the way it does. And so the fingers: when things feel right on the keyboard, it reminds me of how the fingers can feel so right when playing a video game well. Is there anything in that?

Heti: I don’t know because I was never a good enough video game player! And it’s been so long… But I’ve noticed lately that sometimes an unedited paragraph, just glanced at on the screen, can look messy and wrong, while an edited one can look really smooth and good.

Kimball: One of the most striking things to me about your stories is the way that the matter-of-fact tone works with the modern fairy tales to make anything possible. Could you talk about the tone – how you found your way to it and how you use it to such startling effect?

Heti: I guess since I wasn’t trying to create any effect, the tone ended up matter-of-fact. I don’t know. When I was writing this book, I was just coming out of the world of theatre school, where I was writing plays. When you write plays, you know actors are going to be speaking the lines and adding a lot of the emotion. Perhaps in my head was still that idea that the emotion would be added later. This is just guessing on my part. I didn’t really anticipate anyone finding the stories surprising or matter-of-fact. As for the fairy tale element, I was reading Grimm and Aesop and Hans Christian Anderson at the time, and living at my father’s house, in his basement. My father told me stories every night when I was a child before I went to bed. He would make them up. So maybe some combination of being near my father and having read those stories turned my stories in that direction. But I wasn’t intending to write fairy tales or anything. I was thinking of them as “short stories,” that’s all.

Kimball: In an interview with Dave Hickey, you said, “Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just — I can’t do it.” Could you maybe talk more about the idea of the short story (and fiction) and how it’s changed or how you’ve changed in relation to it?

Heti: When I said that, it was a few years into my work on How Should a Person Be? For a while by that point, writing fiction made no sense to me. It felt really meaningless. It was as if someone said, “Why don’t you do all these math problems” — setting before you a bunch of math problems — “and whatever numbers you come up with as answers with will be fine.” You would just be like, “Why should I bother doing these math problems?” There would be no fun or challenge in it. That’s how writing fiction felt to me: totally unconnected to anything real — both the process and the results.

I don’t know if fiction has changed, or if short stories have changed. But I’ve changed, I guess, in that I wanted to talk more directly to the world when I was writing How Should a Person Be? I didn’t care about that so much with The Middle Stories, so I had to find a way of bringing the world outside myself into my writing. Writing fiction all alone in a room – I just felt too isolated from the world. So I began taping conversations with my friends, and bringing that life into How Should a Person Be? and making up experiments with my friends, which I then wrote about in my novel as though those experiments were our real life. I tried to forge a stronger bond between the two.

Kimball: The stories in The Middle Stories are filled with the idea of the world changing and the characters can do nothing about it. “The Man with the Hat” is a story about change that cannot be controlled. In “The Princess and the Plumber,” the frog says, “The world is changing.” “The Woman Who Lived in Shoe,” the mailman says, “It’s a changing world.” “What Changed” is called, well, “What Changed.” Could you talk about why that idea shows up so explicitly in so many of the stories?

Heti: I never noticed that before. And no one has ever pointed it out until now. I suppose that was just how I felt at the time: that everything was changing. And yet at the same time, there’s a way in the stories in which nothing actually changes. People keep talking about change but everything is quite static, actually. Don’t you think? It’s not like the characters learn things and change. Or act differently as a result of what they’ve lived. That’s real change. I don’t think that ever happens in a story.

Kimball: Right, that’s true. The characters don’t change, but the world changes around them. Here’s a subject change: The opening paragraph of “My Favorite Monkey” made me want to go sit under a tree and see if anything romantic happened. Have you ever done that?

Heti: Probably not, but I think under a tree is a pretty romantic place to be. I wish I sat under trees more.

- – -

Michael Kimball is the author of Dear Everybody and, most recently, Us. His new novel, Big Ray, will publish September 18, 2012 (Bloomsbury).

To read Bhanu Kapil‘s work is to witness it taking shape. It is as if she writes just for us, closing the space between reader and writer. That space, whose medium is the page, is cared for as one cares for a body. It takes on a consciousness. We feel comfortable, cared for, led calmly to scenes beautiful and horrific, and we trust her to be our guide. Kapil’s work is not something the reader can passively consume, it is something of which you are a part. Her novels move poetically; they are fragmented but do not surrender a narrative. She doesn’t just show us that we are looking through a window, she opens it and decorates it by setting photographs on the sill along with flowers, quotes, cups of tea and coffee; she paints it orange and red and yellow and green; she lets the outside world spill in: wind, leaves, mud, shouts of wolf-girls playing in libraries, and conversations between immigrants and cyborgs. Her narrators are liminal and migratory and her worlds strange, unstable, and yet familiar.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of four full-length works of prose/poetry: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space of monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011).  This summer, she is teaching a workshop at the intersection of performance and the novel at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program.  During the year, she teaches full-time at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, and part-time for Goddard College in Plainfield,Vermont.  She also maintains a part-time practice as an integrative bodyworker, focusing on Ayurvedic treatments.  Born in the UK to Indian parents, Bhanu, “dreams of turning into a female Michael Ondaatje, writing proper novels in her garage, which has been converted into a solar-heated hut.  If that doesn’t work out, she will continue to write anti-colonial literatures and pioneer new spa treatments.  Currently, she is working on a paste of chickpea flour, turmeric and rose petals that is guaranteed to brighten even the most winter-bound skin.”  For many years, she blogged at WAS JACK KEROUAC A PUNJABI but then, abruptly, stopped.

The interview with conducted through email.

Rowland Saifi How did you begin 2012?

Bhanu Kapil Feverish.  But well-organized.  With a sequence of notebooks in wire racks in a portable butcher’s block left behind by a neighbor, who lost her adjunct position at Front Range Community College and moved back to Oklahoma to take care of her aging parents.  She had a one-eyed orange tomcat, Matthew.  On New Year’s Day, I lay around on the couch like Lord Chatterton, napping, one arm flopping over the side.  Some friends came over to make mandalas; I made one for BAN, my current writing project.  The quadrants of my mandalas were filled with geometries. I felt anxious.  That night, I began to read Persuasion.  The next day, January 2^nd, I abandoned it for Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Having abandoned my blog due to mild stalker issues, I resumed it, with, paradoxically, a post on nudity.  I theorized nudity. I bought a cutlass for my son’s 11th birthday on January 6^th. With various neighbors and family members, I went for assorted walks by a nearby river to observe the “ice flowers.”  On the night of January 5th, I went outside and saw a “moon rainbow.”  My fever diminished then returned, with a vengeance.

RS Do you find yourself often more attracted to theory over literature? Or as it simply the appeal of Agamben over Austen?

BK Well, yes. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, in her newest book, Becoming Undone — or perhaps she doesn’t; perhaps I’m paraphrasing; perhaps this is something my friend, the post-colonial scholar Andrea Spain, a thesis student of Elizabeth Grosz’s at Buffalo, told me: “The concept is the host of the event.” If fiction as incubation, then the idea of fiction hosts fiction, in this analogy.  I abandon Austen out of distorted and insufficient Englishness. The England I want to read about, for example, is not the England I want to write about.  I want, in my own narrative of British life, to write it’s non-being, it’s there-on-the-floor: the body’s abnegated stance.  Which body?  Whose body? This isn’t something I can always work out in narrative, or through images.  Increasingly, the bodies I am trying to write about – emigrant and pre-emigrant: black-brown –  are the ones that don’t appear, very often, in experimental fiction written in the U.S.  1. How can I write about them?  2.  Is what I am saying about experimental fiction true?  I read theory in order to write sentences.  Maybe this is what a sentence is for: to record the activity that precedes it.  Or: what a body is for [never for.]  “A sentence like a nerve, throbbing on the riverbank.” And so on.  I apologize.  Theory – Puar-Grosz-Haraway, Spivak-Cixous, the theories of migration and mental illness brought forward in the work of Dinesh Bhugra, Kamaldeep Bhui and Peter Jones in the UK – comes [come] closest to these “areas of concern.”

RS So in this sense do you feel that theory addresses what it’s like to be living now more than literature?

BK Yes.  The re-loop, the degradation.  The neomort‘s address [cry.]  My “neomort” is an Indian girl.  To write her, I theorize vectors rather than — trying to understand her, I suppose.  This not trying feels closer to life.  To indifference.  To what it’s actually like: to circulate.  To be/never be.  I am not trying to speak in some kind of code; this is my subject matter.  I can’t seem to have a subject matter without these other kinds of preceding actions and thoughts: the “pre” — as I called it, when I was thinking through the monster.  For the neomort (the girl) (the Ban): all I seem capable of writing is the line that diasppears.  A girl walking home in the first minutes of a race riot, before it might even be called that — the sound of breaking glass as equidistant, as happening/coming (simultaneously) from the street and her home.  The violence is, in this very faint sound of breaking glass, understood (felt) by the body — as racial, sexual, social: at once.  In a literature, how do you write a traumatic narrative without coding for aftermath: the act of narration itself?  I want a literature that is not made from literature.  At the same time, what is this text that loops, inexorably, through ivy/asphalt/glass/girl combinations?  Abraded as it goes?  (Friction.) (Concordance.)  I think, too, of the challenge (in/for a literature) of reproducing (writing): the doppler effect of curved, passing sound that has no fixed source.  In a literature, what would happen to the girl?  Would it be a choice: to walk home (into what?) or away from home, towards the riot proper?  I think, in order to create a movement, there would have to be a choice that I represented somehow, as a writer: I would have to choose a direction and track that, as a narrative activity.  Instead, when I stay with the girl — writing her body in the tiniest increments of its failure to “orient”:  I understand that she is collapsing.  To her knees; then to her side.  It has taken me two years of writing this newest book to understand that my character is committing suicide; that is: exerting “sovereignty” over herself.  At the beginning of this writing, when she “stopped,” I thought about her physical ambivalence as the “choice” she was making; but as her body settled on the asphalt and she turned her face to the ivy, I saw tiny mirrors positioned there — like a Robert Smithson installation.  The London street a tiny jungle: dark green, silver and shimmering a bit, from the gold/brown tights she was wearing under her skirt.  In order to write a girl who stops walking and lies down on a street in the opening scene of a riot that is a real riot — an historical riot — I had to stop trying to make a literature out of what I was doing.  This is why, perhaps, theory works better from here on out, as a way to speak about suicide/the body/performance: this other physical space or activity that’s happening inside the larger scene.  The event of the riot, for example, decays around the body of the girl lying on the street, and at points I am more interested in the rain falling upon her.  In the loose genetics of what makes this street real, the freezing cold, vibrating weather sweeping through South-east England at 4 p.m. on an April afternoon is very painful.  There is a mixture of imaginary and true things happening in the text.  The sensory panel, or circuitry, wires across them: so that sometimes the girl opens her eyes, and sometimes she is dead; sometimes there is a historical day and sometimes there is a street scene reduced to its symbolic elements.  The vector is obliterated.  Everything is so fast, so slow, so wet.  Is this theory?  I want to document the forces a body comes to bear or withstand, not through the articulation of those forces but, rather, their impressions.  This is why a raindrop indents the concrete with atomic intensity.  This is why the dark green, glossy leaves of the ivy are so green: multiple kinds of green: as night falls on the “skirt.”  The outskirts of London: les banlieues.

RS Is this a literature that resists the performance of literature?

BK On the contrary. I spend half my time staring at a mobile butcher’s block. The three wire cages are filled with notebooks and on the chopping board are the books I think will help me resolve the problems I am working on. On top of that is an A4 sized moleskine that sits without a word in it. I thought it would be a substitute for a computer. I was meant to write a first draft during Winter break, but did not.  Should have stuck to a spiral bound college ruled jobby. And so dear Rowland, for all my big talk about theory, I am obsessed with the desire to write a work of literature. I behave like a failed novelist on a regular basis. I recriminate myself for not having come up with a form: for example. I re-read the first three pages of every Sebald novel in my house. I force myself to read Cassandra by Christa Wolf but give up by nightfall.  I get my mother to knit me a blue and white sweater with a unicorn on the back, and Clarice Lispector’s “exploding star” positioned on the stomach.  All of this is performance. When what I really want is to burst out of my own skin.  There is no such thing as skin.  Rowland, are you a writer too?

RS In reading your work, it seems to me that you have found a form, one that addresses problems I confront when thinking of writing. In the way you present narrator who addresses the characters as she writes them, not in a traditionally metafictive way, the narrator is not addressing the text, but a kind of caring for a character in a way that makes them, and the narrator, real, even though the mechanism of writing is revealed. Perhaps it is a way of being responsibly subjective in writing? I think this is what I meant about a literature that resists the performance of literature, I feel your novels resist this performance of objective creation, of chronicler of life by creating a more complete experience of living a text as we read it.

BK Thank you, Rowland; I feel you are making conscious the narrative elements or approaches that are automatic, secret.  It is hard to say: this is what I do.  As in my own life, I only seem to understand what has happened after a subtle delay or extreme delay.  As to characters, yes — I feel that it is not enough, and somehow unethical, to describe the historical body of a mutilated boy or girl.  To work only, that is, through description: which is writing.  Because I am perceiving this body, I have the chance to function, in a kind of reverse time, as — not a witness: but as touch.  To be with.  To accompany.  To touch.  I channel light to a character in the same way that I would channel light to my son, if he was crumpled up from the day; this is not to say all my characters are devastated creatures!  (Or that my child is.) I am thinking of what happened when I encountered the graves of the “wolf-girls” in India, during my research there; my sense of the grave as breathing, pulsing lightly beneath my hand.  The sense too, from other disciplines, of the morphogenic field; the cross-activation and interaction of “inert” particles with each other.  I am thinking, in particular, of Melissa Buzzeo’s presentation on The Devastation, her new manuscript, at last year’s Summer Writing Program at Naropa: how, as she said, the “parts of the dust” might “magnetize” each other.  And how, in the non-local, many writers are working on the parking lot, the monster, the red thread knotted three times around the wrist, Andy Warhol, and Japan.  Structure is empathy.  Writing brings you closer still.

RS There is a shift in style between Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, and Incubation. Although there is a strong placement of the narrator in Vertical, in Incubation you address the reader and even at one point give out your phone number. Was this a conscious shift?

BK As the narrator of Vertical, I was still a person, on the whole, for whom the world was — roughly — intact.  I had a mother and a father, I had a home in England, I had a British passport, I had a husband, I had an extended family of male cousins and uncles.  By the time I came to Incubation, many of these things were no longer true.  Diaspora is shivery and mad.  Diaspora takes the fight out of you.  I think narration, for this second book, came out of these diaspora notes or sensitivities — the feeling that I had lost my place in certain societies for ever.  Perhaps that feeling, that I could slip off completely — slip off what? — resulted in a forceful desire: to link up.  To adhere.  In writing.  In retrospect, that would be an explanation for the kinds of conjugal or friendship factors that appear in “book two.”

RS So breaking the text and having a story in the act of becoming to activate the dyadic and triadic relationships of diaspora in the book itself, rather than to simply have it be a theme or plot point as in a book like Andrea Levy’s Small Island?

BK Yes: to register the event in a place that is not language.   And, as a variation of Small Island (which I loved actually), can I suggest Almost Island — an online journal of experimental writing edited and published in India?  Also, in thinking through the triptych space as national space, I think a “telling” might also register reversed/impeded/recursive movements: diaspora, as narration, has not been, for my family, a consistent trajectory. Breaking the text is not a philosophy of the text, in this sense.  More explicitly, I’ve been trying to think about syntax as the the place where cultural expressions might most accurately unfold.  Unfold is the wrong word.

RS I feel like language is a large part of Humanimal, not just the languages that the wolf girls, Amala and Kamala, are described in by Rev. Singh, the reference to the fragments of a forgotten language the children possess used as a graft for new language and “civilizing,” but also the language you must contend with investigating the project, and the incomplete and repeating alphabet which structures the book. Is there is a connection between these layers and transitions through languages and the interstitial existence of the wolf-girls?

BK The mouth stretched to an “o.” Yes.  How pre-speech sounds are gamete-like: a kind of reproductive material that is simultaneously non-genetic and yet propagates a future way of speaking.  I can say that after the fact of writing, but during the writing of humanimal itself, I think was most interested in attending to the connective tissue of the mouth; how the post-colonial body — or more accurately, the colonized body — is altered [shaped] by the forces upon it: violence, but also: acquiescence.  How “interstitial time,” as you describe it, is passive time.  The time you’re given over to.  I’m still working on the language in your previous question: the “becoming you.”  How a person becomes their own other.  ["Mother."]  The ultimate mutation.

RS How did you start writing? When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

BK Very young.  Almost before I could actually write.  Perhaps at 2 I knew I wanted to be a novelist/priest.  Someone who could sing, read books and be a vehicle for color (light) at the same time.  But, at 12, when I stayed up late on a Thursday night to see Salman Rushdie win the Booker — perhaps then, for the first time, I understood that someone like me: could.  Could look like me and write.  Even before that, at 8, in India, I wrote poems in a bird notebook given to me by a Scottish “aunty” from Hayes, Middlesex — Joyce Morzuch, who was married to a Polish man who had been in Auschwitz.  ”Uncle Bernard” would grow strawberries for me in his tiny greenhouse next to the alley, and Aunty Joyce would make me learn a poem by heart every week, that I would then recite aloud on a Saturday afternoon in lieu of the piano lesson she’d officially been asked to give me.  When she knew I was leaving for India, she pressed that notebook very seriously into my hands, with the injunction, in a thick brogue, to “write about something you see every day.”  At 6, I stood on the table in my “Infants” class and gave talks on “the sun” to my classmates, quizzing them on the meanings of their names. “My name means the sun.  Michelle Whitby, what about your name?  What does it mean?”  “Dunno.”  And so on.  In India, my ecstatic, chess-playing grandfather could recite the national poetry of Turkmenistan from heart.  In this sense, everything has always been poetry, the desire to read poetry and to write it.  I feel punctuation in my body before I see it on the page.  Before I was born, my mother would sit beneath a rose-bush, of pink roses, Queen Elizabeth roses, singing the bhajans of Mira Bai: incubating me.  Before my own son was born, I’d sit in aspen groves in Colorado, hoping to flood him with golden light.  What did I read to him?  I can’t remember.  Something.  From the time I was about 10, my father, every few weeks or so, would pull up outside Foyles or Dillons, hand me a ten pound note, park on the double yellow lines with the engine running and say: “Quick!  Run in, find a book you can’t understand, and come back out.  Five minutes!”  Once, I returned with an anthology of metaphysical poetry and spend the next part of childhood trying to get my head around  The Ecstasie.  On a holiday to the Lake District, when I was 13, Mrs. Manders — the mother of an English woman my father almost married and who inexplicably remained a family friend — waited for me in the car while I sat, with my notebook on my knees, beneath the bridge Wordsworth had written beneath, when he was a child, though it was pouring with rain.  When I got back into the car, it smelled of the milky coffee she’d been drinking from a thermos.

RS In the introductory note to Schizophrene, you wrote, “I tried to write an epic on Partition and its trans-generational effects … On the night I knew my book had failed, I threw it  — in the form of  a notebook, a hand-written final draft — into the garden.” This was in the winter and you retrieved it in the summer and wrote the book off what of the original notebook remained. Is this material aspect to the writing normal in your process?

BK A “pen made of snow.” [Waldrop/Jabes.] Yes, I think it is.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps, most obviously, that the choice to become a writer was identical to the choice to leave my culture, my family, my country.  I gripped that pen like animal.  My notebooks, in some sense, are the only wealth I have.  Once, I lived in the mountains in Colorado.  There was a forest fire.  A wall of orange smoke behind the house.  I tucked my newborn son under one arm and lugged a suitcase of notebooks to the car.  In late adulthood, it is still a fetish of mine to re-create a balcony setting, a cafe scene, in everything I write: a pristine morning near the sea — that “notebook life,” as per Carole Maso’s AVA.  One day, I hope to live in a country I haven’t imagined yet.  I long to write for many hours a day.  A writer I love, John McManus, regularly travels to residencies in France, Spain and South Africa; I force him to send me mobile phone photographs taken from his bedroom window, and to tell me what he had for breakfast.  Materiality — the presence of writing paraphernalia and situations — in my writing: turns out to be the desire to live a more dramatic and sophisticated literary existence than the one I am living now; though I can’t complain.  It is Valentine’s Day.  I had smoked salmon and strawberries for breakfast and wrote in my notebook throughout the bulk of the Tuesday morning faculty meeting.  But perhaps you are also asking me about the evolutionary becoming that a book also is: the book of attempt/remnant, the book of the fragment.  Although I am interested in the earthly and durational processes that alllow these fragments to recombine, to attract, I am also interested in energy: the dramatic energy of lightning and electricty, of fire and water mixed together.  The hallucination.  Energies that forge a new material process, that change the fragments themselves.  To this end, I have been re-reading the POLLEN SEED INDEX at the end of Miyung Mi Kim’s Commons.  “The book,” she writes, “emerges through cycles of erosion and accretion.” Its “rehearsals” function: “not as description, but as activation.”  Function is the wrong word.  At the end of Schizophrene comes an activated, non-human figure, pre-Ban: the funeral urn smashed on a ghat.  The shards of ochre clay reverse theselves toward each other, in the air.  Hovering there, for an instant, no longer than a few seconds, they stream fire and water.  Why?  Not for the book, a fact that makes the book weak, impersonal, a sketch: but for the book-to-be: Ban.

RS What is Ban?

BK Ban is a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash) scraped off the soles of running shoes: Puma, Reebok, Adidas.  Looping the city, Ban is an orbital of smoke.  To summarize, she is the parts of something re-mixed as air: integral, rigid air, circa 1972-1979.  She’s a girl. A black girl in an era when, in solidarity, Caribbean and Asian Brits self-defined as black.  A black (brown) girl encountered in the earliest hour of a race riot, or what will become one by nightfall.  April 23rd, 1979: by morning, anti-racism campaigner, Blair Peach, will be dead.  It is, in this sense, a real day; though Ban is unreal.  She’s both dead and never-living: the part, that is, of life that is never given: an existence.  What, for example, is born in England, but is never, not even on a cloudy day, English?  Under what conditions is a birth not recognized as a birth?  Answer: Ban.  And from Agamben’s Homo Sacer, the accompanying concern of sovereignty and sacrifice: the capacity for a banished person to be murdered.  To step beyond the boundary of the city, in medieval Europe, was to stop living, a marker of which was murder: how can a person be killed when they are “already dead”?  And from Ban: “banlieues.” (The former hunting grounds of King Henry VIII.  Earth-mounds.  Oaks split into several parts by a late-century lightning storm.)  These suburbs are, in places, leafy and industrial; the Nestle factory spools a milky, lilac effluent into the Grand Union canal that runs between Hayes and Southall.  Ban is ten.  Ban is nine.  Ban in eight.  Ban is a girl walking home from school just as a protest starts to escalate; the National Front have decided to hold their annual meeting in the council hall of a neighborhood with an almost entirely immigrant — Indian, Pakistani, Jamaican, Bangladeshi — community.  Pausing at the corner of Lansbury Drive and the Uxbridge Road, she hears something: the far-off sound of breaking glass.  Is it coming from her home or is it coming from the street’s distant clamor?  Faced with these two sources of a sound she instinctively links to violence, the potential of violent acts, Ban lies down.  At first, she’s frozen, then folds to the ground.  This is syntax.  From Agamben, I derive the new idea that by doing so, she is exerting sovereignty over herself: she is sacrificing herself.  Is she?  Ban lies down on the sidewalk next to the ivy.  I narrate that, and this writing is the bulk of my activity between September 2010 and February 2012.  I narrate a person’s decision to lie down forever on the ground, in the rain, in England.  As even more time passes, as the image or instinct to form this image desiccates, as Ban herself becomes a kind of particulate matter, I place tiny mirrors in the ivy behind her body.  I think about the cyclical and artificial light that falls upon her in turns.  Or perhaps the mirrors deflect evil.  Perhaps they protect her from a horde of boys in laced-up Doc Martens, or perhaps they illuminate — in strings of weak light — the part of the scene when these boys, finally, arrive.  I don’t know.  This is the part of Ban — a novel of the race riot — my first formal attempt at an anti-colonial literature — that still continues.  In March, I am going to London, to lie down in the place I am from, where this work is set: on the street I am from.  In the rain.  Next to the ivy.  As I did, for Schizophrene, on the border of Pakistan and India: the two Punjabs.  Nobody sees someone do this.  I want to feel it in my body — the root cause.

- – -

A distant cousin of an Arkansas state champion duck caller, Rowland Saifi is the author of the novella, Karner Blue Estates (Black Lodge Press 2009). Having no idea how to call ducks himself, he teaches writing and literature at a few of places in Chicago, including The School of the Art Institute.

The bottle is ceramic. It has an oatmeal look. I thought, “Oatmeal.” Oatmeal is an OK word to have conked in your kettle while drinking Belgium ale. Has a slight bottled taste to it and that makes some sense. The finish was bitter. I like bitter finishes, I do. I like gas station coffee and going to bed after a big, crazy fight. I find it comforting. One time I took my car for a tire change and afterwards I felt taller. I’m not kidding. I felt taller. My car was purring along. Then about eight minutes later I crashed into a deer committing suicide on highway 69, Indiana. This deer just leapt into its moment. I wanted to take the poor doe home for dinner but they said I’d have to contact the local game ranger and get a special permit and who wants to deal with yet another guy in uniform? Ah, bitter finish, this slouched gray bag of bones, I felt, as I watched my thunked car towed away into the cornshine. There are some peppery notes, too.

What my brother really meant was, “You should have already read that book, like when you were 20.”

It’s one of those books. Kerouac, Salinger, Vonnegut maybe, even that one where the private school guy pushes the other private school guy off a tree, etc. Essential, right? There’s an age window for these things, 17-23 maybe, or you know. Miss that window it’s like the space shuttle (we used to have a space program with actual shuttles, kids) and reentry vectors. Go now! You read the book, it slides into your musty quiver, you go past it onto other things. It’s not disregarded, it’s just done. To read the book at my age is a bit like the grown man wearing a football jersey in public. You know, “that guy.”

Coriander, that light, refreshing treat. Bought at 44 shop under a bridge in Louisiana…loved the nutria po-boy (first one I’ve had boiled, not fried) and the ceramic swing top bottle…it poured a huge fluffy white that did recede like a fatigued or maybe hopeless alligator with nice lacing and fresh white ring…I smell lemon and pepper and I already said coriander and it’s floral with some nice fruit smells…I guess I’m saying it’s complex. What is an ellipsis?

It’s not that I know anything about acid. Or I mean anything I want to say here, in this public space. I’m not going to tell you some big story about Coke cans and alligators (don’t feed them right where you are going to jump in to swim!) or anterior cruciate prayers on the edges of the bleachers, making out with MTV stolen chocolate milk, etc. I’m not. It’s boring. And the acid, here in this book, did not interest me. It wasn’t like I was saying wow I can’t wait to finally see people taking/talking black sunshine and pink Owsley and God’s flesh and window glass and heavenly blue and coffee and green double domes and peace tablets because I’ll relate and nod my head like this (I’m nodding right now, sort of diagonally). Really I thought more about the writing. The prose tripped out, dude, whatever. I mean to say the writing was clearly Day-Glo pink, while the subject matter seemed banal. What was the subject matter? I’m not going into it, sorry. But I did approve of Neal Leon Cassady dropping into the book like some type of Character Fairy. Hi, need a lively character? Someone to drive your plot forward? Go to sleep and let me stip-step right into your manuscript. The man juggles slam-hammers. Strangely, I never thought of Tom Wolfe as precursor to DFW, the tangential flares, the winding, bombastic (did I just go bombastic?) mindbendingy good word-shakes, the lists. I really did admire the lists:

Everybody went forth and hauled in all their stuff, out to the bedrooms, tents, Kampers, sleeping bags, the bus, and brought in a ragamuffin mountain of clothes, shoes, boots, toys, paint pots, toothbrushes, books, boxes, capsules, stashes, letters, litter, junk

…glittering Angel esoterica, chains, Iron Crosses, knives, buttons, coins, keys, wrenches, spark plugs

…all the drive-ins, mobile-home parks, Dairy Queens, superettes, Sunset Strips, auto-accessory stores, septic-tank developments, souvenir shops, snack bars, lay-away furniture stores, Daveniter living rooms, hot-plate hotels, bus-station paperback racks, luncheonette in-the-booth jukebox slots

but this is the real-life jungle, Major. Two-winged flies, dapplewing Anapholes, Culex tarsalis, verruga-crazed Phlebotomus biting 8-day fever and Oriental sores, greenhead rabbit-fever horseflies, tularemic Loa loa, testse mites, Mexican fleas, chinches, chiggers, velvet ants

Their faces are painted in Art Nouveau swirls, their Napoleon hats are painted, masks painted, hair dyed weird, embroidered Chinese pajamas, dresses made out of American flags, Flash Gordon diaphanous polyethylene, supermarket Saran Wrap, India-print coverlets shawls Cossack coats sleeveless fur coats piping frogging Bourbon hash embroidery serapes sarongs saris headbands bows batons vests frock coats clerical magisterial scholar’s robes stripes strips flaps thongs Hookah boots harem boots Mexicali boots Durango boots elf boots Knight boots Mod boots Day-Glo Wellingtons Flagellation boots beads medallions amulets totems…

Wheat/yeast giving off a bit of funk? Could just be that it’s raining outside and the word “oatmeal” has left my mind scrubbed and empty like a wire brush, something? Don’t know. Mouthfeel is appropriate.

Thing is Tom Wolfe can fucking write. I’ve heard some say the same about John Jeremiah Sullivan (whose name sounds like a rhyming nighttime song) but JJS can only write. Why are we talking about JJS? I know, I know, you liked the essay where he went to the Christian rock show. Well, me too, though Christian and rock is oxymoronic and Wolfe can fucking write. There is a difference, but my original point was how strongly—and clearly—DFW drops into the continuum after Wolfe, especially in the CNF arena (wrong word).

I’m wondering now how thick the bottle? Because I emptied it so quickly, in just this one writing thingy. (What is this space?) So. I know you can make a kid drink OJ by getting a fatter, squatty glass. It looks like less in the glass. But, you know, it’s the same.

Q: Would you talk a bit about the book in relation to its title? Why the words “architectures” and “possibility”? What about the phrase “after innovative writing?” Are we now in a post-innovative literary world?

A:  Let me take your last two questions first, and argue that the history of writing (think Petronius’ Satyricon, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Ulysses) has been, not one of dogging conventions, but of continuously undoing them, experimenting with and beyond them, continuously redefining them, exploring the boundaries of the writerly act, of how we might tell our narratives—and hence ourselves, our worlds—differently. So-called conventional acts of writing, then, are the uninteresting detritus of literary history. Innovation is where literary history takes place.

If that’s the case, then contemporary experimentalists are not only continuously in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake.  Hence my pun in the title on the word after.

And so to your initial question: for me, innovative writing represents a possibility space where everything can and should be attempted, challenged, thought, where every architecture should be explored.  In other words, we’re talking about the ideology of form here.  Another way of saying this: meaning suggests meaning, but structure suggests meaning as well. To structure one way rather than another is to convey, not simply aesthetic preference, a matter of taste, but a course of thinking, a way of being in the world, that privileges one approach to “reality” over another. One of the jobs of the innovative is unceasingly to challenge the dominant cultures’ narrativization of “reality,” to remind us that there are always other ways to construct the text of our texts, the texts of our lives, always the possibility of effecting change in both.

To write within the innovative, then, is much more than a creative choice.  It’s an ethical imperative.

Q: The two ubiquitously used classroom texts by Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft and Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, focus, as their titles suggest, on the craft of creative writing. Architectures of Possibility extends its reach past the craft of writing and the borders of the classroom to include topics such as publishing pragmatics, the literary marketplace, and what you term the “tribal ecology” of contemporary writing communities. Would you please talk a bit about your decision to include such subject matter? What is the relationship between craft and community?

A:  Architectures of Possibility isn’t interested, as Burroway’s books are, in perpetuating certain truisms about “craft,” but rather problematizing them, theorizing and questioning the often unconscious assumptions behind them, troubling such traditional writing gestures as, say, temporality, scene, and characterization in an attempt to expand our notions of narrativity, ask ourselves what the consequences might be of writing one way rather than another.

But, as you point out, Architectures of Possibility is also interested in a number of other things, including asking what it means to be an author in the 21st century.  Part of the answer is that here, now, there is no longer such a beast as the isolated writer. That species and the myopic Romantic myth that cultivated it have gone extinct.  (Of course it never really existed; all writing has always been collective: to set pen to paper is to engage with a tradition of genre, with authors throughout history who have shared or are sharing your obsessions, with the person who made your pen, the one who made your paper, etc.)

Rather, to exist as an author is to exist as a literary activist—as someone who understands the corporate paradigm of composing-as-competition has been challenged by one celebrating collaboration and support. Distinctions between editor and writer, critic and poet, reviewer and novelist, academic and publisher, blogger, tweeter have become incrementally more fused and confused … to wonderfully liberating effect.

Now, an author is a person who authors, yes, surely—but she or he is also a person who does a tremendous amount more. An author in the 21st century is somebody who helps make literary culture happen. For the literary activist, writing is only one creative act among many that comprises his or her textual life. Others include editing and bringing out fellow writers’ work in online and print journals and through book publishers, reading and reviewing that work, writing essays about it, teaching it, talking it up, urging others to launch journals and indie presses, running reading series, laboring in arts administration, coordinating innovative writing conferences, launching local writing groups, posting about authors and texts they love on their blogs or via other social networking media.

Which is to say: in 2012, ask not what publishing can do for you; ask what you can do for publishing.

And so we are talking about a new paradigm, which I call tribal ecology, where authors easily move among multifarious clans and loose coalitions based on various forms of aesthetic and existential kinship that attempt existing outside (and not infrequently in direct opposition to) the dominant cultures’ models. The tribal ecology is intent on inventing possibility spaces for possibility spaces.

Q: It seems like one of the big distinctions between Architectures of Possibility and more traditional writing manuals like Writing Fiction is the lack of a prescriptive language toward writing. In many ways this distinction is evident even in the titles: the idea of a possibility space versus that of a singular fiction which one “masters” the “craft” of. The latter is obviously problematic, yet many students seem to crave—maybe even require—its clarity and prescriptiveness. Would you describe some of the strategies you used to avoid prescriptive language and yet remain instructive?

A: This goes back to my point above about the ideology of form. By speaking prescriptively about craft, Burroway leads students to believe there really are rules for writing, that those rules are quantifiable and articulable, and that they are somehow a-cultural and a-historical.  None of those assertions is the case.  My interests, in part, lie in disrupting the seeming stability of her position by asking about those assertions’ underlying assumptions.

For example, I spend one chapter talking about how conventional notions of characterization are essentially Freudian in nature in that they privilege the idea that past traumas account for present action.  They also therefore assume a unified identity through time.  And so on.  I begin the next chapter, however, by asking if it is conceivable, and, if so, how, to invent paths into character formations (and deformations) that make us feel more like (and thus help us think more about how) we feel on this side of the age of uncertainty: i.e., mediated, remediated, illegible, dispersed? Something closer, by way of illustration, not to Freudian interpretation, but Baudrillardian: schizoid selves as pure screens, switching stations for all the data networks flowing within us and without? What would such a “character” look like on the page? What would the page on which “he” or “she” existed look like?  Would such a page necessarily be gendered?  Why?  Why not?

I go on to talk about a number of texts that respond to this problematization of characterization, including Beckett’s astonishing Unnamable, the anti-narrative about that indeterminate, disembodied subject position (“character” is far too strong a word for he/she/it), uncertainly human, pulsing in and out of existence between gender and genderlessness, thereness and nowhere/nowhenness. Its modes of expression are hestitation, skepticism, and comma-spliced syntactic entropy. “But enough of this cursed first person,” it announces at one point in its self-canceling word cascades, “it is really too red a herring. . . . Bah, any old pronoun will do, provided one sees through it. Matter of habit.” And, later, almost an aside: “I. Who might that be?”

Beckett’s limit text serves as a penetrating reminder, in a Nietzschean/Derridean vein, that the pronoun (the heart of the heart of character) is, at the end of the day, a sort of hoax foisted upon us by the culture’s language. That character, self, and identity are quantum fields rather than Newtonian nuggets. The rules of grammar, Beckett’s “novel” undertakes to perform, have been repeatedly misunderstood by philosophy and fiction as a metaphysics.

In other words, I don’t pose components of writing in prescriptive terms, but as a series of potentials and complications that I hope will challenge each writer to think about and answer in her or his own way.

Q: Even in departments that champion innovative writing there seems to be this idea of a graduated pedagogical standard—sort of like in Scientology: there are the teachings and then there are the Teachings. In other words, you have to learn the Balzacian mode before you can unlearn it, or learn past it, whichever the case may be. Do you think this is necessary? Was Architectures of Possibility designed for introductory or more advanced fiction courses?

A:  If one isn’t familiar with the literary tradition one is writing within or against, one is always in danger of repeating it, of simply and myopically reinventing the wheel.  So to a great degree I believe it important to understand as many modes of writing as possible—not only the Balzacian mode, of course, but also the Sternean, the Steinian, the Joycean, etc. That way one can begin to discover one’s own mode, can begin to become who one is, rather than believing that the only living writing is that which wants to be a film when it grows up.

One should, I think, give one’s self over to the long conversation across time and space called literary history—not in order to embrace it, necessarily, but rather better to understand it and position oneself with respect to it.

Architectures of Possibility is designed to function effectively (I hope) at either introductory or more advanced fiction courses, since it both lays out the basics of conventional narrativity and simultaneously brackets those basics.  The idea is that, when it comes to writing (not to mention living), answers are never as engaging or productive as well-placed, well-thought-out questions.

Q: Architectures of Possibility includes at its end a list of 101 “limit texts” that have influenced you to become the innovative writer you are today. By way of this list, you ask the reader to compose her own tenuous, ever-changing anti-canon of limit texts. In addition, Architectures includes an astounding number of interviews with contemporary innovative writers in places where one familiar with the standard creative writing textbook format would expect to find full-length excerpted examples of stories, poems, and essays. First, what is a limit text? And second, would you talk a bit about the decision to include interviews and a suggested reading list, rather than full-length examples of innovative writing?

A:  A limit text is a variety of writing disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite think of them in the same terms again.

Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments, in other words, that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example.

If we carry this notion of Grenzsituationen into the literary domain, we find ourselves thinking about the sorts of books that, once you’ve taken them down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Merely by being in the world, limit texts ask us to embrace possibility spaces, difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. Which writings make up the category will, naturally, vary from reader to reader, depending on what that reader has already encountered by way of innovative projects, his or her background, assumptions, and so on.

As far as building Architectures of Possibility as much around interviews (conducted in good part by my collaborator, Trevor Dodge) and suggested reading lists as chapters—that was essential to the vision of the project.  I wanted the interviews and lists to suggest by their very form that approaches to innovative writing comprise a conversation, not a monologue.  So there are more than forty interviews with innovative authors, editors, and publishers (Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Brian Evenson, Shelley Jackson, Ben Marcus, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Steve Tomasula, Deb Olin Unferth, Joe Wenderoth, Lidia Yuknavitch, et al.) working in diverse media, all designed to present various perspectives, harmonies, and counterpoints to my own position(s).

Again, the idea isn’t to speak from some magisterial space of the Teacher, but rather to generate a zone of opportunities, contentions, inspirations.

Q: One of the things that keeps coming up on the threads devoted to experimental writing is the question of novelty, or newness. In The Higgs-Jameson Experimental Fiction Debate, for example, AD Jameson defines experimental fiction as “that which takes unfamiliarity as its dominant—even to the point of schism.” One of the points in question then is whether or not methods such as the Cut-Up can still be thought of as experimental, given their familiarity in literary history. We’re wondering just how important newness is to innovative writing? Or perhaps another way of asking would be: what role does tradition play in the formation of innovative literatures?

A:  The question of “newness” is a terrifically complicated one. “Newness,” after all, to whom, and when, and where?  Is there an aesthetic object that can exist as something wholly novel?  The idea strikes me as too simple by half.

In certain ways, the issue of “newness” is wrapped up with questions concerning the stability of identity and the problematics of historicity. What I mean is this: where and when one stands with respect to a so-called “innovative” text will inform how one reads its “innovation.” If one’s thirteen, for instance, and has never experienced Cut-Up before, then coming across Burroughs’ Naked Lunch may well turn out to be a life-changing event. But surely one reads Naked Lunch differently at 13 than one does when one is 27, and differently again when one is 47.  This is because one is reading it through the lens of all the texts that have come in between all those years, all the lives, all those thoughts, all the geographies. In what sense can we even say the same person is reading the same book?  Such an assertion strikes me as a kind of grammatical mistake.

Moreover, each time “one” (and now I use the term increasingly loosely) reads Naked Lunch, presumably “one” does so with an ever-increasing sense of literary history, of the novel’s own place within that history, which is composed, not only out of a series of disruptions, but also out of a series of continuities.  The “newness” of Naked Lunch becomes less “new” than “one” originally assumed when “one” discovers that writers like Eliot and Tzara were experimenting with versions of Cut-Up decades before Burroughs.  Does that change “one’s” perspective on the topic?  Of course, but how?  Naked Lunch remains new, and not new, and not not new, all at once.  A complex sense of “newness” exists as both present and absent in “one’s” experience of the text.

One more problem with respect to this question.  Let’s say that at some point in “one’s” life “one” stops reading Naked Lunch as a text somehow embodying “newness.” Does that mean the technique that operates within it can no longer be perceived as “new”?  Of course not.  “One” often experiences Cut-Up as “new” when “one” confronts it in a fresh context—in an unexpected moment, say, in Michael Mejia’s novel Forgetfulness, or in Kenneth Goldsmith’s reimagining for the technique in Soliloquy.

Q: Chapter 19: Literary Activism and the Tribal Ecology offers readers an introduction to the importance and uses of literary community, from publishing to readings, writing reviews, and also giving interviews. Regarding the latter, you offer this advice: “It isn’t a bad idea to approach each [interview] with several topics you would like to see discussed and to guide the interviewer toward them.” Is there anything we haven’t covered in this interview that you’d like to get off your chest?

A: Just this quote by Nietzsche, which I have taped above my computer: “In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

*****

Lance Olsen is the author of more than 20 books of and about innovative writing, including the novels Calendar of Regrets, Head in Flames, and Nietzsche’s Kisses. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Village Voice, BOMB, McSweeneys, and Best American Non-Required Reading. He serves as chair of FC2’s Board of Directors and teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.

Nick Kimbro and Rachel Levy teach and study writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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