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.

Photo credit: Foter.com

A Normal Interview with Kristen Radtke

By Krystal Cantú

Krystal Cantú: I’ve read graphic novels before, but I haven’t come across a whole lot of graphic memoirs. Where did you come up with the idea to do a graphic memoir?
Kristen Radtke: I was always writing nonfiction, so when I started working visually, it just made sense to me that the visual work would be nonfiction, too. I didn't intend to make it a memoir--that came later when I worked with my agent and editors. I originally envisioned it as a collection of essays, but creating a cohesive narrative was important to my publisher, and in the end, they were right. I love essay collections, but it wasn’t the right mode for this book.
KC: I think, and I think you might agree, that without illustrations the book would be something completely different. How does the addition of visual art help to narrate a story like yours?
KR: I'm honestly not totally sure. I think that's more for a reader to say than it is my place to speculate--for me, I just began seeing this book in images, saw it in my mind unfolding in panels instead of paragraphs. I like to think that any idea or project can function in some form in any medium, but the more I talk to others about this, the more they say that's nuts. Who knows? For me, the graphic form just made sense to me.
KC: One of the things I love most about your book is the boldness of it. For example, I love your use of print photographs mixed with illustrations. It seems that you weren’t afraid to just do what you wanted and tell your story the way you wanted to. In what ways does mixing different mediums of art open up more possibilities in storytelling?
KR: Thanks for saying so! I love that you saw something fearless here, but the process for me was quite the opposite--every time I tried something new, I thought, "am I allowed to do this?" I'm new to comics and wasn't working in the medium before I began the book, so I had a lot of anxiety about doing it "right." I’ve tried to let that go. I love mixing mediums, and it certainly does open up more possibilities in storytelling, simply because there are suddenly more tools at your disposal.
KC: I’m curious about the illustrations. Why did you choose to use black and white illustrations rather than color? What other kinds of craft choices did you make in this book, in regards to the visual art?
KR: Black and white seemed like a practical choice when I began the book—both in terms of economical printing costs, but also because I’ve never been all that comfortable with my skills in terms of color. I’m working on projects now in non grayscale palettes, and love doing so, but it’s a whole new language to develop, and one I didn’t quite know how to begin with when I started drawing Imagine Wanting Only This. Many of the other craft choices I made didn’t feel so much like choices as they did intuition. I just worked in a style that felt natural to me, and then tried to refine that over time.
KC: I’m also curious about how you divided the chapters in your book. You don’t seem to be a stickler about chronology here, so I was wondering how you decided to break up the chapters?
KR: The structure emerged very slowly, and evolved dramatically over the last few years that I was working on the book. For me it’s always one of the last things to take shape. I can’t say that I can pinpoint specific methodologies regarding how I broke up chapters—eventually, everything just started taking shape. It feels like a miracle every time that happens, because so much of working on a long project—even something short, really—is the feeling that it’ll never come together.
KC: I’d love to know what your process was in writing Imagine Wanting Only This. Did you write all the prose first and then work on the illustrations, or did it all come together at the same time?
KR: The first pieces of Imagine Wanting Only This began as a handful of disparate prose essays. It took me a long time to realize that they were a part of the same project, and longer still to realize that the project would be graphic. After I’d developed that first initial prose framework, I had to negotiate how images could function with the text I’d written, and as a result a lot of that text got cut. When I entered the second half of the project, and when I work on new projects now, the process is a lot more fluid than it was initially. I move back and forth between text and image, and they emerge together much more organically than they did when I started working in this medium.    

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Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, 2017). She is the managing editor of Sarabande Books and the film & video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Find her on Twitter @kristenradtke.
Imagine Wanting Only This has received rave reviews from numerous sources including the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times.

Krystal Cantú is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in fiction at California State University, Fresno. She serves as an editorial intern for the Normal School.

The Skips, the Pops, the Hisses, the Clicks: Conversation with Joe Bonomo

In mid-April, writer and musician Joe Oestreich spoke with Bonomo about rock and roll, essaying, and the sneaky thrill of stumbling upon a Carly Simon album cover.

Joe Oestreich: Rock and roll began with Chuck Berry, so let’s start there. Is it possible to separate the brilliance of the music from the misdeeds of the musician?

Joe Bonomo: Chuck Berry is so larger-than-life, you have to remind yourself that he was actually a living, breathing person. You have to turn off all the white noise—everything that’s been said about Chuck, all mythologizing the critics have done, all the self-mythologizing he’s done. You’ve got to take him off that pedestal. I find that I can do that by reading about him, in his terrific autobiography and in other books, learning what his origins were, what mistakes he made, all the stuff that renders him—not small, exactly—but human. You don’t want to ignore the complexity of his life, but reading about the man is one way to pull yourself away from the myth and back into the music, back into what you dug about Chuck in the first place.

A while ago, I was driving through town, running errands, not paying a lot of attention to the radio, when suddenly “No Particular Place to Go” came on. There’s that great moment when a song surprises you—you didn’t drop the needle yourself, you didn’t press the play button—so you didn’t know it was coming. For the first 30 seconds of the song, you’re just catching up. You’ve heard it a thousand times, but you’re a millisecond behind, so everything is still exciting. That’s what happened with “No Particular Place to Go.” Because I couldn’t have willed that moment to happen, I was surprised into the brilliance of Chuck Berry, as if I was hearing him again for the first time. That was a gift from the universe.

JO: In that moment, it wasn’t a Chuck Berry song, right? It was your song. Like what John Fogerty said after not playing those Creedence tunes for so long because of the lawsuit with Fantasy Records: at some point the artist figures out that the songs don’t belong to the songwriter or the record label. The songs belong to the listener.

JB: Nobody really owns this stuff. I think Keith Richards said that he wants his tombstone to read simply: He passed it along. That’s how rock and roll works. Somebody plays it. Then somebody else pulls it down from the air and passes it along to the next guy.

JO: That’s an apt metaphor for the creative process. The best songwriters say that when they’re at the top of their game, they’re not consciously crafting songs at all; they’re channeling what’s already in the atmosphere.

JB: They just put their antennae up and it captures something. That’s not to say that some songwriters—from Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building on down—don’t sit at a desk and write “work songs.” But yeah, it’s a mystery, isn’t it? How the song comes unbidden?

JO: Do you have to like a song to write about it?

JB: That’s a question I’ve been puzzling over for a long time. I’ve never given myself the challenge of writing about a song I detest, but I think I should. From the essayist’s perspective, it’s always best to test the limits of your understanding, the limits of your own biases.

JO: In the book you say, “photos are, of course, liars.” Are personal essays also liars?

JB: They can be. In two ways. An essay can lie in the conventional, less interesting way of consciously or unconsciously fudging the facts. In other words, poor research. But the more interesting way is in the inauthenticity of the writer’s voice. An essay can lie when the writer’s not being honest about himself, not being honest with himself. I’m not talking about a meta essay, where the essayist is aware of dissembling. I’m talking about the forced epiphany or some other rhetorical gesture that reads as false, when the writer is steering the essay someplace it might not have reached on its own. That’s what I guard against when I’m writing about music. I try to approach the subject from as many different directions as I can and then see where the essay takes me.

JO: Beyond lying or dissembling, a further complication is that the truth changes over time. As you argue in the book, the truth of a current news item changes as soon as it becomes a historical event. Same with music, right? When you’re older you can still love a song you dug as a kid, even though the meaning in that song may have changed for you.

JB: Exactly. I wrote a book about AC/DC’s Highway to Hell in part because I wanted to explore that very question. How is it that a rock and roll album I loved when I was just hitting puberty can still send me now that I’m in my 50s? Beyond irony, beyond nostalgia. That’s an amazing trick. I suppose all art can do it, but pop music seems to do it in an especially vivid, graphic way. A song can score your life without you even realizing it.

In the book I write a lot in the about listening to music at that age—11, 12, 13—because that’s when I started getting glimpses into how complex life was going to be later, how strange and astounding—not just on the level of sex and romance but in larger ways, too. Somehow songs were telling me that about life, before I was able to articulate those ideas to myself. Anything that lodges itself into you at that time—pre-sentiment—stays there. It becomes part of your foundational identity, and then it sticks to you in a way that you can’t rub off.

JO: Conversely, there’s this line in the book: “The song will stop him in his tracks one day when he’s ready to listen.” Is there an artist you first heard as a teenager that maybe you weren’t ready for? One that you appreciated only years later?

JB: Bowie.

JO: Me, too. I wasn’t cool enough for Bowie. I didn’t think he rocked hard enough. I probably didn’t recognize his masculinity as masculinity—at least not in the way I recognized AC/DC.

JB: I remember seeing him on Saturday Night Live when I was 13 or so, and I forget what album he was promoting, but he was doing one of those shock-theatrical, highly stylized personas. The whole thing was kind of kabuki-like, and it was threatening to me, the way he was channeling some sort of abstract human expression that was beyond my ken at that age. So I turned him off.

JO: As you’ve said, when you listen you music as a kid it can teach you things about life that you aren’t yet sophisticated enough to articulate or even consciously appreciate. So I wonder if music is sometimes best heard from a position of ignorance. One of my favorite lines in the book is, “How can something I don’t understand come to mean so much?” I love that idea—even down to the level of how lyrics we’ve misunderstood can take on meaning.

JB: If you’re hearing a lyric wrong, and that lyric over the years has come to mean something to you, then which words are correct? Now, I don’t want to carry that idea too far, because I believe in the intentionality of the artist. But that scenario happens to all of us: You hear a lyric wrong, and you scribble it down in your high school notebook, and it’s burned into you.

JO: I’m afraid to take the conversation where I want to go next, because I know we’re going to sound like two old guys shaking our fists, saying, “Back in my day . . . ,”

JB: That’s inevitable.

JO: True. And yet I love how Field Recordings reminds me that in the old days of albums and cassettes, music wasn’t just a physical object you could hold; it was a physical object you could destroy. Rip open the cassette. Scratch the record. Break into, as you say in the book, “the dark inside of a pop song.” How the heck do you get inside of 1s and 0s?

JB: You don’t. Even with a CD, all you could do was scratch it, but that renders it unplayable. With a 45 or an LP, the skips, the pops, the hisses, the clicks become part of the song. The groove of the record wearing out. The fading of the tape, where what’s recorded on the other side starts leaking in. The way you could injure the song, it gave the thing a dimensional quality that streaming with 1s and 0s lacks entirely, and I do think that is a loss.

When I was a kid, my copy of the Beatles’ second album had a big pop during “I Call Your Name.” Eventually I bought the CD and then later moved on to streaming, but I still hear that pop in the same spot. It became part of the performance—or, more accurately, it became part of my performance of the song.

JO: More evidence that the songs belong to the listener. I love that the book reminds me not just of the physical quality of the medium but also of the equipment. Those huge, wooden stereo consoles weren’t gear; they were furniture. Music seems more real when you physically interact with it.

JB: Even the act of lifting the needle and dropping it. That’s a much more intimate gesture—literally—than clicking on Spotify.

JO: That quiet moment just before the arm drops. And then, when you’ve got a record that skips, trying to figure out which coin you need to place on top of the needle to give it the weight it needs to ride over the skip. A penny?

JB: Two pennies? Maybe the new resurgence of vinyl tempers this a bit, but which generation will grow up without having any vinyl in their house? They don’t own records. Their parents don’t have a shelf of albums. When that kid holds an LP in his hands for the first time, it’s going to feel huge, like it’s 10 feet by 10 feet.

JO: In the book Freakonomics, one of the fun economic facts is that reading out loud to your kids doesn’t necessarily make them more literate. But there is a correlation between just having books in your house and your child’s literacy. So maybe if you keep the physical object of the record at home, then some afternoon when the kid is alone and bored, he can sift though the shelves, pick out the Carly Simon album cover, and say, “Oh my God. What is this?”

JB: Oh my God. Who is this? The kids that only know music through streaming or You Tube, they’re missing out on something, absolutely. But every older generation says that. That’s what the horse-and-carriage driver said about the automobile, etcetera, etcetera. That’s always going to be part of the human condition. So you’re right. We do have to guard against “Get off my porch” kind of thinking. I have to remind myself that somewhere there’s a 13 year old for whom his introduction to music was streaming. In 10 or 15 years when streaming goes away and is replaced by something else, that kid is going to bemoan the loss of streaming in ways I can’t comprehend. But that’s the nature of loss; that’s the nature of growing.

JO: Many of the essays in the book feature the juxtaposition between a writer and a musical act. You’ve got Larry Brown and Hank Williams, Sylvia Plath and the Beatles, Charles Lamb and music writer Lester Bangs. You bring in TS Eliot to help you talk about Elvis Costello. What’s the essayistic instinct there?

JB: It’s not a conscious thing. I don’t sit down and think, What 20th Century modernist could I use to talk about the Rolling Stones? It’s just a matter of me paying attention. Maybe I’ll read something Piet Mondrian said about the visual arts, and it will click with what I’m trying to say about how a certain song moves from the middle eight to the chorus.

I came of age a couple of decades after rock critics like Greil Marcus, Paul Nelson, Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis and others continued the process of dissolving the barriers between so-called “high art” and “low art.” These were some of the first writers to talk about rock and roll and other cultural forms in the same paragraph. For me, pairing, say, literature and music is not a conceit so much as it’s a way of noticing how many common threads there are among different kinds of human expression. Human beings wrestling with what it means to be alive. Painters and art critics wrestle with that in the same way as Sinatra or some one-off punk band playing a Wednesday night in the middle of nowhere: by translating the chaos of being alive.

JO: I so admire your essay “In the Morning I’ll Rise Above,” because I’ve thought for a long time that the two most important words in rock and roll—other than, you know, “rock” and “roll”—are “Saturday” and “night.” In that essay, you remind us that Saturday night is only Saturday night, because it bumps up against Sunday morning.

JB: The pleasure of Saturday night comes because we know it’s finite—even though we like to pretend otherwise. We’re staving off the inevitable. Eventually Sunday’s going to come, and it’s going to require us to take stock.

JO: Two competing belief systems, equally attractive because they’re opposed to each other.

JB: That’s right. Saturday night’s got its own set of promises, a very specific kind of salvation and redemption. And Sunday morning? When you’re reckoning, that’s a very different kind of salvation. But each are valid and valuable and nourishing in their own way.

JO: We talked earlier about how sometimes, especially when you’re a kid, you can hear music and understand without really understanding. Maybe that’s another definition of faith. And speaking of faith, you write a lot about your Catholic upbringing. Is there something about faith or Catholicism that got you into rock and roll? Something about one type of faith competing with the other?

JB: It was fun to be a rock and roll fan when I was a kid in Catholic school—but also scary. Part of the thrill of loving Highway to Hell back then was that at St. Andrews the Apostle, well, AC/DC was not on the curriculum. All the cool guys and girls who disappeared after school, doing things that I could only fantasize about, they were not only fans of that band, they seemed to be acting out the songs. The morality play was being staged right in front of me.

So I don’t know that there’s a direct correlation between growing up Catholic and falling in love with rock and roll, but I like your idea about faith being involved. The Book of Hebrews defines faith as “the evidence of things not seen,” right? There’s that moment of being first turned on by a song when it’s telling you something that you didn’t know you knew. Essays can do that, too. There’s an element of faith involved in music and writing, an element of giving over to the mystery. And allowing yourself to be convinced that the mystery isn’t all threatening or confounding or melancholy. The mystery can tell you something—if you listen. And if you give it time.

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Joe Bonomo’s books include This Must Be Where My Obsession with Infinity Began, Conversations with Greil Marcus (Literary Conversations Series), AC/DC's Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America's Garage Band. A five-time “Notable Essay” selection at Best American Essays, he teaches at Northern Illinois University, and appears online at No Such Thing As Was (nosuchthingaswas.com) and at @BonomoJoe.

In addition to being the bass player and singer for the Columbus, Ohio-based band Watershed, Joe Oestreich is the author of three books of creative nonfiction: Partisans, Lines of Scrimmage (co-written with Scott Pleasant), and Hitless Wonder. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. Visit him at joeoestreich.com.

Grid: cassettes via Foter.com / CC BY

A Normal Interview with Biljana D Obradovic

By Chris Galvan

Chris Galvan: While reading Incognito, it seemed to me that you favor longer lines and direct imagery over abstraction and metaphor. There are many complex themes and specific images that your work seeks to portray, from world shattering events of your homeland to reflective moments in your life. “Vandalism” perhaps captures this perfectly in hindsight for me as a reader of your work. How did you develop your specific style and tone to approach the serious subject matter presented in your work?

Biljana D. Obradović: I have been influenced by my many great teachers: Greg Donovan, Dave Smith, Margaret Gibson, Greg Kuzma, Marcia Southwick, Hilda Raz, and Ted Kooser, but also by poets and friends I like to read such as Bruce Weigl, Charles Simic, Carolyn Forché, Philip Dacey, Stanley Kunitz, and Philip Levine. Imagism (such as) Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are also very important to me. William Carlos Williams’ “No Ideas But In Things” is also important—direct presentation and sensuality is what it’s all about.

I do not care for abstractions—that’s true, never have. It’s what put me off for years when I was reading Serbian poetry—as it was so abstract in many ways. I am a transnational poet, having lived in many countries and that has also influenced me; like Eliot and Pound, I speak several languages and continue to travel a great deal. I care about the process of writing and how an idea emerges, “triggers” in the words of Hugo, and then I am so excited to know what will come of it. I never know where it will go, and that’s what keeps me writing; that excitement to find out.

Endings are important, as well as making connections with many issues that happen all around us every day. Ideas emerge all the time from when I read. As for “Vandalism”—I can be critical to both the U.S. and Serbia; in this case Serbia.

CG: As someone who was born in the United States, I’m always curious to the picture those from other places, countries, and situations can give about living here. As such, I admit that “At the Supermarket” was one of my favorite works in your collection. When you started living in the United States, was cultural insensitivity a common occurrence for you to face?

BDO: I came here in 1988, before things got dicey back home, when no one was leaving the country. But things got bad very fast. My mother got breast cancer a year after I got here, and then the war started. So, I didn’t plan to stay here, but did. I thought that this was a free country, and that there was freedom of the press, but soon learned that that was not the case. You pay dearly for saying things people don’t like.

My father warned me to be careful when I went along with my fellow graduate students at VCU and read from Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses when the Ayatollah Khomeni had put a fatwa on him. I was on TV and excited about being on TV, not realizing as my dad did (a diplomat by profession) that my face on TV may be dangerous. So, I tried to be careful. But it wasn’t easy to be quiet during the war and have people saying all kinds of terrible things about Serbs, when in fact my family and I were against the Milošević regime. I did get death threats written in red ink (perhaps blood) in Lincoln and many scary phone calls.

My teacher and mentor, the poet Greg Donovan, who brought me to study in the U.S. initially, took me to an alley in Richmond when I first came there and warned me not to go to alleys at night. I had no idea that it could be so dangerous. This country is a violent place to live in. I still feel so much safer walking around the streets on Belgrade even in the middle of the night, let alone the daytime by comparison.

CG: In your poem “To All Those Who Want Happy Poems,” you mention that you are fearful of happy moments, as they have a cost. While it isn’t true that everyone writes happy poems per say, as some of the most haunting poems are ones that gain recognition, this does lead me to ask what would you say is the target goal of sharing your work with the world? What would you, ideally, enjoy for someone who reads your work or listens to a reading you perform walk away with?

BDO: Life is a struggle, and every day a new problem arises. Poets write about minutiae that make up life. I am giving them my vision of the world. We are all different, and that’s what makes us human and interesting. So, what I bring to the world is my perspective as a world citizen, having lived in Yugoslavia (both Macedonia and Serbia), Greece, India (I went to the same high school as Salman Rushdie and Amit Choudhury—who was my classmate at Cathedral and John Connon School), then the U.S., and I have spent the past twenty years or so also going to Italy where my husband John Gery teaches at (Ezra Pound’s daughter) Mary de Rachewiltz’s castle in northern Italy. He will do it this summer and needs more students. My brother also lives there with his family and has become an Italian citizen. There are other things that I am interested in, like poetic forms and art. So, it’s this perspective that I hope people find intriguing.

CG: I’ve been curious as to your choice to end Incognito with “Ramses Devotion,” a poem that feels very different from not only the other poems in your last section, but a little different than most of the other poems in your book stylistically with couplets. “Letter to My Landlord” gave us such a lovely intro into the wit that we could expect for the rest of your book at the beginning, so how did your final poem come to be selected as the final send off?

BDO: Well, it’s a weird kind of elegy, and it ends the section on the elegies for the departed family and friends. I think it’s very much about who I am. I have always been interested in weird stuff, and the death stuff was perhaps a little too much. I did not want to end the book on a sad note, so I wanted to end it with my unique sense of humor. “Fly the friendly skies” is what I always heard when entering a United Airlines plane going to back to Europe, so perhaps you can figure out the rest.

CG: Even the most casual reading of your work can see how it has been inspired, shaped, and colored from world events and disasters, from NATO actions in 1999, to the events of the post-9/11 world, to Hurricane Katrina. As a first-time reader of your work, I would be hard pressed to consider another word to describe you as than a survivor. Yet your work also reads to the joy of seeing art you’ve long been fascinated by, and you can give such lovely visages of more peaceful travels despite these challenges. For all of those that seek to create in a world filled with destruction, do you have any advice on how to keep moving forward?

BDO: Yes, I am a survivor. I have had to overcome a lot of challenges in the past twenty-five years especially. How to go on? I do a lot of yoga and meditation and that helps a lot. But, it’s also my family, my son and husband who are always by my side. But most of all, I cannot live without my friends; no matter where they are they have stood by my side and picked me up when I was down.

We are social creatures, and depend on human interaction and each other’s love and caring. Without it, life would be impossible. But then again, when I had no friends and was the new kid in town (and have been that all through my life), I wrote. That’s what keeps me alive.

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Biljana D. Obradović is a transnational poet, translator, critic and Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans, who has won the Norman C. Francis Research Award in Excellence in 2015 at Xavier where she teaches Poetry. She has published four collections of poems, most recently Incognito (WordTech Communications LLC). Biljana is originally from Serbia (ex-Yugoslavia), but has lived in Greece and India, as well as the U.S.

Chris Galvan is an MFA candidate in fiction at California State University, Fresno. He holds Master of Arts in English Literature from Bradley University, and he is a teaching associate in the Fresno State First-Year Writing Program.

Photo credit: Infrogmation via Foter.com / CC BY

A Normal Interview with Andrea Jurjevic

By Tricia Savelli

Tricia Savelli: I read that Small Crimes was a part of the writing you did for your MFA from Georgia State University. Did you write your way into the manuscript, or did you have an idea of what you would write before you started?

Andrea Jurjević: No, I think that the manuscript sort of presented itself to me. I knew I was writing poems, of course. I was aware of that. But I wasn’t really writing toward a book or some kind of concrete collection. I think it was when I started writing the war poems that I felt that I was sort of biting into something more concrete than the stuff that I was writing before that.

TS: I read in your interview with Sequestrum that one of the hardest things you had to do when writing for that publication was taking out the opening line of your poem “Nocturne.”

AJ: Yes! [Laughs]

TS: I wonder if you had similar moments when writing Small Crimes? Did you have to take poems out that were painful to exclude?

AJ: Yes, but also I guess my memory is not that great. [Laughs] I end up forgetting about them after a while. There were a lot of changes, there definitely were. But also — do you ever feel like you’re cleaning up your stuff, in the drawers and in the closets, and you kind of get in that spirit of “I’m just going to clean everything up and only keep the good stuff.” You can also cut too much doing that, and I started feeling like I was at that point when I had submitted the manuscript.

TS: You wondered, “Did I trim it too much?”

AJ: Yes, there was a point where I was feeling like I was getting a little bit carried away with it. [Laughs] “I’m gonna cut my hair short! Oh, maybe a little shorter!”

TS: I feel the same way! It feels good, but after a while you wonder, “Did I cut too much of the meat out?”

AJ: What do you do, then, to strike that balance?

TS: I don’t know! It’s hard to strike that balance. It’s like trimming a rose bush. If you cut them back too far they won’t grow back.

AJ: Yes, but then I start reading people who do a great job writing longer pieces, and I start envying their ability to go overboard and create these long, beautiful poems, and that starts a different kind of desire.

TS: I read in another interview where you said, “Art makes us better people.” It made me wonder how you feel about art and poetry in America as it is now, as “resistance,” in “Trump’s America,” or even a “post-truth” America. How does poetry and art fit into all that?

AJ: Well, I guess we will see with time how it fits. It’s an interesting question, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. But I’m not exactly sure how to answer other than the fact that the reality in which we live in now has just strengthened my commitment to writing and deepened my love for the writers in my life, honestly, and the writers I have read. I cannot imagine my life without them or their work. Sharing seems so elemental and crucial to life that I feel a little sorry for anyone who feels that any of that is dispensable.

TS: Yes, community is so important. Another thing I find important to support writing is a creative process or rituals. Do you have any creative processes that help you write?

AJ: I seem to play a lot of music, and if I find an album that I like a lot, I’ll keep it on repeat obsessively. And black coffee — not much else going on but that, nothing very elaborate. But music is a constant, definitely.

TS: What are you listening to right now?

AJ: Right now it’s Brian Eno, probably just from being overwhelmed with the news and everything that’s been going on. A lot of Wovenhand as well.

TS: When did you start writing? Have you been a writer all your life?

AJ: No, I’ve been a reader all my life, but I really didn’t think of writing for a long time. When I came to the States in my 20s, I really put that idea aside because my English wasn’t good enough at the time. I took journalism courses and I worked in art, and as life went on I kind of got haunted by this need to start writing. I started writing around 10 years ago, in 2008. I think that’s when I wrote my first poem in English. And when I first started writing, I kind of wrote these little Morrissey-type lyrics, if you could even call them poems. [Laughs]

TS: I think we all start doing something like that!

AJ: Yes! All the glorious beginnings.

TS: Are you working on anything new?

AJ: Yes, I keep writing. I’m not sure where this new stuff is going to take me, but yes, I have been writing and translating.

Jurjević read Feb. 3 at Fresno State for her book launch. See the reading on the Philip Levine Prize Facebook page.

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Andrea Jurjevi, a native of Croatia, is the author of Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize (Anhinga Press, 2017). Her poems appear in journals such as Epoch, TriQuarterly, Raleigh Review, The Missouri Review, and her translations of contemporary Croatian poetry in Gulf Coast, Lunch Ticket, and Drunken Boat. She is the recipient of the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, the 2015 RHINO Translation Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches English at Georgia State University where she graduated from the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Tricia Savelli is a writer and MFA candidate in creative nonfiction in Fresno State’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. In 2014, she graduated from Saint Mary’s College of California with a BA in English. She teaches creative writing and works as a graduate writing consultant at Fresno State. She previously served as senior editorial assistant for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest and as a graduate assistant for The Normal School magazine. She has an essay forthcoming in under the gum tree.

The Glimmer of a Singular Voice: A Conversation with Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes

By Steven Church

I first met Taylor Goldsmith, lead singer and songwriter for the California rock band, Dawes in 2012 at the Sanibel Island Writing Conference. Taylor taught a songwriting workshop, and I was there to teach a creative nonfiction workshop. Though we didn’t know much of each other’s work initially, we hit it off pretty much right away and began a friendship that continues today, a friendship forged in a shared appreciation of words and music. Taylor reads my books and sometimes sends me songs he’s working on. I try to make it to a couple of live Dawes shows every year; and we occasionally bounce text messages back and forth on a range of subjects, as we did recently when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. So in advance of their upcoming tour in support of the new album, We’re All Gonna Die, I thought I’d talk again with Taylor about songwriting, voice, playing live, album structure, books, and other things.

Steven Church: Dawes has been on a pretty steady rhythm the last few years of recording and then touring extensively. Can you talk a little about the difference between recording a song and playing it live?

Taylor Goldsmith: As Bob Dylan once said - "a song doesn't live until it's on the road." It's fun to look at the recorded versions as a sort of blueprint, a structure for us all to follow but then to talk to ourselves within it. We've even gotten to the point recently as a band where we agree that the less original 'parts' we play the more alive the song tends to feel. One of the most meaningful things about the marriage between words and music is that the music guides the impression; and sometimes playing a little harder or slower or singing a little higher or lower can change the meaning of words. We try to let the song tell us how it should be played. Sometimes that means fast and loud and sometimes that means slow and quiet. We don't really have a preference between the two. We've been lucky enough to have an audience that seems to be willing to follow us into the gentle stuff as often as the aggressive stuff, which allows us to play a song like “That Western Skyline” as often as “One of Us.”

SC: If every set list, every show, tells a different story, one that’s also part of the album’s story, how do you make those decisions about the order of songs?

TG: Of course we want to balance our sets and our records but fortunately that has so far taken care of itself as the records get written. It’s as if there's some part of my brain that I don't have direct access to that knows what kind of song the record needs next...at least according to my own criteria. Someone else might find one of our records too slow or another too aggressive, but for me, if there is a certain idea or mood lacking, it'll just keep tugging at me until the needed song gets written. We've often come into the studio with about 13 or 14 songs and pare it down from there. And more often than not, those leftover songs not only make it onto the next record, but determine the direction of the record as a whole. I often feel like the first few songs you have for a record dictate how the next ones are written. For Stories Don't End my first song was “From A Window Seat” and for We're All Gonna Die it was the title track. In both cases I was a little surprised at them being this sort of first building block. But I think their idiosyncrasies (at least in relation to other songs I've written) really helped give the sense of the new record being the beginning of a new chapter for the band.

SC: How do you think changes and advances in technology, social media, etc. have affected the relationship between your songwriting process and your audience?

TG: Frankly, I want to share new material as soon as it’s written. And it seems like we're living in a time where that's more and more possible. For a while musicians dreaded new songs ending up on YouTube or something, but now I feel like finding a video of an unreleased new song just adds to the spirit of discovery we've always loved about our favorite music. And hearing the released recorded version only adds to the perceived insight into the creative process. To me, it only seems like a good thing.

SC: Your songs often have a strong narrative voice, a kind of oral storytelling quality, and an honesty that is palpable. Is that something you have to create, or does it just come naturally?

TG: I like to think that the secret to unearthing what it is that people are drawn to in your writing is to stay fully committed to being yourself. Which is not ever easy to do. But I think the slightest glimmer of a singular voice is what makes any sort of writing reflective of the human condition. Once we feel like we've entered into the murky waters where we're hearing the voice someone uses when they're talking to themselves, that's what it's all about.

SC: Absolutely! And it seems like you’re constantly refining and expanding this voice, challenging yourself to explore not just new material but new ways of writing about it.

TG: I think the only way to offer that to an audience is to constantly find new ways of getting out of your own way, to stop questioning whether or not something has been explored already or if there's a way for you to sound smarter or whatever. When something inspires you in a genuine and honest way and you can put that feeling across in your own language (that is as specific to you as your own fingerprint), then you try to live in that zone forever.

SC: As I said, many of your songs have a storytelling quality, but many of them are also essayistic in that they seem interested in exploring an idea as much or more than expressing shared emotion or coming to some kind of easy conclusion.

TG: Some of my favorite songs are written by people who are exploring a world that is otherwise foreign to them. Guys like Warren Zevon or James McMurtry creating little universes that go way beyond all of our shared experiences--whether that's getting into the head of a dead celebrity or into a part of the world you've never been or whatever. Their writing suggests a power of observation that I would assume every writer is always working on and trying to improve.

SC: I think I’ve been guilty of assuming that some of your songs are autobiographical or “confessional,” but it seems clear with, Stories Don’t End, All Your Favorite Bands, and We’re All Gonna Die, that you’ve been kind of moving away from that a bit. I mean, the songs are still coming from that Dawes “consciousness,” but they seem less about you. Is that a fair assessment?

TG: Music is an interesting medium in the sense that everyone assumes the songs are autobiographical. People don't do that with movies or books to the same extent. I don't know why. I guess it's just because that's been the precedent set by songwriters up to this point. I don't have any problem with it and it's true that a lot of my music is autobiographical, but I have enjoyed trying to find different experiences and perspectives from which to speak. It helps make an album feel more like a collection of essays rather than a longer meditation on one man's outlook.

I also feel like most listeners are looking for some sort of common ground with the writer. We don't want a peek into someone's private life for the sake of the peek itself. At least I don't believe that's the richest part of the things we hear or watch or read. I only care about someone airing their dirty laundry as far as I can relate to it. It can very quickly start to feel exploitative or just plain indecent. And I've been guilty of this as much as anyone else. But with these handful of songs off of these last two records, I've been enjoying taking myself out of the equation and seeing how much I really have to say. I definitely feel like I’m testing my mettle, but I guess that's how it should always be.

SC: A lot of writers are big music fans, but you and Griffin in particular have always struck me as two of the biggest book fans of any musicians I know. You read a lot, in a range of genres and styles. Can you talk a little about how literature influences your songwriting process?

TG: As time goes on working in any artistic medium, the more you start to recognize that they are all very much different sides of the same process. Sometimes watching the right movie or reading the right essay leaves me feeling "this feels like a song." And I'm sure that filmmakers or essayists say the same thing about the things they watch or hear or read. If I didn't read, I would have such a harder time writing songs. I feel like just the simple practice of having words flying across your eyeballs regularly does more good than we could ever know. For me, I've always found that writers with a more lyrical sensibility are the ones I go back to. People like Proust, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Miller, Didion, Auster, Delillo. I don't even have to know what they're talking about all the time. The beauty and the rhythm of the sentence - that's more what I'm looking for I think. Griffin is better about getting after nonfiction. Guys like Bertrand Russell and Buckminster Fuller. I try to dip my toe in those waters but it's often way too far over my head for me to really be able to penetrate. I feel like songwriting can be this big, constant game of 'What If...?', so sometimes trying to read the actual experts feels like it's way above my station. I feel like novelists or poets, like a songwriter, are willing to paint enough of a picture for you to do with it what you will. Maybe that's why I keep getting drawn back to them.

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Taylor and Dawes are on tour now. Check out the dates (http://dawestheband.com/tour ), catch them live, and buy their new album, We’re All Gonna Die here: http://dawestheband.com/store/pre-order-new-album. You can also listen to it at: https://open.spotify.com/album/6bSJPJU1SRxm9RQ4Ox5sRe

Steven Church is the author, most recently, of One With the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals, and he’s a Founding Editor and Nonfiction Editor for the literary magazine, The Normal School. He teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State where he is the Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing.

Out from the Shadows: A Normal Interview with José Orduña

By Eddie P Gomez

Orduña will visit Fresno State for a reading and craft talk at WordFest 2017 on Jan. 28.

Eddie P. Gomez: I’ve spent some time with your book recently. It’s incredibly bold. Illegal immigration is certainly a topic of conversation that we are engaging this political season.

José Orduña: Yes, It’s a conversation that seems to come up of cyclically. It comes up and goes away. I think the most reliable indicator of when the conversation of illegal immigration is going to come up again is the economy.

EG: Do you mean that during times of prosperity the border seems to be open?

JO: Yes. When times are good the politicians don’t seem to have a problem with illegal immigration. If you look at the history of immigration from Latin American and even other places, it’s a cycle that happens again and again. Whenever the economy is up and the United States needs labor, there isn’t a peep about illegal immigration except from the most hardline groups which don’t really have a voice in the media and don’t influence the national discourse. However, when there are not a lot of jobs and we are experiencing economic distress for whatever reasons, anti-immigration sentiment finds it voice as this story becomes a story again.

If you look at the last hundred years, whenever there has been a recession, extremist politicians like Pete Wilson come out from the shadows, you know? [Wilson was the former governor of California who was a prominent supporter of Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that was passed into law but later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and whose opponents claimed it unfairly targeted Latinos.]

EG: Is that why some of these fringe groups have gained legitimacy with the American public, because we are still coming out of one of the biggest economic downturns since the Great Depression?

JO: I think this recent downturn has produced a real clear example of scapegoating immigrants. If you look at the reason for the down turn, it had nothing to do with immigration. It was triggered by the housing bubble collapse and job shortages created by the deindustrialization of urban centers across the U.S. Most of the jobs have been lost because manufacturing has gone overseas or because of technology, yet the same old story about the negative impacts of illegal immigration persists. But it doesn’t have any factual basis.

EG: How did your project get started?

JO: During my first days in graduate school, I started going through the process of Naturalization. When it came time to start thinking about my thesis, it was just one of those moments when you’re looking for your glasses and they are right on top your head. I was wracking my head concerning a thesis topic when I sat down with my thesis advisor and he said: “What do you mean that you don’t have a topic? It’s right here in front of you.” He was right. So, there we were. My experience turned into the subject of my thesis.

EG: Let’s talk about the research in your book. It’s a lot. Could you describe the blending of the memoir and the well-researched essay? Was this purposeful and did it have to do with the direction you feel creative nonfiction is heading?

JO: That’s a great question. I’ll say that the MFA program is geared toward thinking about the essay as a fine art, so for a lot of people that means a certain thing. What’s meant by that is something which is still confusing for me. But, I do know that the way that I write essays is different than a lot of the ways other people write essays.

What motivated me to write this book was that it was something that was happening in my life. I not only wanted to understand it but to respond to it and that involved a lot of research. I wanted to respond to this thing that was happening in my life but was also happening in the broader context of U.S. politics. The way I know how to respond to an issue like illegal immigration is to examine it and analyze it. I respond in a way that combines things that are squarely considered art like the essay and by doing a lot of research. I had to read broadly in terms of history, sociology, and various other disciplines in order to get a better understanding of how big an issue immigration really is.

For example, there is a chapter called disappearing acts that deals with black sites, places where people are disappearing, so I searched out the characteristics of black sites and their relevance to illegal immigration in the U.S, which led me to research that involved the Pinochet regime in Chile. So, the intensive research and the particular form of the book was the result of what I was writing about combined with what I felt was necessary in order to write about those things.

EG: Your book provides many digressions in the narrative ranging from Mantegna the Italian painter to the social theorist Michel Foucault to a reflection on Herbert Hoover’s childhood home. Those turns were a way to engage a larger audience in the political conversation on illegal immigration that we are having as a country right now?

JO: In order to understand a broad phenomenon like illegal immigration, we have to understand that it is a whole matrix of issues that are grounded in matters of public health, constitutional law, and issues of imagining and defining a democracy. There are also personal issues and interpersonal relationships to consider. It’s such a complex multi-faceted topic that is all contained in one word-immigration. The variety of subjects that the issue grows from signals its complexity.

EG: What do you want Americans uninformed about the legal histories of Mexican and Latin American immigration policy to take away from your book?

JO: That’s a tricky question because I don’t know if those kinds of people will even pick up my book or how they would respond to it openly. If my primary goal was to inform people about the history of immigration, I think it would have been a very different kind of book.

I thought a lot about who is realistically going to read my book and what I was trying to do in writing this book. I think the result is the tone of the book which is as some people describe it: angry. I wouldn’t say that it’s exclusively angry, but that there is an urgency with which I wrote it that comes across as forceful. I think that the tone and some of the ways I deal with the subject matter is automatically going to turn some people off.

Some people have said that the tone of the book is a turn off and most of that is out of my control, but knowing information about who is buying what kinds of books helped me to imagine a reader and make decisions about how I wanted to write the book. I didn’t want to write the book based on trying to convince as a primary mode because I think the way to do that is to write a book that is more of a historical text. I’m not a trained historian. If my intent was to convince people that immigrants are not the problem, I would have taken a much more neutral tone.

Ultimately, I wrote the book in a way that satisfied something inside of myself artistically but also intellectually. I think readers who pick up the book may have strong feelings about it, but I also hope that the most concrete thing this book accomplishes is that it motivates people who are on the fence regarding illegal immigration to do some research and care more deeply, but I’m not sure. I don’t know if this book has the capability to do that. It’s something I still think about.

EG: In terms of the character Octavio, an undocumented friend of yours from Chicago, there are some differences between the two of you since you enjoy the privileges of speaking English and being a legal permanent resident. Would you say that he accurately gives a voice to illegal immigrants whose story we never hear?

JO: Octavio is one person and one of the things people and discourses do is they flatten multitudes of experiences into one representational experience. Octavio’s experiences exist in relation to a lot of other people’s experiences. His life can inform a reader and certainly represent a kind of political subject because of some of the things that he does, that he has to go through. Some of the things that he can’t do are also representative of what happens to undocumented people in this country, but ultimately, how he feels about things, how he copes with things, and how he engages with the experience is a very individual thing.

In that regard, one of the difficulties of being a minority writer is that you are read as a representative of that particular minority group. There is a part of me that wants to engage with that sort of representation of a politicized experience, but there is also a part of me that wants to resist that, if we are talking about a one for one thing where one individual represents an entire group. I think you can glean a lot of information from one individual’s experiences, but it’s important to realize that the variety of experiences that undocumented people have can be very different.

Having myself alongside of Octavio and examining our differences was my attempt to show that there exist very big differences in the experiences of immigrants. Hopefully the idea of representation in the book comes across as very complex.

EG: Towards the end of the book you went from the process of going through Naturalization to volunteering for several organizations that help immigrants crossing the border like Frontera de Cristo and No More Deaths, is that you being an activist?

JO: I guess that’s activism. When I set out to volunteer for these groups, I wasn’t thinking that I wanted to do research for this book. My activism started when I was growing up in Chicago during my twenties. I became very politically active because in Chicago there is a big community of organizing and resisting.

One of the very first protests I ever went to involved very large scale protests by Native Americans. When I went to those events I was a permanent resident, which affected the way I became involved in direct action. As a permanent resident you are subject to a long list of deportable offenses and an arrest can have negative consequences on becoming a citizen. You can even be deported, depending on the charge. I existed under that long list of deportable offenses, so I felt very curtailed in the ways that I could engage in direct action or protests. When I became a citizen, those things stopped holding me back.

Being a citizen means that you should be able to engage politically in a meaningful and forceful way without fear of repercussion. One of the most insidious things about existing in a status of illegal alien or permanent resident is that you are subject to all of these laws, but you don’t have an active role in creating legislation. Participating in lawmaking, I’ve come to learn, is the bedrock of democracy. I was suddenly able to participate with organizations along the border that provide emergency medical attention and water to people who are passing through parts of the desert which are extremely deadly and into which immigration policy has funneled them.

Another thing that they do which is just as important is to document abuse and generate data. No more deaths just released an incredible report about disappearances in the desert of southern Arizona.

EG: The last scene in your book takes place in a courtroom where illegal immigrants who have been caught in the desert are taken before a judge and subjected to a process called streamlining. Do you consider the experience a highlight of investigating immigration policy while simultaneously participating in democracy?

JO: Operation Streamline is something that most people don’t know about and which is opposite of the discourse that Democrats put out there. President Obama was a liberal Democrat and Latino communities had hope around his presidency because he was somehow one of them because he wasn’t white. Democrats under Obama wanted to show that they were compassionate regarding illegal immigration, but somehow they deported a record number of people.

Operation Streamline is just such a travesty of due process, a complete farce of the law. It is a great example of how unfairly the law can be applied. Operation Streamline, to me, is clear evidence of the law being applied in a completely punitive way. It flies in the face of anything humane. Ending the book in the courtroom was a way to engage the consequences of restrictive immigration policy.

EG: The timing of your book is compelling. Now that donald Trump is in office, are we going into the unknown in terms of immigration?

JO: I think it’s going to be particularly bad. If we had the type of immigration policies which were carried out under Obama, who was supposed to be at least moderately liberal, I can only imagine what is going to happen under Donald Trump. Most of the apparatus of deportation has been bolstered and intensified. The end result is a greater efficiency in terms of deporting people, and this has been achieved under the Obama administration.

EG: What does that mean going forward, in your opinion?

JO: That apparatus will be handed over to Donald Trump, who is a gigantic question mark in terms of how horrendous he is going to be. If we look back through history, we can have something like the Repatriation Act happen again where there exists a combination of official and unofficial means of getting rid of people, since you have a president who is anti-immigrant in terms of policy and a president who is surrounding himself with demonstrably racist people, which has legitimized a lot of people’s racism.

If we look back at the Repatriation Act, a lot of the people who were expelled from California and other parts of the country during that period of time were not expelled by INS. They were terrorized by their racist neighbors. I think that is something that could possibly happen again.

EG: Jose, thank you for tackling such a complex issue. Can you talk about what you are working on currently?

JO: I have a series of essays that resulted from questions opened up during the writing of this book. They deal with an avant-garde performance that I witnessed in Ciudad Juarez called Safari en Juarez and some of the issues that the performance addressed in regard to the city’s poorest colonias.

I am also working on some video essays that have to do with some of the ideas which were at the heart of the book, particularly displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement. Those three words sum up the modes of our current policies and how policy engages with people and can be witnessed in things like the closing of schools, mental hospitals, and health clinics. There are so many resources are being taken away from the community. Those are some of the things I’m focusing on.

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José Orduña was born in Córdoba, Veracruz, and immigrated to Chicago when he was two. In July of 2011 José was sworn in as a US citizen. He is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, is active in Latin American solidarity, and is the Joseph M. Russo Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico. His first book The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement was published by Beacon Press.

Eddie P. Gomez is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in creative nonfiction at California State University, Fresno. He serves as web editor of The Normal School literary magazine.

Photo credit: matthias-uhlig.photography via Foter.com / CC BY

Go Out and Taste the Dirt: A Normal Interview with Tim Z. Hernandez

By Paul Sanchez

“The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, ‘They are just deportees’ ”
— Woody Guthrie, 1948

  From author Tim Z. Hernandez’s first book in 2004, the poetry collection “Skin Tax,” the speakers in his works have been coming to terms with what it means to be “un hombre,” a man, within a culture that expects machismo to encapsulate what masculinity is and can be.

Fast forward to 2013 and Hernandez’s first documentary novel, “Mañana Means Heaven.” The book took a cherished moment from one of the greatest books of the 20th Century, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and through documentary methods and research, he fictionalized the untold story of a female character, Bea Franco, the “Mexican girl” from Kerouac’s famed story.

Now, after years of research, Hernandez has written his second documentary novel, “All They Will Call You,” about a plane crash that occurred in remote western Fresno County almost seventy years ago. The circumstances and attitudes about this latest book’s main event connects the methods and themes of Hernandez’s previous works.

Hernandez will visit the Normal School staff with a book launch event in Fresno on Jan. 27 and a reading and craft talk at WordFest 2017 on Jan. 28. Prior to his visit, he talked with us about documentary novels, reading Kerouac as a teenager, and the important lesson that sometimes being a writer is more than sitting down and writing; being a writer is about living and those who are living, as well as those that have lived.

  Paul Sanchez: Please share your definition of a “documentary novel.”

Tim Z. Hernandez: “All They Will Call You” is a “documentary novel” because it draws its subject material from real-life incidents, the same way a documentary film does. In order to construct the narrative it utilizes documentation, photographs, audio and video transcriptions, interviews, testimony, etc. And just as in film, the book also includes “re-enactments,” or “re-imaginings,” to bring a character or scenario to life.
 
PS: What are some important steps you take in the process of writing a documentary novel?

TZH: Perhaps the most important step is applied research. Get out from behind your desk and physically engage with the world of your book, with your subject. As Matsuo Bashō wrote: “If you wish to learn of the bamboo you must go to the bamboo.” Go out and taste the dirt you are writing about, laugh with the people you are writing about, eat the food and drink the drinks that you tell about in your stories.
 
PS: When was the first time you heard of the plane crash that became the subject of your latest book, “All They Will Call You”?

TZH: I found an article in an old 1948 newspaper back in December of 2010. This is when it all began for me. I was gripped by the mystery of who these people were. It was enough to pull me in.

  PS: What were some important moments as “All They Will Call You” became a reality, from conceptual planning to research and finally publication?

TZH: The most critical moments were when I would finally find a family related to the passengers. Sitting down to ask them the first questions would become the most vital moment to the entire project. I had to be a great listener. I had to be sensitive yet tactful, gentle but fearless in what I asked and how. It was an enormous learning curve for me, but I was a willing student.

  PS: As a big fan of “Manana Means Heaven,” I want to ask what started your interest in Jack Kerouac and other Beat Writers?‬

TZH: I was a fan of Kerouac since the age of 18. A friend who lived in Sweden turned me onto Kerouac’s book, “On the Road.” For an 18-year-old boy, coming of age, that book really is a kind of motivation to get out and seek the world, and perhaps, find your place in it. Back then I wasn’t interested in “The Beats” so much as just Kerouac’s books. And then right after I read “On the Road,” I picked up “Dharma Bums,” and that book too held a whole other approach to life, something a bit more spiritual maybe. And then after that was “Mexico City Blues,” and that’s when I knew I’d be a lifelong fan of Kerouac’s writing. He is boundary-less. His writing and thinking crosses all sorts of lines. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I began to discover that his work was part of this bigger school known as “The Beats.”

  PS: What are some personally significant lessons you learned, not just about writing but about living, when you studied at the Naropa Institute?

TZH: I was attracted to Naropa for two reasons: First, it housed the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, aka the Naropa Writing Program. It was founded by Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and other rebel writers whose work and spirit I had admired. Second, it was the first accredited Buddhist university in the United States. Its approach to education was contemplative, rooted in Eastern practices and traditions.

I knew that I wanted and needed an education that was not the norm. I wanted something holistic, an approach that required an engagement of the whole body, mind, and spiritual aspect. Not merely an intellectual pursuit. And this really is one of the strongest things I’ve learned and continue to carry with me in all things I do. Be physically engaged with the world. Work from the inside out. At least it’s how I approach writing and creating art.  

PS: What do you suggest to writers who want to write a documentary novel?

TZH: The process should feel organic. In other words, the subject should choose you, not the other way around. It’s really less about “looking for a subject to write about,” and more about “am I aware enough, attuned to the universe enough to see what comes across my radar?” As writers, too often we are trained to write, write, write … every single day, show up to the desk and just write. But just as vital, if not more so, is the need to just be. Walk the world with a heightened sense of awareness. Be curious. Explore with the intention of exploring. Spend an hour with a tree. Take time to be fully present and nowhere else. It’s this sense of seeing that will bring us that great idea or subject. And then every step of the way, remain this present for as much as possible.

When interviewing people, listen not just to their words but to their silences. Listen to the sounds of their atmosphere, their breath, the voices that make up their day. The smells and sights, too. All of it. And then, when you do go to write about it, write every aspect of it. Not just the story itself, but the meta aspect as well. Write about your search, your obstacles, your challenges. Transcribe the interviews. Write again the documents you’ve discovered, leave out the fat and keep the meat. And should a vision come to you during the process, write that down too. In this phase your pen should be borderless and fearless.

Your job is only to catch everything. To do this you have to suspend judgment of what is “good material,” and what is “bad material.” Those decisions will come later, in the editing.

  PS: What writers and books are you currently reading?

TZH: Because the school semester is back in session, I’m doing less reading right now. But one book that has impressed me recently is “The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far” by Quintan Ana Wikswo. It’s a multimedia body of work that includes stories, texts, and photographs from her work as a “collector of spaces that contain grief.” She is something of an anthropologist and performance artist who literally goes around the world taking up residence in spaces that once held grief or pain, and she records the space as it is now with writing, audio, video, and photographs. This book is aligned with that work.

  PS: What can readers look forward to reading next from Tim Z Hernandez?

TZH: I really can’t answer that right now. “All They Will Call You” is a project I’ve been working very hard at since late 2010. It has consumed every part of my life for the past seven years, and that it’s just now about to be released into the world … all I want to do at this point is focus on giving this book and story its due. Right now I am nowhere else except with this book. There is also a documentary film that I am still working on around this subject, and that is still in the editing phase. We hope to release it by fall of 2017.

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Tim Z. Hernandez is a writer, research scholar, and performance artist. He is the recipient of an American Book Award for poetry, the Colorado Book Award for poetry, and the International Latino Book Award for historical fiction. His books and research have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Public Radio International, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Named one of sixteen New American Poets by the Poetry Society of America, he was a finalist for the inaugural Split This Rock Freedom Plow Award for his work on locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, the incident made famous by Woody Guthrie’s song of the same name. The result of this work is the basis for his highly anticipated forthcoming book, “All They Will Call You.”
Hernandez holds a BA degree from Naropa University and an M.F.A. from Bennington College, and he is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas El Paso’s Bilingual MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Paul Sanchez is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in poetry at California State University, Fresno. He serves as an assistant editor for The Normal School literary magazine.

Everything is Required: A Normal Interview with Michele Poulos

By Ronald Dzerigian

In her poem, “The Golden Age of Herbalists,” Michele Poulos writes: “…alone in the meadow, he knew everything / he caught sight of was in the dying / and would die before he would, yet he held / in his hands a garden. …”

Before she had chosen to direct a documentary on the late poet Larry Levis, her work already carried with it an understanding of our brevity in this world. In the new film A Late Style of Fire, Poulos paints a lyrical portrait of Levis—a native of California’s great central valley, who died in 1996 of a heart attack at 49—in a way that leaps beautifully from image to word to recollection. She accomplishes, in the film, an aesthetic reflective of Levis’ poems—an acceptance of loss, the profundity of the ordinary, and the knowledge that we live parallel with the dream. This is an accomplishment to be noted, especially in a debut filmmaking feature.

Poulos mentions: “Writing and revising poetry was great training for (her) editing of the film, and vice versa.” Thanks to the efforts of Poulos and her collaborators, we earn further entry into the area inhabited by Levis—a place where verse, what Philip Levine referred to as “the impossible art of poetry,” lives hand-in-hand with a farm boy from Selma, California. The film saw its world premiere in October at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and it has also played at the Virginia Film Festival. A Late Style of Fire makes its Central California premiere on Nov. 18 in Fresno.

Michele Poulos is an award-winning poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from Arizona State University as well as her MFA in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University. It was in Richmond, VA where she encountered the lingering influence of Larry Levis, which has remained since his passing. Black Laurel, her first full-length collection of poems, was published in March 2016.

Ronald Dzerigian: Your film premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 15. What was it like to share the movie for the first time with a big audience?

Michele Poulos: To be honest, I was terribly nervous the night of the world premiere because I’d never seen the film on a big screen before. Weeks earlier, I’d sent off an enormous electronic file of the film to have the “digital cinema package” (DCP) created by a company in California—and that was the version of the film we saw that night. It was literally my first time seeing the film in that format, so I was quite terrified that we’d find an error or a glitch or something. So, while I loved seeing it with full surround sound and with distinct visual clarity, I was still all white knuckles and short breaths.

Plus, earlier in the day, I’d met our film’s composer, Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, for the first time. He had not seen the completed film before that night, and so I was very nervous about his reaction—another thing to worry over. Then of course there were all the other layers of terror including meeting family members of Levis for the first time, meeting famous poets and writers, and on and on. But setting aside all that terror, it was a deeply enjoyable, amazing experience!

RD: Were there any significant reactions from those people in the audience who had experienced Levis and his poetry for the first time through your film?

MP: The questions we fielded during the Q&A session were all quite sophisticated. I realized there had to be some writers in the audience because they asked questions such as: How did you determine what sections of poems to include in the film, and how did you structure the film? Perhaps one of my favorite statements responding to the film was from a woman who simply said, “That was the most profound film I’ve ever seen.” A number of people admitted to having never heard of Levis before, and one viewer sent me an email a few days after the premiere and thanked me by saying, “It was great to be introduced to Larry’s poetry—I’m amazed and somewhat chagrined that I’d never encountered his work before.”

RD: How did you decide how much, or how little, of Levis’ poetry you would include in this film?

MP: When we began editing, I thought I’d try to impose a structure on the film: I’d include three entire poems, featuring one at the beginning, middle, and end. However, once I really started to look at what we had, that structure felt too artificial, too forced. In the end, the sections of poems we selected for inclusion were all determined by the themes that had emerged during the interviews and the later editing process.

I had spoken with some of America’s greatest poets, and so naturally I took my lead from them when I could, and I let their astute comments guide the shape and structure of the film. For example, several of Levis’ friends brought up his wonky relationship to money. Poet Gerald Stern mentioned that “he gave all his money away.” Mary Flinn, Senior Editor of the journal Blackbird, said, “We used to laugh because he thought he had money so long as there were checks in the checkbook.” Those remarks led me to include a section of the poem “Some Ashes Drifting Above Piedra, California” from the book The Dollmaker’s Ghost: “We will never have any money, either, / And we will go on staring past the sink, / Past the curtain, / And into a field which is not even white anymore, / Not even an orchard, / But simply this mud, / And always, / Over that, a hard sky.”

In the end, I think we used selected lines from twenty-two poems. The intention is that the film whets one’s appetite for poetry itself, and the viewer will go buy, and read, a book of poetry—by Levis, of course, or by anyone.

RD: I feel that your film carefully addresses the tumult of Levis’ life in a caring and considerate way while maintaining honesty. Did you find that identifying and maintaining this delicate balance to be challenging?

MP: It was very challenging. A balance was absolutely essential to me because, first of all, many of Levis’ relatives and friends are alive. His son is alive, as are all of his siblings, so I not only needed their approval to green-light the film, but I needed their involvement, enthusiasm, support, and guidance. No one knew some of the details about Levis better than his family, and they needed to be totally on board. So, some of the darker themes revealed in the film—his drug use, for instance—needed to be handled as delicately and sensitively as possible.

On the other hand, I’m a filmmaker, and I would prefer a large, general audience to see the film, not simply a specialized one, and so the film also needed to be entertaining and full of energy and passion. There’s a moment in the film where we see Levis’ death certificate, which lists the cause of his death. We intentionally show that image over the voice of David St. John who says, “It would be easy to say, and highly romantic to say, that, like the great rock stars that we love, that the whole idea of live fast, die young, die young, stay pretty would be fitting of Larry, but it’s not true. …” Painful and rather shocking information is being delivered, and yet that delivery is coupled with an argument that perhaps softens the blow, or at least offers a counterbalancing perspective.

RD: In an interview for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, you mentioned that the idea for your film came from a voice in a dream that stated that you would “make a film about Larry Levis.” So much of Levis’ work takes the reader into the dream-state. Tell us more about your dream.

MP: The idea for the film came to me in a dream I had in 2009. I was already a fan of the poetry of Larry Levis when I moved to Richmond, Virginia in 2005 to study in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Levis had been a faculty member there until his untimely death in 1996. You couldn’t walk down the street without bumping into someone who had known Levis—or even seeing graffiti about him—and the stories people told were fascinating, as savory and tangled as his poems. Hearing about the man behind the poems, I began to wonder why there was no comprehensive biography about this artist of such tremendous talent and reach. It was at that point I had the dream—and in it, a disembodied male voice told me I was to create a film that would have the excitement and artistic quality of the work of the man himself.

RD: You are the author of two collections of poetry: Black Laurel (Iris Press, 2016) and the chapbook A Disturbance in the Air (Slapering Hol Press, 2012). I’ve looked closely at your poems “The Golden Age of Herbalists” and “Lures” and feel that your poems share a lyrical kinship with Levis’ work. Did you feel that, while making this film, you could have been in dialogue with him—perhaps, even, through visual verse?

MP: Thank you for the compliment about seeing a lyrical kinship between my poetry and that of Levis. When I made the film, especially when filming in California where Levis grew up, I felt as though I were in a heightened state of awareness or existence, and part of what made me feel fine-tuned to the landscape and environment and people we interviewed was Levis’ poetry. I very intentionally went to California having fully absorbed his words (poetry and essays) so that I could try and capture the essence of what I imagined had nurtured him and still held him.

One of the more obvious obsessions Levis had were horses, and every time we saw a horse while driving, I yelled at our producer to pull the car over, and the cinematographer then ran out with the camera rolling. But more than capturing an image, I was really going for a tone or a temperature. For example, during the opening sequence, there’s a shot of a house on a hill, and we see heat waves undulating up from the road below. There’s nothing specific connecting the house to Levis himself, but the heat waves make the scene appear almost magical or otherworldly and that visionary effect reflects, I think, a quality to be found in his poems.

RD: Some viewers see your film as a lyrical telling of Levis’ story. Do you feel that poetry can inform us when making a film?

MP: The arts, for me, feed one another. Writing and revising poetry was great training for my editing of the film, and vice versa, though it’s true that poetry, as Norman Dubie states in the film, was “there when we were dressed in furs and carrying fire on our backs” and thus poetry greatly predates cinema.

Film nevertheless continues to employ a number of techniques that I can find in poems that are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old. For example, in a poetry workshop, Tom Sleigh read a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost (originally published in 1667). In Book IX, there’s a passage where the serpent approaches Eve. The syntax embodies the divided mind of the serpent as well as the process of the mind as it experiences division, and this effect is created not only by word choice, but also in the way the words are placed vertically up and down the page. That combined effect creates a lot of tension that is similar to editing in filmmaking, where one can experience quick cuts between scenes that ratchet up the emotional impact. In addition, punctuation acts like the focusing mechanism of a camera: commas and semi-colons create anticipation and suspend action and tension as the serpent moves through the grass, and the focus of the “lens” moves up and down the serpent’s body, from his “circular base of rising folds” to his carbuncle-colored eyes. It’s a wonderful poem to study as a filmmaker; it instructs as well as entertains.

One of my favorite filmmakers, Werner Herzog, creates films that strike me as visually realized poems, exhibiting the same sort of psychological sensitivity, instinctive intelligence, aesthetic sophistication, informing insight, and casual genius that I find in the poetry of Larry Levis. Great art inspires great art, and all great works of art have in common characteristics that result in our being fascinated, delighted, assaulted, and amazed.

RD: Herzog certainly comes to mind when I consider a direct relationship between film and poetry. I hope he eventually gets a chance to see your film!

Out of personal curiosity, did you write any poems during or after the making of this film? If so, how do you feel about those poems?

MP: I wrote very little during the editing of the film, but I have written some poems since we finished editing. (I worked with a brilliant editor from Costa Rica named Gloriana Fonseca Wills.) My newer poems are a bit more experimental. Editing the film gave me permission to take even more chances than I’d already taken writing and editing poetry.

In documentary filmmaking, the shaping of a story really takes place in the editing room, so there’s a necessity for play and experimentation. If you’re uncomfortable with not knowing what the outcome of your project is going to be until the bitter end, then documentary filmmaking might not be for you. I’d say that I’ve taken those lessons with me back to writing poetry; I’ve learned to embrace, as Keats would say, “being in uncertainties, mysteries, [and] doubts.”

RD: What advice would you give to independent filmmakers beginning their first project?

MP: Choose your idea very carefully, especially if you’re making a documentary, because you’ll be living with that material for a very long time. Make sure your idea will sustain you over the course of one, two, even ten years. After that, make sure that both the audio and visual elements get equal attention. A lot of first-time filmmakers forget about the importance of good audio. Finally, try to make as much time as possible free for working on your film, even if that means giving up your apartment to rent a room with a friend so you can work “the day job” a little less. Filmmaking requires a lot of time, and money, but that’s another question.

RD: What do you want people—who are or aren’t familiar with Levis’ work—to glean from A Late Style of Fire?

MP: I hope the audience walks away with a deeper understanding and appreciation of poetry, especially Levis’ poetry. The film is really an introduction to the work itself, and I hope people go buy a book and read the poems with enthusiasm and with a feeling that they know something about how to engage with that reading. I hope viewers make their own connections between the life and the work, and discover how one informs the other. This will be one of the most exciting aspects of the film for viewers, I believe: to see where the life and the poems blend and dissolve and reflect and refract one another.

Also, the film serves as a kind of argument for the importance and necessity not only of poetry, but also of the arts more generally. In the film, Norman Dubie states that, “When nations become privileged, they suddenly have a tolerance for the arts, and they support the arts.” I also think artists of any kind will find something meaningful and quite challenging in it. The film sails right into the question: “What is required of those who make a serious commitment to a life in art?” The answer for some, as it was for Levis, is: everything.

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Ronald Dzerigian resides in a small farming community just outside of Fresno, California, with his wife and two daughters. He received his MFA from California State University, Fresno. He has been a recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Ernesto Trejo Memorial Prize, and the C.G. Hanzlicek Poetry Writing Fellowship. His poems can be found on Poets.org, in the Santa Ana River Review, and forthcoming in RHINO and Prairie Schooner. He is a writing consultant for the Graduate Writing Studio at Fresno State.

Michele Poulos's first feature-length documentary film, A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet, will be making its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October. She is an award-winning poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker. She holds a BFA in filmmaking from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, an MFA degree in poetry from Arizona State University, and an MFA in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her first full-length collection of poems, Black Laurel, was published by Iris Press in March 2016. Her screenplay, Mule Bone Blues, won the 2010 Virginia Screenwriting Competition, and it made it to the second round of the 2015 Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and the second round in the 2010 Austin Screenplay Contest. She just completed co-writing a feature-length romantic comedy about a stand-up comic.