A Normal Interview With Nora Almeida

By Gilliann Hensley

Gillian Hensley: Your essay "Apocalypse Garage: A Scenario for Not Going It Alone" looks at the (allegedly less-than-remarkable) life of Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven's Gate cult. Could you tell me a bit about how this essay came about?

Nora Almeida: I'm interested in the essay as a vehicle to explore an idea--in this case the idea that disappointment can be overcome through subscription to an alternative reality. In this essay, I was also interested in exploring the relationship between ritualization and indoctrination and the mythology of apocalypse, which finds its way into most religions.

That said, I usually start an essay with something simple like an image or a phrase, which often comes out of something I've read or a conversation I've had. I also keep a (digital) notebook that I write in almost every day and a lot of my ideas come out of that writing practice. I find garbage writing gives me analytic space to think about some of the things I hear and encounter out in the world. For example, I'm currently working on an essay about Rhode Island (where I grew up) as a metaphor for a big-small thing (ie. an iceberg the size of Rhode Island) because I was helping a student do research about Yosemite National Park at the library where I work and all of these different articles kept conceptualizing the size of Yosemite Valley in terms of Rhode Island.

In the case of Apocalypse Garage, I thought of the title first and then that lead me down an apocalypse cult internet wormhole (which I definitely recommend, by the way). Once I have a point of entry into an essay, I typically latch onto something specific like a person or an event to build a piece around. In this case it ended up being Applewhite; I was fascinated by the longevity of the Heaven's Gate Cult--that it was sustained for so long. I also thought that Applewhite was somewhat sympathetic because he wasn't just a con-man. He bought into his own crazy, invented ideology.

GH: In telling us this story of Applewhite and the rise and fall of Heaven's Gate, you weave together various strands--moments from his life, lists of "signs" of the end of times, the metaphor of the shantytown, an H.P. Lovecraft story, and so forth. I was curious about the structural choices that you made. What led to those particular choices, and what did you want to achieve with that particular structure?

NA: As a poet, I often think about writing in structural terms. And when you essay (as a verb it means "to put to the proof" per the OED) there are a lot of structural possibilities. I think about juxtaposition in my writing a lot and often use more than one rhetorical mode. I do a lot of intentional research but I also take forever to write prose and so some of the amalgamation that happens is a result of stumbling across different rhetorical angles that might interestingly be absorbed into the essay I'm writing. It's kind of like when you have a word of the day calendar, you keep seeing the word of the day everywhere.

In this essay, I thought it would be interesting to play a little with reliability and interweave a lot of disparate points of view, some of which are more credible and empathetic than others. I also hoped to achieve some kind of plausible dimensionality. I was also going for a kind of mock-journalistic thing and tonally, I was trying to invoke Joan Didion's California. So the 'signs' and the biblical references and the song are in some ways atmospheric.

GH: Throughout the essay you as us to do a lot of imagining--to imagine what Applewhite may have been thinking or feeling, to imagine being one of Applewhite's followers. And in doing so you do a lot of imagining, yourself, on the page, blending the factual (in the form of actual details from Applewhite's life, as well as actual events with the cult, for example) and the fictional ("The Joy of Living" B-Side, the book about Heaven's Gate). What was your intention as a writer in making the choice to include these fictional elements?

NA: I often include a lot of fictional or fictionalized elements in essays that I would still call creative nonfiction. This isn't a stance of some kind towards or against objectivity; blending fact and fiction is just part of the way that I think through an idea. In Apocalypse Garage, I was interested in capturing (as opposed to just considering) multiple perspectives and there's no other way to really do this than to pretend, whether explicitly on the page or otherwise, that I am Applewhite or one of his followers or a Texas policeman or an academic studying Heaven's Gate and cultism.

Of course, I spent a lot of time with research too: the Heaven's Gate websites are still around; I read a lot of Daniel from the King James; and I delved into a lot of academic stuff too (monographs and back issues of obscure journals like Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions). I always spend a lot of time in ProQuest Historical looking at old newspapers and getting lost in Wikipedia black-holes. I like the research part (more than writing in some ways) because it is inexhaustible, there are always more threads to pick apart.

And this essay is essentially about a guy who takes a bunch of sources (the bible, science texts, fiction) and tangles them all together, who is a kind of internet virtuoso and master of deception, who is legitimately deluded, and who manages to cobble together something that people, lots of people, believe so much that his ideas supplant their former worldviews and belief systems. So if I'm reflecting that in some ways, all the better.

This essay aside, I think you can make a lot of things up and still capture a phenomenon or event or person. Perhaps it wouldn't be possible to say this some years ago and perhaps it's controversial to say this now. One of my favorite pieces of writing in this vein is Barthelme's Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning. Even though it is a fictional story, it's the most accurate and moving description of RFK I've ever read.

GH: I noted that, online, you largely refer to yourself as a poet, and I've had the pleasure of running across some of your poems online. When reading "Apocalypse Garage...," I noticed that it is quite associative and image-driven. How did your background as a poet influence your prose in the case of this essay?

NA: My background as a poet influences the way that I read and write anything. I've always read a ton of prose but didn't seriously start writing prose until I spent a few years in a stuck place struggling to write poetry. So now I write prose, but because I'm a poet, I write it really really slowly. It's funny that people always talk about image as though it belonged to poetry. I suppose my prose isn't very discursive, but that's because I'm interested in creating an atmosphere more than I'm interested in narrative or linearity. My favorite thing about reading a novel is the atmosphere it creates, and the way that you can live in a kind of alternate atmosphere for however long the book lasts.

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Nora Almeida lives in Brooklyn where she works as a librarian and edits the magazine Staging Ground. Her writing has appeared in Diagram, Shampoo, No Dear, Caketrain and other journals. Whenever she thinks about nonfiction, she thinks about something Donald Barthelme said about the accuracy of his short story “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning:” any precision in the piece was the result of watching television and reading The New York Times.

Gilliann Hensley is a second year Creative Writing student with a focus on Nonfiction and also holds an MA in Composition Theory with a focus on digital literacies. She is a passionate outdoors-woman, and when she isn't teaching or tutoring, spends her time hiking as many trails as possible in order to capture the American wilderness in prose. Her life-goal is to visit all 59 national parks in the U.S.

Slider Photo by Philipp Salzgeber (http://salzgeber.at/astro/pics/9703293.html) [CC BY-SA 2.0 at (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/at/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons.

A Normal Interview With Catherine Pierce

By Stacey Balkun

“I hesitate to assign poetry one particular job, as there are, of course, amazing poems that succeed by accomplishing all sorts of different things—effecting political or social change, moving or comforting a reader, offering surprise and satisfaction at the level of language, being genuinely funny, rearranging a reader’s brain furniture for an afternoon…”

— Catherine Pierce

Stacey Balkun: The Girls of Peculiar begins with a demand: “Give us back that simple guilt,/ that red ache that comes from lying/ to our mothers.” Who is this poem addressing? Who does this collection imagine as its audience? (Is audience even a thing you think about?)

Catherine Pierce: That particular poem is titled “Poem to the Girls We Were,” and I imagine it being spoken from the perspective of women looking back on their younger and—to their minds, now—more dramatic selves. In that poem, the narrators accuse their younger versions of, essentially, not appreciating their self-created drama while they had it. (Later in that section of the book, the younger girls get a chance to rebut their older selves, in “Poem from the Girls We Were.”) It’s a fitting opening poem for the collection, as so much of The Girls of Peculiar deals with questions of identity. Who am I now? Who was I then? What about all the versions in between? And what would happen if those multiple versions could speak with one another?

It would be disingenuous to say that I don’t think about audience at all, because of course I do—I hope that readers will connect with my poems, I hope that editors will see something of merit there. But I didn’t conceive of any particular audience when I was writing the book, and I don’t keep the idea of audience at the forefront of my mind as I’m working on poems. That said, I think a lot of people are interested in, and sometimes consumed by, ideas of identity, and I hope that those people are able to imagine themselves into this book in some way.

SB: Several poems in The Girls of Peculiar take the shape of postcards. What does the form of a postcard mean to you? How is it (or isn't it) poem-like?

CP: I do think postcard messages are inherently poem-like. That small white space requires us to choose only the most relevant or interesting details, forces us into a concision of language not required by letters or emails or even texts. For me, the postcard poems were a way to consider the question of urgency: if someone (here, a future or alternate version of the self) had only a tiny space in which to convey crucial information, what information would she choose?

SB: The poem “A Short Biography of the American People by City” lists several oddly named towns—Dismal, Climax, Peculiar—are these real places? What was your inspiration for this poem, and how did The Girls of Peculiar become the title of this collection?

CP: They are real places! I grew up not too far away from the town of Intercourse, PA, which is only about eight miles from the town of Blue Ball. I always knew those towns and their proximity to each other as a sort of running joke (rest stops in the area sell key chains, mugs, etc., with the local map), but it didn’t occur to me to write a poem about odd place names until I moved to Mississippi, which has a town named Hot Coffee. I started to think about the significance of names, and of how, if the world worked the way it sometimes seems like it should, we’d learn something significant about a place based on its name, and, in knowing that something, maybe have a better sense of where we belong.

The original title of the collection was Someone Already in Flames, from the poem “Fire Blight,” but when I sent the collection to my editor (the brilliant Henry Israeli at Saturnalia Books), he suggested that I look for a title that might be more thematically in line with the book’s focus on, in particular, the constructions of a distinctly female identity. There are a whole lot of “girls” in this book, and I thought that sounded like an apt suggestion. I pulled out a number of possible titles before settling on the one that stuck. Although I don’t know if the poem it’s taken from is actually particularly representative of the collection as a whole, it seemed like the right title for a book about people, many of whom are girls, searching for the place (in themselves, in time, in the world) that feels most like home.

SB: Several of these poems are acts of witness to personal memory, geography, climate change, and the overall shape of the world. Are poems of witness inherently political? What do you think the “job” of poems of witness is—does poetry ever have a “job?”

CP: I hesitate to assign poetry one particular job, as there are, of course, amazing poems that succeed by accomplishing all sorts of different things—effecting political or social change, moving or comforting a reader, offering surprise and satisfaction at the level of language, being genuinely funny, rearranging a reader’s brain furniture for an afternoon… That said, yes, I suppose I would say that poems of witness are inherently political, insofar as they ask readers to engage with and in some way respond to the challenges the poem sets forth.

SB: So much of The Girls of Peculiar deals with self-doubt and guilt (“Dear Self I Might Have Been,” “Train Safety Assembly,” “The Universe is a Madam”). As poets, we all have an inner critic, for better and worse. How do you manage your inner critic? What is your writing process like?

CP: For me, managing the inner critic has been about figuring out when to amp it up and when to tamp it down. The tamping down happens first, when I’m trying to get an initial draft written. I learned a long time ago that the stakes are wonderfully low for early drafting—no one has to see anything I don’t want to show, so I write a lot of junk, trying to get to the good stuff. If a poem feels like it has a spark of something worth stoking but currently isn’t working at all, I’ll see what happens if I try to completely revamp it—I’ll copy and paste into a new document and hack away, cutting lines, moving stanzas, trying to assess in a clear-eyed way what it’s really trying to do and why it isn’t currently doing that. Distance is a key part of this process for me—although I occasionally luck into a one-sitting poem, more often than not I’ll get a draft written one day, return to it the next, return to it again a week after that, and come back until it has the shape I want. I have some poems that I’ve saved for years, reworking them every few months, until they finally get where I want them to be (others, of course, I scrap long before getting to that point).

Once I’ve got a draft that feels like there’s something to it, I try to amp up the inner critic. The strategy I rely on most these days is to read my poems out loud and assess, as honestly as I can, where I get bored. Dullness, for me, is a poetry cardinal sin. I also try to decide—again, as dispassionately as possible—if the stakes of a poem are high enough to be sent out into the world, or if they’re at least rendered high enough (by language, by detail, by the leaps the poem makes, etc.). If not, then it’s back to tamping down the critic and trying again.

SB: Is the “The Tornado Knows Itself” (TNS 7.1) part of a series? What are you working on now?

CP: Yes: my forthcoming collection The Tornado Is the World centers, in part, around an EF-4 tornado that devastates a small Southern town. Poems in the series follow a handful of recurring characters, one of whom is the tornado itself, though the destruction and its aftermath. This series makes up the core of the book, though there are a number of other poems in the manuscript that don’t directly connect to that narrative but still share some similar themes. The Tornado Is the World will published by Saturnalia Books in the fall of 2016.

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Catherine Pierce is the author of two books of poems: The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia 2012), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters poetry prize, and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Other recent poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Slate, Boston Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

Stacey Balkun received her MFA from Fresno State and her work has appeared or will appear in Gargoyle, Muzzle, THRUSH, Bodega, and others. She is a contributing writer for The California Journal of Women Writers at www.tcjww.org. A 2015 Hambidge Fellow, Stacey served as Artist-in-Residence at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2013. Her chapbook, Lost City Museum, is forthcoming from ELJ Publications.