12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lindsay Hunter

Lindsay Hunter is the co-founder and co-host of the groundbreaking Quickies! reading series, an event that focused on flash fiction. Her first book, Daddy’s, a collection of flash fiction, was published in 2010 by featherproof books, a boutique press in Chicago. Her second collection, DON’T KISS ME, was published by FSG Originals in 2013 and was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her first novel, Ugly Girls, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2014. The Huffington Post called it “a story that hits a note that’s been missing from the chorus of existing feminist literature.” Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award and a 2017 NPR Great Read.

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 changed my life in that it felt like someone was taking me seriously, and that I had a physical object representing the work I had completed, and I was thus allowed to call myself a capital-W Writer. My most recent work is quite different in that it's a novel, but it's similar in that writing is a continuous reclaiming of one's voice. Of allowing yourself to grow but still attempting to write as yourself. 

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

I actually wrote poetry at first! My mentor in undergrad was a poet and that's largely what I wrote and read and studied. I considered myself a poet and then I'd sneak off to work on a shitty novel. I was rejected by eight (8!) grad schools I applied to. I started taking fiction classes at night and trying to write stories. Then I found a grad program that didn't make you say what sort of writer you were, because in truth many writers write all of it! And some of my favorite novels were written by poets.

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 usually just start a project. I relate it to running, or any sort of exercise, in that if you look at all the miles you're supposed to run or minutes you've blocked out to work out, it can feel daunting and impossible and your brain starts to convince you that there's no point in starting, that you could just make yourself a nest of blankets and read instead. But if you just take that first step, then you've started. You're already in it. So I tend to just force my fingers to start moving across the keyboard. Sometimes I start with an idea I've been tossing around in my head (I'm a mom of three little ones, so a lot of writing gets done in my head so I'm ready to go when I have time to sit down at my desk), and sometimes it's a first sentence or an image I'm curious about. Many of the things I've published have been first or second drafts. I don't generally outline or take notes. But! I will also say the process is different, for me, for each book. The last book I wrote was like a huge shapeshifting puzzle that I continually reassembled. The one I'm working on now is like a crazy quilt.

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?

Well, that's different for each book. Ugly Girls and Eat Only When You're Hungry I wrote in chronological order. The two most recent novels I've been working on are quite different. The current one, as I said, is like a crazy quilt. You only see the whole thing if you look at each little piece. So it jumps around in time and place and character. The one just previous is reverse-chronological for one character and chronological for all the rest. But yes, I know I'm working on a book from the very beginning. I tend to treat each "chapter" like its own piece of flash fiction. It makes it doable and fun for me.

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

Oh, I LOVE doing readings. I didn't used to! I got flop sweat and nausea at my very first public reading. I kept thinking, why do they want to hear me? I'm just a rube! But I happened to do that reading with Peter Markus, who blew my mind when he said he loved to read his work. I realized I could write something that felt fun to say, and I started looking at readings as performances. Why bore your audience to death? Why not make it fun, meaningful? I co-hosted a reading series for a while with the hopes that it would help more writers have fun reading their work. Now I host a podcast with the same intention.

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, always, my work deals with loneliness, and with trying to show the humanity where you may not expect it. I wonder about this myself, because in person I am a very chipper, happy idiot, but my writing tends to be dark, even grotesque. I have been looking for ways to include grace, even at the sentence level, in everything I write.

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?

The writer is essential to our culture, to society, to humanity. I can't think how often I've thought, if only so and so read more (okay, I am talking about Trump and his ilk). Reading leads to empathy, to curiosity, to knowledge, to grace. Those are in short supply, but thankfully there's a solution. READ.

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

Essential! Yes, it can be awkward to be shown areas where you've biffed it, or to be told "yeah, no, do this over," but I've been blessed to work with wonderful, smart editors whom I trusted, and who stood up for the writer I am and the work I was making.

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

"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story." I read that in Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. And, "You need to stet more." That was from my wonderful editor at FSG, Emily Bell (who's now at Zando), when she felt that my voice was being trampled by the copy editor. A wonderful reminder to reclaim my voice.

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

Well, it's not "easy," but I definitely use my flash fiction background as I write novels. Flash fiction has kept me connected to the immediacy in what I'm writing, and has helped me stay attuned to when what I'm writing just isn't doing it. I use the constraint of flash fiction (word count, mainly) to reach my daily goals. And my flash fiction background has helped me consider what world, and what slice of that world, I want to present. And! It's fun to write that way. To focus intensely on what I'm working on in that small amount of time I have in the day, to select my words carefully, to feel like what I'm doing is enough.

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?

Since we're in a pandemic and I'm a parent of three little ones, I don't have as much time as I used to. I get maybe six hours a week (groan), and those hours are generally during nap/quiet time for my kids. But that means I've had to adjust my goals and yet still complete them like the beast I know I am. I have a word count goal I set for myself each time I sit down at the desk, and I always meet or exceed that goal. As a project goes along I'll start setting longer goals for myself, like when I'm going to do a big revision or when I'm going to send it to my agent. I always treat it like work; I always take it seriously. I know it will one day be a book I'm proud of.

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

Constraints! I give myself a constraint, like my word count goal or a timed writing session or even a prompt, like "write what this character's living room looks like." If I focus on the constraint, something concrete and achievable, then that feeling of being blocked kind of fades into the background.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I'm from Central Florida, so I'd have to say it's the scent of orange blossoms carried on a hot blast of exhaust.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I wrote Ugly Girls as a response to the movie Drive (and also as a response to the book Ravens by George Dawes Green). I don't generally listen to music as I write, but when I'm revising, it's essential. Sometimes I'll hear a song as I'm just living my life and I'll know there's a story or a chapter I can write just because I heard that song.

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

Anne Tyler is an example of how something can be sad and dark but still filled with grace.

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

I'd love to write a screenplay! I've attempted it a few times but my brain is so wired to the page that it's hard to write something that'll be onscreen. One day...

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 wanted to be an actress! I studied theater in high school and my freshman year of college and I studied it at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute before realizing what I truly loved and wanted to do was to make people feel, and I could do that a whole lot better with my writing. But I think when I read my work in front of an audience, I'm combining the two. Recently, though, I've decided I would have made a great FBI agent.

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

I've been writing since I could write. It comes so naturally to me and so obviously what I was meant to do that I can't believe it's not an inherent part of every human's life. Like, what? You don't write? Really?

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

Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam for the book and The Wolf of Snow Hollow for the film.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I'm working on a new novel! It's this idea I have that life is actually not chronological, that time is a collage of all other times, and that is especially true after a traumatic event. It's about a murder, and motherhood, and young love, and identity. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Andreae Callanan, the debt

 

Infinity dress

The infinity dress was a lie, and we all bought it.
A circle skirt of quivering, cool silk jersey, two

broad straps plenty long to drape over shoulders,
stretch across breasts, wind around and around

the waist and tie up in a tight, bright bow.
A little something nice to take us

from boardroom to ballroom to bedroom.
One cocoon to metamorphose any woman

into Marilyn on Monday and Farrah on Friday,
Helen on holidays and at the annual regatta,

her face launching a hundred rowboats. A dozen
cunning ways to be the bride’s best friend, a dozen

more to stand out or blend. But the joke
was on us: now we know how fifteen

feet of strap gets twisted and twisted
until the dress is not a dress at all, but

just enough rope.

St. John’s, Newfoundland poet Andreae Callanan’s full-length poetry debut is the debt (Windsor ON: Biblioasis, 2021), a collection of very sharp narrative lyrics centred around Newfoundland geography and history, colonialism and empire, being and industry. “She knits with a speed that seems / the stuff of cartoons: heroic, impossible.” she writes, to close the poem “Winter”: “But we are young, and our hands / are very small.” Callanan writes of cod fishing, Bond Street, radio whispers, classic film and the distance between “here” and what the television offers, such as MuchMusic’s Electric Circus. The distances between such are enormous, and Callanan’s narrator offers numerous portraits of now and then, writing poems as portraits and reminiscences; of what she sees, and of what she knows, and clearly remembers.

“We take care of the things that bear our names.” she writes, as part of the extended “Crown,” “We take care of our houses, cheques. Our children. / The rest is someone else’s business. What / falls outside the fence line—beyond the rock / walls, silvering softwood posts, the slipknot- / secured gates—that’s called Crown land.” The bulk of the poems included in this collection are short, lyric narratives but for the longer sequence “Crown,” a piece that works prose sections against line-breaks, composed after the prompt, seemingly, from Charter to Sir Walter Raleigh: 1584 by Queen Elizabeth I, as read to “an assembled crowed in St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1983” by Prince Charles: “[We grant our trusty and wellbeloved servant … free liberty and license …] to discover, search, find out and view such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands, countries, and territories [as are] not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people.” Callanan writes of the distances between rural and urban Newfoundlanders, and of accents, the loss of the fish and of what colonialism looks like, from the contemporary ground. She writes, lovingly, of Newfoundland, and all its “wild and weedy things,” and how she and her contemporaries acted in their youth.

Callanan writes of what is owed, and a debt to the place itself. Or, as the title poem offers: “We are all debtors here, beholden / to this jagged place for every lungful / of spruce-laden salted air, each slap / of ocean blasting rock and boat, dock / and ankle. Each berry-bucket filled / begs something in return. I pay / my dues with words: a no to harm, a yes / to harder work. I pay my dues in placards, / ballots, chants, in reckoning.”

“This fireplace mantel,” she writes as part of the poem “Mantel,” “is a white expanse against a wall as pink / as the smooth inside of a souvenir / seashell.” In the debt, Callanan writes a locale simultaneously centred and far removed from the world. Her poems write of tangible, physical places and objects, composing scenes that both look acknowledge where she stands as well as staring off into that distance. Really, in many ways, this collection is an articulation of that complicated relationship between home and away, writing her familiar and immediate, as well as what might be possible beyond the horizon.

Divya Victor, Curb

 

SETTLEMENT

Settlers, over the land, over the sea
over the tile, over the stone floors
settlers over the furs, over the pinewood planks
of the house settled, the houses settled into the ground
the houses so buried; settling
pulling life like splinters
from the toboggans & caravans pulling cargo
settled out of suitcases, settled down
we settled in & so settled we
into our ways & with those ways did we settle
for this emptying of history
for this sternum rent in two
for this conscience as quiet
as the snap of a wishbone
sucked white.

The latest from Divya Victor is Curb (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021), a powerful and, at times devastating, book-length poem centred around grief and racial violence to a population regularly and routinely challenged on their right to simply exist. She speaks of the strength of community, even through unimaginable heartbreak. As the press release offers: “Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark ‘other’ by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.” Curb exists in the shadow of routine and repeated racial violence against South Asians, specifically in wake of, as the press release reminds, “our post-9/11 political landscape.” She writes the wounds and conflicts, citing specific examples of violence that her poems respond to. Victor is the author of five prior full-length collections—Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (2012), Partial Derivative of the Unnameable (Troll Thread, 2005), Things To Do With Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014), Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow Press, 2015) and Kith (Book*hug/Fence Books, 2017)—as well as the chapbooks SUTURES (2009), Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011) and UNSUB (2014).

Curb is constructed in thirteen poem-sections blending the lyric with prose, blending the personal with documentation, writing out responses to both general and specific instances of racial violence. Writing discomfort, grief and trauma, Curb is document, testament and testimony; naming the victims, the assaults and the assaulters. As the poem ‘PAVEMENT,” composed to respond to the assault and death of Divyendu Sinha in Old Bridge, New Jersey in June 2010: “I forget the his name walking up the stairs / all the fricatives abandoned in the basement / where I read the his news reports—early casualties // at the foot of the my desk. these dog eared returns / never lead me to him you only / to myself [.]” In an essay posted on April 30, 2019 at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation Blog, “>>[WOMAN WAILING]: On the Problem of Representing Trauma as a Brown Woman Within the Institution of Poetry,” Victor writes on her concerns around writing cultural trauma through poetry:

FACT (confessional): I worry, all the time, that my work participates in the maintenance of whiteness’s comfort with itself—a comfort which easily assimilates the processes of learning and understanding “cultures” constructed to sustain and affirm its hegemonic position. I worry that I work, through the defaults of my historical and social positions, in Feel Good Incorporated without my consent. Because I participate within discourses and fields which have worked, overtime, to exclude women of color, I worry all the time that I’m going to write, forever and until I die, for the enlightenment, comfort, and spiritual rehabilitation of white people. Worse: That I will write and perform, for as long as I live, about the death of my kind, for white people who will survive. Put another way, I worry, like Prageeta Sharma has, that my lexicon and my body are bound up in “cheap signaling.” Put yet another way (& to draw on Dawn Lundy Martin’s phrasing), I worry about populating a grave of “bodies that are unaware of their utilitarian bluntness in the symbolic order of race.” I experience this worry as a fear: a fear of permanently orphaning of my future-self at the stoop of Poetry, capital P.

In many ways, the book is anchored by the sequence “Threshold,” the seventh of the book’s thirteen sections. A sequence in eight parts, it is one of numerous pieces throughout the collection that responds to a particular example of violence, and the poem’s post-script reads: “February 22, 2017. Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot in a bar in Olathe, Kansas, by Adam Purinton, a white supremacist who believed that Kuchibhotla was an illegal immigrant from Iran. The shooter yelled, ‘Get out of my country!’ before he shot & murdered Srinivas. Then, the shooter went to another local bar & bragged that he had shot an immigrant. // On that day, I was pregnant & moving into my third trimester.” Each poem in this particular sequence, save the first, opens with the same line, “When I read the news / of the shooting,” allowing each section to further document and examine the trauma of that particular moment by returning to it, and allowing it as a repeated jumping-off point. Structurally, one might see this poem in comparison to John Newlove’s classic 1960s-era poem “Ride Off Any Horizon,” which explored aspects of history from the Canadian prairies, as the second poem in Victor’s sequence reads:

When I read the news
of the shooting, this belly
plumed into an apse— it distended
upward, a balloon hollow
but leaden, these lungs lifted
here— this diaphragm fled, bore through
a tent made of ligament
& rope. The billow screeched
In these ears, pulled here— these legs apart
these toes went numb & cold. The ground
beneath me collapsed, turned to dunes
& the sand quickened. Here— this belly
carrying those pounds of flesh
began to take flight
in seconds it was
in— here— this mouth, pressing against here— these teeth—
a pear balloon, hot flush
with wet wings beating, with wet wings thrashing
in these lungs. The breath
an ocean of blood. This skin
here— a dam, detonating. A pulse, here
pulling history
towards these feet.