July 2017

Reading what people say about their work can be so helpful when it comes to thinking about craft. Here’s a few recent interviews:

1. Victoria Redel talks to The Rumpus about her new book:

“I believe we all have lists of shame. Long lists. We live with our constellation of shames quite privately. But they weigh us down. I wish I could abracadabra away shame. This is such a waste of our small time on earth. Our bodies are often the focus of shame. The shame of the body changing. Of the sexual body. Of the aging body. Not being able to do what you once could do. Even just looking at your skin as you age, the texture, the wrinkle, the sag, and somehow feeling ashamed and responsible for its changes. Illness enters, too. If you were a better person you wouldn’t be ill. Every failure of the body can become a personal indictment. Abracadabra, Gone, I shout again.”

2. Juan Martinez talking about his debut collection BEST WORST AMERICAN at The Rumpus:

“If there’s one thing I learned, one lifesaving element of fiction I’ve learned to be attuned to, is that I can get characters moving if they’re uncomfortable, and particularly if they’re uncomfortable in ways both physical and existential. So like eighty-five percent of my stories have this tendency toward the essayistic, which can be fun but only if the mind of the narrator has an itch, if there’s this uneasiness troubling the prose. I mean, I’m saying all this but the honest answer is that I’m someone is always a little uncomfortable—like, never quite at home in my own skin—and I find the stories therapeutic because it’s where I get to let that uneasiness breathe and be productive. It’s a way of finding comfort in the discomfort.”

3. Samantha Irby spoke to Hazlitt:

“I always hate everything I write as soon as it’s finished, especially once it’s published and there’s no chance to go back and fix it, make it better. I am also very uncomfortable looking back at older versions of myself. Everything embarrasses me, all the time. And there’s never a moment that I can look at something I’ve written without thinking, ‘That could be funnier. You could have used this word instead of that one. How could anyone have ever published this.'”

4. Elizabeth Crane talked to LARB:

““What if” is at the front of some significantly greater percent of the questions in my head on a daily basis. What would it be like to live in that house? What would it be like to be that person? You know, what would it be like for someone a lot like me (who has maybe spent some good time contemplating what seems like a real possibility of life without the energy resources we’re used to) if the apocalypse hit? (Alternate title: “Life Without Coffee Would Probably Suck.”) And both my novels began with what-ifs — my original idea for We Only Know So Much, when I thought it was going to be a short story, was: What would it be like if there were a family whose members existed so much in their own heads that they almost never had a conversation with anyone else in their family? Which could have worked in a short story but in a novel left me without a lot in the way of, you know, scenes. And with History, the initial question was: What if I could sit down with my (dead) mom and try to work a few things out? But you’re right, there is probably a bit more called for in the way of answers or insight for some of the characters in the novels than there is in the stories. Too many possibilities, to bring it back to that. Even in a novel that has an ending that can be seen more than one way, I hope the reader has the feeling of a satisfying resolution, even if it’s not tied in a bow, which will definitely never happen in anything I’ll write.”

5. Scott McClanahan talked to Fanzine:

” I could say I’ve exploited my family and the people I know for their stories. I’ve been like a vampire or a farmer that way. But at the same who else would write about these magnificent people except me. Most writers think they are singular people, but not me. I want to find the singular people and then chew them up for my fiction and be their witness. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded.”

6. Noah Cicero spoke with Electric Literature:

“Give it to the Grand Canyon took me nine months to write, 40,000 words. I go to Starbucks and put headphones on and listen to music — the same song over and over again. Go to Work I wrote mostly to “Rhyme” by Metallica. In Bipolar Cowboy, the songs in the book are the songs I was listening to — “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver, Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” Fleetwood Mac songs. I didn’t do that when I was young but now I do because I’m never going to be famous famous. (If someone gave me $80,000 and said ‘here’s a concept and a nice house to sit in,’ I could write on a Mac computer every day peacefully with a research assistant — the full-fledged Dave Eggers experience — and not listen to music.) When I wrote the Grand Canyon book, it was three-four times a week. I would go to Starbucks and sit for an hour and a half until I finished the coffee, about 1,100 words at a time. I don’t count the words, really, I count the sittings.”

7. Beth Ditto said some stuff to BUST:

“I am still uncomfortable with my voice. But when I was really young, when The Gossip first started out — I was 18,19 — all I wanted was to sound like Kathleen Hanna. But that wasn’t happening! I also had throat surgery to remove polyps from my vocal chords. That made my voice smoother, LIKE A LAAAYDAY.”

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016) and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). Joanna received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM, as well as an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of their writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Brooklyn Magazine, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, BUST, and elsewhere.