from THE BOOK OF SMALLER

Christine, in the Halifax airport

Fog delays, at least eight hours. They remain. The larger weather patters, patterns. Toddler walks, squaks, befriends beyond their gate. I wait for updates, texts. Lower ebbs of Gatineau, Ottawa, Toronto underwater. Rigaud. Families lost, and relocated. Of biblical proportions. A pleth. The Chaudiere, rages. It holds down the house. A syntax, excludes. May have washed away. How high’s the water, mama? Their plane out hasn’t even arrived.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Maureen Medved

Maureen Medved’s [photo credit: Nancy Vaz] writing has been published in literary journals and magazines and on the stage and screen internationally. Maureen’s adaptation of her novel The Tracey Fragments, opened the Panorama program of the 57th annual Berlin International Film Festival, winning the Manfred Salzgeber Prize for a film that “broadens the boundaries of cinema today.” Her novel Black Star came out in April 2018 and a book of essays is forthcoming in 2019. She is working on a book-length non-fiction work and a novel. She writes about film and television and is an Associate Professor inthe Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia.

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 was a total life changer. Of course there was Tracey the movie, and that changed my life in significant ways with Bruce, Ellen, the awards, etc., but that’s another story. In terms of Tracey the book, I was writing alone in a little box, performing my work at punk gigs and so forth and then very suddenly I climbed out of the box.  Both the first book and the second are told in first person POV by someone on the verge of a major crisis. But the first book is about a teen who feels rebellious and the second is about an academic who feels like a messed up teen. But they are different people with different concerns.

           

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

Originally, I grew up reading plays and watching movies with my father. It was Winnipeg. Snow. No internet. What felt like no way out. If we’d had the internet, I’m sure I would have never left my bedroom, watching Streetcar and Long Days Journey into Night on repeat. But back in the prehistoric era I was satisfied reading the plays and listening to stand up comedy albums on the turntable in my little room while the snow mounted outside. Whenever a great movie was playing on TV, the bells would sound in our house and my father and I would set aside everything to watch the film and discuss it for weeks. Because I had no way to watch a film I loved on demand, I would often replay it in my mind. The entire process became a major preoccupation. While I was interested in drama and cinema, I also loved certain novels that spoke to me in a confessional way. As an example, I read Catcherin the Rye very young (I think the first time I read it I was eight or ten. I’m not trying to make myself sound unique.  I was just very drawn to the adult section of the library where the books often made no sense and scared the crap out of me and excited me at the same time). With Salinger I felt like, wow, this teenager is actually telling me his secrets. All that private stuff nobody talks about. It felt forbidden and confessional and sacred. Of course, most ten year olds don’t hear this kind of stuff. This was like magic to me. A private world I had no business entering, but from which I couldn’t turn away. And I could see the little movie in my head as I read along, casting it and directing it as I went. In retrospect, it felt like a real exercise in interactivity. A revelation. I didn’t see myself as a writer then. But as one naturally obsessed with the form, I suddenly discovered something that gave me everything I needed for living. At least, that’s the way I’d perceived it. I remember thinking, I found in narrative a way to get everything I’d wanted. Stories could be told by integrating the monologue of dramatic writing and the visual elements of cinema in ways that could be read on the page and the stage.  I remember my father telling me to listen carefully to real speech and that the best writing came from that. He said each person has their own musicality. My father was not formally educated, and very much self-taught. But in this department he had confidence in his opinions and I took his lessons seriously. Eventually in my twenties I discovered poetry, loved it, and studied with a few poets. I love the idea of telling stories, using the language of the speaker while mining for poetic opportunities that authentically rise out of character.

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?

I start with an image associated with a strong feeling. The feeling usually catches me off guard. I will return to that feeling for a while, being curious about it. Kind of rolling it around inside me. It’s usually an unfamiliar feeling, so I get caught on that. It might be a really disturbing or even an amorphous feeling. But I’m curious enough to stay with it. Eventually, characters rise out of the darkness. At that point, I realize, wow! I might just have something to say here. The initial stages are fun, exploratory, but frustrating, too. Sometimes I can hardly tolerate what’s coming up, and I need to take breaks to consider and reconsider what I’m up against. Then comes the hard part. How to best explore that feeling in a way that is dramatically compelling. I usually work slowly until I kind of nail it in the form of story.  After that, the writing comes fast and furious. Then as I get closer to the final, the process intensifies, and becomes all consuming. It’s both exhilarating and exhausting. People I know often don’t see me for a long, long time when I get to the final stages. I incubate, editing, writing, editing, writing many drafts until I get the desired effect. I usually go to work then come home and write and edit for as long as I can.  

4 - Where does a work of fiction or play 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?

Thus far I’ve mainly been working on novel-length books. Not because I have a novelist’s aspirations, but up to now that is the size of the stories I’ve needed to tell. Even if people say to me, this would make a short story, the work seems deceptively simple, but it is layered inside me like the pages of a map. It just might take a while to unfold the pages. Even though Tracey was based on dramatic monologues, I had a book-length narrative in mind once I chose to write it.

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. I was raised on performance and performance art both in the music and art scenes: Spalding Gray, Lydia Lunch and so many others as well as stand up comedy. I treat readings of my work as performance rather than literary “readings” per se and usually spend considerable time preparing them and getting into character, doing voices, etc.

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 have to ask myself repeatedly what do I have to offer? What can I possibly say that is relevant and pertinent to what’s going on right now? From my own experience I am very preoccupied by what I view as unethical behavior that is both personal and systemic. This is not something new. But I have a strong desire to work with that material. I am also very interested in women’s voices. Women’s rage and the buried sorrow and loss and betrayal under the rage. We live in a world where women are at once elevated and degraded. If we look around us, women’s bodies are more commodified than ever. We see our own journeys, hopes, and dreams in that mirror. I am interested in the women who walk among us virtually invisible. I feel as though their stories are powerful touchstones for systemic problems, and can shed light on much that we don’t want to acknowledge or even see. These women have intense power for healing. I see Tracey (The Tracey Fragments) and Del (Black Star) coming out of that place. These average people on the street who most of us don’t even notice while we pass them, work with them, etc. I’m interested in the private concerns of those people.

Returning to the idea of ethics, this has always been a preoccupation of mine. It occurs to me that we all keep so busy and distracted that we don’t know how to approach ethics and we aren’t taught it, so we don’t even know how to ask the right questions. People often divide ethical matters into good and bad, right and wrong, evil and good. This leaves people completely baffled, so they avoid thinking through major issues in a deeper, more productive way until it’s too late to process them when they are called upon to do so. When it’s urgent. But on a more general level, my writing is about people and what they go through – the little tragedies and joys of living. I’m very interested in the writing itself and exploring language and hopefully expanding the form for me, at least, in ways that surprise me, but also in ways that stay true to character. This is the challenge for me as an artist: how far can I pull the elastic band of the form to reveal new elements of character and new ways to experience those elements without breaking the band completely.  As I walk through life I try to pay attention to the ways people speak and the little ways we surprise each other. Those little moments are important to me, very telling cultural touchstones.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I can’t speak for other writers. For me, the primary role of writer is to reveal something about character, I think, some tiny insight, and the condition of being human in relation to the world. To reveal something we should pay attention to. I believe writers are like those little red candies we chewed back when I was in elementary school that can reveal where we didn’t brush our teeth well enough.

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

I love working with an editor. I like showing drafts of my work to editors to get perspective on my work. I do find it essential to hear what others have to say. I think it’s crucial to work with highly tuned up people who get your vision and can see your blind spots.

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

Always bring it back to character.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (playwriting to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I love moving between forms. I think the genres strengthen, embolden and give perspective to each other.

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 like to write first thing in the morning. Before I start forming the to-do lists and responding to emails. I like to have an idea of what I want to write the night before. I will usually write it down on a piece of paper. Then while I drink my morning coffee, I will start writing free form while waking up. I like to get a good 500 words in that way. Then I’ll file it and start again the next day. I might do the research part of my writing at night. I’ve learned the hard way not to take a lot of breaks from the work. I have been very ill over the past twenty years with a rare condition and was forced to take long breaks because I didn’t have the stamina for a daily writing practice. That was a dark time, not only for my health, but also for the writing. Now that I’m well, carving out a daily practice is important to me. I’ve lost a lot of time. I have books I want to write, and a strong drive to get them out.

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

I love listening to people talk. It’s like music to me. But music itself is also good.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The sweet smell of the wheat fields. Or the air when it becomes paralyzed just before a storm.

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?

I am very influenced by music. I will often choose a piece of music and listen to it on repeat to get a sense of whatever I’m working on and to more deeply access that feeling I’m after.  I am also very influenced by visual art, especially photography. I love portrait work, e.g., Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman. Those artists can catch an entire story in someone’s eyes.

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

Bolano, Borges, Gaitskill, Oates, Paley, D’Ambrosio, O’Connor, Johnson, O’Brien. But I also relate very much to a kind of transgressive community of writers such as Acker, Holmes and Selby Jr. Finally, I am heavily influenced by Singer, Kafka, and Schulz, and those folks. But I admire the work of so many writers. The list is long.

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

I’d like to take up capoeira or some kind of rigorous physical discipline.

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?

Write.

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

It was both a rational decision as well as a necessary one. Rationally, I love telling stories and stories are very important to me. I had a strong desire to be creative and to express myself in a creative way using words. Many writers probably say it, but writing saved me. It allowed me to focus everything inside me in a positive direction.

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

There’s so much. I’m always reading and watching.  Right now I love the TV show Atlanta. I just saw an amazing film Dina. I also loved Tangerine. I review films and television. There’s a ton of media out there right now – more than ever before, but it’s always a struggle to find that stand out piece. I’m always reading a lot of great stuff. But now that I’ve finished this book, I look forward to a summer of novel reading.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a non-fiction book and a novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Eric Schmaltz, SURFACES

There is a delight to seeing what Toronto poet Eric Schmaltz has accomplished with his first full-length title, SURFACES (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018), a title rightly listed equally as poetry, graphic arts and typography. My first real interaction with Schmaltz’ work came in the form of a chapbook manuscript, produced through above/ground press as MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard poems (2014). As he wrote in an email as part of his original submission, the chapbook was “an homage to Paul Dutton’s The Plastic Typewriter.” Toronto poet Dutton’s work, produced by Underwhich Editions in 1993, is described as a “Compilation of concrete or visual poetry that goes beyond the way the typewriter is traditionally used to make impressions on to a piece of paper. Completed in 1977, materials used were a disassembled plastic case typewriter, an intact typewriter, carbon ribbons, carbon paper, metal file and white bond paper.” Further to Schmaltz’ email on his response project, he wrote that:

Following Dutton’s example, I dismantled a keyboard and use its parts and black paint to create a series of visual poems that simultaneously map and disrupt the materiality of the keyboard. These poems engage with ideas and questions regarding language's materiality, tactility, and the language devices we use to creatively communicate.

I was immediately fascinated by Schmaltz’ curiosity in exploring the work of one his forebears, composing new work as both study and exploration, as well as working to find his own way through it, and very openly build on the visual and concrete experiments already set down. As Gary Barwin writes on Schmaltz’ Dutton project for Jacket2:

And the typewriter: a Flintstones era writing machine when looked at from the digital age. I’m writing this digitally, the text appearing on the digital representation of a page. There’s no ink. Only light. Pixel yourself on a boat on a river. But this newfangled thing is modeled on that old fashioned typewriting machine. Keys in QWERTY order. The scrolling page. The word processor defaults to modeling the typewriter experience. Digital mimicry.

So when Eric Schmaltz in 2013 deconstructs typewriting, it’s carbon ribbon dating.  He’s a retronaut re(con)textualizing the typewriter and writing in both space and time. Indeed his typewriter is so changed by spacetime its actually a computer keyboard. He quotes Kenny Goldsmith in the epigraph to MITSUMI: “The twenty-first century is invisible. We were promised jetpacks but ended up with handlebar moustaches. The surface of things is the wrong place to find the 21st century.” (Goldsmith, “The New Aesthetic and The New Writing.”)

The collection presents itself as an assemblage of surfaces, playing off the suggestion of superficial while presenting a sequence of works that work through a variety of depths of text and texture, lines and rough scapes, from what jwcurry might refer to as “dirty concrete,” to cleaner lines, collaged images and manipulated and reassembled texts. SURFACES exists as a collection of sketchworks, presenting a sequence of studies on image, text, response and the page, extending the notion of what the concrete/visual poem can accomplish. In the afterword by Joseph Mosconi, titled “THREE SUPERFICIAL THOUGHTS ON SURFACES,” he writes:

            These questions of surface and depty, of superficiality and profundity, have been a central concern of textual scholarship in the wake of Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s call for what they term “surface reading”—an attention to surface as materiality, as verbal structure, or as an affective and ethical stance. Marcus and Best situate “surface reading” in opposition to the seemingly oppressive structures of “symptomatic reading,” or the search for hidden textual truths typified by Freudian and Marxist literary criticism. “We take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts,” write Marcus and Best, “what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth. A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through.”

            One of the remarkable things about Eric Schmaltz’s Surfaces is that, like the put-down joke, and like the duck-rabbit illusion, the book manages to engage both the shallows and the depths. It asks its readers not only to confront its textual experiments—its schematics, patterns, substrates, and structures—but to think through the social, political, and cognitive contexts that lie beneath such surface encounters.

The past twenty-odd years of Canadian writing has been wonderfully rich in the production of visual and concrete works, an explosion of publishing, producing and curiosity that seemed to come out of nowhere, with dozens of writers and artists now composing and producing, from the older writers who have been working away for decades—jwcurry, bill bissett and Judith Copithorne, for example—to the mid-career practitioners—derek beaulieu, Gary Barwin, W. Mark Sutherland, Sharon Harris, Billy Mavreas, Christian Bök and Helen Hajnoczky—to the array of emerging writer quietly moving their own ways through multiple threads of history to begin producing their own works—Sacha Archer, Kate Siklosi, Kyle Flemmer, Ken Hunt and Dani Spinosa (these lists aren’t meant to be exhaustive, but simply to give a quick sense of some gatherings of activity). All of this activity is impressive, and the benefits of a growing community of practitioners in the digital age have allowed the work being produced to be more thoughtful, and often presented in deep conversation with other works already produced (Spinosa, for example, has been working on some very interesting homage pieces over the past few years). All of this to say that, while Schmaltz’ work is part of something larger and grander, it has also become one of its ongoing highlights, something SURFACES can’t help but broadcast.

new up at Selcouth Station : poems from the book of smaller,

I have a handful of further poems from my unpublished the book of smaller over at Selcouth Station. Thanks so much! To see further poems from the same manuscript, check out the link here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brian Leung

Brian Leung, author of Ivy vs. Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands!, World Famous Love Acts, Lost men, and Take me Home, is a past recipient of the Lambda Literary outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. Other honors include the Asian-American Literary Award, Willa Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Brian’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Story, Ocean State Review, Numero Cinq, Crazyhorse, Grain, Gulf Coast, Kinesis, The Barcelona Review, Mid-American Review, Salt Hill, Gulf Stream, River City, Runes, The Bellingham Review, Hyphen, Velocity, The Connecticut Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Crowd. He is the current Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University.

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 success of World Famous Love Acts certainly caught me off guard.  I mean, it’s a literary short story collection and somehow it became an editor’s pick in People.  My long-time agent, PJ Mark, found me with that first book, as did the editor of my first two novels.  It felt like overnight I went from obscure scribbler, to respected writer.

I should probably mention as well, that the publication of that collection taught me a lot about biases in book business in terms of how one’s work gets categorized.  I took a friend in to a Chicago Borders book store to show him my baby.  Not on the shelf.  We looked it up on their electronic data base. Not in the store, BUT, if it were, it would be in the gay section. Out of eleven stories, four had gay characters. To cut to the chase, after two months of inquiry, Borders finally explained that they had taken it on themselves to categorize my book because it was one of five boxes checked by my publisher (Asian-American, Literary Fiction, Short Stories, Gay, General fiction). My book was in only 40 of their stores, on the Gay Fiction shelf, and even at that, only one copy each. I was devastated.

It's funny, because all these years later, a book store where I scheduled reading wrote on their website that I would be reading from my YA novel, Ivy vs. Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands!  It isn’t a YA novel and isn’t even listed such. But this time, I wasn’t devastated. I simply asked for the correction and moved on.  Too little time to perseverate on such silliness. 

You asked how this current novel is different. It is very different than World Famous Love Acts and even my two novels.  For one thing, this novel is funny.  Not to say that my previous work was humorless, but I certainly was in the mode of writing serious literary fiction.  Take Me Home, for example, take place in the shadow of a historical event, the 1885 massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Spring, Wyoming.  My friends and family constantly claim they never find  “funny, quippy” Brian in any of my work.  My answer? Take on the pro-choice pro-life debate. . .with a smile.  

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

I remember Stuart Little being read to us in Second Grade.  Then Where the Red Fern Grows in CCD (totally off the catechism). And in 7^th grade our English teacher read a few pages to us from Z for Zacharia. Even though I was in a physical place, the words made me see another place. I was fascinated by that power.

Crucially, I had a professor in college, the fantastic writer Kate Braverman, who basically told me I sucked because my writing was to yuckity-yuck. I was trying too hard to be a crowd pleaser.  It pissed me off, so I wrote a piece imitating her style and read it out loud in class, red hot and angry.  I asked her directly if that’s how she wanted me to write. She waited a few beats and then said, directly, “yes.”  Fortunately, I light went on. She didn’t mean write like her. She meant give a damn. Maybe now, after all these years I’ve learned to pull that lesson together with my sense of humor.  Anyway, I knew then fiction was my mode because for me, giving a damn takes space.

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?

If I’m being honest, it takes me between one afternoon and eighteen years. The quickest thing I ever wrote was one of my favorites, a flash fiction called “All the Presidents, Men.”  I wrote it in just a couple of hours at a friend’s NYC apartment.  It is not explicit, but I can share that all the sex acts are named after U.S. Presidents.  There’s even a Millard Fillmore. The idea for Ivy vs. Dogg started eighteen years ago when I was in the car listening to conservative talk radio and yelling at the host.  I actually thought it was going to be my sophomore novel, but my editor thought it would be “off brand.”  BUT if you read the introduction in Lost Men you’ll see my sneaky way of keeping the idea of Ivy and Dogg alive.

All this is to say, I don’t have a particular urgency of getting “done” with a piece. I know if I write half a thing, and if it lingers in my mind over time, I’ll come back to it.  Lost Men was a failed short story from about 1993 called “Three Rivers of Chinatown.”  Then I took a trip to China with my father and a light went on. So that was fourteen years Take Me Home had a ten year journey.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?

The most fun thing is writing from a title.  The first story in my collection is “Six Ways to Jump Off a Bridge.”  I’d written that in my travel journal on that trip to China because we had walked across a six-hundred-year-old bridge and figured in that amount of time, at least once every hundred years someone would have jumped.  But I had no story, and strangely, the one that came about is set in the Pacific Northwest.   When I discovered the history of the massacre I mentioned earlier, I knew that was a book. In fact, my editor bought it based on a one page synopsis for a manuscript I hadn’t written. Talk about pressure. Never again.  So, perhaps I’m more prompt oriented than “big idea” driven.

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

I like to play at readings, especially when I know lots of people in the audience. I can work a room from onstage. And I’m vigilant about knowing few writers can command attention reading for a half hour from a single text.  So, I mix it up, and yeah, I’ll slip in some fresh fiction to see what kind of reaction it gets.

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?

How long do you have?!  My career as a writer and teacher has been about diversity and difference.  By way of example, and I promise I’m not tooting my own horn here, look at these two awards; The Asian American Writers Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Mid-Career A Novelist.  And so, Ivy vs. Dogg presented a problem for me because the town is quite homogeneous, except, it’s not and they don’t know it.   

A bit of clumsy personal history and mixing of terms. I’m half Chinese, half Euro-mix. One of my sisters is Chinese-American and two are white. Two of my nephews choose to identify as black and one is half-Chinese, half Euro-mix. My family is filled with Catholics, Mormons, and Evangelicals. I’m married to a man. I grew up in a family affected by alcoholism, molestation, misogyny, love, and support without question.  I raised chickens and ate government cheese. I have a cousin who is convinced, given the chance, that Muslims want to throw me off of a rooftop.  So, what are the current questions? Apparently, the ones I’ve been living with for half a century, and that’s sad. We are facing a roll back of hard one civil liberties and a retreat from the concerns that just started to resonate with movements like Black Lives Matter. It’s a welcome wonder that Me Too has broken through.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

This depends on the writer. My colleague, Roxane Gay, is a true public intellectual. She must do over a hundred appearances a year, and she creates across multiple platforms.  Not every writer can be that. There isn’t the space.  But I think all of us can, collectively, hold up a mirror to the culture, but without being scolds.  Personally, I’m enjoying supporting other writers. I think that’s where I can contribute, helping these writers find space on the shelf for their work. 

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

I like the sandbox, so every editor I’ve worked with has given me joy.  It’s like I’m a Polar bear and the keepers are throwing a new ball and a block of ice filled with frozen fruit into my enclosure. Maybe I should have used a juggling metaphor, but the point is, I enjoy that final person looking at my work and asking “what if?”

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

“Know when somebody doesn’t love you, and move on. He doesn’t love you.” Oh, but you’re probably talking about writing advice.  Helena Maria Viramontes pulled me aside early on after reading a draft of one of my stories. In it the main character is bi-racial and having a cultural identity crisis.  Viramontes told me that was my subject; that and all the other complexities that made me a specific Brian.  I didn’t have to write about myself, but I needed to draw from that well.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to creative non-fiction to poetry)? What do you see as the appeal?

I have scads of unpublished poetry, which is probably a good thing, but in writing it, I’m reminded to stay in touch with each sentence of prose as if it were poetry.  And, well, check out “Where Went Niola?” online to see how CNF affects my fiction. The character is named Brian.

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?

If I have one regret about getting married. . . .  Well, maybe let’s start a different way.  I used to get up around 5 or 6am and write until 9  or so.  But I was single, or living alone. Man, I wrote a lot, and I go a lot of attention for my writing. But I was emotionally lonely.  When I met Brian, my husband (Yes, that’s his name), I knew within 24 hours that I needed to make love a priority.  Let’s set aside my increasing university responsibilities. Love as a priority, well that means coffee and news in the morning with my husband because I want to spend time with him. It means looking at my week and picking the four days a week and maybe 12-15 hours I’m going to write.  It’s different every week.   Brian and I have been together almost ten years.  I’m  happy to have written less and loved more.

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

Not to get all advicey right off the bat, but this is why it’s important to have multiple writing projects going on at once.  But something maybe less transferable is this, through Purdue Extension, I completed the Master Gardener program, so, wait for it, I’m a Master Gardener.  This means I spend hours volunteer gardening for food pantries and other gardeners.  Plus, I have a quarter acre of my own and two large community garden plots.  I stall, then garden, then write, then stall, then garden, then write, then. . . .   Of course, my mind is problem solving when I’m gardening even when I’m not aware of it.    At this point I’m also able to ask myself why I’m stalling.  Let’s say I’m struggling with the point of view I’m attempting.  I’ll walk away from my laptop pick up, say, Jazz. Other writers have solved my struggles in their books.  Susan Choi’s work is frequent go-to in this regard.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Mint reminds me of my grandmother. Meyer lemon reminds me of my grandfather. Sage can remind me of growing up in rural Southern California, but it has to be a dusty sage scent.

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?

I don’t listen to music unless my husband turns it on. He has good, vast taste.  Once, when I was in a swimming pool in Key West, I spent ten minutes following an ant around the edge. I mean I was at eye level inches away and it didn’t seem to care. It didn’t seem to have any particular agenda, but it’s an ANT, so of course it has an agenda.  I don’t think there’s any scientific evidence that shows ants take leisurely strolls.  I spent the rest of that day watching strangers, thinking of agendas, making them up. That night in the hotel, I was watching news, and catching up on news online. Before I went to bed I started writing something.  That’s my pattern, nature, people, news, write.

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

There’s no doubt that ALL of James Baldwin’s work has guided me.  Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek changed me as a writer, as did Scott Russell Sanders. They helped me think about the natural world in an essential and spiritual way.  And I’m thinking of this just now as I respond to your question. Three of my favorite childhood books are Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and Watership Down.  Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever floored me (the natural world preying on humans). KarenTei Yamashita’s I Hotel has helped me rethink form.

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

By accident I’ve checked of so many bucket list things, even silly ones that weren’t on my list.  I’ve eaten dinner in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion hall of portraits and I’ve been to the Academy Awards.  I’ve been to France to support my book in translation at a book fair. I got married, something I never thought possible.  What’s left? I’d like to see the bottom of the ocean before it’s covered in plastic, like, in one of those deep-diving small submarines. Do you know anyone?  I hope the world will accept one volume of poetry from me. I haven’t sent a book manuscript out yet, but it’s coming within the next five years. Rest.

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’d be a landscape designer. Yes, only that. Except, I’m no good at math. So, I’d need underlings.

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

Is there anything else, really?   I’m part of the thousands of years’ Parietal art movement. I hunt, eat, then paint the cave walls. I don’t have children, so I must leave my physical mark.

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

Greatness as a category requires the perspective of distance.  So, for the future, I’d nominate in terms of recent reads, The Underground Railroad.  Roxane Gay’s Hunger is unbelievably brave and vulnerable. Again, in a recent context, Phantom Thread, is a perfectly executed film.  The documentaries Hoop Dreams and Grey Gardens are recent re-watches that deserve mention.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts awarded me a Center for Artistic Excellence Fellowship, which will allow me to complete a new collection of stories with a novella about an alcoholic dog portraitist. Also on deck, archival research for a follow up novel to Take Me Home. Some of my LGBT readers felt like the gay character in that novel was treated a little harshly.  Maybe they were right, so Muuk gets his own novel.  So, Finnish migration in the 1870’s.  I know, but trust me, there’s an interesting story there.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;