12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sam Szanto

Sam Szanto lives in Durham, UK. Her debut short story collection If No One Speaks was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2022. Over 50 of her stories and poems have been published/ listed in competitions. As well as her many published stories, in April 2022 she won the Shooter Flash Fiction Contest, was placed second in the 2022 Writer’s Mastermind Short Story Contest, third in the 2021 Erewash Open Competition, second in the 2019 Doris Gooderson Competition and was also a winner in the 2020 Literary Taxidermy Competition. Her short story collection Courage was a finalist in the 2021 St Lawrence Book Awards. She won the 2020 Charroux Prize for Poetry and the First Writers International Poetry Prize, and her poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals including The North. Find her on Twitter: @sam_szanto

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
All my work has always been different - you'll be able to tell from reading my current story collection 'If No One Speaks' that all my stories feel very different and are about very different people, as well as being located all over the world. One reviewer said it was amazing that all the stories had been written by the same person - I believe that was meant as a compliment!

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to novel writing first, but I've written poems for a long time too. Short stories came a little later.
 
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 do everything fast, from speaking to walking to writing. Sometimes I'll leave a poem or story and come back to it with a slightly different idea that improves it immeasurably, sometimes things come fully formed. The MA in Writing Poetry course I'm currently taking has helped me work on shaping poems though, as rewriting is part of the craft we're learning.

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?
Definitely the former, the stories have to find their own ways of threading together.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don't enjoy speaking in public, but it's something I want to get better at. I've put myself forward for a live Twitter reading that my publisher has organised in a few weeks' time so will see how that goes! I'm happy to pre-record a reading though - it's the live speaking rather than the being watched that makes me nervous!
 
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 don't write to answer questions, but I usually do realise what I've actually written about once I've finished a story - I've written quite a few stories that I thought were just about relationships that I realised later were about grief.

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 think writing has many purposes. We are teachers, we are entertainers, we are role models. But what I do always think of when I consider this type of question is a comment a novelist once made to me, which is that most people only read books in bed (before they go to sleep) or in the bath. We all think our writing is terribly important and impactful, and sometimes it is, but I try not to forget that really people just want to hear a story, just as my little children do before they go to bed, just as people have always done.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I actually work in a freelance capacity as a copy-editor so see it from the other side - a lot of the time, people ignore my brilliant suggestions and just do what they want to do. I pretty much accept whatever an editor says to me, though - they're the reader, after all, the person I'm doing this for. Once I've finished writing a story and given it to an audience, it's not really mine. However, I have felt a bit patronised occasionally! This has never happened with poetry, actually, only short stories (but not often).

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Pretty much everything Ernest Hemingway had to say about writing. I love his advice to omit what you feel is the last part of the story to leave the reader wanting more.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories)? What do you see as the appeal?
Easy, and necessary. Writing in the one genre constricts me if I do it all the time. Sometimes an idea just works as a poem but not as a story, or vice versa. It happened to me recently that I retold a piece of flash fiction as a prose poem and it worked to great acclaim.

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 don't really have one, as I have young kids who have to take priority, plus occasional freelance work. I write when the kids are at school and as much as possible at all other times.

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

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Fresh paint at the moment!

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?
Music, yes. Transport, too, I get a lot of creativity from journeys. People, though, are my main influences: their conversations, their mannerisms, their jobs, everything about them.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
So many! Tessa Hadley, Curtis Sittenfeld, Kate Atkinson, Rose Tremain, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Moniza Alvi, Rebecca Goss, my writing tutors and the other writers I know...

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Have a novel and a poetry book published, travel to Japan/Canada/New Zealand, help my children to grow up happy (hopefully this will happen!)

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've done many things... worked in marketing for a blind charity, a school and an engineering corporation; sold ice cream and shoes. I still do freelance as a copy-editor and an English tutor so would still be doing that (more often) if I didn't also write.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I had to write. There was never another goal.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I loved Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld. I'm not that into films, really - I was obsessed with The Doors film as a teenager, though. On TV, I currently love Mad Men.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A novel that wants to be a thriller but we'll see... I'm about to start the second year of my MA in Writing Poetry, though, so will be writing a lot of poetry pretty soon!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ned Baeck

Ned Baeck studied Liberal Arts at Concordia University and Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His poetry has appeared in The Continuist, untethered, Sewer Lid, Ottawa Arts Review, Prism, The Nashwaak Review, Poetry Pause, and can be found in the Sunshine in a Jar Facebook page under The Story of Water, curated by Jessica Outram.  Originally from Ontario, he has made his home in Vancouver, BC for most of the last 20 years. He partially fulfilled a dream in 2019, spending 5 months training in a Rinzai Zen temple in Okayama, Japan.

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 sort of a reckoning…of years of chronic alcoholism, homelessness, drifting, fear. Not that there wasn’t any love or light rising…I was able to look back with clear eyes and see the present breaking free of it.  As I described it to a friend, it was my punch, after I had taken a good few.  I wanted it to stand strong, and I think it did. Having Wait published by Guernica gave stolidity to the time capsule, and to the line I had crossed in righting my course. I’d published a chapbook with Luciano Iacobelli’s Lyricalmyrical press, but it was adolescent, this was my first real book, and it freed me, as I walked, of the tentacles I’d lopped off in creating it.

Cage of Light is a different animal.  I didn’t work any less hard on it, but it didn’t come as smoothly.  In Wait, I was looking back on a span of time from a position of privilege (having stopped drinking and flailing 3 years previous), and it emerged under the light of renewed consciousness.  The new book, though it still contains poems about addiction and recovery, abuse and seeking, is ‘all about’ me now. Like surrounding me. And it’s more dispersed.  If you know what parts of southern California are like, it rolls, it sprawls, has little nuclei all around, is less in a major key.  Writing like that demands more of the reader. Asking more of the reader is not something I’m proud of, it just sort of turned out that way. It’s both more and less sober.  Like a fog, if you walk around in it long enough, you’ll get wet, and I hope that is a pleasing if somewhat less crystalline experience.  

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

In fact, I didn’t come to poetry first, at least not officially.  I was in a short-fiction writing class in S.E.E.D. high school, and wrote a few short stories during that time.  I’d get high at home and write surrealist poems, but it wasn’t till I got into a creative writing class taught by a poet (again, Luciano Iacobelli) that I was steered toward reading and writing poetry.  Once I made the shift, felt the freedom and potential, it was for good.

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?

The main body of any poem usually comes quickly, in one sitting, and sometimes appears looking close to its final shape, but usually undergoes copious edits. Getting the first draft on the screen is the first gate, and a kind of seal reopened by editing. Then it either floats and becomes more efficient and streamlined or falls away.

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?

I don’t really know where a poem usually begins, maybe an impression, a feeling, a word with something unknown behind it, something, as Eliot wrote, to be exorcised. I’m never really working on a book. I write poems. I then try to find siblings. Sometimes just appearing during the same time under the same concern is enough to group them together. This is a question of affinity and not laziness, I hope.

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 public readings.  The poem isn’t finally birthed until I’ve read it out loud to an audience. I’m with Mandelstam on that. That said, they live on after ectopic birth on the page.

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 think poetry as any art can address fundamental questions about being alive…what it is like, where it comes from and how it can change.  So I think ‘where did it come from?’, ‘where is it going?’ and ‘what is it like along the way (and what can be done to REALIZE it)?’ are the perennial questions.  I’m speaking of a relationship to others and the universe.

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?

If you look at history, it’s a bit of a death cult. Some writers and artists receive recognition in their lifetime, but others are shrouded in obscurity.  I think especially now, when identity politics dominates what is curated by mainstream culture, much that is good will be seen as such only later, at least canonically. There’s that very neat phrasing about recognition…which I will butcher, but goes something along the lines of ‘first it is mocked, then it is murdered, then some time later it is considered self-evidently true. ‘ (I think that was about prophetic words and prophets, but it goes for art as well.)  I think the role of the writer today is to remind us to be good by sedulous or apocryphal means, and that might be true for other times as well. 

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

I think it’s essential. The editor needs to match the writer in dedication, even push them along.

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

In Zen we go slowly.

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 don’t really have a writing routine, I bear the marks of the outdated romantic notion that it’s ‘just as the spirit takes you’.  My days begin with Chinese herbs, Clif bars and an AA meeting, unless I’m on retreat, in which case only the Chinese herbs survive, and meditation takes the place of meeting.

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

When I don’t feel like writing I just don’t write. I do other things. It is all a continuum anyway.

It all comes home.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Rainwater on a rose. Reminds me of here, which is home. And the smell of a pillow that needs washing.

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?

All of the above influence my work. To some degree I practice ‘found art’ or collage, even though my poems are usually narrative, some of them consist of things found here and there bound together by my own zeitgeist.

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

Zen literature. Ikkyu, hence the epigraphs in my new book. Rinzai, Dogen, Hakuin, Bassui, Ta Hui, Lao Tzu. The Heart Sutra. Cold Mountain. The Diamond Sutra. Joko Beck. And in poetry, Rumi. Kahlil Gibran. T.S. Eliot. Eugenio Montale. Nanao Sakaki. Bukowski. Al Purdy.

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

Surf.

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?

A monk.

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

Besides writing and doing zazen, the only other thing I know how to do is wash dishes.  Actually, I’m usually on the look-out for a good dishwashing job. It goes well with writing. I have a BA, and had things turned out differently with my state of mental health, I might have gone into teaching creative writing or language or Asian Studies.  The monk thing still stands, and it is, unlike the other things listed, still probable.

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

The last great book I read was Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, though I couldn’t finish it because of the sexual violence. So for one that I finished, Convenience Store Woman, by Suyaka Murata.  As for film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus or the 2010 film Alice in Wonderland starring Mia Wasikowska.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m editing a few long poems.  They are about the reckoning of failed love. I want there to be more short pieces that are easily digestible to accompany these long poems, and I want to do the lion’s share of the work, so that the reader or listener just has to take it in without too much parsing.  So maybe it’s not entirely true that I never have a book in mind. I guess I write and ride the waves until there’s some kind of consistency. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Adrian Lürssen, Human Is to Wander

 

Between I and you comes
a sounding out against

picture frames, chanting in exchange
for landscape. She spoke

as if underwater: Here
is a map. Here, a spoonful

of honey. Lying in wait,
the curious air of a genie

unhindered by voice,
she was indifferent

as smoke and driftwood. (“NO LONGER A MOTHER TONGUE”)

Born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa and then Washington D.C., San Francisco Bay Area-based poet Adrian Lürssen’s full-length debut is the poetry collection Human Is to Wander (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2022), as selected by Gillian Conoley for the 2022 Colorado Poetry Prize. As I wrote of his chapbook earlier this year, NEOWISE (Victoria BC: Trainwreck Press, 2022), a title that existed as an excerpt of this eventual full-length collection, Lürssen’s poems and poem-fragments float through and across images, linking and collaging boundaries, scraps and seemingly-found materials. Composed via the fractal and fragment, the structure of Human Is to Wander sits, as did the chapbook-excerpt, as a swirling of a fractured lyric around a central core. “in which on / their heads,” he writes, to open the sequence “THE LIGHT IS NOT THE USUAL LIGHT,” “women carried water / and mountains // brought the sky / full circle [.]”

The book is structured as an extended, book-length line on migration and geopolitics, of shifting geographies and global awareness and globalization. He writes of war and its effects, child soldiers and the dangers and downside of establishing boundaries, from nations to the idea of home; offering the tragedies of which to exclude, and to separate. “The accidental response of any movement,” he writes, to open the poem “ARMY,” “using yelling instead of creases as a / means to exit. Or the outskirts of an enemy camp.” Set in three lyric sections, Lürssen’s mapmaking examines how language, through moving in and beyond specifics, allows for a greater specificity; his language forms akin to Celan, able to alight onto and illuminate dark paths without having to describe each moment. “A system of killing that is irrational or rational,” he writes, to open the poem “SKIRT,” “depending on the training.” As the same poem concludes, later on: “It is a game of answers, this type of love.” Lürssen’s lyrics move in and out of childhood play and war zones, child soldiers and conflations of song and singer, terror and territory, irrational moves and multiple levels of how one employs survival. This is a powerful collection, and there are complexities swirling through these poems that reward multiple readings, and an essential music enough to carry any heart across an unbearable distance. “The enemy becomes a song,” the poem “UNIT” ends, “held by time.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Shane Kowalski

Shane Kowalski lives in Pennsylvania. He works for the United States Postal Service. He is the author of Small Moods (Future Tense Books).  

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Not much has changed. I continue to work, continue to write. Of course, knowing I have a book out there in the world is a strange thought I remember from time to time and it does give me pleasure knowing there are people out there reading my weird, little stories. It's a surreal kind of space that I like to exist in.  

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Weirdly, I actually came to poetry first. In my undergrad years there was so much poetry being taught where I went to school, it just seemed like a good idea to write. Always, though, with an eye towards fiction in the back of my mind. A lot of those poems that I wrote were very prose-ish.
 
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 actually cannot quite say. It's all very moody. Some pieces come really quick, others it's a more protracted process. I do a lot of drafting as I write, so the revision process is streamlined. It's rare that the final shape doesn't closely resemble most of what I started with.   

4 - Where does a 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?
I'm definitely a writer of short pieces that end up having to find a home. I always start with a small thing in a prose piece—an image, a phrase, but more times than not, it's a first sentence. What happens from there is the story.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings, weirdly. They end up being fun. Even though I don't quite look forward to them.
 
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 don't think I have any theoretical concerns. I just like doing voices.

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 have no clue, really. I always like taking a workmanlike approach to these types of questions. Simply: Use the language—Tell good stories. People will take it from there.  

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it's a cool process. Working with a really good editor is like putting on a pair of glasses and seeing your work more clearly.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I remember J. Robert Lennon saying, "Your novel is perfect until you write the first line, and then it is forever ruined."

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 usually try to write and post a very short story to my tumblr every day. My single writing habit I've sustained since 2011. Everything else has just been a mood or passing fancy.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I usually go back to the previous sentence. What's going on in it? What can I use? It is usually giving a direction forward.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
It's a fragrance I couldn't describe unless I was dreaming.

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?
Absolutely. Music, paintings, movies, television—they all have at one point or another influenced my work.  

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Lydia Davis, Robert Walser, Jane Bowles, Chelsey Minnis, Jamaica Kincaid just to name a few.  

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write 10 novels in one year.

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?
Probably some kind of mundane work you could disappear into. Custodian. Librarian. Postal worker. Butler. Who knows...

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was too much fun.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently finally read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which is a masterwork. I didn't think it could live up to the hype, but it is one of the finest examples of human storytelling. They should send it out into space. I also recently watched for the first time Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, which was beautiful and quietly harrowing.  

19 - What are you currently working on?
Oh, a bunch of things. So many short fragments of pieces. A novella-length piece that I've been tinkering with for a few years now about a woman who is a peeping tom. I'm just surrounded by tiny, little pieces of work. Who knows where they'll lead—if to anything at all?

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Shopping, or The End of Time

 

80 to 90 percent of my awareness
Is a delicate ear turned gently toward my son

Which means I ignore
What would have previously torn me asunder

You may imagine motherhood as a funnel of sand
Into which one is pulled

You may imagine a wrecked ship pulling the inhabitants down with her
Into the water

Except for this metaphor
You are willingly rinsing yourself in sand or heavy water

It is an ecstasy of familial love
Among the sand and water (“80 TO 90 PERCENT OF MY AWARENESS”)

The latest from poet Emily Bludworth de Barrios is the poetry collection Shopping, or The End of Time (Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), a collection that works through the lyric of narrative monologue to examine personal space and interpersonal being, including new motherhood and ongoing parenting, as well as simply living as a human being in the world, with all the messy nonsense and possible beauty that goes along with existence. “With pleasure the young men,” she writes, to open the poem “WITH PLEASURE THE YOUNG MEN,” “dismantle the young women // With pleasure their sick slick grins drip over the wet idea // of humiliated flesh [.]” Raised in Houston, Cairo and Caracas and currently based in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, Bludworth de Barrios is the author of the full-length debut Splendor (H_NGM_N Books, 2015), as well as the chapbooks Extraordinary Power (Factory Hollow Press, 2014) and Women, Money, Children, Ghosts (Sixth Finch, 2016). Shopping, or The End of Time, her second full-length collection, is set, within an opening as well as closing poem, into four sections of narrative lyrics—“WOMEN,” “MONEY,” “CHILDREN” and “GHOSTS”—all of which are individually constructed as assemblages of short phrases and bursts; her narratives are less built as accumulations than as a cadence of narrative waves, rolling through rise and fall to either a final crescent, or a sweep up to the shore of the space beyond that final word.

My new blue kitchen cabinets painted blue
Black countertops, black granite flecked with dirty starlight
And Saltillo tile from Saltillo, Mexico, baked, glazed earth and still some little
imprints from the foot of a dog who passed probably 50 years ago
When the Earth had fewer dogs probably but more species, fewer people, but
more thick forest, more dark trees and the webs strung between the trees,
clumps of sticks pushed into nests with the vulnerable blue, white, or cream
eggs inside, speckled, warm, the squirrels’ nests that contain two entrances
that are also two exists, a burrow in the sky, warm and dry
A bird singing with its narrow throat, its voice a slender stem
The legs of the insects slander as stems
The stems numerous and dense moving in quick ticks
My thoughts numerous and dense
Thickly sprouting, dumb (“MY NEW BLUE KITCHEN CABINETS PAINTED BLUE”)

Throughout her poems, Bludworth de Barrios seems fond of the direct statement, whether set as a point from which her narrative can expand further, a counterpoint or even a side-step, depending, of course, on where the statement is set in those narrative waves of rise and fall, rise and fall. “To be a mother,” she writes, as part of the two-page poem “80 TO 90 PERCENT OF MY AWARENESS,” “Is to be a figure in a painting // Wrapped in a sacred blanket [.]” Later on in the collection, the poem “STATUES OR KNOTTED ROPES OR SCORED STONE” offers a slight variation, or even a continuation: “A person is a device / For storing information across time // The parent melts or dissolves / And up springs the child // A person // Is a phenomenal device / That assembles itself from dirt and air [.]”

In certain ways, this is very much a collection writing and exploring the trauma and beauty both large scale and small of parenting, children and interacting with and through the culture, the present, each other and the universe. It would be interesting to examine the ways through which her direct statements on self and being connect, and even conflict, to each other; evolving in the normal ways of human complication: we are never simply one thing, in one way or direction; often working multiple simultaneously. Note the poem, for example, “MY PREGNANCY WAS A LONG AND HAPPY NIGHTMARE,” a three-page extended lyric that opens: “My pregnancy / Was a long and happy nightmare // During which I ate / Pint-sized tubs of ice cream and walked around the block // Becoming more tubby and unwieldly / As if living in the skin of a drum // Wielding and propelling my belly / Feeling dreamy and druggy in the suburbs under the sun [.]” There is a swell and swoop of her narrative, but also a subtle music across that same lyric that itself fills and diminishes across such a lovely spectrum of her lines. One is nearly required to close one’s eyes to truly listen.