Tina May Hall’s “By the Gleam of Her Teeth, She Will Light the Path Before Her” appeared in the January 2010 issue of The Collagist. Her first story collection, Instructions for Contacting the Dead, will be published in the fall of 2010. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in 3rd bed, the minnesota review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Water-Stone Review, Fairy Tale Review, and other journals. Her novella in prose poems, All the Day’s Sad Stories, was published by Caketrain Press in the spring of 2009. She lives with her husband and son in upstate New York in a skinny old house with a mouse in the pantry and a ghost in the furnace who knocks on their dreams all night long.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for “By the Gleam of Her Teeth, She Will Light the Path Before Her”? What was on your mind while you were writing this story?

This story started many years ago in a workshop I took that was centered around the fairytale.  We all wonder what happens after a fairytale ends, but for this story, I was thinking about what happens in the instant before a fairytale begins.  What kind of situation sends the character out into the woods?

2. I love the fairytale of this story. Not only omniscient narration but that narration’s awareness—the way this story is conscious of being told—and the simplicity of the narrative seem appropriately conspiratorial. You just know something bizarre is going to happen, and then it does—although we are left satisfyingly unsure of what that thing is. It reminds me, especially in the end, of some of the stories in an Angela Carter collection, The Bloody Chamber: traditional fairytales turned on their heads into feminist declarations and coming of age narratives. Did you have any such influences, or any such thematic intentions with this piece?

Ah, yes, Angela Carter is a big influence!  I read (and teach) her book, The Bloody Chamber, again and again and am constantly surprised by it.  It is all so gloriously strange and wonderful.  “The Lady in the House of Love” is the story that comes most readily to mind in connection with this one because it, too, is about virginity and that sort of suspended moment before coming into knowledge, not necessarily sexual knowledge, but a transformative experience played out on the body.

3. Although it ends on her, Second Daughter isn’t necessarily the story’s focus. Until the last two paragraphs it seems to have no allegiances at all, and in fact the only thing that really draws the characters together is the narrator; they don’t really touch, they don’t really speak to one another (the Mother’s ponderings on Only Son and the weather hardly count). How did you mean the narrator to function as a character and to hold the other characters together, or perhaps away from each other?

I didn’t really think of the narrator acting as a character so much as an observer or reporter—so, a fairly typical view of the narrator.  However, I think it is odd to have a family moment narrated in such a distant way, and I wanted to play with that—the idea of reportage combined with the intimacy of the dinner table.  I tried to achieve a flatness here that is odds with the domestic scene, in part because I think families in fairytales (and in general) are very strange things and in part to show what it is Second Daughter is hoping for when she escapes (perhaps foolhardily) into the woods.

4. In 2008 you won Caketrain’s Chapbook Competition, and in an interview with John Madera you said that chapbook, All the Day’s Sad Stories, was the longest narrative you’d yet written. You said, “So it made it more manageable for me to think in terms of vignette and scene and to use the white space as breathing space—a coping strategy, I guess!” What do you find intriguing about the vignette form, this sort of burst of narrative energy? Why do you think it became the best way for you to tell a tale?

I think the vignette is well-suited to those of us who write lyrical prose and who enjoy fussing with language.  You always have to consider reader tolerance, and short bursts of highly-concentrated prose are often easier to get away with.  Beyond that, I like to see what happens when you start stacking blocks of images upon each other, giving the reader the satisfaction of the turn in each individual piece and trying to construct a larger structure at the same time, kind of like building a bridge of toothpicks, I guess.

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m working endlessly on a novel which is a sort of murder mystery about a woman who writes encyclopedia entries and gets stuck on the Artic.  There is this whole historical component about Victorian Artic exploration, and I have quite frankly gotten lost in the fascinating diaries and maps and ephemera of the period.  And I have a collection coming out in the fall from the University of Pittsburgh Press called The Physics of Imaginary Objects which will include “By the Gleam of Her Teeth…” and a sort of sequel which envisions Red Riding Hood in her dotage.

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

I’m teaching Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite this week, so it is much on my mind.  It is an absolutely beautiful book, both grand in scope and microscopic in its attention to character and moment.  Phillips is a very important writer to me, more influential even than Carter, so I am thrilled whenever she has something new.  And I’m very excited to see Gretchen Henderson’s book, Galerie de Difformité which will come out next year.  She is doing fantastic things to the very notion of a book and in fact is inviting people to help her deform the “Exhibits” which make up the text.  The website is http://difformite.wordpress.com/

[Interview by Liana Imam]

Peter Schwartz’s poem “There” appears in the February 2010 issue of The Collagist. His poetry has been featured in The Columbia Review, Diagram, and Opium Magazine.  When not dreaming of literary conferences he’s writing or taking photos or thinking of who he should get for the next issue of DOGZPLOT, where he is art editor.  Learn more about his work at: www.sitrahahra.com.

Can you talk about the inspiration for “There”? What was on your mind while you were writing this poem?

I think it started with the line “movement doesn’t need punctuation”.   I hadn’t been writing or sending out work and so became hyper-aware of my need for something special to happen, something that would punctuate the boredom and emptiness that come when I’m not productive.  Then I asked myself: Why?  What if the momentum of doing little (un-special) things could be my salvation?  In other words: What if my life was one giant punctuation?  This shift of awareness is what “There” is about: living on the right side of consciousness, the inspired side.  Not here, but there.

Not too long ago, HTML GIANT posted an excerpt from one of your other poems, “Exit Signs”, which had a line in it that immediately resonated with me, having also read “There”. I returned to that poem after reading your poem for this month’s Collagist and found the line I was looking for: “roads already tilting towards their sequels”. I’m intrigued by the way you play around with the idea of sequels, of applying them not to stories but to concrete objects and abstract ideas in “there” as well.

“you’ll see how the heat

of every possible sequel

burns into the ozone with

or without you, there”

Could you elaborate on this theme?

Great question, wow.  Right now we’re in this moment, yes?  Now we’re in this one.  There, that was a sequel.  For me, life is a long series of sequels.  Being a poet definitely makes me particularly aware of this dynamic as every poem I write is in a sense a sequel to the one before it.  As for concrete objects and abstract ideas, yes, they all must be replaced, repaired or renewed by the human spirit.

I’m interested in your use of literary themes and terms in this poem—for example, “…there you’ll learn movement doesn’t/need punctuation…”, “the catalog of wrongs”, “every possible sequel/burns into the ozone”. There’s an idea established here that one’s everyday life depends on language—that movements can be defined by punctuation or free of it, that wrongs can be remembered in extensive lists. I’ve heard from a lot of writer friends of mine that they often find themselves “narrating” as they go about their business, defining their own actions with purposeful language, and I’ll admit I find myself doing it sometimes too. Perhaps narrating our lives in our heads is just another writing exercise…anyway, is this something you’ve caught yourself doing before? If so, have you noticed any effect upon your writing from it?

Ah yes, the importance of language. I’m unemployed so most of my days are quite similar.  Whether I’m happy or sad is almost entirely dependent on how well I’ve put my feelings into words, be it in a poem or a conversation with a friend.

As for this mental narrating business, I don’t really do that.  I wish I did because if I could translate reality in real-time, I’d probably be less confused and overwhelmed by the world.  I have Asperger’s Syndrome and part of that means I can usually only process events after the fact.  This is why I don’t write in-the-moment, observational poetry.  To quote the last line of “There”, for me, “truth is only truth / by residue.”  In other words, for better or worse, I only deal in abstract essences.

You just released your first chapbook of poetry, Old Men, Girls, and Monsters. Can you tell us about the collection? What makes these poems hang together as a collection?

My use of lists is probably the most obvious thread holding these poems together as a collection.   Writing the first poem, “anonymous confessions 1-24”, was a very liberating experience for me.  I realized the power of nouns.  I realized I could directly name my spirit (examples: old man, monster, compass, heat, etc.).  This naming and cataloging of my spiritual life continues until “the ABC’s of loss”.  That poem is a list of sorts too, but in that piece I wanted to take down my wall of abstraction and chronicle my more personal losses, specifically the abuse and neglect I suffered at the hands of my father as a kid.   I then return to my abstraction (which has always been the great escape of my life) in the final poem, “exit signs”.

What other writing projects are you currently working on?

Because I am so inward and abstract, I’ve turned my focus outwards a bit.  I’m working on my next interview for the PRATE Interview Series as well as a second part to my “Letters to Air” piece.  These are extremely short letters to various people from my past, inspired by Michael Kimball’s novel Dear Everybody.  In fact, I’ll be reading it at the next The Nervous Breakdown Literary Experience at The Happy Ending Lounge in NYC on March 26^th.

What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

I’m obsessed with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  It’s the saddest, most beautiful story I’ve ever come across and is so dense with humanity that I just want to read it over and over until I feel like I have some sense of it as whole.

I’m very excited about Paula Bomer’s BABY, due out this Fall through Word Riot Press.  I think Paula is the kind of writer whose words are simply an extension of who and what she is: profoundly humane.  I’ll probably read her collection a few times, too.

Lucas Southworth’s story “The Glass Coffin” appears in the February 2010 issue of The Collagist. He has stories forthcoming from Mid-American Review and Wigleaf. Other fiction has recently appeared in  CutBank, Harpur Palate, Willow Springs, and Web Conjunctions. “The Glass Coffin” is an excerpt of a novel-in-progress.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for “The Glass Coffin”? What was on your mind while you were writing this story?

“The Glass Coffin” is part of a novel I’m working on. Recently, a friend of mine read the first draft and suggested I take some of the elements further. As a joke, she mentioned sci-fi. I thought it was a weird idea and decided to try it.

When I began writing Lady Monroe’s story, I was thinking about imagination. Thematically the novel explores areas between memory, imagination, and speculation; how murder can cause those areas to grow, shift, and distort. So I was trying to come up with a character who is more comfortable inventing others than thinking about herself. Lady Monroe is locked up. She might even have done something horrible—possibly she’s a murderer herself—but whatever it is, she cannot or does not want to remember. In a way, I think of Lady Monroe as incomplete. All parts of her have faded until only her imagination remains. In “The Glass Coffin,” we see an instance where she is conscious of herself—she looks at her reflection, she observes her surroundings, she eats—but this is unusual. Really, she’s arrived at the point where she has no connection to her body anymore; she has no memory and no reason to speculate. She’s been whittled down to her imagination, and it’s the only way she can survive.

2. Perhaps the most striking aspect about this story is the fact that although it implies a lot of questions—is this some alternate reality, who are Lady Monroe’s captors, what has she done to deserve such a punishment, what was she before it—the story doesn’t beg those questions. That is, it doesn’t feel incomplete or poorly crafted because readers don’t know that information. What goes into creating a balance like this of details known to the author but withheld from the reader?

I think much of it comes down to descriptive authority. I’ve learned a lot from reading fairy tales and studying the blunt and simple ways they often state the magical or surreal or strange. In a fairy tale, someone drops a comb and it grows into a forest. Readers don’t question it. It’s partly because we’ve come to expect that anything can happen in a fairy tale, but it also works because the descriptions are so simple and straightforward. In a fairy tale, the prose is direct. It doesn’t leave any holes. There’s nothing to question.

Even though everything in the “The Glass Coffin” isn’t explained, I tried to make descriptions of the coffin and its surroundings as exact and authoritative as possible. The descriptions create a setting that doesn’t quite make sense but still seems real. From leading workshops, I’ve seen a lot of writers have trouble with descriptions that are too vague or indirect. There is often the feeling that the writer isn’t exactly sure what images he is trying to describe. I hoped to avoid this as much as possible.

Also, I think readers might be satisfied without all the answers because the main character is satisfied without them. She isn’t really seeking any answers anymore. To Lady Monroe, this information is no longer central to her life. She isn’t interested, and therefore readers aren’t overly interested either.

3. The final paragraph about the boy is so wrenching, especially the way Lady Monroe “envies the boy. She likes how he can take things from others. How he suffers no guilt, or any feelings at all. In this way, she hopes, he is like her. He is like the people who built this coffin and locked her here.” That he is both like her and like them—whoever they might be—seems to be a lovely comment on the way imprisonment works; something about locking away the things we are afraid of in ourselves. What particular fears and desires might we draw out of a piece as spare as this?

Readers get the sense, I hope, that Lady Monroe isn’t a complete victim here. She’s been locked up, probably because she committed a very real crime. I understand why Lady Monroe would want to stop remembering. There are reasons why she should fear memory—it’s inconsistent, its unreliable, it sometimes covers up trauma, and it often allows people to recall their transgressions as viable choices.

When Lady Monroe thinks about memory, there’s a distinct violence to it. Similarly, there’s violence in the way she imagines the boy—he has long, sharp fingers, he’s pursued by nightmares, he has crooked teeth. The violence in that last paragraph comes from inside Lady Monroe. It is trapped within her just as she is trapped within the coffin. This violence has always been there for her, but the she imagines it because of her punishment and isolation. Plus she’s in such a strange stasis. She’s dead but alive. They’ve killed her but she continues to live. She fights yet submits. Much of the novel looks at how we all have a kind of latent violence within. This scares us, and we tend to try to forget that we have the freedom to act on it. Locked up alone, Lady Monroe’s realized she doesn’t even have that option anymore.

4. This story is actually part of a novel in progress, which seems to complicate the issue of information withheld—or perhaps ‘complicate isn’t as accurate a word as ‘agitate.’ Can you speak specifically to your process of excerpting, of making something which, although you know will eventually need to function in longer form, must also stand strongly alone?

Excerpting this novel is easy because I’m writing it in short sections, most of which I hope can stand alone. I try to give each section a kind of arc, although it isn’t always conventional. It does help that this is the first time we see Lady Monroe. Later sections about her probably won’t work by themselves. She’s a new character and I’m still figuring her out, but I think by the end of the book we’ll learn more about the boy and begin to get hints about what Lady Monroe’s done and why she was put in the coffin.

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m finishing up a collection of short stories, but it’s one of those projects where I’ve thought it was done quite a few times before. I keep thinking it’s complete and then I’ll write a new story, revise one, or take another one out. Right now, I’m writing what I hope will be a pretty twisted ghost story, which will probably fit in if I want it to. I also just started a website project with a friend, and contribute to another friend’s website, 300reviews.com

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

The best book I’ve read recently is David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Also Mark Leyner’s I Smell Esther Williams is pretty interesting.

I’m not really a reader who anticipates new releases. I usually come to books long after they’ve been released. So I’m not sure I can think of one.

[Interview by Liana Imam]

Dzanc’s new effort to expand our mission and bring the creative world to a national audience, DZANC DAY takes its cue from the popularity of our Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions. On March 20, 2010, Dzanc will run over 30 creative writing workshops in 25 cities across the country. These workshops will be held in cities from Portland, OR to Orlando, FL, from New Haven, CT to Los Angeles, CA and points between.

All monies raised from DZANC DAY will go toward supporting Dzanc’s charitable programs which, in part, bring creative writing programs to students who could not otherwise afford the opportunity. Fantastic authors from across the country have volunteered their time, experience, and expertise to run these individual workshops. Each workshop will allow students to work face-to-face with the instructor in specific venues with each location focusing on a specific aspect of the writing world.

The DZANC DAY workshops serve not only to expand Dzanc’s effort to bring inexpensive, face-to-face workshops to a wider audience, but, as noted, also to help us generate income that will allow Dzanc to continue that effort in our other charitable arenas – awarding the annual Dzanc Prize, running Dzanc Writer in Residence Programs in schools across the country, and more.

To browse available workshops and to sign up, click here. Workshops are being conducted by writers like Kyle Minor, Michael Czyzniejewski, Dave Housley, BJ Hollars, J.A. Tyler, John Domini, Jen Michalski, Anna Clark, Jeff Kass, Peter Markus, Rachael Perry, Erik Smetana, Sherrie Flick, Amelia Gray, Dan Brady, Mike Ingram, Laura Ellen Scott, Pasha Malla, and Jeff Parker, plus many others. Everyone at Dzanc is very appreciative of these people’s efforts on our behalf, and we’re sure these are going to be great. As far as I know, space is still available for all workshops, so please consider signing up, and please let any students or other writers know about these very low-cost events. Judging by the people involved, I’m sure they’re all going to be great.

Nicelle Davis’s poem “Five Steps Closer to Knowing First” appears in the February 2010 issue of The Collagist. She lives in Southern California with her husband James and their son J.J. Her poems are forthcoming in Caesura, FuseLit, Illya’s Honey, Moulin, The New York Quarterly, Redcations, and Transcurrent. She’d like to acknowledge her poetry family at the University of California, Riverside and Antelope Valley Community College. She runs a free online poetry workshop at: http://nicelledavis.wordpress.com/.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for “Five Steps Closer to Knowing First”? What was on your mind while you were writing this poem?

I think the poem is a translation of a conversation I had (by myself in a bathroom) with a pregnancy test. The original dialogue was the F-word repeated—but the F-word used to its full tonal potential. Before this moment, I didn’t realize how the F-word holds the sacred and profane (simultaneously). I learned from that experience that words are just place holders for how our bodies sing to be understood. The internal self is desperate to be known by the external world—to be whole. So the poem is really the F-word in translation.

2. The way these sections build off of one another is so, so lovely. It’s hard to tell where the initially abstract ideas (the chicken stealing the cat’s eye) morph into more definite realities (the doctor advising his patient)—appropriate, considering the content. Did one part come decisively before the other, or were these two ideas always tied?

Ideas are always tied and tangled things for me. I find everyday life to be difficult (overwhelmingly difficult), so my mind creates dreamscapes to help me deal with events as they happen. (I don’t think I’m alone in this—I mean there is that Dr. Freud cat who wrote a lot on the subject of dreams.) For me, all things (real and imagined) build upon one another.

Chickens are great examples of interconnectedness. Chicken is cheep and easy cooking, so many of us are raised on breasts baked in cream-of-mushroom soup. Mother and breast is an easy association. Another easy association is chicken and William Carlos Williams. Love and Poetry—what else is there really? Maybe chicken is just a way for one mouth to of say love and poetry at the same time? Maybe?

Sometimes I think we’d be better off without dictionaries defining our words or dreams—maybe if we took the time to learn each other’s dream language people wouldn’t feel so alone. Maybe? But then again, maybe poultry is just poultry.

Chicken or chicken? You choose.

3. All the images here are so full of possibility, and so curious. The one that really got to me is right in the middle: “My/ veins are now a string/ pulled taught between two/ tin cans. Does it work?” This idea of an exclusively two-way but highly imperfect form of communication is intriguing; how do you mean it to speak to mother/child relationships?

Wow. Your question made me blush—to create possibility is always my artist goal. Sometime I really fail at possibility—I put too many controls on the words—but I’m always trying. Thank you for the compliment.

Language is such a broken and incomplete thing—for this reason communication is a miracle to me. I am constantly amazed by the kindness found in ordinary conversation. If I were to paint a picture of friendship it would look like a game of tin can telephones. Friendship is the product of simple miracles.

4. In an interview for PANK’s blog in August, you talk briefly about being pregnant while going to grad school. One thing that makes this poem so striking is that there is very little wonder at the situation, very little awe, though there is surprise. Had you been curious in your writing about motherhood, or perhaps motherly relationships, before becoming pregnant yourself?

I was carpooling from Los Angeles to my desert home with a very charming young lady when the subject of “our mothers” came up. We joked that we would have to travel to Vegas and back in order to cover the topic. While this was our joke, we actually missed three of our exits (adding an hour to our drive time).

The subject of motherhood is engrossing, but it isn’t glamorous. There is a lot of shit and piss involved—a lot of self reckoning. (For example, I will need to pay 50 cents to the cuss jar for having used bad words in answering this question.). As much as I succeed as a mother, I fail. This puts a whole new perspective on the generations that came before. I’m curious about mothers the way I am curious about poetry—so the two have a tendency to come together in my work.

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

Right now I’m in love with the word “collaboration.” I’ve asked my friends to dress-up like cowboys and write a book with me about the California ghost town Bodie. Will it work? I don’t know, but I know the experience of writing along side voices (whose poetry gives me goose bumps) will be amazing. Plus, I love to play dress-up.

My pet project is a blog called “The Bees’ Knees.” There are a workshop spaces, poetry raffles, a salon, editor interviews, and guest essays on poetics. It is a poetry slumber party that everyone is invited to: http://nicelledavis.wordpress.com/

I am also determined to learn how to write a review that will lead people to a book.

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

Oh, man. Where to start? Where to end? Michael Ondaatje and Graham Green are amazing. Lorine Niedecker is a new love affair. Just found Rimbaud and have been kicking myself for not having read him sooner. There is always Rilke, C.D. Wright, Brenda Hillman, Charles Wright, and I don’t want to stop but should.

For the record, “my boys” will always be Stephen Crane and Nathaniel West. No other writer will possess my heart like they do.

As for new releases…there is so much good writing happening right now that it is impossible for me to name every title.  We really are living in a time of great art—I feel so lucky to be an observer. Just to name a few authors from my cohort I would say read Ching-In Chen, Adam Gallari, Alba Hacker, Alexis Vergalla, and Kate Durbin. They are all very talented writers—and good friends (the are miracles really).

[Interview by Liana Imam]