Bridging the Gap Between Gameplay and Storytelling: A Normal Interview with Robert Denton Bryant and Keith Giglio

By Christina Legler

In Slay the Dragon, Robert Denton Bryant and Keith Giglio lay to rest a few misconceptions aspiring game writers and players alike often have about game writing: gameplay and narrative, they argue, must work cooperatively in a video game. As Slay the Dragon clarifies, there is a certain gap between these two elements of the video game that gamers do not understand about writing, and writers do not understand about gaming.

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Christina Legler: To start, how did you get into video game writing? I understand that both of you have been involved in film and screenwriting, and you both hold MFAs in film and television. How did your backgrounds and professional experiences lead you to game writing?

Robert Denton Bryant: I’ve actually never held the title “game writer,” although I hope to someday. I've been writing all my life . . .

—that’s what got me interested in screenwriting and filmmaking—but I entered the games industry as a tester and then moved up as a lead tester, quality assurance manager, producer, executive producer, and studio director. Along the way I filled in there and there, worked with developers and writers, and saw that very often game designers have an awkward relationship with narrative. When I hired Keith to write a big virtual world game I was exec producing, we experienced that awkward relationship first-hand. And that gave rise to Slay the Dragon.

Keith Giglio: I went with Bob to E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, one year. The room was filled with monitors displaying the new AAA video games . . .

. . . The “trailers” for these games were fascinating. I was instantly taken with the new arena for narrative storytelling. Years later, during the WGA strike, I needed a job and was lucky to land one working for Bob. My assignment was to help turn a toy company’s intellectual property (toys, dollars) into video game content. It was like putting together a puzzle. I had all these assets (setting and characters) designed, but no story.

CL: In an early chapter of Slay the Dragon, you, Bob, relate a tale of when you had an awesome idea for a He-Man video game while working for Mattel that did not fly because your story idea exceeded programming limitations. How did you both handle this transition into game writing when you realized that the limits of game development affect storytelling?

RDB: I think it was much less about programming limitations; everything I wanted to do in that game was do-able in 3D game engines at the time. The problem was scope (my pitch was epic), and, more specifically, I was much more enamored with telling a story than with creating an experience for the player. I had that humbling moment that every writer has when they start talking to game developers. It’s That Moment When you realize that in a game it’s not the writer’s story that matters; it’s the player’s story.

KG: I like a current trend in movies and television of “breadcrumb” storytelling. The audience has to piece together narrative by things they see or hear in the game narrative. Information is there for you to gather and deduce what the narrative or backstory might be. You can see this type of storytelling cropping up in more Hollywood content. A Quiet Place is basically a survival game. No one is telling us about the aliens, we can figure it out by what we see on the walls. Then of course there is Ready Player One, which feels like a video game come to life. Spielberg really knows how to push the tropes.

CL: Game writing is a collaborative effort, something that we as writers of short stories, novels, essays, and poetry may not understand or like. How does working on a collaborative team of developers and writers for a video game compare to, say, co-writing a book with a friend, such as Slay the Dragon? Where is creativity compromised?

KG: By the designers and game producers who do not involve a game writer early in the process. Look at the new God of War. It was rebooted for story. Video game writers are guns for hire unless they are brand name. Engineers know how to code; animators know how to draw and design and bring sketches to life. These are skills which no writer has. But everyone who works on a game thinks they are a writer, because they have played games. They figure if they can write a sentence, they are writers. Sadly, not true. So creativity is compromised by lack of narrative education on the part of the game makers. Game creators like Ken Levine and David Jaffe are literate in screenwriting and narrative structure. This shows in their creation.  I remember writing something for the toy company and was told that scene didn’t work because the level was already designed and we did not have enough polygons. Polygons? They didn’t have enough story!

CL: And, if I may humbly add to that list of mastermind game creators, Neil Druckmann! If these creative geniuses, who not only develop but write as well, were involved in the process from start to finish, we would end up with games that are a more even mixture of story and gameplay/development. If, of course, story matters to them, or if story is the objective.

RDB: Most definitely. We discuss Neil and [The] Last of Us extensively in the book. It’s funny—I misread the question as “when is creativity compressed.” I think the short answer is that creativity is compromised the moment you ask a third party to mediate between you and the audience whose money you want. If you’re not expecting any money from anyone, ever, you can have virtually unlimited creative freedom. If you can sell directly to your audience, ditto, although you have to be mindful of their expectations if you want them to continue buying your work. But if you want a studio to buy your script, or a publisher to finance and distribute your game, there will be collaboration, and some of it may be brutal. This is not always a bad thing. I think limits and boundaries—set by formats, genres, budgets, partner expectations, audience expectations, or your own eagerness for a challenge—can force any artist to grow creatively by turning them into problem solvers.

CL: I understand that you both teach or have taught game writing at universities. What does such a class entail?

RDB: We got started teaching game writing because of the arguments we would have working on our game together. It was obvious that this creative tension between storytelling and game design was worth exploring in a class. Keith had already been teaching screenwriting through The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, so he suggested we pitch a game writing class so that we could present this problem to students and have them tell us how to resolve it. Students in The Writers’ Program were, typically, writers and not game developers, so we found that we had to spend a little time getting them ramped up on basics of game design. In the same way, when our students are mostly game developers, we have to focus a little more on such writerly topics as characters and story structure. The more writers understand gameplay, and game designers understand the emotional journey of a character, the more involving the games they create will be.

KG: Gamers are the original Netflix “bingers.” The kids who take any video game writing course know every game and game characters. They are a passionate group.

CL: In Slay the Dragon, you explain that story depends upon gameplay rather than the other way around. Do you believe that with games like The Last of Us (which focuses heavily on character and story), storytelling is becoming more important in games than it used to be?

KG: Yes and no. I think sadly games have moved to more cooperative play and less you-are-the-hero games. Also with the rise of mobile gaming, there is little or no room for narrative.

RDB: I think any time you talk about “games” as a monolithic, homogenous medium, you’re in danger of running off the tracks.

CL: Good point, because not all games follow the same formula or fit into one big, encompassing genre.

RDB: Exactly. I get frustrated when folks, even players, make sweeping generalizations about “all games” that would be laughed down if they were similarly broad generalizations about “all movies.” Games are a giant, complex, diverse medium. You can point to tens of thousands of recent, popular, and profitable games in which storytelling occupies a very marginal space, if at all, and that’s okay. There’s not much storytelling in Fortnight’s Battle Royale mode, beyond its crazy Hunger Games-like premise, yet it’s one of the hottest games right now. What’s also clear, though, is that for those players who are looking for involving stories, the number of choices have never been better, ranging from indie games like Firewatch and Kentucky Route Zero to story-driven triple-A games like the new God of War.

CL: I would argue that video games have become more “mainstream” nowadays than they were decades ago. By this, I mean that people who play games now don’t necessarily identify as gamers, but simply as people who occasionally play games. Do you agree with this?

RDB: What we know now about the medium, that it took several generations to understand, is that a substantial number of game players play games for life. When they have kids, they’re more understanding about letting their kids play games themselves. Both daughters and sons—every year, the number of women who play video games gets closer to 50 percent of the total audience. Plus, the fact that in the smartphone era, millions of people have a powerful video game device in their purses or pockets, means that games are available almost anywhere, at any time. We’ve come light years from when we were small kids and you had to go somewhere where there was a food-truck-sized computer, or to an amusement arcade, to play a video game. But I think you need look no further than the fact that lifelong video game player Steven Spielberg just released Ready Player One, with a strong third-act message about putting down the controller. The medium of the video game is absolutely within our cultural mainstream—and has been for some time.

KG: All about the tech. But it’s been a while since World of Warcraft pulled so many people into the world. Interesting, that as mobile games exploded, table-top narrative games have resurged. Dungeons and Dragons? Wizard? Create your own fun.

CL: And now for a sort of meta-question: What do you think about an interview with a game writer, about game writing, in a literary magazine? In what ways do game writing and literary writing intersect or differ?

KG: In literary fiction, a writer can spend many pages getting into the mind of the character, so the reader gains empathy to the character or situation. If you wait that long in video games, you’re going to have a very bored player. Games are more like genre fiction. Every chapter/level ends with a turning point and the narrative surges forward. My favorite book last year was Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders. To me, it was the Citizen Kane of literary fiction. A game changer. Celebrate the differences between all writing platforms.

RDB: I think it’s awesome, and quite humbling, to be talking to you in a literary magazine. If we define literature as “narrative art,” I think it’s very easy to consider the best story-driven games rising to fit that. In the book we point to Bioshock as a prime example of a game that works not only as a harrowing adventure tale, but also as a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between game designer and player. It’s pretty meta itself.

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Robert Denton Bryant is the Director of Video Game Development at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. He has also taught game writing and narrative design at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. He holds an MFA in Cinema-Television Production from the University of Southern California.

Keith Giglio has written and produced for a number of feature films and television movies, from Disney’s Tarzan to A Cinderella Story. Presently, he teaches screenwriting and video game writing at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University in New York. He holds an MFA in Film and Television from New York University.

Christina Legler is a graduate student in Fresno State’s MFA Fiction Program. She has been playing video games since the age of four, when a next-door neighbor made the mistake of allowing her to play Sonic: The Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis.

A Normal Interview with Angela Morales

By Tara Williams

Angela Morales will join us in the summer of 2018 for The Normal School’s Summer Nonfiction Workshop and Publishing Institute, July 16-29, on the Fresno State campus.

In her award-winning collection of memoir essays The Girls in My Town, Angela Morales navigates coming of age in Los Angeles as part of a Mexican-American family. In this interview, the journey continues, from the wild moors of England to life in Los Angeles as a writer, mother, wife, and English professor.

Tara Williams:  If I were your fairy godmother, and I gave you a credit card with no limit that was good for one weekend only, with the conditions being you could go anywhere and do anything for that weekend with two other writers of your choice (past or present, living or dead), where would you go, and who would you take with you? 

Angela Morales:  Where to begin…?  First, I’d narrow down my choices to spending time with dead writers as opposed to living writers because, A. I’d want to take advantage of the magic, and B. My list of living writers is too long. 

That said, I’m taking my credit card and heading to Yorkshire to the home of Charlotte Brontë. She and I will embark on an all-day walk across the moors, and maybe Anne and Emily would join us? After the chilly walk, we’d cozy up by the fire and eat scones with jam, and the sisters would reveal to me all their storytelling secrets.

TW: Okay, I have to ask: why the Brontës? And I have to qualify that by confessing my expectations of romance were hopelessly distorted by reading the Brontës in my adolescence. Recently I watched a new movie adaptation of Wuthering Heights and found myself thinking, Oh my God, Heathcliff was a sociopath! That explains so much! 

AM: Why the Brontës? Well, I have always admired Charlotte Brontë because she wrote her novels in the first person, with a narrator’s voice that I’m almost positive was her own voice, with novels that are very much autobiographical. Her voice is clear, steady, and stubborn. She is realistic and very no-nonsense, but quietly passionate, and I feel that, in this way, we are kindred spirits.

TW: Your credit card isn’t maxed out yet.

AM: Then I’d take the train back to London and find a good happy hour in some pub and buy drinks for Chinua Achebe, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, the Romantic Poets, E.B. White, John Muir, Chris Hitchens, and Flannery O’Connor. Oh wait… I’m only allowed two writers, so I’ll have to stick with the Brontës, I suppose, even though, technically that’s three.

TW: As your fairy godmother, I say if you go to the pub with the Brontës, you’re still technically in compliance with the conditions. And if let me know the name of the London pub where you'll be, I could kind of happen by…

AM: Any English pub will do… the smaller the better, anywhere for a nice brown ale and a baked potato.

TW: I noticed River Teeth, in their write-up for your Literary Nonfiction Prize award, described your “escape” from your parents’ appliance store, wording that also appears on the back-cover copy of the book itself, and it occurs to me to wonder if you feel you have “escaped” the influences of your earlier life. What does writing about your childhood do to the way you remember it?

AM: I’m pretty sure that I will never escape the influences of my early life, nor do I want to escape or deny or forget about those influences, even the painful ones.  I’ve always felt that writing about childhood helps me to understand it better and to make order out of chaos. Maybe I’m a bit of a control freak, but I like to take the pieces of my life, or the memories, and tell the stories in a way that’s as true to memory and fact as possible, but to paint the picture of those stories in a way that finds the beauty and the meaning within them. When I write about a childhood memory, I feel like I’ve dragged it out of a burning house, cleaned off the ashes, dressed it up in its best outfit, and pushed it back out into the world, hoping that someone else will love it as much as I do.

TW: That’s a powerful image. Is there anything you can’t or won’t write about?

AM: If an idea or story appears to me and if it feels important, I hope I would be brave enough not to banish it or suppress it, no matter how embarrassing or personal. Thus far, I haven’t come across any topics that make me feel like I’ve hit that brick wall. In nonfiction, however, writers must always consider the ethics of writing about other people and how those people are portrayed. I think if your intentions are pure (meaning, that you don’t aim to destroy anybody) you can write about living people with respect and goodwill, even if it’s a difficult topic.

TW: In the intro to your book The Girls in My Town, you mention your essays growing from recollected images, such as that of your grandmother dying, which you elaborate on in “Nine Days of Ruth.” It reminded me so much of being with my own grandmother, as a mother myself, during her last days, reading aloud to her from her favorite Psalms. Do you have any further thoughts on the role of faith in parenting, in making sense of life and death?

AM: I am not a religious person, though I find much meaning and comfort in being in the wilderness and living in the world. It’s been very important for me to make sure that my children experience solitude and a kind of “nothingness” when they must “unplug” and sit in the deserts of Death Valley or maybe play on a deserted beach on the Channel Islands for days at time. I believe in God, but I think God is everywhere and that the best I can do for my children is to help them to be more mindful of the world around them. As seagulls are squawking overhead and all around us, we might find a dead seagull and notice how the seagull’s body is being eaten by flies and how the ocean waves are pulling it back to the sea. If my children can contemplate that fact of life and death right before their eyes, I think that reality is more valuable than anything I might say to them. Now that my children are a little older, we can talk about how life is really one big mystery and all we can do is search for meaningful ways to understand it.

TW: It looks as if you have so many events coming up in 2018! You’ll be with us here in Fresno for CSU Summer Arts, you’ll be with River Teeth in June, you have a steady schedule of readings and appearances. How does that busy schedule affect your writing? How do you keep it all balanced?

AM: I’m so excited and honored to participate in all these upcoming events! I’ve felt so grateful for all the positive feedback I’ve gotten on my book over the past year, and I’m still trying figure out how to schedule my life so that I have time to write. I teach full-time at a community college, so I’ve learned, over the past decade, if I want to make time to write, I must claim that writing time, no matter what. I’m trying to think of writing time the way you’d think of exercise—it’s an hour or two that you must take to be a healthier person, whether that means getting up before dawn or staying up into the witching hours. My husband, Patrick, my accomplice, has helped me to sneak away to the library or get back to my office late at night. Last month, I was lucky enough to visit Yaddo, an artists’ colony in upstate New York, for an entire month. I got a ton of work done while I was there, and Patrick made sure that the kids got fed and the dogs got walked. So many people are helping me to keep writing, and for this, I’m so lucky. So far, so good.

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Angela Morales, a graduate of the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program, is the author of The Girls in My Town, a collection of personal essays. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays 2013, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, The Southwest Review, The Los Angeles Review, Arts and Letters, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch, Hobart, River Teeth, Under the Sun, and Puerto del Sol, and The Indianola Review. She is the winner of the River Teeth Book Prize, 2014, and has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell Colony.  Currently she teaches composition and creative writing at Glendale Community College and is working on her second collection of essays. She lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband Patrick and their two children, Mira and Leo.

Tara Williams is an MFA candidate in Fresno State’s Creative Writing Fiction program. She has previously published interviews with Bich Minh Nguyen, Leonard Peltier, Julia Butterfly, and former WIBF world champion boxer Lucia Rijker.

A Normal Interview with Dinty W. Moore

By Bonita Hele

Bonita Hele: You’re a busy writer, speaking frequently at workshops and conferences. How do you find your work at conferences and seminars informs your writing?

Dinty W. Moore: I learn a lot from teaching, both in my regular Ohio University faculty position and teaching around the country at various weekend and week-long workshops. Teaching forces you – if you do it right – to articulate what you believe makes for successful writing, and to seek out practical, craft solutions to common narrative concerns. It keeps my mind alert, I think, or hope.

BH: This July, you will be participating in the CSU Summer Arts program, for The Normal School’s Creative Nonfiction Workshop. Are we allowed a sneak preview of topics or themes you’ll be covering? More broadly, do you have a similar approach to workshops you teach, or do you revise your material each time?

DWM: My plan for my workshop is to help participants generate new work, growing out of a series of brief writing based on prompts I will bring along. (I revise the prompts regularly, so we’ll see what new ideas July brings.)

I like to think of the work produced in a generative workshop as seedlings – little sprouting things that the writer takes home and nurtures, discovering eventually whether one or the other will grow into a 1,000-word essay, a 4,000-word essay, or something longer. But the seedlings are there, for whenever the writer finds the time to dive back into the work.

BH: The online nonfiction journal Brevity has been around for roughly 20 years now. How have you found its shape transforming or reforming over that time?

DWM: Brevity began as a home for conventional narrative nonfiction of a very brief nature, but over the years it has expanded – thanks to the submissions that come in – to include lyric essays, experimental essays, ruminative (Montaigne-ish) essays, literary journalistic works, and work that is hard to define but stunning. Of course, we have transformed into something much larger than I ever anticipated as well, with thousands of regular readers spread across the globe. We’ve published work from writers living in India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Dubai, Malaysia, and Japan. I find all of it – the reach, the success, the level of work – to be staggeringly wonderful.

BH: In an interview with Jenny Patton, you remarked on your fascination with the short form. What is the shortest piece you read that still worked, that drew you in as a reader? Is there such a thing as “too short” in the brief art form?

DWM: I’m going to duck the first question.  There are too many examples of “super short” flash and new ones pop up every day.  But no, I don’t think there is a too short limit. Or if there is, someone will prove it wrong.

BH: I’ve read that between first draft and final publication, your essays go through 40 revisions on average. Do you find that as you have developed the writing craft, you don’t revise as much or as deeply as in earlier writings? I guess another way to put it is, is it easier for you to assay these days, or is it as much a journey now as it has ever been?

DWM: No, I still revise almost as much as I did before. Sometimes I may revise even more, because I’ve set my sights higher. I’m one of those writers who works out what he is trying to say in the process of writing and revising, and refining, and rewording, and redefining, and finding new question to ask somewhere in the middle of the revision process.

BH: What excites you most about your current writing project? Is there anything that frustrates you or that you’re finding an inordinate challenge?

DWM: My current writing project is kicking me in the butt right now. Nothing excites me about it but the prospect that someday the tide will turn and I’ll get the better of the project instead of the project having the better of me.

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Dinty W. Moore is author of The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir; the memoir Between Panic & Desire; and many other books. He has published essays and stories in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Arts & Letters, The Normal School, and elsewhere.

Dinty has won many awards for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He edits Brevity, an online journal of flash nonfiction, and lives in Athens, Ohio, where he grows heirloom tomatoes and edible dandelions. 

Nonfiction writer Bonita Jewel Hele, a freelance editor for nearly ten years, spends weekday mornings encouraging elementary students to love literature, afternoons as a Graduate Assistant with the Fresno State MFA program, and evenings reading stories to her three children. 

A Normal Interview With Justin Hocking

Rusty Birdwell: How did you decide on the book’s structure? The titled sections range from one paragraph to several pages (one of my favorite sections being 'Samsara')—how do the short and long sections, and white space, serve the book?

Justin Hocking: Wonderworld revolves largely around my longtime preoccupation with the life of Herman Melville and his novel Moby-Dick. Writing about a classic work definitely involved some risks, and one thing I wanted to avoid was any sort of literary ventriloquism. On the other hand, I did allow myself to draw inspiration from what I found in Moby-Dick's unconventional structure, which is that all things are admissible within the bounds of a single work: short sections, long sections, fiction and nonfiction, stagecraft, slapstick humor, reportage, meditations, environmental writing, literary criticism, etc. This freed me up to digress and meander and experiment with form. I organized one of the longer, crux sections, "The City Swell," as a series of surf reports. Within the shorter sections, I was striving for a kind of economy and compression of language that we find in work by poet-memoirists like Nick Flynn. Flynn and others allow for white space and gaps in their poetry and nonfiction, in a way that trusts the reader to make their own connections, without leaning too heavily on conventional, linear narrative. Most poetry collections rely on a slow accretion of resonant images, themes and language, and that was definitely part of the effect I was hoping for in the memoir.

RB: The best books strive toward the universal and the personal; this book steps seamlessly between the two. In some ways this could occur without the larger tale of the American spirit’s dark journey. Why was it so important for you to include the political, industrial, American-spirit landscape in the book?

JH: In the narrative I took some deep dives into my own messy emotional territory, but I also tried to repeatedly bust out of the traditional memoir format. I needed to get the reader (and myself) out of my head quite a bit, to hopefully avoid the sense of claustrophobia that can sometimes plague a memoir or any first person narrative. So I did quite a lot of outward expansion and weaving in news of the wider world, in hope of rendering the deeply personal material more balanced and bearable for the reader. I also wanted to risk some of the grand, sweeping historical/political/philosophical gestures that Melville did, especially since much of the story took place at the height of the war in Iraq. I got fascinated, for instance, with the history of surfing, and how it ties in with the history of American colonialism in Hawaii and elsewhere. And the more I read Moby-Dick, the more I began noticing parallels between the historic whaling industry (which was all about whale oil), and our contemporary petroleum industry. Another chapter deals with the environmental repercussions of the this industry, specifically a massive oil spill that took place in North Brooklyn in the mid 20th Century. It was a much larger, more insidious spill than the Exxon Valdez disaster, but most people have never heard about it, even though it happened in a city populated by eight million or more people. These are all important issues to me, and again, I took my cues from Moby-Dick—a sprawling, polyphonic, multivalent work that blends the personal with the political and the metaphysical.

RB: Melville eventually becomes a physically present character, following you around, sort of torturing you or communing with you in your own dark period. From the first hint of his almost-presence on page 61 to his finding you in bed or in a bathroom stall, how did this come about in the book?

JH: I'm a big fan of literary writers who delve into the surreal—George Saunders, Karen Russell, and Borges all come to mind. I wanted to see if I could pull it off in nonfiction, as a way to lend some narrative immediacy to this sense I had, while in New York, of feeling both haunted and inspired by Melville. It was another somewhat risky move that I worried might come off as maudlin. There were a couple moments, though, where I utilized Melville's specter as a kind of stand-in or body double for some of my darkest emotions, in a way that I hope actually helped me avoid melodrama.

RB: Could you talk a bit about the L train becoming sentient and somewhat omniscient? It tells a random woman on the subway a lot about you, about some pretty deep moments of internal turmoil for you. It’s the train that really introduces us to you starting to lose your shit. Did this have something to do with the book needing narrative distance at that point?

JH: It was absolutely about narrative distance. Revealing my struggles with anxiety and phobias wasn't easy; the shift from first to third person allowed me, as the writer, a little distance and perspective. I also hoped it would give the reader some respectful breathing room while I explicated my personal problems. Utilizing the L Train voice was also another way to experiment with the surreal, and to channel some of the of chaos and noise and weird allure of New York City life.

RB: You give us plenty of examples of other writers and artists who have suffered the White Death. This is the form of obsession the book uses as a lens for all sorts of ailments of spirit and addiction. Do you consider the White Death beneficial if it runs its course without killing the carrier?

JH: During my research, I was surprised to discover how many other writers and artists struggle with bouts of the White Death, which I define as an all-consuming obsession with Moby-Dick. The visual artist Frank Stella spent twelve years creating fifteen hundred abstract paintings and sculptures, each inspired by Moby-Dick; he claims the obsession nearly destroyed him. More recently, illustrator Matt Kish made one drawing a day, every day, for all 552 pages of his version of Moby-Dick. The writer Sena Jeter Naslund grew obsessed with Moby-Dick at age thirteen; she later wrote the 666 page novel Ahab's Wife. So yes, I think the White Death is more of a creative catalyst than a disease. Probably my favorite example is the playwright Tony Kushner, who claims Moby-Dick as the single most important influence on his work, and that he learned from Melville that it's better to risk total catastrophe than to play it safe as an artist.

RB: Much of the book deals with obsession and addiction—from emotional need and drug addiction to American’s continuing petroleum binge—are these in some way, necessary first steps in a Nekyian journey?

JH: I first encountered the term "Nekyia" in a book called Melville's Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia by the Jungian analyst and critic Edward Edinger. Edinger defines the Nekyia as a kind of "night sea journey" through despair and meaninglessness that we all embark on during our development as individuals and a society; he interprets Moby-Dick as a quintessentially American version of the Nekyia. The word Nekyia derives from the eleventh book of The Odyssey, wherein Odysseus descends to the underworld to commune with the dead. These archetypal voyages often begin with a literal or metaphorical descent, and the potent darkness we encounter there is often a necessary first step in the circuitous journey back home.

RB: Overall the book seems to beg us to see dark times as first passages toward journeys that involve revelation and self-awareness. Reaching something good also seems to come out of a sense of community—deliverance through interdependence (not codependence) seems like a big theme of the book as well. Is this the best track for the deepest problems in the realms of both the personal and the social?

JH: When thinking about or discussing Moby-Dick, most people focus on the narrative of Ahab's revenge against the White Whale. That's certainly a huge part of the story, but it brings up the question of ownership. To whom does the story really belong? In my opinion, the narrative of Moby-Dick belongs principally to the narrator, Ishmael. And his is a story not of revenge, but of interconnection and survival. So I'm much more interested in the book as a survival story. Not just our survival as individuals, but also survival in a larger sense, as we continue to encounter massive, late Holocene extinction of species. And especially as we enter this new, Anthropocene era, where the entire planet's survival will require that we challenge the notions of humankind's disconnection from and dominion over the natural world.

RB: Surfing definitely brought you closer to Melville’s understanding of the ocean—can you talk a little about the process, about how surfing changed your understanding of the ocean and of your internal self?

JH: I grew up in Colorado and California, so the lack of true open space in New York was definitely a shock to the system. The one true open space I found was the coast, at spots like Rockaway Beach, in Queens. As I grew increasingly disillusioned with city life, I gravitated toward Rockaway. Surfing became my solace during an otherwise difficult time. The combination of salt water and physical exertion leaves you feeling scoured out and completely at ease in the world. Melville literally spent years at sea, whereas I only dipped my toes in, so to speak. So I don't think I came anywhere close to his level of understanding of how the ocean can connect us with a sense of primal universality. Melville wasn't a starry-eyed Transcendentalist, though; he was keenly aware of nature's tremendous dark side. As things got more emotionally precarious for me, I started taking some unnecessary risks in the ocean, and eventually had my own modest yet terrifying experience of what Melville called the "sledgehammering seas."

RB: Any trepidation about calling the book a memoir? In recent years memoirs have gotten a bad rap. Does this categorization worry you at all?

JH: Not really, because all my favorite works in recent years are memoirs: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, Lit by Mary Karr, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, just to name a few. These books all push hard against the traditional boundaries of memoir. They take big formal and emotional risks. I challenge anyone to read Another Bullshit Night or Chronology of Water and then try to tell me there's something inherently "wrong" or "bad" about the genre. Memoir has gotten a bad rap because every time some asshole like James Frey fabricates an entire narrative, people use it as an excuse to bash the genre as "failed journalism." But memoir is not journalism. To me, it's one of the most elastic and dynamic literary forms out there, especially when handled by writers who stretch its limits and expand our notions of what it can accomplish, both as an art form and as a vessel for deep communion between writers and readers.

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Justin Hocking’s memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, was published by Graywolf Press in early 2014 and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Hocking is a recipient of the Willamette Writers' 2014 Humanitarian Award for his work in publishing, writing, and teaching. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Orion Magazine, Portland Review, The Portland Noir Anthology, Poets and Writers Magazine, Swap/Concessions, Rattapallax, and elsewhere.

A Normal Interview with Jericho Parms

By Elizabeth Bolanos

Elizabeth Bolanos: Lost Wax felt to me like such a remarkably humble yet perfect title for your book. You’re a writer, a traveler, a professor, and assistant director of an MFA program. I sensed that as a child, you may have imagined yourself exploring all these areas. How did all these elements come together for you?

Jericho Parms: I had many imaginations as a child that related to traveling and exploring a world that  I knew early on was much larger than my own experience of it. I often credit that to my parents who nurtured curiosity and a sense of exploration when I was young. Art and writing were key components of that experience, but it was really when I was a bit older, and began to write and travel on my own when I was in college that those interests began to coalesce, first through a budding passion for journalism, then during the years I worked in an art museum. When I stumbled on the essay as a form, it allowed all of those interests to come together.

EB: You’ve visited so many places, from Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Guatemala, to all over the United States. What’s your favorite travel destination and why?

JP: Picking favorites is such a challenge. Ireland holds a special place for me, and is one of the more strikingly beautiful places I’ve been in recent years. I admire, too, the palpable sense of history and deep respect for literary culture in Ireland. Spain is the place I have most returned to, for many reasons, not least of which because it was one of the first countries I explored on my own. Spain has always renewed my sense of independence and exploration, my love of color and texture, and being there inspires me to slow down, to take things in. But there are, of course, so many remarkable places I still hope to visit.

EB: In Lost Wax, you talk about color, quoting painter Hans Hofmann’s understanding of it and giving us your own examples, such as red being the color of love and lunacy. You also mention a friend who said different kinds of reds, like burgundy, mean different things. If you could describe yourself using only colors, what would they be? Or would describing yourself using only colors even be possible?

JP: I like to imagine we are all living mood rings, constantly changing our colors depending on the day, the hour, the weather, our company or solitude. In that sense, I don’t know that I could describe myself using color with any certainty. Talk long enough about color and I think we inevitably fall into the realm of synesthesia, or at the very least, metaphor. The spectrum of colors we assign to our own identities and those of others—and the language of those colors—is a topic I’ve been exploring through writing lately. Where do our concepts of whiteness and blackness begin and end? What does it mean to be a brown face in a predominantly white space? How does our use of language when applied to identity contribute to or bridge the human divides we continuously find ourselves facing?

To circle back to Hans Hofmann, “It is not the form that dictates the color but the color that brings out the form.” The essay “A Chapter on Red,” in which Hofmann’s line serves as an epigraph, was an attempt to explore and reveal the meditative quality and associative potential of color to both reflect and expose experience. And yet, any writer would have approached an essay on red differently. Color is a series of perceptions, after all. We all see and conceptualize color differently, which means that in the end, color can both illuminate and blind us to the reality of our shared human condition.

EB: Your book also made me think about memory. There’s a part where you mention the memory of a fruit stand where you and a boy you once loved would sit down and eat peaches after seeing a movie. He would talk about the fruit trees in Romania. You said when you were informed by a friend that the fruit stand was gone, the memories of those times with him were all you thought about that day. Why did that moment and that memory stick with you?

JP: I find the workings of memory and our human senses endlessly inspiring, and often I try to mine memory for small moments or details that, when we allow ourselves to linger and meditate on them, can serve as portals to something larger or offer an unexpected foray into meaning. The essay “Origins” is in many way an homage to the senses and the ways in which the sensory quality of language can unearth experience. We often talk about the “occasion” of an essay—the reason for the writer writing at the present moment. I think that can occur on both a large and small scale within an essay as well. News of the fruit stand being gone served as one of many “occasions” in the essay to think back on certain moments (in this case, sharing fruit with a friend). But inclusion of those small memories are less about the experience itself (however sweet it may have been) and more about how it allows me to linger in the sense of nostalgia and indulgence that each sensory detail can convey.

EB: Another part of your memories that stuck with me were the parts about your childhood, before your parents’ divorce, when you talked about the relationship you had with your father when he introduced the world of music to you. One example in the book was where you would practice My Fair Lady together. What’s your fondest music memory with your father?

JP: The essay “The B Side” is written in three parts, and explores my relationship to my father in various stages from childhood to early adulthood through the lens of music—both reflections on the moments we shared when I was young, and the role music came to play in my life as I grew older. The recording sessions I describe in the essay definitely represent some of the fondest memories I have. However, as I alluded to in the piece, I am deeply grateful that those moments were recorded. At various moments I have found myself returning to them and this  carries its own satisfaction and wonder, like rereading a book you’ve always loved after time has passed and extracting new details and meaning from its passages.

EB: “Immortal Wound” is the last essay in the book and it’s my favorite. The piece involves the dead luna moth you noticed as you were walking past a bar. You bring up a beautiful point about humans’ similarity to insects: how we feed on our findings, spin strangeness, glide through, behave nocturnally and are drawn to things the way moths are drawn to light. Was that moment inspirational to you, for more travel and exploration, or the opposite?

JP: “Immortal Wound” is an essay I hold dear because it preserves an experience that, while seemingly simple, felt laced with potential metaphor and meaning at the time and therefore conjured a sense of responsibility to describe, to record, to take notice, to pay tribute … to assay something greater. For me, a moment like finding the dead luna moth was both one of “travel and exploration,” as you note, not just for the ways that it moved my mind into a childlike space of inquiry, curiosity, meditation on the thing itself, but because the moment also had a humble and grounding effect on me as a writer—a writer keenly aware of influences such as Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard who felt as present in my experience of discovering a moth, as I remember feeling present in their descriptions of the moths they witnessed.

Again, as far as an “occasion” for writing an essay goes, this was a big one. An opportunity to step into conversation with two women writers I admire, to explore a similar premise—albeit in a wholly different space, circumstance, and time, and to pay homage to a tradition, through observation and detail, of speaking to our preoccupation with life and death.

EB: The essay “Still Life with Chair” was published in 2015 in a slightly different form in The Normal School. One passage reads: “The simple presence of a chair, like the unbridled promise of life when we are young, is a common assumption: we trust that the structure will hold us. But what if a chair is pulled aside, what if it breaks suddenly beneath you?” How does this idea help you with writing?

JP: I’ve never thought of this idea in direct relation to writing before, but it’s an interesting question. “Still Life with Chair” is an essay that weaves in reflections on chairs, both as an object and their various depictions throughout art history. The piece centers around an accident and focuses on the notion of unexplained loss as well as the promise and excitement of youth, among other things. In the essay, the idea of a chair being pulled away, much like suddenly breaking, serves as a way of reflecting on the sense of uncertainty that can result from unexpected, seemingly random, experiences.

Accidents tend to erode one’s sense of trust in the world, to undermine the things we hold dear, and underscore the ways in which we may often take those things for granted—much like the way we tend to overlook everyday objects and artifacts. If I were to apply this idea to writing, it would likely present a call to greater awareness, a refusal to take for granted even the smallest moments or details that compose our experiences. Or, to go a step further, a refusal to take for granted how many moments can slip by without satisfying a need to write, without fulfilling a commitment to keep going, before losing those moments to days-gone-by and essays-not-written, to a stubborn misfit silence.

I’ve come to believe that sometimes we need a dose of the hard lessons in order to see clearly all of the things there are to be grateful for; we need a slap in the face to get our minds right; sometimes we need to know that although the structures that hold us might break and send us spiraling, at some point we’ll get up again.

EB: When reading your book, I kept feeling like I was escaping into a series of galleries where each essay was a room showcasing little pieces of you. You mention in numerous sections of how you observed different sculptures in galleries. How did those gallery visits inform your writing process?

JP: Art has had a great influence on my writing process. I have a deep appreciation for museums and galleries and the role they play in providing space for art to be widely viewed, studied, and revisited again and again, which is something I’ve grown accustomed to doing—particularly when I’m writing. For me, viewing art is an exercise of attention, a process of giving myself over to observation and allowing new ideas and meditations to surface as a result of the simple act of looking.

Many of the essays that became Lost Wax were written or at least partially drafted during a time when I worked in an art museum. Greek and Roman Sculpture, Egyptian Art, European Painting, Modern and Contemporary Painting, American Decorative Arts, Musical Instruments—the vast collections found in an encyclopedic museum contain, for me, a remarkable capacity to egg me on in the writing process. As an essayist, I tend to feed off of other surfaces—ogle and wonder and scrutinize things that, when given the chance to truly observe, often lead to the gleaning of a new idea, a line of language or description, a memory or association that often becomes where my writing begins. Museum galleries are one of the few places I have found that afford such time and space to stare without shame, to look unabashedly close at something—anything, really—until you find what you have are trying to say.

EB: To close, what projects, writing or otherwise, are you working on now?

JP: I have been working on a new series of essays that explore the concept of inheritance through an extended meditation on a range of objects.

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Jericho Parms is the Author of Lost Wax (University of Georgia Press). Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, The Normal School, Hotel Amerika, Brevity, and elswhere. She is the Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches.

Elizabeth Bolanos was born and raised in Fresno. She is a first-year MFA graduate student at Fresno State pursuing Creative Writing with an Emphasis in Publishing & Editing. Her focus is fiction. She enjoys reading and gaining inspiration from all genres and forms of art.

Photo by Josh Larkin

A Normal Interview with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

By Mary Pickett

Mary Pickett: We just passed an anniversary for you - Your debut memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, was released last Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14, 2017). How have things changed for you within this past year?

Christine Lee: Thank you for recognizing that anniversary.

It has been a year of new experiences. And mostly, lessons learned.

There were amazing things that happened: I had the opportunity to meet and interview with Scott Simon on NPR and had my book reviewed in the New York Times. Those are dream scenarios. And most heartwarming of all—I received encouraging emails from readers.

But there were also so many things I’d not anticipated. Including the changing of my identity—for so many years, I’d been unpublished, and suddenly, I was an author of a book. And the only difference was one day in my entire life—and I had to say goodbye to that writer and embrace a future I’d only dreamt of. So, I was also strangely in mourning.

It’s like when I finally got divorced after four long years of paperwork and court appointments and many talks with lawyers. I seriously thought I’d be overjoyed when the divorce was announced. But when the judge began saying, “I dissolve the marriage of…” I broke down in tears in court. I did not expect that reaction. But you know, grief is part of moving forward and part of achievements—you say goodbye to the past.

It has also been a year of becoming more of a private person—which is ironic, because I just put out a memoir with very personal thoughts and feelings. It is because of that very fact that putting out a book can be a very bruising experience and so I re-prioritized yet again and focused on my inner life. This meant holding dear my closest friends. This meant focusing on my daughter and partner more than ever. This even meant ramping up my urban farm and falling in love with beekeeping. You know—non-writing stuff.

MP: I’m intrigued by your above description of book publication as a “bruising experience.” Can you tell me a little more about that? Might this experience occur only within nonfiction?

CL: I can only speak for my experience with my memoir, because my novel is still forthcoming. I hear publishing a novel is just as bruising for fiction authors, though. Maybe it’s bruising in different ways, because we each have different expectations that might not be met. You’ve spent a lot of time alone writing something for a very long time—maybe a year, maybe ten years, before releasing your dreams and expectations out into the world for judgment. I think in some ways, the MFA workshop is boot camp for that experience—your work, when read by others, is no longer your own. It is absorbed by different minds and it becomes something different altogether.

It’s heartwarming and, also, heartbreaking. Upon publication, your book is no longer your very own. Your book has its own life.

Publishing a book isn’t going to make you happy if you weren’t happy before you published the book. It isn’t going to open doors if you weren’t opening doors for yourself before you published the book. It doesn’t change who you are. To me, it’s like getting married; marriage in and of itself isn’t going to make or break a relationship or change a life. The work is the work. The love is the love. The passion is the passion.

MP: One of my favorite lines in your book is: “This book is about my stroke, but the stroke helped me come to terms with other traumas….” One of which, being your divorce. How did you decide to share these traumas with the world?  

CL: I couldn’t not share the related traumas. My 14-year-old marriage (18 year relationship) fell apart and I was overcoming postpartum depression, and in my misery, I kept looking back at the stroke and the lessons learned therefrom. They were inextricably linked, especially at that time. So, I had to write them down. There is universality in the particular and I hope my readers, whether or not they’ve overcome a medical trauma, also glean helpful lessons from Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember.

MP: Was anything off-limits within this sharing?

CL: I did not share anything about the acute particulars of my separation. I wanted to prioritize my daughter’s wellbeing and that meant not tearing down her biological father. I wanted to write a book about which I’d feel zero regrets.

MP: You have written both nonfiction and fiction. Do you prefer one genre over another? Does genre classification matter?

CL: I really enjoy both fiction and nonfiction—though fiction is my first love, and there is always something special and unique and vulnerable about the thing for which you first feel passion.

Though both genres require craft, they have different requirements. Nonfiction has a hard line in that you must tell the truth as you experienced it. And because you are narrating facts, there is a great burden of curation on the writer to tell the story. You must pick from what you have been given.

Fiction does not have the burden of fact-telling, but it’s not any easier. I like to say that creative nonfiction is about describing the knife and slicing your wrists. Fiction is about building the knife and slicing your wrists.

MP: We first met in the Spring of 2016, when you were a guest lecturer for my Fresno State MFA fiction workshop. I still can’t believe that you drove a total of six hours every Wednesday (from Berkeley to Fresno, and back again)! That’s real dedication to teaching. How does your teaching inform your writing?

CL: That was an epic commute. I can’t believe I did that, either! I ate a ton of Hi-Chews during those drives out of sheer boredom. I think I ate about six packs of Hi-Chews each week and I listened to a lot of podcasts.

But I really did enjoy my time in the classroom with you. Part of the reality is that teaching takes time away from writing—and that is the dirty secret that many writing teachers won’t share. But the other reality is that teaching helps my writing, because by iterating theory and craft to others, it helps me refine my own process and awareness.

MP: What are some of your favorite podcasts?

CL: Dear Sugars, Reading Women, Story Makers Show, and TED Radio Hour.

MP: Can you tell me about your latest writing project: your upcoming novel, The Golem of Seoul?

CL: My novel is about two Korean immigrants who travel to the United States in 1972 to find a long lost relative. They build a golem out of a tin of soil they’ve brought with them from North Korea to help them out. It is a cross-cultural retelling of an old story.

That’s what the novel is right now, but I just got editorial notes back from my editor, so that may change.

MP: I want to thank you for coming back to Fresno State to lead a craft talk and read from your work during WordFest. The focus of your talk was on building worlds - which, as you said, can be applied to both fiction and nonfiction. Do you find the world building process similar for both genres?

CL: I think the world building process differs for each and every book and story. Each story and narrative requires different things out of the writer each time. In one story, you might be intimate with the physical terrain, but have to explore its emotional connection. In another story, you might be imagining a world with which you're not familiar and have to build from scratch, which in some ways means freedom, and in other ways, means more work. I wish I could provide predictive information, but it really is a new start each and every time. But you do hope you've built more muscles and tactics and strategies as time wears on.

MP: You turned the talk into a bit of an art class, by having us build our own worlds out of clay. How did you come up with this exercise? Is this something you might recommend as part of the writing process?

CL: I thought that after sitting and listening in your seats all day that it would be nice for you to get your hands literally dirty. I am very aware that students learn things in different ways - some of us through watching and others through physical experience. And I am aware that playing is very important to art. So, I was looking for an exercise in which you could have "hands-on" experience.

This turned out to be a literal hands-on exercise. I am going to credit Victor LaValle for this exercise. While I was writing the first draft of my novel, Victor suggested I go and build my own golem as my characters do. So, I went out and got some clay and sat down, expecting very little out of the experiment. I learned that it's not so easy to build a little figurine. I learned that it is an emotional experience. I got to embody my own characters and understand what it was like to be in their world - the questions that go through their mind and even the order in which one would build body parts.

Some people don't have to have the kinetic learning experience. But many of us do to some point. And we need all-hands-on-deck to write a book. We need to learn in as many ways as possible. We need to engage in as many ways as possible. So yes - if you're stuck or even if you're not stuck, go out and build something. If your characters are in agriculture, go plant one of the vegetables or fruits they're tending, whether it is a strawberry plant, cotton plant, or an artichoke. You don't have to plant an entire field, but you have to know what it feels like to plant something, to feel the soil, and to see what it looks like when it first pops up out of the soil. You even have to feel and understand what it's like to watch a plant die; so, if you fail at growing the thing, there's opportunity in that, too. If one of your characters is a housekeeper, go out and clean a friend's home. See what it's like to be tasked with something and to wander around someone else's house and have to clean a mess that isn't your own. Embody the experience. Put yourself physically in your world's space, to the extent that it's possible.

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Born in New York City, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, the Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. Her novel, The Golem of Seoul, is forthcoming from Ecco/Harper Collins.

Mary Pickett is a third-year MFA fiction candidate at Fresno State and Senior Associate Fiction Editor for The Normal School.

A Normal Interview with Jon Kerstetter

By Brandon Lingle

Brandon Lingle: Tell us about how you came up with the crossings metaphor as a unifying idea for your book?

Jon Kerstetter: That was a late development. I had, in the earliest stages, envisioned the book as a work that played on the practical and literary tensions of being a doctor and a soldier, (the first title was Soldier-Doctor) but in the course of developing it, I realized there was much more to the story because there was much more to me. Who was I in the most complete sense? Well, soldier and doctor certainly, but I was also a Native American with a different cultural perspective, I was a father and an older man. I was a stroke survivor and a patient during the entire time of the writing. Those were the parts that I had to reveal if the memoir was going to be true to my life and the pivotal events in it. During the first four years of the project, I struggled with the unifying theme and the narrative arc. It was only during the final three years that the notion of crossings really hit me as a central metaphor. What had I done during my entire life? Pushed against the boundaries that tried to define me. And I pushed them hard until I was able to cross them all. Crossings, quite literally, were in my DNA. Once I understood my own history, the crossings became clear, both as metaphor and milestones.

BL: I’ve heard surgeons say medicine is as much art as it is science. How do you think medicine and science inform your art?

JK: The core of medicine and science rests in the ability to make precise observations upon which diagnoses and therapeutics are based. To me, that is also the essence of good writing—keen and precise observations about characters, events, and settings followed by thoughtful interpretations of what has been observed. When I first started writing, I tried to write profound meanings for the reader. The writing was forced and unnatural. My mentors gave me some excellent advice: ‘instead of trying to make meaning, focus on making sentences. Give all the details of who, what, where, and when.’ That was great advice. I then drew on my medical training and began writing exactly what I observed, the color of the room, the sound of a bullet, the smell of battle, and when I made the change, my writing came to life and was precise and accurate.  The meanings I sought to provide for readers then flowed naturally out of the story and its details, much like a diagnosis logically flowed out of astute clinical observations.

BL: Proximity and distance are threads that run through the book. You wrote, “I learned to get close enough to patients to show empathy and compassion while remaining detached enough to move from one case to the next with the understanding that medical science could not save every patient.” And, later, “remain detached in spirit without being distant in practice.” How does the ability to detach impact your writing?

JK: That detachment was critical in my writing. It allowed me to gain needed distance from emotionally laden stories that tended to trap me in a rather sad and depressed mood. War is a sad state of affairs, but to write effectively about it, about any difficult and emotional encounter, a writer needs to first convey the details of exactly what is seen and experienced. Doing so helps readers see and feel and hear as if they were real-time observers in a scene. That is the “show versus tell” or the “show and tell” of writing. With respect to difficult and highly emotional stories, the ability to move between the proximity of emotion and the distance of details is imperative in conveying the full range of our human experience.  Writers are translators: we take one language of human experience and translate it into another language so others can understand us. That translation is never easy. The Triage chapter in the book was originally published as an essay that took me a year and a hundred drafts to complete. In writing the first drafts, I would slump my shoulders, weep, and allow myself to be overcome with grief. I had to make a transition from the participant in the story, to the writer of the story. Without that transition, I was too close emotionally to describe the events in the manner it deserved, with the details that allowed readers to experience firsthand the gut-wrenching challenges of medicine practiced in war.

BL: You note your life’s ironies, “A doctor training to become a soldier, a Native American in the modern cavalry whose roots extended all the way back to the Indian Wars.” Some would cite the ironies of our continued interventions in the Middle East. How does your work help you make sense of these complicated relationships?

JK: Life’s ironies. What would we do without them? In a sense, life merely offers us a sequence of events. We make the interpretations and see the ironies, the tragedies and the humor. We see the love and the hate and the indifference. When I write, whether essays or chapters in a book, I objectify my experiences on paper and then come back months later to encounter them much as a first-time reader would encounter them. That’s why it’s important to let material sit for a while between revisions, so one can get as close to objectivity as possible. And that writing/reading/revising process is the most rewarding kind of experience. It allows me to hone my views, challenge what I believe, see the subtleness of some ironies and the hammering force of others I may have been blind to. Case in point: my assignment to the Cavalry as a medical officer. I knew about Custer’s last stand in an academic, historical sense, but when I was revising that chapter about joining the National Guard, the rich details of my encounter with the commander, his black Stetson with its gold cavalry band and the image of Custer on horseback gave me a fleeting sense that we were playing “Cowboys and Indians,” and the irony hit me. How far had we both come. One needing the other. Now fighting together, yet known in history as fierce enemies. A modern Native doctor in the modern Cavalry. Our ancestors might weep or they might laugh, depending. 

BL: You sought out dangerous and necessary humanitarian work in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo and wrote, “disaster medicine forced a reliance on the ‘thinking’ aspects of medicine rather than the ‘technological’ aspects…” and “I needed those patients just as they needed me. Their need for a doctor fueled my need to be a doctor. Everything I did for them mattered, and as detached as I had to become for professional survival, I became attached to those patients; I was the doctor who gave hope and even laughter with medicine. I lifted patients’ spirits and by doing so, lifted my own. There was a feeling that unified us, patient and doctor, against whatever calamity was trying to destroy us, so in the end we all survived together.” How does writing compare?

JK: Writing defines writers. I am now a writer who is as defined by my writing as I was by my career in medicine. But the defining is not one way. As in medicine and soldiering, I have become part of cadre of people who define writing by pushing boundaries with my unique perspective. We writers all have that opportunity; we shape our craft at the edges where it needs redefining, we bend the rules, twist the structure, challenge the paradigms of what it means to write and create. As much as I need writing now, I have a sense that it also needs me. I have my need to bring a new way of talking about combat and healing and loss, a fresh way of dealing with tragedy and hope. And the canon of literature needs that new approach, needs all of our new viewpoints. I need writing; it needs me.

BL: You spend time discussing the spin-up for your first Iraq deployment… the call up, balancing family with deployment preparations, and training. Then we land in Kuwait. The transition from home to war is a major crossing, and I’m interested in the creative choice to leave the physical trip out?

JK: That trip caused lots of mental anguish in terms of the prospects of putting all that I had learned in training to the test of real-time war medicine. But the anguish was mostly internal and I struggled with its usefulness in the work as a whole. I had written a separate essay in which I explored that physical trip to Iraq, but I had also written about my physical medevac out of Iraq. I decided to maximize the impact of the arrival transition by compressing the time: the reader sees the home preparation and then Bamm! Arrival. That transition is abrupt compared to the months of training preceding it, and the abruptness, I think, adds to the gritty effect of unexpected nature of war. I could have gone the other way and included the trip to Iraq, but that was a choice I made in pacing the story. And that brings up a good point, pacing is a key element in writing. The writer faces many difficult choices in tuning the pace of a story. An essay with the same thematic material may have one pace, yet as part of the larger story in a book, the same material may require different pacing and a different strategy. Choosing what to include or exclude in a story is always a debate.

BL: The entangling nature of war surfaces throughout the book. After orchestrating the autopsies and transfer of Saddam’s sons, you wrote, “I felt my refusal to witness the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein was my way of protecting my family from the entangling influences of their evil.” I appreciated your candor and understand this act of looking away. Do you think our country looks away too much from the truths of war? How do you think our society should recount and discuss war? If our society was more candid and open about the costs, would we be less apathetic when it comes to sending people to fight overseas?     

JK: I think society as a whole looks away from the horrific and difficult truths of war. It is one of the ways we tell ourselves war is not real, that we humans have not crossed into inhumanity. Of course, we know that is self-deception on a grand scale. The role of war writers and war correspondents is that of truth telling—we writers bear the responsibility of telling about war from our unique vantage point. We are the ones who must call to society, sound the warning bell and show the true cost of war and our inhumanity. Hopefully our candor makes people think enough to challenge our politicians and military leaders as to our future roles in conflict. We all know that some wars must be fought; that will perhaps never change. But what must change is our proclivity for conflict leading to war. We, the military writers must become the lens and the mirrors that show the price of apathy. If we continue turning out excellent literature of war, we have a better chance at driving a cultural dialogue that focuses on the true costs of war. That is why it is important to keep writing and keep pushing our readers.

BL: On war’s insidiousness, you wrote, “In one moment you recalled the good things of home, and in the next moment the things of war and its inhumanity would creep in and destroy a perfectly beautiful and peaceful memory.” Can you discuss how writing this book affected these intrusive memories of war for you?

JK: Well, the intrusions were no small thing. They were the cost of writing about war. Writing makes writers relive experiences and when those experiences make writers plunge headlong into personal conflict and pain, the process takes on a horror all its own. There were several times when it was just too difficult to write. And frankly, some of the most difficult pieces I wrote were difficult for my first readers to get through. I had to learn to write in smaller, manageable chunks of the most gruesome war scenes. I even debated about leaving the most difficult scenes out, but that felt like a violation of the truth and my writing task.  I decided that if I was going to write about war and all its ugliness from a physician’s point of view, I had to tell the truth to remain faithful to the craft of writing, but also to the men and women under my care who lost their lives in a most horrific way. My memories would become the memories of readers who trusted me to write the truth… and that became the balm that helped me deal with the intrusiveness of the horrific scenes of war. Yes, there was pain, but the telling of the truth helped in the comprehension of it all.

BL: This vignette about a dying soldier... “The general laid his hand on the expectant soldier’s leg—the leg whose strength I imagined was drifting like a shape-shifting cloud moving against a dark umber sky; strength retreating into a time before it carried a soldier into war. And I watched the drifting of a man back into the womb of his mother, drifting toward a time when a leg was not a leg, a body not a body—to a time when a soldier was only the laughing between two young lovers who could never imagine that a leg-body-man-soldier would one day lie expectant and that that soldier would be their son.” Heart breaking and beautiful, this section captures war’s costs. What can we learn from this loss?

JK: I think the most poignant section of that chapter is the connection I made with the soldier and his mother, with his birth as it relates to two lovers who will one day realize that their greatest joy has become the source of their greatest sorrow. That is the part of war that makes soldier’s human, on both sides of the enemy lines. We are all sons or daughters of someone who loves us; and that relationship will cost some parents and families dearly. The pain will never die. That is the absolute tragedy of war, the loss, the terrible unending loss. That is the part of war that families must shoulder when nobody is looking, when all the Homefront support dies down. It is the part that makes for divorces and drunkenness and depression for survivors. It is the part that no medal or flag ceremony at a military funeral can erase. It is the part of war that continues even when the armistice is signed and armies return home.

BL: Regarding the dying soldier, you wrote, “If this were my son, I would want soldiers to gather in his room, listen to his breathing. I would want them to break stride from their war routines, perhaps to weep, perhaps to pray. And if he called out for his dad, I would want them to be a father to my son. Simply that—nothing more, nothing less—procedures not written in Department of Defense manuals or war theory classes or triage exercises.” How can we develop this type of humanity in our society?

JK: At the heart of that moment I drew on my experiences as a father of four children. And in that, one thing defined my role: love. In that singular moment, love was needed more than all the other things we could give a dying soldier. He didn’t need more medical expertise, no military honor and no blessing from a chaplain. He needed the tenderness of his father holding him in the grasp of loving arms. How do we develop that kind of compassion? That is the stuff of being human and being a parent. It is the stuff of deep reflection on what things are truly important in our lives. Yes of course, as members of the military community we value the mission and our commitment to each other, but in the final hour, in the final moments of our understanding of what it means to be human, we must come to value our love above all else.  Not an easy thing to do, and doing so in the crucible of combat is always a challenge, but I think it is exactly what defines us as human and gives us hope that we shall survive from one generation to the next, both as soldiers and as citizens.

BL: Tim O’Brien says “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis,” and “It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” You’ve written some stomach believing moments in this book. One example that stays with me, “As I slid the remains across the stainless steel table, the sharp edges of bone and the tiny rocks embedded in the tissues made a scratchy, metallic sound. I felt the sound in my teeth.” How do you distill such complicated images?

JK: I distil them by working the memories until the details become so clear I can smell the smells and hear the scratching. That is the work of asking questions of the event and revising to get the details just right.  The mass of details that can be remembered is truly amazing and it becomes my job to sort through the most telling of details to form the images that carry the most power. When revising, details that are most powerful bubble to the top because they are usually the ones that elicit the most emotional or visceral response. Feeling sound in your teeth, like the scratching a chalkboard, is a sound that we all detest. Equating that kind of “universal” experience to a unique medical experience in battle is one of connecting experiences through common language. Again, I see my role as one of translation. In order to bring readers into my emotional landscape, I must translate things I see into something they can see. And precise control of words and details is what I use to get that done.

BL: The rendering of your stroke and its aftermath offers powerful insight. The moment when you’re looking at the MRI images, and you think, “Those brains have stolen my name,” really hit home. Did you find it difficult as a medical doctor to write about medicine for non-medical professionals?

JK: It’s somewhat difficult. Medicine contains its own special language and doctors are guilty of being so deep into their own specialties that making sense of the very complicated nature of disease and trauma if often not their forte. I had to learn not to speak in medicalease but in language that could be understood. Yet in that, I still used medical terminology without necessarily defining all my terms at the risk of slowing pacing. O’Brien does the same thing in describing things soldiers carried. He does not define every technical military thing and it works to the benefit of his readers. Much of what may be said in medical terminology can be understood contextually without having to know the exact definition of a medical word. More of the issue of writing about medicine came as a result of writing about something from which I was estranged. I was no longer a practicing physician, and the difficulty of using medical language only heightened the distance between me and my love of medicine.

BL: Books and writing helped you during your recovery. I appreciated how writing helped you understand “the dual nature of trauma, real versus remembered.” Do you want to write more about Iraq and your recovery?

JK: I want to write more about recovery because there is much more to be said about it, much more that I learned about the process.  I might write another book about war, but I need to rest a bit and consider the emotional cost of doing so.  Recovery is different; it is more about healing and hope and the future, and that excites me.  One thing I and my healthcare providers learned about my recovery is this: it was unique in that writing had some unforeseen consequences in terms of cognitive recovery and even PTSD recovery. A healing brain is stimulated by use, by thinking and processing. And what is writing but thinking and thinking and thinking. That has been the core of my recovery. Writing and thinking.  If I can write about that in more precise clinical terms or even team up with one of my neuropsychologists, that may lead to some very fruitful writing.

BL: In therapy, writing helped you organize and understand your thoughts and experiences. Later you entered an MFA program to hone your craft and create art. What was that crossing like? 

JK: It was crazy scary. At the time I entered the writing program I had a reading speed and comprehension rate at the 5th percentile of adults my age (60 at the time). I felt inadequate and ill-prepared to learn something I thought was so far out of my lane of expertise.  I felt like an old man on skies with youngsters whizzing by me on a steep slope. I envisioned myself as getting tangled in the rope tow. But the program I attended promised to work with me, and they did. They critiqued my writing as they did other students and pushed me to focus and write better. The environment they created was accepting and challenging. That brings up a point about pedagogy. Teachers have the ability to influence the lives of their students, and the students have the ability to change the way they see and do things.  That was certainly operative in my case and I was able to respond in kind to the teaching and mentoring that I received.

BL: The recent politicization of soldier’s deaths in Niger highlighted the civil-military divide in the national dialogue. How can we continue to build understanding in our society?

JK: I think we need to understand that the military is part and parcel of society. We get our mandates from the greater society from which we belong. We are charged with an imperative to kill and destroy, two actions that in a setting other than war, would result in criminal charges. It is that sort of binary social ethic in which the military must do its missions: we are members of our society and members of our military forces; we walk the ethical lines between being both soldier and doctor, soldier and father and soldier and mother. And society demands that we walk that line well. They are the senders: the military are the goers. They are both essential to our continuing existence and even our continuing peace.

BL: I see your story as one of strength, recovery, and resiliency. It’s not a “damaged veteran” narrative. Unfortunately, the “damaged veteran” stereotype still pervades our society. Many works about our nation’s forever wars perpetuate this image. How can we battle against this worn out storyline?

JK: I hate the damaged veteran narrative. It gives such a weak and worn out picture of who veterans really are. The entirety of military training, hopefully of life training, focuses on the ability to adapt and overcome and to interpret the ongoing battle, and if a change is demanded, a change of course follows. What is more demanding of change than a veteran with injuries, mental, physical or both? The veteran must change in order to survive and most do. We are not stuck in a corner of a room twitching at the slightest sound or incapable of learning. My story and so many more like it are the prime evidence that veterans are capable of learning and adapting to change, of moving on in terms of healing and recovery. One of the challenges in redefining the veteran narrative comes in the form of challenging some of the thinking at of healthcare providers who still cling to the damaged veteran model. That is changing as military medicine makes known all it has observed from the current conflicts, but the progress is slower than I would like to see. Interestingly, some of the most intriguing approaches to challenging old paradigms has come from the arts. Private non-profit groups have engaged veterans in plays, painting, paper making, writing and story-telling as forms of healing and growth. If veterans are to expect a different narrative, it may well be up to them to challenge the “expected” with their own stories. And that gives me great hope. As in the battlefield, I see strength and courage displayed among our veterans who face the enormous postwar challenges of healing and learning.

BL: Any advice for veteran writers?

JK: Yes. Write like your life depends on it. Take the time to reflect on all that you have experienced and then put in a first draft and then a second and a third…. When you get to the point where you think you have captured the essence of your story, put it down and revisit it a month later and see how it affects your emotional terrain. If it makes you laugh or weep or cry out in anger, you are on the right track. Give your writing to a very few trusted readers who can give you honest feedback. You are not looking for writing that is just good; you are looking for writing that disrupts readers and demands reflection, writing that is real and truthful, bold and risky. If your writing makes your readers pause and consider things they never considered, you might be done, otherwise, keep writing.

BL: What are you reading now?

JK: I am reading some histories of my tribe and visiting some military museums. Interesting how much can be learned reading those museum placards that you tend to brush over. They tell a story, the visuals and artifacts of a museum tell a story. I want to take more time to learn what they are saying. Currently, I am reading, Empire of the Summer Moon by Gwynne. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I tend to think of histories as dry and boring, but in the hands of a master story teller the subject tends to come alive with meaning. Oh, and I finished Everyman, by Philip Roth. It was a Pen/Faulkner Award Winner. Both books, one nonfiction, the other fiction, challenge common presuppositions about their subject matter and in that regard are just the kind of reading I enjoy the most.

BL: What’s your next project?

JK: I am busy defining that now and will most likely go in the direction of writing about stroke recovery. I have learned so much in recovery that it seems almost imperative that I should share it. I am also working on some short essays in fiction.  I know, essays are in the nonfiction column. But what if I could write one that uses fictional composites of characters and events to make the same points as its nonfiction counterpart. I say it can be done just as easily as a Native American physician can join a Cavalry Regiment in the U.S. Army. If I can entertain that irony, can I not entertain an irony of literary form? I think your readers know the answer.

BL: Anything else you’d like to add?

JK: Life is full of the unexpected. I never thought I would have a stroke. Never thought I would write a book telling about how I recovered, or write essays about my life as a soldier doctor. What I turn to now is legacy formation, not only for my family and grandchildren, but also for my readers.  I trust I am doing that just as I did soldiering and doctoring. 

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Jon R. Kerstetter is a physician and retired U.S. Army Flight Surgeon. He is a graduate of the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, MN (Class of 1988). He was the in-country director of the Johns Hopkins program in Emergency Medicine in Kosovo and provided humanitarian medical care in the conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo and in the hurricane disaster in Honduras.  After joining the Iowa Army National Guard in 1994, he served as a medical officer until his retirement in 2009.  Kerstetter completed three tours of duty in Iraq with the U.S. Army as a combat physician and flight surgeon.

Dr. Kerstetter also holds an MS in business from the University of Utah and an MFA in creative non-fiction at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio. He is the author of the memoir, Crossings: A Doctor Soldier’s Story and his essays have appeared in literary journals including The Normal School, Best American Essays, Riverteeth, Lunch Ticket and others.

Brandon Lingle’s essays have appeared in various publications including The Normal School, The American Scholar, Guernica, The New York Times At War, and The North American Review. His work has been noted in five editions of The Best American Essays. An Air Force officer, he’s served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A California native, he currently lives in Texas and edits War, Literature, and the Arts. Views are his own.

A Normal Interview with Bich Minh “Beth” Nguyen

By Tara Williams

Tara Williams: In the event of a zombie apocalypse and your imminent evacuation taking only what you can carry, which books would you take with you to a remote island compound serving as the last bastion of literate civilization?

Bich Minh Nguyen: This is an incredibly difficult question to answer! Right now the answer might be: Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson; Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison; Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; and if there’s room, Emily Wilson’s recent translation of The Odyssey.

TW: The resonance of the choice to build your memoir around food memories is fascinating to me, especially with the dual meaning of the word assimilation, with its social and digestive connotations. I'm curious whether you started your memoir with this central theme in mind, or if it evolved as part of your writing process.

BMN: It evolved, definitely. When I started writing this, I didn’t know it was going to be a book. It was just an essay. And then another essay, and another. I had no great hopes or aspirations. But then I realized that I kept returning to food, and that food moments were natural markers for time, memory, significant events. And that’s basically how the pages became a book—when I recognized that food was the main anchor and symbol. Every book-length project needs an organizing principle, and food became mine.

TW: It struck me as I was reading that you are a kind of pioneer in the terrain of establishing American identity space for people who are not outwardly Euro-American in physical appearance but for whom American culture is a dominant influence. What does being American mean to you? Do you think there are definitive American cultural traits beyond consumerism and pop culture?

BMN: This is a tough question in late 2017. I grew up thinking that to be an American was to have the privilege of freedom—of expression, of ideas, of movement. I grew up with this belief that surely America is the best place to live. That is now in question, in this current administration. But what’s also in question is the definition of “American culture.” Basically I’ve been taught (most people are still taught) that “American” = white, and that white is the norm and the default; everyone else is still expected to assimilate, and ask if they belong, and wait to be included. If there’s one good thing to emerge from this current political landscape/nightmare, it’s a growing national awareness that that old model doesn’t hold up and cannot stand.

TW: I notice after your memoir, you have published two novels. Could you elaborate on your choice to switch genres in your writing?

BMN: I studied fiction and poetry in college and grad school. I started writing creative nonfiction out of pure frustration with myself, because every time I tried to write about my family’s story through fiction it didn’t sound quite real—because it wasn’t! It took me years to realize that I needed the genre of truth in order to tell the truth. (This isn’t the case for all stories, of course, but it was for mine.) And then it was like I’d gotten something out of the way for myself, in my head, which allowed me to write the fiction I’d always wanted to write. People often think my novels are autobiographical but I’d say they’re probably 80% fiction; the autobiographical parts are mainly about setting. My next book, which I’m still working on, is a series of linked essays about high school, college, music, and post-refugee life; it’s currently titled “Owner of a Lonely Heart." I encourage every writer to be fluent in more than genre, or at least to explore or try out other genres. Doing so opens up possibilities and ideas, and sometimes we have to let the genre choose the work.

TW: In many ways, it seems the current presidential administration embodies and seems to promote many of the xenophobic attitudes you encountered as a child. Does this affect you in any way?

BMN: I think we are all affected by this, daily and deeply, though yes, people of color and immigrants are affected in a far more urgent way. The people I worry about the most are the ones whose safety and status are being threatened. The racism and xenophobia I experienced and witnessed in my childhood has not changed. In many ways, it’s gotten worse.

TW: Do you still eat junk food? If so, what, how often, and under what conditions?

BMN: I eat a lot of gummy bears. Does that count as junk food? I also love pizza rolls (except they’re Annie’s organic, which seems ridiculous even to type) and I’m a huge fan of bad pizza and frozen pizza. For the most part though, I have to admit that I don’t really eat the kinds of junk food that I dreamed about when I was a kid. I think for three reasons: once I had total access to it as an adult, the allure went away; as I grew more socially and politically aware, and more able to accept my own identity, junk food no longer held the same kind of symbolic power or value; and I realized most junk food just doesn’t taste good! For example, I haven’t had a Coke or Pepsi or any similar kind of soda in probably 20 years, simply because I don’t want to. They don’t appeal to me at all. I feel very grateful that my grandmother Noi taught me to have a good relationship with food—to think of it as something that can add joy and goodness to one’s day.

TW: I see your memoir has also been optioned for movie development, and I'd ask about that too, but I know authors don't always have much say in how such a project develops.

BMN: You are right that I have no say in any of this. I do think it’s very strange and kind of hilarious!

If people wonder about the use of the name Beth, I started going by Beth a few years ago as a social experiment to see how my life would change—if people would perceive me differently (and yes, they do!). I’ve been writing an essay about the experience, which will go into my next book. :)

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Bich Minh "Beth" Nguyen received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she won Hopwood Awards in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She currently directs and teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. She and her family live in the Bay Area.

Beth Nguyen will be a Guest Artist in July 2018 for The Normal School’s Summer Workshop and Publishing Institute in Nonfiction, part CSU Summer Arts:

http://blogs.calstate.edu/summerarts/courses/the-normal-schools-summer-workshop/

[A note on pronunciation: Bich is pronounced like "Bic"; Nguyen, the “Smith” of Viet Nam, is pronounced something like Ngoo-ee-ehn (said quickly, as in one syllable), but most people tend to say "Win" or "New-IN" instead and that has become acceptable.]

Tara Williams is an MFA candidate in Fresno State's Creative Writing Fiction program. She has previously published nonfiction books and articles on natural healing modalities, and interviews with cultural icons including Leonard Peltier, Russell Means, Julia Butterfly, and former WIBF World Champion boxer Lucia Rijker, "The Most Dangerous Woman in the World." 

A Normal Interview with Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas

By Bethany Hazen

Bethany Hazen: I've borrowed this from Twitter, but: The zombie apocalypse is upon us and the object to your left is the only weapon you'll have to defend yourself against new humanity. What is it? (Mine was a refrigerator).

Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas: Excellent question.

Belial, my carnivorous pitcher plant, which was recently repotted into a skull-shaped planter. I think we’ll be fine.

BH: Do you have any fall traditions that you're looking forward to this season?

LF: I like pumpkin carving, roller coaster riding, and lecturing my friends about the perpetual cultural relevance of Wes Craven and Fairuza Balk.

BH: You’ll be visiting the CSU, Fresno campus on November 16th as a guest of The Normal School for a reading event. Can you talk about your process for composing your collection of essays in Don’t Come Back: did you set out to recreate your personal history in the context of origin and cultural vacillation, or was it more a process of discovery along the way?

LF: In the past, when I’ve been asked similar questions, I’ve answered that writing Don’t Come Back was like writing “a quema ropa.” The common translation for this phrase is “point blank,” but it draws a different image altogether. It refers, in fact, to a gun being pressed so firmly to your body that when the trigger is pulled the muzzle burns through your clothing.

And that’s more or less what it felt like.

I didn’t even settle on writing this book until about halfway through the second year of my MFA. I had actually made two entirely different plans for two entirely different books before settling on Don’t Come Back. Or, rather, until I couldn’t fight DCB’s will to exist any longer. Because, of course, I knew a book that jumped genres, timelines and perspectives, while utilizing diagrams, images and untranslatable aphorisms, was the most impractical book I could write, and I thought I’d never be able to place it. So, this was never meant to be my first book, or even second, or third. I wasn’t even sure it should be a book at all, but every time I sat down to write either of the two very practical and accessible books I’d planned from start to finish, I simply couldn’t write them. It was like chewing on cardboard and pretending it was a feast for the sake of my host, except I was playing both parts, and quickly lost the will to pretend I was pretending.

Since then I’ve learnt that I can only write about subject matter which feels pressing and immediate. Enjoyment, happiness, knowledge, skill or even interest have almost nothing to do with it. If it does not feel close enough to burn my skin, I don’t even try.

BH: You interviewed family and friends in developing the content for some of these essays. Was this natural inquisitiveness, or was your approach more formal?

LF: The short answer is this: much to my mother’s dismay, I can’t be formal to save my life.

The longer answer is that as a child I was punished with almost improbable frequency because so many of my chosen ‘activities’ resulted in near death experiences. If there was a button I shouldn’t press, a door I shouldn’t open, a tree I should not climb, I would press, open and climb. And if there was a stranger, I would talk to him. That’s what buttons, doors, trees and strangers were for. My parents’ primary objective was to keep me from throwing myself off a cliff just to see what lay at the bottom, when my objective was to do just that. If they could keep me from it past the age of seventeen, they told me with some frequency, they would consider it a success.

Not much has changed since then. I still like cliffs, and I always find that shallow people tell the worst stories.

I also deeply resent the hierarchies that make certain people “invisible” and “irrelevant”, and because theirs are the stories that rarely get told, theirs are the ones I tend to seek out—I always have, but even more so after I started publishing essays here and there. Because even though Don’t Come Back is a book from a fairly small press, and is written in a language none of my subjects speak, writing down their stories to the best of my abilities is my most sincere act of rebellion against a system that refuses to acknowledge their heroism.

BH: You play with experimental forms in Don’t Come Back. For example, you carry the aphorisms that begin each essay through several rounds of translation on the page. In addition, in “Empire of Toes,” you use illustrations in transition to supplement your imagery in prose: the effect is a reminder that the conditions of life and control are transitory. What was your inspiration for incorporating these forms and techniques into your essays?

LF: That’s an interesting question, I don’t think I had thought about this in years and it actually took me a few minutes to remember where I’d gotten the idea.

First, though, I should mention that it all started with my literary translation MFA thesis. I translated a few short stories and poems, but nothing felt thrilling until I arrived at the aphorism. I believe this was primarily due to the fact that at the time they seemed basically impossible to translate, so that was all I wanted to do.

Aphorisms are fascinating because they are what is left of our once vital oral traditions. They are open source books of wisdom and depend on a shifting corpus of silences and tacit understandings. Often times you will get only half of an aphorism and it will be enough to communicate a complete and complex idea. No good deed, every dark cloud, easy come.

You are functioning as at least half of the unwritten text, and translating this invisible transaction required some alternative form of representation. Anything traditional or overtly textual betrayed the subtle negotiation of meaning, and the necessary loss of the process. So I began experimenting with various ways to represent them.

I made charts and spreadsheets, I wrote lists and drew maps; I even tried illustrating the aphorisms myself. To this day I recall my favorite, a tiny grim reaper riding around inside a half open fish mouth like a convertible with the top down, “El pez muere por la boca.” I really wish I had kept it.

Eventually, while writing an essay about a horse, I stumbled onto a reprinting of the Muybridge photographs of a horse mid gallop and knew exactly what I wanted to do. In workshop, in fact, I would often call them my Muybridge translations, and I find it very curious how much time I spent thinking about galloping horses and how long it took me just now to remember it.

See? This is the importance of representing process.

Through it all, workshops and what followed, it always felt important to keep them. Even at the lowest point, one day when I received five rejections for DCB and various complaints about the oddity of the diagrams, even then, I knew that they had to be a part of the book. Because, what I really wanted to translate was the untranslatability of a translated experience. Of being caught between times, places, languages and selves, and if I gave the reader the impression that it all could easily fit into this new English skin, then, I would have failed in my primary objective. And it would not have been, to me, true to my nonfiction.

BH: Your essays include an exploration of mythology, which enriches the reader’s understanding of Colombia’s cultural history. Each of the four parts in Don’t Come Back are headlined with the tales of four mythical characters: Chiminigagua, Bachué, Nemqueteba, and Huitaca. And then your final essay, “CID-LAX-BOG” elaborates and braids together this mythical past to juxtapose your own grappling of a shifting future. What was it about the ‘narrative-now’ that equated to mythology for you?

LF: I think the correlation begins with a different word, and that is literature—and by extension, culture.

I’ve said this a few times in the past, but since I’m still angry about it, I guess I’ll write it now too.

By the time I was fifteen I had read the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and had a fairly decent grasp of Greek and Roman mythology, but I knew almost nothing about the thoughts and stories of the people who had first loved and lived in the steep patch of the Andes that I called home.

I spent the first seven years of my life in a holy city of the Muisca confederation of tribes, and for all those years, I only had the vaguest notion that Chia had something to do with the moon.

Why?

Because after the European invasion it was decided that there was only one culture that could be called culture, and the rest was at best a quaint bedtime story, and at worst heresy.

It had nothing to do with “truth”, reality or science. This was not an empirical improvement or an objective cultural intervention. Zeus and Apollo were no more factual than Bachúe and Nemqueteba, and yet, one was culture and the other was the wild imaginations of a dark and fallen people.

I spent my last year of high school reading and reading Muisca mythology and falling in love with a mode of thinking I felt could rival any Icarus or Persephone of the ancient European world. Even then, without a platform or a plan, I knew I wanted people to love Huitaca, and Bachúe, and Chiminigagua. It wasn’t more complex than this, it still isn’t. Translation is always about this, for me. A desire for other people to love the things I’ve come to love.

By the time I had started my second MFA program I had also begun thinking of the myth as a precursor to the essay. Man’s first science, first history, first assaying into the why and how of all things inside and out, by this point their inclusion was inevitable.

BH: Your previous publication of essays, Drown Sever Sing, also explores mythology in a hybridization of Fiction and Nonfiction. You are or have been a professor of both Fiction and Creative Nonfiction: how do you encourage your students (and yourself) to explore the gray space in between genres? 

LF: This is a very interesting question. I think the idea of exploring ‘gray space’ makes it seem like fiction and nonfiction have been unequivocally defined and it is only the stuff in between that remains indeterminate, a hybrid. But, it continues to be challenging to categorize writing about dreams or even just writing about past experience in the present tense, without implementing some hybrid terminology.

There is not even remotely enough space here to pour out the contents of that barrel of worms, so let me ignore that altogether and give you a series of answers in varying lengths. First, short answer: I live in the gray space. Literally and figuratively. I am an immigrant with a work visa. I am a resident of a country where I do not reside, and just existing in the US is a feat of imagination.

Regarding my own students, the even shorter answer is: I use a lot of prompts.

The long answer, though, and perhaps the most interesting one is the introduction to God in Pain: Inversions of the Apocalypse, wherein Zizek writes, “If, once upon a time, we publicly pretended to believe while privately we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public belief, today we publicly tend to profess our skeptical, hedonistic, relaxed attitude while privately we remain haunted by beliefs […].”

The best nonfiction, for me, deals with the confrontation of our own fictional nonfictions and nonfictional fictions. We all exist in liminal spaces—not just immigrants—and we are perpetually entertaining a series of contradictory notions all at once. The best nonfiction not only acknowledges this but embraces it. All perception is distortion, we are the glass darkly through which we view the world, and life slips by between corruption and correction. Facts may very well exist outside of our sphere of distorted influence, but the moment we attempt to communicate them, we leave our thumb prints on their black shells.

BH: In reading your work, I've come to appreciate how your background in literary translation has informed your craft. How do you think we as writers can emphasize a mindfulness for what might get lost in translation as part of diversification in literature?

LF: First, let us take a moment to acknowledge translators. They are the librarians, nurses, teachers, and crab fishermen of the literate world. They do all the hard work and don’t even remotely get the recognition they deserve.

If you know a translator, please take a moment today to buy them a cup of coffee and offer them a hug. Unless they drink tea, my unscientific survey tells me that a disproportionate number of translators prefer tea.

Ok, good, now let’s carry on.

I imagine that most of my answers have covered this in one way or another. I’m more interested in transparency than invisibility. Counter artifice, collaboration and open source writing.

But, to reiterate, let us consider the terms “good” and “bad” translation. What does this mean? Accuracy? In words? Sounds? Rhyme? Abstractions? Consider how frequently the words “truth” and “fidelity” come up when we talk about translation. What does it mean for a translation to be “true” or “faithful,” which truth, unfaithful to what? How would you truthfully translate a sentence written in a gendered language and into a language with almost no gendering? How do you translate la tierra or el mundo, la, feminine earth, and el, masculine world, when all the target language offers is the, flat, neutered. Genderless earth, genderless world.

Now, without going much further, consider the wordless sensation of your heart breaking, of leaving home, of coming back, of watching someone you love on their deathbed, of helping a friend through withdrawal, or the thrilling panic of first love and first sex. All of these experiences have, of course, already been codified for your convenience, they’ve all been made to fit into standardized “translation” patterns from which you could easily pick. Heads over heels, butterflies in stomachs, knots in throats and heavy, sinking, racing, cold, black hearts.

For me, this is where less than stellar writing comes from.

The best writing questions translating “La” as simply, “The,” only because, “Well… that’s how it’s been done before. That’s what is must be like.” The best writing pays attention to friction and to loss, and the best translators and writers attempt to rescue something new in their translation of a wordless world. To change the terms of that negotiation each time, lose something else and gain something new. The moment one borrows someone else’s language the experience becomes, ever so slightly, someone else’s too.  

BH: The Normal School editorial staff is really excited for the publication of “Whistling,” your collaborative piece with Amanda Dambrink in the Fall 2017 Issue. Is there anything new you’re working on now that you would like to talk about?

LF: Let’s see. I’m currently on course release, so I’m doing my best to make the most of this rare opportunity. Regarding immediate publications, I have an essay coming out in Passages North and a schema in The Believer. Regarding books, there is the novel about the devil which keeps me up at night. And the nonfiction book of historical essay about the coming of age of the northernmost part of South America, which keeps me up every other night. And, finally, there is an anthology I’m working on with Sarah Viren—who is an extraordinary writer and editor—titled Essaying the Americas, which collects essays from Patagonia to Nunavut, from the Mayan mythic past to the Facebook-post present. Basically, I never sleep.

Mostly, though, I’m trying to keep Belial and myself alive.

"Belial, my carnivorous pitcher plant, ... recently repotted into a skull-shaped planter." - L.F.

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Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. graduated with both a creative nonfiction writing and a literary translation MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of “Drown Sever Sing” from Anomalous press and “Don’t Come Back,” from Mad River Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation work has been featured in journals including The Bellingham Review, The Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers and the Sunday Rumpus among others. She won the Best of the Net, the Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices Award, has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus to Richmond, Virginia where she works as an assistant professor for the Virginia Commonwealth University.

Bethany C. Hazen is a first year MFA student pursuing an understanding of Creative Nonfiction and her own voice at California State University, Fresno’s College of Arts and Humanities. She is an editorial intern at The Normal School, and she will likely die in the event of a zombie apocalypse while waiting it all out in a refrigerator.

A Normal Interview with Joe Oestreich

By Barrett Bowlin

I first met Joe Oestreich through his writing, in an Esquire feature on the best bars in America. Out of two dozen or so places mentioned, the write-up on a Columbus, Ohio, watering hole with a tree growing out of the middle of it stood out. And then I met him proper-like, in person at a bar in Daytona, Florida, in 2008, just a few years before his rock memoir, Hitless Wonder, came out, which was followed shortly by a book centered on an infamous, South Carolina high school football game: Lines of Scrimmage (which he co-wrote with Scott Pleasant). Recently, Black Lawrence Press published Oestreich's first nonfiction collection, Partisans, which starts off with an essay on love, murder, and family pets.

Barrett Bowlin: Let's talk a wee bit about "The Mercy Kill." You published it with The Normal School back in 2012, and I was curious what the impetus was for you to write that piece in that particular period. If you can remember, when did you start work on it, and what made it an essential piece to write around that time?

Joe Oestreich: Back then, there were so many bestsellers about dogs. Dog books were everywhere, man. So I consciously set out to write a dog essay—as a challenge. There was this voice in my head like the one from the film Barton Fink that says, "A wrestling picture!" But my voice kept saying, "A dog essay!" The trouble was, my best dog story wasn't the fluffy kind that appeals to dog people. Mine has more of an Old Yeller kind of ending. Still: A dog essay!

BB: And I love how your dog from that period became kind of the side item in the narrative. Tangentially, when did you know you were going to place John Parsons as the central figure?

JO: I found out pretty quickly that I couldn't write about the dog—an old female mutt named Rex—without writing about the man that did her the kindness of putting her out of her misery. And the guy who did that merciful thing—a neighbor named John Parsons—was the same guy who'd been charged with murder. He’d later be convicted, and my parents would testify on his behalf during the sentencing phase of the trial. He's a complicated man, which makes him a compelling character.

BB: What was behind the decision to include "The Mercy Kill" first in the collection? If we're thinking of the essay collection as an album, it's the opening track. Highly coveted space there, dude.

JO: It was a practical decision, rather than, say, a thematic one. At minimum, the first essay has got to make the reader want to stick around to read the second one. I guess I figured if a reader gets to the end of "The Mercy Kill," says "meh," and puts the book down, then there was nothing I could have done to keep him. If that first essay is not for you, no problem. Don't waste your time with the rest of the book. Maybe go rake the leaves or something.

BB: Don't sell yourself short on it, though. Seriously, it's got murder, euthanasia, the story of your father leaving your mother for another woman. What's not to love?

JO: The dog getting shot in the head. That's what's not to love.

BB: True. But the essay works in that essential—and I'm going to call it essential, damn it!—Old Yeller cultural moment. Why do you think of the essay as more of a threshold than an invitation?

JO: It would be great if "The Mercy Kill" worked as both an invitation and a threshold. With that essay, I'm trying to invite the reader into my—I don't know—sensibility, I guess I'd call it. And then, after that first piece, I'm hoping they want to hang around for a while.

BB: Touching on that, too, much like it served as the central subject matter in your first book, Hitless Wonder, music figures into Partisans as an essential component: as a question of what it means to 'rock' (in "This Essay Doesn't Rock," for example); as an exploration into mood and music theory; as part of the larger narrative of your band, Watershed, and so on. When you were assembling the essays for the collection, did musicality figure into the order? If so, how?

JO: You nailed it earlier, when you compared an essay collection to a record album. I was really thinking of Partisans of having an A-side and B-side. In this collection, the A-side essays are largely memoir and travel writing. They concern stuff I did and stuff that happened to me. The B-side essays deal much more in cultural criticism, stuff I notice rather than do. I was born in 1969, so I come from the era of vinyl records. From my perspective, when you flip that record over to the B-side, you’re preparing yourself for a change in mood rather than a rehash of what you heard on Side A. I'm thinking here of a record like Abbey Road.

Wait. I don’t want to compare myself to the Beatles. Maybe I should have said Heaven Tonight by Cheap Trick. Better yet, Van Halen's Diver Down.

BB: In terms of the collection's content, you really do manage to cover a huge amount of real estate. Regarding geography (the U.S., Mexico, France, Turkey) and subject matter (murders, escaping time-share presentations, marriage, the death of animals, tattoos, migrant workers, etc.) and time (1969 to the present), Partisans gets into a fair amount of disparate material. What made you think the essays could function together in a single collection?

JO: That's a tricky one. Maybe they don't. But the way I see it, there are two types of essay collections. In the first type, the essays have an obvious topical or thematic link. Fifteen essays about waterfalls, say. Or thirteen essays about Montana. In the second type, the essays are linked by the voice and (here's that word again) sensibility of the writer. I'm thinking here of books like Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, George Saunders' The Braindead Megaphone, and the Davis Foster Wallace essay collections. I tend to prefer the second type—the wide-ranging type—over the first. I like variety. I also like to fall in love a little bit with the narrator and then have him or her act as my tour guide through a bunch of different places and ideas.

The complication is that unless the author is already famous, it's hard to get that second type published. A wandering, disparate collection by a famous writer like George Saunders is going to be a bestseller. But what if the author isn't famous? Then it’s hard for agents and publishers to identify a clear audience for a wandering, disparate essay collection. Fifteen Essays about Waterfalls might not sell a million, but at least the audience is clear. And in the book proposal, the agent can bullet-point it:

·      Couples looking for moist, outdoorsy places to kiss;

·      Shampoo marketers;

·      Daredevils/barrel makers.

My feeling is that super-cohesive essay collections are easier to sell but not as much fun to read.

BB: I'm curious, then: what was the place or subject matter where you felt most excited about taking the reader to in the collection? Similarly, what was the place you were most worried about taking them?

JO: I always get excited by taking seriously a trivial subject, like, for instance, trying to define what rocks and what doesn't or what it's like to have somebody else rifle through your CD collection. Plus the “CD collection” essay—called "Barreling into Uncool"—gave me a legitimate reason to reference not just one but both of Judas Priest's guitar players. Any essayist can name check KK Downing. It takes real skill to work in Glenn Tipton.

I’m always worried about taking readers into my life. The more memoir-y stuff. The worry isn't that I'm scared to reveal intimate details; the worry is that they'll get bored reading about me. But that's the leap all writers of memoir and personal essay must make. You have to hope that, in writing about yourself, you've transcended the personal and stumbled upon something that resonates with everybody, something universal. I worry about failing at that, about navel gazing.

BB: In my literary hopes and dreams, I envision you with a brushed-nickel frame you've purchased from Target and which you've nailed up above your office door, one that reads: "Don't fucking navel gaze!"

JO: Shouted in the same voice that said, "A dog essay!"

BB: Okay, one last question about the selection process: which subject matters have you written about that didn't make the cut for Partisans? Do you see that material coming together for a future collection?

JO: I left pieces out of the collection not due to subject matter but due to form. Many of the essays I rejected were overly fragmented and lyrical in a way that seemed cutting edge when I was in grad school but seems kind of gimmick-for-gimmick's sake now. I dig lyrical and fragmented essays, just not the ones I wrote.

BB: Dude, I, too, love that you play with a variety of structures for the essays in the book, e.g., braided essays like "The Get Down" and "In Any August," segmented essays like "Two Haircuts" and "This Machine No Longer Kills Fascists (Did It Ever?)," and so on. For someone who works so prominently in creative nonfiction, what goes into the decision-making process for you in terms of structure? When do you figure out what the architecture of a book or a short piece is going to look like?

JO: This sounds trite and obvious, but the goal is try to find the form that's organic to the material. That's hard to do, of course. When beginning a new essay, I experiment a little—with voice, with form. But at some point, you have to stop experimenting and commit to a structure, just to get something down on the page. Then, once it's done, you can step back, take stock, and try to assess if the form you chose worked. I'm never totally confident that I've made the right choice. Could a given essay have been better if I’d tried a different structure? Sure, maybe. But look at the structure I did choose—it actually exists. I sometimes tell my students, "Try not to fall victim to the tyranny of the thing that exists. That initial version of your (essay, story, poem) is a freaking bully. It wants not to be changed."

And I do revise a lot. But I will admit that once I have a completed essay with a given structure, I usually don't radically alter the form in revision. If the first draft of the essay is a solid, split-level suburban home, I try to hone it into an even nicer split-level suburban. I don't change it into an igloo. Or a yurt.

BB: There's a line in the essay "This Machine No Longer Kills Fascists (Did It Ever?):" "I want to believe music makes a difference. I really do. But I'm not so sure."

I love the honesty of this jumping-off point in the essay. That said, if music is having—let's call it 'difficulty'—influencing politics and social change, particularly now, let's focus on music itself. What have you been listening to as of late that's helped to change your perspective on music (if at all)? Or like you did when listening to older, less hipster-approved records in "Barreling into Uncool," what music from your past have you re-examined recently and found something new (and hopefully promising) in?

JO: First of all, there's a shit-ton of great new music out there. I just don't know about it. Yet. As a music fan, I'm always about five years behind. This is by design, kind of. New music gets produced and distributed so quickly that it overwhelms me. It's hard to filter out the white noise to get to the good stuff. Luckily, I have friends whose taste I trust. They tell me everything I need to hear. And then, five years later, I get around to it. So for me, bands like Hacienda and Japandroids are new.

Lots of music fans like to go wide; they listen to everything. I like to go deep. I’d rather listen to one thing. Over and over. Like The Weight is a Gift by Nada Surf. I'll listen to that record for two weeks straight, and I'll hear all kinds of nuance during week two that I missed during week one. This repetition is what it was like when I was a kid and I only owned three albums. And I’m sure I will never love and be inspired by music as much as I was then, when I was going deep out of necessity. All of that said, there's a relatively new singer/songwriter named Aaron Lee Tasjan who’s great. Don’t wait five years on him. One other thing: The older I get, the less I care about what's cool. I concentrate more on what's good. Which is why I can say with 100% certainty that history will be kind to Billy Squier.

BB: I am so going to trust you on that. (Also, thanks incredibly for getting "The Stroke" stuck in my head, you bastard.) Quick follow-up, then: I'm curious what CNF you've come back to in a deep dive recently. What's an example of a solidly good work that you've found again that has way more nuance than what you initially assumed?

JO: You know who the Billy Squier of CNF is? Steve Almond. And I think he might appreciate why I say so. It's because, just as Squier does with a catchy pop song, Almond makes writing catchy essays look easy. And because he's so funny, it's easy to overlook the smarts and thoughtfulness. Almond could probably even bust out the dance moves Squier did in the "Rock Me Tonight" video.

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Joe Oestreich is the author of Partisans, Lines of Scrimmage (with Scott Pleasant), and Hitless Wonder. His work has appeared in The Normal School, Esquire, Creative Nonfiction, and many other journals and magazines. He teaches creative writing at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.

Barrett Bowlin is director of the Writing Center at Binghamton University, where he moonlights as a contributing editor for Memorious. His essays and stories appear in places like Ninth Letter, Hobart, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, Mid-American Review, and Bayou, which awarded him the 2015 James Knudsen Prize in Fiction.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies: Interview with SJ Sindu

By Jennifer M. Dean

SJ Sindu’s debut novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, uses the classic love story/tragedy arc of young lovers re-united as adults only to be kept apart by circumstances, culture, and perhaps even tragic flaws of the characters themselves to chronicle the unique and often painful choices faced by queer South Asians of the Diaspora. Set in twenty-first century Boston, the lovers are two women - Lucky and Nisha - both from Sri Lankan Hindu families, who commit to marriages of convenience to preserve ties with their families. SJ Sindu and I discuss the inspiration for Marriage of a Thousand Lies and the work of crafting the novel.

For some readers, this particular point of the plot - that in Boston, in the United States - a young woman would feel compelled to enter a marriage of convenience to be incredible, yet your writing is such that not only can a reader imagine it as true they ache for Lucky, Kris, and Nisha. How much research - interviews and so on - were a part of your preparation for writing this book and how much of it stemmed from your own experience as a queer desi growing up in a very traditional Sri Lankan family?

A lot of the novel, and especially the experience of Lucky and Kris, were based on my own experience. I know it does seem incredible to some readers--often white readers who are surrounded by a liberal bubble and live in larger cities--that there are arranged marriages and marriages of convenience happening in 2017, in current-day America, in the very cities they live in. One early reader even said that he couldn’t believe a queer person would be in the closet in 2012, when the novel takes place. After the book sold and people were starting to hear about it, I got emails and confessions at author events from other South Asians who have been in marriages of convenience to hide their queerness, or who have agreed to arranged marriages against their will. I knew that Lucky’s story was common, but I didn’t know just how pervasive it is until people started telling me. It’s amazing, actually, and I hope that this story helps to shine some light on that underbelly of South Asian queer life.

A lot of people don’t realize the absoluteness of the closet, especially if you haven’t been in it. For a lot of heterosexual American liberals, the closet is a place you can leave and never go back to again, but that’s just not true. The closet is something that lives inside you, not the other way around. For someone like my protagonist Lucky, the closet has taken over her life--it’s imprisoned her mind, and it’s extremely difficult to escape that kind of chain.

I lived under its grip for years, and it’s a constant process of coming out over and over--coming out is a perpetual action, not a border you can cross and never go back to. I based a lot of Lucky’s internal emotional state on my experience. I also used the experiences of people I knew--fellow South Asian queers who were in the closet in their own ways. Kris’s story is based on one of my close friends from college. But even though Lucky and Kris are often miserable, I consider them better off than Nisha. It’s Nisha I have the greatest sympathy for--she’s trapped in a loop of thinking where she’s closeted even from herself. At least Lucky and Kris know who they are. Nisha’s denial of her own feelings makes her, to me, the most tragic character in the book (aside from Lucky’s mother).

What was the beginning point- for you - in writing this story? How did you come to write this novel?

When I was twenty, about three years after I came out, my family started trying to arrange my marriage. My information was passed around all over the world, and meetings were set up between me and my suitors. I was caught between threats of disownment and sacrificing my life to make my family and the community happy. I was also furious that they’d ask this of me. And I was also furious that the larger South Asian community would pressure my parents so much into pressuring me. My parents also faced disownment from the community if I didn’t fall in line.

I started writing a lot about this experience, and in particular I started writing a short story about a woman who was being forced into an arranged marriage. This is a pretty common early subject for South Asian women writers.

Around that time, a gay desi friend of mine asked me to marry him. We’d appease both our families, he argued, and we’d get to maintain our queerness in our private lives. We’d be great roommates and partners, albeit not in the romantic sense. I said no. But that question haunted me. I wondered what kind of person I would’ve had to be to say yes.

This novel grew out of that time and out of that short story.

Concerns of personal identity and independence vs community identity and obligation are a key area of conflict in your novel. There's definitely a high cost to the life Lucky is forced to lead. What was it like to depict the emotional and psychological toll of that dual life, that mental calculus always at work for young people attempting to negotiate their own identity and what their elders expect and demand of them?

I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of the central conflict in the story. There is a huge psychological and emotional toll for everyone navigating this path--and especially for the women, who are disenfranchised in a culture as patriarchal as the one of modern day South Asian American diaspora. Every woman in the story is forced into the position of deciding between herself (her own happiness, independence, individuality) and obligation to the community. And on top of that, this choice is underscored by Hindu mythology and traditions.

I wanted this novel to be an exploration of that particular aspect of South Asian womanhood, so I created characters who would each make a different choice. Each of them has to sacrifice something, whether it be their individual identity or their family. But Lucky tries to have it both ways, to live out her queer life on the side and still appease her family, but that choice also has the grave cost of her inner peace. It’s a painful place to be, and all of Lucky’s interiority is shaped by that pain. She’s alternatively angry and numb. She’s both fighting against her family and wanting to be near them. These contradictions shape her, as they shape every other woman character in the book.

It was difficult writing this book because of Lucky’s inner turmoil--and the book is told from her point of view, so I had to sink my toes into her interiority. Getting into her headspace day after day was painful. I was often angry and sad while writing, and it took me a long time to climb out of that headspace after finishing the novel.

But there are elements to Lucky’s experience that make her anguish unique, too.

Of course, for Lucky this choice is compounded by her queerness. Her South Asianness keeps her from fully embracing the queer community--which is largely white and Euro-centric. Her queerness keeps her from feeling belonging in her family or South Asian community. She’s always an outsider. I think there’s a temptation to view this story as entirely universal, that these are choices every woman faces, and there’s some truth to that. But it’s also a very particular story of a queer South Asian woman, and the specificity of her experience with homophobia in the South Asian community and with ethnocentrism in the queer community.

You are also a creative writing teacher. What do you tell your students about the process of writing a novel? What do you tell them about revision?

I tell them that it’s hard, that there are no signposts or guidelines or rules when you’re in the thick of it. But I tell them they should do it anyway. I utilize terrible running metaphors. But what I hope my students get out of it is that if you want to write a novel, it takes a lot of dedication and tenacity--far more than writing a single poem or short story. A novel can eat up years of your life. This one took me five years to write and three years to publish.

And even after the tremendous feat of writing a full draft, the real work has just started. My writing process involves a lot of revision. Not everyone works that way, but every novel goes through at least some revision. This novel in its final version is the 19th draft I wrote. The process made me respect revision far more than I did before I started. But at the end, it’s worth it for me. And I tell my students to find a story they want to tell bad enough that it’s worth it for them, too.

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SJ Sindu was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Massachusetts. Her hybrid fiction and nonfiction chapbook, I Once Met You But You Were Dead, won the 2016 Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest and was published by Split Lip Press. Her work has been published in Brevity, The Normal School, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Marriage of a Thousand Lies is her first novel.
Jennifer M. Dean writes, works, and lives in Fresno, California. She is a Contributing Editor at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Poetry Quarterly, Midwestern Gothic and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her first essay collection.

A Normal Interview with Mai Der Vang

Newly released from Graywolf Press, Mai Der Vang’s poetry collection Afterland is the winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.

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By Daniel Arias-Gomez

Sitting down in the Laureate Lab and Visual Studio inside Fresno State’s library, Mai Der Vang gives us an in-depth look at the form and craft of the poems in Afterland.

Daniel Arias-Gomez: I want to start with a bit of a cliché question and ask about your title and about the process of putting together your book as a cohesive whole. I’m under the impression that when people think about poetry books they perceive them as a series of individual poems grouped together rather than as a single unified work. However, your book does feel to me like a unified whole right from the title, Afterland. The word “after” (along with a few other words) is repeated over and over throughout the book, and I don’t think I can overstate the importance of land within the book. I see these and many other threads running throughout the work—so that the individual poems seem to construct a greater narrative that happens at the level of the book as a whole. With this in mind, I was hoping you could talk about the process of crafting Afterland—do you, in fact, see this book working as one long narrative that runs through the poems or not? Also, did you envision it as a cohesive whole when you started working on the poems, or did you work on individual poems separately and the greater narrative started to fall into place by itself?

Mai Der Vang: When I started working on Afterland I was in my MFA program at Columbia. It was a two-year program, and when I went into it I knew that I was going to be working on something that was going to become a collection. I didn’t know exactly at that point what I was going to write about, but I knew that I was going to explore something related to my Hmong-American identity and my experience. But Afterland was not what I had set out to do initially. I would work on the poems every week, and I would also workshop a lot of them. And a lot of the poems came together through just having that time to finally be able to hunker down and write. I’d been working for years before that in the community, so I didn’t have time to devote to the craft. And when I finally got to writing, I think the work just started coming together. “Afterland,” the title poem, was much longer initially. It was almost eleven sections. And I thought, this is too long, I don’t know if anyone will understand it or be able to keep up with or follow. It got too tedious, and so I broke it down to the five sections that remain in the book, and then I moved it to the very end. And I think that, like you said, the idea of land is so significant to the work as a whole. When I was thinking about Afterland, I didn’t come up with the title until the very end. But I found myself writing all this imagery, all these landscape descriptions, and all these forgotten places, these places of desolation, this land that had fallen into ruins, and so for whatever reason I was just naturally doing that. And also, I was exploring the idea of the afterland in many contexts. The afterland of the refugee, and where does the refugee end up after they leave their home country, and what happens to that country as well. There’s a kind of afterland too that exists within that country that has just experienced war. And then obviously the afterland of the spirit. The word afterland itself was a word in the poem, “Dear Shaman,” and as I was thinking about titles I came across that word. I was looking through the whole manuscript to see if there was a phrase, a word, something that stuck out. And at the time I didn’t have a poem called, “Afterland,” but I saw that word, and I thought that it might work as a title. Finally, I spoke to one of my workshop leaders, Dottie Lasky, and she contextualized it for me: she said, it seems like you’re exploring all of these afterspaces. The afterspace of the spirit is the obvious one, but there are also other afterspaces as well. You can even see some afterspaces of a relationship too—there are a couple poems in there about that. But there was a way in which I was looking at these postlandscapes, the way in which these landscapes evolve, change, experience a kind of destruction, and I found that resonating with me, and I stuck with the word afterland. I did not set out to write Afterland. It sort of just emerged through the process. And all the landscape imagery as well was not something I had set out to do either, but for some reason I just found myself diving into the imagery and wanting to pull language from images, and so that kind of fit with the whole idea of afterland, these haunted landscapes.

DAG: Following up on the ideas of the previous question, I want to talk to you about some of the central themes of the book that stood out to me. I think that three very prominent themes in the book are the body, the spirit, and the land. And though each of these occupies its own space within the work, I think that the book is most compelling when these themes start to overlap with each other. To give an example, there are some instances in the book where we see the body as landscape. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship between these three themes within the context of the book?

MDV: Absolutely right. I was really exploring those elements. My parents came to this country as refugees from Laos in the early eighties. I was born here in Fresno, but if they had stayed maybe about a year or so longer, I would have been born in the refugee camps. And I try to deconstruct why I found myself obsessively writing about the body, and I think it has to do with the physicality of space and the fact that I never got to experience what my parents had to endure. There’s a sense in me in which I feel that I was fortunate to be able to escape the atrocities of the war and the running that they experienced. And so for me there’s a gap in that experience, and I think that’s why I think about body so much, because my body was never there. And so I look at the ways in which these bodies become a physical space. Also, when you think about the spirit, there’s always this concept of what happens to the spirit after it passes into the other world, what happens to the body. Those are questions I found myself thinking about. And I think a lot of it is rooted in my having grown up in a family that practices Shamanism. When my parents came over to this country, they didn’t convert to Christianity. They stayed practicing Shamanism, which is a very ancient and very primitive way of seeing the world but also a very wise way of thinking about the body and the spirit and the relationship between the two. And I think there’s a permanence about the spirit that transcends what the body can offer in this landscape. Hmong people do believe that long after your body is gone, your spirit will travel, will seek, and will try to find the land of its ancestors. And a lot of the poems in Afterland try to do that. There’s a way in which I’m trying to figure out that journey that the spirit takes in order to find those ancestors and then eventually be reborn again. When I was writing Afterland I was trying to think about, and research, and look into a lot of these things. So I found myself obsessing over the body and the spirit because of having grown up around that in a family that practices Shamanism and having been told that if a child falls down on the floor you have to call his or her spirit back or else that child is going to get sick. That’s something I grew up hearing all the time from my parents—don’t slip, don’t go running around everywhere—because your spirit would fall, literally and figuratively. So there was a way in which so much of my growing up was blending the literal and the figurative. I think that’s partially why those three elements that you point out figure so profoundly in the work. The vehement belief in the spirit and the afterlife was very prominent in my family.

DAG: I want to delve a little bit more into the concept of Shamanism within the context of your book, and into the way the literal and the figurative merge. As I read Afterland the figure of the Shaman stood out to me a lot. And specifically, I started to think of the poet as Shaman because of the way in which you play with figurative language to explore the relationship between the spirit and the body.

MDV: You know, that’s a really interesting insight because Shamans are the people who mediate between two worlds—they mediate between the spirit world and the living world. If you’re a Hmong family that still practices Shamanism, and someone gets sick in your family where you need to do a ceremony to heal the family, then you would call a Shaman to come to your house. And there’s a ritual in which the Shaman stands or sits on a bench, covers his face, and uses these different instruments to help facilitate the ceremony. And he serves as a mediator, a guide. He is the instrument through which we can traverse these multiple worlds. There’s a story in my family about one of my late uncles. I wasn’t there for this ceremony, but one of my uncles passed away mysteriously. They didn’t know why he passed away, so my father called on this very powerful Shaman—she was a woman, and she was from Merced, I think—to come and do a ceremony in our house. During the ceremony she was able to travel to this other realm from which she was able to tell the family that had gathered at my house what had happened to my uncle, how he had died, and that he wasn’t going to be able to come back. And she was speaking as if she was him. All of this sounds crazy, you know, in a way, but it’s a practice that Hmong people really believe in. And if there’s some level of belief to it, and if they’ve been doing this for years, then you’ve got to believe that there’s something about it, the experience of it, that holds true for us. So I think that I saw myself kind of being someone who was trying to do that in the language, to mediate between these two realms. I didn’t set out to be a Shaman in those poems. But it’s funny that you point that out because there are a couple of poems in there where I am channeling something else, I felt like. So yeah, definitely, the experience of going between these multiple worlds, these multiple languages, this otherworldly landscape, it can be attributed to that, I think.

DAG: I want to move onto a more craft-oriented question about constructing the book. Afterland is divided into sections—but the sections are not numbered, which I think would be the conventional way to do it (perhaps to give the reader a sense of progression). Instead, the sections of your book are separated by a blank page containing a small phrase. So this is a two-part question—first, could you talk about your decision of dividing the book into sections and what the purpose of those sections might be. And second, could you talk about your decision of separating the sections with only blank space and a bit of language (which I find really important since language itself is also a very prominent theme in the book)?

MDV: I went through many, many iterations of how to separate the book into various sections. At first I did it, like you said, the conventional way—I had numbers, I had roman numerals. And then I thought, why am I numbering it? Does numbering it show some chronology? Does numbering it show some kind of hierarchy? At first I thought, okay, if I broke it into these sections and I number it, there would be a sense of chronology that ran through the whole book. And then I realized that I wanted “Afterland” to be its own section. Like I said, I originally had that as the opening poem, but then I moved it to the very end where it became the closing poem. I decided to do away with the numbers because I wanted to break out of this idea of a chronology, and hierarchy, and progression. There wasn’t a clear logical progression to how I had done the sections either. A lot of stuff was all over the place. I felt myself traversing back and forth between these sections. So I wanted to do away with the numbers. But I will say, though, that I feel like a lot of the poems in the first section have to do with the war. And I wanted to open with the war because I wanted it to set a kind of tone—I wouldn’t say an angry tone, but a kind of assertive tone. This is the place from which all of this work begins, thinking about the war and the aftermath of that war. Then the poems in the middle section are poems where I’m thinking about other issues outside of the war, and also the personal reflections of my own life. And then I feel like I close with the poems that have to do with the spirit, the afterland, the Shamanism. And so there’s no clear way to recognize a chronology in that. That’s why I took the numbers away and decided to use these little fragments of language to serve as a separator, to have those fragments of language be a thread through the book—because if you actually take all of those fragments and you put them into one poem they can be a poem. I actually had them originally as a poem, but I thought, I would love to see these bits of language as the section separators, so I tried it. It was a bit of trial and error and starting out with what’s conventional then figuring out for myself where I can deviate, where I can create a new narrative or find ways to fragment things a bit and not try to be so hierarchical and chronological, because I think that’s how experience is. There’s not a clear sense of order, and I think sometimes for poetry that can be a good thing. Sometimes the disorder and the fragmentation is what can build cohesion.

DAG: I want to ask now about your use of form. I noticed that you use couplets often (tercets as well though to a lesser degree). What do you think the couplet and the tercet offer you as a poet in general? Also, how do they work within the context of the book?

MDV: I was playing a lot with form. And I was thinking a lot about not only the form but the way that it looked on the page. And yeah, there were many poems were I simply deferred to couplets, and there are a couple of poems too were I used the tercets. And then there are poems too where it’s just really inconsistent. And again, I think it goes back to my attempt at trying to create this kind of disorder. There are poems that are neat, and tight, and clean, and the form is couplets. And then there are poems where I really didn’t want to use that. And I felt like it depended to me on the spirit of each poem. With couplets, I think there are moments where they work really well, and then there are moments where it’s just too easy to use couplets, because we naturally want to use couplets. I think the tercets are really interesting because they give a different look on the page. The way that I thought about tercets is like you have this third line that’s kind of lingering by itself, like a tag-along line, like a third wheel. And so there are poems where it’s appropriate to create that lingering last, third-line thought. So for me, I was thinking about the visual form and whether or not they spoke to what the poem was trying to say. If there was a poem that was a little bit more intense, I would try to fragment or rupture the lines a little bit more. And I would say that there’s times when you can use couplets and it’s very calm—the poem feels very calm and very tame. But for me, I think I started out with those forms because I wanted to use them as a foundation from which I could start breaking away from.

DAG: That’s really interesting because your answer leads perfectly into my next question. I want to ask you now about the ways in which you push the form of your work. I was wondering if you could talk about the way you use blank space and indentation in your poems—but also about the way in which blank space relates to your use of the stanza and the line. I ask this because I noticed that even in the poems that have a greater freedom of form, there are often couplets and tercets sprinkled all over them. For example, the poem, “This Heft Upon Your Leaving,” is comprised mostly of couplets with a pair of tercets and single-line stanzas. However, many of the lines in this poem are indented without following a consistent pattern. So I’m wondering how this all fits together in your work—how do you think about form and blank space when writing your poems?

MDV: I think a lot about form and blank space. If you look at the poems, and you look at the form, you can see the caesuras, the blank spaces between the words. When I’m thinking about where to put one of those caesuras or where to put a line break, I’m thinking about what it does to the line. What happens if I fragment the line here? How does it change the music of the line? As much as I obsess about imagery, I also obsess about sound. I’m trying to listen very carefully to the way something sounds in a line, and whether it makes sense to have that sound in the next line as well. I think there’s a way in which the effect of the poem becomes that much more haunting when there are so many moments of silence in the poem. When I’m writing poetry, I read a lot out loud—I go back and I repeat it and I read it out loud to myself. And I will spend days lingering on a couple of lines because I’m listening and I’m trying to find the right sound. It’s the challenge that comes with crafting language, the sound. And so for me, when I’m looking at a poem’s shape, I’m thinking about where the natural break in the sound might be, where it might break for me when I’m reading out loud. How I think it should sound on the page is the way that I might try to make it look visually as well. And yeah, there are moments where the form is irregular, and I think it’s really that effect that I’m trying to achieve—the way that it sounds in my mind is the way that I want it to sound and look on the page too. I’m trying so hard to do that with these poems, to make my reader hear the sound on the page visually as opposed to reading the words out loud. And I also like fragmenting a lot of the lines, creating a rupture in the lines and not having them just flow all the way through. There’s a way in which I think that rupture can create surprising moments for the reader, and it’s surprising in terms of meaning as well.

DAG: I want to move into what I think is one of the most interesting elements of Afterland—your use of the “I” in the poems of the book. I think that a big convention in contemporary U.S. poetry is to use the “I” as a kind of lens to look out at the world. It seems to me that these kinds of poems often have a very narrow scope—they employ a very personal “I” as well as very specific, small settings or moments in life. But I think that the “I” in Afterland, rather than narrowing down, extends outwards, moving from the personal to the universal, the individual to the collective, even into the mythic, and sometimes it is even more complicated than that—as the title of “I the Body of Laos and all My UXOs” exemplifies. So I was wondering if you could talk about how you envision the “I” working within the context of your book.

MDV: l think pronouns are so important when writing poetry. You have the choice to write in the first person, the second, even the third person. And for me, my first natural instinct was just to say “I,” but I felt like maybe that was just too easy, just to say “I.” It’s often the first way that you think about experiences, especially if you’re writing something that’s personal. But I was trying to think about the “I” not just as myself the “I” but to try to put myself in a different context and through different personas. I tried to do that especially with that poem, “I the Body of Laos,” to sort of reimagine what that experience and what that story and what that narrative would sound like if I wrote from the point of view of a country plagued with unexploded ordnances—what kind of voice could that elicit? I was trying to push myself to experience the “I” in other ways, and that’s how I landed on a lot of the “I” poems. Sometimes even when I wrote in the second person, the “you” voice, there was a way in which that “you” was asking the “I.” There was a way in which I saw myself as that “you” too. I really was trying to play with all these different points of view and perspectives and think about my pronoun use. And some of the poems too were written originally in the “you” form. I experimented a lot and was thinking about what’s more surprising. Is it more surprising to see this poem as an “I”? Or is it more surprising and different and disturbing to see it as a “you”? Or is it more surprising in this poem to switch the pronoun of the “he” to the “she”? It was really a question of what’s in the best interest for the poem and what would create the most surprise, offer the most disturbing perspective.

DAG: I ask this because your book reminds me of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the way in which the poet can grow to encompass more than just the self of one individual.

MDV: Exactly. I wouldn’t say that all of the “I”s in the book are the first person of my experience. There’s a way in which that “I” is the universal, or tries to be the universal “I,” and it tries to explore that “I” through other “I”s. Or the “you” is even an exploration of the “I.”

DAG: And on that note, I want to talk about the place of myth in your book. I think that one of the most compelling characteristics of the way in which you use the “I” in your book is that sometimes it seems to take on mythic proportions. What do you think is the place of tradition, myth, and myth-making within your book?

MDV: I’ve thought a lot about this. I come from a culture that does not have a definitive literary history. And I talk a lot about that when I talk to people about my writing and the book and about my history. As Hmong people, we didn’t have a written language until the 1950’s. And so for centuries much of the culture and the traditions were passed down through storytelling and oral tradition. What that meant for me was that the challenge before me was to figure out what my history was—not having this history before me, what does it mean for me as a writer to try to understand these histories? In some ways, because I didn’t have that definitive literary history, I found myself exploring the possibilities of it. And I think that’s where all of this myth and myth-making surfaces. Here I was doing a lot of this research into anything that had to do with Hmong people, especially historical research. And I found myself taking these poems and sort of inventing my own way of thinking about history and literature. And so there’s a kind of way in which the lack of something allowed for something new to come out of it. The lack of a literary history allowed me to see the beautiful ways in which I could create this tradition. And also, I think that the myth and the myth-making for me is rooted in my love for surrealism. And because I didn’t have a literary history, I also relied upon a lot of other poets who were doing really amazing things, like the Latin American poets. I was really influenced by a lot of poets from Latin America because they were doing something that I wanted to see happen in my own work. I pulled a lot of that surrealism from the influence of those poets whose history I was clinging on to because I didn’t have one myself. Because I didn’t have a literary history I found myself falling back on another community that had a really strong and vibrant one. I think that’s where myth and myth-making come into my book. A lot of the poems in Afterland, though, are rooted in stories I heard, experiences that I had growing up, in a lot of historical research, and on the act of taking that and putting it through a creative process.

DAG: I find your last answer fascinating because you touched on a subject that I was very interested in talking to you about. So I’m just going to go ahead and read you my next question.

Language is a very important theme in this book. But I think that one fact that seems to be overlooked often is that language is also a defining characteristic of the book itself. When I read the poems in Afterland, I am reminded not of contemporary U.S. poetry but of the tradition of poetry that I grew up with in Mexico, and specifically I think of Pablo Neruda. Your language, like Neruda’s, is highly metaphorical—it often works as metaphor stacked on top of metaphor until you can’t separate reality from a more figurative conception of the world (which some call surrealism, magic realism, etc.). And yet your poems (and Neruda’s) always feel grounded because of the way that you weave concrete imagery throughout them. Now, the connection to Neruda is just one that I personally made. But it made me wonder—who or what were your influences in creating the style of language that we find in Afterland?

Which is why I find really interesting that you mentioned surrealism and Latin American writers in your previous answer.

MDV: This is really spot on, yeah. Like I said, I didn’t have a definitive literary history, so I clung to the Latin American poets and to what they were doing with surrealism—Pablo Neruda, Alejandra Pizarnik from Argentina, as well as other poets that I was reading from my time at Columbia. These poets were doing something that I wanted to do in terms of craft. And I go back to the Shamanism because there’s a way in which Shamanism is surreal. It’s this literal and figurative way of seeing the world and of understanding how we exist and coexist with each other and with nature. And so I think that’s why I found myself at home with surrealism and with this idea of magical realism—because it’s something that I grew up around, the belief that everything has spirits and that we can literally make our spirits fall out of our body if we trip. I think that’s why I felt so connected and inspired by poets who were using, like you said, metaphor stacked on top of metaphor. And I realized too that there were poems where I just really weaved off into this other different place, and it just got too crazy. And for me it’s important, like you said, to ground the reader, to make the reader at least feel like they have something to hold on to as they leave the poem. But I also love moments in a poem too where I can disturb the reader, take the reader slightly off course and then bring the reader back in. And I think that’s what I loved about the work that I was reading from these poets. They were doing that, and there is a way in which they were tapping into this other sense, this other creative sense that was what I needed and what I was feeling.

DAG: I want to ask about the opening poem of the book, “Another Heaven.” This is a very interesting poem because—one, it is off in a section all by itself, and two, it is the poem that sets the tone for the rest of the book. The choice of having this poem—this speaker—introduce us to the book feels very significant to me, and I was hoping you could tell us a bit about the reasoning behind the choice of selecting this as the opening poem.

MDV: I put that poem in the opening because I was thinking about this other landscape, this other heaven. When I think about Shamanism, there’s no such thing as a clear-cut heaven. It’s about this land that the spirit travels to after it has passed into this other world in which it’s searching and traveling to find its ancestors, its literal ancestors, its grandparents, its great aunts and uncles, its family, its lineage. I thought about opening with this poem because I think the whole book is about this other post-heaven—not heaven in the conventional sense that we think of as heaven or hell but this other heaven as a place of returning to one’s lineage and one’s ancestors. Also, when I was exploring these landscapes and borders I thought too about how in our current political context there’s talk about building walls, and I think about how all of that becomes dismantled in the afterlife, and that these walls, these borders don’t transfer into these afterlives. For me, this poem is sort of like a meditation—it’s the meditation about the landscapes that exist outside the normal landscapes that we think of when we think of heaven. I don’t think that Hmong people, that my parents believe in the idea of heaven, but they believe that there is this land that you go to when you rejoin your ancestors after you die, and that’s why I think of it as this other heaven. For them it’s another heaven.

DAG: Afterland does a lot in terms of form and language, but it also explores important political and cultural themes (such as war and Hmong history). What does poetry offer you—as opposed to prose—as a medium to explore these themes?

MDV: What I love about poetry as a craft form is that poetry has the ability to shapeshift. You can take some language and infuse the historical, and infuse the personal, and infuse the collective into one space on the page. And then are moments too in a poem when you can break out into a declarative, for example, and then move away from that to offer some imagery. I’m sure that if you’re thinking about new ways to invent prose people are doing that as well in prose. But in poetry, the ability to shapeshift, to transform in order to fit the needs of the poem is what I really value about it as a craft. And going back to your question about the political and cultural, what poetry does offer in terms of being able to explore those themes is that I can do a lot of that—the voice that I can offer can be that much more assertive, and even angrier. Like I said, the declarative statements in poems can be as angry as I want them to be. Because I think that there’s still so much more to be said about this war, so much more to understand about its implications—it’s still something that people don’t really know about, but the political implications of it are still so present. And as a Hmong people, as a community, we haven’t yet had the chance to fully deconstruct and critique it. Most people, I think, are still at the point where they are just learning about it, even in my own community. Poetry is a way to be able to explore it, to deconstruct it, to have an assertive voice about it. That’s why I chose poetry. With poetry, all of the limitations of form are broken down for me, and the voice can just stand for itself—the voice can be as pure as it wants to be and as assertive as it wants to be.

DAG: I think U.S. poetry has a long history exploring and engaging in political themes, but I also think that poetry in general has been elevated to the point that it has gained the status of a very inaccessible kind of “high art,” especially for people who are not used to reading poetry. I’ve been thinking a lot about accessibility in poetry as of late. So what I want to ask is, how do you, as a poet, manage all of these elements when you write poems? How do you balance form, language, political and social content, and accessibility? How do you think it all fits—or should fit—together?

MDV: When I think about accessibility I think about the fact that we live in a country where there are certain populations that don’t have access to these forms of writing and that there is a population that does have access to it. And on top of that, within the poetry world you have your top dog poets who really are the voices and the leaders of the poetry movement in this country. And for someone like me, coming from a community of color, and as a woman, I have to think about how I am going to carve my way so that my community of poetry can also be recognized on a national scale. And I’ve thought a lot about form. I’ve thought, well, is it more important for me to make my work accessible to audiences, or is it more important for me to follow the form of what poets are doing in this country, to make my work as complex as theirs to make sure my voice is recognized on that national scale? I think both of those are really important to me. On the question of accessibility—and I speak from my own experience—when I read Afterland, there are questions that I have about whether or not my poems will be accessible. And those questions did plague me as I was working on Afterland—the idea of the audience. Who is my audience? Am I writing for the poetry audience? Am I writing for the Hmong community audience? Am I writing for the non-poetry reading audience? Or am I writing for myself? And when I finally thought about that I realized that, as much as I wanted to try to please all these audiences, I was really writing for myself in the end. And not only that but—and I’ve said this again and again—I was writing the poems that I felt were missing from the American literature landscape, the poems that I wanted to be available and accessible to people. That’s why I finally was able to come to peace with all of this and realize I want to write the poems I want to read. And I think this goes back to your question of accessibility because, you know, my worry is that I’m going to write this poem and nobody is going to understand it, especially if they don’t normally read poetry. But there’s a level in which I trust my reader, and I trust my reader’s level of intelligence to make the connections regardless of whether or not they read poetry. For example, this past weekend my sister was in town, and she has a ten year old daughter and a four year old son. My sister doesn’t read poetry, neither does my brother in law. This book is their first introduction to poetry in the contemporary landscape. And so my four year old nephew is there reading my poems, and he’s sounding out the words and asking me questions about what some of these things mean. He’d look at a poem and he’d say, is this true? Is this true? And so there’s a way in which I trust that my reader will make these connections. And because of that trust there is a kind of accessibility that I hope that my work will have for any audience.

DAG: Thank you so much for that. I feel like I learned a lot just by hearing you talk about this. And I like how you talk about it because I think you’re right—I think that just having a book like this out there creates a kind of accessibility that wasn’t there before.

But finally, I want to end in a bit of a romantic note. I mentioned that I think that Afterland feels like a very cohesive whole, and maybe a big part of that is due to your decision of putting the title poem of the book at the very end. This book really feels like a journey to me—starting with the almost mythic speaker of “Another Heaven” preparing to tell us a story, then moving through the metaphorical lands of your poems, experiencing war, meeting the people in them, moving from jungle to city, from past to present, from the concrete to the dream-like, through tradition, myth, history, until we finally reach the last poem of the book, “Afterland.” Could you talk about what this poem means to you as a work in itself? And also, could you talk about how you think it fits within the context of the book as a whole, how it works as the culminating experience for the reader?

MDV: For me, when I think about Afterland, I think that there is a way in which the speaker is already gone, has already passed into the spirit world. And the afterland is the final journey back to the ancestors. And this idea of being gone could apply to the spirit being gone, or it could apply to the refugee being gone from his or her own home country. But this poem, “Afterland,” means a lot because it’s the poem in which I had to do a lot of research about, and it is also the poem in which I took the spirit through the various stages of that journey. As I mentioned, the poem was much longer—it was about eleven sections long. And it was because I was writing out what happens first to the spirit when that spirit dies, and then what happens after that, and then what happens after that. And, you know, Hmong funerals are so elaborate, and they last for a couple of days. And it’s because the act of taking the spirit back to its ancestors is such an intricate and delicate one. One of the first things you have to do is you have to be able to call the spirit out from its current house, from where that spirit was living, where that person was living. So the first section of “Afterland” originally was that calling of that spirit to leave that original home. And then there are other phases in the journey. And these callings are conducted by someone who chants, someone who recites these chants that will take the spirit to the ancestors. So I feel like I was trying to replicate that person calling and chanting for that spirit to go through these various phases. One of those phases in the book is where you have to recite all of the different cities where the spirit has lived, and there’s a section in “Afterland” where I list all the different cities. And that’s basically taking the spirit back through all of those former lands. In a way it’s similar to the refugee too—taking it back to these lands of our history, these lands of our past, these places we have left behind. And so I found myself wanting to kind of return to these lands and be the voice that calls that spirit and helps guide that spirit to its ancestors. There are other sections too in “Afterland” where the spirit is crossing through valleys and mountains. Hmong people believe that the spirit goes through all these different obstacles in order to get back to the land of the ancestors. So much of that poem is about the return to that former land, to that other heaven. And so for me, it made sense to end on this poem. But also because I think that the last line in the last section of the poem, “Once, I was born in a bowl,” felt like a good line to end the book on. And that’s where I left it—the idea of returning back to these ancestors so that one day the spirit can come back and be reborn. And it’s funny, I never thought about the Shamanism in context with the experience of the refugee, but it is so tied to that—that there are all these places we leave behind, and all those places continue to haunt us and to haunt our spirits.

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Mai Der Vang is the author of Afterland (Graywolf, 2017) which received the Walt Whitman Award winner from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, New Republic, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Mai Der’s work has also been anthologized in Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora.
As an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, she is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Mai Der has received residencies from Hedgebrook and is a Kundiman fellow. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley, along with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She lives in Fresno, California  

Daniel Arias-Gomez is a poetry student in the MFA program at CSU Fresno.

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