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How Kate Gale is Making L.A. the New Paris

Some could argue that if Kate Gale ever left Los Angeles, the city’s literary scene would be in dire straights. Not only is she the full-time Managing Editor and founder of Red Hen Press, the largest independent press in southern California, but Kate and her press host no less than four annual reading series in L.A.: Readings at the Ruskin, Conversations at the Geffen, Readings at Boston Court and The Annenberg Beach House series. (There is also a semi-annual Red Hen reading series in New York City.) A former PENUSA President, she currently serves as President of the L.A. chapter of the American Composer’s Forum. She is on the board of A Room of Her Own Foundation, an organization that promotes and celebrates women writers and artists. She has edited four anthologies for Red Hen Press. And she has taught at several college writing programs throughout Los Angeles and beyond.

If that wasn’t enough, Kate is also an accomplished writer; her growing oeuvre includes four books of poetry, two novels, one children’s book, four librettos, and–fortunately for us–a contribution to Black Clock 6. For her work, she has received the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and fellowships from Mitchell Lathrop and The Claremont Graduate University.

Kate Gale is serious about literature and her presence in the literary landscape is profound. She took a breath to talk with Black Clock about independent publishing, editing, writing and literature in L.A.:

BLACK CLOCK: What was the motivation for establishing Red Hen Press?

KATE GALE: I wanted to make Red Hen a literary city and have a publishing company that would represent diverse voices from the wilder side of America. I wanted to make Paris happen here.

How did you envision the L.A. you wanted to mold? Do you see any of this in the city today?

No, we would need Shakespeare and Company to really be the literary city Paris was and what we have is Skylight Books which is grand, but I miss all three Duttons stores. I wanted writing happening, a humming of energy, literary salons, special hangouts for writers–of course, now we call those blogs–but seriously, we are wildly humming. We have literary mags, we have writers and we are tapping our keys and going to readings. We are a literary city. With wine.

Red Hen has a great presence in Los Angeles and is host to frequent author events and readings. What is your take on the L.A. literary community?

We’ve slowly built a presence here to the extent that there are a few people who are glad the press is here and seem to have respect for the press. David St. John is the one person in L.A. who I’ve met who has tried to make sure the press could stay here by trying to help me get a job in Los Angeles. I think it matters to him to have a press here. I have to say that I really love David for that. We have a great board and some supporters like Robert Wyman and Lisa Krueger who have helped keep the press going. The press needs to find a permanent space and hire permanent staff. We have a board member in N.Y. who is working with us on that. And I teach in Nebraska now, so that’s a start. The literary community here in Los Angeles is a bit ephemeral.

In what ways is LA ephemeral?

The L.A. community of writers is not all in one place very often. Maybe that’s why I think of us as being ephemeral. We’re split up. We can’t drive from the Westside to Pasadena because it takes so long; we’re stuck in our holes like rabbits, we never see each other.

It seems Red Hen Press is determined to advocate literacy throughout Los Angeles. How has the Writing in the Schools Program enhanced the press?

Our mission statement is all about building literacy, so we are committed to our Writing in the Schools Program which allows us to send writers into the school to teach. It makes us feel that we have come full circle when we can provide books and writing teachers in inner city schools.

Books are in need of promotion as of late. Has Red Hen been affected by the digitalization of literature? How do you feel about the move from print to screen?

It’s all good, it means for a greener printing world with smaller print runs and it means that there are more ways to publicize books with social networking and so on.

Social networking and the online literature boom has sparked a lot of new interest in independent publishing. How would you advise other entrepreneurs eager to start their own independent press?

Get together a book designer, an editor and a sales/marketing person. You need that person who understands money on board from the beginning. You have to raise money, sell books and understand business to run a press, and that piece is often left out. It can’t all be about the dreamers.

On that note, are there any hidden troubles independent publishers don’t often reveal about the process?

How alone it feels. You have to be able to raise the wheat yourself. It doesn’t feel like being part of a large supportive community, the writers often don’t understand how hard publishing is, but it’s also very clear and cold and quiet as you fly along alone in the dark.

And the hidden joys?

I love getting to meet certain fantastic writers. Li Young Lee has a presence, a quiet ticking hum in the universe. I’m glad I ate sushi with him on Sunset Boulevard.

The dream of starting an independent press is to publish work you see vital and important for the world to witness. Red Hen has a strong commitment to literary work. As Managing Editor of the press, what do you seek most in submitted manuscripts?

Edgy wild cool work that resonates for the literary world. Dark spaces, strange spaces, hollow electric fields, I want story that awakens.

Red Hen Press is synonymous with artistic integrity and authenticity. How would you guide the aspiring writer, committed to the same ideals, toward a well-published path?

Find time every week to write and then don’t do anything else. Write like you make love, like nothing else exists. Write on a schedule, mail work on a schedule, ignore rejections, breathe.

You have quite an accomplished list of publishing credits for your own work. What are you working on at the moment?

I’m finishing a memoir, I always work on poetry and then I’ll go back to my novel.

What do you hope the near future holds for your writing?

My book, Wild Horses, to be accepted and do well so that I can have the sensation of flying and feeling my wingtips touching other wings, so I know even when there’s air around me, I’m not alone.

Your contribution to Black Clock in Issue Six, “Echo Light,” is startling and beautiful. The piece really resonated with Black Clock’s mission to showcase innovative writing. Red Hen Press and Black Clock are similar in that both are committed to promoting cutting edge literature. Black Clock fans should find a natural lineage with the work published by the press. Which Red Hen Press authors would you recommend to fans of Black Clock?

Chris Abani, Percival Everett, Doug Kearney, Camille Dungy, Kate Coles, Brendan Constantine, Peggy Shumaker

Be sure to visit the Red Hen Press website and Kate Gale’s blog for more insight from the mind behind the press. If you are in Los Angeles and haven’t attended one of Red Hen Press’s readings, you should catch up: The next Red Hen event will feature David Mason, William Archila, and Alberto Rio at Pasadena’s Boston Court on November 15, 2010.

by Katie Manderfield
an MFA candidate at CalArts & Associate Editor for Black Clock constructing an experimental literary journal for women; her work has been published/ is forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, 3:AM, and dogmatika

Sitting for a Spell with Francesca Lia Block

An author of tales that court the poetic through the lives of those who inhabit edges and in-betweens, Francesca Lia Block is prolific and steadfast in her drive to give voice to those who could use a little more noise. Best known for her groundbreaking Weetzie Bat books (also known as the Dangerous Angels series) in which characters transcend stereotypes and prejudice within a fertile, magical realist landscape, Block writes what have been deemed “contemporary fairy tales with an edge” that have garnered her no small amount of controversy. For her work, she’s received the Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award and the Phoenix Award, as well as opportunities to develop a show for MTV and a screenplay to put Weetzie Bat on the big screen. No one else makes Los Angeles—where Block has spent very nearly her entire life—and the maladies of modern life so tangibly mythic, so paradoxically abrasive and fecund. Black Clock had a chance to speak to Block this summer about what makes her tick.

BLACK CLOCK: Your work is full of subcultural presence, and illuminates both the gritty and the mystical in those who eschew the mainstream. How do DIY and punk ethics, specifically, influence your life and your work?

FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK: I was a teenager in the late seventies and the culture didn’t excite me until punk came into my life. I remember seeing the Go-Go’s at the Whiskey when they were little punks playing really fast and rough while the boys slammed in front of the stage. It changed me in some important way. I felt that you could be a beautiful girl but also as wild and tough and free and alive as the boys, that you could be an artist and not be perfect, that you could be different and still find your people, that you didn’t have to listen to Styx and Journey and wear expensive jeans and have long shiny blond hair. I’ve loved alternative culture, in all its forms, ever since.

The city of Los Angeles has figured prominently in your writing. Do you think any other cities in the world could feed your creativity as much as L.A. has?

I think that wherever I would have grown up would have fed my creativity because I think I basically would have died if I didn’t get to write. In fact, the more sterile my environment the more necessary it might have been for me to find magic in it. That said, L.A. is the perfect city for me because it is so full of toxic beauty and that contrast really feeds my work.

You have characters with names like “My Secret Agent Lover Man” and “Witch Baby;” you have books with titles like The Magic of Forgetting and Missing Angel Juan. What guides you when you’re dreaming up names?

I choose names mostly from my subconscious but also from things I see around me. Like My Secret Agent Lover Man came from graffiti written between the tiles in the grout at the UC Berkeley library. “My Secret Agent Lover Man you will never read this.” There are names everywhere, inside of us and outside of us, waiting to be discovered.

I’ve read that you use Tarot cards in your writing process—can you explain how this works for you?

The ancient, iconic images of the Tarot can be very inspiring. I feel tapped into a collective unconscious when I use them.

Your writing is often a sensual feast, rich with unexpected flavors and images. What feeds your senses when you’re writing?

The things I love–people, flowers, music, food, movement, dance, art, sculpture. I am constantly grateful to my senses, especially after suffering some severe vision loss lately.

What do you think it is about Weetzie Bat, your most infamous character, that allows her to remain relevant over twenty years after her first appearance in print? Is it her? Is it you? Is it your ability to slink into any of social media’s dresses, be it Twitter, Blogspot, or Facebook, and flaunt it?

It’s not me. It’s all her. I tapped into something with that character–a quality in certain young girls who see the magic and beauty and wonder in the world around them no matter what. They see it more, perhaps, the more they have suffered. They keep coming, each new generation. I was once that girl and I still have some of her in me. Yes, I use social media to remind people about her but she has taken on a life of her own as a reflection of some of my students, my readers, my muses (often these are all the same young women).

What’s your response to people who believe fiction to be indulgent, and thereby of little consequence?

Firsthand experience: fiction saves lives.

by Patricia Cram
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Jonathan Lethem Goes West

To his fans, Jonathan Lethem is one who always pushes into new avenues of form and genre, of kidnapping kangaroos and scouring the Zendo for a killer, and he is certainly synonymous with New York. With novels like Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude that have so deeply imbibed into their pages the grit of New York City, it is impossible to separate the two. Chronic City, Lethem’s latest novel, returns to New York once more, but this spring he is set to do the unthinkable. Brooklyn will be sure to bemoan turning Lethemless in 2011 when he trades in New York for Los Angeles as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College.

BLACK CLOCK: You have had a long relationship with Black Clock, dating back to the first issue. What was your initial draw to the magazine and what has kept you coming back?

JONATHAN LETHEM: So simple: I’m a fan of Steve Erickson’s, going back to before I’d published fiction myself, and well before I had the luck of becoming his friend as well. Only “fan” puts it too gently: Steve’s accumulating shelf is of the great flares burning out there, lighting up the landscape, and when I heard from him that he wanted me involved in his magazine, I couldn’t imagine saying no. That it turned out to be a really singular and strange and effective publishing adventure wasn’t any kind of surprise. It’s made a great home for some work that might not have fit anywhere else, and a couple of the pieces that were effectively ‘commissioned’ for Black Clock are among my favorite of my recent short works.

Last year you did a series of readings in which you read the entirety of your newest novel, Chronic City, over eight days in New York City. A pretty astonishing task, one that makes my vocal chords ache in sympathy. How did it work out? Is it something you would like to do again?

It was a great one-of-a-kind experience, and I’d never do it again. I made the decision based on several terrific misunderstandings with myself and the actual length of the book.

On your website (http://www.jonathanlethem.com) you have a project running called Promiscuous Stories, where you welcome other artists to lift your stories and lyrics. Art influences art like nothing else can, and I believe it to be a vital part of the creative process. How did you come to the decision to “let go” of some of your work? What sort of response have you gotten?

Well, of course there’s been all variety of results by now, as was pretty much inevitable given the shotgun-blast/messages-in-bottles nature of the internet, and the project itself: good art, bad art, interesting attempts, unfinished works of great intrigue and promise, a few altered careers and opinions. Also, needless to say, loads of people have ignored the whole thing outright, as they were always also welcome to do. A theater troupe in Chicago actually renamed themselves The Plagiarists based on the thing. And there’s a very exciting “anthology film” in the works. But the important thing to say about the kind of letting go that I did on the site is that it isn’t actually an original or particularly unusual gesture. In fact, writers (and other artists) are constantly giving other artists (often filmmakers) “free options” on things all the time, without making a big deal of it. And, conversely, artists of all kinds (including writers) are taking the resources and inspiration and even the plot details they need for their own work from the work of others, without even asking, let alone seeking a formal permission–also without making a big deal of it. What my project consists of is framing these activities so they become visible. Making a big–or at least a medium–deal of it, in order to make a political point that these aren’t shameful or incidental or wayward transmissions, but in fact something to celebrate as central to art practice per se.

You have a strong opinion on “plagiarism;” can you speak a little about that?

I use the word provocatively, trying to nudge people into seeing how few of the “borrowings” they’ve been invited to become incensed about really are worth the name. Palming someone else’s efforts off as your own, covertly and lazily–even this isn’t much of a moral disaster. And most people witch-hunted as plagiarists are doing something much more honest, interesting, worthwhile, and inspiring than that.

Which writers and artists have influenced your work?

Too many to mention. A new one every day. A few go right to the bone of my work: Kafka, Hitchcock, Lewis Carroll.

It seems that everyone I speak to about Lionel in Motherless Brooklyn finds something they identify with in his ticcing. I have caught myself doing Lionel-like tics in my day-to-day life. Did you recognize ticcing as a universal act, something that many could potentially relate to? What inspired this decision on his character?

I’m always looking for metaphors that can serve as a net to catch every meaning that wanders past. Tourette’s, while I was writing that book, became a lens for contemplating zones of myself, areas of human culture, streets of Brooklyn, and aspects of human voicing I was fascinated with trying to bring to the page: insults, jokes, self-revelation in the form Freudian slips, etc. Lionel’s condition certainly also became a kind of weird verbal machine, too, for producing ticcishness in myself and others. He goes on making that impression, a decade later–I guess I got lucky.

Rumor is that Edward Norton is set to adapt, direct and star in Motherless Brooklyn. (An absolutely brilliant choice, I think.) What has been your experience with the adaptation so far? Are there any plans for future adaptations for the big screen or otherwise?

I mostly stay away from the work–or non-work–that goes on when my books enter the film adaptation process. It usually isn’t something I can be particularly helpful with. And the frustrations that go with that work get under my skin very easily. So, I don’t know where the Motherless Brooklyn project stands, or if it stands at all. It might be on its knees. Or taking a nap. Some other books have new dance partners just now: Fortress of Solitude, As She Climbed Across the Table, Gun with Occasional Music and Girl in Landscape. It all sounds very exciting, and it arouses all sorts of silly feelings in the author, but what we’re really contemplating consists of someone else’s–several someones–improbable and mostly excruciating art-attempts. I wish them all well.

Music comes up often in your work. You Don’t Love Me Yet surrounds a band of struggling musicians. In The Fortress of Solitude, life is very nearly dictated by music. You also had the enviable chance to interview Mister Bob Dylan himself. How does music serve your writing?

I use music as an emotional touchstone for my writing (and not only for my writing). I listen to it constantly. At the very least it keeps me still for my work, which is no small thing. At its frequent best it reminds me of who I am and why I bother. I can only hope that a handful of readers are drawn into a projected relationship to one or another of my books anywhere near as rich as my projected relationship with, say, Mister Bob Dylan. It’s actually creepy to talk about these things, but they’re what we all wish for.

The writing of liner notes takes place in both The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City. Is it your secret ambition to be a writer of such notes?

Either that or a philatelist.

Crossing genres is something you often do, moving through genres from work to work and many times merging them in a single work. In some stores your books can be found in general fiction, others mystery or science fiction. What do you think of genre boundaries? Is genre something that you dwell on during the writing process? Is there an area you would like to explore more deeply?

I started out quite naively excited about the idea of “genres,” but by now it seems more like a matter for critics than for writers–and mostly, alas, a matter for critics to mishandle. It’s at least a very confusing term to bring into descriptions of what it is I (consciously) set out to do in my work. I draw tremendous energy from all sorts of what I like to call ‘vernacular culture’–comics, animation, pulp crime and science fiction writing, rock and roll, etc.–and always will, but the sorts of novels I like to read, and write, have always been all over the high-low map, as well as drifting in and out of the publishing categories that most people are talking about when they use the word “genre.” For me, I see genres where others don’t, and vice versa. The “academic satire” (I wrote one in As She Climbed Across the Table) is a form as precise as a sonnet–now, there’s a genre. Whereas what gets jumbled up in the publishing category of SF–dystopias both evocative and pedantic, vicarious power fantasies, grindingly earnest advocacy for space exploration, etc.–doesn’t make any literary-critical sense as a “genre” — it’s more like a tradition, or an “area” (or, prestige-wise, a backwater, which is a wearisome matter to combat, but also to pretend to ignore). So, what do I think of boundaries? Useless. Descriptions, that’s what I like–fresh descriptions more than tired or received ones. But descriptions come after the fact.

It’s no secret that New York is your home. Many of your novels take place in the City, picking up different cliques to center each. Often, the City is much more than a setting, becoming a fully rounded character. As someone who has yet to have the chance to visit the City, can you describe what about New York has served as a muse for you?

Just as we write this, Claremont California is about to be my home. Which may be my best excuse, if there’s any excuse, for dodging your question. I’ve spent so many fictional pages trying to evoke–not encompass–the contradictory and ambivalent force of my ongoing reaction to that place, and to my being “from” that place, that it doesn’t feel good to me to try to come up with some reductive paraphrase. I did so too many times in the past. But you should visit.

Your latest work, Chronic City returns to New York. Can you speak about it and its eclectic cast?

I wanted to make an absurd snapshot of Manhattan in the middle of the “aughts,” and then blow it up and explore it meticulously, lavishly–my first joke about the book was that I wanted to write the book Gogol would have if he’d been commissioned to novelize Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover (the one showing the Upper West Side in the foreground, the midwest and China in the background). The disparity between the grim depth of the historical facts surrounding the way we lived between 9/11 and the economic meltdown, and the amnesiac cartoon thinness of how many of us actually lived in those years. Which sounds very punitive, doesn’t it? But as for the eclectic cast, I loved and love them all. I feel very forgiving towards even the worst of them.

For those aspiring writers, can you discuss your experience with publishing and your journey as a writer so far?

Oh, I’ve been absurdly lucky in my journey, which puts me in no position to help anyone else with theirs. Except I’d say how important it is, from the permanently and in many ways rightly defiant and embattled stance of an artist in a capitalist system, to remember that now, more than ever, the people you’ll meet in publishing are doing what they’re doing out of sheer love. If they were into exploitation, they’d find another career.

What is up next for you?

I’m publishing a tiny book about John Carpenter’s They Live in the Fall. Just barely in time to accredit myself as a “Los Angeles writer,” I hope.

by Rachel Kolb
an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Seth Greenland Everywhere

Seth Greenland is a success wherever he goes, from plays, to television and movies, and novels. Google him and find out he was an original blogger for The Huffington Post or follow him on Twitter to learn he’s just played a gay polygamist at a table reading of Big Love—he writes and produces on this year’s season—or that his third novel, The Angry Buddhist, has just sold in France. His first two books, The Bones (Bloomsbury 2005) and Shining City (Bloomsbury 2008), were both quickly optioned by movie studios. A television writer fed up with the hollow art he is forced to create to survive, an angry comedian trying to fulfill his personal philosophy of burn, burn, burn, a widowed grandmother finding solace in medical marijuana and pole-dancing, and an everyday couple hit hard by economic turbulence to whom luck is granted with inheritance of a prostitution ring are only some of the characters who inhabit Greenland’s literary world. Though some critics deem his fiction satire, Greenland disagrees, and frankly, so do we. His fiction, both timely and relevant, artfully extricates the absurd from the everyday and paints through characters who are almost instantly recognizable while constantly alive. This is not a sales pitch: just read him and you’ll see. Greenland’s wit is unmatched suggesting a personality almost ubiquitously connected to the world in which we all live.

BLACK CLOCK: You have had success as a playwright, a screenwriter for both television and movies, and now novels. Do you see this as an accidental evolution of your artistic career or simply the means of survival for a modern, professional writer? What’s next?

SETH GREENLAND: My career has been largely unplanned but to say it was “accidental” doesn’t quite get it right, either. I started out as a writer of mediocre fiction in college. Probably not much worse than what others were doing, but my work certainly didn’t show vivid promise. I was an English major as an undergraduate and to me there was no higher form of creative expression than the novel. If I thought I had the talent at the time, I would have pursued a career as a novelist, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Since I was a lover of movies (or “films” as we called them in the seventies) and I thought I might like to make them, I earned an MFA from NYU film school and set out to be François Truffaut. Unfortunately, that job was taken. Through happenstance, I found myself writing for television shows in Los Angeles. I didn’t care for the work I was employed to do and hightailed it back to New York where I began getting hired to write screenplays for what were intended to be independent films. These scripts generally wound up in the drawers of the producers who had paid for them since they were often unable to find financing. This was a source of endless consternation. You pour your heart into something and its readership consists of your agent, two producers, eight assistants (all of whom think they could have done it better), and ten financing companies. Since I had always enjoyed going to the theater, I thought I might try writing plays. This worked out well for a while. I began getting higher paid screenwriting work and that subsidized my theater career, although to call what I was doing in theater a “career” would be a slight exaggeration since that implies a certain base income; hobby was more like it. Getting these plays produced on main stages at regional theaters involved an arduous, multi-year process of development, readings, more development, a workshop and then, if the artistic director was having a good day and the moon was in the seventh house, your play might finally get produced. This routine became tiresome to me, and I concluded that the time had come to try my hand at writing a novel. I recently finished my third one, titled The Angry Buddhist, thanks for asking. When I’ve done money gigs, I’ve always simultaneously worked on something I’ve cared deeply about. This is what has allowed me to survive as a writer. That and a willingness to always try something new.

For Shining City you made your own short trailer starring you as you, your aunt as your aunt, and several girls as prostitutes. Clearly you aren’t shy of marketing. What motivated the clip and will you make another for your new novel?

What motivated me to do the video was simple math. Innumerable books are published each year, by authors famous and unknown, all of them vying for limited media oxygen. Anything an author can do to call attention to his or her book, short of self-immolation in front of the Pentagon, is fair game. Your publisher will generally do as little as possible and hope you won’t notice and bother them about it. Hence, the video, which can become a story in itself. The one for Shining City was featured in an NPR piece about book videos and that brought more attention to the book. I attribute most of the sales of Shining City to the video. So will I do one for The Angry Buddhist? Most likely. Either that or I’ll just toss caution to the wind and self-immolate in front of the Pentagon. The era of sitting back and letting the world discover your brilliance on its own is over, alas.

Bloomsbury isn’t to blame for the lack of marketing effort, is it? Will The Angry Buddhist be published by the same company?

No, it’s not Bloomsbury’s fault. It’s endemic to the business. I will restrain myself from boring you with why this is so. As for who will publish The Angry Buddhist in North America, that is still to be determined since we will not be offering the rights for sale until after the summer.

You’ve mentioned before that you had quick success finding your publisher, and both of your earlier books were also quickly picked-up by movie companies—The Bones by Sony and Shining City by Warner Brothers. Did that stem from more hustle on your part? What’s the status on both screenplays?

My novels being optioned by movie studios had very little to do with my “hustle.” Getting movie people interested in my books is not one of my superpowers. I have good representation and that is their area. As for the status of the screenplays, The Bones is in turnaround (translation: Sony is not going to make it), and Shining City is in active development at Warner Brothers.

Your involvement with screenwriting and novels has given you a curious position. Do you see any sort of influence that one medium has on the other or any other connections between contemporary fiction and film? Do you see any elements of either bleed from one to the other in your own writing?

Movies boil the idea of what a novel is to its essence: a coherent, forward-moving narrative where you want to find out what happens next. Each medium has an impact upon the other. Novels have always influenced filmmaking since they’ve provided story fodder since the beginning of the medium. The balance of action and reflection that is built into movies is borrowed from novels as well. And today you can see the influence of movies on novels, particularly in genre works where the stripped down storytelling is highly filmic and especially in graphic novels, which use film grammar and are like storyboards for movies. You can see the influence of the novel in television, too, particularly on cable series, where each season of a show will often have a novel-like arc. The one quality I notice from my career as a dramatist that bleeds into my novels is my liberal employment of dialogue which I try to use to advance the plot as often as I can.

What advice would you give young writers struggling to write good dialogue?

In writing novels, where I am generally attempting some version of naturalism, what I try to do is approximate real speech without imitating it. Real speech, with its stops, starts, and stutter steps, repetitions, tics, and digressions is easy enough to mimic but lacks urgency on the page. So the trick is to capture something that sounds like real speech but actually isn’t entirely real, by virtue of being more economical and focused. Another thing I try to get right is the rhythm between my characters. It’s the rare writer who can sustain an aria from one character while another just stands there and listens. For a dialogue-driven scene to be interesting it helps to have characters interrupt, ask questions, augment what someone else is saying, argue their point, anything to make the scene feel more alive. Finally, the characters should not sound alike. Try to give each of the characters a unique voice so that—even if the line doesn’t end with “John said” or “Mary said”—the reader will have a pretty good idea of who spoke it. A final note on this subject: There’s a terrific crime novel written by George V. Higgins called The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Writing students will benefit from taking a look at this book because the story is told almost entirely in dialogue and Higgins is a master.

Does a short piece like “Al Agonistes,” from Black Clock 9, which is written entirely in Al Gore’s interior monologue, develop from a single piece of dialogue? To that end, how do you pick what you write about?

During the run-up to the 2008 election I wrote a series of satirical monologues in the voice of John McCain for The Huffington Post. When the chance to do a political piece for Black Clock came up, I wanted to do an interior monologue in another politician’s voice. The “Al Agonistes” piece came from wanting to write in the voice of an individual whom the chattering class no longer deemed relevant, someone who felt ill-used. Gore is fascinating to me because he’s a guy who was elected President but never allowed to serve. Not to be too heavy, but his tragedy is our collective tragedy. I thought he was a great subject and worthy of a much longer piece. The man is a walking novel. I tip my hat to him.

Insofar as your question as to how I choose what I write about pertains to novels. I write about what interests me, what I think I can go on about at some length. If I have a strong opinion on the subject or an aspect of the characters or the world, that helps. And if I have a certain degree of passion about it, that can help, too. In terms of how I choose what to write about among the variegated ideas vying for my attention at any given time, that’s a process of elimination. Most of the time, I have a number of ideas whirling around in my head, some with great potential, some with less potential, still others that I would never mention out loud. They wax and wane individually over time, some gaining more heft, others diminishing. When one of them begins to feel substantial enough that I can begin writing with a good head of steam, that’s when I know I’m ready to get to work on it.

What inspired the Smart Tarts in Shining City? And is it too early to ask about The Angry Buddhist?

The Smart Tarts were inspired by an article I read in the Los Angeles Times sometime around 2005. A middle class couple in the South Bay with two young kids had been busted for running a prostitution ring out of the kitchen of their suburban home. On the surface they had this normal, bourgeois life, but of course there was far more going on than met the eye. Their plight struck me as a resonant metaphor for what was going on economically in the country and an indication of the extent to which people would go in order to survive (and this was before the economic meltdown). And, needless to say, I thought the whole thing was darkly funny.

The Angry Buddhist came about because I wanted to write about the political climate without telling a straightforward political story. The book is set during the week leading up to a Congressional election. A Congressman is running for re-election and something goes spectacularly wrong for him. The novel is about what people will do in order to survive in a world where morals are situational. All three of my books have been about that, actually.

What draws you to this theme?

I’m interested in the idea of situational morals because it’s a remarkably rich, relatable area. And it’s something people deal with in their lives every day. When someone reads a book about an ordinary person who finds themselves in a moral gray area, it’s natural to ask what you—the reader—would do in a similar situation. How would you react, would you make the same decisions, or different ones, and what lines would you be willing to cross? Do I think morals are situational, per se? I probably do, actually. An example: Do I believe in stealing? Or course not. Would I, like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, steal to feed my family if they were starving? Absolutely. But would I become a pimp, like Marcus Ripps in order to feed them? Probably not. A psychiatrist would have to weigh in on the distinction, but there it is. I’m interested in exploring the idea of right and wrong, the idea of where these notions spring from, and the price paid for the decisions we make. To me, there is nothing more fascinating.

Your novels juxtapose dark humor with very human, very real concerns. One example that comes to mind is in Shining City when your characters find themselves with a dead body and a serious need to dispose of it; as the scenario plays out, the experience is highly-bonding for the two characters. How do you find the balance between, as one review put it, “the preposterous and the plausible,” and, further than that, the satirical and the soulful?

Finding the balance is tricky because the slightest misstep can take a scene from “playing as inspired” to “playing as implausible.” What I try to do is ground my characters in genuine human emotions, and let those emotions play out in the wilder situations. I often place myself in the center of the action and try to imagine what I would do were I to find myself in similar circumstances. In the case of Marcus Ripps, his wife Jan, and the dead body in Shining City, I don’t think anything they do either behaviorally or emotionally is implausible or inconsistent with who they are as characters. Surprising, perhaps, but not inconsistent. Some critics have called my books satires but I consider myself more of a realist than a satirist. Reality, truth be told, has caught up to satire but some people still haven’t noticed.

How so?

The notion that reality has caught up to satire, all you have to do is look around. The television show Jersey Shore, the mainstreaming of pornography, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, The Birthers, the absurd things believed by conspiracy theorists on both the right and the left…great swaths of the country have accepted greatly exaggerated ideas, ideas that are completely ridiculous in some cases (Obama is a Muslim? Really?), as real and this leaves little room in which the satirist can maneuver. As I mentioned earlier, Shining City was actually inspired by a middle class couple with two kids in suburban Los Angeles who were running a call girl ring out of their kitchen. Yes, there are embellishments in the book, but the basic story is as real as the economic environment that inspired the couple to get into the sex business. So when people write that it’s a satire, I lift an eyebrow.

Do you see anything new, in art in general and in your writing, burgeoning from this?

I think that these things, while on one level horribly depressing, are all terrific fodder for fiction (at least it’s good for something). So, yes, I do see valuable art emerging from it. It’s the artists’ role to comment on this stuff and there is no shortage of craziness on which to comment, to explicate, and–not to be pedantic, but–to draw lessons from.

The mentioned NPR interview, “In a World…Where Books Are Hyped Like Movies” by Jesse Baker, may be found at www.npr.org. Seth Greenland’s trailer, and other videos, may be found on his website, www.sethgreenland.com, along with a list of upcoming events he will be attending.

by Justus Caudell
an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Making a Space with Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson is owed some karmic rewards. The publication of his first novel, Altmann’s Tongue, generated enough controversy to oust him from his teaching position at Brigham Young University, rattle his faith, and sever close personal relationships. Asked to stop publishing or risk censure from the Mormon community, Evenson opted to keep writing, leaving his position and his family behind.

Since that decision, however, Evenson has garnered a wealth of awards and critical success, including an O. Henry Award for his short story “Two Brothers” and International Horror Guild Awards for The Wavering Knife and The Open Curtain. Known as a writer who defies easy classification, he has received equal recognition from both literary and genre presses. And the payback just keeps coming: Evenson’s latest novel, Last Days, won the 2010 ALA/RUSA Prize for Best Horror Novel; his work has been adapted into a variety of other media–most recently a stage version of Father of Lies; to date, his writing has appeared in four of twelve issues of Black Clock; and he currently serves as both a professor and director of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

Evenson’s work, though consistently divisive and occasionally iconoclastic, demands to be read. An aura of mystery, in the oldest sense, permeates his writing, fueled by symbolism that seems to function outside rationality and violence that is incomprehensibly rational. Characters with innocuously simple names enact atavistically simple motivations as they drift through uncertain, but curiously familiar, settings. “The Munich Window” features one of the most despicable yet irresistible narrators seen since Nabokov, and Last Days takes readers on a harrowing trek through an underground world of obsession and self-mutilation. In a recent review of short story collection Fugue States, Steve D. Owen called Evenson “the contemporary inheritor of the newest irrealist tradition” for the epistemological incertitude that permeates his writing. Recently, Black Clock was able to chat with Evenson and explore the methods and motivations behind his work.

BLACK CLOCK: Your novel, Father of Lies, recently received a stage adaptation by director Jose Zayas. How was that experience for you?

BRIAN EVENSON: It’s always amazing for me when someone adapts my work in one form or another, just because it creates possibilities for it that I maybe didn’t see. There’re things a play can do that aren’t really possible in a work of fiction. I’m afraid I haven’t seen Jose’s adaptation yet because the only days it was up were when I was out of the country, but I’ve heard only good things about the performance from friends who saw it. I’m very excited to watch it on DVD: I’ve heard he’s done some very interesting things with darkness and staging and with the intimacy of the performance. But I’m always for adaptations. When Zak Sally adapted a story of mine into a comic, for instance, it was really great. The other kinds of adaptations I’ve had, ranging from electronic music to radio plays to an experimental opera, I’ve been really happy about.

When you’re writing, do you ever picture what it would be like if it were adapted into a different medium? The visual aspects of it?

I think a lot of my work is very visual, so I do have a pretty clear visual sense of what’s going on with a story. But I don’t think I ever sit down and think, “Oh, this would make a great movie, this would make a great this or that.” There have been four or five short films made based on my stories, and it’s sometimes really interesting to see how different the visual ideas the director has are from the ideas that I had in writing the story. But I’ve also been very happy with those adaptations as well. I think that it just expands the work. Obviously there’s a lot of openness in my work. There’s an attempt on my part to make a space that people can enter into and make their own.

That’s an interesting concept. Do you want to talk about that for a little bit?

I think there are different ways to think about writing. One thing that I try to do is think about writing as something that serves as a catalyst, that connects to the reader, and the reader ends up completing the story in some ways, filling it in. As a result I think there’s a lot of ambiguity and openness in my work. Even though there are strong visual components, it’s work that demands active participation on the part of the reader.

Does that ambiguity arise from your particular approach to writing? Do you sit down and say “I’m going to write such-and-such a story” or do you try to leave it more open for yourself as well?

Any time I have a clear idea where a story’s going before I’m close to the end, I usually don’t finish it, just because I get bored with it. So yes, I think part of the process for me is trying to do something that feels at least a little bit new to me as I’m writing it. I want a story that’s holding my interest, or a moment along the way that surprises me, or that I don’t know where it came from, that seems to have tapped into something that I don’t really understand completely. As a reader, I’m really interested in work that upsets the easy definitions I have for how a story should work. I like fiction that does things that I can’t predict, but that does them so artfully that they seem natural and necessary at the same time as they seem surprising. So I think that as a writer what I’m trying to do is get to a place where the story is something the reader is really involved in, but sometimes caught off guard by, or turned over by, or disrupted by in some way or another.

Earlier, you put this concept together of creating a space that the reader can enter into. I’ve noticed that in a lot of your recent work especially there is a lot of imagery involving geometric, enclosed spaces. Is that part of why that imagery recurs in your writing?

I think it might be partly that. I’ve always been interested in the notion of enclosed spaces and characters that are put in a position of trauma, or put in a position where they don’t quite understand what’s going on around them. I like the notion of being trapped, and the notion of being in a space that one either does or doesn’t understand very well but that one has to deal with. I think those are things that always come up in my work. I think part of it is the influence of Beckett. I really love what he does in his work in terms of the almost geometrical quality of the descriptions, and how you have in something like The Lost Ones a very careful description of a space and of a cylinder. But you also have that in a lot of his work. In something like Company, you have these moments where the descriptions seem almost geometrical. For me, I’m not really sure where that’s coming from or what that’s about exactly. It may be partly that my mother is an architect. I think it’s really an interest in spaces and the way in which we function in relation to spaces. It’s partly an interest in dwelling, and houses, and things like that, but it’s also an interest in how many spaces just feel constricted and restrained.

If you had it completely figured out, I’m sure it wouldn’t be as interesting for either you or the reader.

I’m sure that’s right. Gaston Bachelard has a book called The Poetics of Space in which he talks about the relationship of spaces, and my interest may be partly coming from that and from phenomenology as well.

Other than philosophy and Beckett, do you have any other influences outside of prose fiction? Beckett wrote some prose but he was also a playwright.

Well, a lot of the Beckett work I’m really interested in is the prose: I think he does some amazing things in his novels. But I came to his plays first. And someone like Thomas Bernard is similar—someone who is as well known for his plays as for his fiction, but does really interesting things in both. He’s really interesting to me both as a playwright and as a fiction writer. Same with Friedrich Dürrenmatt. And I read a lot of contemporary poetry, the poetry of my colleagues at Brown of course but also a great many others, ranging from well-known poets like Ashbery and Creeley to lesser known people. I don’t know if the influences are as direct there, but I’m very interested in language and the way in which language can be manipulated, and poetry’s taught me a lot about that. And film has been a huge influence as well.

Any specific films?

When I was quite a bit younger, I saw Blue Velvet, the David Lynch film, and that was really unlike anything else I’d ever seen. It really blew wide open the notion for me of what was possible with film. Since then, I’ve come across a lot of other films that I’m interested in in different ways. But that one was a film that I came to very young, and it was pretty important.

And that also has that famous scene where Kyle Machlachlan’s character’s hiding in the closet; there’s that entrapment there as well.

Yeah, that definitely has that. That particular scene I think is pretty amazing. Fritz Lang’s M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse were two other films I watched early on and have watched repeatedly. They’re very important to me as well. Michael Haneke’s films too.

I wanted to ask you about the controversy that surrounded your first published book, Altmann’s Tongue. It was a pretty major controversy that altered your life in a lot of ways. Do you think it’s helped shape the writer you’ve become since then?

Yes. Just to give people a sense of the controversy, my first book was published while I was a professor at Brigham Young University, which is a Mormon school. At this point I’m an ex-Mormon, but at the time I was Mormon. There was a student there who was not one of my students who sent an anonymous note to a Mormon Church leader saying that my book Altmann’s Tongue was evil, and that it should be banned and that anyone who had written it shouldn’t be allowed to teach at BYU. The university called me on the carpet and asked me to explain the book, and I did my best to do so. Then as time went on it became clear that they just wanted me to stop writing. And then the anonymous letter was released to the press and it became a pretty major controversy. At the time it was really irritating and traumatic, because it was my first job out of graduate school, I’d been at the school not very long when this happened, probably about a year if that. I really had to start the process of deciding if I was going to stay, and, if I was going to stay, if I was going to stop writing. Because they said to me directly that they didn’t want me to continue with writing the work I was doing. But then I found a job at Oklahoma State, and left, and have gone on from there to have a very productive university career. At the time it was hard, because I was supporting a young family, trying to figure out what to do, but in retrospect what it did for me, which I think was very important, was that it made me realize that people really would respond strongly to what I did, either positively or negatively. So I got the sense very early on that what I did as a writer mattered. I think most writers go through their career without necessarily feeling that, at least to the extent I did. It made me think very carefully about every word, it made me really conscious about what I was doing, and ultimately I think it was a kind of gift. To begin as a writer really feeling like what I was doing mattered and would have consequences.

That’s a great take on it.

(laughs) Yeah, it’s something that over time I’ve come to feel more and more. It’s partly because as time goes on, the trauma associated with that whole experience has faded a lot.

At the time, when you were writing Altmann’s Tongue, did you have any notion that it would be considered at all dangerous or evil?

I was a little surprised by that, partly because when I interviewed for the job I’d mentioned Altmann’s Tongue and explained what I was doing. The interview committee had said to me, “Well, is there sex in the book?” And I’d said, “No, there’s not actually much sex at all in the book.” And they said, “Well, as long as it’s just violence it’ll be okay.” So I went into the experience thinking that I’d checked and made sure that I was doing something that could at least be considered acceptable. So it did catch me a little bit off-guard. And in terms of violence, there are all sorts of books that are quite a bit more violent than Altmann’s Tongue. But the violence in Altmann’s Tongue is very deliberately done in such a way as to be unsettling. It’s not movie violence. One thing I was interested in doing was trying to restore a sense of violence as something that disrupts the social order and destroys the individuals that practice it, violence as something truly disturbing. And in that sense, I think that the response I got to the book from the Mormon community showed me that in fact I’d succeeded in doing that, that I’d made violence threatening again, rather than something that you could just say “Oh, if it’s just violent, it’s no big deal.”

Is that something that you’re still working on in your writing?

I don’t think it’s something I’m working on as much at this point, at least not primarily. There have been moments since Altmann’s Tongue where I’ve been interested in exploring issues of violence, and I think there’s a thread of violence that runs through my work, but the stuff I’m more interested in at this point is trauma, and the psychology of trauma, and how people respond to difficult situations. It’s closely related, but there’s a little difference in emphasis and, consequently, a little more psychological depth.

To shift gears a little bit, you’ve recently written a few books in established franchises under the name B.K. Evenson. Because you’re publishing under a different name, even though it is another form of your actual name, it seems as though you want to keep it separate from your other work. What’s the distinction you’re trying to create between that and your other fiction?

It’s not that I want to keep it utterly separate; I just want a slight distinction. I didn’t use a pseudonym, I just used my initials and last name, and I think it’s because when I started doing these things—I’ve done three things now: one is an Aliens book based on the movie Aliens, I did a short story for the video game Halo, and I just published last week Dead Space: Martyr, which is based on the video game Dead Space—it was partly that at first I thought, “Well, there are going to be people who are interested in these books who aren’t interested as much in my other fiction and vice versa, so I’ll put them all under the name B.K. Evenson so that if they liked the Dead Space book they can find the other things like it.” But the thing that I found when I was writing them was that even they’re probably not quite as complicated as much of my literary fiction (partly because I’m working with a pre-existing property, there are certain rules that they want me to follow), the themes and the ideas that are dealt with in those three pieces are really very much part of my universe. So there are scenes in Dead Space: Martyr that are pretty directly connected to what I’m doing. It just happens that there are also twisted and reanimated dead. It’s a different take. It’s very similar; I’m not ashamed of those books, but I also think that they’re not necessarily the things I’m going to be remembered for, if I’m remembered at all. At the same time, I spent a lot of time trying to make the Dead Space novel the best video game novel out there.

When you were writing those books, you said that it’s simpler in some ways. Is it sort of a relief to be able to work within an already established universe, or are you itching to get back to your more personal projects?

One of the reasons I’ve started doing these is because while the school year’s going on—I’m the Chair of the Creative Writing Program at Brown right now—it’s sometimes pretty hard for me to find the time to do sustained writing. If I’ve started something, it works really well; otherwise, it’s pretty difficult. But with these books, the people I work with want me to do an outline first, so I do an outline that ends up being fifteen or twenty pages. So I have a kind of structure that I can work with. And they’re also really fun to write, and I can give myself permission to think of it as something that I’m doing for fun, that doesn’t seem like work. So they’re books that I can write when school’s going on and when I have all these other administrative things that are taking up my time.

I’ve read before that you had an, uh, memorable experience of the first Alien movie when you were younger. Are you also a fan of the Halo and Dead Space universes, or is that more something that you saw as a good fit for your style of writing and your ideas?

The Aliens book really did fit incredibly well. The first movie in particular something I grew up with. I remember the first time I watched it, and there are moments in that movie I think are still really amazing. I’d played Halo, and was interested in it, and had an idea for something I could do which would be somewhat different than what other people had done with Halo stuff in the past. So that became interesting to me, to think about how can you take this pre-existing thing and move it in a new direction. I do this with genre in my more literary work as well. Some of my work responds to genre, whether it’s horror or something else, in a very direct way. And then with the Dead Space game, I think it’s an amazingly horrifying game, and really fun to play, and I’d played it in advance of being asked to write the novel. It seemed like a really natural fit: I could immediately see ways in which I could find a space for myself within the format of the Dead Space world. And the other thing I loved about Dead Space is that there’s this weird religious component to it, and that seemed like a good fit for some of the things I do. Religious strangeness is never too far away from my work. Like how Last Days is grounded in this notion of a crazy religious cult.

This may sound like a bit of a left-field question, but in Japan in the 1920’s, and then later in postwar Japan, there was an art movement known as Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. That specific movement is pretty contained in that area of the world, but I think I can detect a similar interplay between the erotic, the grotesque, and the absurd/nonsensical in some of your work. For instance, in “Eye” from Altmann’s Tongue and in “Invisible Box,” which was featured in Black Clock 7 and is included in Fugue State as well. Do you see those three elements working together in your writing in any way?

The grotesque is always there, I think. In almost everything I do, the grotesque is present. The erotic is there in some pieces, and not in others. Obviously “Invisible Box” is playing around with that pretty directly, and “Eye” is doing it as well, in two very different ways. The thing about “Invisible Box” is that you start in a space that seems like it’s funny, and then it gets stranger and stranger. I don’t know the Erotic Grotesque Nonsense movement from Japan, so it’s hard for me to know how to respond directly to that, but at the same time I am really fascinated by someone like Hans Bellmer, who does stuff with doll parts and erotic drawings that are also very, very strange. So yeah, I think there is some presence there.

A lot of your work can be described with “sub-” words: subconscious, although I know you don’t really agree with the concept; subversive; subjective; subterranean; finally, subdermal is a great descriptor for many of your stories. There isn’t exactly a question here, but can you talk about some aspects of your writing that occur below the surface?

I mentioned before that when I’m actually working on a story if I know where it’s going and have a sense of how it’s going to play out, I’m not that interested in it. When a story’s working really well, I become very connected to the process of thinking about the language of the story, in the sense that I allow my conscious mind to be distracted by the language of the story and the way in which the language is working. And that opens something else up, and allows certain things to organize themselves or certain things to happen that wouldn’t necessarily happen otherwise. As you’ve mentioned, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the word “subconscious.” It’s not that I don’t believe that there’s something that exists below the conscious mind, it’s just that I question the formal way in which we think about it. It’s partly that that word, “subconscious,” culturally has so much baggage that goes along with it. But at the same time, I really do feel that good writing for me is something that accesses something that exists that is very hard to get at in other ways. Outside of artistic media, it’s very hard to get at. For me, when a story’s really working well, something is going on with the language, and the rhythm, and the sound of the piece, as well as the way in which different regimes of meaning are crosscutting, that ends up connecting to the reader on a subdermal or subterranean—whatever you want to call it—level, that kind of plugs into you in a different way than information does. And that’s what I’m interested in: thinking about writing as something that’s intensive or affective, as something that is short-circuiting some of the things that are seen as the norm for us in terms of our day-to-day confrontation with language.

Is that part of the reason that you draw influences from the horror genre?

Probably, yeah. I think it’s partly just that horror is so interested in mood, and creating a certain kind of mood. It’s a very curious genre. Horror for me is really defined by creating a certain kind of mood. And that mood, also, when it’s done at its best, ties into basic fears that we have and explores things that we generally leave covered up. My work has always had one foot in literature and one foot in horror, and it’s really interested not in being in one camp or the other, but in straddling and trying to use as many different sorts of things as I can to create an effect for the reader that’s intensive in the same way that experience is intensive. I think that fiction can be experiential. You feel, when you read a story that’s intense and very good, that you’ve actually experienced something. Good fiction should be able to have that effect, should be able to increase your heart rate, should be able to make you feel like you’ve lived through something.

You’ve been a frequent contributor to Black Clock. What is it about the magazine that draws you back?

There are several things. One is the design of the magazine: I think it’s incredibly nice-looking, very beautifully done. I also think that Steve Erickson, the editor, has made great choices and has good taste. So I always feel like I’m in exceptionally good company when I’m in Black Clock. One of the appeals for me is knowing, even if I don’t know for sure who’s going to be in the issue, that I’m going to like the work that’s there, and that I’m going to respect the aesthetic that’s been used to assemble the work. It’s that, as much as anything.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
an MFA candidate at CalArts

A Long Talk With Lewis Shiner

The task of providing some introductory overview of author Lewis Shiner’s life and career is, while not quite Herculean, certainly daunting. Shiner might be characterized as primarily a pop artist-cum-magical realist, or a sympathetic but sharp-eyed chronicler of American subcultures, or even a futurist (if a futurist of a somewhat grim outlook.) His fiction, both in its form and content, is entangled in complicated relationships to music as well as comic books and graphic storytelling. And Shiner has been cast in various roles throughout his writing career: early on, as one of the “founders” of the cyberpunk aesthetic; mid-career, as one of the first writers to embrace fully the alternative economies of the globally-networked world cyberpunk had prophesied back in the 1980s. Perhaps Shiner is one of the last, true “working writers” in America, the kind of hammer-it-out-at-the-Selectric guy slogging down the road from small magazine to small magazine to publishing house, the landmarks that now sit scattered and largely vacant, like ghost-towns-in-waiting on America’s literary map. Yet Shiner has clearly yet to exhaust his ambitions, and he remains just as much a pioneer as he’s always been, a model for who and what the 21st Century writer will need to be in order to survive in this new wilderness. Let’s assume, then, that we can say that Lewis Shiner is all of these things. Which, I would argue, and as his status as one of the earliest contributors to the magazine proposes, Lewis Shiner is a prototypical Black Clock author. In other words, intensely independent, and in every respect.

The following interview was conducted via email over the first two weeks of June 2010.

BLACK CLOCK: What are you working on right now?

LEWIS SHINER: The first thing on my to-do list is to finish setting type for a reprint of my novel Glimpses. What’s happening is, I’m bringing my entire backlist back into print, thanks to the good graces of my publisher, Bill Schafer at Subterranean. He’s letting me design the covers and set the type for all the books so that I can get exactly what I want. Black & White and Deserted Cities of the Heart came out last December, and we’ve got Frontera all set to go as well. We were originally going to save Glimpses for last, as that’s the book that I get the most fan mail about, but then something came up.

Which was an audiobook version, done by Stefan Rudnicki of Skyboat Road Company. Stefan is another really loyal supporter of my work, an award winning producer, director, and actor who did a wonderful job on my two previous audiobooks (Say Goodbye and an anthology called Missing Persons). Stefan is determined to get something happening for me in the audiobook market, so we wanted to get a paperback edition out there to support what he’s doing.

So once I get the typeset and the cover finished for Glimpses, I’ll wrap up Frontera and get that off to the printer. Then I’ll get back to finishing the final draft of a new novel called Dark Tangos. It’s set in Buenos Aires in 2006 and 2007 and deals with the fact that Argentina has only now gotten around to putting the guys on trial who actually implemented what they called El Proceso back in the 70s—the Dirty War, where they kidnapped, tortured, and murdered an estimated 30,000 people, most of whom were never found. The protagonist is a guy from the U.S. who gets caught up in all this political stuff because of someone he meets while dancing tango.

Once I get that done, I’ve got a new novel in the planning stages that I’m excited about. If it works out, it’s going to be huge, like 1000 pages, covering 40 or 50 years, cast of thousands, all that kind of thing.

All of this while working my day job and taking salsa classes and trying to keep up with my friends in email.

I’d be interested to learn more about how you came to be associated with Subterranean. When and how did that relationship begin? It also sounds like Subterranean has granted you a level of creative control over your work rare in the publishing industry. Is that fair to say? And, if so, how has your experience with them in this regard been different from your past experiences with publishers?

Bill first approached me in the late nineties with the idea of doing a story collection. It so happened that I had been holding back a batch of stories for just such an occasion, and it was clear that I wasn’t going to get a major conglomerate publisher interested in it. But I had a very clear idea of what I wanted. The stories were all mainstream or slipstream, and I wanted a look that reflected that. I’d also had a number of bad experiences with covers, the most recent, with Say Goodbye, being the worst. St. Martin’s had agreed that their first cover proof, which I called the “glowing alien hand” cover, was a complete dog, but then they came back with what I called the “Nicaraguan rape victim” cover. This one was so bad that I threatened to pull the book and return the advance unless they dropped it. Their third attempt, which had nothing to do with the book except that it had a woman in it, was bad, but at least it wasn’t an outright insult to the readers, so I had to go with it.

Say Goodbye was also my first experience with type design. They sent me a proof of what their designer had come up with, and I made a counterproposal. The designer worked up my specs, showed both designs to his boss, and his boss picked mine.

So I told Bill I would love to do a collection, but I had to have absolute control over the cover and typeset. And, remarkably, he agreed. He set up me with Gail Cross, his designer, and we worked really closely together. She totally got into the project, to the extent of building this huge, beautiful sandcastle in her driveway and Photoshopping it into a beach scene that we picked together. She consulted me on absolutely everything, a dream experience for me. And the best part was that Bill and Gail were really happy with the results as well. This was Love in Vain, a book I am still really proud of. And Bill and Gail and I got to be friends in the process.

The book came out in 2000, as I was working on my next novel, Black & White. That one took eight years to write, and I have to admit I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder when the time came to market it. This would have been the summer of 2007. I made a list of six top agents in New York, and I had a recommendation to each of them from either an important client or a close friend. When I didn’t get the response I wanted, I took the book to a handful of publishers that I knew well enough to approach without an agent. That didn’t work out either.

So I went to Bill and asked if he’d take a look, and he loved it. Because things had turned out well with Love in Vain, I was able to push a little harder and ask to actually design the cover and set the type myself. Bill made Gail look over my shoulder all the way, and she basically taught me how to do her job—how generous is that? And I got what I wanted.

The thing about working with Bill—aside from the fact that he’s a tremendously nice guy—is that he is very, very good at what he does. He knows who his customers are, he knows what they want, and he can predict pretty accurately how much a book is going to sell. As a result, he’s making a profit while the conglomerate publishers are losing their shirts. And he’s making much nicer books than they are—sewn spines, cloth covers, beautiful painted dust jacket art. The difference between working for a company that’s making money and one that’s scrambling in desperation is huge.

Another thing about Bill is that he trusts his own judgment. That’s pretty rare in New York publishing, where how they feel about a book is tempered by the author’s track record and what everybody else in the company thinks. Bill, to my everlasting gratitude, likes my work. He doesn’t care what category it gets filed under, and he can set his print runs to accommodate the size of my audience.

Neither Bill nor I are going to get rich from this deal, but I get great looking books that I’m really proud of, and I think Bill is at least breaking even on me.

Final book design is something I think many (beginning, in particular) writers don’t give much thought to, only to learn too late and rather unpleasantly how important it actually is. The novel is more than just the words on the page, ultimately…

What was the best creative experience you ever had with a major publisher?

Purely in terms of a creative experience, I would have to mention Slam. My editor at Doubleday was Pat LoBruto, and he and I just clicked. He totally got the book, and had wonderful suggestions, and we spent some great hours on the phone together. We’re still friends today. Unfortunately he was not there during the production stages, where there were lots of problems. Like, I had to rewrite the flap copy hours after getting out of oral surgery because what they had was unspeakable and they didn’t show it to me until the last minute. And Chip Kidd—who is an outstanding designer—had a bad day when he did Slam and got the brilliant idea of doing ragged right margins on the right hand pages, and ragged left margins on the left hand pages. The only problem being that ragged left destroys the paragraphing. Fortunately one of the editorial assistants smuggled me out a preview of the typeset, and I called my new editor and showed him at least two places in the first ten pages where it was literally impossible to tell who was speaking, to the extent that the meaning of the book was changed. And he backed down before I had to go to the wall, but it was another of those incidents that took months, if not years, off my life.

So for an overall good experience, I would have to go back to the first time. Everything with Frontera was simple and straightforward. It was an SF paperback original, and they had a nice piece of art lying around by Vincent DiFate, a guy who did gorgeous paintings of rockets and planets, and they tweaked the colors so it would look like Mars instead of the Moon, and there was my cover. It was mostly red and black, which were the hot colors for paperbacks at the time, and I’d always liked DiFate’s work, so I really had nothing to complain about. My editor was Betsy Mitchell, whom I’d worked with when she was editing at Analog, and we got along well. She liked the book and didn’t ask for much in the way of changes. It got good distribution—it was actually in the rack at my local grocery. It didn’t sell very well, but I don’t think that was in any way the publisher’s fault.

Given the state of the publishing industry, i.e., crumbling (shades of that sandcastle), do you think it’s still possible for young / starting-out writers to have a comparable experience with a big house?

I think so, especially in SF. It is much, much harder to break in than when I was starting—there are fewer magazines, fewer anthologies, lower circulations, and so on, but you can still get a buzz going as a short story writer, and that creates excitement about your first novel, and editors still love that thrill of breaking a new writer. The truth is, it’s much easier now to sell a book as a first-timer than as somebody who’s got a bad track record.

In connection with Love in Vain, you mentioned your work in the context of slipstream. But that is not the only genre in which you work. How would you describe your relationship to genre?

I seem to be the only person around who doesn’t care about genre. I know I’ve said this before—I think there’s more in common between any two of my books, regardless of genre, than there is in common between one of my novels and another novel in the same alleged genre. Which is to say, Frontera, which is nominally “hard” science fiction, is more like Black & White, which is a literary suspense novel, than it is like some other hard SF novel. Or to put it still another way, if you like Frontera, you’ll probably like one of my other books.

Like most writers, I write the same kind of stuff as I read, and I read Westerns, detective novels, literary novels, whatever. And I will point out that one of my favorite writers, Jane Smiley, has published a Western (Liddie Newton), a whodunnit (Duplicate Keys), a sitcom (Moo), a couple of historical novels (Greenlanders, Private Life), a Hollywood novel (Ten Days in the Hills), etc. Don DeLillo has written SF (Ratner’s Star), a spy novel (The Names), a sports novel (End Zone), all of them great books that played by (and with) genre conventions. I’ll read anything Jane Smiley writes—I don’t care what it’s about. The things that I look for in a novel—evocative prose, sympathetic characters, stimulating ideas, prickly little splinters of the real world—don’t have to do with genre.

Mr. McSweeney’s, Chip Kidd… surely Slam was one of his earliest assignments?

Kidd was already pretty famous when he did Slam. I was a fan of his, so I was doubly disappointed by what he did on my book. I’m not just talking about the typeset, but about the cover as well—here’s a novel about skateboarding and anarchy, with all kinds of visual potential, and he turns in art that makes it look like a postmodern novel of homoerotic love. But book design is a creative art, and you can’t knock one out of the park every time.

I was lucky to have great cover art for Deserted Cities of the Heart by Bob Hickson—it was commissioned by the Bantam New Fiction line, back when they were going to make me a mainstream star. But the editors and I couldn’t agree on what good writing was—they literally told me that I needed to use “bigger words and longer sentences”—so I got kicked back into the SF ghetto. I was deliberating going to another publisher entirely, but I had seen the cover art and that made me stay with Bantam, albeit in their new SF hardcover line.

And with Glimpses they got Honi Werner, one of the top cover painters/designers in the world, to do the book, and her art was gorgeous. Again, I was a big fan of hers and she would have been at the top of my list if I’d gotten to pick, and unlike Kidd, she didn’t disappoint.

Your experience seems to me to highlight one of the more fascinating consequences of publishers’ attempts make sense of a marketplace in which the book is not the primary commodity, i.e., publishers no longer rely primarily on the book, with its design, layout, blurbs, and carefully composed author photos, to communicate to the reader that not only is this a book worth reading, but here is a writer worth following. Publishers, in effect, offer less and expect more of their authors in terms of creating a marketable “brand.”

Obviously, web presence is a major aspect of such branding. And, like nearly every writer working today, you have a presence on the web (http://www.lewisshiner.com). But unique on your website is the sheer amount of writing you make available to any visitor for free, via your “Fiction Liberation Front.” Which is another way of saying that your website is less image and more substance. What gave you the idea for this project? How did it actually come about?

By 2007 the handwriting was on the wall—or on the web, if you will. Print publishing was clearly in trouble, especially as far as short fiction was concerned. And short fiction had always been a problem for me. I could sell short SF or fantasy, but I had never cracked the serious mainstream markets. Mainstream fiction in the U.S. is dominated by graduates of MFA writing workshops who now teach in some other MFA writing program. You only have to look at the biographies in the back of Best American Short Stories to see what I’m talking about. If you’re good enough, or lucky enough, or connected enough, or whatever, you might be able to overcome that, but I never did. And I am not cut out for academia.

So if I wanted to get my stuff out there where people could see it—and I did—I needed to put it online. The question was, how do I get paid? I talked to a lot of people, and the only answer anybody could give me was, “get a sponsor.” I couldn’t stand the idea of having ads for SUVs or network TV shows or Big Macs on my website—even assuming I could land a high-profile sponsor like that—so I just said “to hell with it.” It’s not like there’s that much money to be made from short fiction anyway. So I decided to be my own sponsor. It’s a way of making my day job less onerous, thinking of it that way.

Did you encounter any difficulties along the way in terms of regaining the rights to your work?

There was no problem with getting the rights to my stories—generally magazines only buy first serial rights, which leaves you free to reprint once the thing has been published. In cases like Subterranean, the online magazine that my publisher runs, where I had a new story last year, I simply link to the site from Fiction Liberation Front.

Novels are a different story, but in my case it was all part of the synergy. As I was conceiving of FLF, I was also conceiving of bringing my backlist into print (and I had been careful to get the rights back to all my novels as soon as the contracts expired). Bill at Subterranean had been reading the same studies I had, which all say that giving your book away online only increases sales of the print edition. Which makes sense—most people don’t want to read an entire novel sitting at the computer, so having the book online really serves as a teaser. Of course as the Kindle and the Nook and the iPad get more popular, that may change, but so far there is a hardcore audience that still wants a print artifact, and I am part of that audience. So with each new Subterranean trade paperback, we put the PDF up on Fiction Liberation Front.

I picked the name as a way to grab attention—ditto labeling my introduction a “manifesto.” And it worked—the bOING bOING website gave me a great plug, and I got a lot of favorable publicity in various blogs. It upped my street cred with the anarchist community, and still serves as a good hook for talking about my work.

What sort of input or reaction did you receive from other writers? Did anyone caution you against “giving your work away”?

The only real dissent was that one SF writer called me a “scab” because he thought if we all banded together and insisted that we wouldn’t put our stuff online unless we got paid well for it, we could bring publishing to its knees. Being the lefty and unionist that I am (I’m a member of the Wobblies), that stung, but I was unable to take his argument seriously.

Probably the biggest impediment was the sheer amount of work involved—all told, 67 short stories, nearly all in both PFD and HTML format, plus nonfiction, screenplays, audio, video, and two novels (so far). I was afraid that I would run out of steam, and there were periods of several months at a time when I didn’t post anything. But then somebody I didn’t know would write and say, “Hey, what’s happening with FLF?” or “When are you going to put up some cyberpunk?” and I would go back to work. Toward the end, which was January and February of this year, with the end in sight, I posted a ton of stuff, with the result that all of my short fiction (except collaborations and one story that I hate) is up there. And the collaborations are coming.

Assuming that the FLF could be described as an “experiment,” how might you describe the results?

I am really proud of the fact that if somebody wants to read one of my stories, it’s out there. So the work can stand or fall on its own merits. It would be nice to be able to make a living writing fiction, but given that that’s not happening, at least my work is available. There are so many writers who can’t say that.

Despite your association with the science-fiction, slipstream, cyberpunk etc. genres, and aside from forward-looking projects like the FLF, one theme that threads through nearly all your work is history, or, better yet, the present’s compulsion or need to intervene in the past (and vice-versa.) The plots of both Glimpses and Deserted Cities Cities of the Heart orbit around characters who can become unanchored in time (Eddie Yates in the latter, Ray Shackleford in the former) and your most recent novel, Black & White, links genealogy to larger patterns in America’s collective life in ways that recall both Faulkner and the Chandler-esque detective novel. What about history fascinates you? Has your own work as a fiction-writer—someone who “merely” makes up stories—altered your understanding of or attitude towards history? If so, how?

The present is always intervening in the past, isn’t it? That’s what memory does. On a personal level, the level of nostalgia, you get a book like Glimpses, in which one character accuses the protagonist of trying to have sex with his own past. On a cultural level, the level, say, of modern Mayans preserving the myths and cultures of their ancestors, you get a book like Deserted Cities of the Heart.

When I was a kid, history was the art of memorizing dates—which I was lousy at. So I thought I hated history. I was in my 30s before I understood that the French Revolution, which had always been in one compartment, happened in the same half-century as the American Revolution, which had always been in this other compartment. And that the American Revolution had actually helped inspire the French. And how very similar ideas about democracy had gone down two wildly divergent paths.

It turned out that I loved history when it dealt with connections and characters and concepts, and I ended up learning about history by writing about it.

At one very basic level, history is important to my writing because I don’t have a lot of imagination. When you steal from history, you get some really fascinating characters, and you get lots of background and plot and scenery. It’s your job to make these people convincing, but you get a leg up—at least in confidence—because you know they did exist, and there must have been reasons they did what they did.

Plus, you can find the seeds of everything in the modern world by looking at the past. You can really see this in some of the short stories—”Gold,” which is about Jean Lafitte, and “White City,” about Nikola Tesla, come to mind. Lafitte was actually an early, self-taught socialist, and Tesla was the prototype for the scientists who think technology can solve everything. They provide a great armature for talking about greed, or science, or any other facet of the modern world, because once you put those ideas in a different context, like the past, it lets you see them differently. This decontextualizing is what the best SF does, but I never had the patience or the skills to do that kind of world building.

Your quoting Glimpses reminds me again what a complex relationship that novel has to the American nostalgic mode. Shackleford’s initial ventures into the past are escapist, in one sense, but, ultimately, he cannot avoid taking responsibility for what he hears on his journeys into the past. Were these complications ones you set out to explore in writing the novel, or did they only begin to emerge as you began writing and—to use that language again—began to learn about these people and this world?

Glimpses had kind of a funny history. I started out to write a mainstream novel about a guy whose father died in a diving “accident” in Mexico, basically what is now the “In Transit” chapter of Glimpses. I worked on it for a year, but I wasn’t getting much of anywhere—there was something missing. There wasn’t enough story, or enough weirdness, or something, and I was not excited by it.

So I took a break and started writing a quickie short story about a stereo repairman who could conjure up lost albums. This I was excited about, and I kept backing up and adding more to the beginning of the story, and it kept getting bigger and bigger, and finally I realized I was going to have to account for why this guy needed to do this so bad, and who he was, etc. I’m not too bright sometimes and it took like two or three days for me to realize, “Hey, what if his father died in a diving ‘accident’ in Mexico?”

At that point it really took off, and when I caught up to the Cozumel section, it was now interesting to me again.

But yeah, from the start of the short story version I knew it was going to end with Ray not getting what he wanted in terms of finding the music. I knew that it was totally unhealthy to be that obsessed with the past. On the other hand, I was being obsessive myself, so part of the reason for writing the short story was to talk myself out of my own obsession.

I’m curious: how did you feel about Shackleford, the character, while you were writing Glimpses? Now that 15 (give or take) years have passed since the novel’s initial publication, and since we have now cycled through revivals of both the ‘70s and the ‘80s*, do you view Shackleford or that novel any differently?

*What is it Pynchon writes in V? That, as Americans, we seem particularly susceptible to “a great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in”?

“A great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in”… I have that too, but in this case it’s a homesickness for the years you were in high school, which I think is even stronger. And there was, in fact, something really special about the sixties. It was one of the only moments in history where the most powerful nations on earth were so prosperous that the national zeitgeist could turn to issues other than basic survival—issues like civil rights and spirituality and art. Where so many kids had so much money that thousands of bands could spring up across the country.

At the time, I was daring myself to go places I had never been in my fiction before. I was inspired by a writer named Jonathan Carroll, author of amazing novels like Land of Laughs and After Silence. There were lots of moments in Carroll’s novels that made me squirm with discomfort—it was the same effect as watching someone break down emotionally in front of a huge crowd of people. I admired his courage for being able to sacrifice his dignity in the name of honesty, and wondered if I could do that.

To that end I came up with a verbal style for the book that verged on the inarticulate. I was really going after the cadence of spoken rather than written English. And I put a lot of intensely personal stuff in there. I would think of putting something in the book and I would recoil in shame and fear and think, “Oh no, I couldn’t put that in there.” And I took the very fact that I felt that way as a sign that it had to go in.

There are certainly a lot of differences between Ray and myself—for one thing, Ray is not an artist and not a verbal person. We have (slightly) different musical tastes. I was always more of a cynic. But still, it was very autobiographical, painfully so.

In fact, Glimpses is now my least favorite of my books. There are a million reasons for that, including the fact that it evokes all these bad memories of my parents. It evokes my first marriage, which was pretty unhappy at the end. Lori is largely based on a couple of women, one of whom I had a disastrous love affair with, the other of whom I married and had a disastrous marriage with. I read the scenes between Ray and Lori now and think, “My god, you idiot, run away.”

And the very things I was trying to achieve now bother me. I don’t like the style, which seems very obtrusive. I don’t like the sentimentality. And while, ultimately, the book makes a point about the dangers of nostalgia, there’s a certain contradiction there, because it makes the point by wallowing in it. It’s like making a pornographically violent movie to advocate pacifism. It’s very clear that Ray’s uncontrollable nostalgia is literally killing him by the end of the novel, but I think most readers—and I myself—read those scenes and say, “Okay, let it kill me, I don’t care! I’m eating soul food with Jimi Hendrix in Harlem!”

Let’s talk a bit more about Black & White, your most recent novel and one for which (I’d wager) you feel a bit more authorial affection. (Though I feel that Glimpses is also, in part, about the virtues of fandom.) What motivated you to write Black & White?

I moved to North Carolina in 1996. Within a few weeks of moving here, I got to be friends with the receptionist at the place I was working, Pam Footman. She was the one who first told me about Hayti. I immediately recognized that this was a book that needed to be written, and, as usual, I went around looking to see if somebody else had done it so I wouldn’t have to. No such luck.

The initial stage of a book is like setting up a piece of screen wire in my brain and seeing what gets caught in it. The story of Hayti is the story of a highway, and that made me think of my Uncle Bob, and his quote about concrete highway embankments being full of dead bodies. Which led me to a protagonist who was a highway engineer, which led me to memories of my days as an architectural and engineering draftsman, back around 1970.

I get annoyed by some of the books and movies that deal with racism purely as a historical issue. “Gosh, things sure were nasty back then. Glad that’s over.” So it was important to me that the novel not end in the sixties, but show the same racism still going on, just in different ways. So that meant there had to be a second generation protagonist in the present day. And that led to the usual father and son issues, but it’s a little different here because Robert, the father, is only ten years older than me. Michael, the son, is much younger than me. So that changed the dynamics a good deal.

Anyway, it didn’t take long before the screen wire had enough junk in it that it started looking like a novel.

Could you talk a little more about what was happening / what you were doing / where you were in the decade or so between the publication of Say Goodbye and Black & White?

Mostly I was working on Black & White. I did a huge amount of research, including skimming through every issue of the Carolina Times, the newspaper that was published in Hayti, between 1964 and 1970. And I was struggling with the form of the book, and with personal issues, like an ugly divorce.

Plus, I was suffering an attack of this delusion I used to get from time to time that there was some way I could still make a living from writing. I took time off to write a thriller screenplay called The Next that’s about—wait for it—vampire lawyers. A natural, right? Not according to Hollywood. My protagonist didn’t pack enough fire power and kill enough people to be a real “hero.”

And I went through a phase where I thought I could make Black & White into the first novel of a police procedural series. I spent a couple of years on that. But in the end, I don’t like cops, and that proved to be a fatal handicap.

Finally, in 2004, I got laid off from my job at the same time that the screenplay washed out in Hollywood. I sat down and thought, what would I write if I knew absolutely that it would not get published? What would I want to write just for its own sake? And the answer was Black & White, but in its original incarnation, as a literary suspense novel. It took me five months to find another job, and in that period I got a good running start on a draft of the book that was close to the final form.

There was this perception that Black & White was some sort of “return,” but really, I never left. I’m just slow.

I want to go back to something you mentioned in your last response, which I think is superb advice for all writers, published and unpublished, seasoned as well as aspiring, traditional, experimental and “popular”: “what would I write if I knew absolutely that it would not get published? What would I want to write just for its own sake?” Yes, write that.

If you could unmoor yourself in time and deliver some advice to the young author you were, what might it be?

Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything I could say that would help. I already understood that I would probably need some skills that I could parlay into a day job. I could tell myself to give up, that it wasn’t going to work out, but I wouldn’t have listened. I can’t think of anything I could say that would lead me to anyplace but where I am.

As a kind of belated follow-up to the genre question… and prompted by your mention that Black & White at one time led the life of a police procedural… one of the aspects of your work that has always impressed me is that, while you are definitely a novelist of ideas, you are also not afraid to be a novelist of action as well. (I’m thinking particularly here of Deserted Cities of the Heart.) Things happen, there is real, external conflict, there may even be gunfire and explosions, but these elements are just meant to divert the reader until the next “meaningful” (i.e., “literary”) passage.

I don’t think of the action sequences in my books as diversions so much as physical manifestations of the ideas that are in conflict. In Deserted Cities of the Heart, for example, you’ve got the Fighting 666th, this rogue offshoot of the US Army, you’ve got the Marxist rebels, and you’ve got Eddie as some kind of new age messiah. How are these ideas going to work themselves out in the real world? Not by a televised debate, that’s for sure. If you don’t put Eddie’s ideas to the test in front of live ammo, you’re not being intellectually honest.

Likewise in Black & White, it’s well and good to talk about racism, but it says so much more to be staring down a couple of hundred guys with white hoods and axe handles. It’s the same debate, but now we’re playing for keeps. Now you can feel what I’m talking about, not just understand it conceptually.

In that sense, your novels feel very cinematic to me. Have you been particularly influenced by film?

To me there’s a big difference between the kind of confrontation I was just talking about and your typical car chase in a Hollywood movie, which resolves nothing, reveals nothing, just wastes your time and leaves you right where you were before you started.

I don’t think I’m an especially visual writer. I try to put myself in the scene, but the details I come away with are as likely to be smells or sounds or physical sensations as they are visual images.

I am probably less of a film fan than anyone I know. I haven’t been in a movie theater in seven years, go months at a time without even watching a DVD, don’t have cable. On the whole, I’d rather read. These days my girlfriend and I like to watch movies in Spanish to practice the language, and we’ve seen some great ones, especially from Argentina—El secreto de sus ojos, Hombre mirando al sudeste. But I hate pretty much everything from Hollywood because it’s so violent and so loud and so predictable. And that’s just the comedies. [apes Rodney Dangerfield, tugging on his tie]

Back in the early ‘90s I watched some movies with a friend who’s a film student, and he showed me how absolutely everything is telegraphed in advance in a Hollywood movie, by the music, by the characters’ reaction shots, even by the cinematography. My favorite example is from James Cameron’s Abyss—Cameron is just so Hollywood. There’s this big moment where the flying saucer is going to come up out of the Abyss. The camera suddenly pulls back, and here is this tiny guy standing on the edge of the cliff, and you know, beyond any question, that a) the ship is about a second and a half from appearing, and b) it will exactly fit the dimensions of the frame. No surprises here, everything by the numbers.

Is screenwriting anything you’d be interested in getting into again?

Despite everything I just said, I like writing screenplays. I like the rigid structure, love that moment when the course of the movie changes at the end of first act. At one point, when I was still trying to do Black & White as a cop novel, I worked on a screenplay version for a while, just to tighten the structure and figure out the ending. And it really helped.

So yeah, I’d write a screenplay again, but only if somebody paid me to. And that’s not likely to happen. Hollywood and I just don’t see eye to eye.

It’s amazing to me how many aspiring fiction writers seem to give little consideration, as you say, to how ideas will play out in actual interactions and circumstances. Everything is internal to the characters, and, even if the world around them is vivid, it is usually only so in that that world is a reflection of their internal states.

But to turn some attention to states of another sort: of all your novels, Slam seems to me the most grounded in Texas and quintessentially Texan experiences. Though not a “native Texan,” how important, if at all, was your experience growing up in Dallas in your growth as a writer?

I think it would be hard to find a city with less personality than Dallas. It was settled in the first place because it was a convenient location to put up a few banks—there’s no natural beauty, and no particular geographic advantage like the port in Houston or the river in Austin. It’s just a bunch of suburbs, with an architectural style so dull that a friend of mine used to call it “Texas Borax.” So my stories set in Dallas tend to be about traffic jams and urban sprawl.

I totally agree with you about Slam. Even though there are regional writers that I love, like Thomas McGuane and Frederick Barthelme, and even though I have dear friends who write books that are very Texan—Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett and Marshall Terry are obvious examples—Slam was the closest I ever got to a real Texas novel.

If the setting is vivid in Slam, it may be because, unlike Dallas, the Texas coast has so much personality. It muscled its way into the book, like it or not. But you have to remember that I moved constantly as a kid, an average of once a year. I was 13 when we first moved to Texas, so even though I “identify as a Texan” for want of any other designation, I’m not a “real” Texan. Whereas somebody like Joe Lansdale is Texas through and through. I think he takes a coffin full of Texas dirt with him when he travels so he can sleep in his native soil.

Even though I lived in Dallas for 15 years, it was never home. When you ask me what the word “home” conjures for me, nothing comes to mind.

The ‘80s and early ‘90s seem, in retrospect, to have been a time during which “regionalism” had some literary cachet. Like, it might actually have been to a writer’s advantage to be from or based in a place neglected or overlooked or dismissed by a good chunk of the rest of the country. True, this aesthetic could lead writers into a desperate preciousness, but—and Joe R. Lansdale strikes me as a great example—it could also inspire writers to be much less beholden to any of the rules and pieties associated with “literary fiction.” Has that been lost as literary culture has continued to be more and more concentrated in large, NY-based publishing houses? I don’t know. But it does seem more and more difficult for authors to make a case for certain coordinates having a literary presence, Dallas being one of them. Yet Dallas is wrapped up, and in complicated ways, with Texas and all its mythos. Go figure.

I am a native Dallasite, and I’ve set multiple pieces of fiction “here,” but I have no illusions about the place. Though it has its hidden pockets of weirdness, it can never be as fringe as another place also characterized as plastic, vapid and crawling with those people Dr. Thompson dubbed “greedheads”: Los Angeles. Which leads me to my next question: could you talk a little about your association with Black Clock—which is both very much connected to the L.A. literary community and national in its ambition / scope—and what your experience has been as a contributor to the magazine? How did you come to be associated? What is it like to write for the magazine?

Steve Erickson is the reason I’m involved with Black Clock, plain and simple. He contacted me when he was planning the second issue, the “lost music” issue, and asked for a story because of Glimpses. I’d been following his work since Days Between Stations made such a huge impact back in the mid-eighties, so I was really flattered that he knew and liked what I was doing. I pitched him an idea off the top of my head, about the mysteries around Glenn Miller’s death, and he told me to go for it. I sent him an email when I started to actually write it and realized that it was going to be really long, like 15,000 words (which is what it turned out to be). He just said, “No problem. Write it.” He had a couple of minor suggestions when I turned it in, which were quite sensible, and didn’t freak out about the length, which is way in excess of what the magazine usually publishes. I got to read proofs, which is important to me, and the magazine itself looked great, so all in all it was pretty much a perfect experience. You don’t get a lot of those as a writer.

So when I finished Black & White, I wanted to get some literary credibility for it. Steve offered to print an excerpt in Black Clock (which he did, as “Wonderland” in issue #8), and it was again a really happy experience. If I wrote more short fiction, I’d be knocking on the door more often, but my ideas tend to be novel-length these days.

For somebody in my situation, to get the support and encouragement of somebody like Steve is huge, and I can’t thank him enough for the help he’s given me.

As a novelist, how would you describe the health of the novel (as a form) right now? Where do you see the novel going in the next decade? And where do you expect to be then?

I expect to be sitting here at this desk, writing away—when I’m not at my day job, which I hope I’ve still got. My books will all be available through Amazon and through Fiction Liberation Front, and if my body’s willing I’ll still go out dancing once or twice a week. It’s not the future of riches and fame I originally saw for myself, but it’s a future I can live with. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.

I am so out of touch with any kind of literary establishment, I can’t tell you how healthy the novel is right now, let alone what it’s going to be like in ten years. Certainly memoirs are all the rage right now, though their appeal is lost on me. People surf the net and watch TV instead of reading. Critics in the New York Times Book Review regularly trot out all the old postmodern clichés about fiction being irrelevant.

But I believe we need narratives to make sense of our lives and our world. I know I personally start pining for a good novel if I spend too much of my reading-time on research or other non-fiction. In the last few weeks I’ve bought brand-new novels from Jane Smiley and Lionel Shriver and Ted Mooney (in hardback, from my neighborhood indie bookstore), so that reassures me that at least for now there’s enough supply to meet my demand.

Ten years from now? I don’t know what form it’ll be delivered in, but yeah, I think the novel will outlive the people who keep eulogizing it. I know a good number of people in their 20s and 30s who are passionate about literature, and, even if they have to circulate PDFs in email, or whatever the equivalent is in ten years, they will still want it.

As will I.

Lewis Shiner is the author of six novels, including Glimpses, Black & White, and Deserted Cities of the Heart. His shorter work has appeared in Black Clock, The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, The New York Times, and many other publications, and was recently gathered in Collected Stories from Subterranean Press.

by Joe Milazzo
an Assistant Managing Editor of Black Clock and Director of Community Education and Outreach at The Writer’s Garret in Dallas, whose writing has appeared in Electronic Book Review, Tea Party, In Posse Review, Drunken Boat, Antennae and Black Clock

PRINT SNOT DEAD: An Interview with Betty Nguyen

Media assassin and cultural glass blower Betty Nguyen makes death-of-print doomsayers eat their words. As a part of the Levi’s Workshop 2010 summer series, Nguyen—whose traditional titles include curator, art director, and founder and editor of First Person Magazine—has created a contemporary library that offers the public “a diverse sampling of anything artists are noting, coming across, doodling, making right now and flipping upside down into your own message… In a backlash to the world of internet, $60,000 Italian art catalogs, or life commitments, it is just to give people the opportunity and window into another’s life, to read something new and connected to a global consciousness of sharing ideas in one place.”

Unofficially called Print Snot Dead, Nguyen’s project is an oasis in a sea of announcements from across the country of library operation cutbacks and closings due to drastic budget reductions, of bookstores both small and large struggling to survive or shutting their doors, and of articles and editorials bemoaning the death of the printed object which, most recently, is being blamed on the iPad. Which begs the question: What makes Nguyen’s library stand out? Afterall, its intention is on the more humble end of the spectrum; its model of providing a public space where people can read for free is not new and in many communities in danger of extinction; and go into almost any independent bookstore and you’ll stumble upon a section reserved for zines, chapbooks, and other DIY printed matter.

Of course there’s the fact that like placing vintage plastic-framed glasses on the face of Johnny Depp, setting up Nguyen’s space in the newly-renovated Levi’s Workshop revamps the community library’s image from a musty, tan-carpeted, fluorescent-lit glorified waiting room filled with more dust and mean librarians than books you actually want to read, to a place of cool where hip-factor is calculated by geeking-out over a minefield of work vetted by the cultural elite. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the marketing power of a major corporate brand backing the contemporary library. Still, there is more to the project than making what’s old, new again or creating a buzz for Levi’s.

What makes Nguyen’s library exciting is that as much as it applies certain traditional frameworks, it also totally disregards elements that we have come to understand are part and parcel with them. In bringing the library into an art space, Nguyen ignores notions held by a society–which generally still views writing and art as distinct fields–that the library is reserved for “books” not “art” and that the gallery is reserved for “art” not “books.” In presenting work from both visual and literary artists side-by-side in the same space, Nguyen further eschews these distinctions and dares visitors to do the same. In soliciting work that artists are not only creating but excited by and finding or exploring themselves, Nguyen places as much value on sharing uniqueness of mind and passion as on an “original work.” And in presenting the curated works in a library–where everything can and should be handled, read, viewed, explored–Nguyen invites us to abandon the customary reserve of white box gallery culture and actively engage and love the work with unfettered enthusiasm.

Black Clock recently spoke with Nguyen to gain more insight on her library–which opens its doors this Saturday, July 17th in the Levi’s Workshop San Francisco space (aka the old Slanted Door restaurant)– as well as her perspective on art and writing, First Person Magazine, the iPad, Tina Turner, and Celestial Seasonings.

BLACK CLOCK: What inspired your contemporary library and the concept of “Print Snot Dead”?

BETTY NGUYEN: Well, I’ve curated a few “zine libraries” of handmade books, as that format still is popular in the Bay Area and in the United States. And I thought I’d expand the invitation to artists. To kind of bring them back to their punk roots of making zines. And of course, “Print Snot Dead” comes from “Punk Snot Dead.” Punk was a big thing in San Francisco, and I thought of it when I was asked to curate the zine library as part of the Levi’s Workshop here this summer. But the zine library isn’t going to be called “Print Snot Dead”; that was kind of an inside joke.

It’s interesting, as their marketing Levi’s to work with the community, that the creative pinpoint here [in San Francisco] is DIY print. I know in New York, they are setting up a free photo studio. And in New Orleans, a music studio. So, they must have figured the widest audience or most popular medium here to connect with is print media on a DIY level, which I find interesting. It’s kind of a fusion of Beat poet slash letterpress/silkscreen poster art that is kind of still valued when promoting signs here or ads. Like the whole Mission Street art school, seemed like everyone came from sign-making somehow. I guess, because I have a magazine, I have always loved print. I love photography, illustration, stories, relaying, editions. I love holding something in my hands and reading or flipping. I still subscribe to a few things, to support print publications, and I love buying books.

Can you tell us about some of the work in the show?

This artist from Chiapas found me on Facebook and sent me something. It’s totally crazy. I was scared to actually open the package in the mail–it was so suspicious-looking and it was from Mexico. It’s like his diary from many years. I kind of can’t believe he sent it to me. I don’t even know where to send it back, but it’s like, 600 pages with collage inserts, watercolors, and it’s super-musty. I also got a newspaper made from Frank Benson, an artist friend in New York. It’s got no text. Just black-and-white large photos of a couple of concrete windows that have been covered with random nailed in sheets of metal chain link that creeps in from the walls, and everything’s been sprayed white to interlock the materials. It’s super-creepy, the more I look at it. One artist has promised me a pop-up book!

What has been your approach in curating contemporary libraries?

It’s a bit different, as it’s kind of more open than curating an exhibition. It’s more of an open selection of zines from bookstores and my friend who runs the San Francisco Zine Fest, and inviting artists too who have a bit of extra time for me which is nice. There’s no comment that the show is making, yet… which is something I usually tackle. And it’s not something I am developing with an artist. I am kind of open to surprises and versatility of what someone has lurking inside to put into this format. So far, my approach has been to ask, “What is on your mind?” and “Can you put that into a paper form of some kind?” That has been the only premise.

If print’s not dead, what is it?

Good question. I believe that print is now honored. It’s not over, it’s got more value. Like anything couture, or something cooked in the kitchen rather than industrially popped out of a can, print is the tried and true thing that has passed a lot of time, hands, minds, and because the process is longer, the product has more staying power. Print is permanent, until it’s tossed or burned. I like to have books on my shelves as a reference library. Do you know how many bookmarks are in my computer that I’ll probably never go back to? Maybe that’s an organizational thing, but print to me, is delicious. I like to read out loud in a certain voice to my romantic friend, and share things. I like to give away books, and pick them up. You can send a link, but what if you got a card in the mail? Does it have more of a subtext than an emoticon? Each serves a purpose. Print is tangible. It can appeal to the senses. I just got a magazine that has smells on every page. I nerd-out on the paper quality of my new hardback books. When I select ink colors it’s with total pleasure for the magazine-user. I ask myself, “How will this make them feel, blue over red? Does it emulate the qualities of Summer?” I just had this huge discussion with my Art Director about the user-friendliness of our next issue which will be a newspaper. I want it on panels. I want them to flip through it, and feel satisfied, whereas he was looking at it like a poster and stories were cutting into different sections and I found it confusing. There’s an overall rhythm, and emotion that we are trying to communicate. And he looks closely at his dots, and underlines and grids. Whereas, I step back and look at the creative direction of the entire reader’s experience, and how the placement of features works psychologically. You can’t get this by scrolling.

The separation between “art” and “writing”–particularly literary writing–still seems to pervade in American mainstream culture. As a curator, artist, and editor of First Person Magazine, have you also found this to be true?

I actually find this to be totally the opposite. I find that most of my ideas, how I convey them to artists and my audience, and what I am questioning or presenting in my curatorial work is done completely through writing. Visual work almost comes second as concepts become more important in thinking about art and its execution. In fact, I am constantly reading and writing and researching. Literature is a goldmine for reflecting society. It is imperative to inform yourself of the past, and present events to determine what is current and needs to be presented; from this, I think, “Well, how are these perceptions formed?”

I like to read while I write. And because I don’t have a huge artist community in San Francisco, in contrast to New York, I surround myself with interviews and literature books that I rely on for fleshing out ideas. I wrote before I became a curator. In fact, curating is more an intuitive process for me, that I can’t quite write about until almost the end of my gathering process when I am forced to write a press release or in many cases a proposal for a museum. I listen to my instincts first for why a show should examine what’s going on in the world or my own personal world. Writing is a way to share what’s going on inside my head to the galleries and museums. It’s communication guides the exhibition. I think that artists and curators have a deep respect for those who can write well. Art criticism is crucial to discussion and connecting what we do to the whole rest of the world including pop culture, politics, social phenomena. Conflict and debate, archiving…

What have your experiences been in involving literary text in your work?

First Person Magazine began because I write in a slightly different way about art as an experience. I wanted to convey this mainly because most art publications were just sighting the same theorists over and over, and the rhetoric just didn’t justify the only way of digesting or understanding art. There’s now a huge change with blogging. Everyone writes in first person or more casually about art, and even gets a bit tabloid-y about it. I’m not big on the art gossip pages, but I know they’re popular to view. Another way, I work literature is through First Person Magazine‘s taglines. I worked for other magazines, and more often than not, the titles for stories were tacky derivatives of fashionable songs. For each issue of FP, I choose quotes from one book that I am reading to stand in for the taglines that I think add to the story. Our second issue used Richard Brautigan’s quotes, which are funny and very juicy. Our third injected quotes from conversations from a Mike Kelley book that I thought were sexy and kinda dark. And our Summer Issue, due out July 17th, is filled with David Lynch quotes from an interview book. Initially, I was just into incorporating poetry somehow, and now it’s expanded.

I just recently put together a poetry reading as part of a festival I curated, called No Birds Allowed, and I think it was refreshing to invite poets and playwrights into a gallery setting. So, I guess I like to expand the term ‘art’ or ‘artist’ to anyone who is making something that introduces something new. This is why I ask musicians to also contribute and write for First Person Magazine. I put everyone on the same playing field.

I am also working on curating a contemporary library that I hope will tour. Art books, ones that are handmade by poets, are included; I like how resourceful they can be. The art catalogs sometimes get to be trendy… colored paper is in, or newsprint, or this binding, and they’re really expensive, so it is almost competitive. But when you get a literary artist involved, that stuff is just like from a bookbinding class they took or figured out. I love poetry right now. But it’s kind of this under-the-radar thing. I was invited to a poetry reading by a friend of mine, who’s an absolute genius, and was thrilled to re-enter this arena. But when I asked one of my favorite poets and old friends to read at No Birds, he was actually intimidated to read at an art opening. So, he suggested a friend substitute. Which I thought was funny but worked out. I also got a call recently from Jack Walls, Robert Mapplethorpe’s boyfriend in New York, because he found out I liked his work. I absolutely would love to do a show with him. He wrote this poem which took two years to compose on paper in cursive which is so sensual and, I’m thinking because he’s Black, it was just really direct and no frills. The imagery just pierced into your mind like a film you’ve seen over and over. When I say that comment, about his racial background, I just remember seeing Tina Turner on this Hugh Hefner TV show and she said to Hugh–who commented that “Rhythm and Blues” was coming up as the new American music–she responded, “Well, Black people don’t really mess around with words like that. We like to call our music, ‘Grease’ cause it’s dirty and sexy.” And I just thought, that was awesome.

I also wrote for a catalog I published for Cosmic Wonder museum exhibition, and the opening quote is a line from the music composer Arvo Part that seemed like such a beautiful little nugget of truth. So, I feel like poetry can exist in many forms. Come to think of it, I also had a quote from a Celestial Seasonings magnet about the idea of Wonder. So, if you just look around, I think literature pervades everywhere.

How do you think the internet is changing our relationship with print, the printed object, reading, creating, how we share information?

I guess I think it’s funny that everything has to be more real or personable to give it value since the internet gives access to people on a very intimate level. Like when publications show the “inside” of their books or zines, sometimes their fingers or clips are in them to show the actual books. A lot of photography comes into play when communicating a publication as an actual object that exists in reality as a three dimensional form.

I like the idea of the Kindle, because in college I hated lugging around big books or reading in bed. But at the same time, now as an adult, I find reading away from the internet an indulgence that I wouldn’t trade for the world. I am happy that there is more access, and archiving, but also, some things you read on the internet are ephemeral. My friend just posted that Gmail has the right to delete your account for any or no given reason. So, nothing is ever safe except for print if we hang on to things.

As far as creating… Well, I was just thinking that Facebook or blogs are almost this “how many signatures can I get in my yearbook” coolness, or gossip thing. It’s like a bunch of housewives reincarnated in the form of the world, and everyone’s really aware now of Public and Private domains in our lives. Like the Warhol celebrity thing. So many people archive their lives to create new “content” on their pages. A new profile pic, etc.. I’ve been watching this hack chef make recipes on YouTube that are pretty funny. And I guess people gauge how many comments or hits you get as this value of importance. But like, why are there so many fashion bloggers versus art bloggers? Maybe they have more time on their hands to follow other trends while artists are in their studios making work from scratch? And why isn’t a poetry blog as accessible or attractive as a fashion blog? What makes them tick?

My friend David Enos has a blog on Tumblr that is hilarious. My Tumblr community kind of provides me with my daily laugh or smile, but as far as sharing information, there isn’t a lot there to grasp onto. I guess you can look up diseases without consulting a doctor which is kind of cool. But nothing on the internet is fact. Or has to be. It’s like everyone became an expert. The democracy is kind of confusing. And Yelp, I think is totally paid employees or a bit passive aggressive. I guess information just gets shared faster. Like, did a lot of important creative people die this year more than any other, or is it because we have the internet that it becomes more sensationalized?

Thoughts on the iPad?

I really want one for my bookshelf.

It seems that your contemporary library is as much about creating a space for face-to-face community and physical interaction, as much as it is about providing a place for interaction with the printed object. With that said, what are your thoughts on Neen’s Miltos Manetas’ assertion that “real space is usually bad taste”?

A neen is a space. It’s just for people who are tech. They try to imitate life. I think they should use their lexicon to encourage their own system of imagery and language. Kind of like animation. You have this whole other world you can create, and for the most part, those people are trying to show the public, “Look how much we can make fur or water or people look REAL?” Who cares. We can see what’s real. You have the capacity to make a complete fantasy with your tools and you make a dog? I’m not interested. So bad taste, is obviously a funny pisstake. Or maybe they can’t function socially and have to poke fun. I love going into a bookstore and reading for a bit. Because I know once I leave with the book, the only other place I’ll have that same tranquility is on the train.

How do you think the floundering public libraries has/will affect our relationship to reading and sense of community?

I don’t think that public libraries are floundering at all. In fact, with the recession tons more of the public have become members to take full advantage of this loan system that is such a generous thing. It’s rare for the U.S. to offer something still for free to the public, so I think they are thriving. And they are also going online and allowing access to downloadable materials. Public libraries also work with university libraries to loan materials. So, there is a wealth of information that the public is accessing.

Perhaps “floundering” is the wrong word. I’m referring to the massive budget cuts in funding for both public and school libraries, which has forced many to cut hours, close their doors several days a week, or close altogether. And then there’s the closing of all these independent bookstores across the country–thoughts on how that’s changing the landscape?

I haven’t heard of any independent bookstores closing. In fact, there always seems to be one opening here in San Francisco.

Sounds like bookstore heaven. In Los Angeles, Dutton’s, Equator Books, Other Times, A Different Light, Bodhi Tree, and Wilshire Books all closed within the last three years—and those are just the ones off the top of my head. Though San Francisco sounds pretty idyllic, I’m curious to know if you’ve observed the development of any movements or scenes offering an alternative to independent bookstores?

Independent magazines are still starting, and maybe we’re being more resourceful about our finance models, but magazines are producing more events and showing their creative wares and sustainability. First Person Magazine has been invited to over five international publication fairs this year alone.

Where do you see print in ten years? What about the relationship between “art” and “writing”?

I’ve never been able to project that far in advance for anything. I hope for things and make goals for myself. But I think that people who do print aren’t just about paper and words. What fuels those publications, like First Person Magazine, is our interest in life, culture, art, so we are creating communities and produce projects. I hope the direction of things moves towards partnerships. That our creative energy will be recognized and not just utilized to get “reviews” or “exposure.” As a publisher, I have a lot of creative energy to synergize everything in the magazine to life–into festivals, exhibitions, editions, design. We know what’s good, out there, and next, so we are great consultants with ideas and artists unto ourselves. Gone are the days of the journalist-hack as wannabe or hanger-on. Writers are great observers. Sensitive and full of wild fictions that come from real experiences. Writing and art are symbiotic. They need each other to exist. Artists, critics, and writers love to write about what’s happening, because we do what we do because we think it is important. That sounds egotistical, but it’s not. In my “First Word,” in the upcoming issue [of First Person Magazine,] I talk about creatives being out of love with the ordinary. Writers are the thinkers of our times. And artists manifest our times into memoirs.

Betty Nguyen’s contemporary library opens this Saturday, July 17th, 2010 at 7pm (Levi’s Workshop, 580 Valencia Street, cross street 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103) in conjunction with the launch of First Person Magazine‘s Summer Issue, Discomfort of Sculpture.

by Kyoung Kim
who is currently nomadic

image of Betty Nguyen by David Enos

Poems-For-All Free for All!

Poems-For-All is a fantastic literary project founded by Richard Hansen. Hansen prints poems in miniature-sized books and urges readers to spread them around. A full description of the project’s manifesto fills the backs of the little books. It reads:

“They’re scattered around town—on buses, trains, cabs, in restrooms, bars, left along with the tip; stuffed into a stranger’s back pocket. Whatever. Wherever. Small poems in small booklets half the size of a business card. A project of the 24^th street irregular press, which cranks them out to be taken by the handful and scattered like seeds by those who want to see poetry grow in a barren cultural landscape.”

Poems-For-All is rooted in Sacramento, CA where Hansen and his wife run the used bookstore, The Book Collector. I interviewed Hansen about Poems-For-All to gain some insight into this intriguing bite-sized poetry project:

BLACK CLOCK: FREE?! What is the motivation behind offering the poems without cost?

RICHARD HANSEN: Everything, it seems, is for sale. I own a bookstore, I sell books. And I just wanted the project to be free of all those strings; I wanted their value, if they have any, to be derived by something other than cost. And I am totally freed of the burden of commerce. I don’t have to set a price, or collect coin. Again, I already do that in my bookstore. So, it’s a thrill to make little books of poetry and dispense them freely, and for free, for no other reason that it pleases me to do so.

What have been the positive and negative consequences of this?

Negative consequence: We are a value driven society. We try to ascribe monetary value to everything around us. And when something doesn’t have a monetary value it can often be taken for granted. Some equate free with “it must not be ‘worth’ anything.”

Positive consequence: The “return” from giving away little books of poetry is sweeter and more rewarding than any[thing] money can provide. Seeing the joy of discovery. Or hearing about it. It’s good karma, if you believe in it; kindness given with kindness returned. (Often in wonderfully intangible ways.)

Can you tell me a little about the submission process?

If I feel like a poem will work well in the project, it goes in regardless of what school of poetry it comes out of, or in what form it’s written. I take in submissions via email, the web form on the website, and mailed manuscripts. I find it easier to process and track digital submissions, so the email and web form submissions tend to move into publication faster. When I accept a poem it’s given a number. Every poem in the series has one. To the chagrin of many poets who’ve submitted, I don’t work them into published form sequentially. #1018 may get published before #987. The entire process is subjective and non linear.

The scattering around method is great! Have you found any of the poems in a really bizarre place, or have you heard of your poems reaching really far-off places? I’m sure the internet has contributed to a wider audience–can people receive poems internationally?

I put them in bizarre places. It’s my tradition, every time I travel, for example, to put the little book with Peter Orlovsky’s Writing Poems is a Saintly Thing (PFA #23) into the Gideon’s Bible in the hotel room. The poems do reach far-off places and people can and do request them from all over the world. I’ve sent books to Australia, Scotland, England, Germany, Pakistan, Israel, Canada. Even, Texas.

What is the impact you’ve seen as a result of the internet access?

Huge. References to the project appear in all manner of wonderful places around the net. And there’s the Poems-For-All website. Many folks find out about the project from the web.

How has this project contributed or connected to the bookstore you and your wife maintain?

The bookstore is the base of operations, if you will, for the project. It’s where people can find me, most days, to drop off submissions or pick up poems. There’s also a window display and a little display inside where folks can pick up random samples from the series. We have folding parties at the bookstore and poetry events related to the project there. I do a lot of the production at the store. It isn’t uncommon to have the paper cutter on the counter, building books when not helping customers. While Poems-For-All was never intended to be a marketing tool, it does indirectly help promote the bookstore. People who come looking for the little books sometimes become customers.

The bookstore is also the only place (currently) where you can get copies of Poems-For-All pointlessly small blank books. These are sold for 50¢ with all the money raised going to Loaves & Fishes, a local organization that helps the homeless. I’m surprised by how popular these have become and we’ve raised over $250 since this little sideline effort started six months ago.

I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about the literary community you are a part of in Sacramento and the ways in which Poems-For-All contributes to it?

Sacramento has a diverse literary community with several established organizations. The Sacramento Poetry Center (SPC), for example, just celebrated its 30th anniversary. I’ve been on their board and presently do a lot of design work for them. And SPC has been very supportive of Poems-For-All. We just held an event there on March 1st, 2010 celebrating the local poets who’ve been published in the series. In addition to SPC’s Monday reading series, there are a number of others, including Poetry Unplugged on Thursdays, a Brown Bag lunchtime series at the library and the Rattlesnake press reading that takes place at my bookstore on second Wednesdays. I think Poems-For-All is well received in Sacramento. There are over 50 local poets represented in the series, for example, and I’ve had the privilege of being allowed to include the project in a number of events. I’ve tried to make the project a ubiquitous presence in Sacramento; something complementary to all the wonderful things going on in the name of literature here.

What has been your motivation for starting Poems-For-All? How has the project transformed from an idea to an actual publication?

Curiosity started it all. I used to work at a company where I was in charge of ordering business cards. The printer would deliver them with scrap cardstock cut the size of the business card to fill out the boxes. Soon I had stacks and stacks of these little blank scraps of high quality paper. I just started folding them, playing with the idea: what if I could make these into little books? It’s pretty easy. I started publishing poems I wanted to share with others and the project grew from there.

My present motivation: I like being a Johnny Appleseed for poetry. I just want to scatter like seeds these little books of poetry. And encourage and help others who want to do the same.

Could you share some advice or insight for embarking on a successful small press project?

Love what you create. Whether it’s one book, a journal, a small press–make sure it’s something you’re going to want to be waist-deep in all the time. Projects like this can sap a lot of your time, money and energy away from other things. Know this before you begin. And make sure you, and your family, are going to be okay with it.

Seek out what others have done. Seeking out what others are doing is a great point of inspiration. Get excited by what you find out there and ask yourself what you can do to add to that excitement.

Innovate. Find ways to make the books of your press stand out. Consider moving beyond the conventional dimensions of the chapbook. And just because someone else is making tiny books doesn’t mean you can’t do it differently (or better.)

Flickr.com is a great resource for no-cost images for your covers and other photography needs. Many excellent photographers make wonderful imagery available under a creative commons copyright that often allows you to use the image with just an attribution. Use the advanced search features on Flickr to find CC images. Some photographers even allow you to use their work on publications that are for profit.

Scrounge. Get it cheap or free. Look for discounts from printers and ask for the scraps of paper that collect in the boxes around their cutting machine. Scour the bargain bins and closeout shelves at paper stores for interesting paper, etc. that you can use. Monitor Craigslist for folks who give away paper, printers, etc. (it sometimes amazes me what folks give away that’s useful to a small press publisher).

Eliminate the middleman. Do everything within your power to sell your books without having to go through a distributor. Work out direct arrangements with bookstores and other points of sale whenever possible. The best point of sale is the poet or writer doing an event that gets folks excited about, right then and there, buying the book.

The artwork is fantastic. Who designs it and what is the process?

I’ve designed the majority of the covers. Making them has been a great way for me to hone my graphic design skills. I enjoy the challenge of making each one unique.

Occasionally I’m aided with photos, images, or design ideas from the poet, but more often I just look to the poem to inspire the cover that’s going to complement it. When I first started, the covers were colored cardstock cut to the same dimensions as a business card—3.5” long, 2” tall—that had crude ink stamp markings on the front. Today I design the covers with Adobe Photoshop and then use InDesign to put them into a template that allows me to print them out ten-to-a-page on a letter-size sheet. Some covers are still created with black ink on white paper which I then apply on colored (and/or textured) paper to give the cover its ‘flavor.’

A few of the covers in the series are designed entirely by other people. I had the good fortune to meet linocut artist Marc Snyder who does his work at approximately the same size as a Poems-For-All cover. He suggested three Jean Arp poems for the series and then provided a linocut drawing (the original artwork is actual size!) for their covers. He also did the same for a Kenneth Patchen poem.

In what ways has Poems-For-All been rewarding and satisfying?

The process of making them brings me joy. Designing their covers gives me joy. Seeing people’s reaction when they pick up or are given the little books makes me happy. I enjoy the collaborations between so many poets and artists. I’ve made friends because of them. I love thinking about the next book. With a series that never stops, the question is always “What’s next? What’s next?”

How do you think PFA has contributed to the literary community at large?

There are two ways to look at Poems-For-All books. They are either novel or novelty. I leave it up to those who discover them to decide which.

For more on this great project, be sure to visit Richard Hansen and his press at the Poems-For-All website.

by Katie Manderfield
an MFA candidate at CalArts, an editorial assistant for Black Clock, and is constructing an experimental literary journal for women; her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, 3:AM, and dogmatika

image courtesy of Poems-For-All

Loud and Quiet: An Interview with Anne-Marie Kinney

In “Zizou Président,” author Anne-Marie Kinney flexes literary skills as deft as Zizou’s footwork to capture the palpable energy of the World Cup without the maddening buzz of the vuvuzela. Kinney’s story, published in Black Clock 12 and free to read online, brings us back to the summer of 1998 when Zinedine Zidane led France to its ultimate World Cup victory and became a soccer legend. Though set in a specific moment and place in time, Kinney’s depiction of the raw frenzy of collective emotion that hinges on the superhuman achievements of select individuals is universal; marked by a kind of historical clairvoyance, it offers a glimpse of things to come for the next country and the next “president” to claim the championship title in July. Black Clock recently spoke with Kinney about her writing, Zizou, the World Cup, celebrity, mass culture, and naming her dog Dee Dee Ramone.

BLACK CLOCK: What inspired you to write “Zizou Président”?

ANNE-MARIE KINNEY: I’ve always found Zinedine Zidane to be compelling. Aside from the fact that his fame and influence can’t be overstated, I really see him as a poet. He transcends the game. I wouldn’t call myself a huge fan of any sport only because I’m too scatterbrained to know when games are on and get myself in front of a TV at an appointed time, but I do enjoy soccer because it’s so emotional and violent, and there was something extra with Zidane. You could see the fury inside him, in his face, and the way he channeled it into the most precise, beautiful moves. When I learned that Black Clock was seeking submissions for a sports issue, he immediately leapt to mind.

This story is sublime and so well-crafted. In a few pages, it takes a very specific person, moment in time, and place to create a tableau of humanity. How did you decide on your narrative approach to this piece? In other words, how the hell’d you do it?

I can’t say I ever decide on a narrative approach. It just happens however it happens and then I see what I’ve got. I started with my memories of being in Paris during the ’98 World Cup–which was the World Cup that really made Zidane a superstar–and just being wrapped up in the energy of it all. For the opening ceremonies, they had these four sort of giant robots that were crouched in different parts of the city, and it seemed like they were there, motionless, for the longest time, so it was so startling and also such a release to see them finally come to life on the big day. I watched it on TV and then went out, where it seemed like everyone in the whole city was in the street celebrating, and it got pretty out of hand. It was hot, hard to move, there was glass flying, cops running–it’s kind of a blur. I guess the story built itself from that peripheral blur, and the dangerous, anything-can-happen thickness in the air, and I went from there into Zidane’s head, into the quiet center. I was inspired by things he’s said in interviews, what I knew of his life, the racism he’s faced, both overt and implicit, and also the documentary Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, which is just a match shown with him in close-up the entire time with this very intense and hypnotic music by Mogwai in the background. I wanted the story to center on loudness and quiet, and the way each feeds the other. That’s probably the most conscious narrative choice I made.

Did you write “Zizou Président” before or after the famous headbutting Materazzi incident?

I just wrote this a few months ago. At first, I thought if I was going to write about Zidane I was sort of obligated to address the 2006 incident, but I ended up being more interested in his rise, rather than what some would deem his fall, though I wouldn’t. I think he was forgiven pretty quickly. He was and is far too beloved for it to taint his legacy too much.

Perhaps because it’s still relatively fresh in my mind even a few years later, the supposed “fall” (which I agree with you in that I don’t think it’s really his fall) was the elephant in the room when I read the story. Not an annoying, crowding, why-aren’t-you-addressing-this elephant; more one that expands the story into a realm beyond the moment, making it both historical and prescient.

I wanted the Materazzi incident to be kind of hanging somewhere outside or beyond this story. When it happened, people started talking about Zidane’s history of violence, and speculating about all the possible reasons he might have done it, or what Materazzi might have said to provoke him, so those elements–his response to taunting, his quick temper–are all here in the story, waiting, suggesting where they’re going to lead. In the end, his head hurts from the two goals he scored with it, but I like to imagine that he’s also feeling the pain of what’s to come.

Have you written other work that considers the perspective of other famous individuals?

My characters tend to pay a lot of attention to pop music. I did write an as yet unpublished story about a character who worships Dee Dee Ramone. Which is only a little autobiographical.

Do you worship Dee Dee Ramone?

I don’t worship anybody, but I did name my dog after him.

What do you think makes an icon, draws us to some and not to others, generates a cult of personality?

That’s a really good question. I’m not sure I know how to answer. I think some of it is about a person having the right appeal at the right time, either socially or politically. That’s definitely a part of it with Zidane, as an Algerian-French player who became the best just as tensions were building for Arabs in France. I don’t know if I could break it down like that for every icon. I guess they wouldn’t be icons without some indefinable spark.

What are you working on these days?

I’m working on a new short story, and I have another novel sort of brewing, slowly. My first novel is currently making the rounds of publishers, so I’m just going to work every day and trying not to think about that.

And watching the World Cup?

I’m following it in the news, but the only match I’ve caught was a re-broadcast of England vs. USA. It’s tough because the matches are in the morning.

Do you have a favorite team or player? Any predictions?

I don’t have any predictions, but I can’t help but root for the home team. I’d love to see the U.S. make a respectable showing.

Anne-Marie Kinney is a writer and copy editor from Northern California. She completed her MFA in creative writing from CalArts in 2008, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Keyhole, Satellite Fiction, as well as Black Clock. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

by Kyoung Kim
Assistant Managing Editor of Black Clock

Tagging Christian Svanes Kolding

Christian Svanes Kolding’s film, The Things We Keep is only one-minute fifty-seven seconds long. It lacks a plot and characters. It’s essentially a pan of a lot of stuff. And yet you end up watching it over and over again until what was supposed to be a short YouTube break has turned into an hour. This is in part because the film, made entirely of still images that Kolding’s digitally animated together and set to the tune of Broadcast’s “Corporeal,” is visually and sonically cool. But more than that, what makes The Things We Keep so compelling and addictive, is that it explodes with stories.

Kolding elegantly achieves this multiplicity of story in his short film–or as he describes it, a window into “augmented reality”—by providing textual tags for a number of objects that appear on the screen. Kolding, who was born in Denmark and is currently based in New York, provides nibbles of history to items such as “Handmade Doll, Venice, CA. Official Name: Edie Chickenpants. Gift from Carly. Received in 2008. Frequent Travel Companion.” and “Matchbook, New York City. La Esquina Restaurant in Nolita. Obtained in 2010. They make excellent breakfast burritos. Their fish tacos are not bad. Nothing like Los Angeles, of course.” These mundane yet offbeat descriptions are incredibly familiar to anyone who owns, well, anything. At the same time, they provide the viewer with enough of a seed to generate his/her own story about each of Kolding’s keepsakes, as well as Kolding himself–all of which elicits a feeling in the viewer akin to reading a Raymond Carver story.

Kolding is a self-proclaimed “director, creative consultant, and visual artist.” But given his deft textual work in The Things We Keep and his ability to evoke none other than the ghost of Carver, he should also be tagged as a “writer”—one we recently had the pleasure of talking with at length about augmented realities, reverse engineering, text and film, and yes, the objects he keeps.

BLACK CLOCK: I understand the opening credits of To Kill a Mockingbird inspired your film, The Things We Keep. Can you elaborate on this?

CHRISTIAN SVANES KOLDING: I’ve always loved the opening sequence of To Kill a Mockingbird because it shows us a world that is made up of fantasy as well as the mindset of a teenage girl from the South. I love the way the camera tracks across a variety of objects that will later have significance in the film, while these objects also provide us with clues for the setting of the film, and clues about the main characters. From a technical point of view, it’s a beautiful shot. The camera does a very slow track along a table top as we start from an omniscient point of view, overhead, and then moves along in a parallel line. It has always been a shot that I’ve remember, something that I’ve always wanted to recreate. I guess, I enjoy reverse engineering shots so that I can better understand them.

Deconstruction-reconstruction?

Yes, it is a deconstruction-reconstruction of sorts. It’s me trying to figure out how a shot is made. Plus there’s always the fantasy that in reverse engineering and recreating, I somehow [can] get into the mindset of the original director and can perhaps unlock some additional creative energy.

Do you feel like you’re able to realize that fantasy in reality?

Well, the fantasy is a bit of wishful thinking and not realistic. I could never get into another director’s mindset, and, I suppose, I wouldn’t want to try to borrow too much from another director, even those I admire a lot. It would become theft if I spent too much time trying to get into other directors’ mindsets, I suspect.

So, in terms of the reality, I would say whenever I try to deconstruct someone else’s composition, there are a few things that happen. First, there is an “Aha!” moment; I realize how something was done. Then there is a moment of disappointment.

Why disappointment?

As I realize that my first effort at reconstruction lives up neither to the expectation of emulating the original, nor does it stand on its own. Which is okay, because at some point you make the work something else. You transform it a bit, either by tweaking it in some places or just starting a different riff altogether, thus transforming the work. That becomes gratifying.

So, yeah, I tried to recreate pieces of the opening sequence, but knew all along that I wanted [the film] to be about objects that I keep–keepsakes. I didn’t know right away that I wanted to tag the objects. That came later.

How did you decide which objects were worthy enough to be considered things you keep?

There was little emotion involved. Primarily, it was a few practical considerations. 1) I limited the selection to objects that were already on display in the apartment and 2) the objects had to fit on top of the hutch/buffet–which acted as the stage. Don’t like the word buffet or hutch… The large Danish teak cabinet… That’s a mouthful…

That’s okay. Better than “hutch”?

So yeah, the object had to fit on top of the teak cabinet, and I had a limitation on the length of the shot. There were far more objects than space available, and [in the future,] I’d like to do more work using the “unused” objects, but not in the same way.

I started thinking about augmented reality, which I think about a lot. Not so much as ponderings on the theoretical aspects of augmented reality or the ethical issues, but more the practical issues. Such as, as I am walking down a street, what do I want to see? What information do I want to access? What’s interesting to me is not the retail aspect of augmented reality, but the submerged storytelling aspect of it. I walk past a mailbox, and I wish I could get some information from that mailbox on the street corner that tells me who has been there–that maybe even singles-out people I’d be interested in knowing about. Did they pause for a moment before dropping the letter into the mailbox? How much information should the mailbox give me in an augmented reality context? These are the kind of inane things that I might think about, and I started to think about them with these keepsakes.

These keepsakes in our home have meaning to Adriana[, my wife,] and me, but do they mean something to somebody else? No, not really. So, I can convey that in an augmented reality world, but even then, it’s not really effective because it’s not important. Important to me but not to you, except that you might be able to relate to the sentiments expressed in identifying the objects, which give them new meaning. You can relate to that because you might have objects that you keep yourself. That’s how I started to think about it. And so I started to think about what story was behind each object, and if that story was interesting to someone besides me. That was a central question.

How did you determine if a story was interesting to someone besides you?

I don’t know exactly.

Did you set out a criteria or was it a gut feeling?

It was more a hunch. I knew a bit of the audience in advance. In the sense that when I make things, I often make things for a specific audience. In this case, it was for the set of friends who had provided me with the objects. Not a limited set or a closed set, but a set that was created purely by the selection of the objects. So, I wrote the tags with them in mind, as if we were sitting around a dining table and I was explaining each object to each friend at the table while introducing other objects, most of which would be unfamiliar objects to most of the guests. That was the roundabout way of approaching it. Carly Eiseman gave me an object, so I wrote about it with her in mind, knowing that she would see the film, for example.

But the film certainly connects with a wider audience, selected for the Brooklyn Rooftop Films Summer Series and all.

Yes, but I didn’t know that right away. I wasn’t even sure it would connect with a wider audience.

Were you surprised?

I’m still a bit a bit surprised. I think it’s because I believe that the strength of the film is not its technical achievement, which is a bit gimmicky (truth be told), and even though I think the objects are interesting, they are ultimately not compelling enough to get people to respond to the story. So the strength of the story lies elsewhere. I think that people respond to the story because they reflect on their own keepsakes and what those particular objects mean to them, and each keepsake is not about the object itself, it’s about the memory, and the memory is more important than the object. The object is a proxy for a relationship, a person or persons that we hold dear, and their memory is embedded in the object. And so people relate to that, reflect on that, apply that to their own experience. Also, because ours is very mobile society (this one that you and I live in), these objects take on added meaning because they can travel with us while our friends can’t.

The film’s ability to affect this response from its audience also shows the strength in what you did with the text and the tagging. You talk about how in tagging the objects you offer meaning, which makes me wonder what you think about the importance of naming/tagging as it relates to the film, in communicating to the audience (both your intended or otherwise), and in general.

The perils of naming any object is that by naming it, you might already limit the potential of how other people experience it or name it themselves. Name it, tag it, define it. But, in terms of my story, I tagged the objects because I wanted the audience to understand a few things. First, what would life look like if you could look through the lens of an augmented reality world at someone else’s keepsakes resting on a cabinet top? What would that look like? In tagging them, I wanted the audience to understand what these objects meant to me. I tried to tag them using a language that was a bit more taxonomy-based. This faux-taxonomy voice was a bit of a put on–that was me trying to be funny. Not sure if that came off as funny but it worked in its own way. It wasn’t insincere, it was just meant to be a bit lighthearted.

It certainly works and provides a continuous voice to the piece.

Thank you.

The text is also small and moves quickly—

Yes. Adriana complained to me about that. It frustrated her.

The film asks to be viewed a few times to really be read.

Yes. One could say that. There were two opposing demands that I had to meet, or so I felt. A story like this needs to be short, or so I was convinced. Thus, in order to convey the breadth of meaningful objects that are comprised in The Things We Keep, the camera had to move rather quickly; therefore, the text moved quickly with it. That was one demand. The other was that when the text appears on the screen, it demand to be read. It is annoying when you can’t read it. In most of the films that I’ve created, there is always a lot of stuff going on in the background, which often demands more than one viewing, so it didn’t bother me too much if someone in the audience couldn’t absorb all of the details. In this case, I chose brevity and then tried to find the right song for the piece that might help people go back and view the piece again.

I love the music choice for the piece. But I think what compelled me to view it again was the text and knowing the film was short enough that I could view it in its entirety a second, third, fourth time around.

Good. I like mystery. I don’t know if there is too much mystery in The Things We Keep, but I like [people] not getting everything the first time around. That was also a bit of the rationale for the actual format of the tagging.

I wasn’t directly inspired by Nicholas Felton, the graphic designer, though there are some who suggest that I was. I love his work, and it probably influenced me in choosing the layout for the tagging, but the layout–that is, the format of the tagging–was created with the awareness that most people would have to go back and read it again. So, each tag had a headline and then supporting details with a bit of taxonomy thrown in. It’s funny, because in choosing the headlines, one becomes aware of the perils of such editorial power, which is relevant to me as a storyteller. [For example, I ask myself,] “Am I choosing the right headlines?”

Someone else also told me that I stole from Fight Club. That’s okay. I must have been influenced, but I didn’t have Fight Club in mind when I made this. But I do love that scene in Fight Club–the tagging of Ikea furniture in the apartment.

It’s always funny when people try to guess your inspiration or say “you got this from…”.

Yes, it is amusing, but I’m definitely guilty of the same thing.

In the watching and re-watching, reading and re-reading—through the repetition of engagement—the film becomes a “thing” precious to the viewer.

Ah, I like that. I haven’t heard that before. I wonder, then, how it will be received at the film screening on Saturday. Not sure that a film festival screening is the best place for a film like this. We’ll see.

I was wondering the same thing. I mean, I think it will be received well, but offer a different experience. Has working on this film changed how you work with text and image?

I think so. I’m creating more work based on this notion of tagging [to create] augmented reality. And right now, I’ve limited the scope of the tagging to a format and style that is similar to what we see in The Things We Keep. The next story will take place on a subway, with people. I want to create a series of video portraits on a subway. Each person is wearing a headset. An iPod. The augmented reality component uses the iPod experience as its launching point, but I want to explore things beyond the music that each passenger is listening to. The portraits are videos, not stills. But I digress…. So I’m continuing this style of tagging, but at some point I think I need to ask some deeper questions about tagging. It feels very surface level right now.

In addressing what to do with all of this material and informational “stuff”–how to organize it, ingest it–you have your finger on a pulse point that’s really relevant right now. People are hitting crises of informational overload, and your piece offers an alternative approach to these crises.

I want tagging to bring us closer–closer to unfamiliar objects and closer to unfamiliar people. I want tagging to unlock some mysteries, give us essential information. Of course, we are trying to figure out what is essential. For me, essential is about emotion, I suppose. We relate to objects and people through empathy, common experience. But I also want tagging to ask new questions that give rise to new mysteries, that which is uncommon, unfamiliar. I’m trying to have it both ways.

With regard to your comment about the informational crisis point and how The Things We Keep offers an alternative, the irony is that my piece centers around “stuff.” Stuff that is just lying around, a bit like information clutter or data clutter. Yes, we need to sort it, but I’m still wondering why we keep it around, even as I’ve already answered that question. Because the stuff is a proxy for relationships, is data clutter a similar kind of proxy? [If so,] what kind of relationship is that?

These questions come out beautifully in your film, which in turn raise the questions: What is more important, the object or the words? The thing or the memory/story? Not in a distracting way, but more philosophically. It sets up this duality, but also allows you to step away and mull it over and wonder why and if there even is a duality.

Ultimately, the memory is more important. We are reliant upon the object, but it is the story that is more important. I mean, I love good design and nicely design objects (in all manifestations), but, it is the memory, the relationship, that is more meaningful, and we must get back to that. We must keep the relationships vital and meaningful.

The Things We Keep screen debuts at the Rooftop Films Summer Series this Saturday, 5/29 at 8pm; it can also be viewed online here.

by Kyoung Kim
Assistant Managing Editor of Black Clock

photography by Birgit Richter

Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category—

How Kate Gale is Making L.A. the New Paris

Sitting for a Spell with Francesca Lia Block

Jonathan Lethem Goes West

Seth Greenland Everywhere

Making a Space with Brian Evenson

A Long Talk With Lewis Shiner

PRINT SNOT DEAD: An Interview with Betty Nguyen

Poems-For-All Free for All!

Loud and Quiet: An Interview with Anne-Marie Kinney

Tagging Christian Svanes Kolding

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