12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her novels include The Box, a Bustle Best Books selection, and Drafts of a Suicide Note, a Foreword INDIES finalist and PEN Open Book Award nominee. Awabi, her duet of short stories, won the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award; and her essay collection Listen, we all bleed was a PEN/Galbraith nominee and ASLE Book Award finalist. Her work appears in Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Litro, Menagerie, Superstition Review, and Necessary Fiction and has won recognition in the Best of the Net and Aeon Award competitions.

She is represented by Akin Akinwumi (aakinwumi at willenfield dot com) at Willenfield Literary Agency.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, Awabi, a duet of short stories, won the inaugural Digging Press Chapbook Series Award. It was my first opportunity to work with an editor, the great Gessy Alvarez, from whom I learned so much. She gave me the confidence to develop some of Awabi’s characters into protagonists of my current novel-in-progress, of which the lead character, Ayuka, daily brings me joy.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

Since my earliest days, all my favorite books have been novels; and it’s reading other books that makes me want to write them. Fiction has always been a refuge for me, a way of getting out of myself.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It depends on the project. All my books begin as reams of handwritten notes; but whereas my novel The Box came together in less than a year, with the final manuscript bearing a surprising degree of resemblance to the first drafts, Ayuka’s novel is already in its third major overhaul.

4 - Where does a prose work usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Again, it depends. The Box and my first novel Drafts of a Suicide Note were conceived as novels, the novel form being my first love as a writer and my favorite kind of book to read. My short story “The Indoor Gardener,” though its acceptance for publication preceded that of The Box, began as an excerpt from that novel. Ayuka’s novel, though, is arising from short stories.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy giving readings, but I also find it terrifying. I’ve been fortunate in my audiences, which for the most part have been encouraging rather than discouraging. But I prefer only to give readings of work that’s already settled into itself.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I seem to be obsessed with anti-anthropocentrism. Even when the first spark of a project is a human character, some nonhuman thing or phenomenon, like the handful of paper in Drafts of a Suicide Note, shows up to undermine the human characters’ agency and self-control. Dispelling the human from the center of our imaginative universes is vital: it has long been time to put other Earthlings first and to admit that without, for example, a healthy Ocean, our species will not survive. It’s our species’ hubris, believing humans to be the most important beings on Earth, believing ourselves to be entitled (by virtue of nothing whatsoever!) to exploit and consume everything else, that’s directly causing global ecological collapse.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Literature has the ability to pinpoint and question the ambiguities inherent to each and every moment; great writing discovers beauty in ambivalence, complexity, even contradiction. In today’s egocentric, exclusionist, and exploitative cultures where simplistic demagoguery and unquestioning cancelations decide what counts as “free expression,” ambiguity is suffocated at every turn—and yet, it may be the only truth.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve been really fortunate so far in that the best, most talented, professional, and companiable editors have wanted to work with me; and they have shared my determination to make the book or story of the moment its best self. Even when that self is weird and doesn’t “fit in.” They’ve also relished joy and laughter as integral parts of the process, and that is so important.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

From Grace Paley in The Paris Review, an interview to which my awesome editor Yuka Igarashi drew my attention: “One of the first things I tell my classes is, If you want to write, keep a low overhead. […] Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. […] Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to essays to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

I wouldn’t say that moving between forms has ever been easy for me. Novels and short stories require very different strategies for timing and pacing; essays are beholden to things beyond themselves to a greater extent than fiction. These constraints present specific challenges and opportunities that preclude effortless flowing between forms. But I do aspire to such flexibility in my writing; I don’t want my work to fall into unbreakable patterns. That means continuing to experiment with form, genre, language, subject matter beyond my comfort zones. Each project has something new to teach me.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I try to keep to an eight-hour workday just as I would in any profession, but that doesn’t always pan out. Each morning begins with some sort of caffeinated beverage and a phone conversation with my mom, almost always about books!

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

From the edge of writerly despair, I turn to other writers’ books. Anything with beautiful prose might help me to stave off panic and regroup—to find, if not exactly inspiration, the courage and desire to carry on searching for ideas.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Seaweed in salt water.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Other-than-human Earthlings, including boxes, snails, sounds, artworks, buildings, shapes, and theoretical or scientific papers, are vital influences on my writing. I tend to think about language in musical terms; my sentences prioritize rhythm, timbre, tone, breath, phrasing . . . Even though I’m not a poet, the way a piece looks on a page, even in manuscript, is also an important consideration for me.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Ah! You got me started. This list could go on for reams. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Clarice Lispector, Sofia Samatar, Andrei Platonov, Antoine Volodine, Lev Tolstoy, Mark Haber, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Fernando Pessoa, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Salman Rushdie, Amina Cain, Terry Pratchett, Mieko Kanai, Marie N’Diaye, Maxim Osipov, Chinua Achebe, Maria Stepanova, Yoko Tawada, W.G. Sebald, Maaza Mengiste, Yoko Ogawa . . .

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I wish I understood Greek, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, and German, and I wish I could improve my totally inadequate French and Italian. If only such things came easily.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Had I not decided to throw caution to the winds, throw over my education and common sense, and become a writer, I would’ve ended up a miserable musicologist or piano teacher wishing daily for the world to end me.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Can’t help it. Can’t stop. Tried to stop and (see question 17) shan’t try again.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Right now I’m reading two phenomenal novels for blurbs. Watch for both of them in 2024! Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber (forthcoming from Coffee House) is an inimitable digression on digression, grief, and techno that curls and stretches language in ways that English doesn’t often dare. The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan (forthcoming from Counterpoint) looks obliquely at McCarthy-era artworlds while experimenting elegantly with the very idea of “plot,” with what makes a story a love story, and of course with color. Films haven’t been doing it for me lately, but Nathan’s novel may just make me want to take another look at Old Hollywood.

20 - What are you currently working on?

In addition to Ayuka’s novel, I’m working with several writers and artists on The Tubercled Blossom Pearly Mussel Memorial Library of Hope, which I was invited to create for Delisted 2023; an international artistic collaboration curated by Jennifer Calkins in honor of twenty-one nonhuman species that were recently stricken off the US Endangered Species List and declared extinct, relieving the US Government of the obligation to either seek them out or preserve their habitats.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Nikki Reimer, No Town Called We

 

Fear Is, Um, Part of Love

an insect’s eye is how we begin
we’re thick with it
fear with

riotous cones and rods
how we melt into it
sick with

worry into muddled
now you see
not fear but

one dozen refractions of
the other’s body

blink again, whoops
followed one dozen arms
to their logical conclusion
now we don’t

The latest from Calgary poet and editor Nikki Reimer—following the trade collections [sic] (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2010) [see my review of such here], DOWNVERSE (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], and chapbooks fist things first (Windsor ON: Wrinkle Press, 2009), that stays news (Vancouver BC: Nomados Literary Publishers, 2011) and BEHIND THE DRYWALL (Gytha Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]—is No Town Called We (Talonbooks, 2023), published alongside the companion above/ground press visual chapbook, Dinosaurs of Glory (2023). Composed across a quartet of lyric clusters—“No Town Called Poetry,” “The Daily We,” “One Poet Always Lies” and “The iLL Symbolic”—No Town Called We is a suite of lyric experimentation and cultural discourse, working to orient and even articulate oneself amid a field that pushes an insistence to keep moving, move forward and do not question. “consciously enter the state of we,” the poem “Keep on Truck” ends, “via this inherited truck / in the land of trucks and honey / to keep moving: / just keep moving [.]” If David Martin’s recent Kink Bands (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] examined considerations of the underground, including minerals and their extraction, Reimer examines the effects of those very extractions upon the land, the landscape, the people and multiple cultures above ground. As she wrote specifically of that companion chapbook in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics: “Resistance, too, might take the form of art practice, a deliberative contemplative act that refuses to be yoked to the wheel of capitalism. Not product, but practice. Listening to the bees while turning your pain into art. And together these methods of resistance might become a kind of agnostic prayer.”

Reimer’s is a lyric that has been increasingly open and engaged on deeply personal matters of grief, fear, loss and anxiety, examining death, climate crisis and capitalism generally, and Alberta’s oil production and ensuing climate devastations and overt cultural loss through the capitalist engine more specifically, as well as her ongoing grief following the sudden and unexpected loss of her brother. In No Town Called We, she speaks of direct human consequence upon the land and landscape, the responsibilities and failures of humans generally, and even poets, specifically, offering the poem “But the Moon” as a kind of complaint on distraction, focused on what is happening in the sky instead of here on the ground. “What exactly did you think the moon was going to do for you, poet?” she writes. “Why are you writing these words, line by line by line?” As Reimer writes to open the poem “Plants We Have Killed”: “what duty of care do we owe each other? // when embodiment stands in / for direct action?”

Ongoing notes: Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks: J-T Kelly + Mark Statman,

I’ve been seeing these Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks that Jordan Davis has been producing out of Brooklyn for a while now—see my review of Buck Downs’ GREEDY MAN: selected poems (2023) here and Nada Gordon’s The Swing of Things (2022) here—so I’m pleased to see copies of J-T Kelly’s LIKE NOW (2023) and Mark Statman’s CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS (2023) appear at my door.

The chapbook debut by Indianapolis poet and innkeeper J-T Kelly, LIKE NOW, offers an assemblage of short lyric first-person narrative and layered accumulations that sway and play, such as the short poem “Plunder”: “Pomegranate—ripe, / Unbroken— // I, too, hide my heart— / Fruitlessly.” There’s something of a disjointed lyric reminiscent of Canadian poets Stuart Ross, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick, each composing poems that lean into disconnections, connections and surreal threads and sly humour across the short lyric. I’m curious in how Kelly’s poems form across such narrative disjoints and jumbles, and how these pieces shape themselves not simply through a completed thought run all the way to the end, but one that rests somewhere in the middle, allowing the reader the space through which to complete on their own. I am intrigued by these poems of J-T Kelly.

West

What I said when I was leaving.
Your friends and their boots.
I left it there on the key stand.
The road is dry. But I still think about
standing on the on-ramp outside of Bismarck.
At the mercy of. Sometimes forty-five miles
from a pay phone. I went north because
Zach didn’t listen and had gone south.
He had been picked up and taken to some field.
They tried to set him on fire, but the gasoline
dissolved the adhesive and he broke free.
The wheat so near to harvest must have swayed majestically
as he ran, pain in his eyes, suffocating,
And deciding to finish grad school, which he did.
You, it turns out, consider me to be.
The headlights extend sideways out of the low stalks of winter
    wheat.
The passenger seat holds my fur-lined leather mittens
and your anthology of poetry from The New York school which I
    will not give back.
You can go to hell. I’m going to Seattle.

I hadn’t actually heard of New York-based American writer, poet and translator Mark Statman before seeing this new title, although the acknowledgments of CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS offers that he is the author of six poetry collections, two works of prose and has translated collections by Federico García Lorca (with Pablo Medina), José María Hinojosa and Martín Barea Mattos. I’m fascinated by the idea of the chapbook-length selected poems, something Davis has been exploring for some time (there was also the chapbook-length Stuart Ross bilingual Spanish/English ‘selected’ I reviewed recently, published in Argentina), and I would almost think that putting together a chapbook-length selected would be far more challenging than attempting one book-length, even beyond the consideration of weighing the possibility of ‘best’ against potential ‘representative of this author’s work,’ etcetera. I’m curious as to how the poems in this collection might be representative of Statman’s larger canvas of writing, offering first-person lyric musings via hesitation, soft and slow unfolding of narration. There’s a slowness here his lines and breaks require, both firm and thoughtful, never in any particular hurry, because you’ll get there in the end, either way, whether losing a poem through a young woman’s accent (“the disappearance of the poem”) or a piece on the death of Kenneth Koch, that opens the collection, “Kenneth’s Death,” that begins: “he’s dead and / I still don’t believe: / years later / I’m walking someplace / and I’ll think / this is something / I’ll tell him / when he gets back / when he gets back / as though where Kenneth’s gone / is simply too far away / to telephone or / send a postcard [.]”

chicatanas

some mysteries have
to be that way
Alma asked me yesterday
if I was going to
the casita today
was I going to harvest
our chicatanas
giant ants from
whose toasted bodies
legs and heads removed
Alma makes a
sharp spicy salsa
the chicatanas only come out
once a year and every year
since we bought the
casita we’ve had them
they emerge before dawn
the ground wet it’s either
on the 24^th or 25^th of
every June St. John’s Day
I ask Alma
but how do you know
which day 24, 25 and she
smiles and says because
the morning after
the dawn fills with
small white butterflies

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mary Leader

Mary Leader [photo credit: Margaret Ann Wadleigh] began writing poems around age forty in the midst of a career as a lawyer, working for the Oklahoma Supreme Court.  She left home to earn a PhD in English and American Literature from Brandeis University, published her first book, Red Signature, and went on to teach, primarily at Purdue University in Indiana.  Retired now, she has returned to Oklahoma to read and write full-time.  Her British publisher is Shearsman Books.  Shearsman has brought brought out three of her collections, most recently her fifth book, The Distaff Side, and will also publish her sixth book, The Wood That Will Be Used, in 2024.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, titled Red Signature, was chosen for the National Poetry Series and was published by Graywolf in 1997.  I was 49, so my view of the world (jaundiced) and of myself (knowing "in my heart" that my poems were real) combined to mean I was never reliant on publication as representing any kind of meaningful judgment pro or con.  On the other hand, I was penniless, and the book allowed me to get a tenure-track University teaching job.  That was a big plus.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Circuitously, and late.  I married at 20 and had one baby seven months later and another two years after that.  As they grew up, I started taking college classes, and decided fiction was my direction.  I went to law school, though, and worked as a lawyer until the kids were grown, then had my stereotypical midlife storm.  I came out of that writing poems. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

To be honest, I am not systematic enough in my writing to be able to answer those questions.  I notice dust on a neglected knickknack on a dusty shelf, next to a pile of paper not covered with dust but not presentable either.  It's a wonder anything ever coheres, but it does, and from my language-busy brain things like poems, and ultimately the parameters of projects, emerge.  Then I further mess with connecting my old writing over the years with new ideas for pushing this way or that.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Well, in saying I couldn't answer that last question, I seem to have answered this one!

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings.  My road not taken? an actress.  I adore voices.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Again picking up from "voices" from the last question, the biggest theoretical concern I don't have, and never have had, is the prescription to "find your voice."  For me, that's not the task of poetry.  Utterance that comes out has to do with the intersections of imagination and memory and language and form.  Voice as identity? having just one? well, that's not a process I believe in.  I believe in engagement at intersections, with other minds and with weather. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I get nothing, personally, by placing the tips of my third-and-fourth fingers on the wrist of culture.  I know there's a pulse there but it is so huge and so complex, I can't deal with it.  Only language and the art of using it is the realm I have access to.  Infinite writers, manifold roles, make up reality for me.  It may or may not have a public aspect, but for me, not so much.  It's abstract.  It's a belonging to consciousness.  Culture and consciousness overlap, I suppose, but on different levels of our times and spaces.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

At least one reader is essential.  Editors doing what they do — putting out magazines and books and webpages and so on — I find pleasant to work with on those things, especially Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books.  Seeing the book into print is an important job and I personally am quite keen on the book form as a thing of beauty.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Always consider — don't always do it but consider — removing first lines and last lines.  Those are the two most popular places for telling a lie.  Sometimes, they can be switched instead of being removed.  Oh, and read poems line by line up from the bottom.  That helps you, over years, get a sense for shapeliness of line.  Once in a blue moon, the whole poem is better that way.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I wake up early and first thing, I stagger to my chair and boot up my laptop.  I do word puzzles on the New York Times website (saving the news for afternoon or evening) and jigsaw puzzles on Lenagames.com, Lena being a Russian.  This drill lets me wake up and see how my brain is doing.  If it's perking, I turn to the hard stuff of composing language and editing it, almost "playing poems" as a game.  If my brain is sluggish, I do corollary activities such as corresponding with someone or flipping through a book of poems or making my bed.  I wish I knew another language.  I'd enjoy translation as another kind of game.  See, Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I'm retired, so between real writing and fooling around, there's always something to do.  Attention produces inspiration.  I also have fallow periods, but that is good too.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Childhood home? cigarette smoke.  Where I'm from, and have returned to? Oklahoma has a dry smell of grass when it gets parched at the end of the summer, and a juicy smell when cut, come spring.   

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Those four richly available sources — evergreen — support me as a writer, but tangentially.  They're all worth pursuing and that pursuit, however amateurish, deposits impressions and details that will pop up during composition or revision.  But I also see where McFadden is coming from.  A book is inconceivable unless another book exists and is known to a person who would produce one.  It's a Plato thing.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

When, as a lawyer, I first took up the notion of poetry, I studied from Norton anthologies.  I treated them as catalogues of designs I would like to try my hand at, drawn to form.  I relished the patterns of George Herbert and shapes of May Swenson, the ventriloquism of T. S. Eliot and the documentary technique of Muriel Rukeyser.  Poets close to my heart are Eleanor Ross Taylor and Gwendolyn Brooks.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Edit and write an introduction to a Selected Poems by my mother, Katharine H. Privett.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Actress.  But you can't do that alone.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I did other things first, and did not have anything to do with writing (other than legal writing) until I was nearly 40.  What made me write then was having a psychotherapist ask me what made me happy as a child.  I burst into tears.  Making art was the answer, mostly visual but also some little stories or poems or plays.  I have practiced drawing as an adult, but I realized I couldn't do the work that artists do unless I made language my medium.  Possibly to do with my mother being extremely verbal, with poetry as her core. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

At 75, I read and watch film mostly for entertainment.  Have you seen Derry Girls on netflix?  Knowing what is great in these departments is no longer very operational for me.  I do serious reading, though, of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, in small pieces — as if poetry — at my Lectio Divina group.  We meditate in silence, contemplate, read slowly and intensively, and finally talk about it.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am polishing my next book, titled The Wood That Will Be Used, which is due out from Shearsman on September 1, 2024.  I am going through the boxes and piles of paper in an effort to make sense or an archive (whichever comes first), of literary materials from my life.  And I have some nascent stories, which I am endeavoring to bring into short prose or long poetry.

 12 or 20 (second series)questions;