Issue 7

Panhandler Poetry - Fiction - Nonfiction - Drama - Criticism - Interviews - Art

Panhandler poetry - fiction - nonfiction - drama - criticism - interviews - art

Issue Seven Clyde McDowell Art /1-11 Maile Chapman Interview /12-21 John Capouya and Suzanne Williamson Collaboration /22-45 Christy Gast Art /46-55 Tobias Wolff Interview /56-66 Jeremiah Barber Art /67-82 Emily Sandberg Fiction /83-86 Tammy Rae Carland Art /87-96 Skott Cowgill Art /97-112 Editor: Jonathan Fink Art Editor: Valerie George Managing Editors: Jason Schuck, Maria Steele www.panhandlermagazine.com Cover images by Richard Michael Haley Panhandler (ISSN 0738-8705) is published by the University of West Florida’s Department of English and World Languages.

C lyde M c D owell

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Bio Clyde McDowell is a Northeast Mississippian folk artist who works primarily in sculpture and mixed media. When it’s cold outside, he stays indoors and makes jewelry. His art – large and small, public and private – is made from vintage barn wood and a wide assortment of found objects such as animal bones, automobile parts, and broken bottles and dishes. McDowell likes to get people, young and old, thinking about art. To expose his community to the art world, he often donates his work to various local fundraisers. In February of 2012, his work will be shown in the “Folk Art and Friendly Folks” exhibit at the Union County Heritage Museum in New Albany, Mississippi.

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Bird Nest, 2012 Mixed Media

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Birds with Boobs, 2011 Mixed Media

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Double Crossed, 2009 Mixed Media

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Double Crossed (detail), 2009 Mixed Media

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Lady Petina, 2012 Mixed Media

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Punk’d Off, 2011 Mixed Media

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War Paint, 2011 Mixed Media

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Untitled, 2012 Mixed Media

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Untitled (detail), 2012 Mixed Media

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M aile C hapman

INTERVIEW

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Bio Maile Chapman is the author of the novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto (Graywolf Press, 2010; Jonathan Cape, UK, 2010). Her stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Finland including Public Space, Post Road, and The Mississippi Review, among others. From 2010-2011, she was a fellow at Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She currently teaches in the MFA program at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Match 8, 2012

Maria Steele: I’m curious how your experience writing short fiction helped your structuring of Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto.

I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly.

Maile Chapman: Actually, you did.

Jon and I were just talking about this in the car on the way over. He asked, “Is it SuVANto?” It’s SUvanto, which is what you said. The Finnish emphasis is on the first syllable, which is counterintuitive for us.

MS: Did it help you write and structure Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto or did you have to learn a completely different method with the novel? If so, please talk about that process.

MC: What ended up being the most helpful was Greek drama. I used a five-act structure that I borrowed from Greek drama.

MS: Yes, the play – and I’m not going to try to pronounce it.

MC: The Bacchai.

MS: The Bacchai. Thank you. Okay, that’s simple.

MC: I started this novel when I was just finishing my MFA. My thesis was a collection of short stories, and I sort of thought I was a short story writer, but I didn’t want to have that gap time after finishing graduate school and then struggling to find a new project to work on. I started writing the novel so that I

would have something to keep me busy for a good long time.

And now, when I look back on the short stories I was writing, they’re so boring. They don’t have any resolution. They don’t have any drama.

At first I had the same problem with the novel. It was just very quiet. And so the dramatic structure of The Bacchai helped me a lot because I could say, “Okay, something obviously has to happen here. And something has to happen here.” It reminded me that there had to be high points and low points to create some forward motion. And I also had to learn that all the things you exclude in a short story because they pull attention in different directions could actually be included in a novel because there’s so much more room for chaos.

kind of functional way that Finland and Sweden both do. I kept thinking about that hospital and those images, and finally I just said, “Okay, maybe I should try to go to that area.” And then I looked at Fulbright grants, and that was the grant that took me over there for a year. Not as many Americans were applying to go to Finland as to countries like France or Germany because of the language barrier. Because of that, I didn’t have to already speak Finnish in order to apply. So that was also a draw for me. It just all came together: the possibility of getting a Fulbright, and the chance to be near that particular hospital, which is called Paimio.

JS: Had you been to Finland prior to writing the novel? I was wondering if the novel came from previous experience, or if you had the idea for the novel and then went to Finland to do research?

MC: I think I had two chapters done and a pretty good idea of where it was going because of the structure of The Bacchae. I knew more or less what the end was going to be without knowing exactly what the end was going to be. I might have had three chapters kind of done when I went over there. I did a lot of the writing there.

MC: I hadn’t been. I hadn’t done a whole lot of international traveling at all. I selected topics I knew I wanted to write about, and one of them was Scandinavia. I also wanted to write a book I could apply for grants to go and work on overseas.

JS: Smart.

MC: So that was part of my strategy. And I had a book of architecture called Space, Time, and Architecture, based on a collection of lectures that somebody had given, and one of the little photos in it was a picture of a hospital in Finland, and that interested me because it was just such a cool building. For a while, I wasn’t sure. Should I go to Finland? Should I go to Sweden? I even thought about Norway, but Norway doesn’t really have the same architectural history in that - 14 -

JS: How much did you write prior to going over there?

JS: How long did you stay in Finland?

MC: I was in Finland for almost a year, but I ended up staying in Europe for five years.

MS: You mentioned that you went to Finland, and that you didn’t have to know the language, but there’s a lot of language in the novel particularly having to do with food, which I really like. I’m curious, did that happen organically – as you were learning the language and inevitably you would learn about food of course as it’s sort a basic thing wherever you go – or is that something that you knew and intentionally wanted to put in?

MC: That’s funny. Nobody’s ever mentioned that it’s all food words before. I had studied Swedish years earlier, and I ended up going to a bilingual area. The school that I asked to be affiliated with was a Swedishspeaking university—the only one in Finland, in the coastal area close to Sweden where both languages are actually used. I could kind of

of this is terrifying for me to read in some parts. But these diseases seem to contribute to the Gothic feeling of the novel and a sense of the uncanny. Please talk about these uncanny prognoses, as it were, of the women at Suvanto.

MC: I had a bunch of old nursing texts for research and I really liked

“There was something weirdly feminine in the way that some of those things, especially tumors, were compared to the size of a cherry, size of a lemon, size of a teacup, size of a thimble. ” get by on my Swedish in that area, but I also took Finnish classes. It was so difficult. It’s such a hard language. I didn’t do terribly well. I got far enough to get around and have rudimentary conversations, and the food stuff—restaurant Finnish, being able to order in a restaurant, that kind of thing—was what I was able to learn most quickly. And the colors and seasons and things like that. I kind of felt like,a little kid, when your vocabulary is small and you can only talk about things in a rudimentary way. Those daily routine things were what I was learning.

MS: And what Sunny was learning too, which really came out in the novel.

MC: Thank you. I borrowed from my experience of studying Finnish definitely to write those parts with Sunny.

MS: Also, the descriptions of the patients’ diseases are haunting: Julia’s STD, and Laimi’s bleeding, and how Pearl’s mysterious illness is sort of explained at the end. All

those. Medicine changes so fast that to look at what was once current practice felt very haunting. I’m thinking, “Okay, this represents the best that people could do for each other back then.” And we look now at what they were doing then and it’s terrifyingly old-fashioned. People are having mustard poultices put here and there. And many historical medical and nursing practices don’t seem right to us today because our feelings have changed so much about how to treat patients. So, sometimes our current perspective makes the good intentions of the past seem damaging. That seemed interestingly morally ambiguous, that somebody is really doing her best to help another person, but we feel uncomfortable because we know that better things are yet to come. This is probably how people will look back and think about harsh but important treatments like chemotherapy. And I noticed that a lot of the material in the nursing text books were compared to domestic objects. Tumors were often compared to fruit, but sometimes they were also compared to things like - 15 -

teacups and thimbles.

MS: Sizes?

MC: Yes, like, “a tumor the size of a teacup.” I thought, “Well, that’s weird,” because [the tea cup] is hollow, and it just didn’t seem like an intuitive thing to compare [the tumor] to at all.

MS: And it’s also large.

MC: Yeah, creepily large. There was something weirdly feminine in the way that some of those things, especially tumors, were compared to the size of a cherry, size of a lemon, size of a teacup, size of a thimble. There seemed to be something beautiful in that, and also terrifying and domestic, but uncanny because those are not things you want in your body. Those images kept sticking with me, and thread too—sewing kits and things like that, and the idea of how much of the work of nursing is similar to other female endeavors of the time or previously, even though nursing is such hard work, such physical work. It’s real labor. It takes so much attention, care, strength and knowledge, yet some of the things being used are still like thread and needles, and scissors, sheets, and towels—things so similar to domestic life.

MS: Wow. That’s very interesting.

MC: There’s a scene in the novel when somebody gets a ring off of a finger…

MS: She uses a string.

MC: She does. And I found that in a nursing textbook. Get two pieces of thread and tuck them under the ring on either side and then you just sort of use even pressure to pull it off. I recently had to re-plumb part of my bathroom. Shouldn’t have done it

myself, but I did. And I had to get a particular tool from the hardware store to remove a copper compression ring. This is totally an aside, but it just happened, so it’s fresh in my mind. The compression ring looked exactly like a wedding ring. It was basically a copper, shiny wedding ring inside this other thing, and I had to get the right tool so that I could remove it using the same principle as the thread. It was something that you need the right tool to do. It’s just interesting that the tool in the novel was a sewing kit.

MS: I thought it was interesting how it’s Julia’s rings that she’s pulling off. At the end, one of the things Sunny feels guilty about is that Julia couldn’t die with her rings on. This is also an aside, but it just cropped up in my mind and I really appreciated that because my mom is PTA at a nursing home, and so she talks a lot about the dignity of dying. So, that really struck a cord with me.

JS: Had you been a nurse before, or was that something else you researched for the novel?

MC: I researched it for the novel.

My aunt was an LPN—a Licensed Practical Nurse—at geriatric facilities for my whole childhood. So, for like forty years, she worked nursing homes. That’s where I went the day my little sister was born. I spent the day with Aunt Diane at the hospital.

So, the trappings of nursing were always around—her cap and white shoes and all those things before they had more modern uniforms.

When I first started writing the novel, I thought I wanted to write about medicine, and then I realized I really wanted to write about nursing.

Nursing is so much more believable somehow. It’s such hard work. It really drew me in. And nurses make such a difference. I had an experience many years ago where I had to spend a night in the hospital. The

nurse who was there during the day was so helpful, and the nurse who was there during the night was stretched way too thin because she had way too much to do. And it just made such a difference to me.

Those overnight hours were awful.

JS: Do you remember the first thing you wrote that was going to be part of this book and if it made it into the book?

MC: I first started writing the book as a collage of architectural texts, newspaper articles, diary entries, and things like that, and all of that fell away. The first image I had, and the first thing that I probably described, is something that did not make it in, which was an image of Sunny at the very end of her life being buried in her nursing uniform with her emblems. That never made it in. I thought that would be the very last scene.

JS: So you started kind of with the end in mind and then tried to work backwards that way?

MC: Yeah JS: And it changed?

MC: It changed to a different feeling at the very end—maybe more optimistic, I hope. Though I didn’t actually think that her being in her coffin was so bad because it was the end of a life that she had enjoyed living by the time she got there, although that doesn’t sound very cheerful when I say it out loud. And then the first sentence that I had for ages and ages and ages—I worked on it for so long—was the first thing that my editor suggested to remove. And then the second sentence is what is now the first sentence. And he was so right.

JS: How long did you spend on this?

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MC: I started it in winter break between 2000 and 2001, and then it was published in 2010. So it was a long time.

JS: That’s great though.

MS: This kind of goes back to what we were just talking about: the nurses and your influence. But it’s not difficult for me to imagine that these women are sisters, or mothers or aunts. They seem very real, yet completely isolated in this place.

And I’m just curious how much you relied on actual people—actually characters and character traits that you knew—to apply to these characters, or did you have to invent a lot of it. I’m just curious how you came up with these characterizations because they strike me as very real.

MC: Thank you. That’s great to hear.

I originally had a lot more Finnish characters, and then realized I was too far out of my depth. I didn’t know how to write about Finnish women and the psychology of illness in that cultural context and era. But I can write about Americans because I’ve known some older women. I was very lucky when I was younger in that I had lots of older family members. On the radio yesterday I heard a woman who wrote a book about getting older, and it unleashed a floodgate of callers who were outraged that everybody expected them to be so nice just because they were old now. And there’s also an article in the New Yorker—a personal reflection on aging written by a poet—who says that now that he’s in a wheelchair, people treat him differently. He went out to eat with a friend, and afterwards, the waiter or somebody said, “Did you enjoy your din-din?” And he was, like, “Oh my God. I’ve spent my life as a writer and observer of people, and, it comes to this?”

MS: Wow. MC: A lot of angry, older ladies were calling in and saying, “I am so sick of being called ‘sweetheart’ and ‘deary’ and ‘darling.’” And I have a couple of older family members who were a little bit foul-mouthed, drinking beer and watching Seahawks games on TV in Seattle. [They contradict] this idea that older people become emblematic of some kind of nice, gentle nature.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas— where I eventually enrolled—who invited me to come were both men.

So actually most of the good results that I’ve had in my life from the book have been from male readers.

MS: That’s really interesting MC: Weird, huh? I wanted everybody to have this sort of queasy, uncanny feeling about it.

MS: It worked for me.

MS: I’d say this book problematizes the nice, grandmotherly, older woman. And that’s why I think it’s so realistic. Because I think we all have relatives like that, and that’s what makes them three-dimensional. So I really appreciated it. The novel also, I think, trespasses on that still mystical or still taboo subject of the female body. It’s something we’re still arguing about in politics. In writing this, how did you think about your audience in terms of gender?

How did it affect males versus females?

JS: You actually touched on a couple of things that I was planning on asking. One: you mentioned Seattle – that’s where you’re from?

MC: I tried not to think about it very much. Who’s going to want to read a book set in a geriatric, gynecological, surgical ward? Male or female of any age, who’s going to want to read that except me? I tried not to think about that very much for fear that it would stop me or persuade me make it a little more accessible and a little less jarring. I looked for an agent for a long time. And the agent who eventually took me on is male. I had a lot of conversations with editors who were kind of maybe thinking about maybe being interested. But the editor who acquired it for Graywolf is male. And he pointed out to me that the two people who really championed the manuscript and made it possible for me to publish this were both men.

And when I applied for PhD programs, the two faculty members at

MC: When I step back and look at the Northwest, it’s Gothic in a way that was never really obvious when I was there. But then there’s “Twin Peaks.” There’s that show “The Killing” that’s a remake of a Danish series about an investigation of a girl’s murder. There’s just a lot of creepy dark wood, dark forest—atmospheric stuff—that definitely came in. This fictional place that I wrote about was set in a pine forest.

When I go back to the Pacific Northwest now, especially now that I live in a desert, everything seems to be covered in moss, and there are rust marks on all the walls, and lichen and mildew everywhere. I think it must have affected me. I visited the beach here in Pensacola today, and I took off my shoes immediately, and the sand is like sugar. Where I’m from, the Pacific is freezing. It’s like

MC: South of Seattle. Tacoma, Washington.

JS: How did your childhood, or your upbringing, influence your writing?

There’s a lot of it—you’ve touched on some of it with your relatives and nursing and things—but I didn’t know if you see a lot of your childhood come out in your writing.

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ice water. There are crabs and barnacles and razor-sharp clamshells everywhere, and rocks. You can’t go barefoot. It’s just a completely different experience. The beach there is forbidding, even though it’s so beautiful.

I also wasn’t supervised at all as a reader. And I wonder about whether that’s a good idea or not, to just let a kid read anything from any shelf in the library, because I read a lot of really inappropriate stuff that gave me bad dreams for years and years. And when I was five, a made-for-TV movie called Trilogy of Terror was on TV. I was five years old, I think, six years old. And my parents let me watch it. It was the seventies, I guess. And the first two vignettes are not really very scary at all. But in the third vignette Karen Black buys a Zuni fetish doll with a chain around its waist. You can’t take the chain off or something will happen. You just know that you’re not supposed to, and she gets in the shower, and the chain falls off, and the doll comes alive. It has weapons and these gnashing, horrible teeth, and it immediately scuttles under the couch and waits for her. She comes out, and of course she’s probably in a towel. It’s the most horrifying, warping…

MS: Especially when you’re six.

MC: My parents split when I was six, and we were all watching it, so I think I had to be just barely six. It went on and on, and it made this noise, this awful noise, and there were visual effects of its teeth moving. It’s sort of claymation, and it’s scuttling all over, and then it’s in the oven, and somehow I think it turns off the lights. And it’s awful. It’s awful. I had nightmares for a long time.

I couldn’t put my feet near the furniture. I couldn’t walk right up to the bed because there might be a vicious doll under it, and I hated dolls.

So that got me going on the Gothic

stuff—scary dolls, like Freud’s uncanny. A doll that may or may not be alive is his classic example. Trilogy of Terror came on TV again years later when I was actually in my MFA program, and I thought, “Okay, I’m going to put this to bed forever, I’m going to watch this.” And the first two vignettes were not scary, and then the third one was so scary.

MS: Still scary?

MC: Still scary. It’s even scarier today because the production effects are really disturbing. It’s so Gothic.

JS: I kind of want to see it now.

MC: You should rent it.

MS: I can’t watch horror movies, so I would not laugh.

JS: Sounds great. Have you seen it again recently?

MC: I should probably watch it every ten years, but I haven’t seen it since then.

JS: Were you always an avid reader from an early age? Did you always know you were going to be a writer?

When was the moment you decided to do this seriously?

MC: I thought that reading and writing were extensions of the same thing, when I was little. I was always doodling and reading and writing little things in English class, and entering little writer contests. I was writing consistently but it wasn’t until I was through with undergrad that I even realized MFA programs existed. And that was when I really turned the corner and committed to it.

JS: So your undergrad was creative writing as well?

MC: It was Interdisciplinary Studies.

I did a lot of creative writing and a lot of French. I wasn’t motivated to publish. I drifted around and did other jobs, which, in retrospect, was really perfect. I went to a lot of hospitals and temped at a medical school, and I’m sure those things all fed into what I would write later.

JS: Did you have a backup plan?

and this is my first year as a tenure-track assistant professor. I got really lucky. They had an opening, and they did a national search and let me apply for it, which is great because Las Vegas was exactly where I wanted to be. With teaching, I gave myself the year off from writing. And that was something my thesis advisor in my MFA program said, that

“This fictional place that I wrote about was set in a pine forest. When I go back to the Pacific Northwest now, especially now that I live in a desert, everything seems to be covered in moss, and there are rust marks on all the walls, and lichen and mildew everywhere.”

MC: No. My friends had studied software development and engineering and things that were useful.

It never occurred to me to do that.

Being able to read and do what I wanted was great, but I graduated completely unemployable. I temped in Seattle for a long time. I ended up working at the University of Washington in the medical school and then in one of the departments there. But no, I didn’t have a backup plan. And now I teach, which is a good backup plan, because I enjoy it.

MS: How do you balance your time between teaching and writing?

Sometimes new writers struggle with [time management]. I would like to hear how a successful writer manages it?

MC: I would also like to know how a successful writer manages it. I just recently started a new job at UNLV, - 18 -

he couldn’t write on Tuesdays and Thursdays because those were the days he taught and he wasn’t going to be hard on himself. That always stuck with me. I’ve been working mostly on short pieces instead of the novel in the process.

Last year I had a fellowship at the New York Public Library and had nothing to do but write and that was amazing, but kind of hard in the opposite way. I didn’t have anything else to help balance my time. So I think the ideal for me is having just enough of a claim on my attention that I really value my writing time.

Teaching three days a week and writing on those other days is going to be perfect.

MS: Congratulations on the job.

MC: Thank you!

MS: You mentioned you were working on some shorter pieces. Can you talk a little bit about what you

are working on?

MC: I’m slowly working on two novels. The first is a Gothic novel set in contemporary Ireland. They have a very challenged national health care system. Their infrastructure is not in good shape.

Some of their hospital buildings—I lived there for three years before going to Las Vegas—some of their wards don’t have sinks. They had a wave of resistant Staph being acquired in hospitals by people going in for other things. They had to put hand sanitizer at the foot of every patient’s bed. There is not enough money. The father of somebody we knew there had a heart attack in one county, and they had an angioplasty machine nearby but no one was trained to use it. An expensive, important piece of equipment,, and no one could use it. He was taken by ambulance to a Dublin hospital, over two hours away. He died in the outskirts of Dublin. And that kind of thing happens a lot.

The novel takes place in a rural Irish hospital with budget problems, and it’s about, among other things, pandemic flu virus research. It’s fictionalized, but there is actually a system for predicting which flu strains should be used for the vaccine each year. And I found that interesting, that someone somewhere is gambling on what the flu virus will be next time around.

MS: Where do you go for research?

Do you stay atop of current trends?

This novel is more current than Suvanto so do you attend medical conferences? Do you talk to people, read medical magazines?

MC: I should be more systematic.

But I end up gravitating, and that’s the fun of writing fiction. You can just gravitate to things that are cool and intriguing. I don’t get into topics that are as challenging as I’d like, but someday I’m going to take biology

classes at UNLV to help me. During my research year at the library I had access to a books on the history of vaccines or how vaccines are selected for the next year. I also read a fair amount about Ellis Island and the medical facilities there. I was surprised to learn that the hospital at Ellis Island was a cutting edge facility that had access to all this medical talent in New York City at a time when people were coming from all over the world. Immigrants would arrive, sometimes with unknown, unrecognizable problems and the Ellis Island doctors would have access to specialists in Manhattan for Tropical Medicine, Poverty and Medicine, Travel and Medicine, to help figure out the problems.

Of course a lot of what they saw was routine but even the routine problems were upsetting to read about. There was a very contagious eye infection problem that caused scarring and permanent blindness, and if you had it, you wouldn’t be allowed in. You’d be quarantined.

There was a hall that people would walk down, and almost before they could know what was happening a nurse or somebody would grab their eyelids with a hook. They would rapidly turn your eyelids inside out to see if you had this problem, and if you did, you’d be quarantined and treated. It was the best they had, and it sounds so awful and barbaric now, but it saved people’s vision. At the hospital on the island they would abrade the inside of your eyelids repeatedly with pumice-like material that produced a blue residue, so you had ink blue tears streaming down your face after being treated.

MS: It sounds like Science Fiction.

MC: Doesn’t it? That was one of the two most contagious problems.

The other was a scalp condition, incredibly contagious, and they didn’t want it to spread. If you see pictures of kids with white kerchiefs on their - 19 -

heads they were probably being treated for that scalp condition. It made honeycombed-shaped, deep gold lesions on people’s scalps that caused baldness. It looked like leprosy, and it was sometimes misdiagnosed as leprosy. It was actually a mouse fungus.

MS: It was a regular pattern?

MC: So I’m told. Someone with actual medical training and a systematic way of thinking might be looking at this material in a different way, but as a writer, the mouse fungus and the blue tears are the things that catch my interest. I’m weak on science, but I know enough to follow my instincts.

MS: But what you know is certainly interesting.

MC: I’m great at cocktail parties. No one wants to sit by me.

JS: You mentioned your thesis advisor earlier. Would you consider that person your mentor? Or was there anyone else who helped push you or encouraged your writing before that?

MC: I was lucky. I never had anyone discourage me. My dad writes poetry, and he was always really supportive. He would read everything I wrote if I wanted him to. He would never push if I didn’t. George Saunders was my thesis advisor at Syracuse. When he called to offer me a spot in that program he was a stranger saying we’d like you to come, we like your writing, and that was amazing. For three years I got to say, “Hi, I’m a fiction writer,” because people wanted to know if you were there for fiction or for poetry. You never get to do that in the outside world. That would seem incredibly insufferable: “Hi, I’m a fiction writer.” But it was great to have those years to actually do that, to

get into the habit of thinking of oneself as a writer. All of the faculty there were very supportive.

JS: So it was in your MFA program when you started sending out work?

MC: Yes. I had done some playwriting in Seattle and had a few short plays produced but I wasn’t sending out fiction. It was in Syracuse that I started sending submissions out and reading more. There was so much more to discover than I’d ever known about. I thought I was a reader before, and then I got there and people were reading stuff I’d never heard of. It made me a better reader first, and that helped me be a better writer.

JS: As far as reading goes, is there a must read list that you would encourage aspiring writers to read?

MC: That is hard.

JS: Could you put together a list of five maybe?

MC: A list of five? Turn of the Screw

by Henry James.

JS: Should we narrow it to three?

MC: I’ll shoot for five. This is totally not systematic. These are just my favorite books. Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu is my favorite Gothic novel. You never hear anything about it. Poe’s Philosophy of Composition. Angela Carter would be good for her retelling of fairy tales, and A.S. Byatt, off the top of my head. There is a short story called “Raw Material” by A.S. Byatt that is the most harrowing thing that I’ve read in a long time. It is the kind of Gothic that I like, where it’s not the creaking floorboards or creepy closets. It’s Gothic unfolding in broad daylight.

JS: I guess I’ve got a summer list now.

MC: Read The Little Black Book of Short Stories by A.S. Byatt.

MS: Your book has been called a “feminist thriller,” and I was curious as to what your response is to that term?

MC: I wanted the story to have a moral gray area. One review used the phrase misogynistic doctor and that made me sad because I really did not want to present the case of misogynistic doctor experimenting on women. Maybe he is experimenting on them, but it’s from the best of intentions. I wanted there to be moral ambiguity. So “feminist thriller” I don’t mind at all. I kind of liked that, for the word “thriller.” The caveat is that sometimes people describe writing as “feminist” when the writing isn’t very literary or good.

Not to say there isn’t any good literary feminist writing—of course there is—but it’s almost like throwing you a bone. It’s like, “Well, we’re going to give you an A for trying to tackle the difficult issues. The writing isn’t that great, but the topics are important”—that kind of thing. I know that sounds like a terrible thing to say.

MS: I appreciate you saying that.

MC: I just moderated a panel two weeks ago in Las Vegas with three writers: Mary Gaitskill, Sarah Shunlien Bynum, and Cheryl Strayed, titled, “Not Your Grandmother’s Sense and Sensibility: 21st Century Female Novelists.” I put a lot of thought into how to make this an engaging panel that everyone would want to listen to. If you think you know what is going to be said already, it isn’t appealing to go out of your way to hear it being said again.

I kept the focus on craft as much as possible—talking about the craft of writing, while allowing for all of those - 20 -

other topics to come in: issues of femaleness, and life vs. work balance, motherhood, and how to write about female characters and male characters, and whether there is a difference between them. My suspicion is that sometimes when words like “feminist” are used to describe writing, that description isn’t about the writing, it’s about the writer, and/ or the content, the subject matter, and maybe even where the work is published. It’s not a craft descriptor. I’m not sure that there is such a thing as feminist craft in writing.

So that term is external to the actual writing.

JS: You mentioned you are working on two novels. Do you have to go through the process of resubmitting or is Graywolf onboard?

MC: This is all pretty new to me.I will show it to them first. Hopefully they will like it. If they don’t like it, they are not obliged to take it. But I think the etiquette is they would see it first, and I would be thrilled if they want to work with me again because working with Graywolf was really great. It was really good overseas, too. There is such a misconception about American Literature in general. Some Europeans assume that there isn’t a lot of great literature coming out of the States—some of that is due to the odd assortment of literary fiction and garbage that actually makes it over. So people very much respect the choices that Graywolf makes as an independent publisher. Graywolf appeals to certain European sensibilities. My book was picked up by an English publisher, a Spanish publisher, and a Norwegian publisher. That’s not a lot of foreign rights, but it’s a great start.

JS: You mentioned that film you saw at a young age. Do you ever see your writing for film? Is that a goal that you might have?

MC: It’s a good question. I’m so on the page when I’m actually working, but it is cinematic in my head. I had Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in my mind a lot when I was working on the novel—the isolation, the quiet, the cold, the contained panic..

I am trying to adapt it into a treatment of a screenplay. Apparently it was suggested to a few screenplay writers who were like, “Hmm, I’m not sure I’m interested in trying to do that.” My agent suggested that maybe I should try. Not that anyone wants it or anything, I’m just doing it as an exercise. It’s challenging, but it’s fun.

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John C a p o u ya a n d Suzanne W i l l i a ms o n

Collaboration

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John Capouya Bio John Capouya is a journalist, author, and Assistant Professor of Journalism and Writing at the University of Tampa. During his journalism career he held staff positions at Newsweek, The New York Times, New York Newsday, and SmartMoney magazine, among other media outlets. He has a M.S. degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Capouya regularly contributes feature stories and book reviews to The Tampa Bay Times and fortune.com. His current book project is Florida Soul, a history of rhythm and blues music in that state, to be published by the University Press of Florida. His previous book was Gorgeous George, a biography of the flamboyant wrestler and pop culture figure in the 1940s’ and 50’s. Published by HarperCollins in 2008, that book is being adapted into a feature film and a documentary. His website is johncapouya.com.

John Capouya Artist’s Statement When I first began accompanying my collaborator, Suzanne Williamson, on her photo trips to Native American burial and ceremonial mounds, those silent heaps didn’t stir me. If they weren’t in such sweltering climes I’d say they left me cold.

But I’ve always been fascinated by story, its enduring power and complex craft. On one of our explorations here in Florida it struck me that these manmade monuments are repositories of story—piles of plot, character and meaning—and that the tales they hold extend over astonishing lengths of time. Yet those stories are also interrupted, cleaved, and mangled by changing cultures and conditions, and of course by the overarching story of conquest, colonization and extermination.

How could I render them, honor them, and in some way contribute to them? I didn’t want to make the mounds’ stories my own but to create a personal response, the way I’d seen Suzanne do in her photographs. It couldn’t be straight narrative, since the truths these structures trace are anything but linear. So I tried creating my own fragmentary takes, frozen flashes captured from different angles: one tool, one building technique, one Native American belief or ritual. In our collaborative art exhibition, the texts’ lengths were also limited by the size of the “frames,’’ the wall spaces we projected them onto; I think the longest vignette is 128 words.

The approach I take here is journalistic and not: I interviewed archaeologists and historians, read the original 16th- and 17th-century accounts by Spanish and French “explorers.” (One particularly rich source was a Florida archaeologist who’s also the traditional chief of the Muscogee Nation.) So these pieces are factual, and I quote others, but they’re also subjective, impressionistic and idiosyncratic. I tried to confront these diminished yet powerful places as openly and honestly as possible, and trust that the reactions I relayed would resonate with both historic truth and the contemporary reader. I hope that happens; I know I am richer for the experience of these beautiful ruins, and my collaboration with an inspired artist.

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Suzanne Williamson Bio Suzanne Williamson is a photographer and installation artist whose work focuses on landscape and the built environment. She is currently exploring Florida’s ancient Native American mound sites for the Florida Mounds Project in collaboration with writer John Capouya. Work from the project was exhibited in an interdisciplinary installation titled, SHADOW and REFLECTION: VISIONS of FLORIDA’S SACRED LANDSCAPES in 2011at the Morean Arts Center, St. Petersburg, FL. Williamson has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally including at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Florida Museum for Women Artists of Deland, Houston Center for Photography, Art in General of New York City and PIEROGI 2000 in Brooklyn. Her work has been reviewed in ARTnews, Creative Loafing Tampa, New York Press and Arts Magazine. Wiliamson’s photographs are in the collection of Trenam Kemker Law Firm in Tampa, the Allan Chasanoff Collection at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris among others.

Suzanne Williamson’s photographic work has been published in Saw Palm Literary Arts Journal, The Tampa Bay Times, American Archaeology, Harpers, Ohio Magazine and Texas Monthly. She studied Anthropology and photography at SUNY, College at Purchase, NY and at the International Center of Photography, NYC. She has received several fellowships to the artist colonies MacDowell and Yaddo, as well as Creative Capital workshop grants from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.

Currently an arts consultant in New York City and recent Programming Coordinator for the Tampa Museum of Art, she is the former Photo Editor of ARTnews magazine. Williamson has also directed Ledel and Photograph galleries and managed private photography collections in New York City, serving on the Board of The MacDowell Colony. As part of a collective, Williamson launched a photographic exhibition of the events of 9/11, entitled “Here is New York.” It was installed downtown in New York City, and traveled throughout the U.S. and overseas, raising over a million dollars for charity. Visit her websites www.flmoundsproject.org, and www.suzannewilliamsonphoto. com.

Suzanne Williamson Artist’s Statement My photographic work is centered on accumulated layers of human narrative that exist in the landscape. I am interested in what people build in order to define their worlds—just as I seek to create art that will illuminate ours. Working in collaboration with nonfiction writer John Capouya on the Florida Mounds Project, I am currently exploring a part of Florida’s living history—ancient Native American mound sites. The mounds are our oldest American monuments, survivors of cultural conflict, ignorance and fascination. Although altered by neglect, development, and time itself, the Florida mounds that remain are special, even sacred places.

The history of these ancient sites is embedded in their physical being which contains all past events and written accounts—all efforts to preserve, destroy or understand them and the people who built them. They are living history. I see my photographs as reflections in the mirror of that history.

My artwork in this series is inspired by the 19th-century expeditionary photographers who fanned out across the globe, making pictures of the world’s sacred monuments. I photograph using black and white film and vintage cameras from the 1920’s and 1950’s. Their lenses allow me to pull my pictures in and out of focus, making images that evoke these sacred lands’ disintegration and persistence, and transforming them in our eyes. High and low-tech installation materials such as paper, aluminum and transparent fabric reflect the multiple meanings of the mounds today.

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Shadow and Reflection: Visions of Florida’s Sacred Landscapes They are the American pyramids, the work and art of Florida’s first peoples. For thousands of years before the Spanish came, early Americans living in Nature transformed it, building mounds with earth, shells and sand.

These served as village gathering places, temples for religious ceremonies, and as burial sites. Native Americans continued to build here until roughly the mid-1700s, and many mounds remain. These heritage sites are living history, tracing the past, informing the present, limning the pathways between ancient times and our own.

This collaboration is based in our ongoing exploration of Florida mounds, their mysteries and multiple meanings.

The title of our project echoes the beliefs of the Calusa people of Charlotte Harbor. To them each person had three souls: one’s shadow, one’s reflection, and a third in the center of the eye. We referenced those visual elements in an installation exhibited last year in St. Petersburg, a combination of images on reflective surfaces; photographs printed on paper and on large panels of transparent fabric; and interpretive texts projected on walls like diffused light in a forest.

In this folio, black and white photographs reveal the mounds as they are and as they once were, transporting the viewer to some in-between place. At once sharp and diffuse, the images suggest the mounds’ fragility and disintegration as well as their endurance.

The texts are another form of exploration, reverberating with the images. These vignettes illuminate the mounds as well as the ethos, the time, and the cultural framework that created them. As creative nonfiction, they also re-imagine history and the people who made it to create more layers of meaning, tracing the writer’s inner explorations and, ideally, leading readers to their own.

For visitors, the experience of these sacred sites is often mediated by framed displays or historic plaques.

Historians and archaeologists have sifted through archives and artifacts, interpreting these earlier cultures with their analytic methods. Our collaborative project creates a contemporary, open-ended archive, offering and contextualizing fragments of the past.

—John Capouya and Suzanne Williamson

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Shell Mound near Cedar Key, Levy County, FL 2010 MONSTER Stare at the slope of this huge shell mound outside Cedar Key and a face–an animal or person made monster–emerges. Protruding roots become bugging eyes and moss its pelt.

This thing, male, is probably 4,500 years old. Before corn was grown or pottery made here, it lived.

One side of its mouth is open, disgorging a cascade of clamshells and half-oysters that pours down, above and before you, 25 feet or more. Or he could be ingesting, inhaling them, the way Saturn eats his son…

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Crystal River Archaeological State Park, Citrus County FL, 2009 GETTING IT “I get it,’’ I say, meaning: I see the sense in this green 14-acre mound complex on the Crystal River. Facing the curving blue water I grasp how the layout served as a ceremonial and burial site for 1500 years.

That’s when the archaeologist tells me, essentially: You’ve got it all wrong. “These were aquatic people,’’ he says. “They didn’t farm; they fished. And they came in canoes, on a highway of water. You’re looking at this from the land.’’

“I see,’’ I say, not seeing. Absorbing my losses I turn inland, thinking: “Is this what they mean by ‘paradigm shift?’”

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Ormond Mound, Volusia County, FL 2007 RUINS Dirt cathedrals, they’re lowly and lofty, natural and artificial. Stolidly of the earth, mounds only exist to rise up from it.

Shapely plain, ancient Indian mounds persist and endure. Yet they’re change embodied, Nature transformed, these beautiful ruins.

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Anderson/Narvaez Mound, Pinellas County, FL 2010 STORIES Why do we say a building is this or that many “stories’’ high? It may go back to the Middle Ages when European churches had tale-telling stained-glass windows at each level.

Indian mounds are narrative piles, layers of story lain horizontally in earth, sand, shell and bones.

For hundreds or thousands of years, those stories have pressed, settled, and leached into each other.

When scientists incise downward to cut a tubed core sample, what chopped plots, speech fragments and mangled characters must they remove?

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Lake Jackson Archaeological State Park, Leon County, FL 2011 PURPOSE Consider the will, the shared purpose of the people living near the southern rim of Lake Jackson around 1200 AD. Their borrow pit, a gaping excavated hole, shows in reverse the scale of their earth-moving. The biggest ceremonial mound, still visible, covers 24,000 square feet.

A day’s walk to the east, just south of Lake Miccosukee, an earlier culture also moved earth to approach heaven. Their great flat-topped pyramid is 46 feet tall; with no wheels, no pack animals, and no metal tools, they made something like seven million trips, bearing tribute one basketful at a time.

They set their intention, as the Buddhists say, and made it manifest.

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Mound Key, Lee County, FL 2011 EYE The eye was a potent locus for Florida’s early peoples, one reason carved images of birds— with their prominent side-set eyes—were so common.

The Calusa believed the essential soul resided there, in the pupil. When their warriors gave the invader Ponce de León his mortal wound, by one account, it was with an arrow to the eye.

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Crystal River Archaeological State Park, Citrus County, FL 2008 REMAINS They’re not what they were. These photographs show the mounds’ remains, their persistent, diminishing selves.

Yet, stand quietly at one of these earth or shell monuments, and you may sense a soft-strong emanation, some of its original sway.

“Some sites are dead as a hammer to me,’’ says a Native American archaeologist. “But others are alive. I won’t go near them without offering tobacco and imploring the powers that be not to harm us, saying: ‘We’re here to learn.’”

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Sacred Lands, Anderson/Narvaez Mound, Pinellas County, FL 2010 HAMMER The lightning whelk, native to Florida coasts, is a huge snail. Its shell, up to a foot long, opens to the left, a rarity.

When the Tocobaga and Manasota of Tampa Bay ran a stick handle through it, the wide end of this tapered cone became a powerful hammer. The pointed end was a pick, used to dig canoes out of charred trees. Just a quarter-inch thick, the once-living matter gave but didn’t shatter. Whelks were traded as far away as Michigan and Oklahoma, exchanged for copper.

Hefting a replica hammer and chopping in a short arc, I feel a surging centrifugal pull, and a gorgeous menace.

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Crystal River Archaeological State Park, Citrus County, FL 2009 KINSHIP Mounds were kinship machines, busy physical plants where communal ties and shared identity were produced daily. Showrooms too, they displayed those same goods.

A burial mound is both a constant, visible symbol of a clan’s lineage and a repository for its ancestors, where they are visited and consulted.

Only a priest could perform ceremonies on a temple mound, we think, and it took a chief to convene a meeting. But everyone came to the mounds to find—and to create—common ground.

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Maximo Point Park, Pinellas County, FL 2010 SURVIVAL “By the twenty second of September we had eaten all but one of the horses.’’

To Spaniard Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, part of a 1527 expedition, Florida was the land “to which we had been brought by our sins, an awful country, so strange and so bad…’’

The locals were adapted to Florida; the arrivals, anything but. Ship-killing hurricanes, trees split top to bottom by lightning, mosquitoes—all was affliction.

Of 600 men, four lived. When Cabeza de Vaca wrote his account for Charles V he explained: “This is the only thing that a man who returned naked could bring back.”

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Pinellas Point Mound, Pinellas County, FL 2009 TODAY What and where are our mounds?

Suzanne: “Mine is a beautiful hill in a Catholic cemetery—the place where we buried my parents. I visit their graves to speak to them with love and ask for their help, as Florida’s early peoples visited their ancestors.’’

John: “Mound-making reminds me of Habitat for Humanity: Disparate people come together and give their labor for the common good, creating a new built environment.’’

A Florida archaeologist: “Football stadiums, where we gather for ritual ceremony, including feasts. They also mark our family ties to that territory.’’

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Emerson Point Preserve, Manatee County, FL 2009 SECRETS Me: “What can you tell me about your traditional burial practices?’’

Chief of Florida’s Muscogee Nation: “Nothing.’’

Me: “I see. How about the afterlife, what’s that like?’’

Chief: “I’m not going to tell you that either. Look, you have to understand, only a couple of generations ago my having this conversation with you would have been a killing offense.’’

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Along the Calusa Heritage Trail, Pineland, Lee County, FL 2011 CITYSCAPE When archaeologist Frank Hamilton Cushing came to the former Calusa settlement on Pine Island in 1896, he marveled at the complex array of at least a dozen mounds, hand-dug canals, and a man-made lake. The Indian city was “so vast,’’ he wrote, “that I could scarcely believe it to have been artificial, wholly the work of human hands.’’

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Mt. Royal, Putnam County, FL 2010 BURIED “They are a most pious people toward their deceased,’’ one Franciscan friar wrote of the Indians. “They all cry with great tenderness for the time of 30 days…’’

Found in burial mounds: shell cups; copper earrings; pottery with holes, so the spirits of the dead could get out; stone ax blades; wooden pipes carved as birds; panther masks; wolf teeth; arrows; and human remains. Some corpses were de-fleshed in charnel houses, skulls and big bones bundled then buried.

Little bones too. Spanish and French accounts tell of Timucua parents who sacrificed their children after the death of a chief.

Is it true? “We think some did,’’ says one archaeologist, “including the Timucua and their pre-Columbian ancestors in northeastern Florida. I’ve excavated what I’m sure were three sacrificed babies from that culture.’’

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Green Mound, Volusia County, FL 2007 STILL Missing here are human music and motion. Some of these mound sites—former hubs—must now be among the quietest places in Florida.

Standing at isolated Green Mound on the Atlantic coast, I occasionally hear the wind, a bird, or a distant machine. We’re clear of the bland static people emit with their presence. So still, it’s…spooky.

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Fort Center, Glades County, FL 2011 NEEDS Building mounds didn’t feed a single Indian family. In a Florida hurricane, the great lumps gave no shelter. Why, then?

We think some mound-making was the physical re-enactment of Native creation myths. When crops or humans failed, or the river dried, they’d rebuild the world, symbolically starting over to restore the original order and balance of the universe.

Done right, these believers found, their bold and strenuous group prayers got answers.

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Installation View 1

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Installation View 2

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Installation View 3

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Notes for Individual Images Crystal River Archaeological State Park, Citrus County FL, 2009: Palm overlooking the Crystal River. 30 x 30” photograph printed on aluminum.

Anderson/Narvaez Mound, Pinellas County, FL 2010: Prehistoric shells cover the mound summit. 40 x 40” photograph printed on aluminum Lake Jackson Archaeological State Park, Leon County, FL 2011: The borrow pit Mound Key, Lee County, FL 2011: Looking back from the summit Crystal River Archaeological State Park, Citrus County, FL 2008: Spanish moss frames a mound Sacred Lands, Anderson/Narvaez Mound, Pinellas County, FL 2010: Prehistoric shells on the mound Crystal River Archaeological State Park, Citrus County, FL 2009: Profile of the temple Mound Maximo Point Park, Pinellas County, FL 2010: Prehistoric shells embedded in palm tree roots. Cabeza de Vaca landed nearby. Photograph printed on voile, 60 x 60” fabric panel Pinellas Point Mound, Pinellas County, FL 2009: Through the trees on the mound. 30″ x 30” photograph printed on aluminum Emerson Point Preserve, Manatee County, FL 2009: Philodendron climbs a tree by the temple mound at the Portavant Mound complex Along the Calusa Heritage Trail, Pineland, Lee County, FL 2011: A stand of gumbo limbo trees on the trail Mt. Royal, Putnam County, FL 2010: Pond near the mound complex. Photograph printed on voile, 60 x 60” fabric panel Green Mound, Volusia County, FL 2007: Live oaks grow on the mound Fort Center, Glades County, FL 2011: A series of carved ditches meet Fisheating Creek in this earthwork complex Installation View 1: Detail of photo on fabric and text. Photo by George Cott Installation View 2: Photo by George Cott Installation View 3: Photo by George Cott

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C hristy G ast

ART - 46 -

Bio Sculptor and video artist Christy Gast is known for conflating the landscape and the body (often her own) through folk performance conventions. For past projects, Gast has tap danced around Lake Okeechobee, performed as a mermaid on trapeze and a cowgirl with an inflatable desert, and written and recorded a cappella folk ballads about women in the military. Deeply engaged in the role of landscape in both art history and politics, most of the artist’s large-scale projects start with the notion of “public land,” in both practical and romantic senses. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally, including MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Performa, Artist’s Space and Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York; the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; Miami Art Museum, the de la Cruz Collection, Gallery Diet, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and High Desert Test Sites in California, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and Centro Cultural Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile.

Artist’s Statement This new body of work investigates the collision that occurs when two notions regarding studio practice meet: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which locates creation within a physical space, and Daniel Buren’s manifesto The Function of the Studio, which frees the artist from its confines. The resulting group of burlap sculptures, double-sized duplications of a year’s worth of sculptural assemblage, reflects on the artist’s studio as the site of that collision, treating the conceptual and physical space of creation as an archaeological site.

The exhibition title, Out of Place, refers to the notion of existing between polarities: here and there, object and idea, interior and exterior, figure and abstraction, past and present. By manipulating burlap, typically used as a container for materials of potential (roots, dry legumes, soil), I replicate the folkloric objects, wooden planks and textiles I used to create a series of assemblages. The assemblages, which I thought of as untitled signifiers, referred to places outside of the studio where I gathered the materials or formal suggestions for the individual works: Lake Okeechobee, the Salton Sea, Teufelsberg.

The burlap doubled doubles, containers for or skins of the studio practice, are unruly interlocutors in the gallery, sprawling and dripping through the space. Like most of my practice, this exhibition works through notions of cultural landscape in both practical and romantic senses, or political and art historical manifestations.

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Cordage, 2012 Burlap, cotton 80x25x24 in

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Cordage (detail), 2012

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Lee, 2012 Burlap, cotton, copper 48x32x11 in

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Maryanne, 2012 Burlap, cotton, polyfil 60x35x35″

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Redland, 2012 Burlap, cotton, polyfil 31x24x8 in

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Walkabout, 2012 Burlap, cotton, newsprint 109x66x54 in

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Walkabout (installation view), 2012

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Weeki-Wachee, 2012 Burlap, cotton, polyfil 18x18x3 in

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T obias W olff

INTERVIEW

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Bio Tobias Wolff is the author of the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question. His most recent collection of short stories, Our Story Begins, won The Story Prize for 2008. Other honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award – both for excellence in the short story – the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also been the editor of Best American Short Stories, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, and A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and other magazines and literary journals.

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April 11, 2012

Jonathan Fink: When I was a graduate student at Syracuse, Mary Karr told me that when she began to write The Liar’s Club that she kept a three-by-five card of your advice posted on her computer. I’m paraphrasing, but the advice said something like, “Don’t be afraid to look selfish, petty, or small minded, or else the readers won’t believe the story is true.”

Tobias Wolff: In writing a memoir?

JF: In writing a memoir. How is that advice important to writing a compelling memoir?

TW: Well, I don’t think I said anything about getting readers to believe the story. It was about being truthful. But you ask a good question. In fact, I think a lot of memoirs take that advice a little too much to heart, and lean very heavily on the rather nasty aspects of their character as a way of showing how honest they are in their memoirs, right?

You know, “I’m such a good person that I’m going to tell you what a bad person I used to be”—that kind of thing. And it can become a bit of a mannerism, an affectation. Conversion stories are often like that. For the sinner to really come around, they want to show you that, “God really bagged a trophy when they got me. I was a rogue elephant out there.” It isn’t as exciting a conversion story if you were, like, “I was a pretty nice kid, and then I got even nicer.”

A memoir isn’t everybody’s form and shouldn’t be. It is a tough form

to take on because of the necessity that wherever our lives are interesting is where they intersect with other lives. You don’t have that interesting of a life when you’re alone. I could never write a memoir about what I do now because I spend all my time alone, writing semicolons and taking them out and then putting them back in. When you’re writing a memoir, you’re exposing other people to public view. And sometimes that will be in an uncomplimentary way. Or it will be in a way that, even if you do it with love, they will not be grateful for. Nobody likes someone else to take charge of his story. We want to be in charge of our own narrative, and when you see that taken out of your hands, you don’t like it.

In writing a memoir you expose other people to view in ways that they probably aren’t going to like, and so you have to be careful that you are being as objective about yourself and your part in the story as you are about other people and their part in the story. If you’re putting other people under a pretty close lens, you really have no choice but to put that lens on yourself, too.

Otherwise, you’ll end up with a very distorted story in which you’re some kind of angel flying above this fallen world, when in fact you’re part of this fallen creation yourself, and you participated in the story that you’re telling, and you probably have some things to answer for, too.

It’s a question of balance. When I wrote the memoir This Boy’s Life, I really wanted to be fair. One way of being fair was not to paint myself as some kind of little saintly kid, which I most certainly was not. But now it sometimes seems to me that I leaned a little too hard on that. After all, I was a kid. So much has to do with balance—your tone, and your motive in writing. All that will play into the final form and feeling of a piece.

JF: Do you have the impulse to re- 58 -

vise after something’s been published?

TW: Oh, endlessly. I revise constantly as I’m writing. And then when I send a piece out, if it gets accepted, when I get the proofs back I revise again on the page.

And if a story or a piece should be anthologized, I’ll look at it and see other things that I can do to make it better or I think I can do to make it better. And then when it’s about to come out in a collection, I do it again. If there’s another edition, I look at it. These are not holy texts.

This isn’t the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is work that as long as it’s available to me to make better, I will. One of the things that appeals to me about writing a short story is the possibility of perfection. We can’t live perfect lives, but maybe, just maybe, we can write a perfect short story or a perfect poem. So, it’s that pursuit of the perfect that makes you restless. I had a book of my selected stories come out about two and a half years ago. There were some stories that I’d published in the midseventies, others within a year or two of the book itself. While I was going through them all again I had a friend over for dinner one night, another writer, Timothy Garton Ash. He said, “Well, what’s the work in that? You’re just putting them together, right?” I said, “Well, yeah, but I’m going through them.” He said, “Wait, they’ve already been published in books, and you’re going through them again? You’re rewriting them again?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Do you think you should be doing that?” Because of this conversation I ended up putting a note at the beginning of the book saying I’d revised the stories again since they last appeared. I still don’t know that I really needed to do that.

But, you know, I wanted to hold my head up with Timothy, so I did.

My editor, Gary Fisketjon, when I mentioned it to him, said, “Oh, yeah,

you definitely should put a note in there.” And that surprised me.

I just assumed all writers did that, that they were constantly adjusting and tuning and tweaking their work.

The Irish writer Frank O’Connor has a great story called, “Guests of the Nation.” It was adapted years ago

by Neal Jordon, a filmmaker, into a movie called The Crying Game.

sentences and words in stories and getting more out, but that’s how I am.

JF: When George Saunders was here last year, he described the revision process as the author going over a piece so much that the piece benefits from all of the author’s “different selves.” You sit down to

“The purpose of a workshop is not only to learn to accept advice, but to learn to reject it, to have some confidence in your own work, to remember that it is your name on the story, not someone else’s, not a committee’s.”

If you look at different versions of that story over the years, he continued to change the ending. Not what happens at the end, but the wording. He just couldn’t obviously feel like he’d gotten it absolutely right.

The last line in the penultimate version was, “And anything that happened to me thereafter, I never felt the same about again.” So, then, he’s got the last version, which is, “And anything that happened me thereafter, I never felt the same about again.” He drops the preposition “to,” right? “To me.” It’s more correct, but “happened me” is how his character would actually say it.

“Anything that happened me thereafter, I never felt the same about again.” It’s more striking, haunting, it has strange poetry. Just that little adjustment. He didn’t fool with it after that, but he’d been revisiting it for many years. And I recognize that impulse in myself. And it’s also probably the reason why I haven’t written a whole lot of books. I wish I’d written more. I probably should have spent less time brooding over

revise, and the more you go over a piece, the more those different “selves” interact with the piece over time, and so the piece becomes better than if it had been written solely by one of your individual “selves.”

TW: That’s interesting. I think you almost do have to cultivate a kind of split identity as a writer. One, you have to be this free spirit who allows the work to come out and not to be critical of yourself too much when you’re writing or you’ll paralyze yourself, constipate yourself.

And then after it’s down, you have to become this cold-eyed editor who hates you and wants to find fault with your work. You consider every sentence guilty until proven innocent.

JF: Do you think any of that has changed because the traditional relationship between writer and editor has changed? Do you still work closely with an editor who makes aesthetic suggestions?

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TW: No, I’ve always done a lot of rewriting. I had a wonderful English teacher when I was fifteen. I had gotten a scholarship to a boarding school in Pennsylvania, and I was woefully unprepared for it. I thought I knew how to write, and I didn’t. But I wanted to be a writer. So he took me seriously, and he would edit my work very severely, and show me all the fat, the vagueness, the lack of clarity. At first I was shocked and thrown off, and then it became one of the most valuable things I was ever given: the ability to start seeing things through his eyes when I read my work, after I had gotten a draft down. I had teachers like that later on as well. By the time I ever had an editor, I was pretty well my own editor. But I have a good editor who works very closely with me and who marks up my work a lot, and gives me a chance to test my own work by holding it up to the light, asking a question about it.

Even if I decide to stick with something, I know why I was doing it. Sometimes you need to follow your own advice, though. The purpose of a workshop is not only to learn to accept advice, but to learn to reject it, to have some confidence in your own work, to remember that it is your name on the story, not someone else’s, not a committee’s.

When I give their stories back to my students, I never ask later on, “Did you change that thing?” It’s their story, their decision to make.

JF: I also found, too, that if I didn’t take that advice on a specific piece, sometimes that advice would come back and permeate in other pieces.

TW: I think that’s true. Like what, in your case? Just, for example, something that you might not have taken in a specific case but came back?

JF: Well, many times, especially in a class setting, you will receive

contradictory advice. Someone will write, “Best line in the story.” And then someone else will underline the same line and write, “Worst line in the story.”

TW: Exactly.

JF: And so you would get contradictory advice, but I also think of things like structure or framing. For example, someone might say, “You might consider starting this poem later. This current beginning material is sort of introductory, clear-yourthroat material.” And I might not necessarily take that advice for that specific poem, but on a different poem those suggestion might come back to me, and I might say, “Yeah, this is definitely ‘clear your throat’ material that can be removed.”

TW: That’s a very good example.

JF: Those sorts of things. Good coaches live in the ear. You sort of hear those voices.

TW: That’s right. But that thing about contradictory advice is true. That happens in a workshop, and you really have to learn to sort through it and to try to hear those things that are in tune with, I don’t know, the song you’re trying to sing, and not another kind of song. And you do, you pick that up after a while.

But I see that even in reviews. Especially you’ll see it when a collection of short stories comes out, and this reviewer will say, “Well, another blah-blah collection by so-and-so, and it has one very distinguished story in it. There’s one significantly weak story in it.” Then you read another reviewer in an eminent journal, and they’ll have it flipped. So if you’re relying on them for guidance, don’t. To quote Hemingway, who is always quotable on such things, he said about reviews—he claimed not to pay attention to them; in his case, until sort of the end of his life, they

were always pretty positive—but he said, “If you believe the good things the sons-of-bitches say about you, then you’ll have to believe the bad things the sons-of-bitches say about you.” He has a point. You can translate that to the workshop. You have to develop independence.

JF: We had some students ask a really good question in class. We’re reading the whole spectrum of your stories, and the students compared “Hunters in the Snow” to “The Chain.” These are very different stories in that the authorial presence in “Hunters in the Snow” almost feels amoral. As a reader you’re urging the characters to get Kenny to the hospital. Why are they stopping for waffles while he’s bleeding in the truck?

TW: Not very nice guys. Not my fault.

JF: And then “The Chain” almost borders on being a parable about the urge of vigilante justice: violence begets violence.

TW: Absolutely.

JF: So the students asked, “What allows ‘Hunters in the Snow’ to be kind of amoral while ‘The Chain’ feels almost like a parable?” I said, “We’ll ask Wolff when he gets here.”

What differentiated the process of “Hunters in the Snow” from “The Chain”?

TW: I’ll tell you a little bit about the writing of the story, which was that I read a newspaper article about some guys who went out hunting, five or six of them. And they were drinking while they were hunting, and then one of them accidentally shot another one. I don’t remember how, but it was an accident. It wasn’t like it happened in the story.

And then on the way to the hospital, they had the guy in the backseat of - 60 -

a car. They stopped at a bar, and got drunk, and forgot about him.

He bled to death. So, that was the story—outrageous story. I thought, “God, if I’d stayed in Washington State and gone hunting with my old friends that could have been me!”

It stayed with me, and I as I began to write it as a story, I had to make some decisions.

One thing was to get the booze out because the minute you have alcohol in the story, then the human agency leaves, the idea of choice.

Then it’s just that demon rum that’s to blame. I wanted to put responsibility on the characters. The amorality is probably, you know, something of an illusion. The story is so constructed that it puts moral responsibility on the characters rather than on the writer, if that makes any sense. And they make some bad decisions, but they do it in a funny way, and in the interest of friendship. These guys who have been kind of at each other suddenly discover that there’s still the embers of friendship burning between them, while their buddy—I changed it from a car, which was at least a little bit comfortable, to the back of a truck in the freezing cold, which is almost melodramatically cruel and horrible—they forget about him, right?

They even take away his blankets after a while.

JF: They even admonish him. Why are you kicking off your blanket?

TW: It’s grotesque, of course. And I had fun making it so, but it’s a dramatization, really, of things that actually go on between people. And there’s also that whole dynamic of two against one. Three isn’t two plus one; it’s two against one. I have a couple of sons who are a little over a year apart, and sometimes they’d have a friend over to play on these horrible, grim winter days in Syracuse, which you remember, and you’ve been in the very house

where they grew up because Mary Karr bought my house. And I’d be upstairs working, and all of a sudden I’d hear this cry go up: “No Fair! Two against one!” And that kind of thing finds its way into the story as well.

The other thing I did was reduce the dramatis personae—the number of characters in the piece—because my point was to get down into these strange, troubled relationships—the bullying, the pain, the secrecy—and it could be much more vividly seen with a smaller number of people. So I took an event that happened and changed it.

But I could imagine it happening to me. It wasn’t outside the realm of my experience. When I was a boy growing up in Washington State, I used to go hunting, and my stepfather and his friends were just like those guys. A little boy drowned in the river that we lived right next to. Willy Quick. Still remember his name. Three years old. Wandered down to the river and fell in. They organized a search to try to find the body. My stepfather was a scoutmaster at that point, and he happened to have these big rafts—big, inflatable rafts. These four or five guys got into a raft, and my stepfather and I went along, looking for Willy. And my stepfather in this utterly tragic situation starts getting drunk. He had brought along a flask of Old Crow, and he got really, really drunk, and weird. Those guys, they weren’t drinking—this was too serious for that—but they actually put him off on the bank. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. They let me stay in, and I knew I had hell to pay when I got home, but I was not getting out of that raft in the middle of nowhere. It’s just the kind of thing that I could’ve imagined him doing, you know, what happens in that story. So, even though it seems kind of freakish and nearly implausible, it isn’t. But I decided to keep my hands off the scale. I didn’t want to be tipping the reader as to my at-

titude towards these characters. I just let them play it out on this blank, cold, white canvas.

JF: That moment is so wonderful in the story and surprising when the reader finds out after Kenny’s been shot that the farmer actually asked him to shoot the dog. For me, it felt like one of those moments that was a surprise for the writer during the writing process. Was that a surprise when you were writing?

TW: Yeah, it was. I mean, it was when I first started doing it. Then I remembered where I’d actually gotten that story. When I was a boy, I was very fond of a book called The Compleat Practical Joker. It was an anthology of practical jokes that had been put together by a guy named H. Allen Smith. You can probably still get it at the library. And I read that when I was about eight or nine years old, and something really stuck with me. Some guys had gone hunting, and that very thing had happened. One of them had been asked to shoot a dog that was sick and old as a kind of price for hunting on the property. And the guy started joking around with his friends, and he ended up getting shot by them because they thought he’d gone off. But I’d forgotten that until I started writing “Hunters in the Snow,” and then that came back to me, and I thought it just fit perfectly into the story, and so I used it. It’s funny how a story is made up of so many different personal experiences, reading experiences, imagination and what might have happened. All those things kind of come together in the story.

JF: It’s nice too because it kind of complicates the culpability. What seems like an immediate threat from Kenny all of a sudden becomes more complicated when, oh, he’s asked to do this. It doesn’t diminish the threat, but it complicates it.

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TW: Kenny was definitely trying to terrify Tub. You don’t want to say that because Kenny did get killed after all that he got what was coming to him. You probably shouldn’t be killed for a practical joke, but, you know, there are some situations where you could imagine it happening.

The other story, that was quite close to my experience. I was sledding with a son of mine right after Christmas in a park—Syracuse, Thornden Park—and as he was getting down towards the end of his slide, this dog runs out of a yard.

Big, black German Shepherd, like a wolf. You can see him coming.

I’m way up at the top of the hill, and I’m running, and the snow is deep.

I can’t get down. The dog lunges at him, and my son for some reason moved his head. Because he had a parka on, he didn’t see him coming.

The dog got him here [Wolff points to his shoulder] and was shaking him like a doll. And luckily—I didn’t get there—a teenage girl was sledding down behind him, and she jumped off and picked up a two-by-four from a pile of lumber that was behind a shed there and clobbered the dog several times over the head, and it let go and ran back in. She saved my son’s life, there’s no question about it. He was a mess. He was all bruised up. So we called the police.

And the idiots wouldn’t do anything about it because they said the dog was on a chain. I said, “The chain reaches well into the park where kids are playing and sledding.”

They said, “He’s on a chain. That’s what the ordinance requires.” And I said, “If you put on a chain on him that’s five miles long and he goes around killing people, is that okay?”

And they doubled down on their stupidity.

I had this friend from Texas who had a rather Texan way of resolving problems. So when he heard about this, and he came over and saw my

son, he said, “You gotta take care of that dog.” I was still trying to get some results with the police; I had actually gone up to the very top of the department, and I was waiting to hear from them, but they’re obviously not going to do anything about that dog. And I said, “I don’t know quite what I can do at this point.” He said, “I know what you can do.” He said, “Go out to dinner, my treat, and I’ll shoot that damn thing.” I said, “Hmm.” That appealed to me. I was mad. My friend, as you might guess, from just the conversation I’ve related so far, was a rather combative guy, tended to get in disputes with people. I said, “Geez, I feel like that’s something I should do myself.” He said, “Yeah, but they’ll know you did it.” He said, “Don’t worry about it. Maybe someday you can do something for me.”

He said, “Don’t worry about it. The time will come,” as indeed it would with him. I said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Eventually, I got the police chief in Syracuse to deal with it and the dog was gotten rid of. The dog had a lot of complaints against him. He was a savage dog. And my son was okay. Not long after that my friend got into a really rough contretemps with some guy at a gas station, the guy creased his car pulling out and didn’t even stop. And my friend pursued the guy and they really got into it. And I thought, “What if he’d asked me to get involved in this?

Where might that have led?” And this whole chain, if you will, of every man getting justice in this world, creates a situation where somebody is always on the short end and having to get their justice back.

It’s our world, isn’t it? Everybody is trying to get even. And nobody gets even. Everybody gets further in the hole. So it was that kind of personal experience, coupled with a more general sense of how justice operates in this world when you try to get it on your own, that led me to

write that story. But the atmospherics—the description of the weather, the feeling of trying to run down the hill, the rage and the feeling of helplessness when you aren’t doing anything afterwards about it, how you feel like you need to redress this wrong—all that came out of my experience. And then the rest of it was what might have been if I

and that’s when I show it.

RSR: What do you do when you get to that point where you know there is something else that needs to be done, but you just can’t see it? Are you willing to let other people see it at that point or do you put it away?

TW: No, I just bash my head against

“Someone asked Evan Connell the same thing and he said, ‘I sit in a room, and I put in commas and then I take them out again.’ With me it’s semicolons. I try to avoid them.” had pulled the trigger on this situation right then and let it go forward.

I know that no good would come of it.

Regina Sakalarios-Rogers: You said before that you don’t like to talk about your work while you are writing it. When do you get to that point where you feel like it is finished or ready for someone else’s eyes?

TW: In my case, basically when I feel like I’ve brought the work as far along as I possibly can, and I don’t see any more that I can do to make it better, then I will show it to a few readers. They will make me aware of things that are insufficiently stated and developed, or overdeveloped perhaps. But that’s not usually the case. I tend to cut so much when I write that sometimes I cut out muscle and bone and not just the fat. Sometimes there is some restoration that needs to be done. As long as I can see more to do in the piece there is no point in showing it to anyone else. But once I reach a point where it feels finished to me, I wonder what other people will think, - 62 -

the wall until something comes out of my head. If I know it isn’t right I don’t see any point in showing to other people because they’ll just say it isn’t right and they’ll be right. I already knew that.

JF: Carver used to say a writer is someone who is willing to sit and stare at something longer than anyone else.

TW: Did he say that? I love it. That’s right. Someone asked Evan Connell the same thing and he said, “I sit in a room, and I put in commas and then I take them out again.” With me it’s semicolons. I try to avoid them.

RSR: So the Hemingway idea of stopping in the middle so you can begin the next day when you know what’s going to happen next, that used to work for me, but I found it’s kind of impractical.

TW: Writers give a lot of advice, and I think a lot of times the advice they give is what they think would be good for other people but they don’t really do it themselves. And I have a

feeling that may fall in that category.

It sounds great. But if you’re writing a good sentence you’re going to stop? Are you kidding me? I don’t believe he did that. I really don’t.

I used to smoke, and my best friend also smoked. And we told ourselves that we were going to kill ourselves if we kept doing it. So when we were in our twenties we made a deal to stop smoking, both of us the same day. I lasted a week or so and then I was back on the Camels. And so I told my friend that I was smoking again, and he said, “Oh hell, I started smoking the next day.” I said, “Well you should have told me because we had a deal.”

And he said, “But I thought it was good for you not to smoke. So I didn’t want to do anything to encourage you.” I don’t like being lied to for my own good. But I think that we as teachers and mentors do it all the time. For example, one thing I absolutely recommend is that anyone who wants to be a writer should keep a journal. Not necessarily deep thoughts—of all things those will be the least interesting to you later on—but sights, smells, sounds, things you overhear, a funny story, the surface of the world, what it’s like at a given time in your life, the sensory experience of being alive.

and say I do it. I just don’t say anything about that. But writers do. A poet friend of mine, I heard him tell a group of people once—he was talking about how he writes his poems—and he said he’s got the poem in the typewriter, and he has a little file card that he keeps next to the typewriter upon which he writes what he actually means to say in the poem, and he said that he often ends up using the file card as the poem. Because he actually says what he means to say on the file card. I think that sounds like great advice. But I seriously doubt that is true. As much respect as I have for him, I think he’s making a point about something and it’s a good point. But I have to say I have my doubts about the veracity of that story.

JF: Joan Didion has a good essay titled, “On Keeping a Notebook.” Do you know that one?

Maria Steele: We were talking a little about memoir and your experiences from your own life, and I’m curious about your decision to make Old School fiction. Some people might wonder, “Why not memoir?” What advantages did fiction offer?

TW: No I don’t.

JF: In it, she says that the point for keeping a notebook is to stay on “nodding terms” with who you were in the past. That doesn’t necessarily mean acceptance of who you were in the past, but the notebook allows you to go back and touch that past.

TW: But, having said that, I don’t keep one. I never have. But I give that advice constantly. I don’t lie

JF: I think we see that many times, especially in introductory workshops, when students move into an explanatory mode in their writing.

There is a part of the students that recognizes where the story needs to go or the poem needs to go, but they don’t have the language yet.

That explanatory language frequently functions as placeholder language that hopefully will be replaced with narrative or imagistic language later in revision.

TW: This is a novel that takes place during a year at a boarding school. I went to such a school and had some of the experiences my narrator did.

But I made up many of the crucial events in order to make it a story.

What happened to me there wasn’t really a story. I had to invent. The minute you start inventing, even if - 63 -

you are drawing on your own experience to some extent, you should call it what it is, which is fiction. I have very little patience with novels that are masquerading as memoirs to get past the critical scrutiny of editors and, later, readers. The obvious, most recent example is the James Frey thing. But there are a lot of them. I once thought of teaching a course on false memoirs. For example, there is a writer—not really a writer, he only had the one book—a book called Fragments,

by Binjamin Wilkomirski in which he describes being caught during a pogrom during the early days of World War II, rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz with his mom who concealed him because he was really little at the time. He grew up in Auschwitz and managed to survive the war and wrote this horrific book about it. Well, Binjamin Wilkomirski is actually Swiss. And he grew up in Switzerland. He was the son, adopted son, of a prosperous doctor in Geneva and a weird guy who decided to write a book about being a Holocaust survivor. But this book was taken as absolutely serious and won the Jerusalem Prize, and all these people were coming forward saying, “I think he might be my long lost cousin.”

And this has been a pattern.

There have been several of these false Holocaust memoirs. There is one by a woman named Misha Defonseca, and another by a couple in Brooklyn. They turned out to have been made up. It’s not innocent. You can’t just say, “Well, there is always a lot of play and imagination when writing a memoir.” But when you deliberately falsify things like that, as Frey and all these writers did, you feed a skepticism about people’s witness, especially in relation to the Holocaust. It is very pernicious because there is a whole industry of Holocaust denial out there, and you are feeding that beast. You are doing a tremendous amount of harm

when you do this because they will say, “See, it’s all made up.”

I had never intended for Old School to be a memoir. I certainly couldn’t have written that novel without having the experience myself, being in such a place, being in that culture, and all the questions about class, money, ambition and vocation that were raised in that situation. I was expelled, flunked out actually. I didn’t do what this guy does, but I could imagine doing it. I was very ambitious in a literary way. I well understand that people who have read This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, which are memoirs, may read this book and make the assumption that it’s a memoir that is just calling itself a novel. That would be incorrect. I put the word “novel” on the cover. It is a work of fiction. Once you put the word “novel” on the cover of a book, you really can do anything. If you put the word “memoir” on the cover of the book, I don’t think you can do anything. I think you have to stick to the story your memory tells you, which might differ from the story your sister’s memory tells her. If you’re sticking to the story you truly think is yours, then you are writing a memoir. But deliberately to invent and novelize and all that kind of thing, and to know you are doing it, then you are in different terrain, and you should acknowledge that fact.

JF: We were saying how much we enjoyed the characterization of Ayn Rand in the book. Did you get any blow back from that?

TW: Actually, No. I fully expected to because she’s a religious figure to those who follow her, like Paul Ryan in congress. Glenn Beck is a big supporter. I was a big fan when I was teenager. She offers very simple answers to very complicated problems, which is always appealing. It’s actually quite an accurate picture of her. I did a lot of research

writing the book. I did see Robert Frost when I was a boy. He came to my school and talked. Nevertheless, I didn’t rely on that. I read a lot, a couple of biographies, a monograph about his teaching, about things he said when he talked. He’d tell people things like, “If you really want to be a writer, go to Brazil.”

He’d never been to Brazil. He was very whimsical and mischievous.

But he could also be mean as a snake, that sweet looking old man.

It was intriguing to me. And Ayn Rand, I read her. Everybody I knew read Ayn Rand. Well, I shouldn’t say, “everybody.” That isn’t true. But a great many of the reading kids I knew, especially the girls. Girls were really into Ayn Rand. She had these powerful women in her work. She testified before congress. She was very influential. In fact, the the objectivist philosophy that she created provided the planks of the Libertarian Party that, of course, have been borrowed by the Republican Party as well. She continues to have an influence on our political life and our political discourse—the questions around values, our obligations to others, individualism, capitalism.

She is still a very powerful presence in this country.

Hemingway I chose because all three of these writers were in their own way extremely powerful, influential figures—public figures as well as literary figures. Robert Frost went to Russia and had a famous, scolding conversation with Khrushchev while he was there. He was an informal ambassador, and he read a poem at Kennedy’s inauguration. He was chosen to do that.

And Hemingway was the most famous writer in the world and not just famous—he created a code of conduct, a way to be in the world that wasn’t very workable for young men who tended to be attracted to it, including myself. They weren’t just big literary figures, they were also influential figures, and that was - 64 -

why I chose them. The book is also about influence—the yielding to a given influence and then the rejecting of that influence as we grow up.

MS: We see these boys compete to meet with these successful writers, and I think a lot of us can identify with the narrator’s ambitions and fears and motivations. That’s kind of an outsider looking in. Could you talk a little about your perspective as an insider, as someone whom other writers admire and probably imitate? What is it like to help shape someone else’s writerly identity?

TW: Well, I never know, thank goodness, what’s in other people’s minds. I can only imagine. But I don’t imagine out that way too much. I do work with younger writers. That’s something I do a lot of.

But I don’t know if anyone is actually trying to imitate me. I don’t think anyone is. Maybe I’m not seeing it. I try not to create some kind of school around my work. I don’t want to try to make more people who write like me. Why would I want to produce more me’s? There is quite enough of them. When I’m working with younger writers I try to figure out what it is they are trying to do and to help them do that better rather than try to conform their work to some theory of how all stories should be.

JF: (to the students) What questions do you guys have?

Audience: Getting back to something you said earlier when you were talking about taking advice from editors versus holding your ground. When you’re a young writer, how do you make that distinction? You’re still trying to find your voice, still trying to figure out who you are as a writer. When do you decide, “Okay that is the direction I’ll go,” or, “No, I’m keeping my guns where I am right now”?

TW: There is a great deal of conversation about “finding one’s voice,” and I wouldn’t suggest that as a very helpful project. I think that is something that happens to us almost by accident. What I would do is write about things that really interest you, situations, people that really interest you in a language that seems right for the story you are telling. Your voice, such as it is, will emerge as an effect of that. It’s actually something that happens to us, not something we make happen. It happens as a consequence of our attention to other things and our interest in other things. I think it is a recipe for frustration to always be “looking” for your voice. It’s like saying, “He was searching for himself.” You know what, maybe if he hadn’t been, he would’ve found himself? Maybe if he really got interested in something and followed those interests and wasn’t always looking in, but looking out and letting things seize his or her attention and you follow that interest and passion then you become a person in the service of those passions. It’s not so much as “finding yourself” as yourself finding you in a way. Through those kinds of pursuits and the kind of loyalty you develop to certain ideas and interests. It’s the same way with writing. As to the question “How does a writer know where to stand and where to go?” I still listen to advice.

I really do. I don’t shut down when I hear it. I entertain it. Basically, it’s an instinct you develop and it gets more and more refined over time.

You can start parsing out whether this is really a description of something you weren’t trying to do that the person who voiced it wishes you were trying to do. Or you heard something that helped you do that thing that you actually wanted to do.

And then you’ll develop an instinct for picking that up. It’s almost like a musical ear. You’ll develop a way of hearing what’s useful for you. It’s

something that comes from doing it a lot.

Audience: How old were you when you first got published, and what did it feel like? How long had you been trying to get published and what was that experience like?

TW: That’s a good question. I started writing when I was quite young, nine or ten years old, though not with the idea of being a writer. By the time I was fifteen, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I even wrote while I was in the Army for four years.

When I got out of the Army I went to University and wrote the entire time I was in University. I wrote a novel, which actually got picked up. I was then twenty-eight years old. It was published in England by Allen and Unwin, which was J.R.R. Tolkien’s publisher. I was just delighted with it. I was living in San Francisco when it came out. I got the novel in the mail. I bought myself a Coors across the street at the market, a 16-ouncer. I lived on Broadway and there is a tunnel that goes through Broadway, which is a big hill. I lived right at the top of the hill. There was a cement wall that ran across the street. It was very quiet—beautiful view of the bay. So I got my beer, and I went out there and sat on the top of the wall and opened my novel. I started reading it and thought, “This is terrible!” And it is! It’s a terrible novel. But it got published. I never list it among my publications.

At the time, I had really fallen in love with short stories as well. I wrote another novel, which I also didn’t like, and put it aside. Later I returned to that material in This Boy’s Life, and decided to tell it straight, tell what really happened.

Then it gave itself to me. But that was many years later. I was reluctant to write a memoir. It didn’t occur to me as something to do. I liked writing short stories and had been reading a lot of them. I got - 65 -

really lucky. In 1975 or 76, The Atlantic Monthly picked up one of my stories for a series called, “Atlantic Firsts.” They showcased the story and made a fuss about it. That really kicked off my public writing life in this country. Other publications followed, other short stories, then a collection of short stories. I was very lucky. I’ve actually had a better life as a writer than I ever thought I would.

MS: You talked a little bit about Hemingway. In the short story, “Bullet in the Brain,” you see Anders critique something to death. It brings to question sort of this malignant cynicism in the marketplace, and I’m wondering if you find that you can be as passionately inspired as when you first started writing? Is reading Hemingway today still the same as when you wanted to type out his stories?

TW: The Hemingway stories still blow me away. The same with Chekhov. The Irish writer William Trevor, the writer Katherine Anne Porter. I’ve read almost too much Flannery O’Connor. I’ve taught her so often over the years that the effect is not quite the same for me anymore. I still use her work in my classes because my students haven’t read her yet, and I can see the effect on them, and it’s wonderful. She’s a revelation. I still read so-called “classics.” I’m reading a novel right now that I haven’t read before by Maupassant called Bel Ami. I loved his stories over the years—wonderful short story writer.

He was amazingly prolific, especially for someone who died so young, like Chekov. I love reading Dickens.

I become self-forgetful. When I read Dickens there is nothing I can use in my own work except the feeling of, “God this wonderful. I wish I could do something this good.”

JF: One of the things I like so much

about a story like “Bullet in the Brain” is that when you begin with Anders, he’s cynical. I can almost imagine the impetus for the story might be, “Okay, I’m going to get back at the book critics.” But by the end it’s redemptive. The reader sees Anders return to his love of language. Is it possible to have a sustained attention on a character as a writer without generating some sort of sympathy for that character? Can you sustain that dislike for a character, or is sympathy inherent in the attention that you have given him?

TW: That is a really good question.

The very act of looking closely at another human being—even one who does terrible things, like Pinky in Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock—makes them human to you. The Roman poet Horace said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” We have that feeling, I think, when we read. That creates problems for readers. For example, the French writer Celine, who was a Fascist and an Anti-Semite, when you read him, he’s such a good writer that you feel embarrassed to like his work. But you do. He’s humanly engaging. He’s funny. His characters are alive on the page. I could go on.

Literature, at its best, has a way of encouraging a sense of human recognition, even kinship, that our habitual daily lives sometimes dim. To realize you’ve had that experience with someone you didn’t really want to have it with can be very bracing.

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J eremiah B arber

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Bio Jeremiah Barber is a visual artist and writer based in San Francisco, California. Through artistic action he investigates themes of memory and body decay, perseverance, and transcendence. He completed an MFA in Art Practice at Stanford University, where he is a Visiting Lecturer in Experimental Media Art. A former member of Marina Abramovic’s Independent Performance Group, he has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and San Francisco’s the LAB. His writing has appeared in KQED Arts and Art Practical. A recent collaboration with the theater duo Sean Donovan and Sebastián Calderón Bentin, 18 1⁄2 Minutes, will appear this summer at the Performance Studies International Conference.

Artist’s Statement I am an artist who uses action to mark time, thought, and body impressions that so quickly fade. I grew up in a highly religious home and throughout my life have studied the idea of mysticism, miracle errata, and the body as a vessel for an intangible spirit. Trained as a painter, I have an interest in alternative modes of documentation for my work: blueprints, drawings of failed performance, photographs, sculptural artifact, and video made using obsolete technologies. My installations weave these approaches together strengthening what Philip Auslander has called the “performativity” of seeing performance documentation. I am fascinated by the desire, from sacred to organic to parasitic, to impress ourselves onto the world.

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Lift/Head Filament (video still), 2011 Performance photographed by Ingrid Rojas Contreras 6 min Elm Grove, Portola Valley, CA

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I Was of Three Minds, 2012 Performance photographed by Ingrid Rojas Contreras 40 min Incline Gallery, San Francisco, CA

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I Was of Three Minds (Image 2), 2012

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I Was of Three Minds (Image 3), 2012

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Dreamburn (film and video stills), 2012 Performance photographed by Elisabeth Kohnke (Image 1), John Rory Fraser (Images 2, 3, and 5) and Andy Vogt (Image 4) 10 min 3020 Laguna St, San Francisco, CA

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Dreamburn (film and video stills 2), 2012

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Dreamburn (film and video stills 3), 2012

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Dreamburn (film and video stills 4), 2012

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Dreamburn (film and video stills 5), 2012

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Non-Existent, Come to Me, 2010 Performance photographed by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Images 1 and 3), Jamil Hellu (Image 2), and Sanaz Mazinani (Image 4) 2 hours Stanford University, CA

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Non-Existent, Come to Me (Image 2), 2010

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Non-Existent, Come to Me (Image 3), 2010

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Non-Existent, Come to Me (Image 4), 2010

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Notes Lift/Head Filament (video still), 2011: An attempt to send a lantern in the shape of my head off into the sky.

I Was of Three Minds, 2012: Incline Gallery is a space made up of three long ramps that were formerly used to push bodies up to a morgue on the second floor. For this performance, I carry a negative version of myself through the gallery and set it afire at the top.

Dreamburn (film and video stills), 2012: Dreamburn was one of several installations in a house in San Francisco’s Marina district that, shortly after the exhibition, was demolished. The house was built in 1876. The artists were instructed to use only materials found on site. For this project, I flood the basement and carry in a negative version of myself to be destroyed. Dreamburn was captured on 16mm film by Christian Gainsley and John Rory Fraser, with sound by Ryan Malloy. Dreamburn is a Highlight Gallery off-site project, and was partially funded by an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York.

Non-Existent, Come to Me, 2010: I construct a giant head to the dimensions of my own, at a scale of ten, from redwood, vinyl, cotton and monofilament. I sew myself inside and move it from my studio to the University gallery, 2 miles. The head and I collapse in parallel.

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E mily S andberg

FICTION

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Bio Emily Sandberg grew up in Iowa and now lives in Virginia. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Virginia. Her day jobs include proofreading transcriptions of the papers of the Founding Fathers for an online early access project and assisting a professor with putting together his archive. Her story “Spoon” appears in Issue 28 of Fringe. She is currently at work on a long writing project that she likes to think of as a series of “girthy pamphlets.”

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Ears

The bus is filling up fast, but there’s still a seat open next to me. I don’t normally take the bus, but my car is in the shop, engine trouble, and the only loaner vehicle available was a fifteen-passenger van—the Club Wagon, it was called. My own car is small, compact. I didn’t think I’d be able to maneuver a giant van around town without hitting something, or worse, someone. So I passed on the Club Wagon, took the bus instead.

And now I can’t stop thinking about this one particular incident—it happened on a bus some time ago.

A man took out a knife and sliced off the ear of a sleeping woman seated next to him. They were strangers, traveling across the country together. She woke up, started to scream, and he stayed calm, took out a Ziploc, slipped her ear into the bag. I don’t know what he planned to do with it, the news didn’t say. It ended with the other passengers wrestling the knife away, restraining him until authorities arrived.

I wonder what made him cut off her ear. What was he trying to say?

Maybe nothing. Maybe: My brain isn’t working right; my neurons are misfiring; my mental chemistry is out of whack. Had he been trying for a long time to say something, only nobody would listen?

Van Gogh and his famous ear: If he’d given it to me instead of that prostitute Rachel, I like to think I’d have listened and done what he’d asked—kept the ear safe, guarded it for him. Because he would’ve been giving me more than just part of his ear—also a feeling of we’re in

this together. I would’ve reveled in my new role as keeper of the ear.

Because of his colors, his lines—I don’t know much about art, least of all how to talk about it, but I feel something when I look at his sunflowers, his night-sky, his self-portrait, as if I’m somehow connected and receiving the answer to a question I’ve had for a long time without even knowing I had it. I like to think we would’ve connected in person.

Vincent and me. That I would’ve been different from everyone else he tried and failed to connect with— the women, Gauguin, the people of Arles. If only I’d been born at a time and place to encounter him…but even then, I know things might not have played out the way they do in my head. I might’ve found him insufferable. That alternate theory—Gauguin slicing off van Gogh’s ear during a fight—I might’ve sympathized with Gauguin. Even under the prevailing self-mutilation theory: I might’ve found the gesture disgusting and reacted with horror just as Rachel did, my name appearing at the top of the petition to run him out of town.

Possibly Gauguin and I would’ve run off to Tahiti together and lived there until he tired of me, everything I represented, and left, just as he did with his wife. He’d shack up with some native woman, bare breasts, grass skirt, and there I’d be, alone, preparing fresh fish and fruit meals for one.

Then, too, it’s possible neither man would’ve wanted anything to do with me, and I should concentrate harder on finding someone among the living. But still, in my mind, there’s Vincent, holding out the box lined with tissue paper, his ear nestled inside like a gift, asking… “You mind if I sit here?”

There’s a man waiting in the aisle, wanting the empty seat next to me.

He’s tall, lanky, dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, silver rings in both ears.

I let him have the seat.

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“Wanna hear my great idea?” he asks, as the bus lurches into motion.

I probably don’t. But I’ll let him tell me. “OK,” I say, “What’s your great idea?”

He shifts in his seat so that he’s facing me directly. “You know how cars have those warning lights on the dash? Well, I think people should have them too. So if something isn’t right with, say, your liver, a little liver-shaped light shows up on your forehead and you know to get to a doctor. A different light for each body part—heart, kidneys, lungs, gallbladder, pancreas, brain…everything.”

I’m not sure what to say. I think of the first car I ever had: the engine was fine; it was the ‘Check Engine’ light that gave me problems—it would come on and stay on, and after having a mechanic tell me on three separate occasions that there wasn’t anything wrong with my car, I finally just stuck some black electrical tape over the light so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

I think about mentioning this to the man next to me, but before I’m able to, he presses the button for a stop, gets up, moves off down the aisle, as if he’d boarded the bus just to tell someone his idea. Crazy, though not scary-crazy in the slice and bag your ear kind of way. I imagine that woman waking up: the pain, the blood, the little ear-shaped light blinking on her forehead, grotesque in its obviousness. Had I been in her place, first off, I wouldn’t have gone to sleep. I couldn’t have gone to sleep; really, I’ve never been able to sleep in public places. So when he came at me with the knife, I’d be up for it. I’d try to talk him out of it, convince him it wasn’t an ear he wanted, and if that didn’t work, if he was really set on an ear, then I’d take the angle that it wasn’t my ear he wanted. See how the lobe doesn’t hang exactly right? That mouse—the one with the human

ear growing on its back—it was in the news some years ago. I’d suggest he get one of those, an earmouse. I’d like one myself, I think, a listening mouse. I’d keep it in a cage on my desk and talk to its ear in my regular voice.

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T ammy R ae C arland

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Bio Tammy Rae Carland is an artist who works with photography, video and interdisciplinary materials dealing with issues of marginalization, affect, performance and comedy. She has screened and exhibited her work internationally and was recently included in the 12th Istanbul Biennale in Turkey, Seeing Gertrude Stein at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Bay Area Now 6 exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In the 1990’s Carland independently produced a series of influential fanzines, including I (heart) Amy Carter and from 1997-2005 co-ran Mr. Lady Records and Videos, an independent record label and video art distribution company dedicated to the production of feminist and queer culture. Tammy Rae Carland received her MFA from UC Irvine, her BA from The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. She lives in Oakland California where she is a Professor at the California College of the Arts and Chairs the Photography Program.

Artist’s Statement I produce photographs, film/video, sculpture and mixed-media pieces focused on restaging often marginal performances and identities that are rooted in historical and social disappearance. My research includes photographic discourse, biographical narratives, the history of feminist and queer cultural acting up as well as domestic and theatrical performativity. I am particularly invested in utilizing the repetition and reinterpretation that takes place in the theatrical arts as content and its relationship to visual arts in terms of practice and production.

The photographs selected from the series of work I’m Dying Up Here are part of an even larger body of work that consists of photographs, mixed media text pieces, cast ceramic and bronze objects and kinetic sculptures.

The work is based in an exploration of female stand-up comedians, particularly focusing on the 1960′s to a current generation of underground performers. I use a theatrical backdrop that points to the artifice of these public personas and the spectacle of performing and acting out. The photographs are entirely choreographed and not based on real performances, though formally they are constructed to sometimes pass as the real thing. By juxtaposing photographs of empty stages littered with the residuals or preparations for an act with images of performers caught mid-act and sculptures of cast stage props, the work mines the fragility, repetition, melancholy and pathos inherent in the isolation of a one-person act. Invariably, I intend to open the conversation onto a larger meditation on the fragmentation of the body, gender representation, abject behavior and the legacy of female performance.

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Bent Banana (I’m Dying Up Here), 2010 Color Photograph 30” X 40”

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Carole & Mitzi (I’m Dying Up Here), 2010 Color Photograph 40” X 30”

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Drum Riser (I’m Dying Up Here), 2010 Color Photograph 30” X 40”

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Glitter Drapes (I’m Dying Up Here), 2010 Color Photograph 30” X 40”

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Mophead (I’m Dying Up Here), 2010 Color Photograph 30” X 40”

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Strawberry Shortcake (I’m Dying Up Here), 2010 Color Photograph 30” X 40”

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Unknown Comic (I’m Dying Up Here), 2010 Color Photograph 30” X 40”

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Upside Down (I’m Dying Up Here), 2010 Color Photograph 40” X 30”

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S kott C owgill

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Bio Skott Cowgill was born in Florida, studied briefly at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Arts in Baltimore, then aimed his compass to the West. He now lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Skott works primarily in oil, painting on canvas, and an array of found surfaces. His graffiti projects can be found all over the city of San Francisco and have been celebrated in such events as the 10th Annual Clarion Alley Mural Project Block Party.

Skott’s work has been exhibited nationally, extensively collected, and has been featured in several films. His work has made appearances in the D.I.Y films Mango Kiss, Alley Ball, The Mission Movie, and, most recently, the widely circulated documentary film Beautiful Losers which focuses on the careers and work of a collective group of artists who, since the 1990s, began a movement in the art world using D.I.Y aesthetics.

All of the paintings in this folio are “Untitled” and were created in 2012.

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Clyde Mcdowell Maile Chapman John Capouya Suzanne Williamson Christy Gast Tobias Wolff Jeremiah Barber Emily Sandberg Tammy Rae Carland Skott Cowgill