Interview with Ander Monson

Ander Monson’s first name means “other” in German, and if he weren’t a writer, he’d be a rapper or an interstellar villain. He is the author of a poetry collection, Vacationland, a novel (or a fiction collection—”What’s the difference?” he asks), and an essay collection, Neck Deep. In the final weeks of 2007 and the first ones of 2008, he was kind enough to participate in an epic email interview. In it, he talks about why truth matters in nonfiction, but why he doesn’t want to talk about autobiography in his own; why he dislikes the term “experimental,” but why “not experimenting makes you dead in the water”; why he likes containers more than what they contain; why personal essays should be less boring and more like Voltron; and last but not least, cheerleader shorts with POETRY on the ass.

KR: Of what does a typical day in the life of Ander Monson consist?

AM: Well, today I got up and drove ten hours in the car to get to my parents’ home in Hancock, Michigan. This is hardly a typical day for me, but my days don’t tend towards routine. I spend probably the most time of any given day during the semester involved in teaching, a little less in editorial work, work around the house. Work work work. Though I approach writing as a kind of work, but also a kind of play. So it is fit in wherever I can fit it, and wherever it pushes its head through: usually in the later nights when everyone is asleep. If I’m lucky. Summers. Breaks. It’s not ideal in terms of generating work, but in other ways I think the mind is working when it is attending to other things. If I just sat down and could write 4-5 hours a day I doubt I could get anything done.

KR: What is the origin of your name? In the beginning of your book, Other Electricities, you include a list of radio dead call signs featuring such surnames as “Simonson” and “Edmonson.” Did your own last name used to be longer? When did it get truncated? Why?

AM: I don’t know of it being originally any longer when it is. It’s Norwegian, Swedish, something Scandinavian and suitably rugged/cold. I am Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish in parts. My father wanted to name me Gustav. My mother did not. I have been told Ander means other in German, which is potentially rich. As for the book, that moment is there partly to suggest (but not to enforce) some possible autobiographical overlap, which I figure many readers sort of assume anyway, especially with a first book, so I thought, well, why not make that assumption a point of tension to be played with in the text. Though it is fiction, so I hesitate to claim autobiography too forcefully. Or maybe that’s too much of a tease.

KR: In all three of your books so far, you write over and over and over of Liz, your X (”Liz my X, my only X: Liz my unknown quotient,” etc.), but you dedicate OE to “Megan who is my absolute, my X.” Can one have multiple Xs? How does that work?

AM: X, being a variable, can stand in for anything, don’t you think? Incomprehensible longing. Distance. Devastation. Grief. Love in all of its varieties. Loneliness. Absence. Desire. But Xs in a set of equations are assumed to be resolvable to the same referent, or else the system isn’t solvable, or usefully manipulable. But any system (see also Godel and his Incompleteness Theorem) automatically introduces some level of instability, of impossibility. So there is a lot of overlap between the books: “Index for X” in Neck Deep was the original index for OE. Many of the characters in Vacationland show up in OE. So there is some playfulness at work within the form: there is constraint and ambiguity, which is where all the good stuff, one hopes, occurs.

KR: How did you become a writer? Was it something you always knew you wanted to pursue? Did it run in your family? Where did your creativity have its genesis?

AM: Jesus. Who can answer this? It would seem to have required—like most claims we want to make about our lives—some fiction, some reconstruction of our lives into narrative arc. I can point to the fact that I was published at eight in our local paper for my book report on The Hardy Boys and the Curse of the Crimson Flame, which was surprisingly good. Indeed. It was plagiarized from the back of the book. No one knew until maybe when I was 25 or so. So I wonder about how being lauded as a “writer” at eight based on a falsehood might have started something. Or maybe there’s the audacity of plagiarism that I can claim as the genesis of my creativity. There’s no way to say. This is one of the tricky things about writing about our lives at all, especially as nonfiction.

KR: If you weren’t a writer, teacher, and editor, what would you be?

AM: I never have a good answer to this question. It’s a sort of cocktail party game among writers that I grind to a halt every time. It’s pretty sad. You’d think I would get with the picture. I guess I’ll say what Richard Nixon said when someone asked him towards the end of his life: a rapper. (My memory tells me it was a gangster rapper, but that seems a little too much knowledge about the hip-hop for Nixon to have realistically.) Or maybe I should say a dead president?

KR: Do you have an agent? How did you get one, and why? Do you recommend that all authors, no matter how quote-unquote experimental, seek representation?

AM: I do have an agent. I work with Matt McGowan, at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. He contacted me, which is probably the best way for it to happen. I spent one summer after grad school sending out letters to agents trying to find representation for a version of OE. I just ran through the Literary Marketplace looking for anyone who seemed interested in literary or experimental (though I don’t like this term at all), or preferably both. I sent out 50 query letters to agencies with last names beginning with A through M. That seemed like plenty. I had queried a couple specific agents first whom I had references for, with no luck. Of the fifty queries, I got a dozen requests to see the first pages, probably partly because I had fairly good pubs by that point, and Rick Moody had picked the title story for a fiction prize that year. Of those twelve, none were interested. I got a lot of notes back to the effect of “this has drawings; I can’t sell this” or “beautiful but confusing: try McSweeney’s” (which I had done, and had a pretty good correspondence with one of their editors who seemed quite interested—in many ways it would have been a good fit for their books, which are brainy and beautifully made—but then they never got back to me and I didn’t feel strongly enough to follow up on it). So that was it for maybe a year or so. Then it got picked out of the slush pile by Sarabande. And then it was published and got reviewed pretty well, and by then I had already signed up with Matt, and then I got a bunch of queries.

I don’t think that I’d recommend getting an agent to everyone. The only reason I have one is because I found somebody willing to be in it for the long haul, who is devoted to the writer, not just the salability of the book (though I’m sure he’d like to make some money one of these days, I imagine). The nice part about it is that you don’t have to devote a lot of time to the commercial-think and submit-and-reject part of the brain that you kind of need to have in order to get your work out there. My agent handles most of that, so I can just think about making interesting stories and books. The downside is that you do start to think a little bit: about the reader, or about the publisher, or about your agent, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing for the work.

KR: Very few agents, editors, or publishers will even consider essay collections these days, unless you are lucky enough to be, for instance, David Sedaris. Why is this? What advice do you—as an innovative essayist with a relatively recently published collection, Neck Deep—have for aspiring essayists? Do you every worry that the personal essay—as opposed to say, the book-length, naratively arcing memoir—is a dying genre?

AM: Well, for one, the book (I feel strongly about this: same with the short story collection) should be a book, not just a collection, which implies odds and ends. Stuff that wouldn’t fit anywhere, maybe. I was very conscious about this when I was working on ND: it being a book. I don’t think the personal essay is a dying genre at all, though. It’s just not usually all that sexy. It has a bad rap: it’s boring, it’s dead E. B. White going to the lake. It’s expository. It’s required in freshman composition classes. Teaching anything enough in school will probably seem to kill it. But you take it out of school, you get it to kick a little ass, maybe, do something funky, and it revives pretty good. A bunch of short essays doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Maybe essays should be like Voltron: fierce individually but when they combine they should become a giant robot that can battle a variety of interstellar villains. See: you’d buy that. Or I would, anyhow. Maybe I should change my answer to the what would you do question before. Interstellar villain: that pays. The girls like it from what I hear.

KR: The “mock-humble” (or, more specifically, what reviewer Ken Tucker called “the cold mock-humble” in his review of Christian Wiman’s memoir in the NYTBR) seems to be a pitfall for many creative nonfictioners. You sort of worry about this issue of self-presentation in your essay “Cranbrook Schools: Adventures in Bourgeois Topologies,” where you explore your quasi-criminal/delinquent past. Why is the temptation of self-aggrandizement in nonfictio so dangerous and why do so many accomplished writers commit this error? Do you think you avoided it? How is it avoided?

AM: I don’t think I avoided it, or that it can be avoided. If you are writing nonfiction, you are writing about yourself. You are the I, the eye through which everything is being seen and selected. No matter how much of your subject shows up in your essay or (especially) memoir, it’s still finally got your name on it, and for good reason. I tried to counter this in a couple ways: first, leaving in damaging details, things I wasn’t all that comfortable with revealing about myself. This is a way of showing vulnerability (though it can be a construction too) which is important to me in reading anything. The second is through self-consciousness (and this is I think not as successful in Neck Deep). The third is through forefronting it: the essay is in itself a tracing of the writer’s thinking about a subject (or subjects). Reading an essay is like being possessed. These essays are about subjects—all these things in the world that interest, excite me. But they are knowingly about the self, which makes them less about the self. Or at least more honest about it. A sample from some song that I have now forgotten goes like this: “He’s stupid, but he knows he’s stupid, which almost makes him smart.” So. One of the essays is titled not “Snow” but “I Have Been Thinking About Snow,” which acknowledges that thinkiness, that thickness of mind, that implicit subjectivity. I’m more interested in the mind as it chews on snow than snow itself. Maybe that’s not true, but it feels true right now. I’m sure other writers have found ways of countering this instinct. James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men deploys self-consciousness and exhaustive detail, for instance, as a way of hopefully achieving balance.

KR: In the “sincerity” drawer of the virtual card catalog on your (really sweet) website, on the page you’ve made for Neck Deep, you denote how “true” each individual essay in the collection is (”As true as my memory lets it be,” “Not very true at all,” “All too true,” and so forth). Why does “truth” matter in creative non-fiction? How does it matter? Does it matter?

AM: It matters because readers feel like it matters. It matters because James Frey got bitch-slapped on national television, because JT LeRoy got sued. It matters because your dad doesn’t really want to show up in your essay. It matters because it’s harder for writers (or, well, me) to write nonfiction, or that it should be for all of us, because there’s so much more self there (especially in essay, and in memoir, don’t even get me started; perhaps we should just stop writing memoirs unless we are ready to sever most of our relationships with the people we write about). And because nonfiction comes without the shroud of invulnerability that fiction implies. The essay or the nonfiction book is about real people. It has claims on factual truth that nothing else does. And the people who show up in my, or anyone’s, nonfiction can track me down and tell me what they think. And they will.

KR: Relatedly, your absent mother—dead of cancer and/or gone to Canada, as you put it—figures prominently into your work. Where did she really go, if anywhere? Or should I even be curious about/asking that?

AM: The autobiography behind the text isn’t a place I’m interested in going (sorry). But in the text, it’s more interesting, or well, it feels more important. This is one of the central, irreducible/unresolvable (probably: readers have their own theories, I’d assume) mysteries that show up in the book. The armless brother is another. I will say I do have a brother. He’s currently en route to here from San Francisco with his wife and child. Like every time he tries to come up to the Upper Peninsula in winter he gets jacked. His flight from Chicago couldn’t land in Marquette (the only place he’ll fly into since at least they have jet service) and couldn’t return because of low visibility, so they landed in Traverse City (7 hours away) and he’s rented a car and is shooting through the winter night to make it home by Xmas. That’s how it works here. (It’s also one reason I won’t fly in anymore. It sucks.)

KR: You were raise in Houghton, Michigan in the Upper Peninsula—where is home now? Do you agree that Houghton is, in fact, one of the 100 Best Small Towns in America, as it was designated in 1993? Why or why not? The picture of Northern Michigan you paint in your work is much less rosy, full of death and dismemberment and loneliness and loss. Why?

AM: The Houghton that I write about, particularly in OE, isn’t the real Houghton. It is after all a book of fiction. It was mostly written two days drive away in Alabama. The Houghton there, the Keweenaw Peninsula in the sentences there, is a mythology. Something remembered, darker, shadowy, made larger and more omnipotent via absence. I’m actually writing this response in Houghton, or, well, in Houghton’s sadder brother, Hancock, across the Portage Canal. It’s a lot harder to render a place, especially a place from memory, when you are in it. I live in Grand Rapids now. It’s about ten hours away by car. Also in Michigan, but a very different part of the state.

KR: Also, obviously, setting and/or a strong sense of place is extremely important to your work. In all three books, Michigan itself is essentially a character—well-rounded and present. Why is this? Why is place so important to some authors but not to others?

AM: I dunno. I don’t understand why most writers aren’t more interested in it. It is a powerful force in my memory, in my mind, and it’s hard for me to think of myself without it.

KR: You write, on your website, “it feels sometimes like I am always in Michigan.” Why is Michigan so much a part of you? And do you think, had fate caused you to be born and raised in some other state, that it would be as much a component of Who You Are as Michigan is?

AM: Hard to say. How much of place’s effect on us is learned, how much is innate, and how much depends on the particular ferocity of the place? Perhaps the writers who aren’t as interested in place are from places that impacted them in less obvious ways. Or perhaps the writers who foreground place in their work do so because they are from places that are in some way Other, undiscovered, strange, or unusual. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a strange place, and really hasn’t been written about all that much, though I am continuing to discover some of the historical and contemporary writers who have approached the place as subject: David Means, Karl Iagnemma, Catie Rosemurgy, Beth Roberts, Sharon Dilworth, Cynie Cory, Jonathan Johnson, Jim Harrison, and so on, just to iterate a few. Though the place shows up in very different ways in each of their work. But it’s hard not to be drawn to a place like this if you’re from it or have encountered it in all its weirdness and wildness.

KR: So much of your work has to do with snow and ice and cold—what do these things mean to you and why are they such a preoccupation?

AM: They’re all part of this matrix of place and the memory of it: and when I talk about place I am talking about weather. Some places aren’t as infused with/ informed by weather as Upper Michigan. Again, I’m not sure exactly why it is an obsession to me. If I could tease it out, it wouldn’t be very interesting. Mystery is at the heart of many good things.

KR: Relatedly, with climate change proceeding at what can only be described as a terrifying pace, do you worry that some day, it may never snow again anymore? What do we lose when there is no snow, nor any more prospect of it ever again?

AM: There will always be something wild, something remote in the world. But it is strange to think about this place without the choking cold and snow of it. But things here are changing, too. Property values are rising along the waterfront after people buy up all of it on the way up from Chicago and Detroit. This is another story.

KR: You lived in Saudi, Arabia for a while, right? What brought that about and what was it like?

AM: My family relocated there (to Riyadh) when I was younger. It too is a strange place, kind of the opposite of Michigan. I find it hard now to refer to formative moments there because I only lived there, off and on, for three years. And by the time we moved here I feel like psychologically, biologically, a lot of me was already set, which is a weird way to think about it. So I wonder if I mainly experienced absence (of my home landscape) rather than presence (of this new one).

KR: You got your BA from Knox College, your MA from Iowa State, and your MFA from University of Alabama—who were your mentors, especially in terms of creative writing?

AM: If I only pick one per place, Robin Metz at Knox, Deb Marquart at Iowa State, and Sandy Huss at Alabama, though I worked fairly closely with others too in all of these places.

KR: Also, U of A is particularly known for teaching creative writing with an “experimental” bent. What does “experimental” mean, anyway, and did that have anything to do with your decision to go there?

AM: It didn’t really have as obvious of an experimental edge when I went there, but I ended up applying because it was the only place I looked at that didn’t 1. force you to choose a genre and 2. only submit manuscript pages. I had a chapbook, Safety Features (which is well out of print but might eventually be brought back into the world) that consisted of photos and short fiction taking place in airports, and I received a grant for it at ISU, had it printed, and in some ways that was perhaps the start of my small press, New Michigan Press. So I very much wanted to submit that as part of my portfolio, and Alabama was the only one that was okay with bound pages. All of this, in retrospect, represents a culture open to adventure (which is the term I prefer, though really “experimental” gets a bad rap—what literature/art isn’t experimental? The idea of experiment would suggest that we don’t know what we will find, that we are out in deep water alone, and might not make it back. For me it (and adventure, which is sexier) implies risk, which is what writers should want, and what readers should want. I expect “experimental” is more commonly applied to failed experiments, stuff that doesn’t turn out to be genius. But that’s the nature of experiment: some work, some don’t. But not experimenting makes you dead in the water.

KR: Your work is so full of visual representations and components—have you ever made or considered making a film?

AM: No; I’ve been asked this before. I lack skill in that area. And enthusiasm, too, kind of. But I have been toying with these visual essays that are, I suppose, short films, or, well, they are video, in the YouTube sense. I’m also planning on posting some video reviews on Amazon of books I like. It’s kind of a ridiculous idea, but an entertaining one. It is, too, an experiment. Maybe it’ll be good. More than likely it won’t. But there’s only one way to find out.

KR: You also seem to have a highly developed fixation on order and arrangement, organization and structure—mathematical, alphabetical and on and on—have you always been this way? Why? Are you like this in your personal life or just in your writing? Is your desk really clean, or are you messy?

AM: My desk is never clean, nor my office(s), nor my house, nor my lawn. My car can be clean for a while, but that’s about it. By clean I mean the opposite of messy, not the opposite of dirty. I don’t think much about me is dirty—I like control too much—but it is often disordered. Perhaps that’s why my writing and thinking really likes order. I feel that embracing mess is healthier, more productive, because it allows for interesting overlaps, like where three books are laying half-open side by side and there’s something there in the collision/juxtaposition. Though I can’t deal with dirty or messy in the kitchen. Or bathroom. But the rest of the actual living space, well…

KR: In OE, even the Table of Contents is worth reading for entertainment as opposed to simply for information. Additionally, you include a web/map of “characters and their relationships herein,” and “a helpful guide to the characters.” In fact, help for your readers in dealing with the confusion potentially caused by your writing seems to be a central concern of yours. Why this preoccupation with manners and authorial assistance? Is your work really that confusing or are you just really polite?

AM: Heh. Part of the persona I’m interested in (or one of them I suppose) with my writing involves self-consciousness, or a sort of pomo stance, and this mediation between text and author (as if those things are really all that separate or discernible, finally) allows layering, which is something I’m really interested in, especially as I’m not always all that interested in straight-up this-happened then that narrative. I don’t think my work is confusing, but I do think it’s dense and it can be weird and electrical: a mess. So a lot of the revision process is in finding ways to work at order out of that coil of wire and spill, to think about readership, or to maybe create my own idea of reader.

KR: Also, what are the uses of difficulty in writing as opposed to clarity? What do you think the reader owes the writer in terms of effort and vice versa?

AM: I don’t feel as a reader that I owe the writer much. If it doesn’t interest me I give it up. One reason why I have ten plus books on my bedside table. As a reader I want stuff that captivates me on one level or another, and ideally that somehow prods the writermind so I can’t read too much of it without wanting to go to the simulated page of MS Word on my laptop and start hacking. From a writer’s standpoint, I suppose I think I owe the reader an interesting and effervescent mess, something stimulating, worth their time, an interruption, maybe of what they expected. A reinvention. A vivisection. Conveniently all those -tion words rhyme so I could beat box a bit here too. Maybe I’ll save that for the Amazon video review.

KR: You are the editor of DIAGRAM, an electronic journal of text and art, a journal staffed by people who are “interested in representations. In naming. In indicating. In schematics. In the labeling and taxonomy of things. In poems that masquerade as stories; in stories that disguise themselves as indices or obituaries.” The same could be said about all your work to date. Why this interest in such schematics?

AM: There’s that thing again about order, which schematics attempt to do. I get this question a lot and am never sure how to answer it. Schematics are attempts to represent something often very difficult (or asymptotically approaching impossibility) to describe or represent. They are in this way like poems, or prose, or art, explorations of systems, sometimes ridiculous and sometimes brilliant in idea or execution. I’m not sure I believe this answer fully, because part of what draws me to them is unnameable, mysterious, other.

KR: Also, on the subject of DIAGRAM, what made you decide to start a literary journal? Why one like DIAGRAM with its major visual components and why online? Why one with an associated chapbook contest?

AM: DIAGRAM was before the chapbook contest by a couple years. The short answer is that I got fed up with the structure of the litmag I was editing at the time, Black Warrior Review, and wanted my own empire where I could take whatever editorial risks I wanted without having to consult my editorial board or worry about institutional funding or the literary magazine as graduate teaching tool. New Michigan Press started up around that with my interests in design, and partly as a way of providing a print venue (I do like print) for what’s much better as an online magazine (we get far more readers online than we could in print, which is probably the case for most online magazines if well-thought-out, if they have a reason to be online besides wanting readers and running on no budget—though those are good reasons too). The chapbook contest helps to fund the press and journal. It also allows us to publish more work that we really like, and to get it out there in a physical form (hence the print anthologies of DIAGRAM, hence the T-shirts: our new shirt has this weird semi-evil gerbil on it, and we’re getting our new POETRY shorts ready for AWP—they’re cheerleader shorts with POE TRY on the ass, which I think is pretty great). But most of my projects all share this in common: a DIY aesthetic, a quickness and craftiness. I saw this great image and bam, a month later we have shirts and we can sell them and wear them stretched tight across our chests. There’s not a lot of bureaucracy standing between idea and execution, which can sometimes be a bad idea too, I imagine. But I am very much a doer, finally. I can’t stand sitting still in all that mess.

KR: Do you have any advice to others who might also want to begin small publishing empires? Tips and How Tos? Dos and/or Don’ts?

AM: Have a good idea and get a great designer, or learn design yourself. It’s increasingly transparent now with the continual advance of software and type and so on. Design design design design. You might as well learn some of it yourself if you can. Almost every editorial anything I’ve been involved with has been because of my self-taught design chops, such as they are. If you can produce what you want yourself, it’s a lot easier to make it happen.

KR: What literary journals do you read? Which ones would you recommend?

AM: I read Ninth Letter pretty routinely. I think I still subscribe to Ploughshares which is maybe the only venerable-type journal I read. Well, maybe Alaska Quarterly Review. I’m always delighted by them. And Conduit. I tend to subscribe to a lot more magazines—like John Waters, I tell myself—than I read. It’s important to support people doing what you do or want to do. I’m often impressed by new journals (one of my favorite favorite parts of AWP: the bookfair, the proliferation of journalalia). I like Octopus a lot online. This newish Hotel St. George. A Public Space.

KR: In the poem “Alibi,” you write, “when did we begin to affix/ the arc of myth to your descent,/ you Orpheus, you Icarus.” Why do so many contemporary poets like to affix myth to their subjects, even to very contemporary ones?

AM: Not sure. It attaches the new to the old, or at least acknowledges that the new has antecedent, has root, has beginning. Perhaps it’s just shroud, but it enlivens it. I don’t do all that much with myth in my work, at least Greek myth (though I took Ancient Greek in college, which rocked), though Orpheus is the major recurring character. Icarus occasionally too. Orpheus, though, the Jean Cocteau film version, is fantastic. With the metaphor of Orpheus tuning in a car radio to something from the beyond as where the poem, where art, comes from.

KR: You write a fair number of poems and stories that are in the imperative—”Burn for X,” etc. Did you intend to do that? Or does it just happen? What are the uses of writing in such a confrontational and commanding mode?

AM: The imperative is a legacy to the poem/story. The piece begins with momentum. It commands you. Maybe it’s too strong, but I like it. I like a title that creates tension, that holds a bar in the air that the story/poem has to clear. Maybe it connects to that idea of acknowledging the reader. I’m not really sure. I haven’t noticed this about my work before. Doing so allows a kind of lyric intensity, sometimes a desperation, which raises the stakes? That seems sort of pompous on rereading this answer. But I do have a fondness for the imperative. I’ve been writing these sermon poems in the last couple years that use the rhetoric (well, sort of) of sermons, and maybe this comes from the same place.

KR: Vacationland contains a fair number of self-portraits, such as “Self-Portrait w/ Backpack that is Filled with Onions and that May Be Emblematic of X.” In a way, a lot of the poems in the book could be read as self-portraits, so why label some of them self-portraits so explicitly?

AM: I don’t really like to think of any of them—even the so-called self-portraits—as self-portraits of the author. Or, well, no more than any piece of art is a self-portrait of the artist (which really they are, even when not obviously representational—the work is like a capture or distillation of a particular state of the artist’s mind). But I like the phrase self-portrait as… or …with…, as a way of being apparently simple, open, honest. The poem is apparently being up front, though usually that’s a slight misrepresentation. I’m not getting anywhere interesting answering this question, so I’ll give it up for now.

KR: You seem to love anaphora, as evidenced by, say, the “True Truths and Lies” section of your website (”Ander Monson is avaricious. Ander Monson is a seven-foot-tall French Canadian orphan. Ander Monson is in jail.”), and many of the chapters of your novel (”Dream Obits for Carrie H.” and so forth). Why?

AM: Why not? Doesn’t it start with sound? Repetition is everywhere in OE in particular, working at times like an incantation, maybe. Repeating the thing sometimes solidifies it, and sometimes it allows it to disintegrate, disappear through iteration. It’s wonderful to hold in the mouth, the eye, or the mind, and watch it flicker, dissolve.

KR: Is Other Electricities a novel like the author’s note on the back of Neck Deep says, or is it “a fiction collection” like the author’s note on the back of Vacationland says?

AM: What’s the difference?

KR: You write in lots of genres—did you always plan on that or did it just happen? Which is your favorite, if you have one, and why? Do you write in other genres? Screenplays? Plays?

AM: I wrote a terrible play called “Twenty-Five Arrows In Various Directions” in my first workshop in college (playwriting). I got a D. My play ruled, however. The first two pages are verbatim from Waiting for Godot. It was really funny…probably. I do not have ambitions to write anything else for the stage, having surely peaked at 20.

KR: If one were inclined, one could say that all three of your books—your novel, your poetry collection, and your book of essays—are all sort of “about” the same thing (northern Michigan, coming-of-age, Liz, loss, teeth, etc.). You say of your poetry collection, Vacationland, for example, that it acts as a “kind of companion volume to OE, an appendix of sorts featuring the same cast of characters.” Do you ever worry your readers might get tired of this repetition? Do you worry about being a self-plagiarist? How does one know where “concerns” or even “obsessions” tip over into broken-record territory?

AM: I guess I don’t really care. Well, I think of the books as being very different from each other, though they tap into the same constellation of stuff, that matrix that is the mind, or a massive juggernaut of an cosmic essay or something. They access the same data in parts. There’s not much overlap for me with Neck Deep (with the exception of the “Index for X…” essay which was originally the index for OE) to OE or Vacationland, though I’m sure there are strands that move through all of them. For me the only thing that’s important is if the piece I’m working on molts and gets somewhere that’s interesting to me.

KR: Staying with the subject of form, you like form a lot, but you also like to do a lot of the same forms—outlines and indexes, for example—in all of your books. Why? What new forms will you explore next or will you keep investigating these?

AM: The index is recurring: the A one in Vacationland and then the longer one in OE and the longest one in ND. I’ve only done two outlines though: the little sonnets in Vacationland and the outline essay in ND. The first iteration of each of these forms acts as an exploratory thing for me, and if I feel like I’ve exhausted what I can do with the form, I’ll leave it. But with both the first crack didn’t do it. I mean, they were good, but the form felt—to go to the metaphor of the mine that the outline essay thinks about—still rich. There’s lots left in both of those lodes.

I don’t feel obligated to explore new forms, I don’t think, though it does give me a lot of pleasure to do so. It’s the hacker in me, I think, who wants to explore the limits of systems. I’m working on an essay about this idea, actually.

KR: Similarly, in the little interview that always comes with Sarabande books (which I like), you say that “more writers should keep in mind the possibilities that the book as a form (and not just as a container for the text) has to offer,” which is a good point. I think it’s interesting, though, that you keep using the same content over and over in all three of your books, and even use the same forms in all three of them, even though the genres—poetry, fiction, essay—change. Does the fact that you treat the same content so frequently mean that matching form and content for you is not a big concern? That it’s mostly the content that matters and needs to be expressed?

AM: I don’t think form can be matched to content like the two things are separate, independent, as if they can both be just mixed and matched until poof, we get the right catalyst for the reaction that excites us. But I am interested in form as a container and a subject. I’ve usually liked containers more than what is contained in them, the way that their shapes can constrain (and create).

And I don’t think that the forms are used in the same way in each book. Take the index, for instance: only in OE is there an actual, functional index. The other two iterations are nonfunctional in terms of the technology of the book; they are there partly to give the individual piece shape. All books should have indexes, ideally. It is at the least a very useful exercise to index one’s books. It tells you something about your own mind.

Finally there’s just the mind, isn’t there? We have world, but we only see what the mind apprehends and draws from or draws into us. And we have word, but that is too a product of the mind, connected to who knows what finally within us? And if the mind has its own limitations, its own matrix of obsession, compulsion, and emotion, well, there’s nothing else to do but go there. It is limitless, or seemingly so.

KR: I like how this re-treatment of the same material over and over sort of imitates the repetition-compulsion of loss and grief. Do you think you will keep re-using the material for your next books, or will you get some new content? Where will you get it? What will it be?

AM: I doubt it. The new projects I’m working on are pretty different, at least stylistically. There’s a new fiction project, Deciduousness, that’s pretty varied. A new poetry collection, The Available World, is done. And a subset of that is being published by New Michigan Press this month in chapbook form: Our Aperture. Some new essays—primarily thinking about technology in one way or another—are coming together into a book I hope in the next whatever. But at the same time I am drawn to this world, the world that OE and V and ND all show traces of. The first third of OE got excised in the editing process and I’m thinking of doing something with it—it’s more armless brotherness than OE gets really to talk about mostly. And the new poems include some armless brotherness too. So obviously even as I move forward the brain is still operating underneath my consciousness, returning to the same places. But each time we remember something, the memory changes: the brain is physically altered, so remembering, returning, isn’t a capitulation. It’s an invention.

KR: In OE, you have many characters who have suffered from, as well as many mentions of, dismemberment and amputation—Jesse, for instance, who “lost his index finger and thumb in a bomb-making accident due to accumulated static” and the nameless, armless brother. Where does this obsession originate and what does it mean?

AM: Who knows what any obsession means? Or even where it originates? I could tell you what I think I know, but I don’t really believe it. It would be shaped somehow by what I would want it to mean. Instead, maybe, this: I discovered the armless brother character in a workshop I took in college. I wrote a poem called “I am digging up treasure for my armless brother” (this action takes place in OE), and felt something there. Like when you are digging up something and you strike a metal box and all of a sudden you make contact with another world. This sounds kind of lame. And the poem wasn’t successful, but it was a character I wanted to follow, even though he doesn’t get that much screen time in OE. He might in another project.

KR: Postcards get many loving mentions throughout your work—what is the appeal of the postcard? What are its formal possibilities and limitations?

AM: Postcards are interesting forms of asynchronous communication. Seemingly they presuppose a Vacationer and A Correspondent who receives word of how interesting location X is and how much fun Vacationer is having. Which is just a weird rhetorical situation. It’s easily romanticizeable, and lends itself fairly easily to myth, as each card constructs a new element/episode of the myth. Plus it’s a formal constraint (ask Michael Martone about this—he loves them): the size is the size and the space is the space. Plus now all this is overlaid with the new use of them for PostSecret, so they’ve been sexed up again, and they resonate.

KR: Your Slow Dancing Through the Ether: a Fine Binding Project, a collaboration with book artist Kris Ingmundson, represents, among other things, what you call “a central thematic element of the written word reflected in the vessel that carries it” Why do some people seem so devoted to books-as-beautiful-objects whereas others give less-than-a-crap? Also, the Amazon Kindle hand-held electronic reading device—do you think that this means the Book is Dead as so many periodicals and journalists have been quick to announce? Why or why not?

AM: I don’t know anyone (and I know a lot of readers) who has a Kindle. This is a tired debate. The book is a surprisingly enduring technology and has plenty of life in it. Provided, perhaps, that writers/designers/publishers recognize that the book is a technology, an artificial space with certain constraints, and take advantage of what it can do that e-books or whatever cannot. (And long live the e-book too, though I hope we can discard that term. Maybe it’s just something else. Not a book delivered electronically (after all, if text is just content, if it can just be shuttled from form to form, slapped in a new design and sold, well maybe it shouldn’t be a book in the first place, since it’s not really using its bookness in the first place).) One hopes that this will drive the content creators to think about why they want to publish books as opposed to electronic texts. And maybe electronic texts can move forward too without having to feel like they just have to be static whatever. I’m more interested in the novels that are being written to be read on cell phones: now these are writers working within constraint. As are writers who write for the page. But we need to think about this stuff when writing.

KR: Writing, to many, is seen as a quintessentially solitary pursuit—the lone scribbler in the garret and whatnot—but you are dedicated to collaboration, sometimes with just one other person and sometimes, as with “Index for X” on your site, with others on a massive scale. How, specifically, does collaboration differ from solo writing? What are the advantages? The challenges? The rewards? The drawbacks?

AM: Collaboration can be a lot more fun. I give up certain elements of control (which I find it hard to do—but forcing myself to collaborate helps me get over this) and get back an interaction, something new, surprising. Even, for instance, the experience of working with a book designer/typesetter on my books is useful. I haven’t designed any of my published full-length books, though I probably could have if I pushed for it. Maybe collaboration gets you some of the electricity that you see in good bands where the greatness emerges from something between two (or four, or seventeen) people. It makes you think about audience and readership. It really opens things up. Of course it can fail spectacularly too, but there’s that thing again about failure: failing isn’t a bad thing for an artist. Some of the collaborations have definitely been more successful than others (I really like that Index for X piece on Born, and I hope to do more of them.

It’s especially useful for writers because almost always we lack the technical chops to do a lot of the interesting technological (or musical) or crafty chops to do anything interesting with it. And learning the software is a pile of work, and by the time you learn it there’s something newer and more transparent. Which is all good, but sometimes it’s more exciting to just partner up with one (or more) people, to connect—mouth on mouth or word on word or whatever. Share the electricity. There’s this thing that kids in my high school used to do. We’d go into one of the bathrooms (men’s as I remember) and hold hands or whatever, and then turn on the the hand dryer and touch it. I don’t remember what the other end of the chain touched: maybe another dryer, or maybe something else metal and grounded. And electricity would move through you. And then when you let go you’d get shocked. But it was a communal thing. Shared. Bigger.

KR: To return, briefly, to the question of truth in literature versus truth in real life, how much of OE is based, as they say, on a true story? Were kids really constantly dropping through the ice on snowmobiles every time you turned around? And did anyone from Houghton read your book when it came out and get pissed at you for the way you’d represented the people and the place?

AM: Well, one of the Amazon book reviews of OE is pretty pissed about how I’ve represented the place (never mind that for me, the place in the book isn’t the place—it’s the mythologization of the place written from six states away). So clearly some readers expect more verisimilitude, or want the book to be more of a tourist attraction, or to justify or represent their lives up there somehow. I have heard a lot more from non-UP readers than I have from UP readers, which isn’t surprising given the relative numbers, but which always seemed odd to me. Maybe it’s not a book you pass around to members of your family from the place and say You’ve Gotta Read This.

On the subject of autobiography, though, the place names are pretty much all real (Misery Bay, for instance, is not made up, though it sounds like it is). Suffice to say that people who knew me in high school probably recognize a lot of it, albeit shifted and transformed. But there’s definitely a phenomenon of kids (and adults) going through the ice on snowmobiles (or in other ways). It happens all the time. It’s maybe the most dramatic of the recurring images. Maybe it’s the one image that stays with me.

KR: You use the same names for your main characters—Jess and Liz and all the rest—across all three of your books. Are these their real names, or did you change them? How did changing them, if you did, change your writing process? Or if you did not change them, how did you decide not to disguise anyone’s identity? Or did you disguise them in other ways?

AM: These aren’t real names. Nor are these characters based all that closely on real people. Though they do connect the published books, I admit. Like the setting of OE, they are misremembered, transformed—transubstantiated, really—mythologized, and partly or primarily fabricated. I would feel in no way comfortable writing real people in as fictional characters. But you can see obvious correspondences in the fictional Jesse character and two or three (minimum) of my high school friends. It’s all recombination: I feel like I needed to get distance and space on some of the action of the book (and the place) in order to write about it, and changing names, creating characters, shifting action and arc around helps to push that far enough away so I can feel like I can shape it. Otherwise I’d have to treat it as nonfiction, which is more limiting in lots of ways (though it also gives you other superpowers).

KR: You write a great deal in the second-person, either directly to a “you” sort of apostrophically, or with the you-as-I mode, where the you subs in for a first-person point of view—why do you do this? What are the benefits of this approach?

AM: Space, angle of incidence and angle of reflection: what you want (or what I want, if you prefer) is to find ways to move around characters, especially characters who have strong enough resemblances to fragments from my real life—at least in my mind they do which makes it tough to write around them. And it allows a sort of community, commonality. And it allows me to put the reader into play a little bit, too.

KR: In OE you write, “It’s the white desire—the thing that makes the Finns run from the saunas and jump into the snowbank. It’s the need for something different—speed, the lack of seatbelts, the alcoholic killing of the liver, the killing of the lakes with cancer runoff from the processed ore, the impossibility and invincibility of the body held up against the rushing of air. It’s the jumping from cliffs surrounding the waterfall into the pool below…” This strikes me as one of the best descriptions of thanatos I’ve seen in a while. Why do people have this weird death-urge? Does everyone? Do you?

AM: Oh absolutely I do. I guess maybe not everyone does—I can’t pretend to know—but the urge for self-destruction manifests itself everywhere in my life, though probably less so in recent years. Still you see it in me botching an interview by saying something ridiculous or showing up significantly underprepared, to my penchant for overwork and exhaustion, my interest in alcoholic obliteration. Or you could look at my history of blowing things up, almost getting blown up, crashing cars, not to mention my criminal history and general delinquency. I’m sure there’s a pretty easy psychoanalysis you could apply to all of this, but I’m more interested in letting it manifest itself—at least in its inclination to run as close to the edge as possible—in my writing and imagined lives.

KR: In all three of your books, the idea of decay and destruction, wrecks and ruins—sunken ferries and demolished high schools, the entire city of Detroit and the list goes on—show up again and again. What is it about ruins that is so fascinating? Why do we get out of contemplating them?

AM: See also Dame Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins for an interesting and thorough thinking-through of this idea. It connects us to death and deaths, and the remainders/reminders of previous lives all reduced to nothing—or a shell, a zero, the representation of nothing more than nothing itself—being a ruin, now.

KR: You have some very nice blurbs (like from Michael Martone who I interviewed most recently before you). How did you get them? What are the qualities of a good blurb? Do you ever write them for other authors?

AM: I find it to be more than a little humiliating asking for blurbs, but it’s easier when you have forged some kind of personal connection to somebody more famous and interesting than you. Martone taught me at Alabama, so that’s a no-brainer. Robert Olen Butler offered when I met him in Florida, which was very generous (and this is the ideal way to get blurbs, I think, to have authors run across your work and just like it and offer). I try to offer to people I know whose work I run across and admire, though I’m not really enough of a big shot to get asked very often to write them. If you’re lucky, your agent or publisher can help do some of this panhandling for you so you don’t have to feel quite as sullied as you end up feeling. Probably it’s easier if you live in NYC or run in haute-culture circles? If one is connected. But some people I know just ask almost at random people whose work they admire to blurb them and transcend the Midwestern sense of shame I feel going around, hat or book in hand. Ideally it wouldn’t be part of the process. But it is. I’ve bought books because of blurbs before. It’s like spam. If it stopped working—if we stopped buying the stuff—the problem would solve itself.

KR: All three of your books seem meticulous in their attribution of inspiration and influences—you give credit to everyone from Martin Amis to the McDonald’s McDLT. How important is it to so openly acknowledge ones literary lineages and borrowings?

AM: For me it’s a no-brainer, as long as I can do it enjoyably, as long as it does not bog down the work in question. I think readers—and I include myself—want to believe the magic act of writing, that a book or poem or story is the product of one genius mind working alone. But the act of writing is constantly one of cross-pollination and remembering and reworking and borrowing. Even if we’re not aware of it, it’s happening. It must be. This stuff comes from somewhere. So why not acknowledge it when I see where it comes from? I’m always interested in reading this kind of analysis from other writers though I guess most don’t do it. I love the notes at the back of some poetry collections where lines or ideas from other writers get cited. I mean, that’s why I read, partly, to be blown away, and to be moved to work up something of my own. So acknowledging that debt is the least I can do. But you have to stop somewhere too when the debt is more abstract, because too much of this—thousands and thousands of footnotes hovering underneath the page like a cloud—takes away from the reader’s experience and becomes self-indulgent.

KR: In OE, you make a direct acknowledgement of the obvious cliché of the mutilated shop teacher (”lost digits, etc.”) as part of your (successful) effort to rise above said cliché. How do you decide when to use a cliché or not? And how do you use it effectively?

AM: eh…I don’t have much of an answer for this one.

KR: What makes high school—as a place, as a feeling, as a period of time, as a cast of characters, and as a series of trials/tests to be gotten through—so compelling?

AM: It’s formative, right? And it’s universal, or nearly so, and we’re all mid-development when we’re in it. And it produces such a feeling of alienation and outsiderness that it retains power even a dozen years or more away from it. Plus it is so susceptible to myth: it’s rich soil.

KR: For a novel, OE is fractured—it is full of flashbacks and forwards and contains very few moments in the present, or even what could traditionally be called scenes. Why did you choose to write it this way? And how did you do it, as in did you have any difficulty outlining it (if you did) or keeping it straight as you created it?

AM: The generative process was one of abundance and explosion, without a lot of thought given to order. The mess predominated. A lot of time was spent in revision trying to fit structures onto the mess (or vice versa), or trying to press on the sprawl to generate its own structure. Some of the organizational material was retained for the reader, there, too (the character map, the guide to symbols, etc.) since it felt useful and energetic.

KR: I think you like the TV show Twin Peaks—what do you like about it and what other shows do you like?

AM: I am always vaguely embarrassed of my interest in television: it feels like I should spend as much time with books. And sometimes I do, but I do enjoy lots of good things on television (probably mostly the new Battlestar Galactica which is frequently stellar, though it’s probably good that it’s ending this year). It occurred to me—and maybe this is one of those acknowledgments of influence or sourcing you mentioned earlier—that the show had certain similarities with OE (the murdered girl, for instance, the mythologization of a place, the stylized/dreamlike quality of some of the action). So I thought I’d cite it, bring it into the texture of the fiction. Maybe that’s why some readers have identified the book as being somehow hyper, like hyperlinks, hypertext, elements of the web. It does feel to me more networked, rhizomal, than a lot of books I’ve read.

KR: Music shows up often in all three of your books, everything from Warrant to Lou Reed to Top 40 radio. What do these musical references add to your work, do you think? Do you think they add anything for people who do not know the songs or artists? If so, what?

AM: Since much of my work is meant for the voice (not the eye), the auditory qualities of what’s going on seem like they should be part of the discussion, and so the music gets cited too. Maybe it suggests a soundtrack for the work to anyone who knows the songs. For me it adds texture, atmosphere. If it was electronic text, you could click on Warrant to get to a sample of their songs, or their lyrics or something. Which would add…very little? Of course you can do that anyhow if you’re of the mind. Possibly these references date the book, or situate the work in a particular time and place.

KR: You mention James Ellroy twice in OE, once in the list of characters and once in the index, and yet he is not, strictly speaking, in your novel. What is your favorite book by him, and what exactly about “his ruthlessness is to be admired”?

AM: My Dark Places is a phenomenal memoir. Maybe the best one I’ve read by far. Maybe you can add Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home to that, making it a tier of two. Ellroy’s book is brilliant because it is (or appears, anyhow) completely unsparing, totally honest (which is a great magic trick to pull off). He uses the tools of his trade: as crime writer, he investigates his life as a crime—and it is a crime; his mother murdered when he was young. And he traces it, and tries to solve this unsolved murder in the present, which is a pretty badass idea.

KR: Are there any underappreciated writers—young or old, living or dead—whom you would especially recommend? Who are your most significant influences?

AM: I never know what to answer to this. I don’t think of myself as having particular influences (well, that aren’t cited in the book anyhow, though I don’t think of many of these people as influences, exactly, which would seem to assign them a special bonus sort of importance). I don’t think of myself in terms of any particular career arc, or in terms of another writer’s genius. That seems self-important to the extreme. There are, of course, a lot of writers I like, both well-known and not. Some people are good at this litany, but it’s not one of the things I’m all that interested in. I should probably develop something really obscure or totally fabricated to talk about at times like this. That would at least be entertaining. Note to self for next time.

KR: Do you have any advice for aspiring first-bookers?

AM: Hm. I guess it’s good to believe in the force of your own genius, especially if you are a genius. Or even if you are not; you never know until later. But also that having an editor can be very very very useful if s/he is a good one.

KR: It’s kind of become an interview habit of mine to ask my interviewees about cooking. So: do you cook? Could you share a favorite recipe—maybe for a favorite Michigan potluck hot dish—with the readers of Redivider

?

AM: Here’s a recipe I like for pasties (more or less the official food of the Upper Peninsula; they were brought in by Cornish miners for the mines there; typically they’d be made with huge crusts so that miners could eat without getting their soiled hands on the delicious interior.

3 c. flour, 1 1/2 sticks butter (cold and cut into bits—butter is preferable to lard in my opinion), 1 1/2 tsp. salt (I usually omit), 6 tbsp. water. In a large bowl, combine flour, butter and salt. Blend ingredients until well combined and add water, one tablespoon at a time to form a dough. Toss mixture until it forms a ball. Kneed dough lightly against a smooth surface with heel of the hand to distribute fat evenly. Form into a ball, dust with flour, wrap in wax paper and chill for 30 minutes.

Filling:

• 1 lb. coarsely ground round/ground chuck
• 1 lb. coarsely ground pork
• 5 carrots, chopped
• 2 lg. onions, chopped
• 2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 c. rutabaga, chopped (rutabaga is key)
• 1/2 tsp. pepper

Combine all ingredients in large bowl. Divide the dough into 6 pieces, and roll one of the pieces into a 10-inch round on a lightly floured surface. Put 1 1/2 cups of filling on half of the round. Moisten the edges and fold the unfilled half over the filling to enclose it. Pinch the edges together to seal them and crimp them decoratively with a fork if you are hardcore. Transfer pasty to lightly buttered baking sheet and cut several slits in the top. Roll out and fill the remaining dough in the same manner. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Put 1 tsp. butter through a slit in each pasty and continue baking for 30 minutes more. Remove from oven, cover with a damp cloth, cool for 15 minutes. Eat hot with ketchup (or with whatever suits you).

KR: Is there anything about which I haven’t asked you that you that you’d like to add?

AM: No—though surely I’ll think of something entertaining later. Thanks for your close reading and attention to my work, Kathleen.