Harry Dodge is an American sculptor, performer, video artist, and author, whose work crosses genres and mediums, and flows through a variety of philosophical questions while addressing intermediacy, relation, materiality, and the unnamable.

In the early nineties, Dodge was one of the founders of the San Francisco community-based performance space, The Bearded Lady, which served as a touchstone for a pioneering queer DIY literary and arts scene.

His solo and collaborative work has been exhibited at many venues both nationally and internationally, including at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, a solo show entitled Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2013, and Hammer Museum’s 2014 Biennial, Made in L.A.

Dodge’s work is in a variety of collections, including The Museum of Modern Art (NY), and The Hammer Museum (LA). In 2015 he was featured at Wallspace, NY with his solo exhibit, The Cybernetic Fold. Recent group exhibitions include: The Promise of Total Automation at Kunsthalle Wien Austria; a three-person show at London’s The Approach Gallery, Triples: Harry Dodge, Evan Holloway and Peter Shelton; and Routine Pleasures, a show organized by Michael Ned Holte at the MAK Center in Los Angeles.

Dodge co-wrote, directed, edited, and starred in (with Silas Howard) a narrative feature film, By Hook or By Crook, which premiered at Sundance in 2002 and received five Best Feature awards. From 2004 to 2008, Dodge collaborated with video artist Stanya Kahn, and has since made a series of his own videos, including The Time-Eaters, Love Streams, and Mysterious Fires.

Dodge holds an MFA from Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and is on the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Program in Art. Harry Dodge is also the partner of the author and academic Maggie Nelson, whose interview is the featured Lunch Special in this issue.

His latest show, The Inner Reality of Ultra-Intelligent Life, is on view through January 8, 2017 at The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Ca.

Harry Dodge graciously constructed this interview with me via email in October 2016.

Carrie Kellerby: Your art practice has involved a variety of film and video work over the course of your career—including the feature film By Hook or by Crook, and a number of videos including The Time-Eaters, Love Streams, and this year’s Mysterious Fires. One of the recurring characteristics of this work includes the layering of multiple edits. Can you describe your creative process while filming a project, and specifically address your attraction to layering and repetitions?

Harry Dodge: I’m interested in all parts of a work being read, either analytically or viscerally. Layers and repetition can certainly be read as related to my interest in constructedness, or even superposition, simultaneity, non-location, plurality, the multiform elsewhere. I mean I’m a deep materialist and really into thinking through these ideas of everything being kind of interlocked, you know intergalactically entangled.

When I’m scripting, I am happiest making language objects that are complicated and specific. I want the performers to say the words exactly as I’ve written them. I use a lot of non-actors and these folks would never be able to remember everything, so we film with a live (human) prompter, feeding a performer phrase after phrase. I edit out the interstitial material and part of the fun is pressuring my edits with the goal of generating a final performance so smooth and funny that (even though there are hundreds of edits in every minute of video), the performer comes off as preternaturally voluble. I’m a really active director. I’m constantly interrupting, sculpting the performance, so there’s a lot of that stuff that needs to be cut out. That’s part of the liberty I take while directing, right, because I also know that the “joins” (as some editors refer to them) produce meaning. In my last video though, Mysterious Fires, I decided while editing to include some of the informal moments: directing the actor, giggling with one another. In allowing viewers to witness this material, I was able to discuss new subjects like how art arises from sociality, how form arises from flow that is already happening, not from some distinct exalted, estranged art-zone. I thought of it (the inclusion of this material) as a way of re-valuing love, community, affect.

CK: The titles of your work are also very intriguing. Can you discuss the concept of title as it emerges in your work? How do titles work towards or push against terms of categorical definition? Does the title in any way limit the possibilities of what the work can do?

HD: I do the titles last. I always know what the strange, affective truth of my interest was while making a piece. When I title, I’m trying to reify that, while knowingly providing specific registers and references through language. They’re packed little poems—sometimes they even contain fragmented quotations or short jokes. So, yes, there’s a lot to each title. The title might limit, but there is no problem with that at all. In fact I’m trying, with the title, to de-limit a reading, direct a viewer.

CK: Much of your art responds to philosophical theories, yet it doesn’t feel overly intellectual or static; in fact there is a distinct emotional texture to your work. Would you discuss the emotional qualities of your work in general and how theoretic speculation interacts with those qualities?

HD: During my childhood and for the first decade of my career, which included live performance, creative writing, and filmmaking, I was absolutely concerned with addressing emotion. Back then I thought emotionality was the only way to reach people and hold them long enough to communicate. Also relevant: I’ve always had a love for, a devotion to, and a knack for making narrative-based work that generates humor and pathos at once. I think of Richard Pryor here as a sort of magnificent example of that, a big influence. And also these Bette Midler VHS tapes (of her Broadway shows) I hoarded as a kid, which for some reason intermingled in my mind with her stellar, crushing performance as Janis Joplin in that movie, The Rose. There’s this moment, when playing Janis Joplin, she is singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” really slowly and weakly, and then she just collapses. These strange moments shape us forever. Ha ha.

Some people say an artist works on only one question in a career. I absolutely believe I’ve been lucky enough to have two.

Right after I was done with By Hook or By Crook, I lost interest in pressing on the possibilities of narrativity/emotionality as my main tool for effecting communication, change, relation. Like a lightning bolt, I suddenly wanted to employ an attention to structure almost exclusively, and sought to have form or flow be the effervescent stew from which experimental vapors arise. I got into theory, science, philosophy, and history, and started experimenting with more poetic forms.

Worth noting: I think that I worked so hard and so long in narrative, and have such a deep love of humor entwined with pathos, that even when I pay no attention to it, it’s still one of the oft-used tools in my box. I still use character, I guess, to deliver inquisitions on structure. My video Love Streams is an example of that, where a performer delivers monologues about how these extension arms are built. (It’s an extended, off-kilter metaphor about quantum entanglement.)

The fact is, even though a lot of the early work was narrative, I’ve been interested in poetics since I was young. I have always liked things that were kind of hanging together but also falling apart at the same time, or being formed in situ. I could feel the reverberations between two words, say, in a poem, much more than in a story and I like the weird echo, all of that energy happening in the space between things. Narrative is so bossy and overwhelming. It’s like the worst kind of narcotic—especially if you want to communicate about structure. That said, I think it’s generative for me to use media and forms that I am suspicious of. I sort of stay irascible. If a thing gets too coherent, “Oh I got to figure out how to knock this back down.” There’s like a fracas that is always on.

I read everyday, before and after studio work. This pleasure is one thread of what I call the erotics of my practice. I also heed physicalized desires (I guess you could call these libidinal urges) during moments of making, or choosing materials. But I don’t understand those zones (libidinal) as distinct from theoretical interests (intellectual)! My point is that I experience these impulses/pleasures as absolutely mutually imbricated, mutually generating. In this way, (bodily saturation with erotic pleasures via extended bouts of thinking) I mean that quite often structures I’ve been researching will, in some way or another show up in the work.

CK: Your work also seems to spring from language, particularly when I look at your drawings, paintings, and sculpture. It’s tempting to describe your art as visual writing. Would you describe your relationship with language and how it develops as a process for artistic production?

HD: I have to admit I experience language as a sensory faculty, like little raccoon hands on an acorn—a weird mental haptic. And conversation as one of our options for being together physically, like aural frottage. In my case, as I said, thinking, reading language: they’re full body pleasures, not totally distinct from the feeling of hot sand or a poke in the eye.

I read a lot of theory, a lot of nonfiction. One book leads to another. When I go into the studio, or into a generative mode, I don’t try to make diagrams of what I’ve been reading, and I don’t worry (specifically) about “legibility.” I assume that my cells have been saturated in the information I’ve been thinking about, and I let those “cellular intelligences” go to work. Often the larger organism (one’s whole body) is way ahead of the language-based computations conventionally understood as located in the brain. I like to listen to my whole body talking (as if you could ever do otherwise!)

CK: Your text, The River of the Mother of God: Notes on Indeterminacy, V2. (A work in progress), strikes me as a performative of the whole notion of human indeterminacy, as if it were a philosophical proposition about the aggregation of “possibles” within human experience and the transitional nature of the ephemeral “Thing-in-itself.” One of the many interesting explorations of this piece has to do with relationship—juxtaposition and place. Could you describe how this project began and how you see this kind of work developing for you in the future?

HD: A few things:

• Maggie [Nelson] was finishing her book, The Argonauts, and I kept reading and advising her to add more theoretical information about indeterminacy, to make it sort of encyclopedic on the subject of flow, continuousness. I had these lists of situations, philosophers, years of research. She would say, “That is your book, not my book.” Or something like that. “You should write that one.”
• At the same time I had just read the [Hito] Steyerl article, “On Free-Fall,” and felt oddly compelled to connect it to this [Gertrude] Stein essay about how she loves verbs.
• I had had a show at just that point, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, which I had really worked hard on, but which had been at a museum in Connecticut. Very little personal conversation was generated from that show (#isolated&dejected), and I wanted to do a kind of (social) experiment in which I tried, explicitly and generously, to outline my specific thoughts and interests. I wondered if, in this way, I might be able to connect more certainly, begin conversations: Is language (in its way) a social fabric? A magic carpet that can bridge us (however imperfectly) for long moments?
• I needed a matrix that could house this series of observations, collected research. Implicit in a discussion of place, or orientation, is relation. In a discourse on poetics of relation, by definition you have difference, encounter, verbs, and so the notion of action (change) becomes a fulcrum. Using orientation as a kind of theme, River of the Mother of God could fold and flower from that point, or maybe that condition. Rather than being borne solely by words introduced as symbols, the ideas could slide against the form (as the form) and make meaning in that way as well.

CK: In this textual collage, language is the medium for artistic exploration, but it is also the subject of the exploration, suggesting a parallel with the way our bodies deliver the perception of experience as embodied beings. What do you see at the possibilities and/or limitations in which working with, or transforming, language affects the way humans experience one another?

HD: I mean, let’s face it, there a lot of ways of using language, so what are we talking about? Poetics, road signs? And while language is amazing, it’s not everything. Remembering that it’s not a zero-sum game is half the battle. (One of the things discourse can do—ecstatically—is augment, knit, even secrete, human sociality.)

That said, I acknowledge that language teaches us, by its apparent specificity, to expect mastery, crave mastery. I mean that’s cultural too: injunctions, coercive at best, which seek to manage, compress, excise specificity from our otherwise infinite or fractal-tastic experiences.

The pressure, the sinking feeling that the “real” should be quantifiable, navigable, and describable in language is a place where we flounder. I might be looking at some art and bringing my attention to bear on the piece and that bodily experience is in some real sense, proliferative, chaotic, maybe even infinite. There’s something about the pressure of the rational, these gridded, clacking protuberances exploded off of the Enlightenment, the worst parts of Humanism, and the history of that, that needs to be re-thought. We have this devaluation, this amputation of all kinds of bodily experiences, or what I call non-language knowings. It’s forcing a sort of stultifying binary, which is “This is rational or irrational” rather than, “I know this thing by this other set of parameters—one of myriad ways of knowing.” It’d be cool if we didn’t have to go straight to the word “irrational,” which has a specific connotation.

Relevant here: poetics as a way of addressing this unknowable. And maybe this is obvious, but check out Adorno’s theory of “Non-Identity” as outlined in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. She defines it as what’s left over after you make a concept, “the preponderance of the object.” Here’s a passage from Bennett:

Non-Identity is the name Adorno gives to that which is not subject to knowledge…it is a presence that acts upon us: we knowers are haunted he says, by a painful, nagging feeling that something’s being forgotten or left out. This discomfiting sense of the inadequacy of representation remains no matter how refined or analytically precise one’s concepts become. ‘Negative Dialectics’ is the method Adorno designs to teach us how to accentuate this discomforting experience and how to give it a meaning. When practiced correctly, negative dialectics will render the static buzz of nonidentity into a powerful reminder that “objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder” and thus that life will always exceed our knowledge and control. A sort of ethical project par excellence, as Adorno sees it, is to keep remembering this and learn how to accept it. Only then can we stop raging against a world that refuses to offer us the ‘reconcilement’ that we, according to Adorno, crave.

So poetics (language-based or otherwise) feverishly practiced, is a way we can attempt the impossible work of addressing that which is unknowable—encountering affect. And worth noting: this isn’t a vague or general infinity. We’re talking about the proliferative filigree of specificity, Planck space even, difference par excellence. What Edouard Glissant calls “Relation” or “totality.”

CK: In addition to paintings, writings, and video work, you also have a body of sculptural work. Can you describe what inspires you to work in one medium rather than another?

HD: Each of these modes of approach allows a different tonal mode of communicating. Also each of the media institutes a different sensory and bodily grid in terms of the workday. I’m sitting, standing, typing, video-editing, texting friends to help make video, sawing, shopping, sanding, drilling, dragging charcoal around, etc. (I like to mix it up.) Also worth noting is my belief that each of the media talks back to non-art things in our world—instance by instance. E.g., if I make a video, it’s talking back to Youtube, or Facebook, or iPhone cameras. If I make a sculpture it’s talking back to bodies in space, object acquisitiveness, food, nature, the machinic.

The word drip or droop: they both have a kind of register, so to pull up an instance of the unexpected (for example) using a word, is a different challenge than to rustle an uncanny construction into a sculpture. Drawing is wry and reverberative in distinct ways. I’m interested in all of that.

Most of my video work is structured around the power of language rather than images. Which, as you may know, is considered a video sin. It’s like I ride a figurative horse into abstraction—I mean my interests are quite structural in a weird way.

…language teaches us, by its apparent specificity, to expect mastery, crave mastery.

I often think of things in terms of shapes, forms, and flows, so it’s odd that I employ so much character—emotion, as you call it, or even comedy, but for me those things, if I complicate them just enough they start to break down as signifiers, hopefully. They atomize a little.

CK: In the movie By Hook or by Crook, the character you play, Valentine, finally finds his birth mother with the help of his newly found friend, Shy. After reading Maggie Nelson’s book, The Argonauts, I discovered that this is a fragment from your own life. She describes your discovery of your own birth family in a way that feels like a continuation of the movie, as if the book was one piece in the many time-space continuums of Harry Dodge.

HD: That’s funny, I love that idea. That this character lives in different authors’ minds at discoherent times, coming and going in various voices and dimensions.

While this is true almost whole-cloth as an observation, it’s important to remind here that any piece of art, whether nonfiction or otherwise, is a construction. I mean—I think you’re all over that when you say the word “fragment” here, but to me it’s absolutely interesting. I’m not sure absolute “nonfiction representation” is even possible, right? But that’s not a lament on my part. Honestly, it’s a miracle that anything like language is even possible. I tend to view it positivistically. But sure, a couple of otherwise canny readers have asked me, “What’s it like for someone so uncomfortable with language to have a writer for a partner?” E.g., there is this structuring device in The Argonauts, which limns a conversation Maggie and I had when we first met about whether language is able to do the work of describing fluidity, or anything really. We take sides in the first part of the book, but the binary unravels. This thing is perhaps calcified in the book for the sake of navigability—and it works. It’s social—which is one of the boons of language—but not exactly factual.

Having said all of that, I want to add that the the notion of privacy (and it’s true that I’m exceptionally private) strikes me as functioning in a register or sphere that is actually fairly distinct from the machine of presenting one’s creative endeavors as social and communicative mediating objects. You see what I mean? One thing is crafted to cause or augment sociality (conversation piece)—another thing is simply the wrestling of control over moments of imminent exposure. Control-consent seems to be the hyphenated fulcrum under that particular teeter-totter. In other words, I’m much less distressed when I’m the one making decisions about how I’m represented. It’s not called exposure at that point. It’s called art.

CK: How do you view the making of art in terms of cultural dialogue? What kinds of responsibilities do you think artists have, if any, outside of the art world?

HD: Art, the word, the practice, protects and cultivates not only the imaginary—which alongside the agency of matter = potency—but all manner of things that defy instrumentalization by capitalism. Art (the word and practice) points at (and enjoins) all the stuff that can’t be quantified in any other way: the unnamable, the unknowable, affective inner experience, etc. The teeming open system that Glissant calls “totality” from which he subtracts “unity.” He says—and I agree—that there are things we can never know, and that “consequently we imagine it through a poetics; this imaginary realm provides the full-sense of all these always decisive differentiations.” Here, to me, poetics is a synonym for art and experimentalism in general.

Now, as social-ethical beings, citizens, friends, lovers, neighbors (aside from being artists, whose tools are fevered, demented, and poetic, and whose works should not be judged in terms linked to efficacy, transparency, or coherence) we’ve a great responsibility to be out in, discovering, entangling with, and critiquing our world, worlds.

As an aside, I do read art (not judge it) finally, each time, in terms of its contemporary relevance—invoking resonant forms (from outside of the gallery) and trying to get a sense of the relationship(s) the artist might be having to those rhyming supra-art situations/forms. But I wouldn’t extrapolate this habitual intellectualized art-reading protocol into a sort of cogent, articulated “political” injunction for art, in which a kind of experimentalism or opacity is pressured to causality in knowable ways.

CK: There is an additive dynamic to your work—a this-and-this—as opposed to this-or-that. Do you believe that identity is potentially everything that one accepts it to be?

HD: I think our identities are always on the move. Everything is always on the move. The trick is to allow ourselves to heed alternate forms of epistemological sense-making. (It’s hard to see “clearly” that thing in motion.) So identity—which is a word I almost never use any more!—doesn’t only accrue, it also winnows and alchemizes continuously (being constantly affected by every other thing). As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m very interested in the idea of a plural subject and sort of keep fondling a specific notion of multiplicity and interconnection (Relation) that is fecund, replete, with difference. In other words, homogeneity doesn’t have to be the final result of permeability. Intense articulation is not only possible, but (I suppose) inevitable. E.g., #Callmemyname.

As Glissant says, “In Relation the whole is not the finality of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity. […] Diversity, the quantifiable totality of every possible difference, is the motor driving universal energy…” 

CK: And finally, what are you reading now that might be inspiration for future work?

HD: I just started looking into what they’re calling software studies. I’m about 100 pages into The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin Bratton. Also into A Prehistory of the Cloud by Tung-Hui Hu. As I said, I’m a deep materialist. Lately, I’ve been (successfully) trying to alchemize/transform my neo-Luddite/technophobic thinking habits into a more dynamic understanding of materiality through reading intensely on machine consciousness and the philosophy of (the infrastructure of) network technologies and computation. The accidental megastructure. Wow, man. These last few months, it’s like I got a new brain.

Carrie Kellerby has a BFA in Art History, a BA in Creative Writing, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. She is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, and the advisor and co-editor of the Arts and Graphics department at Lunch Ticket. She teaches writing at Colorado Mesa University, dabbles in paint and yoga, and spends way too much time gardening.

In one of Michael Jaime-Becerra’s stories, “Lopez Trucking Incorporated,” the sixteen-year-old narrator climbs into the cab of the commercial rig belonging to his grandfather, a man who’s been estranged from his family—and perhaps himself—for years. “The rig smells like old smoke and leather,” the narrator observes. There’s a statue of the Virgin Mary sitting on the dashboard, along with a yellow clay ashtray in the shape of Texas, something his sister made for their Grandpa back in the third grade. “It’s been cracked and glued back together a few times,” he says, and the passenger seat is big and soft, like “a catcher’s mitt,” but the rumble from the rig’s engines are enough to make everything shake: the Virgin, the ashtray, even the fillings in the boy’s teeth.

One gets the feeling that all of Jaime-Becerra’s characters have been cracked and put back together a few times. Family holds them, too, even if it sometimes stalls the launch of their own lives. Setting serves the same purpose, and for Jaime-Becerra’s collection of linked short stories, Every Night is Ladies’ Night (Rayo, 2004), as well as his novel, This Time Tomorrow (Thomas Dunne, 2010), that setting is El Monte, California, a four-by-seven-mile tract of low-lying land east of Los Angeles, bordered by the San Gabriel and Rio Hondo rivers. Once a way-station for nomadic Native American tribes, Spanish missionaries, and soldiers, El Monte is now a predominantly Mexican-American community of small businesses and industrial outlets, bordered by two of LA’s busiest freeways (the 605 and the 10). It is also a continuing beacon for immigrant families seeking to realize their dreams; or, as the chamber of commerce says in its online history, El Monte offers a home for those who want to put down roots while seeking “new opportunities and ideas.”

That can be said not only of Jaime-Becerra’s characters but perhaps of the author himself, who met me at Diana’s restaurant and tortilleria on Durfee Avenue, one of El Monte’s main drags (and the main thoroughfare in many of his stories). Over generous burritos, we talked about all of his works to date—including, most recently, nonfiction for LAtitudes: An Angelenos’ Atlas, and a story in the final issue of Black Clock—as well as his experience as a student, practitioner, and now an associate professor of creative writing (over a decade at UC Riverside). We talked about trying to find that ever-elusive balance between family and artistic fulfillment, and then he took me on a personal tour of the old neighborhood and the familiar places that still catch him, like a big, well-oiled glove, even as they rattle and crack with age and break open to the new.

Sherrye Henry Jr.: You’ve said that when you were young, you wanted to be a cowboy first—and only later, a writer. What changed your mind?

Michael Jaime-Becerra: The first real success I remember having was in fourth grade. I was writing an Indiana Jones knock-off, called Panama Jack. It was terrible, but I had a lot of fun doing it. And then in seventh grade I wrote a book about a skateboard contest in outer space. I was into skateboarding and had a taste for science fiction, and I tried to merge the two. You would get medals in school—and I was really competitive, and wanted one of those medals—but nothing happened that year. Only my English teacher found it imaginative and inventive. I found this out much later (in fact, she came to a reading of Ladies’ Night, and told me she did this without her principal’s permission), but she had forwarded the book to the county fair at the time. I didn’t know about it until I got this letter at the house that the book had placed third, and that was a really transformative moment for me: The book that I had made was in this glass case, with other books from other cities that I hadn’t even heard of, and there was big ribbon around it. And that moment really galvanized me: that moment of publication, of writing something for a public audience. I was writing about what interested me; I drew from the things I was passionate about at that age; I was living in this imaginative world. So it was a convergence of all these things.

The book that I had made was in this glass case, with other books from other cities that I hadn’t even heard of, and there was big ribbon around it. And that moment really galvanized me: that moment of publication, of writing something for a public audience.

I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, but I knew that I wanted to write.

That moment—I go back to it a lot, for being recognized for a talent that I had, outside of my own environment, by an audience that had nothing to do with me. The county fair is everybody, and it was real validation. That’s a word that’s really important to this discussion. It’s personal validation, but more than that, it’s cultural validation, like we all have a place in the world. As time has gone by, that’s become more my conscious purpose as a writer.

SH: So it’s both aspects of validation, the internal satisfaction of your writing and also its acknowledgment and acceptance by the outside world.

MJB: Yes. My parents lived along the San Gabriel River. Every year the rains would cause the river to overflow, and someone would invariably decide to go inner tubing, and without fail, every year, the county search and rescue would have to fish the person out, and we’d hear the sirens along the bike path and the helicopters overhead. One year my dad had a ladder pressed against the fence, and I saw Stan Chambers, a local newscaster, doing a live remote. That was another really important moment for me, the world coming to where I lived. This idea of this is where I’m from but it has a place in the larger world.

SH: You started in college [UCR] with poetry. Why and when did you switch to fiction?

MJB: I was a terrible fiction writer. I believe I got a B- in my first creative writing class. But I didn’t have a healthy literary diet. I was reading Frank Miller and The Dark Knight comics; and Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero, and I was doing my best to imitate them. And then, I was really struggling. I was the first in my family to go to college. I was the first person I knew to go to college. And things were really chaotic at home. I was working a graveyard shift and then showing up for an 8:30 class in my work clothes. I was having terrible time of it, and I was afraid to ask my advisor for help. I felt like something of an astronaut, launched into orbit. So I thought I’d take the most advanced class I could find, and if I did well, then I deserved to be there. Otherwise I’d keep working at UPS.

So I took this class with the poet Maurya Simon, and I decided to write something that entertained me. That was a huge distinction, because up until then I’d been writing to entertain people, this imaginary perceived audience, by emulating [other writers]. So I wrote this poem about the frustrations of getting my father a beer in the middle of a football game. It was really short—maybe ten lines, called “Los Angeles 34, Denver 17,” something like that. The workshop responded really well. I think they saw a sense of honesty, of honest emotion, and personal investment in the work, and that was the turning point for me. I thought, I’ll just keep doing this. I started to look for more experiences to write about, and to read more poetry, and began a series of poems from memories of my adolescence that eventually became my first book of poetry, The Estrellitas Off Peck Road (Temporary Vandalism, 1997). That was a lot of fun.

SH: When did you make the transition to fiction?

MJB: At UCR, we have a cross-genre requirement. (We still do, and I’m glad we do.) So I decided to try fiction again, and took a class with Susan Straight. That was a happy accident, because here I was, a person interested in writing about where he was from, stories that are rooted in memory, and [she’s] a writer who is one of the best at doing exactly that. I wrote my first stories in her workshop. I started to realize that my poems were scenes with line breaks, and if I stacked enough of these scenes together, I had a story. They were rudimentary, they were teetering, but they were stories.

SH: And that became another turning point for you?

MJB: The last poem I wrote was called “The Water Machine,” about a boy and his mother’s abusive boyfriend. It was this big sprawling poem [that] was really a story, and I felt I needed more space. I wanted a bigger canvas.

SH: What did you bring to fiction from poetry?

MJB: An attention to line; an attention to the rhythm and the shape of the paragraph; a lot of that attention to micro detail that a poet has to have, and even if I didn’t have the skills back then, the understanding that such things existed came from my work in poetry.

A lot of the poets I love are very visible on the page; you are reading a distillation of their vision… Whereas I want my reader to see the characters, and my role as a writer is to be more of a conduit between the two.

SH: Do you still get called to write poetry, even on the side?

MJB: I do and they end up being scenes.

As time has gone by, I want my own presence as a writer to be less visible. A lot of the poets I love are very visible on the page; you are reading a distillation of their vision, and you go into their poetry with that understanding. Whereas I want my reader to see the characters, and my role as a writer is to be more of a conduit between the two. There are writers, like Annie Proulx, who are in the foreground. When you open her book, you’re on her turf, with her language. Michael Chabon, too. But [John] Cheever—even though he’s hilarious, he’s in the background a lot. My role model for the last couple of years has been William Trevor, who allows the characters to be who they want to be and adapts the perspective of the narrator to meet that.

SH: You’ve now written a collection of linked short stories and a novel: How do you decide what form a story will take—or does it tell you?

MJB: The leap from poetry to short stories was based on space, and [so was] the leap to the novel. The last story I wrote for Ladies’ Night was close to seventy pages [“Media Vuelta”]. One of my readers said, you know, I think Michael is just going to keep going. And I realized that I could. Then going through grad school and writing a lot more and reading a lot more, having a healthier literary diet, created a sense of possibility for me. Up until that point, the idea of writing a novel felt like buying a three-story house and filling it with furniture from my studio apartment. It’s too much space; but by then I felt I was ready to move in.

The story [for This Time Tomorrow] came out of a conversation with my barber at the time, who said, “Once you’ve been with someone for a year, you know whether you want to marry them.” That really struck me. At the time, I was dating a woman (now my wife), and she came from a really traditional Mexican household, which meant that you don’t leave until you are married. I came from a version of that household too—so I thought how interesting it would be to write about this: this lack of space.

SH: This part of the world, El Monte, appears in all of your stories. How do you make setting become a character, invested with a body and beating heart?

MJB: You have to find the meaning of the setting to the characters. One of the most valuable comments made to me in workshop—I’ll never forget it—was about a description of a McDonald’s play yard, and [whether] it was important to the story, or just important to me.

That made me think, and realize the process of stepping into the background. I rewrote the description from the point of view of the character who’s sitting in the drive-through window, who’s just had a miscarriage and is seeing the play yard through her experience. There’s another moment, in Ladies’ Night, when Lencho, who has burned hands, is grappling with something—fumbling as if looking for a socket wrench. I use his frame of reference, which is the auto mechanic, to attach itself to the setting which becomes character.

SH: And why is this particular setting, El Monte, so important to you?

MJB: I wanted to take my world to the larger world. During the early 90s, [California] Proposition 187 sparked a lot of anti-immigrant debate and rhetoric, and it was very much part of the cultural conversation at the time. I remember thinking—I’m the son of an immigrant on my father’s side, and I’m second generation on my mother’s side, and a lot of the people I knew growing up were immigrants, and they were productive, hardworking, honest people. My father got up every morning at four a.m. to work as a meat cutter in Altadena. The people who were being railed against were not the people I knew or the experience growing up that I’d had.

At the same time, James Elroy—the iconic crime writer—wrote My Dark Places about his mother’s murder in El Monte, and (understandably) he describes the city really negatively. But that was not my experience, and so I wanted to write the social and cultural context that I came out of. That was another turning point, a moment of convergences that led to Ladies’ Night. That remains a focus: I want to bring this place and its people, their personal goals and struggles and dreams and desires, into other people’s lives.

SH: Two of the stories in Ladies’ Night are from a woman’s point of view, as are two sections in your novel. What are the challenges in writing “the other”? What must any writer do when expressing an experience or consciousness distinct from their own?

MJB: Emotional truth is the goal for me. That applies when I’m writing any character, but most of all when I’m writing one who’s not like me, in terms of race, gender, etc. There was a woman in grad school who was working on a novel from the male perspective, and the men in workshop would say—Oh, no guy would ever do that! He’s too aggressive! So she’d dial it back, and then in the next workshop, she’d hear that the character was too passive.

Emotional truth is the goal for me.

That caused a lot of frustration on her part, because she was going back and forth trying to hit this imagined target and not really satisfying anyone. [I realized] that the character has to be true to him- or herself, and has to be consistent to his or her views. Whatever people want to make of that is up to them. That takes a sense of confidence on the writer’s part. Flannery O’Connor is a role model for this; her characters are often ugly, and she just leaves it up to us to decide what to make of them.

At the same time, a lot of what I was writing about with the character of Joyce [in This Time Tomorrow] came out of my own experiences and emotions: wanting to escape a responsibility to tradition, wanting to escape a sense of loneliness, wanting to invest in another person but not being sure. All of these are very human things, not gender things. And that’s the part of her that I tried to concentrate on, and hoped other people would connect with and see the truth in. All my work in poetry informed this too. The poet Ai writes persona poems, in which she embodies people like Jimmy Hoffa, Elvis, and James Dean. I was fascinated by her ability to adapt these personalities and convince me of their experiences, and I thought, surely I can write from the perspective of other characters. Ultimately, it’s in honoring “the other” that writers create characters who feel tangible, real. Otherwise it can feel exploitative; writers who put the perceived audience first rather than the characters can end up exploiting both.

SH: Growing up, did you feel an “otherness” with aspects of American culture?

MJB: Absolutely. I remember, when I was about eight or ten, my father wanting a nice golf sweater. He didn’t play golf, but he wanted a sweater, so we went to a nice store in Arcadia, and as we were walking around I noticed the salesperson following us. That was the first moment I became conscious of my otherness.

Even more than race—because the El Monte I grew up in was pretty homogenous—was this idea of class, something I became acutely conscious of. I had some friends who wore the same clothes all year, but I got new sneakers once or twice a year. I had jeans, but they were Levi’s. I had a skateboard. I had a bicycle. I had a Commodore 64 computer. I had mixed feelings about these badges. Then, between the eighth grade and high school, I went from public school, where I was among the upper economic tiers, to a private school, where I was among the lower. So my experience of the social order got completely reversed, and the older I get, the more I realize how profoundly that year affected me. That’s why Ana [in This Time Tomorrow] is thirteen, as are some of my other characters. That’s a really profound age, the age when your identity starts to harden, if it hasn’t already, along with your sense of what’s possible in the world.

SH: Will you—or your characters—ever venture from El Monte?

MJB: Many of my characters want to escape. There’s a theory that we all tell the same story over and over again, and that’s the one I tell: Joyce wants to escape responsibility to her father; Gilbert wants to escape the confines of his loneliness; Ana wants to escape the perceived threat of Joyce to her father. One of the books that I want to write, down the line, is set in a mining town in Chihuahua, where my father and his family are from. It’s about a boy who takes up the accordion and eventually ends up playing in a conjunto during the fifties, and taking a road trip west.

SH: So you do have stories in the pipeline? You’re not one of these writers who finishes a book and stares at the blank page and says, “Oh no, what next?”

MJB: I have the next ten years of my life mapped out, creatively speaking. I’m working on another linked collection, inspired by the Nick Adams stories of In Our Time, by Hemingway, about innocence to loss of innocence to the need for recovery. The central character is a guy named Memo, short for Guillermo, and the arc as I imagine it is Memo learning to make bad decisions from his father, and then making bad decisions as a young man, and then Memo seeking redemption at the end.

SH: So now in addition to escape, we get to see the aftermath.

MJB: I’ve also started this novel about a boy named Omar, who wants to run away from home to join a skateboard contest in Long Beach, with hopes of joining the tour and that will lead to endorsements, etc. It starts in El Monte. My hope is that it will end up a couple hundred pages down the river, in Long Beach.

SH: As a former MFA student and now a teacher, you’re aware of the controversy surrounding the degree, from Junot Diaz’ assertion that the programs are still “too white” to the recent article in the Atlantic, which casts doubt on their value to would-be writers at all. What advice would you give to any student considering an MFA degree, its possible risks and rewards?

…writers who put the perceived audience first rather than the characters can end up exploiting both.

MJB: The greatest risk is going to the first place that lets you in. The same way that writers jump at the first agent who suggests an interest in them, thinking that’s the only chance they have. I actually teach a course at UCR for our most promising undergraduates. It’s all about researching graduate programs to understand their philosophy, the work of the faculty who teach there, and then talking to the current students, to get a sense of what the program is like so they can make an informed decision [rather than] applying blindly to the “best” school and then assuming that it will fit them, be productive for their work. That’s not always the case.

Know where you are applying to is the first thing, and then do your best work to apply there. Sometimes people apply too early, or think of the MFA as a place where they will read a lot and hone their skills. That’s implicitly going to happen, but if you don’t have something to take with you going into that program, it’s not going to be a productive experience. If you’re writing short stories, have at least three, four, five of those stories under your belt in some form, before you apply. If you’re writing a novel, have at least 100 pages and be committed. I was in school with people who started a new novel every quarter, it seemed. They’d go through workshop and think—well, the workshop didn’t like that, and then they’d cast it aside. That’s not the way the degree is best served. The degree to me is best served as a finishing point or capstone for the craft of writing. So you have to have some facility with the craft and also some investment in it, something more than, “This is what I think I’ll do.”

SH: What about another criticism of MFA programs, that they all produce writers who all sound alike?

MJB: That argument presumes that all MFA programs are the same, or that all MFA instruction comes with the same rigor and understanding. They’re not. There are good MFA programs, venues for writers to unfurl themselves, and there are places for writers to mold themselves into a niche or image. I’m hoping we have the former. What is it that you want to do? Who is it that you want to be? And how can I use what I know and the skills that I have to help you become that, your fullest form and expression as a writer?

Even when I find myself disagreeing with a student, over what they’ve done on the page, I make my argument on the basis of the art. I can see what you tell me you want to do, and if you modify this or change the POV, cut this scene or expand here, then that’s more the story I think you want to tell.

If one is in a workshop with ten people, and you come out with three people understanding what you’re trying to achieve, that’s still a positive experience. Don’t let others make your story into what they want to see. Those are the people that we have to cast aside. Those who really understand what you’re trying to do and honor your creativity with their commentary: those are the people you listen to.

SH: Let’s talk for a moment about love. For me, as a reader, that’s what drew me into your characters and their stories: love and all its complexities. It’s what they fight for and what gives them hope. Without straying into the morality of fiction (another controversial topic), do you feel a writer has a responsibility to create worlds in which there is still the hope for love, even if—like the spark of wires in the last story of Ladies’ Night—it’s all so tenuous and uncertain?

MJB: I have a hard time with a lot of the fascination with dystopian worlds right now, because I feel that comes from a place of privilege. Things are so good in your existence that you can afford to tear it all down and play around with what’s left? Whereas a lot of the people I grew up with—and am still surrounded by—are working toward a starting place: of putting together a world.

I also feel that it’s easier to write the sad story than the happy one. I feel some readers go into a story expecting that this will be serious and dark, because if it’s not, then there’s not a whole lot of dramatic value to it. It’s harder to tell a story where the character wins—and wins plausibly, to the reader’s satisfaction. It’s easier to see the dark and sad stuff, it’s harder to pull off the spark. It’s harder for me. The original ending of Ladies’ Night found a character taking a dark, sad turn, and I changed it after a conversation with my editor, who asked me what note I wanted readers leaving my world with. So it’s not that you have to end on a happy or light note. My responsibility is to the truth. To create the social, cultural, and financial context of the world that my characters come from, and the truth of it is that sometimes we have good days, sometimes we win. That’s part of our reality too. We need to see it. To have that spark of hope, to keep going. Even in dark stories, that spark can take the form of connection or transcendence.

SH: Is there a topic we haven’t covered—anything you’d like to add to the current conversation on creative writing?

MJB: I’m always happy when I can put a book down and I can remember the person in the book—the character and the story. We live in a culture in which attention is the most prized commodity. It used to be television we [writers] were fighting with. Now it’s all sorts of screens, all the paths to wander on your television and your laptop and your phone. When something stays with me, and makes me excited about the craft and its ability to survive all those competing things, then that’s the beauty of the art. Great literature still has the power to do that. It has a way of moving people. As a writer, you have to give something that will hit the reader hard, and stay with them. It’s the truth that hits the hardest.

Sherrye Henry Jr. has wanted to be a writer all her life, and thankfully it only took her fifty years to quit everything else and give it a shot. A reformed lawyer, a runner turned yogi, and a mom forever, she is grateful to be engaged in the terrifying pursuit of trying to wrap words around the human experience, and has found great courage in the MFA community at Antioch LA, particularly in her role as Nitpicker (Proof Edit Manager) for Lunch Ticket. You can find her in a Rocky Mt. cabin with one bearded husband and two shaggy dogs.

Fred Moten is a professor at the University of California, Riverside. His work comprises several books of poetry, including Arkansas (Pressed Wafer, 2000), I ran from it and was still in it (Cusp Books), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008), B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2014) and The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014). His critical works include In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Autonomedia, 2013), which was co-authored by Stefano Harney. In 2009, Moten was regarded as one of ten “New American Poets” by the Poetry Society of America. His current projects include two upcoming critical texts, which will further explore his study of black art and social life.

I interviewed Fred Moten via Skype in August 2016. Fred was kind enough to spend nearly an hour with me navigating a discussion on poetry, passion, and the current and ever-looming state of our nation.

Doni Shepard: In a 2014 interview from the National Book Awards, in which you were a finalist for your collection The Feel Trio, your work was referenced as “riveting, lyrical, jumping, beat-poppin’, black devotion.” Your work continues to engage in conversation about experiencing and understanding black progress, pain, and the dedication to justice. In a time of such discourse in America, what are your thoughts on the way the mainstream media is engaging in conversations about police brutality and violence to black bodies in 2016?

Fred Moten: I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I probably don’t think about it very much because I don’t watch mainstream media often. It’s no different now than it ever has been. The root of the problem of police brutality is police. There is a relationship between the police, the necessity of their presence, and black people living in America. How is it that the presence of black people is used to justify the very idea of the police and the particular ways of engagement that police have with people? Now if the mainstream media ever even asked why can’t we mourn the social life that we murderously regulate and the lives of those we send to regulate it equally then that might be cool—or at least a place to start.

DS: Where do you think the most honest conversations are happening?

FM: The most honest conversations I’ve ever heard on the relationship of black people and policing are the conversations that black people have. There’s a lot of interesting stuff people are saying about policing and a lot of rhetoric around police brutality coming from folks who are concerned and folks who are activists and organizers. Some of that talk is more interesting than others. But none of it, the most advanced of it, is never anything other than what I heard around the dinner table.

Black folks have always understood something fundamental about police, how the police operate, and how policing works. I don’t know that there’s anything all that deep or new to be said about it. The thing that was important and legitimate to say thirty years ago, fifty years ago when the Panthers were most active, those things are still true now. The only real question is: How do we work towards the abolition of policing? Really this is just another moment in the long history of the question of abolition. People have been saying this forever, you know? It’s still true. 

To be interested in poetry is to be interested in the music and the content that emerges as a function of social life in all of its complexity and richness and pain and beauty.

DS: How does the current state of black America change the voice of black poets? How do you define the relationship between politics and poetry?

FM: The current state of black America is the old state of black America. If there’s such a thing as a black poet and if there is such a thing as a particular role that a black poet has that is somehow different than anyone else’s role, I don’t think that role has changed since the time of Phillis Wheatley or George Moses Horton or Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Brooks. It’s the same. The thing is, there are people who are interested in poetry, and I definitely believe that there is such a thing as poetry, and I believe it is possible and necessary for people to be interested in it. To be interested in poetry is to be interested in the music and the content that emerges as a function of social life in all of its complexity and richness and pain and beauty. So, we make music out of our lives, out of the way we live in order to hopefully make that living better. That’s my sense of what it is. There’s a bunch of possible ways to do that.

Do I think the conditions are special now? That there’s some specific role of the black poet? No. Conditions that exist right now, they existed ten years ago and they existed twenty years ago. The police didn’t just start shooting black folks. To run around acting like this is something new is embarrassing, as far as I’m concerned. By the same token, quite frankly, if a person decided that in the face of the latest murder of a black person by the police, or by the chairman of Goldman Sachs, or by the top lieutenant of some set of the Grape Street Crips, or whoever, if they felt that the way that they needed to respond was to write a poem about how beautiful this tree is that they are looking at right now, I still feel that this is a completely legitimate response. Ultimately, what do you do with the language that comes to you and who do you do it with? That’s the question.

But do we need 8,000 more poems that are describing some horrific thing that just happened to another black person? For me, no. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have those poems. I’m saying that doesn’t strike me as the only possible response. If that were the only possible response then it didn’t just become the only possible response now. It’s been that way. Black people have been getting killed in messed up ways for as long as there have been black people. That’s not to be cavalier, it’s just to say that a lot of times, people start running around talking about some special task that the poet has. It’s another form of self-aggrandizement.

The flip side is always some form of self-flagellation where you have to feel bad about not doing it this way, or even more often, where you can make a whole bunch of other people feel bad because they aren’t doing it this way. This or that thing that this individual does in response to the contingencies of social life is almost always negligent. It doesn’t matter how self-righteous or pontificatory you think you have a right to be when it comes to that. It’s nastiness and recrimination and name-calling going on in the so-called poetry world that for me is silly and disgusting. I’m uninterested in it completely. Involuntary exile from the poetry world for myself, to be honest, and I’m feeling pretty good about that.

DS: How has the current cultural climate affected the work you are producing now? What effect is this having on your curriculum as a professor?

FM: The issues that I have been concerned about as a teacher and as a writer, they were there before I was born and they are still here. I don’t feel like my primary concerns on a thematic level have changed. The only thing that I’m trying to do better is to organize better the form of my classes and the form that the writing takes. That primary task is really about collaboration and working with other people and trying to foster the most people in the most generative and loving forms of collaboration. But the themes haven’t changed. The content doesn’t change. The form changes and I’m trying hard to figure out a way to do better when it comes to those things.

I don’t want to do anything by myself. That’s horrible. I have these things that I feel obligated to do over the next year or so but I just really would like to finish them as quickly as possible. If I could just abandon them, I would, but I made some obligations and commitments to try and finish these things. So that’s what I’m going to do. But I’m never going to start anything where it’s by myself. At least that’s the way I feel about it right now. Even the stuff that was supposedly by myself was never really by myself. I don’t even want to pretend like that anymore.

DS: I think as poets and writers that we’re constantly—as much as it’s a solitary act—we want that connection and to collaborate and to kind of get that energy from the people around us and the world around us. That is a very relatable feeling.

FM: Everybody wants to be with other people. Nobody wants to be by themselves. Sometimes there’s a commonplace misconception of what it is to be a poet. Or at least I used to think that there was a set of commonplace misconceptions about what it is to be a poet that required people to isolate themselves even if they didn’t want to. Now I’m thinking maybe these aren’t misconceptions about what it is to be a poet. Maybe that’s what a poet really is—a person who isolates in the interest of a certain conception. The misconception isn’t about what a poet is but about what poetry is. Any poets who have isolated themselves is not what poetry is in the first place. At this stage in the game it’s the whole identity of the poet that’s the problem, but at the same time, it’s very difficult to extricate oneself from that way of thinking. It’s like a straitjacket. In a way, you’re trying to extricate yourself from it, but it’s just as delusionally heroic to fully embody it. It’s not some big thing where someone has to struggle against the identity of the poet. You just have to forget about it. So I’m trying to not struggle with it and turn that into some poetic theme. I just want to do something else and that’s all.

DS: Are there other poets or musicians you tend to gravitate to for a sense of connection? Are there any emerging artists you have been inspired or influenced by?

FM: There are certain writers whose work I have been invested in for a long time and I’ll never not be invested in them. Part of it is because those writers are the ones who are bigger than just themselves. They are these conduits, passageways through which someone discovers something bigger, and they are always the same. Amari Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Gwendolyn Brooks, Shakespeare, Samuel Delany, John Donne.

On the most basic level, my work has been primarily structured by love of blackness and love of black people, both of which are often conceived of by what you called the mainstream media as “unlovable.”

There is also a whole bunch of new stuff that I love but I keep coming back to the ones I’m always interested in. It turns out that there’s always so much more to them than I ever thought.

Some of the folks maybe my own age or younger who I have been really enjoying reading the last few years are Renee Gladman, Mercedes Eng, Douglas Kearney, Kimberly Alidio. There’s a lot of great stuff so I’m trying my best to keep my eyes open and my ears open and pay attention.

DS: Who is your intended audience—or do you have an intended audience in mind when you write?

FM: No, not really, to tell you the truth. The audience is anybody who wants to read it. What I’m writing is definitely not for everybody. I don’t believe that it should be. I don’t think that there’s anything in what I’m writing that’s so absolutely necessary that anybody has to read it. There’s plenty of other stuff out there. I don’t have some sense of a mission I’m on that requires the world to be reading my work. On the one hand, I feel like I’m writing for anybody who wants to read it, but on the other hand, it makes perfect sense to me if no one ever wanted to read that at all. I would still probably be writing in some way. In this respect, it’s just not an individual thing. I don’t know that anybody is so absolutely indispensable.

DS: During your visit to Antioch [University Los Angeles, June 2016], you spoke about “loving the unlovable.” Can you expand on this? How do you integrate this concept into your work?

FM: It’s an imprecise way of saying things because, of course, the paradox is if the unlovable can be loved then it ain’t unlovable. But what I was talking about was specifically with regard to this song by Snoop Dogg called “Ups and Downs.” There’s this one moment in the song when he is speaking directly to men on death row and expresses love for them. “All my dogs up against the life sentence.” For me, it was a totally important and beautiful moment in the song because he is expressing love for folks that are often conceived of as the very embodiment of the unlovable. That capacity to express love for those who are generally perceived of to be unlovable is important.

The question is how can we sustain that? It’s interesting in the song just because I don’t know that the song is able to sustain it for much more than a second. The next lines of the song are really problematic, but for that one moment, something has opened up.

DS: How have you worked that into what you are currently producing?

FM: On the most basic level, my work has been primarily structured by love of blackness and love of black people, both of which are often conceived of by what you called the mainstream media as “unlovable.” I don’t know that I’ve tried to make some big set of theoretical or thematic claims about why black people should be loved. I’ve written from the assumptions that they are lovable.

DS: At the Antioch residency, you read a poem about your son experiencing bullying. How would you describe the influence of parenting in relation to the work you produce?

FM: My kids are constantly saying all of these really amazing things. If I have a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper, it’s great for me because I can write it down. So parenting on that level produces a great opportunity for plagiarism. [laughs] But also, it’s a deep and profound experience of being both more and less than yourself. It is also an experience of feeling this extraordinary vulnerability or precariousness and of actually embracing that rather than trying to resist. It’s basically like any other thing that’s really worth anything. It’s really fun and it’s really hard at the same time and it’s something that you immerse yourself in. You’re never out of it; you’re always in it. It’s this fundamental aspect of life that turns out to be like life itself.

DS: Your work in regards to form and structure appears to be deeply calculated. It moves. It transforms. While some of your work follows a traditional format, other pieces are fragmented, not capitalized, and splashed with voided space—always in motion, always appropriate and intentional. How would you describe the way you employ form to demonstrate resistance or activism in your work?

FM: I don’t know that it’s meant to demonstrate activism. Maybe nowadays I would say that it’s an attempt to demonstrate demonstration itself. To demonstrate that term “monstration.” That term is interesting. It’s all bound up with showing— even the miraculous. It’s also bound up with the notion of the monstrous, the strange, the radically disruptive. That’s also a fundamental aspect of life. To live is to be disrupted. To be challenged. To be faced with the surprising. The revelatory. We figure out a way to deal with that. How we ought to be able to deal with it is to embrace it, to love it. But often it turns out that how people devise ways of dealing with change or difference is to try to fight it or kill it. To suppress it or to regulate it. What I’m interested in is the writing being a field for the embracing of differences, rather than their suppression.

The best way to work across boundaries is to refuse to believe in them.

The primary precursor for that is the aesthetic feel, which for me is most prevalent within black music. That has always been the model for me, in terms of how to leave my own work open to what you might call the demonstrative or the miraculous or the monstrous even. Black music is beautiful to me. As Hortense Spillers says, it claims monstrosity rather than trying to reject it.

DS: In an interview with NPR, Douglas Kearney referred to you as “the perfect storm,” speaking to your ability to create vivid work through a combination of intellect and lyricism. Do you feel that using this multi-faceted approach assists your work in transcending barriers as a poet? What is the advice you would give to writers who would like to work across genres as you have between your poetry and critical work?

FM: The best way to work across boundaries is to refuse to believe in them. I know this is what Doug does in his work but to me this has always been a hallmark of art, and of black art more particularly. I don’t think that art accepts these artificial distinctions between theory and practice or between the discursive and the lyrical, between critique and celebration. That’s my opinion. It’s not a new opinion. It’s not a unique opinion. It’s a commonplace formulation, but it doesn’t feel any less true to me.

One of my favorite poets is John Donne; another is Amari Baraka. I don’t see that there is any simple acceptance of the distinction between critique and celebration or critique and lyricism in their work. By the same token, they are philosophers, whose work is equally as disruptive and dismissive of those artificial boundaries. The problem is these generic boundaries in the first place. It’s not that I don’t believe in genre. It’s not that I don’t believe in the differentiating force that emerges in writing. It’s just that it’s possible—as my friend and mentor Denise da Silva would say—to have difference without separability in writing. This is what all of the really good work out there is doing. It’s demonstrating, constantly. It’s difference without separability.

DS: You have been quoted as saying “poetry is a modality of organization.” What types of strategies do you employ in word choice throughout your poetic material? How do you suggest poets implement this intricacy to motivate change in their readers?

FM: I never think of it as trying to motivate change in a reader. I just assume readers change. They don’t need me to motivate them to do it. They don’t need motivation to do it. Stuff changes. Things change. People change. To the extent that there’s an intention behind what I’m doing, it is to be in praise of the stuff that I love and to try to do so in a way that people will enjoy. I don’t feel like I have some special set of things that I need to tell people. The stuff that I know is stuff that everybody already knows. Maybe it’s cool to be reminded every once in a while, but I don’t even know that I have some particularly special, indispensable way of reminding people.

It’s just fun and something that I need to do. I’ve got a temperament and I was brought up in a certain of way and it led to me being embedded in this kind of activity. It’s great. I feel lucky. I’ve got a job that allows me to do it. I get paid for it well. I feel very lucky that everything lined up for me this way, but the luck of it is almost fundamentally detached from any sense of me deserving it.

It’s also detached from any sense of me being able to somehow account for it or compensate for it or pay something back for it. I always get freaked out when I hear about these athletes talking about giving something back to the community. That always struck me as a form self-aggrandizement. Because first of all, anything that you would ever put forward as a recompense pales in comparison to what the community gave you. You can’t pay the community back for what the community has given you. The community don’t want you to pay them back; that has been my general experience of it. All those things are just the ways in which so-called individual achievement becomes this platform from which people constantly play out this oscillation between exaltation and shame. I’m not interested in that. It seems contradictory: You’ve got a lot to say but it’s only special if it’s relatable to what other folks have to say; it’s a saying that only comes into its own within the context of a choir.

That’s the way I feel, so when it comes to techniques and word choices and stuff like that, I don’t consider that. I once heard the great musician Cecil Taylor, they were asking him about what his composition method was. He was like, “Well, I play one note and then I try to find another note that will sound good next to it,” you know? I have one word and I try to find another word that will sound good next to it. Sometimes it will look good next to it. The only key thing is to not limit yourself in terms of what that next word might be. Try to have as big of a set of resources as possible for what that next word will be. Just don’t limit yourself. Try to make something that will make the people move.

Doni Shepard is a poet, mother, and lifetime learner currently residing in Phoenix. She spends her days managing content for a popular startup, mommying an extraordinary three-year-old, and serving as Lunch Ticket’s Poetry Editor. Upon nightfall you can generally find her in an insomniac haze binge-watching Shameless with a fluffy orange feline named Doobie. Her work has been featured by Dirty Chai, and can be found in the love anthology Spectrum 3: LoveLoveLove. She is currently an MFA candidate at Antioch University Los Angeles, concentrating in poetry.

 

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of five books of nonfiction including Reclaimers and the memoir/history, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize. Her work appears regularly in journals and magazines such as Orion, Brevity, High Country News. Her sixth book will be a middle-grade novel The Luckiest Scar on Earth, coming in February 2017. She is on the faculty of Antioch Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing Program, and lives in Stehekin, Washington with her wife, Laurie.

Haley Isleib interviewed Ana Maria Spagna by phone in the summer of 2016.

Haley Isleib: When you began to write, what did you aspire to write about and why? What’s your origin story?

Ana Maria Spagna: When I was a little kid I wanted to write. My teacher let me write a novel when I was in second grade sitting in a beanbag chair; that’s probably the highlight of my career so far. But when I got to high school and college, I lost the spark some. I went to college and I was an English major. Anybody who’s been an English major knows you mostly read books and analyze them. I didn’t do any creative writing. So I had lost that spark and was a little lost after college and went to work for the Park Service.

As soon as I was in these beautiful places, working Canyonlands, and then I moved here to North Cascades, all I wanted to do was write. I wanted to write and write and write. But when I sat down to do it, all I could write was, “It’s really pretty.” [laughs] I didn’t know what to do with what I wanted to say. I realized I had to go back to school.

I went back and studied fiction writing. That was the absolute best thing for me because I learned about an actual narrative arc and having the story go somewhere. Then I went back to the woods and I could hang all these things I wanted to say on actual story. I went immediately—or pretty soon—back to nonfiction. Nonfiction with this narrative structure that I had learned in school. I worked in the summers and wrote very seriously every winter. Since about 1996 that’s been what I do, write.

HI: In winter?

AMS: In winter until I quit my trails job in 2004. That’s when I started thinking, this is what I do, I’m a writer.

HI: Has your career followed an expected course? When you were studying fiction did you know you wanted to write nonfiction?

AMS: I think I did. I had written an undergraduate thesis about creative nonfiction, so I knew the term, knew it was out there, and admired it. So I probably did know I wanted to do that. The unexpected part was realizing that I needed that fiction training and I need fiction in my writing life. I need a little variety in my writing life. I don’t write poetry but I read poetry so that’s part of the spark too.

HI: I sense that poetic voice in your writing. You have a new book coming out, but I want to talk about another book of yours, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It).  

AMS: Right. [laughs]

HI: Its tone is so different. My first year at NILA [Northwest Institute of Literary Arts MFA] I thought, Oh poetic prose, she’s very serious, which of course isn’t the only true thing. There is humor in your other works too. Can you tell me a little bit about how that project came to be?

AMS: That’s the anomaly in my writing career because someone came to me. I had written a very tongue-in-cheek piece. Orion has a column every month that’s just a list, called “Enumeration.” I had made a list of ten skills you’ll need for the post-oil world. It was very playful, whimsical. Ten skills from sleeping to navigating by the stars. After that came out, a book publisher, Story Publishing, wrote to me and asked if I would do a hundred skills. I said, “No, no, you don’t get it. I’m not a dooms-dayer, that was just playful.” They said, “No, we do get it, we want it to be exactly like that, playful.”

Coming up with a hundred skills was super easy. I thoroughly enjoyed that whimsical tone and living in that world. I was worried about the illustrations because the writer never works with an illustrator—the wrong type of illustration could undercut that tone, could make it seem like I was trying to be serious. The publisher found this illustrator whose work matched the way I saw the book perfectly.

HI: Did you work at all with the illustrator [Brian Cronin] or meet him?

AMS: Not one tiny bit. In fact the publisher was quite adamant about not having any direct contact with the illustrator. For example, the original illustrations—as much as I liked them—were all male figures. I can’t abide that, on principle. So they wrote to him and asked him to put more female and they sent me the pictures. I said, “Now the girls are doing all the girly things. Can you please have the girls do some welding or something?” All of that happened with the publisher mediating, which was interesting to me. It worked, but I would someday like to meet the guy.

HI: Tell me about Stehekin, the remote spot where you live in Washington state, which is a town you have to hike to, no road in, surrounded by millions of acres of wilderness. You have internet but no grocery store. How does this experience impact your creative process and the content of what you write? How long have you lived in Stehekin?

AMS: I’ve lived there off and on since 1990. Full time since ’98. Eighteen years now.

HI: So right after grad school?

AMS: Before grad school, we lived here in the summer. We were working seasonally and they give you housing for the summer. In the winter, we’d have to go and find work someplace else. When I was pushing thirty that was getting old; that was also part of why I went to graduate school. I remember Laurie asking me, “Do you have a better winter job lined up?” [laughs] “Go to graduate school.”

As soon as I finished graduate school, Northern Arizona University, where I went, offered me a job at the university. Very, very hard to turn down, but Laurie was committed to working here in Stehekin and I was still very enamored of my life on trail crew. I made the difficult decision to say no to that job. We bought land, built a house, and made this our home.

People make progress and try to make right and then lose ground. Sometimes what you define as right changes over time…

There are no roads in or out, so it’s like an island. But it’s not an island; it’s a landlocked valley. A community of about eighty people live here year-round. In summer, a lot more people come to their summer homes, so there might be up to 400 people in summer. There’s a bakery that’s open in summer and there are restaurants that are open in summer, two of them, but other than that there’s nothing. There’s no grocery store, movie theater, nothing—just each other. [laughs]

The bakery, they sell my books, and I get credit. I eat a lot at the bakery. It works out.

HI: You mentioned the seasonal rhythm to your writing early on. How does Stehekin figure into your writing practice?

AMS: Part of my writing practice is going on long walks, or going running or going skiing in the winter and thinking things through. It is a quiet place for me to be productive. I think there aren’t as many distractions as there are in other places, although in summer it’s so wildly busy and everybody else is on vacation. They presume, of course, I’m on vacation because I don’t go to an office to work. There are certainly things that pull against me but I’m pretty disciplined about getting up, getting into the writing, spending the necessary hours in the chair every day. I don’t know how this works in the so-called real world, but I can still unplug my modem and have no internet so…

HI: Ahhh. That’s wonderful.

AMS: So even if I wanted to be distracted, it would take so long for the modem to boot up it’s not worth it. [laughs] I force this on myself.

HI: I’m going to switch gears a bit. I’ve heard people say we’re living through a new civil rights era. Your second book, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, is a work of nonfiction about your father and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Do you see any parallels between then and now?

AMS: Absolutely. It was actually the late fifties when he was involved, very early in the civil rights movement in northern Florida. At the time that I was researching that book—I was doing most of my research between 2004-2006—the gay rights movement started to gain real national momentum, seemed to be gaining steam. Couples had lined up in San Francisco to get marriage licenses, which seemed outrageous to me at the time, I mean outrageous. [laughs] I could definitely see the parallels of that sense of momentum and also the sense of danger too, that people were putting themselves out there. That part is woven into the book.

When I wrote the book it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Tallahassee bus boycott. This year is the sixtieth. If anything, in terms of race, things are even more fraught, if not more dangerous. At least people are talking about the danger in different ways, in ways I wouldn’t have expected it to re-erupt. As scary as that is—maybe people find it disheartening—I find it heartening, taking things that have been held under the surface and letting them erupt. Having the conversations we have to have. I don’t think I would feel that way if I hadn’t done the research I did for that book, and immersed myself in that earlier civil rights movement.

HI: I’m hearing maybe that research gives you hope.

AMS: Yeah, it absolutely does. It gives me hope and it gives me perspective. It makes me realize the necessity of the courage to speak out, and gives me a lot of admiration for the people in the Black Lives Matter movement, and all over the country for speaking out, however you do it. It only leads to good even if there’s a rough road in between. I wouldn’t think that if I hadn’t done that research.

HI: The word I heard you say a couple of times was “surprise,” about both the mid-oughts and recently. I wonder if that surprise is related to hope in some way. Because in retrospect, it always seems like, “Of course, because it only makes sense,” but at the time…

AMS: When I first thought about the fifties and sixties civil rights movement, the way I learned it in school, it just seemed inevitable that that was going to happen. When I did the research, I realized how very un-inevitable it was in their time. And still, in my dumb passive American way, I still thought, “Wow, it’s amazing that that erupted in the past.” To see it erupting again, very much in our present time—yeah, it gives me hope for the kind of history that can evolve in our own time.

HI: I think we have a way of seeing history as progressing, going from A to B to an end goal, but life isn’t really like that at all. In a way it’s a surprise that things can suddenly erupt, but things can also suddenly retreat or go back.

AMS: Yeah, most assuredly. The whole history of all the progress that happened post-Civil War in terms of race—what happened to it? For so long the reactionaries won with Jim Crow, with pushing it back, taking voting rights away. And see how easily that’s happening again in our own time.

HI: In Reclaimers, which is more recent, you tell three stories braided together—I think this weirdly dovetails with what we were just talking about—because these are stories about people reclaiming things that had been lost. At some point in the past, things got worse, and then after decades of effort, people reclaimed. Two pieces of land return to their tribes, and a river was undammed.

AMS: There is a parallel. There was a surprise in it. When I started Reclaimers, I thought of it as a book coming out of my interest in nature and nature writing, and issues of land and water. I didn’t see it as a book that would be related to Test Ride or to civil rights. But it was absolutely clear once I started finding these stories of people reclaiming land and water that there were exact parallels. People make progress and try to make right and then lose ground.

Sometimes what you define as right changes over time, which is one of the themes I pursue in Reclaimers. In the thirties, building dams was the best thing we could possibly do and people with good intentions built dams. And then a hundred years later people with good intentions are bringing those dams down. A certain openness to changing our idea of what’s right and letting that evolve over time became one of the underpinnings of a book that I thought was just about land policy.

HI: This idea of reclaiming, these braided stories, seem like part of a wider weave. I see “reclaiming” as an underlying mission of our times. This documenting of reclaiming could be almost infinite. Do you see any future projects continuing on this focus?

AMS: You’re absolutely right that it could be infinite. Everybody who heard that I was doing a project on reclaiming would tell me a story of reclamation. And it would be something in a realm I hadn’t even thought of, like reclaiming identity. I realized at some point that this could sprawl. I had to rein it in.

This is a little digression, but I realized that when I finish a book, I have a sense of loss. Now I don’t live in that world everyday and I miss it. I lived there so long and I was so close to it, and it meant so much to me; now it’s this thing that belongs to everyone else out in the world, and I need to distance myself. Maybe it’s getting to where I could revisit it and start writing about those ideas again, but that was just a realization that came to me in the last few days.

And the American West is totally fraught with that end-point thing because it was the Western expansion. This is where we would get to, and this would be paradise. Now we’re just barely a hundred years in, and no, this is where we live, and we’re going to have to make it work for a lot longer than one big glorious burst.

HI: And this is just an aside too. The concept of writing about reclaiming could be its whole own genre almost, not that you would have to do all the work.

AMS: It really could.

HI: In a lot of ways, many memoirs, especially of difficult times, seem related, not exactly the same, but people resurrecting relationships they’d let die…

AMS: Or reclaiming their past.

HI: Right. Did you start a whole genre?

AMS: [laughs] Parsing the language a bit, I think a lot of memoirs are an arc toward redemption, just like a lot of work in nature these days is work toward restoration. And both of those words make me a little bit uncomfortable because they suppose an end point. You have this place that’s ruined, you restore it and it’s good. Or you have this nasty past and you redeem yourself and it’s good. What I like about “reclaiming” is that, no, that’s not how it happens, you reclaim it and then at some point in the future it will need to be reclaimed again. When I’m teaching memoir, I encourage people not to feel like you’re writing a book in which you feel like your life now has an end point. “Yes, did that, all better now.”

HI: You’ve hit on something I think is an underlying obstacle in our Western thinking—at least in my Western experience, there’s an idea that we’re going to get somewhere and that will be good, and we’ll be done. Reality isn’t like that. Even evolution isn’t like that. “Progress” implies that there is a goal that can be reached and then you’re done.

AMS: That taints a lot of my work. A lot of my work has been wedged into the genre of writing about the American West. And the American West is totally fraught with that end-point thing because it was the Western expansion. This is where we would get to, and this would be paradise. Now we’re just barely a hundred years in, and no, this is where we live, and we’re going to have to make it work for a lot longer than one big glorious burst. That’s something that makes writing about the West challenging. What are we? We don’t know what we are yet, us white Westerners. What about these people who were here a long time before we were? They’ve got a story. We’ve got to listen.

HI: Speaking of that, tell me a bit about the two tribes who reclaimed pieces of tribal land in Reclaimers. I’ve heard you talk about the process of getting close to those stories. What made those two stories stand out of all those you heard?

AMS: In 2011, I was on a road trip with my mom when I passed a sign at the entrance to Death Valley National Park that read “Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone.” Now I worked for the National Park Service [NPS] for many years and I’ve visited plenty of parks and I’d never seen a sign like it so I was intrigued. Over the next several months I uncovered a remarkable story, basically that the Timbisha Shoshone have lived in Death Valley for 10,000 years but had their land taken by the NPS in 1933. After years of effort by elders and activists like Pauline Esteves, they were able to reclaim 325 acres in the middle of the park at Furnace Creek in 2000 through a congressional act signed by President Bill Clinton. It was an astonishing feat, a tiny tribe versus the U.S. government. That’s what attracted me to the story, but it took me a long time to track down Esteves. When I finally did she explained that the tribe has continued to struggle in the fifteen years since the reclamation. If she didn’t introduce me to the idea that reclaiming is cyclical, that it must happen over and over again, she certainly reinforced it.

The other tribe is the Mountain Maidu in the Northern Sierras. My first attraction to their story was to a program they’d initiated working in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service using Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to manage USFS lands. I liked the idea that reclamation could happen without changing ownership. But again, the longer I lived with the story, the more my understanding grew and changed. The Maidu ended up with the chance to reclaim title to a sacred valley called Humbug Valley from Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and that saga was amazing—the way they brought allies to their cause, the way they remained patient and hopeful in the face of pretty long odds and real tragedies along the way.

So I suppose it was serendipity that drew me to those two sagas–and to the story of the Condit Dam removal as well—but it was the experience of staying with the stories and the people involved, understanding the complexity and nuances over several months (I followed each saga for about three years) that most affected me and my understanding of reclaiming as an ongoing, ever-changing, communal commitment. It’s a basic human endeavor, both an instinct, in some sense, and an obligation, not limited to indigenous people. Or perhaps it is in the sense that one Maidu woman articulated. All of us are indigenous to this planet so, “Find your place and care for it.”

HI: You have a middle-grade novel, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, coming in early 2017, featuring a snowboarder. Where did this come from?

AMS: After graduate school, I was writing a lot of short stories. One rule of my writing life is that if an editor or anybody contacts you and asks if you do X, you say yes. An editor with Milkweed Editions wrote to me—this would have been in 1998, a long time ago—and said do you have any short stories for kids? And I said yes. I did not have any short stories for kids. So I went back to a story I loved, about a snowboarder in her twenties, and I made her younger for the sake of the request. I realized that this is what this story needed all along; this story is not about a twenty-whatever- year-old, it’s about a fourteen year old. And I sold it to Milkweed; they were going to put it in an anthology, which never came out. But I loved this fourteen-year-old so much that it became my little playground, no matter what book I was writing I would go back and I would play around with Charlotte the snowboarder for a while.

So I was writing it for a long, long, long time. And it’s about a snowboarder and her activist father…

I was writing it intensely while I was writing my Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus about my dad. And I didn’t even realize this, that’s how crazy my subconscious was. When I saw I’d written the same exact book, I was so embarrassed that I put it back in the proverbial drawer. Forget that.

But then last winter I thought, what’s wrong with writing the same book twice? I like Charlotte and I think I can do something with her. So I pulled it back out, and worked on it. I was delighted to see how our subconscious works. Not only is it about a daughter and her activist father, but spoiler alert, at some point her father has a heart attack, which my dad did. And the fourteen-year-old is able to save him out on the slopes. If I had other modern grief counseling, this is exactly what they would have had me do—rewrite my story. The book did that work for me, whereas when I was writing it I thought of it as a playground, some place where I can change characters and make them do things.

HI: Do you snowboard and is there a culture that goes with that?

AMS: I do not snowboard. I’m a skier. I do backcountry telemarking. Part of the book is backcountry snowboarding, so that has the parallel. Her world of snowboard culture is familiar to mine from going to small ski areas. Stehekin is a small ski area. But also it got to be another world I could inhabit that isn’t my world. So it was familiar but not familiar. It was great to have a story that is entirely set in winter. I was doing a lot of my writing in winter. I could just inhabit that snowy landscape.

It’s part of the story for young people to understand, things are being changed and that we are propelling that change, whether on private land or public land or through the climate.

One of the joys of the book—there are many joys of the book—but in its final stages I realized that I had never had a kid read the book. So I hired my eleven-year-old niece to be a reader for me. It was such a fantastic experience: to have an eleven-year-old reader. Kids read so intensely. She had such insights into these characters that they could have knocked me off my feet. I definitely made changes to the plot based on her feedback.

HI: Since we’ve been speaking about hope, what kind of future do you see for kids like the hero of your story?

AMS: I have a remarkable amount of faith in people finding their place and loving it. It doesn’t have to be as bizarre a place as Stehekin. But finding your place and planting your feet there and caring enough about it to care what happens, both to the natural world in that place and also in the community. No one’s going to be able to tackle world hunger by themselves, but you can certainly work at a food pantry, you can certainly notice it in your own community.

So that idea of finding a place that you love passionately enough is one thing I have a lot of faith that kids can find. I know there’s a lot about the natural world that is threatened, but there’s a lot that’s still alive. Spending time in the non-human world can give you the brain space and the peace within yourself—now I’m getting all preachy—to look the hard stuff of the world in the eye. The more young people can get out and play outside, be outside, doing whatever, then when they come back to face the world we live in, they’re bolstered. At least that’s been my personal experience and I hope that at least some young people can have that experience.

HI: There are certain obstacles for that. Some kids living in cities never get out, because they can’t afford to.

AMS: Right, and there just aren’t the opportunities. I don’t think everybody has to see the great wilderness either. Just having city parks down the street make all the difference in the world. And that, again, is something that people can make happen in their own small places. That’s something that is actually attainable, to make parks available, to get kids to parks. Give them the chance to play outside. But you’re right. There are institutional obstacles.

HI: I’m from Alaska and when I was growing up, things were quite open. But I remember taking a road trip with my dad across Texas, and it’s also wide-open space. At one point he turned to me and he said, “You realize all of this is privately held land, this is private land.” And I actually looked at him and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean?” It was just so strange. When we were going through some scrubby not very beautiful land with prickly pear and mesquite and rubble, natural rubble, he said, “This area was grasslands, and it was beautiful. It’s been overgrazed, and it’s hard to recover a grassland once you destroy it. But this isn’t how it used to be.”  

AMS: It’s like what we were saying about the end-thing. You can have this static idea of the landscape, and you don’t realize that the landscape has been changed. We have changed it; we are changing it radically all the time. It’s part of the story for young people to understand, things are being changed and that we are propelling that change, whether on private land or public land or through the climate.

I’ve often been perversely grateful that I didn’t grow up in Alaska. I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, in Riverside. In the 1970s, it was the smoggiest town in the United States. We didn’t have snow days, we had smog days. We had to stay home from school because it was so smoggy. There are mountains all around but you couldn’t see any of them. I think that gave me this fierce desire to care for the outdoors. Not only get away and be in the outdoors, but also to care for it and be aware of what can happen to it. It’s an amazing reclaiming story that in Riverside now you can see the mountains. Through smog control measures and air quality control laws, California has reversed it from the seventies. Now it’s not perfect, but the fact that I can go there and see the mountains is stunning to me. And a testament to people who worked really hard.

HI: Tell me about your teaching philosophy.

AMS: I believe in the writing itself. I believe that what’s most important in any creative writing class is to figure out what the piece is about. I had a teacher at NAU (Northern Arizona University) named Jane Armstrong Woodman. In workshop, the first thing she would do is ask everybody what’s the piece about? It was the single most useful things I had ever had a writing teacher do, because I was stunned at all the different answers people had of what they thought my story was about. Some of them were what I thought the story was about, but a lot of them were not. Some of them were things where I said, “Wow, if that’s what you think this story is about, I have to change something because it’s not.”

That taught me about finding the core of what happens. I try to help the students figure this out—I don’t think as writers we know what it’s about until we are well into a piece. At least I don’t. I want to help the student figure it out, but I also want students to help each other try to figure it out, and respect that there is an “aboutness” to every piece of writing. The feedback we give has to grow out of that place naturally. Otherwise, we’re imposing our own aesthetic or our own ideas on a piece that may not be what we want it to be. So I thank Jane for teaching me about “aboutness.”

I had several teachers as an undergraduate, and even in high school, who had such a passion for reading literature that way, for getting at the heart of literature and challenging me to think more deeply about what I read. That literature background informs the focus in my teaching of writing and in my own writing—to get at the core of things. And to complicate things.

The other thing that Jane Woodman would say is that we aren’t ever trying to teach in our nonfiction, we’re trying to wonder. You’re trying to figure out, what do I think right now? What do I know right now? Which is the Montaigne thing.

Through smog control measures and air quality control laws, California has reversed it from the seventies. Now it’s not perfect, but the fact that I can go there and see the mountains is stunning to me. And a testament to people who worked really hard.

HI: Was she a teacher of fiction or nonfiction?

AMS: She was a teacher of both. When she first taught me that it was in a fiction workshop. Later I took nonfiction from her and she had the same approach. Whether I’m teaching fiction or nonfiction, I would approach it that same way.

HI: What are the changes you’ve seen over the years in terms of “creative nonfiction” as a distinct field?

AMS: It’s definitely moved in interesting ways. John D’Agata at Iowa is a real provocateur. He’s been provocative in terms of moving nonfiction closer to poetry or to fiction. All of that is super exciting. I love seeing what writers can do with imagery and juxtaposition so that they’re not having to lean quite so heavily on traditional direct reflection to make meaning in nonfiction. I admit that I am immersed in that world of reflection and I love reflection on the page—I live there, I reside there in my own writing. But in student writing and other people’s writing, I love to see how they can find ways to make meaning without depending on that particular kind of direct telling; they can do more with showing.

I’m not particularly interested—because it’s tiresome to me—about the how much can you lie in nonfiction. I think you don’t lie in nonfiction. But there’s a lot of gray area there, there are things you can miss, or things you don’t remember rightly. I think most people who read and write nonfiction know all that. I’m more interested in how you get at the meaning, and all the amazing ways there are to use words to make meaning on the page.

HI: When you say you don’t lie in nonfiction, that means you don’t make events up or…

AMS: You don’t change a fact on purpose. John D’Agata has this famous thing where there’s a number (I won’t get this straight at all but anyway) he changes an actual number. He knows the number is nine but he thinks five sounds better, or something like that. That to me is abhorrent, you can’t do that just because you like it better, you can’t change it. You can work around it, but don’t change facts, don’t fabricate events, don’t fabricate characters. I’m sort of on the fence about compressing time. If you visited your mom three times at the hospital, can you dramatize it as one visit to the hospital? You probably can, I don’t think that’s lying in a crucial way. But if she wasn’t in the hospital and you say that she was, that’s lying.

HI: That’s a good definition. The gray area, though, is vast, because of course memory isn’t a recorder. Not just the facts can be different from somebody else’s when you compare memories, but what you remember is so shaped by the emotion you were having at the time.

AMS: There are all kinds of new neuroscience research proving this, which anybody who spent any time writing memoir already knows. Your own memory can be affected by how you felt at the time. Your memory is going to be different from other people’s who were in the same place. That’s part of the fascination of exploring memory or seeing how another writer explores memory. It’s all that tricky terrain.

HI: What are you working on now? 

AMS: I am working on another collection of essays. Whatever longer book effort I’m working on, I always go back to essays. It’s my little comfort zone. That collection is coming together and I think it will be finished in the fall. Then I’ll start thinking about another long book project. I’ve been asked to write a sequel to the middle-grade novel, so I’ve been fooling around with that too, playing with that on the side while I write the essays. That might the next thing, or there might be another nonfiction project too. One crucial aspect of my creative process is that I have to be working on more than one thing at once. I can’t just work on one project at once, or I start pressuring myself too much.

HI: I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your writing day to do this interview. I appreciate it.

AMS: Thank you.

Haley Isleib writes and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is a recent Antioch MFA graduate with a focus on writing for young people. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including Daily Science Fiction, Plasm, and Fireweed: Poetry of Western Oregon; her screenplays have won awards including Best Feature Screenplay in Other Worlds Austin Film Festival; and she is a recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Poetry. Born & raised in Alaska, she is in self-imposed exile from winter and no longer owns a pair of snow pants.

Douglas Unger has published four novels and a collection of stories, including Leaving the Land, which won the Society of Midland Authors Award for best fiction, a citation from the PEN Ernest Hemingway award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Robert F. Kennedy awards. His fourth novel, Voices from Silence, was an “experts recommend selection” of the Washington Post Book World. New fiction and essays have appeared in Boulevard, Southwest Review, The Writers Chronicle, and Carve magazines, as well as in West of 98: Living and Writing in the New American West and the Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Fiction. He has just completed Dream City, a novel set in Las Vegas.

Unger moved to Las Vegas in 1991, after teaching eight years at Syracuse University. He is the co-founder of the MFA in Creative Writing International program and PhD with Creative Dissertation at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Unger serves on the executive boards of Words Without Borders, Point of Contact, The Americas for Conservation and the Arts, and as an advisory editor for The Americas Series with Texas Tech University Press. His awards include a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction, a Fulbright scholarship in Comparative Literature for Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, a fellowship from the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, a State of Washington Governor’s award, the Nevada Board of Regents Creative Activities Award, and induction into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

I met Douglas Unger following a June 2016 panel at the AULA MFA residency that explored the role of writer-activists in an era when sustainability has become imperative. I was struck by Unger’s response to the moderator’s question, “Are you a writer or an activist first?” Unger said, “I would characterize myself as a ‘literary activist.’ I work with groups that engage writers in environmental activism.”

Unger approaches sustainability from his childhood experiences, which included vacations and holidays spent on his father’s sheep ranch in South Dakota. He watched farms and ranches go under as a result of major social and economic changes that included the rise of agribusiness and urban flight. Later, Unger used his writing to engage the challenge of sustaining communities and cultures during periods of rapid transformation.

Unger’s contribution to the sustainability panel was still fresh in my mind when we met for breakfast at the Marriott the following morning. I recognized Unger from the back, thanks to his neat ponytail. He was checking his flight information on a computer in the hotel lobby. He logged out and I ordered a coffee before we slid into a spacious booth to chat.

Juliann Allison: How did you become a writer? How did you transition from reluctant rancher to writer and activist?

Douglas Unger: I’m not sure if I set out to become a writer. I grew up partly in Colorado, partly outside of New York. I went to Argentina on a student exchange and stayed. The system was very strange, and it allowed you to study without having a place as a student at the university, as an estudiante libre. I went to the University of Chicago and took mainly sciences. I was thinking about getting into neurophysiology, and worked in a neurophysiology lab. I had connections with United Press International (UPI) and when all the war demonstrations were going on and there was political turmoil, I started covering that for UPI as a photojournalist. So I started writing, and gravitated toward it. I’m glad because I discovered in the neurophysiology lab that I am not very good with my hands. I think that if I had become a brain surgeon, I would have done terrible damage.

The old family farm-centered agricultural model embodied a kind of independence, a complete thinking about one’s relationship to town, relationship to city, relationship to state that emphasized certain American values…

JA: Did you consider yourself an activist at this point?

DU: Not really. Although I was certainly sympathetic to the activists. As a journalist, I really tried to be objective.

JA: Your first novel, Leaving the Land, is the story of a turkey farmer’s daughter struggling to hold onto her family’s land while their hometown falls victim to corporate farming. Can you tell me more about this novel, which many consider a classic on the vanishing family farm in the American Midwest? To what extent does it capture your own sense about agriculture, the agrarian lifestyle, and contemporary culture?

DU: There’s a big difference between identifying with a character who is integrated into a particular circumstance and being that character yourself. Leaving the Land is much more based on my father’s second wife, and her growing up on a turkey farm outside of Gillete, Wyoming, and listening to her stories about it, and really identifying with her whole sense of the land where she came from. The rest of it is invented.

My attitude toward that kind of agricultural labor is—I don’t want to romanticize it—it’s hard. The work is hard. The labor’s hard. The demands on you are very, very difficult. In my day, whole families would be out working all day long just to make the place work, to make a profit. I identified with the character, but I’m not a big back-to-nature person. If I prefer any kind of jungle, it’s an urban jungle. If you could spin me around three times and drop me into any city, I’d feel at home. I’ve gone through periods of time when I’ve worked out in nature, but I prefer the companionship of people and cultural activity of the city any day.

JA: What about urban environments?

DU: I think about the integration of green space, and open space, and utilized space in cities a great deal. I’ll use Berlin as an example. I’ve become interested in Berlin recently because my wife lives there. I’ve observed the way the city uses big parks, and the way the residents of the city have community gardens on the outskirts of the city. There’s a whole connection with getting out into the green spaces while you’re enjoying the city. There’s a way the European cities have integrated that better than our cities have. I think about city design, and wish that we could do a better job of it.

Las Vegas is getting better. They had no plan up until about 2000, then they started with a nice plan to make walkways and hiking trails. They’re a little late, but they’re doing a much better job. Out in the new areas, like Summerlin, there’s more of a British feel because it has roundabouts and green spaces. That part of Las Vegas is better planned, more walkable.

JA: You’ve talked about the relationship between the agrarian lifestyle and issues of democracy, individualism, and responsibility. If we are losing these virtues associated with agrarianism, where do you see them being re-enacted?

DU: My philosophy has been formed by this Harold Breimyer book, Individual Freedom and the Economic Organization of Agriculture. It adopts, like Wendell Berry does, a Jeffersonian view of American democracy, and I think it’s essentially correct. The old family-farm centered agricultural model embodied a kind of independence, a complete thinking about one’s relationship to town, relationship to city, relationship to state that emphasized certain American values—frugality and connection with agricultural resources that looks at the farm as complete and sustainable entity that diversifies by rotating crops from legumes to wheat. And you have some type of animal, not because there is an intrinsic value to raising animals but because you get an organic fertilizer. This connection cultivates a sustainable, holistic view of a person’s landscape and how to use it that doesn’t spoil or waste it. That attitude was extremely important. Plus there was an independent attitude toward what power and what freedom we wanted inflicted on us by law, and which powers and freedoms we wanted to have control of ourselves. There’s a whole sense of community involvement as well because of cooperative uses of water and markets, and farm co-ops. That kind of thing, which is a quaint model now, really fostered an attitude toward sustainable life.

What happened in the latter part of the twentieth century is that that model was replaced by an economy-of- scale model, in which you had a hundred-sixty-acre small-scale family dairy replaced by a thousand-acre operation, and then by a two-thousand-acre farm. You are dealing with units that are larger than a family can manage, and so you hire laborers, and adopt a monoculture. You have a whole movement in farming to using a lot of fertilizer to produce tremendous yields, and raising one-grain crops, and selling them. In the 1980s and 1990s, corporations bought up farmland. There are exceptions to it. Organic farms, for instance. Now there’s a movement back to the land—millennials trying to teach themselves how to farm.

In the Third World, monoculture farming is promoted. There’s money in it, whereas there isn’t money for sustainable, small farms. Everyone talks about North American free trade and, Oh God! the factories are leaving. But nobody talks about what it did to Mexico. Suddenly, there were farm credits available for large farms so they adopted these huge, corporate-style farming methods and we see the result of that—onions and fruits coming into Trader Joe’s. What NAFTA did was shake up subsistence farming, which the Mexican Revolution was designed to preserve. And now it’s happening all around the world.

JA: Can you talk about how Latinos view their own, or humanity’s, connection to earth, land, or place today?

You have to know who you are to understand your relationship to the place around you and your community, to have some sense of an integrated self that you understand as you, even though that changes

DU: There’s an interesting thing that emerged in the polling of the Latino voter in the United States and our misconceptions about that growing and important sector of America. Everyone assumed that immigration would be a big issue, and jobs and the economy would be a big issue, and there would be all of these conservative values. But the truth is that the top two concerns for Latinos were the environment and climate change.

As far as we can tell at Americas for Conservation + Arts [a Colorado-based organization dedicated to uniting diverse communities for a sustainable future], neighborhood organizations that are out there everyday, organizing Latino families, find that most Mexican-Americans have some connection to the land or have some relatives who have done agricultural work. They saw first-hand the changes that have gone on and they are concerned. There’s also a tremendous sense of community involvement and community support that, in part, comes just from culture, support for community food, community child support, community concerns for each other. When you put on an event, organize literary events, try to get a crowd out in the Mexican-American community, what you’ll see is that not only will they come, but they will bring food for the community, and be thinking about who will take care of the kids. If I do this in the middle of Las Vegas, I’ll have to think about this as an organizer. It won’t just come up out of the community. That’s a different kind of thing, a different kind of relatedness.

I’m sure there are other communities like that. It kind of reminds me of rural farm communities. Maybe you can attribute it to a closeness to the landscape. Maybe you can attribute it to a different way of looking at community. But that community sense is directly related to their concerns about the environment and climate change.

JA: Your writing and activism are clearly integrated around questions of culture and sustainability. What organizations, in addition to Americas for Conservation + Arts, are you engaged with? How do you think your efforts have impacted Latino communities?

DU: Latinos are a tremendously cohesive, organized unit or sector of the population. They understand that to do anything, they have to speak with one voice. But in the Latino community you have to be careful because there’s a real difference between El Salvadorans, Mexicans, and Guatemalans, and each group is different from the Cubans and from the Puerto Ricans. But there is a sense of a common project of assimilation, a common project of community building.

I’ve done an interesting thing with Words without Borders [a nonprofit that recognizes a strong land ethic among Latin American and Latino communities]. When we put together our Mexico unit [one of three country-organized courses]—I chair that project—I thought we had to do something about the Indigenous communities and languages in Mexico. I selected poetry and stories [translated from] Mazateca and Curicha from the backlist of Words without Borders magazine. Then we started to look at the differences among those subcultures in Mexico and discovered, my gosh, that there are whole neighborhoods of these peoples in odd places. Just outside of Seattle, there’s a Uribe community. There’s a Mazateca community right here in LA, where they’re in the same neighborhood and they’re riding the same buses to work, and their getting together to cook their native foods.

I participated in this project with the Nevada Council of the Arts, looking at Oaxaca and Zapoteca embroidery, and how there’s a whole society that is passing on the embroidery arts from mother to daughter, and then doing these festivals among themselves to show off the results of their work and sustain this beautiful and elaborate embroidery, and the symbols in it, and the way one reads the embroidery. We did a whole museum show together. My graduate students and I translated, put the text together for the catalogue for that exhibit.

Even within an ethnic community, there are dozens, often many more subgroups, and each one has its own concerns, and different traditions. I’m still thinking about that, thinking about what that means, certainly, within sustainability and cultural preservation. It’s important and I’m interested in how we preserve these cultural ideas, and art, the songs of these communities, where we make space for them in the American patchwork, the American idea. And how do we encourage cultural cohesion in a society made up of these different parts? That has to do with sustainability.

How do we preserve the beautiful folkloric songs? How do you preserve Mazateca poetry that is so focused on the role of the mother in society? This is really interesting to me as an artist. It’s fascinating that Mazatecans have this preoccupation with mothers in poetry, and then you find a Mexican comedian in the U.S., in a club, making the audience laugh with twenty different mama jokes, right? Where does that whole thing come from? And isn’t that interesting to think about? You can do anything in Mexican culture, generally, you can insult somebody, call them anything you want, use every curse word in the book, but if you insult his mother, it’s a knife fight. You cannot insult his mother. It’s the one thing they don’t do.

If you teach the availability of these cultures and subcultures, the richness of them, who knows what students will make of it, but at least it’s there.

JA: Can you tell us about your new work?

DU: I’ve just spent a long time working on a book about Las Vegas. It’s very complicated. It’s called Dream City and what I’m trying to do with the book is to go against all the available Las Vegas clichés. There’re no murders, no hookers. There’re no gangsters. There’s one old barber who is nostalgic about the mob days, but there’s no mob. What it’s really about is the corporate world of Las Vegas and how it modeled the city. It’s about all the back-stabbing. It’s fiction, but it’s set in that world.

Right now, I’m putting the first section together in another way. I’ve been cutting it down and reshaping it. I’m trying to sell it. It’s very difficult to sell a novel these days. What I’m trying to do is take a look at people who are drawn into aspirational greed. The main character evaluates himself by how far he climbs up the corporate ladder in terms of money, and gets to the point where he is admitted into the wealthy and elite of Las Vegas who have their own rituals, and their own meetings, and their own places to go, their own rights of passage. And so he’s in this group where he’s always wanted to be and the recession happens and in 2010 he loses it all. In the process of getting there, he strips away every kind of passive human value, like compassion and his personal ethics. His marriage gets in real trouble, and he becomes more cynically disposed. He becomes what he never wanted to be, and loses it.

I’m hoping to make that an interesting story, but what I’ve discovered is that editors and readers in publishing houses want to know: where are the gangsters, where are the hookers, where’s the body? They expect a certain thing out of Las Vegas. This is different than that.

Novels, to me, are puzzles. It’s a question of how to structure the story to give your readers just enough so that they are interested in turning the page, and much of that has to do with the ordering of events, how to order events, how to anticipate events, then how to keep rewarding expectations, and reversing them along the way. It’s a structural problem.

JA: It sounds like fun. It sounds like a lot of work, but it could also be fun, a challenge.

DU: Yeah. I just finished writing an essay on teaching the Mexican drug war. It’s [published in] a couple of places. I enjoyed the process of teaching such a dark subject and watching students react to narco culture.

We all have to be activists. When you hear it, you have to confront it. There’s a nice way to be persuasive. But if you don’t, then you’re responsible.

It wasn’t depressing at all, translating, and comparing it to hip hop and rap, looking at it like a cultural phenomenon. Then looking at narco cinema. Who is the most prolific actor? A guy name Mario Almada, who has played the bad guy in 1000 films. What American actor has been in 1000 movies? You have Mexican narco film directors who are doing over twenty movies a year, right? I had students who went to our local Walmart and found titles, movies funded by drug dealers to make themselves look like heroes.

Then there’s the cult of Santo [Jesús] Malverde, which has more than twelve million devotees, that’s one out of every ten people in Mexico. It’s the saint of the drug lords. Yet it’s got this indigenous underpinning to the feminine goddess of underworld of Toltec and Aztec tradition. So it’s a reincarnation of her. It’s a whole new religion. My students were so fascinated by all of this. I wrote an essay about it.

JA: Do you have any advice for writers seeking to lend their voice to the earth or land? How important is a science background?

DU: It’s an individual attitude that you carry with you whether you are a writer or not. The thing is to decide who you are first. You have to know who you are to understand your relationship to the place around you and your community, to have some sense of an integrated self that you understand as you, even though that changes. Then, be very aware of what is around you. I like Henry James’s idea about what writers should be, and that a writer is someone on whom nothing is missed. Just be aware and observant enough to see what’s around you and cultivate that ability as much as you possibly can.

There’s that, and then about sustainability, I think we should all be activists. You can be an activist just by being a poet in your community, and representing that space in the cultural organization of your family, your community, your city. That’s a good thing, but if you look at the kind of crisis that’s coming, I’m very concerned that we all have to do something. In the United States, we are not nearly aware enough or focused enough on it. And it astonishes me that the corporate rhetoric by companies that want to exploit resources and damn the consequences and profit from it has been given such a privileged and unquestioned place in politics and the media.

It’s not that way around the world. You go to Germany, and everyone is aware. The same in France. You go to Argentina, and it’s a struggle, but not a naked struggle. If someone is going to profit, it’s out there. And the whole sense of climate change is out there. They are talking about it, and people are aware that there is more flooding, and every newscaster is saying it’s because of climate change. We don’t have that happening [in the U.S.]. If someone does say it, then there’s a counterargument being financed by someone who wants to do what they’ve always done, to exploit and despoil without paying for it.

We all have to be activists. When you hear it, you have to confront it. There’s a nice way to be persuasive. But if you don’t, then you’re responsible. I don’t want to be responsible. There are things we all really need to be aware of. [Climate change] is the most important issue of our time.

Juliann Allison is a feminist scholar, environmentalist, homeschool advocate, yogini, runner, rock climber, mate, and mother of four, with a passion for the outdoors. She is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Public Policy at UC Riverside, and an MFA student at Antioch University Los Angeles.