12 or 20 (second series) questions with Andrew Bertaina

Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024), the book length essay, Ethan Hawke & Me (Barrelhouse, 2025), and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You (Moon City Press Award Winner 2021). His work has appeared in The ThreePenny Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Best Microfiction, and listed as notable in three editions of The Best American Essays and as a special mention in The Pushcart Prize anthology. He has an MFA from American University and more of his work is available at andrewbertaina.com
 
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 really just making writing feel possible. I wasn't sure I'd ever have a book, and I think landing that first book just made writing feel suddenly real. 

This book is my third, which means the initial excitement isn't quite as large. I've settled into a career as a writer, which means books if I'm lucky, so I'm enjoying it, but it's definitely a different experience. 

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I have always written fiction and non-fiction. Like most writers I started out wanting to write fiction. However, I started my MFA as a really inexperienced writer, and I happened to land in a non-fiction course and wound up loving it. I think I wanted to write fiction because the novel has long been the dominant form, which means my experience as an avid reader had me thinking it was the only real form. 
 
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?
My writing tends to come quickly when I'm interested in a project. I really prefer to finish a whole draft in as few sittings as possible. I find that without momentum I tend to lose the thread of a project. My writing is already partially fragmentary, so I need to do it quickly to keep it together!

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?
In this case, Ethan Hawke & Me was a known project. I figured I was working toward a book, and I had the lovely scaffolding of the Before Trilogy movies by Richard Linklater. The book is subdivided into three distinct time periods in my life that roughly coincide with the thematic concerns of the movies. That gave me a nice pathway into the book. 

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, but I consider them as only somewhat related to the art. Reading is a bit of a performance with its attendant requirements of audience engagement. Ie, I love and write pretty lyrically. I tend to find something funny or that breaks up the hypnotic feeling of being read to when I'm doing it for an audience.
 
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?
My writing is always considered with questions of meaning, self, spiritual, and cultural. I tend to write towards questions that I try to unravel in my work. How should a person be? I think Sheila Heti already took that title, but it's the question underneath my work. What to do with the time we have been given here? 

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 the role of a writer in the culture is pretty diminished, particularly in the United States. People don't think writers are cultural critics in the way they used to. I do think story telling is an important part of conception on a cultural level, and I think losing a role of prominence probably isn't the best thing for writers. However, it's always been a rarefied air for those writers at the top. Almost everyone else should be doing it for the love of the game. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I found working with my editor to be really positive. Mike Ingram at Barrelhouse was great. He pushed me where I needed it but was also okay with my stylistic tics. As I said, I write lyrically. I would really struggle with an editor who wanted that lyricism pared down to make it more palatable. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Read a lot. I feel like we are in an era where I see more and more writers cropping up, but folks should be matching that with a lot of reading. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I write what I'm interested in. That's the only reason I have continued to write for the last fifteen years. That means I'm bad at the marketing side because everyone thinks they can sell a novel. But I just can't get myself to write something I'm not interested in. The appeal of working in multiple genres is really keeping myself interested in the work. 

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 have a writing schedule. I tend to work best when inspiration strikes, which can come in burst of a month or so when I will get a lot done. Then I might go months and write only one or two short things. I wish I could control it more. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read! Or if I'm in the middle of something I'll take a nature walk and not listen to anything. I find the mind needs time to wander. The subconscious brain is always working, and we just need to let it have some silence at times. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of hot tar or honeysuckle. 

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?
In the case of this book the Before Trilogy was really the inspiration. Of course, my book is written with writers like Patricia Hample or Lia Purpura as influences at a line level, but it was really these movies that helped create an outline for life. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Too many to count! As I said, Patricia Hampl and Lia Purpura come to mind for this project, but I'm inspired constantly by so many different writers, past and present. I love to be fed by the great lake of writing. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Live an entirely different kind of life :). 

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 considered being a therapist. Sometimes I tell my kids that I got an A+ in my college acting course and wish I'd pursued that instead. Bookshop owner. I have a lot I'd have liked to do. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I just wanted to see if I could do it after having the incredible experience of feeling so moved by the masters. A mixture of wonder, honor, and I suppose a bit of hubris. Also, I was so bad at math. Horrendously so. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was It Lasts Forever and then it's over by Anne De Marcken. It's this incredible meditation on grief and loss folded into a zombie novel. I'm not even a zombie guy. This book just blew me away. It has these haunting and lyric lines combined with thinking through the grief of a relationship and life that has been lost. I'm always drawn by line level stuff and this book manages to wed the gorgeous lines to the form of a strange and compelling story. Masterful. 

The last great film was probably All Of Us Strangers. I am apparently just a sucker for grief. We all have those things we love. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm writing some short stories that keep getting stranger and stranger. I think I'm just always interested in something new in fiction. In the essay form, I have a more consistent voice, but I don't have anything to reflect on right now, so it's weird short stories! 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Gina Myers, Some of the Times

 

New city same shit
Moving through
the streets
pre-fall golden
in late afternoon
sunlight / bright red
crumbling brick
& shoddy griffiti
asks freedom?
Each year I fight
& each year
the things that hold
me back feel stronger
Shirking the day’s
responsibilities
to sit by the river
this afternoon
I wouldn’t give this
up but no it’s not
freedom. (“PHILADELPHIA”)

From Philadelphia poet Gina Myers comes her third full-length collection, Some of the Times (Baltimore MD: Barrelhouse Books, 2020), following A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013), two books I now regret having missed. Some of the Times is a collection of first-person lyrics that explore her lived experience and geography, that being the city of Philadelphia, a city that to her was fairly new at the moment of composition. Most of the poems are shorter, almost clipped, but provide the sense of being very much part of a larger structure, suggesting the collection less an assemblage than a suite of contained lyrics. Myers writes on paying rent, police brutality, tenuous employment, chronic illness, labour camps in Cuba, baseball games and thunderstorms. Her poems occupy the ground level of a city in ruin amid dangerous heat. There is a particular flavour of working class ethos that permeates the culture, and the poetry, of Philadelphia that is reminiscent (positively, of course) of work I’ve seen over the years out of Hamilton, Ontario, or even the border city of Windsor. Myers aesthetic, of course, is very much that, but blended with an influence from the lyric of the New York School of Poets, something she wrote about in her short 2016 piece “Is there room in the room that you room in?” for the ottawa poetry newsletter:

In an interview, Eileen Myles defines what it means to be a New York School poet: “As an aesthetic it means putting yourself in the middle of a place and being excited and stunned by it, and trying to make sense of it in your work.” This, putting one’s self somewhere and being excited to be there despite all that being there involves--the joyful as well as the heartbreaking and ugly--and trying to make sense of it, is what poetry is for me. And I am happy to be here. And I’m happy you’re here too.

The poem “PHILADELPHIA,” a longer sequence near the beginning of the collection, sits as a poem of arrival and of placement, rife with self-dismissal and regret: “How much of / an asshole am I / that I live / somewhere / for a month / & think I can / tell its story / Every day there / is news of / a new police / brutality / What use / is love / right now?” According to the notes at the back of the collection, the poem was composed from August to October, 2014 (which is, curiously, exactly during the time I was in Philadelphia, and was first able to meet Myers). In a conversation with Krystal Languell, posted at Entropy on September 26, 2017, Myers discusses the poem, which had appeared earlier that same year as a chapbook with Barrelhouse:

Philadelphia was written within the first two months of my move to Philadelphia, which was a time of great uncertainty and instability for me personally. The book wrestles with that instability along with wrestling with larger social and political issues. The world outside of me has remained to be uncertain and unstable, certainly hostile and perhaps increasingly so under the current government–or at least whatever veil of “democracy” and “justice” there was has been lifted. In that sense, not much has changed from the time of writing the book. However, personally, I am feeling more settled in, more at home here in Philly, though I’m reaching my three year mark, which is when my wanderlust usually comes on strong.

There are elements of influence in her first-person explorations of self and the crumbling infrastructures of city and culture, from Eileen Myles to fellow Philadelphia poet ryan eckes; structural echoes to her poems that run similarly down the page and through the excess of sirens, unkempt streets and the ravaged potential of human accomplishment. This is her restlessness, her “wanderlust,” as she calls it, alongside a hardscrabble lyric, one pulled together from lyric scraps, struggle and observation. “I don’t need your theories,” she writes, to close out the poem “4.18.14,” “to understand my lived / experience. There is / an anger I carry / inside I will never / let go of. Something basic / to hold onto while everything / else disappears.”

 

Jessica Laser, Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides

Fazana

When my woman says hello

She says what can I get you.

I had no time to peruse the menu.

I was lost in thought and English

Came last, after German, French,

And Dante with no mirror page.

I decided then that to eat

Would be fine, but to decide the dish

Translation. Croatia lost to Brazil.

I went to my room to make sure

Of everything, as I often needed.

There you were absurdly, suddenly

A parrot on my knee. Your plume

Fired in the background.

To see you

So upset me

I would have learned a new language

If it meant in English to disconnect my knee.

Between two other, similar versions

Not in the same translation

I found in myself the lyric I looked for.

I found it with its moral intact.

A poet must heat to song in the dark.

Lest reckoned the poet he died to see boil.

Chicago poet Jessica Laser’s full-length poetry debut is Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Seattle WA: Letter Machine Editions, 2019), a title that includes but a single sentence on the back cover as copy: “There are so many ways to think of us that I have thought them all.” Composed as book-length character study, Laser utilizes twists of language, literary and historical references and some damned sharp lines to create a complex and multi-faceted exploration of character and story. She begins her collection with a narrative poem that introduces “Sergie Kuzmich,” an older writer going through a divorce (and a multitude of affairs, it would seem) who meets the much younger, emerging writer/narrator and begins a relationship. The book then opens up into what constructs itself as a study through the lyric, but one that explores both subject and unnamed narrator, exploring, as Laser suggests, her subject from all sides. “When I complete a family / We are never better,” the voice of Kuzmich responds, further on in the first section, in the poem “Sensual Delight in Virtue,” continuing: “never / Than when our enemies love us / Which is to say when we fail. / But Sergei Kuzmich from all sides / There is no treason to describe.” Laser tells a story, and tells it slant, in a way reminiscent, even, of the work of Letter Machine Editions co-editor/co-publisher Joshua Marie Wilkinson [see my review of one of his books here], even as she ends the second section, the lyric suite/sequence “Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience,” with:

We are what we have and memoires

Keep us from comfort.

They are what we know.

You are what we know and I

I am the thing that knows you.

People apply

Their many logics.

They can’t all be right

And are each wrong

Two truths comprise our

O truths

Comprise our failures

And remember us.

Laser moves through her subject (or subjects, really) and through her own reading, including references to numerous authors and works, something picked up in a review of the book by Allison Casey, over at Barrelhouse, writing: “Jessica Laser’s debut book Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides wields a terrible blade of knowledge—one most of us can only wield via Google. Even the title boasts a wide-cast net of experience, referencing a passage from War and Peace, and the name of an obscure Russian soldier. I know this thanks to Google, the 80 pages of Tolstoy I got through last summer, and a helpful epigraph at the beginning of the book.” Later on in her review, she adds that “Laser brings everyone from Flaubert to Nietzsche to Wittgenstein to Eliot into the fray, and ironically, it’s in a move like Eliot (or maybe more like Anne Carson) that Laser risks losing her reader among the weeds in all her influences and allusions. At what point are they more for her than for the poems?”

Throughout the book, Laser moves from reference to collage, and her final poem/section, “Losss,” is made up entirely of quoted lines/stanzas (one hundred and seventy-one of them, in fact), footnoted and properly sourced, including lines from Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Leo Tolstoy, Vaslav Nijinsky, W.S. Merwin, the books of Genesis and Exodus, Alice Munro, T.S. Eliot and multiple others. It is curious how Laser moves through the collection, from sourced material to her own, writing out an exploration of character which includes explorations of the self, the self in relation to others and the self in relation to God, such as in the second section, where she writes: “When I saw the man, I / Lived unbearably. I had no vision / Of myself as a mystic, / No audience with god.” In the end, this might be a book about the finding ground, or finding place, utilizing the unnamed narrator as a means-to-an-exploration, writing a poem-essay on “Sergei Kuzmich” that has nothing to do with him at all. And yet, as the song goes, writing Kuzmich in a way that the character would move through this book, and think these poems are all about him (wouldn’t he?).

I locked those habits in a drawer

Where I was told they’d be

What is the difference

Between now and forgetting

And if I infer from the drawer

Will my inference be in it

I look at reason in the dark

It seems to me to flicker

Not the flame and not the wick

It is the motion to and fro

It could be both though (“Tractatus”)

Chase Berggrun, R E D

I was thirsty

I was a country of queer force

rushing east to see the strangest side of twilight

I was a woman                        in the usual way

I had no language            but distress and duty

I have been taught to doubt my mother and fear tradition

but my queer tongue       would not     could not shut up (“CHAPTER I”)

I am very taken by this new erasure by New York poet and editor Chase Berggrun, their debut collection R E D (Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh: Birds, LLC.: 2018), a follow-up to the chapbook Discontent and Its Civilizations: Poems of Erasure, published by jubilat in 2012. And yet, to describe this book as purely an erasure would be to reduce, or even misunderstand it, as R E D is as much a book of reconstruction, of rebuilding, as Berggrun writes in “A Note on Process,” to open the collection:

R E D consists of twenty-seven erasure poems. They were produced using a system of formal constrains: text was erased while preserving the word order of the original source, with no words altered or added, according to a strict set of self-imposed rules. The poems use as a source the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.

As the text of Dracula, a classic Victorian-era horror novel soaked with a disdain of femininity and the misogyny of its time, is erased, a new story is told, in which the narrator takes back the agency stolen from her predecessors.

This work was written at the same time its author had begun their own gender transition. As they were discovering and attempting to define their own womanhood, the narrator of these poems traveled alongside them.

I’m fascinated by the idea that such a book could emerge from a Victorian novel (one might presume that seeking the counterpoint against such repression would be an obvious target), especially Dracula, a book reworked and re-envisioned by multiple writers, including Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley, who riffed off vampires and blood in his own Seeing Red (Turnstone Press, 2003). Berggrun’s project, on their part, is a far more intimate revision, writing on and through their own reconstruction, including their own gender transition; writing out a story of a narrator rebuilding their whole self from the ground up, utilizing the remains of the old self, and both eliminating and repurposing materials as required. In an interview conducted by Dan Brady, posted in November 2017 at Barrelhouse, Berggrun describes some of their thoughts on erasure:

I’ve been intensely studying poetic appropriation, and erasure in particular, for kind of a long time, and it seriously terrifies me. It scares me how easily it can become violent, and how often people use it in a violent way. It’s a poetic form, certainly, but it’s inherent politicality is both potent and dangerous, in a different way than, say, a sonnet in iambic pentameter. Not to say that any formal device is apolitical, but the way erasing interacts with another person’s work is an especially risky enterprise. Solmaz Sharif wrote a brilliant and important essay on this: required reading for anyone considering using erasure. This Robin Coste Lewis lecture is also incredibly necessary.

I tried to engage with Dracula in many other ways before I started to erase it: erasure was my last resort. Erasure is undeniably connected to the tools of white supremacy. It’s very, very easy to fuck up. I don’t believe, and never have believed, that every artist has a right to alter, appropriate, or work with any text they want: we’ve seen the racist result of this kind of mindset again and again. Kenneth Goldsmith, a person whose work and attitude I deeply abhor, is a product of that kind of thinking. John Gosslee’s erasures of Hoa Nguyen’s work, et cetera, et cetera. Examples are everywhere.

Berggrun’s language is staggered, direct and intimate, even as they use Stoker’s original words, in his original order. One can’t imagine Stoker writing, as Berggrun reveals in their own “CHAPTER XV,” such lines as: “I was surprised when unconsciously I imagined // the way his sperm dropped in white patches / which congealed as it touched my body [.]” I’m startled by how rich and how strong this collection is, and how deeply personal and intimate, which allow for such powerful results. And curious how Dracula, again, became the source material instead of any other particular title, although Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1823), another book of creation, might miss the point, being a book of creation out of dead parts, instead of a book that simply revealed what had already been there, albeit hidden or repressed. R E D is a book of declaration that forces “I am here,” even as we witness this stunning and revealing metamorphosis.

One time I tried to take a human life

I tried to kill my own body      through prayer

I left behind        a brain

a brain that a man fashioned for me

determined to destroy this woman’s nerve

I found in his absence a silence

like a blush-bright smile (“CHAPTER XVIII”)