Mike Young, November 2011

Mike Young is the author of Look! Look! Feathers, a book of stories, and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, a book of poems selected by The Believer as one of the Top 20 Poetry Books of 2010. He co-edits NOÖ Journal, runs Magic Helicopter Press, and writes for HTMLGIANT. Find him online at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com.

Mike’s story, “Do You Know What a Shark Nose Is?”, will appear in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Redivider (9.1).

Redivider: I’ve wanted to ask you for a while why you wanted to start a press, if any of the reasons are sayable. Magic Helicopter seems to have its general course planned out loosely in advance while moment to moment it hones particular methods of promoting its writers. Improv publishing.

Mike Young: I wanted to start a press probably for the same reason I reacted to my favorite computer games as a kid by saying: cool, how do I make one? That itch-to-make plus the impulse to share, to say “hey, you gotta read this” to my friends. An invisible friendship model is how I think of writing/reading and definitely publishing. Our earliest projects were Mary Miller’s chapbook Less Shiny and Benjamin Buchholz’s chapbook Thirteen Stares, both of which I thought were doing startling things within their chosen forms, and both of which made me think of very specific potential readers. I think that deliberate audience imagining is what gives MHP any planned feel that might come across. When it comes to methods, there’s certainly a lot of improvisation (beer cozies, vampire teeth), but yeah: it’s all modeled on thinking “who are these authors, who are their readers,” and the answers are going to slide differently for everybody. I think maybe one big thing in “promotion” is striking a balance between recognizing that reading is an intensely private act and recognizing that people often have fun participating in the larger “conversation” a book invites—“conversation” being perhaps too fancy a word for things like people posting videos of themselves reading Drunk Sonnets while they’re drunk, but there you go. You have to hang out with someone in public before you invite them back to your house, or so it usually goes.

R: You’ve often emphasized friendship and sharing and community between writers and readers, and between both those and lit mags, presses. Is merging roles—writers are readers, and vice versa, who run their own journals and/or presses—helpful in relating to each other that way?

MY: I guess I just don’t know how not to be all those things at once. A writer, a reader, a sharer. It’s all in the living room, you know? I mean, the division of those roles opens up some gaping for me. I gape at a reader who doesn’t have any interest in writing, and I think that’s very beautiful, but the reason it’s so beautiful is because I don’t understand it all. Likewise, I don’t understand a writer who doesn’t want to be a sharer, whose entire goal is to acquire as many eyes as possible and store those eyes inside their drawer like laundry change. That’s something I gape at very scornfully, but again that’s because it’s such a head-scratcher for me. If I felt differently about roles, I would do differently, and I would have more free time, but I honestly can’t imagine what else I’d do with that time, so I do the way I do. Thank God I don’t want to have kids, right?

R: The epigraph to Look! Look! Feathers, a line by Frank Stanford (“No one knows how to love anybody’s trouble”), has an echo in Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You: “…stranger friend enemies / were ready to accept me as I was / a voice.” Feathers’ characters are mostly “stranger friend enemies” to each other, and that uncertainty allows for nearly any unexpected thing to bloom in or around them. Where do the words “trouble” and “voice” take you?

MY: Oh man, I like that “stranger friend enemies” thing. Existing inside of unnameable relationships with people is totally all over those stories; you’re right. For me, the Stanford epigraph harkens back to Levinas and Buber and the unknowable Other who must be acknowledged as unknowable and still loved, which is the stake at the bottom of everything, the stake and the space, the gap. Trouble might be another word for feelings, but voice isn’t another word for feelings, so there’s your trouble. A voice—the right voice—is hypnotic, exotic, this yawn that suggests one way into the word yawn—which is that whoever’s yawning must exist, yet still remains a little unbelievable in that other sense of yawn, the gap again. If I had kids I would definitely play football with them, but it would be hard to watch them learn to them turn their lights off by themselves.

R: In answer to a question about poet-novelists last month, Rebecca Wolff pointed out that “sharpened attention to language” has become a catch-all for desirable results when writers shift between “officially” writing poetry and prose. Writers are supposed to pay attention all the time to how they’re using language, no matter the form or genre. You’ve published books of your poetry and prose, and currently are at work on a novel, so I’m wondering whether any one form has changed another for you, and whether talking about categories in this way at all is a sort of conceptual game.

MY: Probably it’s a conceptual game, but on some level you need a little gamesmanship. I mean, games are imagination and vice versa, right? Like, okay, let’s pretend we’re both Spock, except you’ll be evil Spock with a goatee. Let’s pretend we’re writing something that’s called “a poem” and we’ll come up with some ways it needs to chase, just to keep things fun. Let’s pretend we’re not paralyzed by the roll call of all those absurd truths pertaining to death and such. Writing a novel is hard when you’re used to finishing things. But writing a novel is also fun when you give yourself permission to go a little more bat-shit. Batty like knock around, batty like follow by a sonar of impulse rather than a sight. Not necessarily to say sonar as in “sharpened attention” to sonic language, because I think I do that no matter what, but rather a more conceptual (game!) sonar of idea/narrative zigging and zagging.

R: The (sold out) Barrelhouse online poetry workshop you’re teaching has just started. You’ve taught both, however, in a physical classroom and via the Internet. What sort of differences have you noticed between the two? Are there major tradeoffs?

MY: People in an internet classroom are so different than themselves in a physical classroom. Shyness loses all of its predictability. That’s the big difference. Also the idea of time, the idea of leisurely composing your thoughts (one hopes) versus composing them on the fly, all that stuff. Probably just all the differences between physicality and byteacality that everybody else talks about. One thing that’s nice about teaching writing online is that it makes the whole thing a little more realistic endeavor: I mean, there you are, sitting where you sit when you write, not sitting inside your itchy performative “oh-yeah-I-have-this-sack-of-breath-to-navigate” thing. Sitting such where you’re not even paying attention to your own face and you don’t have to, which is pretty freeing. If I had kids I would send them to one side of the house, and I would hide somewhere on the other side, and a telephone would ring next to my kids, and they would pick it up, and it would be my voice whispering “Freedom” in a really creepy way.