12 or 20 (second series) questions with Molly Gaudry

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil and named 2nd finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. She is the creative director at The Lit Pub. 

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, We Take Me Apart, changed everything for me. Suddenly I had a book! I could hold it in my hands! My name was on the cover! It was magical, transformational—I had left home at fifteen to go to an arts school that I graduated from with a vocational degree in Creative Writing, I was an English major in college, got an MA in fiction from UC. I had devoted so much of my adolescent and YA life to writing that when WTMA came out I finally felt as if I had accomplished something, as if I had met my secret, unwhisperable goal.

My most recent work, Ogie: A Ghost Story, is the immediate sequel to WTMA and book two of the longer series. The narrative voices are similar (mother narrates WTMA, daughter narrates Ogie), but the books feel like different genres to me. I feel as if WTMA was a poetry project and that Ogie is more of a fiction project. But that’s just me overanalyzing things. The books’ forms are nearly identical, so all I can really say to back that up is that the language of Ogie is not as “poetic” as it was in WTMA. There’s more meat in Ogie.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t. I studied fiction for years—at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, then at the University of Redlands for a few years, then with Brock Clarke and Michael Griffith at the University of Cincinnati. On my own, outside the academy, I began to gravitate toward writers like Kathy Fish, Claudia Smith, Kim Chinquee. They were/are writing in these gorgeous, distilled forms. My own writing began to shrink. I started publishing flash fictions and prose poems. I thought I should learn more about the line if I was going to go around calling myself a poet, and I got my MFA in poetry from George Mason University. And now I’ve written a book called Ogie that I think feels more like a fiction project than anything I’ve ever written. Go figure.

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 don’t know, honestly. After WTMA came out, I felt a lot of pressure to finish the next book, whatever book that might be. But then one day it hit me: I wouldn’t let other people make me feel bad about myself, so why would I do it to myself? I adopted the philosophy that I would not feel guilty for not writing, I would not feel the pressure to write every day. I would go out there and tend to the tasks of my life and when the next book came I would be willing and ready to receive it. WTMA was written in April 2009. Ogie didn’t come until April 2013. For those four years in between, I’ve just been tending other tasks—guilt free, not writing.

In terms of process, both books spilled out quickly. I think a hundred pages of poems might take a poet a much longer time to finesse, but I have that fiction background and it powers me through my first drafts. I also fully embrace something Stephen King said, which was a draft must be written in a season—if it takes any longer it will stall out and fail. With Ogie I seem to have confirmed at least to myself a theory that began with WTMA—that I am a spring writer, and not just a spring writer but an April writer.

The final product closely resembles the draft as it becomes what it needs to be. Both books’ first 50 pages were heading toward becoming different books entirely, but then I essentially started over both times—taking into account what I knew of the characters, their voices, their situations—and revised and rewrote drafts that very closely led into their final products.

I think it helps me immensely when I am writing—only when I am writing—to fill pages and pages of journals every night and every morning. At night I journal about the work I did that day, what went wrong, what went right, what I hope to accomplish the next day. Then I sleep on all that. And in the morning before returning to the manuscript I journal where I think I went wrong the night before, and where I think I was on to something, and detail precisely what I hope to accomplish over the next several hours. The journal is a living document, and I even take notes during the writing. (e.g. The last three manuscript pages took twice as long to write today as three ms. pages yesterday. Maybe because this scene was more difficult to write. I guess it’s not really getting at the heart of things, it’s not doing the work it needs to be doing. I think I’ll cut the first two pages and start rewriting after the third. If what I’m trying to say is that it’s difficult to be a ghost in this world, unable to access the living except with the help of the narrator, then the narrator has to find a way to communicate this. She should touch the ghost, or try to. Let her philosophize about what it is to be a ghost, untouchable, and what it is to be among the living, untouched. Begin with an attempt at touching, the sadness of pretending to be touched.)

4 - Where does a poem or a story 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 used to write short pieces. I don’t anymore. Now, when I am writing, I am always working on a book from the very beginning. The only exception is for solicitations. If someone asks for a short piece I’ll try to write one.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love readings. Love 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’m interested in form. I’m always interested in having the work lead to questions about the function of white space. I’ve been reading some YA verse novels and cannot honestly understand the decisions behind the line breaks in some of the most successful bestselling ones out there. I hate to say it, but the books feel lazy to me. I wanted to fall in love with those books. I hope people don’t read my verse novels and think I’m being lazy. I take seriously the prose poem’s mission to be subversive to prose, subversive to poetry. Likewise, I hope the verse novel is subversive to verse and subversive to the novel and what it should/could/can be. I hope I am disrupting the expectations we have when we come to something that is labeled “verse novel,” but that at the same time I also deliver some pleasurable rewards for the risks I am taking. That doesn’t seem to be happening in so many of the other ones out there. Which, I’ll just add, is fine because what they do seem to be doing, that I don’t care a hoot about, is creating these YA characters with realistic YA problems and giving these YA readers these books with a whole lot of white space to help them just read read read and flip flip flip the pages. When I was a YA, all I ever wanted to do was read and flip pages. I didn’t care about “literature,” I just wanted a character I could relate to. So I get it, you know?

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?
To write, right?

I don’t really get the question. And I really don’t want to attempt to answer it. It’ll just make me sound foolish.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. God bless editors everywhere.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Michael Griffith told me once that any thing that appears in a story, any thing that gets a physical description or even the merest mention, can be made stronger by giving it some emotional reason for exiting—so that the thing does double duty in the work.

(e.g., from a chapbook of mine called Portrait of a Modern Family: The coat was fur and belonged to her mother. It might have been raccoon. She wasn’t sure. One of her mother’s lovers gifted the coat and killed the furred things himself. Her mother liked manly men. Most hunted. All wore a uniform of some kind. Official men her mother liked. Men who wore flannel on weekends. The teacher was the opposite. She liked a man with a sensitive side. Whose job required no uniform. She would never let a man who took the lives of animals with his hands touch her with his hands. She was a vegetarian. Wore the coat because it was her mother’s and because it was warm and made her uncomfortable. All of it. The raccoon skins. The thought of men’s hands on her mother. The thought of men’s hands on her. Her mother’s many lovers. Her own lack of lovers of late. The warmth of the coat. Yet she delighted in the discomfort. At the comedy event she would laugh it off.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s all the same, isn’t it? It’s just words and an attempt at communicating some thing. People who don’t get this, don’t get that writing is writing, whether poem, story, essay, Tweet, love letter, or whatever, are trouble in my mind. Why the need to separate, block off, enclose? Carole Maso says it best: “Let the genres blur if they will. Let the genres redefine themselves. . . . I love most what the novel might be, and not what it all too often is.”

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?
Coffee, email, as much sitting in the sunshine as I can get, reading, and then whatever else there is that actually needs to be done.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m either writing or not writing. When I am not writing I am simply just not writing. I have no need for inspiration. When I am writing, there is no excuse for stalling. I turn to the journal and work it out fast.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Fog for my first home. Freshly mown grass for my second home. The ocean for my home away from home and where my heart is.

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?
Probably?

Music more than anything else I think.

This is a hard question. When I’m not writing I’m probably feeling and absorbing all the influences of all the life that is happening around me. When I am writing I am basically only writing, or journaling while trying to make time to eat and sleep, and balancing in whatever work actually needs to be done (job, etc.).

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
All of them. Let me read all of them. They are all important, always, at all times.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Live in a home from which I can see and hear both mountains and ocean.

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?
Dancer while physically able, then choreographer.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The need to communicate. I had no other way.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Madame Bovary, Lydia Davis translation. Life of Pi.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Nothing. Ogie is done. I’m back in a not-writing period and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sasha Fletcher, when all our days are numbered…

When I made dinner I made dinner with my eyes open.

A bird flew past the window while waiting to become electric.

We were all of us waiting to become electric.

We were all of us waiting to become something.

We were all of us waiting.

I am waiting for my dinner she said. I told her I knew. She said Good. She came up close behind me & put her chin on my shoulder. Hey she said. When’s dinner.

When I met Toronto author Ken Sparling a couple of months ago, he recommended a first novel(la) by American writer Sasha Fletcher, a book with the loveliest of titles, his when all our days are numbered marching bands will fill the streets & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds (mud luscious press, 2010), informally known, it would seem, as when all our days are numbered. Fletcher’s first little novel is a long lyric sentence written as a first book, a sweet, sentence-driven abstract that feels enormously young but no less knowing or smart, slowly learning how to ask all the right questions. What else can I tell you?

A fireman walked down the street. I watched him from the roof. He stopped the fire using his hands. He said What are you doing. The fire didn’t say anything. He asked the fire if the fire heard him. The fire said No I didn’t & then he covered it in water like a sheet & said Go to sleep & it did & everything was okay.

Later the fireman cut his own throat open with an axe. He had been crying. Out of his neck flew a bird & the bird flew up into the sky.

He had been a good fireman & a good father & a pretty good cook. He had several children. All of them lived in different rooms. He would walk through the alley each day & they would all gather & he would say I love you very much & they would register that he loved them & weep.

Every night he would read them bedtime stories until reading to each of them individually became very tiring.

Every night he would read to a different child. Every night he would record the readings on a cassette player & on the nights when he wasn’t reading to them they would play the cassette & look at a big cardboard cut-out of their fireman daddy who loved them & who put out fires all the time and saved everyone.

12 or 20 questions: J.A. Tyler on Mud Luscious Press;

Mud Luscious Press is an online quarterly, a monthly chapbook series, and a novel(la) press. Interested in the most raw and aggressive literature, to date we have published 11 online issues, 50+ chapbooks, 3 novel(la)s, and 1 anthology, with another 6 novel(la)s and 2 anthologies already on deck through 2012. Visit www.mudlusciouspress.com for more details or to purchase one of our titles.

J. A. Tyler is the author of seven novel(la)s including the recently released INCONCEIVABLE WILSON (Scrambler Books, 2009) and the forthcoming A MAN OF GLASS & ALL THE WAYS WE HAVE FAILED (Fugue State Press, 2011). He is founding editor of Mud Luscious Press and is also on the editorial staffs of Dzanc Books, Rumble, BigOther, and Tarpaulin Sky. For more, visit: www.mudlusciouspress.com.

1 – When did Mud Luscious Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Mud Luscious Press started as an online quarterly in fall 2008 and in winter 2008 we leapt into the chapbook industry, hand-making tiny 4x4 chapbooks of 1000 words or less and distributing three per month for $2 each. We collected all of those first 43 chapbooks into our first perfect-bound book FIRST YEAR { an mlp anthology} and once that title took off, we opened up our novel(la) series, which has produced three titles to date and has another six slated through 2012 alongside another two anthologies, one of our Stamp Stories project and another of the Lamination Colony archives.

Most importantly, what we have learned is that literature can be whatever you like. We didn’t know if people wanted another online quarterly, but then the submissions started piling up and the visitor stats grew. We didn’t know if people wanted to buy a handmade chapbook for even a mere $2, but they did and continue to. And we didn’t know if producing perfect-bound books was something we could tackle with finesse or success and believe now that we have done both. All of Mud Luscious Press started at my kitchen table, and I think about that any day that the editing schedule is a little thick or hectic or maybe I’m not seeing the usual 2-3 orders a day. Lit is what we make it, and it can be anything.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

We started the online quarterly because I wanted to force myself to read more online literature. So if people were submitting work and wanting publication, I would have to read those works and judge their merit based on my own aesthetic biases. We started the chapbook series because Ken Baumann said on his blog that he had a long poem to read and would anyone like to read it and I said yes and read it and knew it needed to be in print in some vibrant but little form. We started the novel(la) series because Molly Gaudry submitted a chapbook to our series and I told her that if she made it into a book-length piece I would publish it. She did and we did. And here we are now, loving all that has happened.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

I believe that small publishing needs to grow authors as well as catalogs, which is why you see Ben Brooks’ novel(la) AN ISLAND OF FIFTY just released but another of his books coming in 2012. We hope to keep our authors with Mud Luscious Press just like any major-house publisher would look to keep theirs. We want to be just as aggressive as our authors and their literature.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

Mud Luscious Press is in line with only a few other presses in terms of pushing the novel(la) form to its greatest extent. We are also currently conducting our Stamp Stories project – 50-word stories printed on 1x1 cardstock and distributed with various participating indie presses. We also like to think that we are at the forefront of aggressive literature, language that is unafraid to break itself open and sift through the entrails.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?

Quite simply: find them, edit them, craft them into a book form, publish them, and make readers want and need to read them.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

We do both the general sweeping edits during the rough draft stage (content, structure, organization, etc.) and line-edits of all varieties in the final draft stages (grammar, phrasing, rhythm, etc.)

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

Our books are distributed publisher direct at www.mudlusciouspress.com and online at www.powells.com. The typical initial print runs are anywhere from 100 to 300 copies with second and third runs usually printed within the first year of a title’s existence.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

We have just recently brought on board an Associate Editor Andrew Borgstrom and there are absolutely no drawbacks to having another staff member. My burden is lessened, freeing me up to take on more projects and our quality is greater, with two sets of eyes to look at everything that is going up or out.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

I am so much more careful now when I write. I take more time to hone my phrasing. I watch my words more closely. I know the mistakes too to avoid in terms of cover letters, solicitations, and all the other aspects of online and print publication.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and Nichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

I refuse to publish my own writing via Mud Luscious Press. Our press is for others, my writing needs to be elsewhere. I see how it works for someone like James Chapman, whose Fugue State Press is enormous and glorious and whose own writing is also enormous and glorious – but for me, I need a much more objective stance than what this would allow.

11– How do you see Mud Luscious Press evolving?

It is already happening I believe – we are re-issuing Ken Sparling’s DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL in 2012 (originally published with Knopf) and Norman Lock’s GRIM TALES (originally published in TRIO with Ravenna Books). We have also recently acquired the print archives of Pindeldyboz and will soon house the remains of Lamination Colony. This kind of sprawl is where I believe Mud Luscious Press is heading, touching literature in all the places we possibly can.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

We are most proud of all our titles – they look good, they feel nice in your hands, and they are literature that needs to be read. We’re not sure if people have overlooked them, but if they have, they need to look again. My biggest frustration: not enough money in the coffers or time in the day for all we want to do.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

We looked (and still do) to Calamari, Fugue State Press, and Dzanc books among others – all of these small presses are aggressive and forthright, know what they like and what they want, publicize as they see fit and under their own terms – these are presses that go to their passions like light – publishing work that always captures and holds our attention.

14– How does Mud Luscious Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Mud Luscious Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

We have a news feed for anyone who wants to follow the happenings, make contact with us, etc. and we also try to have an open dialogue with as many other journals and presses as we can – our current Stamp Stories project (discussed above in #4) is a great example of this, something that has allowed us to cross-promote with a variety of presses and to tap into some of their great authors, a kind of snowball effect for both the immediate and the at-large community. We learn by what other presses are doing, we push because other presses are pushing, so I cannot say enough about how important this conversations within the literature are.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

Our first official reading was in tandem with the FlatmanCrooked crew at Denver’s 2010 AWP – its was a puppet vs. author reading and one that we’ll do again very soon – also at AWP in DC 2011 we’ll be joining up with Pank, Annalemma, The Collagist, and Ampersand Books for various readings in and around the center of AWP. But other than those yearly kinds of readings / launches, we let our authors field their own reading schedules – we hook them up with as many reviews and interviews as we can, help publicize their scheduled readings, and otherwise make it a team effort to get knowledge of the books out there for all to see and hear.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

The internet is where we are. The internet is our bookstore, our reading library, our archive, our newsfeed, our promotional guru, our sounding board, our relationship builder, and all the other things that go into making a press a press.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

We are always open to submissions, have never closed that window since our inception – 1000 words or less for our online quarterly, 1000 words or less for our chapbook series, 15-35K for our novel(la) series – we always want aggressive and raw – we are not fond of straight narrative, genre writing, heavy dialogue, or thick exposition.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

Molly Gaudry’s WE TAKE ME APART, Ben Brooks’ AN ISLAND OF FIFTY, and Sasha Fletcher’s WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED are the first three titles in our novel(la) series and are all special in their own ways: Guadry’s book is a novel(la) in verse, playing off of fairy-tales and the words of Gertrude Stein; Brooks’ book is a mountain of political disintegration, surrounded in a jacket of Derrick Jensen; Fletcher’s book is a surreal clanging of one person against another, how our relationships become cops in the backyard, building us oceans of clouds and glass.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

12 or 20 questions: with Sasha Fletcher

Sasha Fletcher's novella WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS AND WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS is out now from ml press. He is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Columbia University in the city of New York.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
So far I honestly have no idea. I check goodreads a little more compulsively and wait for google alerts.

In actuality, the novella is the second book I finished. The first is a book of linked prose poems that was a finalist for octopus. I feel like the novella occupies a space between the first book and whatever book these poems I'm working on now become.

The novella was me trying to push the form more. Writing fragments that sort of went together was one thing, but I wanted to see if I could build something larger page by page.

The new poems are generally much longer than I used to write. The prose poems are all about 1.5-2 pages [where they used to average around 120 words or so] and I'm using line breaks, which I usually never did. In terms of actually talking about the work, I think a lot of it involved trying to raise the stakes, and to push things. There's still a lot of familiar stuff. The sky crashes down, bones get up and walk out of your body, there are birds, there are notes coming from unknown places saying things very loudly and lots of things get set on fire. There's still a lot of domesticity. There are boats. There is drowning. But I feel like I'm doing all these things in a different way right now.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Well I came to fiction first because I hated poetry, then I quit fiction because poetry was a thing I could actually do [in that for years I could start stories and never manage to care enough to finish them, and suddenly when I started writing poems I could care enough to finish them].

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?
It really depends. The novella ended up being written in about six weeks. Then it went through five rounds of final edits over about a month. The book of poems I have took two years. I have absolutely no idea how long this current book will take, but either way I need to turn in a version of it next August to graduate.

The writing tends to come quickly some of the time, but a lot of it is crap. If it's not actually crap it may just be that it sounds crap, as the sound and rhythm of a piece tend to be as important as what's being said. We are saying that how a thing is said and what is being said should generally be reflective of the other.

I have a few pieces that came out as-is. Aside from a few adjustments for rhythm or word-choice, they just fell right out of me. I have a bunch of poems right now, some of which I've been working on since October, but all of them have these brackets where important parts are missing and unwritten. Sometimes the brackets are full of notes and plans. Sometimes I need to hold the idea in my head and go over how to deal with it. Other times the solution just appears.

I guess I am saying it varies, but that I work a lot and sometimes that gets me somewhere.


4 - Where does fiction 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?
It completely depends. With the book of poems, I set out to try to write a ten poem chapbook where all the poems went together and functioned as a body of work. I wanted to create a body of work. I started that in June 2008 and I think by that October I'd titled the book and started sequencing it and from there on everything was written in a big old .doc with EVERYTHING HERE IS OK in 72 pt Times New Roman on the first page.

With the novella, I'd written three longer prose pieces that I had no idea if they were poems of fiction and no idea what to do with them in a larger context, but they were all written one after another and in the same voice. J.A. Tyler had seen the poetry book and said he would be interested if I had a novella. So I sat down, wrote those three pieces together and then went from there.

Recently I've been freaking out a bit about this whole writing another book thing. Generally after three or four months I can figure out the direction of the work and sit down and just focus on the book. But I've been trying so hard to just to write really good poems that I haven't thought at all about how they'll go together. Reading over them recently I know they will. Some of them will. They all fit somehow. But I don't know how. I've been working on whatever these poems are since August 2009. Most of them are in completely different forms. But I guess, to answer it, I generally am trying to work on a book from near the beginning, or at least with one in mind, and right now I'm not, and it's been weird. I am just now, in the last two weeks, becoming really OK with not knowing everything in advance, or having some over-arching plan for things.


5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love reading out loud and it is a very big part of figuring out if a thing is working or not.


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 know. I am, personally, not a very big fan of theory or theoretical concerns. On the other hand, in terms of questions, I can talk about concerns I used to have, and then why I don't bother as much with them anymore. So. 1) I used to be really concerned with the idea of dealing with the fantastic and absurd, what is generally regarded as the surreal, in an everyday sort of way. It seemed really important to me that when bringing in these elements they were described exactly how the voice in the piece would describe brushing their teeth or filling out taxes or sitting on the bus to work. That nothing ever, in my mind, succeeded by calling attention to itself, but by sneaking in unannounced. Once I got OK at doing that, I decided to then work on more fantastic pieces that folded in elements of the everyday, and then tried write with the two encroaching on each other.

I think the novella was actually a pretty good synthesis of that, of having everything just there together, seeming like it all belongs. At least to me.

But so 2) I've found with my current work that maybe these questions would be helpful to start posing again, but that my genuine fear of models such as that are that they promote laziness. That by having a question to answer, rather than having to just make it all up and hold it all together, that you might not allow the piece to move how it needs to. That you'll limit it. And that you might not worry about anything other than your concerns. I find that idea terrifying. I am very much afraid of being lazy in my writing. I think it's safe to say that I sometimes have a problem with not cleaning the house enough and cluttering up my desk and I am wary of things I guess.

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 have no idea.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It completely depends on the editor. At this point my girlfriend edits everything, and she is really good at it. I think what you need in an editor is someone who is willing to see the work only for what it is trying to do [as opposed to what they would do] and who can see the ways in which to help you do it better. It's hard. Most of us want to talk about how we'd do it or would like to see it done, but that isn't a thing that's helpful, because it's about our vision and not theirs. Any single person that can look at what you have done, see what it is trying to do, and help you to do that better, any single person that can do that is probably the best fucking person you will ever meet.

Which also doesn't mean, I think, that you should ever be at a point where you need someone else in order to tell if your work is good or not. Or maybe. I want to take that back. I think whatever helps you to write better is whatever helps you to write better and writing better is a very good thing. That is what I think.

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

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 get up, I check my email, I have a shower, I make some breakfast, I dick around on the internet, I eat some lunch, I do some reading, I go for a walk, I read over what I'm working on, I read over it some more, I sit and think, I do some writing, I eat some dinner, I write some more, I go to bed, I maybe have sex.

During the semester is a bit different. Last semester I was turning in two assignment based poems a week. So I was doing that and also trying to do my own work and doing the readings for class and also reading the things that I thought would help me, so I am sort of taking it a little easier right now.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I go for a walk. I watch TV. I take in a movie. I bother my girlfriend. I call my dad. I put it away. I give it some space. I get a little mad. I try harder not to.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Clean laundry. Dryer Sheets.

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. I listen to music constantly when I work, with the intention of having the tone of the music dictate the tone of the work. I have shit tons of mixes titled after pieces or after sections of books.

The film You, The Living by Roy Anderrson probably had more of an effect on me and my work and how I think and process information than anything else.

I still sometimes draw and I find it helpful to get me thinking about things in different ways. About depiction in different ways.

I spent a bit doing poems based on things I saw in Marcel Dzama Drawings. I think about how Jasper Johns does things a lot and how I can try to do that. I spend a lot of time sitting and looking at the sky. Often from one side of a window.


14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Right now: Josh Bell, Richard Siken, Emily Pettit, Rachel B Glaser, Objects for a Fog Death by Julie Doxsee, Bob Hicok, Ken Sparling, Ben Mirov.

In general: Donald Barthelme, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford, Frank O'Hara, David Berman, Amy Hempel, Zachary Schomburg, Padgett Powell, James Tate and David Foster Wallace.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
 Sell more books? Get a teaching gig? Get married? Buy a house? Have some kids?


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 really liked gutting fish. It was a good job. Alternately, I have no idea. I try real hard to worry mostly about the things I can actually deal with. That other shit just keeps me up at night and I like sleeping when I can.


17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I knew how to do two things moderately well. Draw and Write. When it came down to the jobs I could get with a BFA in Ceramics and the time that would be involved with getting better at something, I ended up picking the one that cost less to do.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished Pee on Water by Rachel B Glaser and it is incredible. I saw Micmacs the other week and that was pretty awesome. Before that I saw Altman's The Long Goodbye and I really really loved that. 


19 - What are you currently working on?
A bunch of poems that will be a book of poems. A lot of them have to do with the end of the world. As like a regular occurrence. Or something like that. Floods, the sky falling, various things being set on fire, people having trouble sleeping and making up stories to pass the time, rivers doing things they wouldn't normally do, like pretending to be kids, or being ominous. Stuff like that.


12 or 20 (small press) questions;