Susan Steinberg is the author of the short story collections, Hydroplane (FC2) and The End of Free Love (FC2). Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Columbia, and elsewhere. She has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Vermont Studio Center, The Wurlitzer Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and Yaddo and was recently Scholar-in-Residence in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. She received a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Question #1

Experimental writing, as a category or concept, seems fraught with widespread confusion and misunderstanding.  How exactly would you describe “experimental writing”?  Or, to borrow a question from Kate Sutherland, “What’s Experimental about Experimental Writing?”

Question #2

A few years ago, Marjorie Welish wrote an article for Boston Review about Raymond Queneau, which she concluded by claiming, “Experimental writing is by definition its own adventure, a way characterized most definitely with error yet also with discovery and potential conceptual originality, which in time may well prove significant.”  If we accept Welish’s suggestion that experimental writing is inherently connected to error and discovery, how are readers to determine the success or failure of a particular work of experimental writing?  Without established criteria for evaluation, how can we differentiate between gold and copper?

I do believe that experimental writing is often about trial and error — it certainly is for me — but I don’t believe we’re without established criteria.  I should preface this by saying that I’m no fan of the notion of the “best” in art; I don’t care for the lists.  That said, I think it’s useful to have a discussion about what makes a work of art successful — to its audience, in a context of art like it, in a context of art unlike it.  Perhaps it’s futile to ask questions about plot of a plot-less narrative.  Or to apply the criteria reserved for a formulaic genre piece to a piece which resists narrative.  But I would make the argument that this type of criteria won’t get us very far anyway in a discussion of art.  In a discussion of sales, however, we’ll get somewhere.  So how does one determine the strength and/or success of the work of Virginia Woolf or Djuna Barnes or Lydia Davis or Ben Marcus?  Perhaps we begin by confronting such works — even the most innovative and intimidating — in the way we would any art which truly pushes the boundaries of its own discipline.  And if we can’t find a way in through the usual methods (speaking aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally, contextually, historically) we can always ask what it’s asking to be asked.

Question #3

In his book About Writing, Samuel Delany suggests that many writers (himself included) “no longer see experimental writing as a way to deal with [crisis] aesthetically” (226).  Does this sentiment ring true for you as well?

I haven’t read the book, but I would like to.  It rings true that other writers no longer perceive experimental writing in this way, but for me it is absolutely, in part, “a way to deal with [crisis] aesthetically.”

Question #4

Given Amy King’s recent VIDA article on the under-representation of women in major literary publications, it seems extremely important to acknowledge the fact that gender issues continue to problematize the field of literature.  How would you characterize the relationship between women and experimental literature?

As the Chair of the Board of Directors of VIDA, I have been in dialogue with a lot of writers over the past year, most recently with Carole Maso, about this very thing.  And I’m discovering that for many of us, there is a close relationship:  that is to say one is often doubly marginalized if one is both female and writing experimental fiction.  It’s simultaneously very limiting and very liberating.

Question #5

Which are your favorite works of experimental literature, and why?

Novels — Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway.   Novella — William Gass’s The Pedersen Kid.  Short stories — too many to list, but I would include Denis Johnson’s “Dundun,” Victoria Redel’s “A Day in the Park,” and Ander Monson’s “Bowling Balls Sent Down Through Windows From Overpasses That Stretch Like Spiderwebs Above.”  Because beyond the brilliant line-by-line writing, the formal invention, the “crises” of the stories themselves, these pieces, as great, careful, urgent, considered, fearless works of art, respectfully say fuck you to formula, convention, laziness, and a market that embraces it all.