Showing posts with label Rescue Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rescue Press. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Sandra Doller, Not Now Now
Monday, August 25, 2025
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hannah Brooks-Motl
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?
My first book came out in 2014. I had the sense that something else should happen then, so I did a variety of things that now seem unbelievable to me—danced it, chanted it, etc. I haven’t pursued such activities with recent books, but the experience relaxed my relation to ideas about “the work” generally. I’d say it helped me welcome contingency, accident, potential embarrassment. Otherwise, there’s a general kind of vibe that persists across the books, sort of earthy and philosophical (I hope).
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As a reader, I came first to novels. My family took many cross-country drives when I was a kid. I read for the days it took us to get somewhere. Non-stop, fully immersed—that’s my dream. Poetry arrived in the form of my much older sister, who was a poet then (now she’s a forensic pathologist); her 90s poet life seemed impossibly glamorous. She let me hang out in bars with her and her writer friends when I was a teen.
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 write a lot in notebooks, accruing language and concerns. At some point the feeling mysteriously arrives that a poem should result. The poems undulate across the many days or weeks of gathering and jots. I sort of find them there, lead them out.
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 wrote one book “project,” involving the essays of Michel de Montaigne. Mainly now I let reading, practice, life be my guide.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like readings, sometimes very much. Sometimes a poetry reading will manifest and crystallize the happy, nervy, hopeful energy of people together, yearning to be.
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?
One concern is with poetry’s rescue of discourse, where the poem, or the kind of thinking a poem is, can be a true statement, albeit one that we only very briefly inhabit or are allowed. Recently, I’m invested—to my surprise—in rehabilitating the old quarrel between Shelley and Wordsworth, via Mill, poems of the head vs poems of the heart, to ask: why choose? As in, why is that the choice we are asked to make again and again? There’s (always) questions of what reading is good for; in what ways does poetry do a kind of (moral) philosophizing; interest in humans, their behaviors and reasons (actual, believed), and the lives of creatures.
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?
Writers and artists and thinkers I admire tend to believe in some different or other reality, the pursuit and discovery of which language, image, aesthetic expression uniquely allow. Art is a bridge one walks on and toward—an earthy, clumsy substance and a spiritual, extravagant one. It often encodes a personal longing but it’s also social, environmental, historical, political. Who but writers and artists will honor these stubborn, modest, generous dreams?
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I am a scholarly editor—I mean I edit monographs, edited collections, journal articles. I was an acquisitions editor for a university press full-time for years, now I do free-lance developmental editing. I have lots to say about editing and its importance, but yes, I think working with editors is essential.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I have a poem in my latest book that includes the line “Keep going + believe = ‘advice.’” It’s a joke but not a joke.
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?
Most days I get up very early to write. People used to sleep differently—a first sleep, an interlude around 3:00 am, a second sleep. This historic interlude is where a lot of my work’s language arrives.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Philosophy. Biography. Walks in the woods.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Cut grass, violet skies with a thunderstorm somewhere, slight farm.
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?
Working and being with animals. Listening to the anecdotes of others.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Iris Murdoch, Marguerite Young, Lorine Niedecker, Paul Valéry, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ernst Bloch, Paul Goodman, Wong May, Dan Bevacqua, Peter Gizzi, Emily Hunt, Sara Nicholson, Ben Estes, Alan Felsenthal, Kai Ihns, Hai-dang Phan, Patrick Morrissey.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Hike the AT. Live in France. Write a play with my husband and stage it in our house.
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?
I frequently wish I had been an ethologist. It’s the science of, someone has said, interviewing animals in their own language.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My other artistic talents were minimal. Other forms of more regular or professionally legible work leave me feeling half-alive.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great book was Unclay by TF Powys; last great film was a rewatching of The Souvenir by Joanna Hogg.
19 - What are you currently working on?
More poems and a novel about a self-taught artist in rural Illinois.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Madeline McDonnell
Madeline McDonnell’s latest book is the novel Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue Press, 2025). You can find her in Oregon, or here
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Picture me at my desk, sometime in the late aughts, a credulous, timorous rictus stilling my face. Argh!? My rictus was supposed to be a confident confidence woman’s! The agents who’d visited my MFA program had counseled chicanery, after all… According to them, I had nearly enough stories for a collection-nobody-would-ever-read, a collection they might be able to trick a corporation into buying if I pretended I had a novel. I’d been working at amassing the words that might abet this lucre-producing lie, not thinking about the rot at its center, just thinking I couldn’t look at my trick doc any longer. So I checked my email, dead heart near-beating with expectancy even though I had nothing to expect… But lo! A message from two incredulous, incredible friends. They’d started a small press and wanted to publish a brief book of big stories—three of my longer ones, if I’d let them. Wha—!? Just three!? I hadn’t thought such a book possible, but why not—when omne trium perfectum—when I could immediately see the three that needed to be one, that were already speaking to each other even outside the covers to come—
I think about this moment all the time, and still cannot believe my luck. One click, and there!: a revelation and reminder that a book might be only what it wanted and needed to be.
Lonesome Ballroom is the novel this early and essential correction made possible. A campus novel / tale of movie-watching, marriage-plotting, and mother-daughtering, it is also a swirling/twirling/whirling wannabe movie musical, a 32-bar-ballad-in-222-pages, a nascent 5.5x8 gallery exhibit featuring photos by actual fantastic photogs, and a 3-D art-creature whose right-side-up-upside-down cover doubles as a lachrymose laser-launcher.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
When I was a kid, I’d read these retrograde manners guides masquerading as radical mysteries for hours, delighting less in their wacky events than their wack voice: Nancy Drew, an attractive girl of eighteen, was driving home along a country road in her new, dark-blue convertible. She had just delivered some legal papers for her father. “It was sweet of Dad to give me this car for my birthday,” she thought. “And it's fun to help him in his work.” Afterward, I’d still hear those wicked, restrictive rhythms: Madeline McDonnell, an attractive girl of eight, was walking into the kitchen because she wanted a snack. “It was sweet of Dad to buy these Chips Ahoy,” she thought. “And it’s fun to eat them!” F*cked up, yes! But from then on I dreamed of making (and messing with) that sort of authoritative story sound, of changing the score of my own—and others’—interiors.
In college, I became passionate about poetry, and wrote a lot of lines featuring mythical figures about whom I knew almost nothing, and a long series of Meadowlands-esque dialogues between a me-speaker and her faithless boyfriend. Maybe I knew I could never achieve greater poetic glory than when I was given the oddball opportunity to read that sequence aloud to a workshop whose students included said FB!? Or maybe I stopped writing poetry because my fiction accommodated the jokes that the strained restraint of my wannabe Louisean lines wouldn’t abide.
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?
There was this one time I started typing out a story I’d only just begun thinking about. While I was typing, a person came into the brightly lit room (I usually close the blinds and barricade myself) and started talking to me (i.e. messing with the music of my prose!?!?) and I didn’t even get mad, I think I actually might have responded, if distractedly? I finished the story maybe 20 minutes later, then sent it to a magazine I’d long admired (I never send out anything), where it appeared soon after.
That said, I started the book that would become Lonesome Ballroom in 2008 and I was still making not insignificant edits the night before it went to print this January, 2025!
By these calculations, any particular writing project takes me an average of 8.25 years, which actually isn’t that bad?
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?
Hm… The works that have become realest seem to require that I derealize their origins. I suspect they usually arise from some overlap between what I’m reading and what I’m lying to myself about?
I think more about “books” now that I’ve made a few and understand how the object can make the text mean more, and mean more clearly and complex-ly (!?). Also, I have two little kids, and, though parenting makes it harder to sit for concentrated hours in a chair and write, it doesn’t interfere that much with thinking about what I would like to be writing, so I’ve had a lot of time to sort my ideas into secret brain-bound containers I’m hoping will one day be physical books. If my life were different, I might spend more time writing, less time sorting/book-planning—I’m not sure!?
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Many have noted the useful pressure a public performance can place on a private, page-bound performance. But this note bears resounding, maybe? I’ve been flummoxed by phrases for years, only to see them come clear in the moment before I say them aloud to a crowd. Can we fix this!? Probably not, so thanks to all those intrepid souls who organize readings! Another reason for thanks: reading is the best, so it feels only right that we get dressed up and have parties for it from time to time even if they’re not as wild as this one.
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 work has long been curious about whether conventional narrative shapes (particularly those of the climactic-Freytagian-pyramid-causal-event-chain ilk) are the best containers (or even mediocre containers!?) for stories interested in feminine cultural practices and reproductive labor.
I am also wondering how I might become an intentional, rather than, accidental researcher. As I worked on Lonesome Ballroom, subjects and texts I had long knowledge of, or was drawn, frictionlessly, to, informed my subjects and found their way into my text, which ultimately became “an inquiry into gender’s relationship to popular aesthetics that swirls from ancient epics to turn-of-the-millennium reality shows, mid-century melodramas to neo-noir car chases, beauteous battle scenes to boy-next-door meet-cutes,” per my flap copy! Now I’m trying to write about some things I’m afraid to know, and I’ve found I’m not very good at learning about such things, go figure!?
As for the current questions, they seem manifold! Urgent! But for me, the main one is more practical than theoretical: how do we get people to read more literature (esp. when the attention economy has turned so many of us into at least partial objects rather than subjects, the most devalued, no-good goods!). This podcast doesn’t answer that question exactly, but its erudite hosts, Hilary Plum and Zach Peckham, are building “an archive of grassroots knowledge that serves the future of publishing,” and it is both a galvanizing and a soothing archive, o strange and wondrous combo!
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?
Well, one thing a literary writer might do is articulate experiences and even truths (!?) that are reduced, or, worse, turned into slick, initially soothing, but ultimately desolating lies by more explicitly societal modes of discourse (whether the awful argot of in-person or online sociality, the oft-mocked overcirculated jargon of the academy or religion or name-your-institutional-mass, or even the essential, life-saving, culture-changing language of political action, visionary policy, or persuasive public dissent). Maybe one writer can complicate and contradict and confess in the way a social collective cannot, which, strangely, beautifully, can enable a more profound collectivity?
And maybe a writer should also proselytize about the power of reading here or there, esp. as reading is ever more disempowered in our culture? When I say “our culture,” I’m referring to the one that’s insidiously distracted from the workings of power by the very powermongers fracturing its attentions; ongoingly depressed and suppressed by so-called “market demands”; and increasingly isolated inside dying urban, suburban, rural, and linguistic structures! Attending closely, and for long intervals, to the more vital structures inside our literature can maybe help with these problems?
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I am lucky because the “outside editor” I have worked with most is not really so outside, given that there is a Caryl-Pagel shaped ventricle in my heart, and a synaptic cleft in my brain hosting this ongoing neurotransmission: Neuron 1: “C!” Neuron 2: “P!” There is no editor better than CP if you’re looking to rescue what you didn’t even know you’d lost, i.e. the intra- (stylistic, formal, narrative) and extra- (bookmaking, promo-as-performance-and-collaboration) textual possibilities you were too terrified to see. I am especially lucky to have her not just as my editor, but as one of my early readers: where normies might just see a mess, she discerns the better book I don’t yet daydream of, and explains which narrative and stylistic choices sent her these complex, and unexpectedly encouraging, secret messages.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I had a so-wonderful-she’s-actually-kind-of-famous English teacher in high school who gave out a list titled “What Every Sophomore Should Know” (I think!? Forgive me, Mrs. G., if I’m misquoting), featuring a delightfully rangy range of recs for living. One I remember: Marry Late. A good edit might be: Marry Later. Like, do you really need to do it now?
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’m not teaching right now and so have been trying to write when my kids are at school. Keeping this routine is complicated by the way a typical day begins for me, which involves dragging myself and three other humans out of bed before the sun has risen, picking some !@#$ up off the floor, feeding and clothing a bunch of people, picking some more @#$ up off the floor, yelling or telling others to stop yelling, picking some additional @#$ up off the floor, driving blearily around, crying, making a bunch of beds (it’s psychologically disastrous to skip this step!), realizing I’m not even dressed, etc. By the time school starts, I’m often pretty tired, and the vision, concentration, and weird optimism writing can require often feel remote. But I try!
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Right now, stalled-ness seems to stem less from lack of inspiration and more from the exigencies I described in the previous response. Luckily, reading or walking around outside seem to help no matter my stalled-ness’s source.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The only place that really smells like the home I mostly grew up in, is the home I mostly grew up in. But if it’s summer and I smell sun on certain conifers I remember my grandparents’ house in Southern California.
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?
Yes. Or, more accurately: OMG, where do I even begin!? I suppose I might as well b. with Lonesome B., whose form and composition were made possible by musical compositions and forms. When figuring out how to render the experience of a character who feels bitterly trapped but somewhat rapt by her trap, it helped to think of the tender trap that is a 32-bar American-songbook standard, the kind that kicks you out via the same rhythms and chord changes with which it invited you in. (But are you really out? Don’t you kind of want to play it again?) While working on LB I was also thinking about visual art: how crucial Sara Cwynar’s hyper-pretty palette is to her rigorous investigations of gendered consumer culture, how her retro (color) grades enable work that is anything but retrograde. Could I do something similar with the sentence, using syntactic and verbal “prettiness” as lure and cudgel, engine and blown gasket? LB’s main character, Betty, also thinks a bit about Cindy Sherman, and LB incorporates one of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. I was definitely thinking about Cindy as I tried to find a structure for Betty’s story, the way UFS uses received (patriarchal) cinematic tropes, but builds an entirely new, non-causal, anti-action structure to contain and thereby remake them. Joan Brown’s wild couplings (flat encaustic stasis + mobile patterning; cartoonish colors + gritty weird scenes; composed/performed set-ups + discomposed/not-fully-readable subjects, etc.) were also huge for me!
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
A question whose responses I love reading (there are so many great recs in this series!), but one that’s tough to answer fully! So I’ll partially respond to the first clause (work) by naming two idols whose last names begin with the excellent (am I rite?) letter “e”: Deborah Eisenberg and Jenny Erpenbeck, and by linking to this little list of books that have helped me think about structure.
And I’ll answer the second clause (life outside) by naming a few children’s books that a) aren’t glutted with the saccharine and coercive falsehoods endemic to the genre and b) are as likely to delight a five-year-old as they are a ten-year-old or a forty-five-year old (all ages currently represented in my household): Telephone Tales by Gianni Rodari, the Moomin novels by genius Tove Jansson, all the Dory Fantasmagories by Abby Hanlon, and the goat, The Complete Polly and the Wolf, by Catherine Storr. I hope this helps some depressed literary parent out there!
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d love to make “a wage” for (/against!) housework!
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?
Audio book reader?
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
In my youth, I loved the total transportation out of myself the performing arts could effect… But then I’d be in a play or onstage playing music and find myself seized by performance-sabotaging ideation. I discovered that when I was writing I could not only find similar transportation and me-obliteration, but also that those intermittent intellectual interventions made my work better rather than worse. In other words, writing required both thinking and not-thinking, self and non-self, and I was glad!
More practically, I was never very good at anything more practical.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Star Lake by Arda Collins. Diary of a Pregnant Woman by Agnès Varda.
19 - What are you currently working on?
In the hope of not getting trapped in the same novel for the next 16-17 years, I’ve started several books at once. Maybe if one book isn’t working I can pause and work on another? But so far this is just making me feel like I might be in this new morass for 48-51 years? So…see you back here when I’m 93-96, I guess?
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Sunday, September 29, 2024
Daisy Atterbury, The Kármán Line
The Kármán line is the
altitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. The Kármán
line is the edge of space, as opposed to near space, the high altitude
region of the atmosphere. When they say altitude they’re thinking in
terms of the human. What is measurable from the ground. Beyond the Kármán line the
Earth’s atmosphere is too thin to support an object in flight. (“after star
death.”)
The Severan Marble Plan of Rome is a carved marble rendering, a map of ancient Rome based on property records. Its size complicates its ongoing digital reconstruction.
The marble map is a blueprint of every architectural feature of the ancient city, from buildings to monuments to staircases. The map’s carved blocks once covered a wall inside the Templum Pacis, but all surviving pieces have been shipped to the floor of a Stanford University warehouse to be scanned and catalogued. The 1,186 surviving marble fragments make up only ten percent of the original marble plan. Using 3D modeling, the Computer Science department is digitally reconstructing the whole.
The Severan Marble Plan project is a study in method. Virtual teams of engineers, archaeologists, and researchers from the Sovraintendenza of the City of Rome solve the puzzle by using shape-matching algorithms to digitally construct the jigsaw based on matching forms. That the process is “painstaking and slow” is no deterrent.
The original plan is detailed, accurate, and consistent in scale because it was copied from precise contemporary surveys of the city of Rome, produced from cadastral records. Carving mistakes and small irregularities remain in the original map. Its reproduction is made all the more difficult because of this lingering trace of the hand.
In the 1750s, a European mapmaker cut a wooden map of the British Empire into pieces as an educational tool for the children. In the 1990s, puzzle-making attained status as an aristocratic pastime.
I’m going to Spaceport America.
What becomes interesting, also, is how her sections of pieces, set more traditionally into the shapes of poems, suggest themselves as asides to the main narrative as variations on the Greek Chorus, offering an alternate perspective on the main action, otherwise tethering together those elements of narrative.
You cant rely on
structure these folded
matchbooks I take one
greased packet of fire
sauce
This makes a very large
salsa verde, ten calories
The way you discovered
money, you pissed me off
when we touched, I sort
of
peeled back, a paint
strip falling
from the pole. But we
keep
contact. I muscle myself
into a tight shirt, press
my face
against a glass pane,
make notes
Towards future health
wondering if the problem
is lack
of calories or ritual
lack. Dry as a bone
and full of vacancies
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