Kelly Puig is a Cuban-American
writer and interdisciplinary artist. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brown
University where she was the recipient of the Weston Prize for best graduate
work in addition to the Frances Mason Harris Prize for best manuscript of
poetry or prose fiction written by a woman. Her cross-genre debut, The Book
of Embers, was selected by Amaranth Borsuk for the Essay Press Book Prize.
Her writing has appeared in A Mouth Holds Many Things (Fonograf
Editions), Hyena (Hexentexte), Witness, Denver Quarterly, Tupelo
Quarterly and elsewhere.
1 - How did your first
book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous?
How does it feel different?
The Book of Embers is my first book.
In so far as the process
of art-making is not for the faint of heart, the book completely rewrote my
life. The book and its processes calling for incarnation led to divorce,
processes calling for seeing into sight revealed (unbeknownst to me) my
tetrachromacy, processes calling for initiation ushered in a host of
visionaries I was not previously acquainted with to accompany me through the
labyrinth into the enigma of night where I was forced to reckon with personal
and collective history whether I was comfortable or not. The book was an
initiation rite—period—of experiencing in words, on the inside of words, as
Bachelard says, secret movements of our own.
That initiation rite
showed me a great many things but what changed me most was this newfound
perception of consciousness itself, how it continuously seeks to write, or
rather, rewrite us into existence.
2 - How did you come to
prose first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I came to prose second.
Poetry was my wheelhouse, still is, though I gravitate toward the mechanics of
how poetry can reshape sentences, especially successive sentences that become
paragraphs, and what to do with those paragraphs.
At Brown, I was the
impostor-poet in the cohort of fiction writers, trying to figure out what
fiction meant to me. Fiction 101 was the most difficult class I took at
Columbia as an undergraduate. Never in the multiple-choice-question-of-life
would I have imagined I’d get an MFA in Fiction. Poetry remains the lens
through which “Fiction” is most curious to me.
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?
Both. Sophia fell
out of me in a matter of weeks. The Book of Embers grew out of a failed
project… so accounting for its origin in The Word for the Universe, the
overall life of the project grew iteratively over roughly 15 years all in.
Sophia looks much like her
initial ‘draft’ whereas The Book of Embers went through successively
pressurized machinations in the alembic. What started out as a ball of ribbon
with text printed on it became a hologram whose dimensions are best determined
by the reader.
4 - Where does a 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?
Book. As an
interdisciplinary artist deeply interested in how the book form informs a piece
of writing and vice versa, I, on the one hand, see everything as a book—a
strand of hair, a length of ribbon, a leaf, egg, attic, highway, body—and on
the other, seek to understand how isolation of the book to a single application
has more to show and tell me.
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
I tend toward the
paradoxical nature of hermitesse and evangelical so readings are things I both
gravitate toward and run from. I say that also with experience as an audience
member, who does feel a different kind of alchemy when words are read aloud, to
course through the body, in community, and generally feel that is a most
powerful thing. I also recognize as a reader that my experiences reading have
facilitated acts of completion for me personally, and there’s something to be
said for those moments.
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?
As I alluded to above, I’m
drawn to what the book object has to reveal in its material reality and how
that material reality dialogues with questions and/or realities that undergird
what a text is up to or up against—especially when that involves the psychic
toll/potentiality of human history. In its own deconstruction/reconstruction of
what a book can be/is, The Book of Embers is an incarnate reckoning—as
it were—with the nature of paradox—inside not only the physical structure of
the book form but of course the body of human history that necessitates the
book’s existence.
For me, because of my
ancestral hybridity, I’m constantly thinking about how to let the paradox
inhabit me a hundred times over. While that is an eternal question, I think it
is also an enormously topical question in today’s world. What, literally, do we
make of this? Gertrude Stein’s edict—and then there is using everything—starts
with letting everything inhabit us down to the absolute nitty-gritty where the
tragedy and miracle of existence have much still to say.
Other questions I keep
returning to involve time, and how the book object does or doesn’t enact time?
what exactly is the language of time? what is happening inside time inside me
inside the book object in a way that is wholly singular compared to every other
form of art and consumption? how does my relationship to time as a result of
the book object inform/infuse everything else including the act of writing
itself?
Another theme I am
preoccupied with regards “story” and story-telling in general: through what
means are we telling story vs. through what means is story telling us? I’m
thinking of Parul Sehgal’s New Yorker article “The Tyranny of the Tale”
which I write about in The Book of Embers. Story is so full of decay for
me, which is perhaps why I find myself reaching across genres with such
frequency, trying to incorporate “fact” from fiction, putting that back into
the recursive retort, trying to figure out how to unravel story, how to let
story collapse, and in so doing, perhaps gain access to another kind of story
that is more complete in its complexity, more truthful about the nature of
language, which loops us back around to the nature of paradox once again.
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?
Because it is within
language that war starts, because it is within language that the other
materializes, the role of the writer is to keep as close an eye on the alphabet
as possible, and report back with rigor because our humanity depends on it.
8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I haven’t used an editor
to date.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The darling you most need
to kill?
You know the answer.
I just made that one up.
Similarly: get the fuck
out of your own way.
Less crude levity and
something I’ve interpreted as invaluable advice:
I want to get to that
place where I have no strength to hide anything. — Modern dancer Bobbi Jene Smith in the eponymous documentary directed by Elvira Lind.
All of them, applicable to
writing but more important for life itself.
10 - How easy has it been
for you to move between genres, especially within the same project? What do you
see as the appeal?
More genres = more colors
in the palette capable of approximating the truth.
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?
Green tea + morning hours
= afternoon and evening where I have space to chew on whatever has been
percolating in the first half of the equation.
12 - When your writing
gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
When I am stalled, I get
outside and walk my brains out—not for lack of inspiration, but rather because
something needs rejiggering.
13 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
Hmmm. Well, what does
extra fresh oxygen smell like? Home is the place of extra fresh oxygen that
comes directly from plants because I am plant-obsessed because plants teach me
about patience and the living, myriad forms patient beauty can take… so I guess
patience is the fragrance of home… and home, the felt sense of secret growing.
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?
All of the above which is The
Book of Embers. I don’t know how to separate influence and work… they are
one and the same. Writing is the synthesizing act of reading as much as it is
absorbing nature/music/science/visual art—all modes, that for me, come down to
attempting to understand what it means to be curious about being alive.
15 - What other writers or
writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Because my writing is
heavily informed by other writers, what becomes even important in my life is
the very real life outside the mind, and how to tend to those around me with
the same kind of care and thought writing demands of me.
16 - What would you like
to do that you haven't yet done?
Book as a series of
physical art installations and/or sculptural interventions.
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?
I feel I must first speak
to the obvious, namely as Thomas Mann put it, a writer is someone for whom
writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The simple act of
attempting to choose a profession—what a thing!—is beyond me given I most
certainly did not choose writing for myself. What sane person would do such a
thing?
As a child I was dead-set
on becoming an archaeologist, which obviously is just another definition for
writer.
Choosing something else
would mean bodysnatching had occurred—I would be not me—and perhaps that other
Kelly would make a talented esthetician, but she’d still be trying to get to
the bottom of things, poking and prodding beneath the surface for what lay
hidden, clearly an archaeologist in the flesh.
18 - What made you write,
as opposed to doing something else?
See above.
19 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m still thinking about Memoria
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul starring Tilda Swinton, which was only
available to watch in theaters and I most definitely downloaded illegally
because what a thought! A film made to be seen only in theaters. There is a
scene I won’t spoil that I constantly return to around which the whole movie
centers. I try to live there, in that moment, with that breadth of
transrational spaciousness.
Memoria prompted me to see
Weerasethakul’s earlier film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which is easily streamed and equally profound. I guess I’m on a
Weerasethakul kick these days so that is my answer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
20 - What are you
currently working on?
I’m noodling something to
come out of The Book of Embers, not deus ex machina, but dea
ex machina, and all her inner-workings.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
