Rhea Ramakrishnan with Tess Fahlgren, B. Tyler Lee, and Ari Laurel

On Form: A Roundtable Discussion

Featuring Tess Fahlgren, Ari Laurel, and B. Tyler Lee

In this interview, writers Tess Fahlgren, Ari Laurel, and B. Tyler Lee discuss their writing process, their audience, borrowed forms, and the boundaries between genres.

Read Ari Laurel’s story “Farewell to the Last Mango in the Pacific Northwest” in Issue 44

Read B. Tyler Lee’s poems “Recipe: Rhubarb, Chili, & Ginger Jam” and “Recipe: Snowplow” in Issue 43

Read Tess Fahlgren’s essay “feast day: a lyric” in Issue 42

Rhea Ramakrishnan: I often think about how writing gives form to thoughts and ideas. And I think sometimes it can go the other way too, where writing isn’t fully equipped to represent our thoughts. But then I love when writers play with form because it allows us to make new associations. Sometimes it even commands us to make new associations and to bring things together that we normally wouldn’t put together. So going into this discussion, I just want to be thinking about how form is working in the things that we write and how that informs our genre and the way that we are presenting certain ideas. How would you describe your writing? Does it typically fall into a specific genre? And if so, how do you approach the traditional conventions of that genre?

Tess Fahlgren: When it comes down to the basics, I only ever write nonfiction, really. But then when I think about the particular piece that brought me into this conversation, it is extremely lyric. It’s like a hermit crab essay in four different ways. It’s completely experimental. And it’s not really the way that I write that often, but I do think that some things just kind of demand new forms and new ways of thinking. And I like to be open to those moments, you know? But I think, generally speaking, I’m more often going to have full sentences and big paragraphs. A twelve page essay is more likely to come out of me. But whenever I can find that reason to do something experimental, it’s always a lot of fun.

Ari Laurel: I was going to say something similar. I don’t actually think of my writing as that experimental with form. Actually, I’ve written a lot of conventional stories. I think the one thing that might make my writing a little unconventional with form or that might guide form a little bit is that in a lot of traditional craft environments, it’s often seen as a no-no if you have a story that’s really politically motivated or the politics are really the motivation of the story. In a lot of craft environments, in my experience anyways, they want to really remove the politics from the craft and just talk about the quality of the writing. But for me, it’s a really huge motivation for a lot of what I write, and I want, just as with craft, to make sure that the politics are doing what they’re trying to do, that they’re not too alienating, that they’re asking the right questions, but they’re still inviting though they might push things a little bit. And I think that’s really hard to find in a traditional workshop. I guess in some ways, because of the political motivation, I

intentionally think of my work sometimes as propaganda, and I think that that can be frowned upon in certain environments.

B. Tyler Lee: I totally see what you’re what you’re saying. I mean, I’ve witnessed that happen frequently. And I think it’s interesting because I do have a lot of poetry that I will, depending on the day or the time, send out as nonfiction because it is drawn from real life. [A lot of my writing] takes on hybrid forms, so it depends on what the requirements of the publication are. Sometimes I’ll have five different pieces that could be poems or they could be nonfiction, but usually [a publication will] only take one nonfiction piece, so I’m going to send them out as poems and then see what happens. Sometimes things get taken and put in a hybrid section or put someplace else and that actually brings me great joy. I like the idea that the piece doesn’t necessarily have to be confined by genres because I think the genre classifications get in the way of what we want to do.

Ari Laurel: And I think also, you know, lots of writers have a political point of view, right? And just because I want to introduce mine and that’s like a forefront of whatever it is that I’m writing, it doesn’t mean that I want my stories to lack pathos and complexity and want to paper over things.

B. Tyler Lee: I see this actually happening in the way that you use form in your piece, Tess, too. So, for me, sometimes I’m trying to get at these really difficult things that I don’t necessarily want to go into the depth of, especially in terms of personal trauma or something like that. Like, I don’t want it to be this meditation on this bad thing that happened or whatever, but it informs the piece in some way. And so if you use the form to maybe jump around from idea to idea or you put it in a footnote or you do something else with it, then that keeps it from dwelling in that place that’s just a surface level addressing of the issue. And you’re able to juxtapose that, I think, with the form too.

Rhea Ramakrishnan: Now when you say this, I am thinking about form as a way to approach something that is not as simple to approach head on, whether it’s we don’t fully understand it or it’s related to grief or trauma. That’s really interesting because I think that our brains don’t really process grief and trauma the ways that society or cultural or social norms would expect us to process those things, and I feel like that can be a really interesting—and political in some ways too—approach to writing and form in our writing.

Ari Laurel: But I did actually have a question for Bethany—you were saying that you submit poetry as nonfiction sometimes. Does that bother you at all that that it might color how other people read your work? To approach it in a different way that you intended? Or is it pretty easy to let that go?

B. Tyler Lee: When I was younger, I really wanted people to read stuff in a certain way. [But] there’s no way to ensure that people see things or do things in the way that you want them to, whether that’s in parenting or writing or teaching or, you know, anything. And so I think that embracing that has made it easier. But I also have poems that are, for me, very clearly poems. There is no option for them to be

something else. And one of the things that I’ve always appreciated about poetry is that it can be fictional or it can be nonfiction, right? But I write a lot of these recipe poems, and I also have some others that are done as lab reports or where the poem is almost entirely in footnotes. Sometimes a container will shape something in such a way that it no longer is nonfiction. And that’s fine. So I won’t submit any of those as nonfiction. I know there are a lot of recipe form haters out there, but for me, the recipe form is very interesting because recipes inherently have this kind of commentary on domesticity on the body and embodiments, right? They have these very clear physical connections. They are directive, right? So there’s always an implied you on the other end of a recipe. There’s a clear implied audience who has these physical items in front of them and that creates a different relationship to a recipe to me. We can call them hermit crab nonfiction or we can call them poems or whatever we want them to be. The recipe itself is so embodied that I think that allowing the genre to form around that is this strange queering of the form. I approach a lot of the food stuff and the domesticity stuff through the lens of queerness.

Rhea Ramakrishnan: So I’m interested in which comes first, the structure or the content. Bethany, it almost seems to me like you’re saying you have a content or some sort of subject material that you want to address. And then you create a structure around it. I’m wondering if, Ari or Tess, you have a different way of approaching that or if you just write and then the structure comes later. What is your process?

Tess Fahlgren: I definitely just write and the structure comes later. The “feast day” essay—the way that that even came about was born kind of out of frustration. It was my first semester with the MFA and I was like what is life, how do I do anything? And I happened to just go to the website of the church where I grew up and I was just looking at the website and it happened to be the feast day of my patron saint. And so I thought, oh, well, that’s kind of interesting. And then, again, out of frustration, I thought, what if I just copy and paste this and said what I really think in footnotes? I ended up really liking it and then wanting to go forward with that. I ended up doing a bunch of research and then I started writing cow essays and I was like, what if they’re together? And so that, I think, is kind of a unique way to have gotten to a form. I’m also a visual artist so I work very intuitively and try not to overthink form very much. I think that I’ve gotten in trouble when I’ve tried to force it. When I tell myself I’m going to write a thing that’s going to look a certain way, I end up writing myself into a corner and feeling like I’m not using my own voice. So whether that means form comes first or content—I feel like they’re kind of coming out together and the way that the content shows up is telling me how it wants to exist on the page.

Ari Laurel: I’m so glad you described how you your process for that piece. I think it made sense and I think it also speaks a lot to how I do stuff as well. I think I really try to do what I can to get into any sort of flow, whether it is a rant or something like that, just pretty much anything that gets the words out first. And then I always figure that if it’s no good then I can do something with it later or not do anything with it. Usually the content does come first for me. So I’ll say, I want to write about blank. Blank is so interesting and there’s so many things to say about it. And so when I’m in that mode of excitement, I don’t try to set myself up for any sort of particular form or framework. I just go in and I write what’s so great about this thing or everything I know about this thing. And it encourages me to just think deeply on

the topic and what I like so much about it and kind of preserves the excitement that I have for it. And then I think, like you said, the form comes later when I see patterns and when I see a particular voice that is coming through.

Rhea Ramakrishnan: That’s very interesting. Something in both of your pieces that I’ve noticed is the footnotes. And Bethany, you were also talking about using footnotes in some of your work. I just wanted to tell you that while reading the pieces, those footnotes really do work to ground me in the piece. I’m a reader who gets lost in other thoughts as I read, and I’ll often find myself having to backtrack. But having to keep up with footnotes does keep me really present. I think it expects a lot from the reader, but I think that readers don’t really want to be spoon-fed either. So I find those pieces really interesting. Bethany, I’m interested in your thoughts on content and structure, too.

B. Tyler Lee: Sometimes I do content first and I think about, yeah, I want to write about this thing, so how am I going to get at it? And sometimes I write blocks of text and then I edit it and move it around and keep moving it until it seems to cohere. But then other times, the form really does [come first]. The first of the recipe poems that I wrote in the particular way that I’m doing them now was because I had been writing this manuscript for a couple of years that had a lot of food related work and I found this recipe for something called an “Obituary Cocktail.” And I was like, that’s a great name. But it also worked because my partner was in the process of grieving the loss of her father and I had been trying to write something about that that didn’t hit it head on. And so the name “Obituary Cocktail” had everything that I needed in there. I was able to use the idea of absinthe. I mean, it’s a really heavily alcoholic cocktail, right? So you drink a couple and I’m assuming that you’re under the table, right? And so I was thinking about that as a metaphor for loss. That sparked these ideas for me about how to approach things that I wasn’t necessarily planning to write about right then. Sometimes I start with something and then I want to find the container for it. And then sometimes the container shows up and I’m like, oh, I’ve got content to stuff in here. I’m curious, Ari, because you said that you generally start with the content - what was the content that you were starting with for “The Last Mango”?

Ari Laurel: Actually, it was the mango. I was thinking about the conventional Asian-American migration story. I complain a lot with other Asian-American writer friends about these tropes. Sometimes it feels like I’m still reading things from like 2010, and I’m like, when are we going to get over these mangoes, man? And I love mangoes. But I was also thinking about, for my dream future, would I give up this thing that I love so much—which is a mango—and I was like, well, certainly. And so then I thought, what would that look like to give up this thing that’s really sensual, that’s been so celebrated in a lot of people’s writing, that carries a lot of metaphorical weight about migration and people’s homeland or ancestral land. And I wrote, I guess, sort of an obituary for that. But yeah, I appreciate what you were saying—a recipe poem adds this extra sensory layer. Like not only as a metaphor, but you start to be able to taste and smell things. And so it was sort of surprising when you referenced that there are people out there who really don’t like recipe poems. I think that’s really wild. That’s something that I learned today.

B. Tyler Lee: I think it’s the same people who viscerally hate any hermit crab. They want it to [just] be writing and they don’t want it to reference this other thing. I found that most people who hate recipe pieces hate most borrowed forms. But it’s very appealing to me. My partner’s field of study was food writing, but I also I dealt with food instability at certain points and had an eating disorder when I was younger. So I think that a lot of those things have really made my relationship to [food] very visceral. I was curious about the mango, though I obviously don’t have that heritage connection, but I had put a mango in a poem intentionally that takes place in winter time to indicate some of the things that I get at in that piece, which is the availability of this thing that’s out of season, out of place, out of time. I’m very interested in the way that we encounter food.

Rhea Ramakrishnan: I’d love to hear more about all of your preoccupations or what sort of themes and motifs you find continue to show up in your work. I’ve heard a little bit about them so far. I know the recipes and food is interesting to you, Bethany. And Ari, you’re interested in Asian-American issues and also the Pacific Northwest. You want to tell me more about what’s showing up in your writing?

Ari Laurel: I have a hard time thinking of [my answer to this question]. But I think a huge part of that is because, [since] taking a break from my writing, there’s been a political shift. And so it seems like a lot of the things that I’m working on now feel really different. When I was a young person, I used to read fan fiction, and even when I moved on from reading fan fiction, I really liked this idea of literature that was actually fan fiction. So like Paradise Lost is Bible fanfic and like Wide Sargasso Sea is Jane Eyre fanfic. I really like creating expanded universe stuff for people and putting in Easter eggs and creating new facets of that universe. And I think a lot of people enjoy that kind of stuff, too. But I think it was sort of a roundabout way for me to arrive at the thing I’m doing now, which is just thinking about history and thinking about the present and trying to work within this universe in a weird way. What would it mean to put in Easter eggs about our time now looking back from the future? So that kind of thing.

Rhea Ramakrishnan: I love that—an expanded definition of fan fiction. Would you say also that you’re interested in writing about climate? I kind of read Farewell to the Last Mango as climate fiction.

Ari Laurel: I think that this project, in particular, is a response to different sorts of nihilism that people experience, myself included. I see a lot of dystopia that becomes really popular. And I think dystopias are a lot of fun and they make you think. But I think they tend to make me a little bit cynical as well. There is a lot to be cynical about. I think that there is climate nihilism or economic nihilism and I think [my writing] is supposed to be a response to that because it’s really hard to build on. I think having kind of like a critical foundation is helpful for you to see through sort of a film of capitalism, we’ll say. But it’s hard to build on. So I’m trying to, I guess, find another thing to build upon, like writing about the natural strengths of the region of the Pacific Northwest and things that I know about the land and its history. Like the salmon runs here—they used to be so prolific. You couldn’t even see the water and like, you can’t imagine things being like that anymore. But maybe one day it could be like that again. There are a lot of groups and tribes that are working to make it that way again. I think that is a huge deal. So I’m trying to

write about the strength of the people who live here as well.

Tess Fahlgren: What you’re saying about the land is resonating with me a bit. I am extremely preoccupied by growing up where I grew up in the middle of nowhere and especially as someone who didn’t fit in at all. I’m kind of obsessed with it. And that obsession has been really frustrating for me because it’s like, why can’t you just move on? Why can’t you leave? Why are you so obsessed with this place that never loved you back? And the way that [rural America] behaves politically in our culture—it is rural America’s fault that we got Trump, so what do you do with that? Can you defend a place where a large amount of people will never feel welcome or safe? And where do I fall in that? Where do I go if I can’t love this place, but I don’t have anywhere else that I love either? So I have this huge struggle with where I grew up. But there’s all these things that I find really interesting about it. I think that the train is interesting. I think that the history of the train is fascinating because it’s the history of colonization and it’s the history of industrialization and immigration and all these things that are so fascinating. And it’s just a part of our life. Every single day it goes right through town and we don’t even hear it anymore. There’s all these different ways of looking at the train—like, can you tell that I’m writing about the train right now? So I find I find this place really, really interesting. When I was in grad school, I think I was trying to kind of fight that off a little bit. I was like, find something else to write about, no one really wants to read this. And I think that was getting me in trouble a little bit, just making it hard to write the whole time. My main preoccupation was about abuse. I was coming to terms with an abusive relationship that I was in when I was younger, here in this place. So that’s another thing that kind of brought me back. I wanted to look at it head on. I wanted to focus on it. I read In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and I was like, OK, we can do this, we’re allowed to write a book about this experience. Maybe you guys can think about this or have something to say about this, but is there some happy middle ground between a preoccupation and an obsession and a job where ‘it’s my duty to talk about this thing’ is maybe less productive than ‘I’m curious about this thing’? Because I ended up eventually giving up on that project. It felt like work and didn’t feel fun and I wasn’t enjoying myself. But I felt like it was important, like I should talk about this, but I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to. But what do you think? Is there a difference between a preoccupation and the various responsibilities that we have?

Ari Laurel: I think a preoccupation is kind of like, you’re going to do it even if you feel like you shouldn’t do it. What you were describing about the land really reminded me of James Joyce’s relationship with Ireland, where he had such a complicated relationship with Ireland and Dublin, and he would leave all the time and then write about it and come back and then leave again. But that’s all he ever wrote about. And so to me, that means something. And maybe it is more of a preoccupation than a duty.

B. Tyler Lee: I like what you said about curiosity and I think both Rhea and Ari have said something about the idea of not fully pinning down exactly what something is. And I think the problem that comes out of something being a job or something you’re writing out of duty is that it becomes like a term paper or it becomes something where the truth is the thing to get at. And there’s this inherent value in it being true, but then if the value is because it’s true then that’s all there is to it. That doesn’t take it outward.

Right?

Rhea Ramakrishnan: Yeah. And I’m also fascinated by this difference between like preoccupation and obligation. I do feel intimately aware of that feeling where it’s sometimes like I have to write about this certain thing because I need to represent it for the people who I’m representing. And it’s important for that reason, but I’m either not interested or I don’t feel like I am the person to do it. There are various different reasons why I don’t follow through with a project like that. But I am interested in what we feel like our obligations to our readers are. Do we think about our readers at all? Like, I hate thinking about the marketing my own writing, but especially editing a magazine I think about it more and more because I know how people are reading things when they’re published and I do want people to read it. I don’t want to be writing in a vacuum. So what are your thoughts on that?

Ari Laurel: My professional background is in marketing and communications and I’m pretty bad at it. I’m not sure I would hire me for that, but I think that feeling of like, oh gosh, I’m representing so many people—I think that I feel like I understand where that’s coming from. And I think for a really long time that really paralyzed a lot of what I was writing or it stopped me short from completing projects. And there is a really good author named, I think Matthew Salesses who called that “rep sweats.” If you have all this pressure of entire communities or imagined communities on you it makes it a lot harder to complete a project. And so when I think about what I owe to other people, I guess I’ve just kind of made peace with the fact that if people aren’t interested, then they aren’t. And so it’s made me kind of contend with like, well, why am I even writing? Like why do I keep writing, even though I submit to the same kind of intimate workshop of friends that I have been for the last five or six years? And it’s a lot of fun. I enjoy that community. I like making stuff. And if nobody wants to read it in the end, then I guess that’s OK. I feel like I’ve made peace with that. I think since getting in Blue Mesa, I felt like, oh gosh, other people are taking this a lot more seriously than me. So maybe I should start taking this more seriously. I think I sent you a URL to a writer website that I’m putting up soon. And it’s kind of like, well, I guess it’s time to do something like this, even if I don’t get any hits on it, you know what I mean? It’s kind of just responding to the outside, but not trying to be too carried away with it because I just try to remember that I write for myself or for my community, for the people that I like and enjoy, who I know enjoy reading it.

Tess Fahlgren: Yeah, that’s very important. And I think I feel like I’m finally landing there myself. I think that I got kind of wrapped up in an idea that was the whole reason I wanted to get into the MFA program when I was 27. When I was going through the application process the thing I told myself at the time was, OK, you want to be a writer, you’ve wanted to be a writer your whole life. You’re poor. You don’t have any time to write because you’re working all the time. So let’s see if we can do it, you know? And then it was like, once you graduate, you’ll have a publishable manuscript and you’ll be done. That was kind of what I told myself and that wasn’t the case at all. So as the MFA went on, I started thinking I was really just putting a lot of pressure on myself. Like [telling myself] if you’re going to do it, this is your chance. This is your chance to write a thing that people are going to want to read. They’re going to like it. And like I keep saying, it just didn’t work out. That project wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It changed

my whole perspective on writing, I think, because the major flaw in that project was that I was looking at it from that angle. Especially in the way that the world is right now, we need to be able to pay our bills. Life is hard and I find that I need to think about money, you know? I don’t want that to be a part of my writing process, but it is, unfortunately. But I think I’ve kind of moved past that a little bit. [I’ve had to tell myself], that’s not going to be your income, so you don’t have to think about the reader so much anymore. At the beginning of this conversation, I was thinking about what you, Bethany, were talking about with essays versus poems and when they’re seen differently from your reader, what does that mean? And a lot of times I have read something and had people come up to me afterward and congratulated me on my poem and I’m like, that was so not a poem. Like if you could look at it on a page, you’d know that was not a poem. And I’ve been introduced like, “This is my friend who’s a poet,” and it’s so funny. I do not write poetry, but I think that’s cool, actually, because, at a certain point, these genre specifics are conversations that writers have with each other. And I really, really believe in accessibility. Especially because the people I grew up with don’t know or care what the differences is between a poem and an essay—most of them, I don’t want to generalize—but they can still enjoy it and it doesn’t really matter to me what they call it. As long as somebody can pick it up in the magazine and read it and be touched by it, then that’s great, no matter what. So, I guess that comes back to audience as well.

B. Tyler Lee: I think a lot of times people, when they say it’s a poem or it sounds like a poem, they’re commenting on some kind of creativity of ideas or some kind of emotional response. They’re seeing images in there and so they have this idea that they know what a poem looks like when they encountered on the page. But then when they hear it out loud, for example, they’re like, I guess that’s what a poem sounds like, right?

Tess Fahlgren: It’s funny that after teaching nonfiction, my educator brain wants to be like, “No, it’s not a poem, it’s an essay! Isn’t that cool?” Because it is exciting when you think about all the different things that an essay can do and can look like and can feel like. It’s cool, but it doesn’t really matter if they walk away thinking it’s a poem or an essay at the end of the day.

Rhea Ramakrishnan: Sometimes when people say something is poem I wonder if maybe they’re also commenting on their inability to access it because people are provided with fewer tools to read poetry. That’s not really taught to most people. We were talking a little bit about accessibility, but how do we think about access in terms of who gets to see our writing and who we want it to be for and who writing more generally is for?

Tess Fahlgren: I used to write for the local paper and I just wrote a column that was kind of random. It was in my hometown local paper that often has such bogus political stuff in it that is just insane. And it was a really strange experience, but it was really, really fun because it was directly to my community and that felt really good. I feel so different from, for example, “feast day,” which I will never tell my mom about. And like, when I’m stressed out, I worry that she’s read it, you know? I’m curious, too, if you guys have, just a blanket idea of who all of your writing is for or if you also have like this way of

compartmentalizing your work?

Ari Laurel: I want my writing to be for everyone or for every kind of working person, I suppose. But I’m afraid that it’s not because of my own personal background, just kind of dealing with coming from a more academic background. I think that sometimes my writing leans into that cerebral space a little bit. I think that’s just something that I have to work through and just kind of see how I can make it more for everybody and less theoretical or less convoluted in some ways. And tell stories of everyday people or people that I know and encounter.

B. Tyler Lee: Writing is an interesting art form in that, unless you’re giving a reading, your reader is always accessing that piece asynchronously. So, you don’t really have any control over where it goes or who’s reading it or how they’re encountering any of that kind of stuff. And so, I find that if I get too hung up on the idea of an audience, getting too caught up in that idea, makes it so that I’m not going to produce anything because I’m trying too hard to meet some moving goalpost of expectation. I can’t remember who said it, but was a poet and I’ll probably remember it later, but he said, “I want to write for someone like me, but smarter.” I’ve always loved that idea of this imaginary reader being the person who has your interests and preoccupations and obsessions and whatever, but is also smart enough to figure out what you mean. I would love for someone to maybe understand what I wrote even better than I can. That for me brings me joy in terms of writing.

You can listen to the extended cut of this interview on the Blue Mesa Review Blog.