An interview with Colin Winnette regarding his new short story collection concerning animals, “Animal Collection”
ADJ: Hi, Colin.
CW: Hi, Adam.
ADJ: Let’s talk about your new book, Animal Collection.
CW: OK, but I think Adam Robinson has already posted something. Does HG have a policy against there being two posts on the same topic?
ADJ: No, it’s OK so long as both guys are named Adam.
… But let’s you and I make small talk, instead. You moved to San Francisco recently. How’s that been working out?
CW: I went to Target today for bookshelves—
ADJ: They have Targets in San Francisco?
CW: They do! The San Franciscan Targets.
ADJ: Have you heard what James Howard Kunstler said about Target?
CW: No, what?
Composing the Decomposed: A Review of Amelia Gray’s Threats
Threats
by Amelia Gray
FSG Originals, February 2012
288 pages / $14 Buy from Amazon
You’re in someone else’s body but you’re not really in someone else’s body, you’re in your own body, lying next to someone else’s body. “An embarrassment of childhood odor” – is it coming from your body? – steams around you, and you may or may not be wearing a fireman’s suit. This is what it feels like when Franny dies.
Franny: a large woman who wears five layers of lipstick and “smells like stones.” Franny: your wife. How she died, although you were there with her when she did, remains a mystery, even to you. A mystery: this is what it feels like to live.
This is also what it feels like to read Amelia Gray’s debut novel, Threats, out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux last month. To read it is to succumb to the emotional torpor and physical disorientation that is life after the death of a loved one. This means: a fair amount of hallucination, an undertone of deep sadness, intermittent boredom, and shots of curious paranoia. This means: laughing out loud and worrying that you shouldn’t be laughing because, hello, someone died and life is sad. This means: being as confused as David (our numb hero) is when he receives the “threats” the book is named for, finding a terrifying note in the crack behind the mirror, not worrying about what it means, or else worrying a lot, wondering who the hell has left it for you, who might be out to get you, and if Franny might be – tragically, for that would mean she’s left you – still alive.
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April 13th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
April 13th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
linkdump.com
Today seems quiet. Everyone is probably packing?
Threats by Amelia Gray is out, and I can tell you it’ll do to your head/brain/skull all things promised, and more. (I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy, borrowed from someone who had borrowed it [now I have my own], but it is available HERE)
Picador has been reprinting the novels of Donald Antrim with new intros: George Saunders (The Verificationist), Jonathan Franzen (The Hundred Brothers), and Jeffrey Eugenides (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World). Elect Mr. Robinson… will be out this June.
Kaleidoscope is a randomized novella by Jianyu Pên.
Madras Press recently released a special edition of “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link, with illustrations and a letterpressed cover.
The second issue of The Coffin Factory just came out, with work by Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, Edwidge Danticat, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, etc. (more later)
The Guggenheim has digitized many of its (out-of-print) publications.
Redivider FINALLY (yes I’m calling you out) has an updated website with the new issue, featuring the talented Mike Young, Mary Miller, J.A. Tyler, Melissa Broder, etc. The cover is nice:
Some of these things will be available at AWP. Do you think someone will write a blog post soon called “AWP recap?” What if that didn’t happen?
12 Arctic Char Consulting a Doctor
2. What you want is reliable quality. Like a Glock. The new Diagram is up. I enjoyed Scott McFarland’s “Teenagers with Glocks,” a take/homage on We Real Cool, a poem Gwendolyn Brooks grew to detest, to not want to read, to not want as her “one hit.” But come on, Gwen. Most poets have zero hits.
1. Rather than trimming their sails, a number of independent booksellers are taking a page from Amazon by producing titles themselves.
3. NANO fiction winter sale all that.
12. How to tie the 5 best fishing knots:
5. I see maybe (emphasize maybe) 2 films a year, as in going to actual movies. I saw Dragon Tattoo thingy. I did not leave depressed. Plot (and this is a plot heavy film) pretty much held together. Acting was passable by today’s standards (Rooney Mara very strong). Cinematography didn’t utilize the setting as it could/should have, but it wasn’t weak or distracting/jarring. So then I stumbled on Nordic Noir. Why would Nordic Noir be so literate/popular? Because:
Norway remains, in most people’s consciousnesses, the most imposing of the Nordic countries, with the ancient legacy of the Vikings still casting a shadow over the country (and foreign perceptions of it).
Many of us do seem to be having an Ingmar Bergman moment right now. We love to slouch on our IKEA sofas watching the characters in “Mad Men” as they ruminate on the loneliness and impotence of their lives while staring silently off into darkened rooms filled with Danish modern furniture.
Three factors underpin the success of Nordic crime fiction: language, heroes and setting.
OK
6. The biggest obstacle to me publishing Wild Grass was finding the courage to self-publish. So many people told me it was a bad idea, but deep down I knew it was what I wanted to do.
7. Look, a Caitlin Horrocks story at the Paris Review. Read this.
8. Need a resolution? I suggest never leave “the house without a gun, a knife and a flashlight” Indeed. Lives saved. Or you could just tip properly.
9. Oliver Stone (yes, him) talking about writing in a way maybe we haven’t seen so much? You should probably go ahead and watch this (and the first part). Audience questions, sometimes conflict, a nuanced and, well, interesting Q & A. Be sure to check out the SPAZ “little boy” at 5 minute mark. Wow.
10. How about Amelia Gray rocking the LA Times? She has a ‘face to watch.’ I agree since her face is highly watchable and her prose is highly readable. Gray is actually my current most-given-book-to-promising-students book I give. And it always works. She rocks them. She is the “gateway drug” to better reading, me thinks.
wallop
And the trouble people took to attach a modern-sounding label to these texts and to create a special genre-haven’t there been short texts since way back when? So people were, perhaps they still are, fidgeting with blaster, sudden fiction, flash fiction, prose poem and attempting to segregate these texts. The quality of the thing ought to be foregrounded. -Diane Williams
I believe a reader must work harder in interpreting flash, filling in those gaps with his or her own experiences. -Kim Chinquee
I love the immediacy of the medium–of reading a story that is not only compressed, but memorable in the images that are presented. -Meg Tuite
I had long admired the very short stories of Kafka, Borges, Hempel, others, before I gave the idea of length any real thought. -Pamela Painter.
I’ve been very interested to see what different writers have done with the very short form. It can go in so many directions, and whether one chooses a sort of mini-essay or mini-narrative or prose poem, meditation, etc., each will be quite different because the mind of each different writer comes through so clearly–the writer’s way of thinking, viewing the world, and then of course his or her way of handling language. In such a short form, each word has to be right. -Lydia Davis
I think my stories start fairly short, somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-300 words, and often stay there. -Chella Courington
I’ve always read the shortest stories I could get my hands on. It’s always appealed, the power to receive the full scope of a piece, to tour all the feelings the writer wants you to feel in one uninterrupted moment. It’s so easy to be brutal without consequence to characters in the shortest form. -Amelia Gray
I also think it’s the least egotistical form of writing. Not a lot of show-offs go into writing flash. None that I know anyway. -Mary Hamilton
Two Videos
No Perch does readings in unusual places. Here, Amelia Gray reads from Threats on a moped. (That video quality? How on earth?)
Mule & Pear is a new book of poetry by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and has a book trailer I really love which is saying something because I do not care for book trailers.
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Amelia Gray}
Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2). Her first novel, THREATS, is due Winter 2012 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Concept Flash
The Concept Flash is not about an emotion (that would be expressionism, aka Kafka), but rather something larger, an idea.
The idea is then set, into concrete.
The logic of the idea follows the dialectic of the concept. This can assist you, in a structural sense, or even with the setting, characterization, narrative, etc. The attributes of the concept can be appropriated for technique within the flash. The concept flash is infinite in its manner. You could write a lifetime of these: ideas in our lives represented as things. Stop digging holes with your fingers. I am offering a type of shovel. OK, a spoon.
Will you shut up and provide an example?
Yes, I will provide an example.
Cube by Amelia Gray.
Blake Butler—
Mega congratulations to Amelia Gray on selling her third book, tentatively titled THREATS, to FSG! What you know about dat????????? Screwed up clique on the rise.
19
Deus ex McFlurry: An Interview with Amelia Gray
This year saw the release of Amelia Gray’s second book, a collection of texts from FC2 called Museum of the Weird. More than a simple consolidation of stories into a single body, or even a creation of texts within the confines of one body and a strong mind, Museum of the Weird seems an object bent out of the mysterious and new, taking foreign objects, mysterious relations, freak peoples, and bringing them together in a wilding chorus of the strange and, holy shit, the entertaining, addictive. Last month I traded a bunch of emails with Amelia re: the new book, how she works, the function of belief, fate, trying, and just what the hell is with all the eating of the hair that shows up all throughout her writing.
* * *
B: Amelia, your prose has an interesting quality of being at once familiar and intuitive, while also at a seeming kind of remove: beyond just using objects and animals as active elements, there is at all times a feeling that you are way back in there somewhere, narrating your way your way rationally out of these intensely messed up, or as you say “weird,” prompts. Do you think your writing is a kind of emotional propaganda? Is all writing emotional propaganda?
A: The phrase “emotional propaganda” strikes me as redundant because any effective piece of rhetoric contains some emotional element. In propaganda and in writing there is an actor with an intent and an audience, a communicating element and a receiving element. Effective propaganda sets up a world in which only one outcome is possible in the same way that a great tragic story drives its characters towards an inescapable fate. So sure, in the way each genre stands as a completed product, writing is a kind of message propaganda that ultimately stands to aid or question a cause/idea/person. Fiction tends to attack or support ideas like love or trust or babies via scenes and characters, while war propaganda, for example–thinking of WWII posters here–attacks or supports a country or cause using ideas like love or trust or babies. There’s an emotional appeal in each, driven towards a point or points.
The biggest difference is that war propaganda or motivational speeches tend to get created with a message in mind beforehand, while fiction doesn’t have to be created in the same way (though it can be). When I write, I tend to start with a very basic idea or image (all these could be described as prompts, sure) and write my way out of it. Someone creating a political image might do the opposite–begin with a larger point and work to seek out its supporting evidence–but we end up in roughly the same place.
“Propaganda” doesn’t insinuate emptiness, nor does it have to suggest a singular message, nor does it have to be negative, but it does suggest that there’s ultimately a point to every message. Same with fiction or poetry or advertising or journalism: if a string of letters doesn’t make any words, the point might be that there’s no point, or there might be a different point, point is there’s a point.
B: Once you have your idea, say, babies, how do you go about “writing your way out of it”? How do you know when you are “out”?
A: In the story I wrote about babies called “Babies,” I started with an ordinary fear of accidental pregnancy and unwilling parents and put it into the context of an irrational fear, where the baby is immediately there and there’s no time to have serious conversations or hold a baby shower or make a doctor’s appointment. The ordinary fear combines with the irrational fear and sets off a rational string of events. Obviously the woman is going to want to clean everything up. The baby is hungry, there’s no food in the house. That’s a more comic story, things are lightly touched. I could have made it more about umbilical cord infections or traumatic blood loss or flesh ripping or whatever, but I wanted to keep the real bumping up against the unreal, babies floating inside balloons. At the end I felt the impulse to make it a happy story, where the relationship is saved and the individuals are improved, and then I felt the impulse to crush that impulse in as few words as possible, and then I felt I was out. I had the plot of that story down fast, so I remember the impulses shifting. That’s not how it always goes but it’s how it went then.
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November 29th, 2010 / 1:22 pm
November 29th, 2010 / 1:22 pm
Live Giants 10: Amelia Gray
Thanks to everyone for watching, to Amelia Gray for reading, and to Mary Hamilton for handling the internet questions.
At any point you can pick up a copy of Amelia’s brand new Museum of the Weird here.
Nick Antosca—
Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by J. Robert Lennon. Congratulations, Amelia!
Opening Sentences
Openings in directly quoted dialogue:(*)
“‘Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.’” – Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth
“’49 Wyatt, 01549 Wyatt.” – In Parenthesis, David Jones
“‘Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,’ she said.” – “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” Amy Hempel
Openings simply establishing who speaks and/or when and where we are in space and/or time:
“William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen.” – Stoner, John Williams
“When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another.” – “Water Liars,” Barry Hannah
“I am Gimpel the Fool.” – “Gimpel the Fool,” Isaac Bashevis Singer READ MORE >
Round this–
A new major book review section is about to open, at… the Wall Street Journal?
Jeff T. Johnson’s got an essay on “The New Hybridity” at Fanzine.
Castro thinks Ahmadinejad should stop slandering the Jews. You can add that to the list of things Castro and I agree about.
Mathias Svalina has been writing Book Proposals for Broadway Books. From “My Year on a Moving Sidewalk”:
This book will be popular among readers who enjoyed such books at Mary Roach’s Stiff, Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars & the City of Portland, Oregon’s downloadable pdf “SIDEWALK REPAIR MANUAL: How to Repair and Maintain a Sidewalk.”
Bianca Stone has a new chapbook coming out. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows is now available for pre-order from Argos Books.
Tender, imaginative, wry and wise, the poems in Stone’s first collection take the reader from the bottom of the ocean to the orbit of the moon. In between, the geography of the heart is mapped lyrically and unexpectedly.
Not a lot to complain about in that description, is there?
At the Faster Times, Kyle Minor absolutely loses his shit over Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird. I stopped pretending I could follow what he was talking about somewhere toward the middle, but the upshot seems to be that he likes her book very, very much.
And finally, as if you needed me to tell you, the launch event for Richard Yates is at BookCourt tonight. It begins in about ten hours, which means that I am going to leave my house in a few minutes to head down there and claim a seat.
Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird
This is one for the decade, and came out today. You are going to need at least 1-3 copies. I’d say more but you probably already know. Or here are blurbs.
“Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird is a cabinet of curiosities—a talking armadillo, a serial killer named God, a woman who amputates her toes for dinner, a man married to a paring knife—this collection of stories is so good and funny and wondrous that I couldn’t look away from her dark and curious imagination.”—Michael Kimball
“To say Amelia Gray belongs in the hilariously inventive hallows of Ann Quin and Rikki Ducornet would be to miss her light. This book is gleaming evidence of the author as a trophy case unto herself, wrought of magic equally surprising, wicked, giddy, and loaded with a megaton of Boom.”—Blake Butler
[Here is a sample text from the book: There Will Be Sense.]
Get get now. Do the get. Get the real: straight from FC2.
Or also available here.
“Every word was once an animal. – Emerson” – Marcus
Today, at Community Thrift on 17th and Valencia, I bought these books for $2.50. The first page of Dear Mr. Capote says “Ed Seifert” in pencil. Wonder if he’s related to George, who won the Super Bowl. Jaroslav won the Nobel Prize. My family farmed the rim of the Dust Bowl and nearly made it stinking rich off a bunch of black sand but didn’t. It seems “Seifert” comes from “cipher.” Encoding words is a form of mathematics. “Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.” – Michael Marcus
Tomorrow I’m reading at Amnesia, at nine o’clock, with Lindsay Hunter, Amelia Gray, and Aaron Burch. Wearing a coonskin cap and a corduroy suit, I will read from my novel for the very first time. The novel is called A Dog On Onondaga. I vow to never finish writing it, but to self-publish new handbound editions whenever I feel like it. Maybe you think that’s vain. Sometimes I stare in the mirror for oceans of time, for no reason. Your opinion of me is so much sand on the beach of yesterday. Three days ago part of me did something immoral; the rest of me has only begun to feel bad. Another part of me wants desperately to be lost in the desert with a backpack full of books; but that can probably wait until the winter of my content. I plan to go to the community pool tomorrow, so that my body will remember what it was like when it was a word. READ MORE >
Matthew Simmons—
Amelia Gray threatened an audience at a reading. The New Republic wrote about it.
4 Loonmachines
1. New online edition of Gigantic Magazine is now live for May.
2. DC’s exhibits 50 treehouses
3. Mark Baumer is walking and blogging across America from coast to coast (for real, he just started this weekend)
4. Amelia Gray’s constraint writing & media for this week at Everyday Genius
Blake Butler—
Amelia Gray makes sense out of the Publishers Weekly and WILLA kerfuffle at the Huffington Post: “To vastly extrapolate, assuming that the number of top-quality male and female writers is equally distributed, most journals would publish more men than women, without even considering bias.”
Blake Butler—
Zach Dodson and Amelia Gray talk shop over at the Powell’s book blog, about finalizing a book, publishing, monsoons, and $$$. “For a long while Jonathan (my partner in featherproof) was playing the lottery with the sole purpose of funding the press.”
