Behind the Masthead: Gary Garrison, Prose Editor

Have you heard about the new staff of HFR? Our intrepid intern Kacie Blackburn already spoke with Brian Bender, our new international poetry editor, and now she's interviewed one of the prose editors, Gary Garrison. Check out their interview below, and if you want to put this new staff to work, check out our flash prose contest--deadline: May 15th!

Kacie Blackburn: What do you do as a prose editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review?

Gary Garrison: As a prose editor at HFR I have the incredible opportunity to read through all the wonderful work that our first and second readers have enjoyed and handed off to me. Then, with the help and guidance of my amazing co-editor, Allegra, we have to select the handful of stories that we get to share with the world.

KB: What do you look for in a submission?

GG: I try my best to be open to every single make and model of story that I come across. I guess I look for all the little parts--language, voice, narrative, character--to come together into a greater sum, into something that resonates, something that I really have the desire to share.

KB: What is your opinion on dialogue in submissions? Is using “he said”, “she replied”, “they asked”, too much?

GG: I've always admired great dialogue, so if it is there that's great! But if it's not there and the story doesn't really need it, that's also great! I don't know if I've really been bothered by dialogue tags (though I suppose the line between just right and too many is pretty thin), however, tags that call attention to themselves ("he cried!") and tell us something that the dialogue should be able to tell us on its own can be a bit much.

KB: What do you do in your spare time, other than review submissions?

GG: My spare time usually blends seamlessly into my not-so-spare time as I switch from an assigned book to personal choice. Outside of that I play lots of bar trivia (Reester Bunny!) and try to travel way more than I should. I also enjoy watching movies with my cat.

KB: If you were stranded on a deserted island with one book, what book would it be?

GG: My desert island book would, at the moment, probably have to be The Brief And Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--though that will probably change at any moment.

KB: Have you worked with HFR before this semester?

GG: I worked with HFR as a reader the fall before I started as a prose editor.

KB: What have you enjoyed most about working with HFR, so far?

GG: HFR is an amazing journal! I'm fortunate to have had countless incredible people come before me to build HFR into the literary machine it is today. I'm constantly reading really inspiring work and I get the chance to share those unique little unicorns!

***

Gary Garrison is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University where he is the prose editor of Hayden's Ferry Review. He lives, writes, movie watches, and trivia plays in Tempe with his cat, Widget.

A Cup of Coffee With Dexter L. Booth (Interview by Kevin Hanlon)

Dexter L. Booth showed up late, frazzled, and having just come from the preparation committee meeting for a friend’s surprise birthday party. He apologized, and we laughed. Planning surprise birthday parties alone would be enough work for most people, but Booth keeps busy and uses every second of the day to his advantage.

A couple of years ago, Booth was still polishing his manuscript and hard at work getting his writing published. “I entered it into a bunch of contests,” he says, “That’s kind of what you do. You enter, you wait, and you just hope someone likes your stuff.”

It didn’t take long for Booth–a graduate of the MFA program at Arizona State University and an alumnus of Hayden’s Ferry Review [ed. note: Booth served as poetry editor for issue 49 & 50]–to get noticed. In 2012, his poetry collection, Scratching the Ghost, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. The following year, the book was published. These days Booth is on tour, giving readings and promoting his work while still teaching undergraduate English at ASU.

But Booth is humble. He never intended for any fame or recognition, although he remarked that it was nice to be acknowledged for his writing. He hopes he can inspire others to read and write through his work both in the classroom and on the page.

Scratching the Ghost explores childhood memories, growing up, and everything that comes with life and afterwards. Booth has produced honest and passionate poetry that reveals tender and universal truths of life. It dwells in the areas most people fear to address.

We sat down for nearly three hours and chatted about technology, ghosts, and what it means to be a black poet in the 21st century.

Kevin Hanlon: Where does (your) poetry take place?

Dexter L. Booth: Somewhere between the real world, where our feet are on the ground, and the sort of mental space that I won’t say is necessarily religious, but somewhere between the real world and that dream state. You know, when you wake up and things are kind of hazy, you’re still sort of dreaming, and you’re not quite sure if someone is next to you or not. I think my poems take place in that space. They try to figure out the self: the waking self and the daily self.

KH: In your poem, “Letter to a Friend,” from the section entitled Our Famous Shadows, you write, “I always come back to these woods/feeling guilty under the accusing/leaves. How everything changes–/a mother again loses her son to the stream.” Where is the line between influence and experience in your work?

DLB: I don’t know. I was a visual artist in undergrad – a painting major. I have this visual part of my mind, and I think that sometimes that helps my poetry because I can see things in a way that’s a little different than people that don’t have that background. I try to write from experience, partly because I like confessionist poetry, and partly because this was a time in my life when these things needed to be addressed. So I think those two things are very closely connected in this book.

KH: What are Our Famous Shadows?

DLB: That was actually an alternative title for the book. A lot of the poems are about childhood and this idea that you become infamous for the things that you did in your childhood. There are these huge events in our life you’re like, when I as a kid a kid, I did this thing, and it’s awesome. Then you get older and you realize it wasn’t really that great. And then sometimes you have strange events in your life and you’re like, oh this thing happened and it was weird, and you look back and think, What? I survived?

I think childhood becomes the shadow that follows you around. You’re not always going to be the same person, but the things you did in your childhood–the friends you made, how you were raised–those are the things that stick with you. In some ways, those are the things that get artists some sort of attention. I think childhood is one of the key elements to writing poetry and staying creative. The most creative people I’ve ever met are children. That’s one part of myself that I never want to let go of: that freedom that children have to imagine things the way that they do.

When you’re little you’re like, oh there are no rules, you can do whatever you want. You draw whatever you want–you can make yourself purple if you want. Then you grow up, and especially if you go to art school they say, “Well there are these rules, and you have to color in these lines.” I think we get accustomed to working in these structures that we forget that there is a sort of freedom in not following the rules.

KH: You moved here from Virginia, and it comes out a lot in your poetry. Can you tell me about that?

DLB: I was born and raised in Virginia, and pretty much my whole family is there. No one has really left…ever. When I came to Arizona for my MFA I was the first one in my family to move out of Virginia. I got in my car with my cats and some art supplies, and I just drove across the country. I had never even left the state. It was terrifying. And so again, you can see that reference to the title [of the book]. Virginia as a state doesn’t have the best history, and so literally there are lots of ghosts in Virginia’s history that I felt followed me across the country. In some ways, I had to come to terms with those.

There’s a poem in there for my friend John where we talked about race. The poem is entitled “Queen Elizabeth.” It was very strange leaving Virginia and then coming here. I met people who would say, “I’ve never had a black friend,” and, “What’s it like to be black?” It was very strange.

KH: In that poem, “Queen Elizabeth,” you talk about being a black writer. What’s that mean?

DLB: What does that mean? I think that’s the question for the 21st century: What does it mean to be a black writer in poetry? For me, I just want to make my own path. Obviously, in the book, about 95% of the stuff actually happened. That was a real situation [in “Queen Elizabeth.”]. I was at a poetry reading and I heard a younger black kid say, “I don’t want to be a black writer.” That was something that bothered me because I had thought that same thing previously, before even coming for my MFA. Back then I said, I want to go do this thing. I want to write poems, but I don’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want people to assume that I wrote like Langston Hughes or was a slam poet. I guess in some ways that poem is me coming to terms with the fact that what it means to be a black writer is whatever I do with my writing. Every day that I wake up I’m going to be my heritage, and so I have to take that and move forward. I can’t worry about those things when I write.

KH: We live in an ever increasingly technological world. Why write? Why poetry?

DLB: I write because I don’t know what else to do. I’ve been writing and making art since I was little, and that’s the only thing that I enjoy. I have always wanted to affect people’s lives, but I don’t trust myself enough to be a doctor and cut someone open. That’s just not a thing that I should do. But with poetry, I can affect people and I never have to meet them–there’s no recovery time. They can’t blame me if they walk away from the poem and they’re like, “Oh my lungs hurt,” you know? I have nothing to do with that. I just don’t know anything else that I’d be doing with my life other than writing and teaching. I love it.

KH: What is the state of poetry today?

DLB: I think that we are entering a kind of a renaissance, at least in my mind, with technology, with slam poetry, with rap music, with all of these things that are branching out from traditional poetry, as we knew it. Especially with the Internet and self-publishing there are people who can publish their poems everywhere. There are people who stand on corners and sell their poems that they staple together. I think a lot more people are writing now, which is good. I hope that means a lot more people are reading.

KH: Do you think it’s important to unplug?

DLB: Yes, definitely. When the weather’s nice I go out to Hole in the Rock by myself with a computer or a notebook and write. Even if I’m at home writing, I cut off the Internet because I do get distracted. I’ll wonder, “Oh what are people doing on Facebook?” and that’s just not important…ever.

KH: When do you know a piece is finished or whole?

DLB: When I can’t fix it anymore. With Scratching the Ghost, I can’t do anything to the book now that it’s published, so it’s just done. Once it’s published that’s as close to finished as it’s going to get.

KH: What is your greatest source of inspiration?

DLB: Now I get it from other people, from watching the world. After the book, I was tired of writing about myself, so now I write about other people and things that are going on in other countries. The world sufferings, I guess you could say.

KH: What’s next? What are you working on?

DLB: Right now I’m working on a collection of poems that are letters to different friends. They’re letters to friends, but they’re letters to the world that address a larger issue.

***
Dexter L. Booth reads tonight (April 9) at 7 p.m. at the Tempe Center for the Arts. Scratching the Ghost is available from Graywolf Press.

Where Are They Now: An Interview with Past Contributors (Part 2)

With fifty-three issues published, nearly twenty-five hundred contributors accepted and tens of thousands of submissions read, we start to wonder where our previous contributors have run off to. Fortunately, I was able to catch up with a few of them, and we were able to go through a round-table discussion of questions and answers in order to find out what some of them have been up to!

Here's part two of our interview, featuring: Anthony Varallo, a fiction contributor in Issue 47; Hugh Sheehy, a fiction contributor in Issue 36; and Liz Prato, a nonfiction contributor in Issue 50. Check out part 1 here!

Sophean Soeun: If you could have written one bestselling book/series before the original author wrote it, which book/series would it be and why?

Hugh Sheehy: I don’t have a good answer for this. I mean, I feel like I should say Shakespeare, which is pretty awesome to imagine for myself, though I suspect a little boring for other people (they’d be let down to think of Shakespeare as being just five foot six, for starters). There are plenty of writers I admire--more recently, folks like David Mitchell and Jane Smiley--but I tend to read their work until I lose interest in it. (As a result, I’m always at a loss when people ask me about my favorite authors and books, or worse, about my influences, because I suspect that readers would be better at spotting them than I am.) One series of books that made a deep impression on me when I was young is John Bellairs’s Johnny Dixon novels. I haven’t read them since I was ten and eleven, and I doubt I’ll go back and look at them anytime soon, lest I correct my memory too much: I want to write books that make people now feel the way those novels made me feel then.

Liz Prato

Liz Prato: I just realized every title I was coming up with -- like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? and Ramona the Brave -- are from my childhood, so it’s not so much that I could have written those books, but that they taught me what I wanted to write. And that goes back to the question about bizarre ideas. I was never reading fantasy or sci-fi. I was just reading about ordinary people trying to figure out this being human gig, because I’ve always found that plenty mysterious. Any book that helps another person understand that better -- that’s what I want to write.

Anthony Varallo: I read a lot of Hardy Boys books as a kid. They had a whole display of them at the supermarket—right at the checkout lane—for some mysterious reason. That always impressed me, that you might need The Secret of the Old Mill or The Sinister Signpost as urgently as aspirin or breath mints. I guess I’d like to write a book like that.

SS: Why is there so little understanding among beginning writers of what actually constitutes a story/plot/conflict?

Anthony Varallo

AV: I had almost no idea what a short story--or a “literary” short story--was until I got to college. I simply hadn’t read many short stories; I read novels. That’s something I remind my students all the time: those of us who aspire to write short fiction come to short fiction through the novel, which is very different from the short story. I think we sometimes forget how confusing the short story can seem to beginning writers (“Why does nothing happen?” “Why is this so depressing?” “How could that be the ending?”) who have never seen a “plot” that’s closer to “a series of ordinary events ending in epiphany.”

LP: Funny -- my problem with a lot of short stories I see from young writers is that nothing happens. And by that, I mean there is no conflict, nothing at stake, nothing pushing against the character. I just read an amazing story by Joanna Rose that accomplishes what both Tony and I are talking about. It takes place during an average week in a small town bar, and the entire conflict is that a stranger comes in and acts like a dick. The tension comes from how these insular, dignified people will react. It’s a quiet story without enormous action and no life or death consequences, and the tension is still thick throughout. The epiphany at the end is what maintaining the integrity of their community looks like to these people. But that’s probably precisely the sort of plot that baffles beginning writers.

Oh, and I totally I agree that the issue is people try to write short stories without reading short stories, without making an effort to understand how and why they work. A lot of young writers struggling to get their work published ask me for advice, and I say, “Do you re-read your favorite stories and figure out the way they work?” and it’s not just that they say no -- it’s as if that never occurred to them. There’s a way in which writers are like astrophysicists, though: it’s not enough to imagine a world beyond our boundaries, and it’s not enough to just understand the math and the science. You have to be able to do both.

Hugh Sheehy

HS: I like to think of John Gardner’s statement about fiction having a moral imperative as deriving from the Latin stem mor-, which means “custom”: so fiction has to show us a theory of what people are, how they work in a certain place-and-time (which, since we’re talking about representation here, is interchangeable with “mind”). So fiction presents us with some kind of narrative (implicitly so, if there is no story to speak of in the fiction, as you see in some of the work, for instance, of Lydia Davis) that demonstrates how an author works out tensions she perceives between subjects she imagines in a more or less verisimilar way: they might be a particular bankrupt husband and wife with only a car left to their names and the bank coming for that on Monday, or they might be a forlorn cuckolded widower and a woman who grows teeth all over her body, or they might take some other form. I think what’s difficult for a lot of beginners--I know it was (is) for me--is learning to accept and then embrace the need to keep working with the tensions between subjects until the conflicts stand out clearly and drive or order the action. This is a wordy way of agreeing with the definition of fiction-writing Liz and Anthony are discussing. It also, I think, can shed some light on why writers just starting out often traffic heavily in cliches--sometimes composing stories using cliches of speech and writing in order to tell a story that is itself a cliche. Fiction writing is a kind of thinking, one many of us have to learn.

But I think there are professional writers who are confused about this stuff. Take the “story” versus “plot” issue. The difference goes beyond terminology into realms of metaphysics and aesthetics. I teach my students that “story” refers to the larger sense of narrative created by a story’s telling: the sense we have of characters having lives off of the page. And I teach that “plot” refers to the way the story is told: the point of view, the structuring of events, the personal narrative strategies each writer fashions to make things like tone work--in short, the writing. But there’s a problem some might see with this distinction, particularly that the “story” the reader imagines is inseparable from the “plot” they read as it is embodied in the words on the page. If the language that makes up a story cannot be separated from a reader’s reading-and-imagination of the story, then it makes no sense to distinguish between “story” and “plot”. Some folks might say I am guilty of reification when I speak of a story distinct from a plot; I would say that when I am writing, I am choosing to tell some things and not others. And then they might point out that the story I speak of does not exist apart from the words on the page, and I might say that if I am reifying it is with good intentions, and so on and so forth. I think there’s a poorly articulated conflict among creative writers over whether to privilege the word or the imagination, language or story. It’s been around since at least the mid-Twentieth Century quibbles over how to write, what to write about, the political role of writing--in short, whether story itself can make a difference, or whether creative writing has to move on to other effects to do more than provide a temporary escape for readers. Today there’s a lot of vague talk about experimental writing versus conventional writing, and while there are clearer differences between writing programs, creative writing teachers need to cover a lot of terrain and accommodate students who want to write, not understand critical ideas, even if those can be very useful. Add in small (or large) differences in aesthetic philosophy between teachers, and you can get a whole lot of confusion over basic things, like what is meant by “plot” (which is, unfortunately, commonly used to mean something like “narrative stencil”). In the face of a muddle like that, some students might just shrug their shoulders and write what they intended to write when they registered for the course. That’s too bad for the less sure writers, because a little learning can go a very long way in fiction writing. That said, I think the terminology problem may fade a little as we get better at teaching CW (a young academic field) and increase our library of craft books. Still, there will probably always be some conflict over the basics, because differences in fundamental understanding make way for invention and large scale innovations in arts.

Where Are They Now: An Interview with Past Contributors (Part 1)

With fifty-three issues published, nearly twenty-five hundred contributors accepted and tens of thousands of submissions read, we start to wonder where our previous contributors have run off to. Fortunately, I was able to catch up with a few of them, and we were able to go through a round-table discussion of questions and answers in order to find out what some of them have been up to!

Anthony Varallo is a fiction contributor in Issue 47; Hugh Sheehy is a fiction contributor in Issue 36; and Liz Prato is a nonfiction contributor in Issue 50.

Sophean Soeun: What are you currently working on? What have you accomplished since your publication in HFR? 

Anthony Varallo

Anthony Varallo: I am currently working on a novel and a collection of short-short stories. Since publishing my story “No One at All” in HFR, I’ve published my third collection of short stories, Think of Me and I’ll Know (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press). “No One at All” is included in the collection—thanks, HFR!

Hugh Sheehy: I’m nearly finished with a collection of stories and in the process of drafting a novel. Since publishing in HFR, I’ve published a first book, The Invisibles, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award in 2012. I’ve also made a sort of half-hearted run at reviewing books and drawn up plans for a few essays; I hope to get to those when I finish these next two books.

Liz Prato: I’m editing a short story anthology for Forest Avenue Press, which comes out in May 2014. I’m working on strengthening my short story collection, and have had a couple of stories and essays published, including a piece on The Rumpus which is an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress. So, yeah -- that’s the big thing I’m working on, a memoir, which I swore I’d never write. It surprised the hell out of me, but there I was one day -- writing a memoir.

SS: Where do some of your ideas originate from? Has there ever been a time where an idea came from somewhere you least expected? Do you have an idea you know you have to write but haven’t figured out how to do it yet?

AV: My ideas usually come from a) some small recollection of something in my past and b) other short stories I love. So, for example, “No One at All,” is a story about two boys vacationing at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a place I remember visiting when I was a kid, a place where I used to see all these beach shops selling hermit crabs, even though I never bought one. But I remember those hermit crabs clinging to the sides of their cages--that memory was the point of departure for the story. The rest was me wanting to write a story about childhood in the style of John Updike (especially stories like “Pigeon Feathers” or “A Sense of Shelter”), James Joyce (“Araby,” of course), Sherwood Anderson (“I Want to Know Why”), and every other great story I’ve ever tried to shamelessly imitate in my writing. I have one story that was given to me--I mean just given--to me by my then 5-year-old son. One day my son started referring to one of his kindergarten classmates as “my enemy” as in “today at lunch I sat with Mark, Allison, James, and my enemy” or, referring to a TV show we were watching: “This is my enemy’s favorite show!” Well, even though I told my son we should not refer to people as “my enemy,” I secretly loved the idea of that, and ended up writing a story, “My Enemy” about a guy who believes his enemy is out to get him. I always credit my son with the idea, though. He’s kind of proud of that.

Hugh Sheehy

HS: I’m kind of always on the lookout for an idea. I can definitely identify with the motivations and process Anthony describes; that said, I look for stories most actively in my interactions with others and experiences of place. The other day, I made a discovery of a story idea I’ve since begun working on in the sparest of my spare time while talking on the telephone with a hotel receptionist who made an offhand comment about international tourism. I suspect that the mechanism for recognition of a potential story is, in my case, literary in a some way, though whether that’s primary or secondary is harder to say with much certainty; I think I recognize the structures and materials of my favorite works of fiction in my observations. But I’m never sure what came first: the fiction I read before I came up with the idea or the story I made out my experience and imagination. Beyond that, though--the grasping of the idea--I use whatever comes to hand to get the story drafted, then go back and refine, whether junking useless additions or working up weak parts into something strong, until the story seems to read itself to me when I look it over again, which is a way, I hope, of replying to your last question, a way of saying, yes, I never know how it’s going to happen on the page except in some general way.

LP: Ideas are rarely a problem. It’s just a matter of paying attention to my surroundings and actually writing stuff down. I tend to get these really great ideas when I’m lying in bed at night -- you know, when the subconscious mind is starting to creep in -- but I’m too stubborn/stupid to get up and write them down. I always think, “Oh, that’s such a great idea of course I’ll still remember it in the morning.” And I never do. Lather, rinse, repeat. I went through a LONG stretch after my dad and brother died when I had no ideas. Zippo. Zero. Nadda. That scared the living crap out of me. As far as an idea I have that I can’t figure out how to write about, yes -- I have a novel like that. I get back to it every two years thinking, “I know how to write it now!” and do a total re-write and take it to writers group or workshop or wherever, and hear, “Nope. Still not working.” I recently mentioned that project to a friend who I met in workshop 10 years ago. She sighed and said, “That poor novel.” I think Anthony’s onto something though . . . maybe I need to get a kid to steal some ideas from!

SS: How do you title your pieces? (Is it a process? Does it just come naturally? Are they usually relevant to the piece or irrelevant? Do you do it before? After? During?) 

AV: It depends on the story. Sometimes the title just sort of presents itself, ta-da, as you’re writing, but sometimes you finish a story and realize you are writing a Story That Has No Title. So, for example, one of the stories in my new collection, was titled “Story With a Gun in It,” which was the filename until I realized I couldn’t possibly call it that, and changed the title to “Time Apart Together” after I’d revised the story a few times. I once published a story under the title “Places of Comfort,” until a writing friend of mine said, “Dude, you cannot call a story ‘Places of Comfort.’” He was right; I changed the title.

HS: I title my stories after I’ve written them. I prefer titles that reveal a second meaning once one has read the story, titles that close a piece, like a coda. So I usually have to wait to figure out that part.

LP: I like titles that are voicey or idiosyncratic in some way, so it usually involves writing and understanding the language of my piece first. I often end up taking a line from the story itself. There are times, though, when I’ll just default to something sort-of-descriptive, but easy. One of my best experiences is when David Leavitt asked me to come up with a different title for a story. The previous title was really received -- something like “What She Left Behind,” and what David’s urging brought me to was “Underneath the Magnolia Trees When Magnolias Were in Bloom.” It has more words in it, which must mean it’s better, right?

SS: What is the most bizarre idea you have written about or thought of writing?

AV: That’s really hard to answer. I mean, all ideas seem pretty bizarre—or do I mean bad?—as you are writing them. The only thing I know is that if the idea seems somehow “unworthy” of being written about (hey, like two kids going to Rehoboth Beach!) that usually means it’s actually a pretty good idea for a story, but if the idea seems like a GREAT idea that everyone is sure to LOVE, that usually means you’re about to write a terrible story. It’s kind of cruel, when you think about it.

HS: I can’t be too forthcoming here because I’m still hoping to make several strange ideas I’ve found spellbinding for several years work in various pieces of fiction. But I will tell you that, as an undergraduate, I wrote very strange allegorical stories for my workshops, one of which ran to sixty pages (or would have, had I not handed it in 10 point font, and single-spaced--I was kind of a brat and feel I should go on apologizing): in one of these, four nearly identical figures make a road trip to California, only to discover, among many other things, that the state has fallen into the sea, and that, on the new western coastline, a very large orgy is underway.

Liz Prato

LP: Well, I’m instantly jealous of Hugh, because I seriously lack bizarre ideas. It’s a big fear of mine, that one of my greatest failings as a writer is my lack of imagination. I keep writing about the same themes -- love and loss -- again and again. There are no mystical portals or creatures which transmute, or really, any laws of the physical universe being broken. There is just someone losing someone they love and trying to figure out how to survive -- or not survive -- in that new world.

HS: It’s funny. I think writers who lean toward the visionary tend to envy writers who strive primarily for verisimilitude. In the end, though, I think the deep subjects Liz mentions tend to maintain pretty consistently across the spectrum between the visionary and the verisimilar, which disappear into each other anyway, or at least tend to in the literature I love most--the way Hemingway’s “The Killers,” to cherry-pick my example, reads as both a vaudeville act and a ‘realistic’ representation of possible events.

***
Check back here next week for part two!

Interview with David James Poissant

On Tuesday, March 18^th at 8 p.m., writer and Hayden’s Ferry Review contributor David James Poissant will be giving a reading at The Tavern on Mill (404 S. Mill Ave.) from his debut book, The Heaven of Animals, a collection of short stories. The Heaven of Animals will be available for purchase at the reading, courtesy of ASU Bookstores.

Poissant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Central Florida, and his stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, Playboy, and Ploughshares, among others. His work has been awarded the Matt Clark Prize, the George Garrett Fiction Award, the RopeWalk Fiction Chapbook Prize, and the Alice White Reeves Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts & Letters. His story “The Hand Model” appeared in HFR52.

With The Heaven of Animals just released, Poissant is already hard at work on his first novel, Class, Order, Family, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. Jake Adler recently had an opportunity to speak with Poissant about his work as he travels the country on his book tour.

Jake Adler: What are the central themes of Heaven of Animals? What ties your collection of short stories together?

David James Poissant: Well, while there are a number of animals that wander through the stories, I feel like the central themes include love, loss, and atonement. Many of the narrators in these stories are seeking to right a wrong, to atone for something they've done—some cruelty to a family member or loved one. I'm really interested in the ways by which we hurt those we love most, sometimes on purpose, though often without meaning to. There is a decent dose of tragedy in the book, but humor too, and hope. My hope is that some hope shines through!

JA: How long have you been working with the book and what inspired the collection? Did writing one story prompt or inspire you to write another? Do you have a favorite story from Heaven of Animals?

DJP: I wrote the earliest story from the collection in 2004, and I finished the final revisions on the book in 2013, so I guess you could say that the collection took me nine years. But that's a little misleading, since, during that time, I also wrote and published another twenty stories and several essays, plus began work on the book that will be my first novel. I wouldn't say that I have a favorite story from the collection. I think that it depends on the day and my mood. I know from giving lots of readings that “100% Cotton” and “What the Wolf Wants” make for the best out-loud reading experiences for audiences. Otherwise, I don't know. Picking a favorite feels like trying to decide which of my kids I like best!

JA: What can you tell me about your forthcoming novel? How have you approached it differently than Heaven of Animals? How do you know when a story is becoming a novel, rather than simply a short story?

DJP: So, I wrote “Venn Diagram” and “Wake the Baby,” two of the stories in The Heaven of Animals, with no plans to return to those characters. But I just couldn’t shake them. The novel picks up about thirty-five years later. Richard Starling is a physicist. Lisa Starling is an ornithologist. They’ve spent the bulk of their careers at Cornell and enjoyed summers at their lake house in North Carolina. Their sons, Michael and Thad, are now grown and in their thirties. Michael is a pharmaceutical rep married to an elementary school art teacher. They live in Texas. Thad lives with his boyfriend, an up-and-coming painter, in Brooklyn. Then, one summer, Lisa calls her sons out of the blue to inform them that she and Richard are retiring early and that the lake house (which was always supposed to stay in the family) will be sold. The sons and their partners are summoned to North Carolina for a final week together as family, and, as tends to happen whenever family gets together for a week, things get tense. When a tragedy strikes the lake community, it reverberates through the lives of these six characters in a way that causes them to question not only why they’ve come here, but what comes next and whether they still want what they thought they wanted when the week began.

It’s a long novel (growing ever longer) told in six roving, third person, limited omniscient viewpoints. I think that I always knew that it would be a novel, just based on the scope of the story I wanted to tell, which felt larger than the constraints of a story or novella-length work.

JA: As a Creative Writing MFA professor at the University of Central Florida, what sort of trends do you see rising among young writers today? What do your students tend to struggle with most, and what have they done that has surprised you?

DJP: What's great about the writing in MFA programs today is that I don't see many "trends." People sometimes worry that MFA programs churn out writers who all sound the same, but that hasn't been my perspective, at least not based on my limited experience. I have students writing stories and novels, magic realism and psychological realism, tragedy and comedy, and everything on the spectrum from traditional to very experimental. It really runs the gamut, which is great. We have good students here, hardworking and committed writers. It's really an honor to get to work with them.

JA: What advice could you offer Creative Writing undergraduates or young writers seeking to apply for MFA programs?

DJP: Getting into MFA programs is getting harder and harder. My best advice is this: You can't charm or joke your way into a program with your cover letter. Better to take it seriously and be professional about it. Likewise, reference letters are important, but they seldom make or break an application. I'd say that 95% of the decision on who gets in at UCF (and, by extension, probably most MFA programs) comes down to the writing sample. Put forward your best, most polished work. Really, the secret is that there is no secret. We're all just looking for the best writers we can find. And, of course, that decision is subjective, so best to cast a wide net. For example, when I applied to programs in 2004, I applied to twelve and only got into one, the University of Arizona. But, if the program's the right program for you, all you need is one.

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 4)

[Check out part one, part two and part three of the interview!] 

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs TONIGHT on ABC.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: Ok, so what are the returned? I mean it’s one of the mysteries of the book. They look and act more or less like normal humans. They have to eat, drink, sleep; they have internal organs etc. There are some differences like the vast amount of food they eat and the slight amount of time they sleep, but they seem more or less normal. What are they?

Jason Mott: I’m a very rational person. I love science, but at the end of the day this is an event that could never happen. So this question about the explanation comes up a lot. This is impossible. I’m not going to insult my readers by giving them some condescending answer. Instead, I ask the readers to ponder the question for themselves and, at the end of the day, the returned are whatever the reader decides they are. The reader can fill in the backstory of the returned however they see fit.

AMK&MH: Even if it did happen in the real world, we probably would be able to determine how, right?

JM: Precisely. To me, the returned are representative of so much more than whatever the answer to who or what they are could answer. It really comes in a far second to what they offer and what they fulfill in people. I just don’t really care what their backstory is or how they got there. If my mother showed up today, I wouldn’t give two shits about the how or why, I’d just be happy she was there. I would take circumstances as they were and make the best of what was given.

AMK&MH: This is another reason The Returned crosses over from genre to literature in my opinion: you don’t ask, “What’s going to happen next?” you ask, “What would I do if this happened to me?” You ask, “Why has this happened, not just what is going to happen.” I suspect that’s what will draw folks to The Returned... the novel as well as the TV show. Do you really believe you’d accept your mother if she returned, no questions asked?

JM: Oh yeah. I would love to have her return just to see how far I’ve come. I wanted to create this world where you had people who weren’t excited about those who were coming back. Every death is different, and it affects those connected differently. I’m not the same person I was when my mother passed in 2001; I’m not the same person I was when my father passed in 2008. So… in a way, part of me is worried, if she did come back, would she like the person I’ve become? Would we have friction? Would there be anything about me now that she wouldn’t like or approve of? I wanted to put those ideas into character as well.

AMK&MH: I hadn’t really thought of it that way before.

JM: Yeah, you spend years apart and you change and grow and develop; you get new interests, hobbies, you develop new outlooks on life. Take the pastor for example: his love interest (when he was 17) returns, but now he’s a married man, he has a wife. But she’s still 17; she still sees him at that stage in his life and, he has to ask himself if he is comfortable with who he has become in order to stay in the role he lives now. I think that’s a big friction point for people; I like to provide friction points for characters.

AMK&MH: How long did it take you to write The Returned?

JM: About ten months.

AMK&MH: Woah! That seems quick.

JM: Well, that’s before we got into revisions and serious editing, but yeah about ten months for the first draft of the entire manuscript. I started drafting it in September 2010 and finished it around July 2011.

Then I sent out queries way earlier than I should have….. I got lucky that my agent didn’t reply back until October; by then I had made some very heavy revisions. It wasn’t a complete train wreck by the time I actually got to speak with someone about it.

She did do a great job of making The Returned a viable book. I think this experience taught me as much if not more than my MFA program did. I’ve learned to be more self aware about what the art is doing and how it is working. For instance, the character of Lucille was a character who was pretty far down the row, to me. The novel was Harold’s; she was important but not extremely prevalent. In the original version, Lucille died four chapters before the end of the book. To me, that seemed like an appropriate departure for her as I didn’t view her as a particularly important character, I wanted the ending just to focus on Harold and Jacob. But when my agent read the script, the first thing she said was that Lucille died too early.

And something else I hadn’t considered while writing is that other people view the story through different characters. She said that Lucille was her main lens through which she read the book. Lucille was her filter. To have her die really didn’t work.

AMK&MH: Well, if we did a page count, I’ll bet Harold and Lucille actually share roughly the same page space. Like you said, they’re a unit.

JM: Lucille was as equally invested in the narrative as Harold was, and Harold was invested in her. But at the time, I was so engrossed in Harold and Jacob that I kind of forgot Lucille. That’s one thing my agent pointed out. She said you have to keep her alive longer, your climax is too early—you can’t forget that this is her story as well. At first I really resisted making these changes, but she talked about it again with my buddy, Justin, and he agreed with her. Then he came to me and reiterated that she does this for a living and that I needed to trust her judgment. From that point forward, I made any changes she suggested with no reservations. I didn’t even blink; I just did it. If she told me to get dressed up in an animal costume and go dance on the street corner I’d do it.

AMK&MH: So what are you working on now? I feel like I keep hearing about another new novel and some Retuned spinoffs.

JM: I just finished a draft of a second book set in the mountains of North Carolina. A small move from the coast to the mountains. A novel focusing on a father/daughter relationship, based loosely on one of my good friends from college. The novel has a few elements of the fantastic involved in it. Religion and a few other more characteristic elements of Southern fiction come into it.

AMK&MH: It’s unavoidable. Religion plays a huge role in those parts of the country.

JM: So I’m focusing most of my energy on that and also tying up a few loose ends with this novel. On the backburner I have a couple of fun graphic novel projects I’m working on. So hopefully if this does well and someone comes knocking on my door I can be like, “Hey! I got this too!”

As for the spinoffs, they’re prequels. They’re short stories that give early readers a chance to get a sense of the premise and tone of the novel, as well as my writing style. I’m a debut author. No one knows me. So these prequels are a good way for both The Returned and me to say “Hello” to readers.

AMK&MH: Thank you for your time, Jason.

JM: Thank you!

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 3)

[Check out part one and part two of the interview!]

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs on March 9, 2014.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: The Returned takes place in the small, Southern town of Arcadia. When Arcadia is selected as a location for a Bureau internment camp (as more and more returned flood the streets of America, the Bureau decides that “temporary” incarceration is their only option) the novel changes from a story about a small town to a story about a small town taken over by Colonel Lewis and his camp. The story also takes on a lot of historical weight from this point on. The Holocaust, for example, is referenced. A pretty serious risk.

Jason Mott: There were some delicate steps taken when I was working on this part of the novel. You know, once you tread into that territory there are so many things that people start bringing to the reading and interpretation of the book.

At the same time, when I was in grad school I did this project which focused on Japanese internment camps during WWII. So I spent a couple of years researching camp Topaz out near Salt Lake and learned a lot about that type of life and what those people endured. Many of the camps were quite nice but others were just devastating. These were just ordinary U.S. citizens who happened to be Japanese and all of a sudden they were jailed in these camps. That stuck with me for a long time. I think that this section of the book was largely a reaction to this past and also from a fear that it might happen again. It seemed important to me to write about.

Given the unique circumstances that occur during the book, you would need these pre-built/fabricated rural areas to put these camps in (old schools, for example). The town of Arcadia (modeled more or less of the town my mom is from) fit that purpose perfectly. And it made logical sense for the story too. The returned were growing in number and the US reached a point where they had to figure out what to do with all of these unaccounted people. Not all people are wanted back by their families—

AMK&MH: Right, when Agent Bellamy asks Harold if he wants to keep Jacob, he first says “No.”

JM: Exactly. Imagine how many people might reject the returned. There are only so many people that any one place can hold. Ergo, you have to keep these people somewhere. These camps made the most sense. So I don’t think it’s fair to say I’m making a political statement here but to deny the historical/political reference it makes would be ludicrous.

There certainly are shadows of the Holocaust here. Any time you have a group of people who are perceived to be different based upon race, religion, creed, etc., (in this case they people discriminated against used to be alive!) you have, I think, the potential for a lot of turmoil, chaos, and instances of regular, everyday people making poor choices. But you also have extremists. That’s why the Colonel Lewis shows up. I try to make characters who counter one another.

AMK&MH: The Returned doesn’t have a huge, explosive ending, which makes it (aside from the writing itself, its pacing and structure) a shade more literary than it might be with a more punctuated climax.

JM: I didn’t want a terribly dramatic ending. In small towns, you can have feuds, but there are limits to how far they will take them. It’s very rare that any feuds end in bloodshed. You’ll shoot someone’s dog, but you won’t shoot them. There’s lots of animal theft and weird things like that but not much more, While you can fight all you want in a small town, when something bigger comes along, you head over to that person’s house and help them out, even if you hate them. If a hurricane comes through a town like that, you’ll find sworn enemies helping to rebuild each-others homes. You can hate them later.

I really wanted this small town dynamic represented in the characters. I wanted these characters, when they finally confronted one-another, not to be strangers. They still live in the same town and are both part of that community. So when Fred finally confronts Harold, when Fred demands he let him kill the returned Harold is keeping safe, when that big, explosive climax should happen, it can’t.

AMK&MH: They’re also cast in extreme circumstances. Harold seems pretty cognizant of that. He basically gets what’s going on; he understands what Fred is up to. That’s one of the things about the book that I really liked, when they finally get to the big confrontation Fred’s like, “I’m gonna burn your house down, but it’s cool cause you have insurance.” Hilarious!

JM: That’s kind of what I’m saying, no matter how much you dislike someone, there are limits to what kind of damage you’ll do. You can absolutely hate someone, but you still won’t want to do them permanent damage, and if push comes to shove you help them out. In small towns, there isn’t a lot of outside help, so you’re somewhat forced to rely on one another.

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 2)

[Check out the first part of this interview here!]

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs on March 9, 2014.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: How did you come up with this idea of the dead reanimating as near-exact copies of their former selves rather than as flesh-hungry zombies or ghosts or something more…. mainstream? I’ve read that the premise emerged from a dream you had.

Jason Mott: Yes, I had a dream where I came home from work, just a regular sunny day and my (deceased) mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She was just sitting there waiting for me, much as she had in my childhood when I would come home from school.

It was a weird dream. Humdrum really, a boring type of dream where nothing particular happened. In the dream I just came in like this was a normal occurrence and then she asked me how everything had been going. After that we just spent the entire dream sitting at the table and talking about everything that had happened since she died.

I told her going to undergrad, about grad school, new friends I had made…just normal life. She harassed me about still not being married. There was no dramatic ending to it; I just remember waking up and being incredibly emotionally distraught. I expected to walk out and find my mother in the other room.

I told one of my good friends (Justin Hedge) about this, and he brought up the notion that I might not be the only person with these experiences. “What,” he asked if it weren’t a dream and it was happening to people across the world?” He ended up talking me into writing a short story about the experience. I read the story at a reading we were doing together a bit later, and it was received very well— visceral responses from everyone. After that we talked a bit about whether or not it had potential as a novel, tossed around story ideas, and then I started writing.

AMK&MH: So the two of you did a sort of “treatment” for the novel like a film?

JM: Yeah, we bounce material and ideas off of each other all the time. This was one of the ideas that Justin believed in more than I did, but it ended up working out.

AMK&MH: The Returned is a complex novel with a particularly vivid world. How did you go from dream, to premise, to a world rich with such varied characters, settings, and conflicts?

JM: It started slowly. We started talking about how people would react when their family members started returning. On a small scale, it is first perceived as a miracle. But on a larger scale you’d have to have people who could help place these returned back where they belong or to help you find someone you thought might be returned. Thus the “Bureau of the Returned,” a government agency designed to help return the returned to their families and to make sense of them. They, of course, coalesce an extreme level of political power and wealth as the crisis escalates and, by the end of the novel, are on the verge of taking over the world.

We wanted to develop an organization similar to the Red Cross, something to help people out but also an organization that aided in the organizational properties of the narrative itself…like a character. I figured I needed one government bureau to take the reigns of this problem rather than have many smaller organizations scattered throughout the story. You don’t want to make the reader wander aimlessly; you need to keep the narrative focused as much as possible.

Once we had the Bureau, it was nice because you can give a made-up organization whatever freedoms and limitations you deem necessary. On a small scale (realistically), you have many branches of government that all operate under different rules and circumstances. Then you have different governments that operate differently in different countries. By using the umbrella of the bureau simplified things as it would operate the same on a global scale, the reader doesn’t have to worry about change of rules across various parts of the globe. The book takes a leap from this one small town to this global issue in a simple way. I try not to distract readers too much; that’s something I struggle with on first drafts because I always have tons of distracting elements that need to be streamlined and extricated from the text.

There’s nothing cooler than the massive, faceless corporation. I’ve always been a huge fan of video games and many games make use of this to great effect. I’m a huge fan of this idea and using it in my writing… giving them their own character.

AMK&MH: How did you manage to create such a rich, original world without falling into the more standard undead story, i.e. The Walking Dead and World War Z.

JM: Those are great books… but they’re different, that’s all. They’re both well-written, literary, and intelligent. They’re just different stories from The Returned. I never thought of myself as trying to avoid writing another type of book (especially since I’m a big fan of those books), I just chased an idea and the story grew in its own direction.

AMK&MH: Like most parents who lose a child, Harold blames himself for Jacob’s death; Jacob wandered off while he was the one who didn’t keep a close enough eye on him. I think this is why Harold struggles so greatly to accept Jacob when he returns. Now he must face his demons… literally…

JM: Exactly. Harold has spent his life hiding from Jacob’s death. Now, there is this paradigm shift and Harold can no longer hide; Jacob is sitting right there on the chair in their living room. That’s why Harold has the most conflict with this change; he can’t hide anymore.

AMK&MH: You don’t have any children, but the way Harold and Lucille deal with Jacob and parent him once this conflict is resolved for Harold is wonderfully genuine and authentic. It almost feels “old American”…

JM: Well, I don’t have kids of my own, but when my mom passed, I was twenty-three and my nephew, Justin, was thirteen. I became this type of surrogate wife to my father. I cooked the meals and more or less raised my nephew while my dad went to work. Luckily, I had already quit my job and moved back in with my father to pursue a career in writing, so I was around.

I learned a lot about parenting through my nephew and my father. It was kind of like being thrown into the deep end of the pool; I started my experience raising kids by raising a teenager just a few years after being a teenager myself. It was a quick learning process you might say, because I was learning to take care of someone younger, take care of my father, and also learning to write during this period of my life.

A lot of people have asked me, “Why didn’t you use younger characters for Harold and Lucille?” It’s a popular trend in novels and in Hollywood right now. But the greater the distance between Jacob’s death and his return, the greater the emotional complexity. That’s why it takes the entire novel for Harold to come to terms with what has happened and how things have changed; Harold has been brooding on hiding from his son’s death for fifty years now.

AMK&MH: This conflict reaches its climax when Lucille finally confronts Harold about the way he’s treating Jacob. Harold won’t hang out with him or even really acknowledge him; he just sits on the front porch smoking cigarettes while Jacob stands inside the screen door. When Lucille asks why he won’t acknowledge Jacob, Harold says something to the effect of, “That’s not my son.” Lucille smacks him, and Harold has a decision to make. In many ways, The Returned is about marriage; it’s about family.

JM: I’ve never been married, but I drew a lot on my parent’s and my friends’ marriages for Lucille and Harold. I think that in a strong marriage, a good marriage, each person becomes a living representation of the other person’s conscience. So it took Lucille slapping the shit out of Harold for him to be able to embrace Jacob. It took that moment of spurn for him to make that journey. I don’t think I’ve ever properly grieved for my mother; I think that’s partly what allowed me to write so strongly for Harold’s part and to root for him in his journey. Harold and Bellamy were always my focal characters.

AMK&MH: Is The Returned Harold’s book?

JM: The book is more or less about Harold’s grieving and having a second chance. In whatever form you recognize resolution, Jacob’s return was Harold’s chance to find it. Anyone’s death leaves unresolved issues for those still living. Some are bad. Some are good. I wanted to provide, through Harold’s character, some answers to these issues everyone deals with at some point in their lives.

***

Stay tuned for more of this interview later this week!