David Peak Has a Conversation with Keith Nathan Brown
Keith Nathan Brown is one of my favorite writers.
His writing is playful but intense, exploratory but precise. Whether he’s skewing form, “The Tongue,” or using chunks of language to capture nothing less than an immensity, “Insomnia of the Soil,” he is almost always profound in an intimate way—and often very funny. He’s an original in the rarest sense, meaning that his pieces are often instantly recognizable as having been penned by Keith Nathan Brown, yet remaining distinct from one another in the ways that really matter: in tone, in form, in subject.
Keith’s new collection, Embodied: A Psycho-Soma in Poetry and Prose, was just released by Sententia Books. I believe it is a book well worth your time, whatever your taste in literature. It takes a special kind of book to leave you hungry after finishing its last page, to leave you questioning the things you hold as absolutes. That’s how I felt after reading Embodied.
Luckily, Keith was nice enough to patiently sift through my emails over the course of a few weeks, and attempt to help me make sense of it all. READ MORE >
Catching up with comics and cartooning maestro Tom Eaton
Tom and I both attended Penn State in the mid-to-late 1990s. After graduation we became friends, then gradually lost touch in the circus that is life. I recently decided to catch up with him again by interviewing him. Read on to learn about his collaborations with Sufjan Stevens, Danielson, Shara Worden, and Rosie Thomas, as well as his work for Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and the Cartoon Network; and above all else to see many examples of his mighty cartooning art. —Adam
A D JAMESON: If I remember correctly, we met in 1998 or 1999. I had just graduated from Penn State, where I’d found some of your minicomics at Comic Swap. I enjoyed them tremendously!
TOM EATON: I’m so glad you enjoyed them. You must have been the target audience. I put them out at Comic Swap, and some of the record stores.
ADJ: I remember specifically finding the Valentine’s Day one, right around Valentine’s Day.
TE: Good! I was proud of that one…
Interview With Leni Zumas (The Listeners)
Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City) and the novel The Listeners, recently out from Tin House in 2012. Her fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Open City, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, New York Tyrant, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and other magazines. She is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Portland State University.
Tin House says of her new novel: “Leni Zumas portrays a world twisted on its axis by loss, in all its grotesque beauty. From the first line the prose is glorious: pricklingly honest and hallucinatory, a lucid dream world realized. The Listeners marks the debut of a major American writer.”
Check out the haunting book trailer by artist Luca Dipierro.
This interview was conducted through email.
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Genevieve Hudson: The Listeners is filled with examples of renaming, not naming, and unusual descriptions. One example that comes to mind is a boy you describe as “a calamity-haired baby spark.” Do you think of ways to defamiliarize as you write? How does it play a part in your process?
Leni Zumas: My debt to Viktor Shklovsky is huge. Reading his essay “Art as Technique” years ago broke wide open, for me, the idea of strangeness in fiction. In Shklovsky’s view, “estrangement” is crucial to sensation: the reader must experience something as slightly off-kilter, off-expectation, in order to see/hear/feel it as if for the first time (and thereby to be moved by it). The things we’ve already seen—or believe we already know—lose their ability to move us. So as I wrote The Listeners, I was always trying to avoid terms so familiar they’ve grown dead, or at least deadening.
Interview with Guillaume Morissette
Q: Hi, Guillaume. Who are some of your favorite authors/what are some of your favorite books?
A: A nonfiction book called, ‘A History of Celibacy’, I forget its author. Also Mark Leyner, Clarice Lispector, recent stuff like Lidia Yuknavitch/Tao Lin/Blake Butler, Bill Bissett, older stuff like René Daumal/Ikkyu/Pessoa, canon stuff like Ann Beattie/Lorrie Moore/Lydia Davis/Amy Hempel, Jean Rhys, Alain Robbe-Grillet, some Saul Bellow, ‘The People of Paper’ by Salvador Plascencia, other things.
Q: I’m a big fan of Clarice Lispector. Which one(s) have you read? What do you like about her?
A: I recommend, ‘Hour of The Star’ to people a lot. For a while, she didn’t feel like a human person to me, she felt like some sort of superhuman or terminator sent from the future to write sharp commanding novels with intensely lucid individual sentences, like I read somewhere that after ‘Passion According To GH’, she fell asleep holding a cigarette and injured her typing hand in the fire and then somehow still went on to produce another 8-10 books after that. Then at some point I read, ‘Near To The Wild Heart’, her first novel, and it made me feel closer to her and think of her as a person, and that made me question what I wanted my own writing to make me ‘come across as’, and my answer to that was: flawed, profoundly flawed, but hopefully lucid about the flaws and maybe minimally theatrical about them.
Mike Young—
“Blotting out the stars / Was only compositional.” — from “Painting” by Jared White in Sink Review. Long but worth it. HBD JW.
Comments Off on From the “Save Poetry From the Internet” Document I’ve Started Pasting Things Into at Work
jeffrey steingarten on writing
I find that you wake up in the morning and the first thing you want is some alcohol.
I think that it’s bigoted of farmers to get up so early.
What I really meant to say was that I felt doomed and damaged, defective, disabled, and depressed.
On a practical note, I did find that switching from cold lemonade to hot and back again alleviated the mounting boredom.
And what does butter taste like?
What we need is a system of graduated fines and perhaps short jail sentences to discourage the production of totally depressing baked goods.
Grease is good. Grease works.
Yes, we had drunk a nicotine solution in our cocktails.
The Greek are really good at white statues.
People from Colorado are like cholesterol, blocking our city’s arteries.
One snowy afternoon I found myself alone in a room with four pounds of pork.
But I’d had a huge lunch, you know?
What’s so bad about addiction? I can’t remember. Isn’t it something about giving up your freedom? Isn’t freedom an illusion?
Her Pineapple Salad Surprise contains ketchup, fat-free Miracle Whip, lobsters, and Cointreau.
Oh, are you an MSG crybaby?
I apologize for not completing the fast in a responsible and instructive manner.
Talking with Okla Elliott
Okla Elliott’s published drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, A Public Space, and The Southeast Review, among others. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks—The Mutable Wheel; Lucid Bodies and Other Poems; and A Vulgar Geography—and he co-edited (with Kyle Minor) The Other Chekhov. His new book, From the Crooked Timber is out now from Press 53. You can get it from Amazon
To help celebrate the recent publication of From the Crooked Timber I asked him a few questions and got him to talk about a bunch of things, from art to politics to influence to the narcissism of minute differences.
TOM CLANCY: POETRY OF DAD’S DEATHSTATE
>> INTERVIEW <<
Clancy predicts a totally unfunded secret intelligence agency that publishes eBooks that go on to predict the state of war and peace. He is the cultural side of the police state – the non-state state. He predates Jack Bauer by decades. He invents a protomasculine character haunted by the cold war, in seamless transition into the near-warless future. The 90s never died, they just killed. Every dad read this shit and every dad wondered what would need to be done in a worse-case scenario. Wife, kids, house, Xbox, netbook, and cruise missile. Tom Clancy’s next book will be about the war that hasn’t happened yet. The big war. The quiet war that lasts forever. Drone strikes like cymbal crashes. Cyber attacks by children in China. An Etsy dirty bomb. The the hyperpoliticical bedroom radicalism of London’s East End Tumblr scene. He only wants to tell us that we are never safe from stories of violence and instability. There is always the threat that our lives might need to mean something: quickly, violently, profitably.