Grist

The Journal for Writers

Exquisite Desolation: Emily Fridlund’s Catapult | Review by Sarah Appleton

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Emily Fridlund has had an eventful year: her novel The History of Wolves was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and her short story collection, Catapult, won Sarabande Books’s Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Ben Marcus. Fridlund’s short stories are riveting; they tantalize in their description and submerge readers in the ominous, off-kilter world of her characters.

Fridlund entrances the reader right from the start of each story. “My wife could take your skin off with one glance, she was that excruciating,” begins the opening story, “Expecting.” This bluntness is characteristic of her narrators and their opening lines, and the underlying threat leaves little room to doubt that darkness will follow. These openings often skirt the plot’s central tension and speak instead to the narrator’s root of or excuse for their present situation, illuminating a quality of the character that tips toward deranged by the end of the story. “It wasn’t my husband that wanted the bear, it was me,” the narrator opens “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” a story about a couple starting a lodge and attempting to start a family too, although they are divided on this. In the titular story, the adolescent narrator says, “That summer I was reading vampire books, so when Noah said no to sex, I let myself pretend that’s what he was. I told myself: inside his mouth is a hallway to death.” Of course, the whole story, then, is about sex and not about sex, about a girl teetering on the cusp of not-quite-womanhood. As these opening lines demonstrate, the lines work to frame the character’s already off-kilter world, which tilts further as the plot progresses.

Perhaps the most unifying characteristic of the collection’s eleven stories are the fraught relationships between characters—husbands and wives, best friends, parents and children, those who are thrown together by circumstance, characters who are often waiting or stalled in a liminal space. In “Expecting,” the narrator thinks of his son’s pregnant girlfriend, “She looks devastated by her body. I tell her she looks nice because I’m afraid for her.” Later, when the baby is born, the characters are discomfited by her aloofness, her decidedly unbaby-like qualities. “She reminds me of my wife,” the narrator thinks, “and I pray that the baby will never learn to talk, never wobble onto her feet so she can walk away…We call her ‘the baby’ to her face to make ourselves feel better.” Before the baby, two females walked out of the narrator’s life, and this sense of isolation and being left behind pervades the collection. It recurs in “Here, Still.” The narrator thinks, “With most people in my life, I come to the end of myself pretty fast. I walk to my borders—where there’s dinner on a dropleaf table, maybe small talk or sex—then wave politely and turn back. [My best friend] made me sorry there wasn’t anywhere better to go.” This narrator, like others, is more than arm’s length from those around her, fundamentally incapable of forging a human connection with those she ought to be closest to, who love her most.

Characters also experience fraught relationships with their selves. “I was still holding out hope that my body could go back to being what it was a year ago, effortless and completely forgettable,” the narrator of the titular story says, “but that was starting to seem less and less likely.” Her thought belies her vulnerability, but smacks of Fridlund’s precise description, too, which enables readers to feel, like the narrator, the “effortless and completely forgettable” body she once had. In “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” a guest visiting the lodge gets drunk and tells the story about leaving his mother to die in an avalanche.  “‘I just wanted to survive,’” he says, “‘but now I can’t do nothing. I’m a napkin. I’m rust.’” The guest’s description of himself moves from something disposable to something already decayed, a description which rings with exceptional eloquence.

Fridlund also stuns readers with the preciseness and concision of her characterization: “Her mother is in her fifties, widowed, loyal to horoscopes. She is afraid of making decisions that work against her fate,” from “Time Difference,” and “I thought of how Tom combed his hair before he came to bed, the way he once wore swimming goggles in a snowstorm,” in “Here, Still.” Fridlund wrenches readers most, however, with her salient descriptions of the human condition and the relationships we cultivate. “Childhood, by then, had been sucked dry by the unremitting soullessness of adolescence,” the newly-teenaged narrator laments in the titular story. In “Time Difference,” the narrator notes, “The problem with living with someone is that your every act can be transformed into another example of their larger theory of you,” a sentence which may well sum up the experiences and relationships of most of the collection’s narrators given their insularity.

One of the most striking pieces of the collection, “Gimme Shelter,” is distinctive because it’s composed of short vignettes that build a life, and ultimately disorient the reader as the narrator, Lynn, becomes increasingly unreliable. The story is anchored by the house she grew up in and the family it once contained. In the second vignette, Lynn recounts a dream in which the house has a 19th century library that her parents have hidden from her and her siblings. She professes to understand “that [her parents] were just a little cruel, to hide the best room in the house from their children.” Although her parents have done no such thing, the sentiment sticks despite the apparent normalcy of her childhood. From this moment, Lynn’s psychological state seems to slowly and subtly deteriorate. In the end, Fridlund circles back to the structure of a house. Lynn, reminiscing with her siblings at her father’s funeral, reflects on the game of their mother’s invention they played as children: “it seemed possible to Lynn for a brief instant that no other reality had in fact ever fully existed for any of them, that there had only ever been that old car on the highway with all of them inside, each locked in their chosen rooms, and she wondered in anguish and awe how many times she would forget and have to remember this again.” Lynn reveals how isolated she’s felt all along, thereby becoming another of Fridlund’s isolated narrators despite their proximity to people who love them.

In short, Fridlund’s collection is a riveting read, and the blow of one last line leads to the scintillating opening sentence of the following story. At times, Fridlund may push her original detail a little too far, distracting readers from the central tensions of a scene rather than enriching them. This, however, is not the norm; on the whole, the collection is so enthralling that it can be read in one go, but its stories are so devastating that one yearns to read them repeatedly. “It’s all too staged, too obvious to talk about,” the frustrated narrator of “Lock Jaw” thinks. Like the narrator’s situation, these stories are conspicuously staged, set against desolate, decrepit backdrops, peopled with isolated, off-kilter characters. And yet, these stories are far from being too obvious to talk about. They are exactly what we should be saying.

 

Catapult: Stories
by Emily Fridlund
Sarabande Books, 2017
 ISBN: 978-1946448057
240 pp. / $15.95

 

 

 

 

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Sarah Appleton earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University. Her writing projects focus on memory, family, and feminism. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Kingswood School where she lives with  her fiancé and beautiful Australian Shepherd, Zoë. You can find her@sarahkapples on Twitter.

“Henry Puts the Casual Back in Casualty”: Conor Bracken’s Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour | Review by Allison Pitinii Davis

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In Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger takes the speaker on a surreal tour of international atrocities. The collection’s absurdism deglorifies and satirizes Kissinger and his neo-imperialist policies. By posing as Kissinger’s lover, the speaker inhabits a self-incriminating position. This suggests that Kissinger represents both himself but also the oppressor in all Americans—we all are complicit in his crimes. The dark humor in this collection cuts both ways—by the end, to accuse Kissinger is to accuse the self.  

The title—a play on Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour—foreshadows the themes of war and love. The collection’s 19 poems place readers in the aftermaths of military campaigns and state terror, especially Cold-War-era Operation Condor (1968–1989). The collection situates Kissinger’s involvement in the operation in the larger context of historic atrocity through its exploration of the Nazi-led Oradour-sur-Glane massacre (1944) and Papal-led Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). These poems aestheticize the banality of evil—in “My First Day in Argentina,” “The Albigensian Crusade,” and especially in “A Short History of Operation Condor,” Kissinger and the speaker commemorate human suffering by gorging themselves on food, capitalism, white supremacy, and each other: 

We fed each other delicacies with dirty hands— 
dulce de leche under our nails, beefy 
sinews between our teeth. We flossed 
with the flags of every country but our own. 

We bought islands we couldn’t even stripmine.  
We were white and alive and in love 
with the little pulse in each other’s wrist 
that went give and take and give and take 

and take take take take take take take. (5, 9-17) 

Eating and loving are conflated with exploiting—Kissinger cannot act without exploiting. He is depicted as a system that converts every movement into acquisition. Even when giving, Kissinger is taking, as if every act he commits is surrounded by an absolute value sign that ensures that he ends up on top. Tonally, from the title onward, the collection forces language into a similar machine—no matter how violent the atrocity, the high-satire allows the collection to discuss it like it’s mundane. The result is that Kissinger and the speaker’s language itself commits an atrocity: it makes the immoral tonally moral. The form of the collection enacts its contents: for Kissinger and the speaker, “We bought islands we couldn’t even strip-mine” is an act of giddy luxury. For the reader who is in on the satire, it is a chance to get deeper into the psychology of evil than a more solemn collection would have allowed. Allowing the reader in this close is uncomfortable, and that is a success of the book. Bracken doesn’t hide behind self-righteousness, and in result, he doesn’t allow his readers to find refuge in their own feelings of innocence. This is a collection that asks us to look at and listen to Kissinger only to realize that Kissinger is a mirror, an echo.  

Speaking of looking at Kissinger, the speaker does it a lot, and in this collection about mass murders, it is significant that the body we see most mangled is Kissinger’s. Perhaps the most provocative poem is “Henry Makes a Suggestion.” Kissinger’s suggestion is that the speaker turns Kissinger’s body into a canoe. The list of specifics is funny until we reach the skin: 

His legs the oars, an arm the tiller, 
the ribs and spine a sturdy frame over which 
to stretch and batten the skin 
I’ll have to shave and tan and oil first (15, 3-6) 

These lines that ask the reader to imagine Kissinger’s skin being stretched and tanned cannot avoid asking the reader to think about the irony of Kissinger’s history. Kissinger, born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1923, fled Nazi persecution in 1938. These lines recall the popular accusation that Nazis—most famously, Ilse Koch—made lampshades out of the skin of concentration camp inmates. Kissinger extended the cruelty to others that Nazis wanted to extend to him and his family—he narrowly escaped persecution only to persecute others. These lines suggest that perhaps Kissinger has awareness of this, and this poem is as close as Kissinger comes to admitting guilt. 

Kissinger’s dehumanized body situates Kissinger’s irony within a larger historical lesson: the oppressed can become the oppressor.  In the final poem of the collection, “The Vulgar Luxury It Is to Be,” the speaker enacts Kissinger’s violence when he kills a chicken and imagines, to relieve his guilt, that the chicken wanted to die. The speaker believes, like Kissinger, that he has the right to transform his victim’s suffering into a larger narrative about the oppressor’s suffering. The speaker imagines that his own hunger “is a sacrament/even this chicken knelt to take.//I believe I am owed this” (35, 25-17). Kissinger and the speaker (and thus, the reader) become one, and the collection intentionally leaves the reader with nowhere to wash our hands of the union. 

 

Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour
by Conor Bracken
Bull City Press, 2017
 ISBN: 978-1-4951-5768-4
48 pp. / $12.00

 

 

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Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017) and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. She holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in Best American Poetry 2016, Crazyhorse, The New Republic, The Bind, The New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD student at The University of Tennessee.

Seeking Stars: Jordan Rice’s Constellarium | Review by Hannah Widdifield

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In her debut collection of poetry, Jordan Rice guides readers through the transformative process of being and becoming. The central topic at hand is Rice’s transition from biologically male to female, but as the title of her collection suggests, this is only one in a series of processes of change, not only for herself, but for anyone engaged in living. These processes, regardless of how we try to tidy and organize them, are perhaps only fully appreciated when they are spread out before us so that we may make our own myths and tales out of self-constellations.

Divided into four sections, Constellarium begins with a series of poems wherein Rice wrestles directly with her personal transition and gender identity at both a conceptual and actualized level. The opening poem’s engagement with the mundane experience of laser hair removal transcends to profundity as it invokes the fear, pain, and visceral sensation of transformation as she smells the stubble on her face singe.

The second section confronts identity, bodily integrity, and the struggles that surround its realization in a more indirect fashion, offering poem topics that range from the strain of military service to the Columbia space shuttle disaster. “Inheritance” sees the poet struggling to reconcile not merely her gender identity with her body, but her body to her spirit. The poem addresses the gravity of violent death, invoking brutal wound imagery, all the while quietly philosophizing about the material barrier that a body can be, separating our soul selves from the rest of the world: “Even if a bullet strikes us dead center, we can still fire back, though the body in shock won’t hear a room flash into silence.”

Passover, the next section, is the shortest of all, comprised of only three poems, and is perhaps the most challenging to place within the narrative of the collection as a whole. Addressing both war and a sort of family-tradition-religion triad, this section maintains a nervous energy that compliments its erratic organization. The poem “Passover” is no longer a biblical tale, but is replaced with stories of a family trip and an uncle far away in battle. The poems within this segment serve as a refreshing reminder that not all experience can be trimmed and fit into a grander narrative and must be accepted in its raw and ragged form.

The fourth section sees Rice at her most experimental in terms of format, but also includes perhaps the most painful of her verses. Calling upon violent experiences like sexual abuse and kidnapping, the poet situates her own painful struggles in the context of the world’s painful struggles. And yet, the section and the collection end with “Saudaude,” a salve for the soul, which is Rice’s most easily graceful poem. In it, she recounts her pre-transition loss of virginity to a young woman she genuinely cared for in a hotel that the young woman’s father owned. The narrative is tender and uncomplicated: the highest bit of conflict is the threat of being caught by the girl’s father. In it, Rice’s past self already knows how necessary the moment will be in getting through her future struggles. She implores herself: “Remember her palms placed together on your chest, and her breath at your shoulder, past the men she will love and those she will take as lovers, the nights you lie alone and begin to regret.” This final poem is a rich foil to an earlier poem in the collection that talks of her child who will gain a mother, but ultimately lose a father once Rice transitions. “Saudaude,” however, encapsulates the essential opposite of regret, whatever that may be—nostalgia, reverie, or a quiet and simple love of a moment of beauty from another life.

Constellarium
by Jordan Rice
Orison Books
ISBN 978-0-9906917-7-8
90 pp.  /  $16.00

 

 

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Hannah Widdifield is a modernist and a disability studies scholar currently working on her PhD in literature, criticism, and textual studies. As a disabled scholar, she is interested in exploring the ways that modernity shapes societal conceptions of disability.

Wings and Scythes: An Interview with Kristin Robertson About Craft and Her Debut Poetry Collection, Surgical Wing | By Hank Backer

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Kristin Robertson published her collection, Surgical Wing, with Alice James Books in May of 2017.  It is available for purchase here.  Kristin and I attended the Creative Writing Program at Georgia State University simultaneously, and I was lucky enough to see some of the poems in her collection early in their development across several workshops.  I’ve loved Kristin’s poems ever since I encountered them in workshop: dark, alluring, fully invoking whatever mythos she seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of, and, above all, expertly crafted.

Hank: I’d like to ask some questions about the forms used in your collection.  If Surgical Wing is to be believed, you see the world in perfectly balanced couplets.  When in the writing process does a poem become couplets for you, and when did you, as a writer, discover the couplet?  Is the couplet a form particular to Wing, or do you think you’ve found your style with the couplet? Are the poems you’re currently writing in couplets?

Kristin: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the book. I started writing in couplets less for the effect of the two lines together and more for the breath, for the white space. I find line breaks more exciting and meaningful when I write in couplets. I also enjoy reading poems in couplets, so maybe I was trying to write what I like to read. They work for the collection to suggest pairs of wings and, yes, a balance—life and death, love and loss, all of that. These days, if I write a draft in couplets, I will rework it in a few ways to see how the poem changes. I guess you could say I’m practicing some conscious uncoupling…

 

Hank: The other form used frequently in Wing are sonnets (do you think of them as sonnets, by the way?) all with the title “Clinical Trial: Human with Wings.” They bookend each section wonderfully; can you talk a bit about how these poems came to you as a writer? Was the manuscript pretty much complete before you started writing these, or did these poems develop naturally along with the whole collection?

Kristin: There’s something so satisfying about the fourteen-line poem and the vestigial sonnet form. In addition to the series, “Red-Winged Blackbirds” is an English sonnet. There are a few blank verse poems in the book as well. I always saw the “Clinical Trial” poems working together as a series, and they were published as one before the book came out, but I wrote them at different times while working on the manuscript. As I was putting it together, I suspected these persona poems, written from the point of view of human beings who undergo plastic surgery to get wings, were going to be a departure from the rest of the book. In the end, though, they do the work of introducing this convergence of human poems and bird poems.

 

Hank: There’s a distrust, I think, of men in this collection; or maybe an interest in men one ought not to trust?  Browning’s Duke from “My Last Duchess,” for instance, makes an appearance in “Audubon Ate His Birds,” Hitchcock and his birds haunt your letter to Tippi Hedren, and a sadistic, knot-obsessed lover occupies the mind of the speaker in “Blue Herons.”  Do you think these poems address a particular concern to an audience in 2016, or as Susan Chira called it, the year feminism lost, or are these poems about something older than the duke’s inability to stoop?  Does the responsibility of the poet somehow change when “feminism loses”?

Kristin: I wouldn’t say the book is about a distrust of men, but I do try to explore the deep gulf of understanding between the sexes. The manuscript was accepted for publication back in 2015, though what you’re talking about with regard to feminism still holds true. We have been fighting the same fights for a long time. If Surgical Wing is particularly relevant in a conversation with regard to politics, I would say it’s the health care crisis.

Kristin: Does the poet have a responsibility to change? I don’t think so. Others have spoken so eloquently about how every poem written today is political. To be vulnerable to wonder is a political act. But you actually ask the question a bit differently: Does the responsibility of the poet change? What a poet writes won’t change necessarily, but the role of the poet might. People are reading poetry—perhaps more now than they have in decades. Take a look at the list of books coming out this year and in 2018 that are either directly or indirectly responsive to issues involving race, immigration, sexuality, the opioid epidemic. It’s an unbelievable time to be a reader of poetry.

 

Hank: Two poems seem related to me, and possibly both could be read as ars poetica.  Both poems involve a creative process other than writing, and describe that process in a way, I think, that can teach us about writing: ceramics in “Loon” and photography in “Nampa–Sha.”  I ask mainly because the line “We settled into desks, scattered like floating driftwood,/ and again etched feathers into clay with X-Acto knives” so perfectly conveys your precise use of language throughout the collection—do these poems describe your writing process?  Can you talk a bit about that process in more general terms?

Kristin: Separating poets into two broad camps with regard to revision—those who don’t revise enough and those who revise too much—I am definitely in the latter. Like a sculptor who chisels and shapes a lump of clay until only a tiny nub remains, I kill so many poems by cutting and editing until they lose their spark, their lifeblood. I imagine the other side doesn’t fare much better, though. Revision is a necessary scythe.

Kristin: I’m pretty organized in some areas of writing and publishing, but my process for keeping track of drafts needs work. I have had to use Submittable several times to recover an earlier draft of a poem, which might answer a follow-up question about whether I revise poems after I have submitted them to journals. When is a poem finished? Pretty much never.

 

Hank: “Haint Ceilings” seems to me to be the perfect gothic poem—the speaker is occupied in a domestic task, remembering the suicides she’s witnessed before the poem reveals what’s really haunting the speaker.  How we perceive, describe, and protect ourselves from horror is a generative subject for you as a writer.  Is this obsession particular to you, or to Southern writers, or are we writers in general just a bunch of morbid folk?

Kristin: A few folks have talked about the book having hints of the Southern Gothic and magical realism, which is pretty damn cool. It is a haunted book. Only when I was ordering the manuscript did I see the missing girl, who appears in poems like “Audubon Ate His Birds,” “Leaving Coins on the Mouths of Cadavers at Emory Hospital, a Defense,” “Hyoid Bone,” and “Clinical Trial, Day 7,” both as a universal speaker for the book and also as a ghost, a girl like James Wright’s Jenny whispering over our left shoulder, “Take care now, / Be patient, and live.” One of my editors and I discussed whether to include “Haint Ceilings.” It fits in the section, and in the end I opted for a bird in the hand, but right now I’m working on more poems about growing up in the South and Southern myths. So, to answer your last question: yes, yes, and yes.

 

Hank: A maybe slightly related question: you occasionally switch to the second person: “Haint Ceilings,” “Swan Song,” and “You’re About to Fold a Paper Airplane” all use the second person pronoun.  What makes a poem a second person poem for you?  Second person poems feel, to me, directive and slightly disassociated from the narrative.  Is the second person especially helpful when writing in a Gothic mode, or is there something else that makes you switch perspective?

Kristin: There’s such controversy over that second person pronoun. I understand the argument about the “you” taking the place of a first-person speaker and the author’s reasons for avoiding the “I.” The second person can be useful as long as it doesn’t feel lazy. These three poems are directives, as you point out. I do think you’re right about the disassociation, too. I will make you the subject of my poem on occasion, but I have replaced the second person in drafts as well, more than likely to the benefit of the poems.

 

Hank: “Loon,” “Scar,” and “Bonfire” all deal with the speaker as a child: do you find a young speaker to be a generative subject for your poems?  “Scar” and “Bonfire” seem to reflect on your childhood as a memory, and “Loon” exists more completely in an art classroom.  All three, however, as Dr. Bottoms would say, are dynamite poems.  Do you plan on exploring your childhood more in future collections?

Kristin: Thanks—maybe I should! I don’t set out to write about my childhood, but it creeps in. Years ago when writers started bristling at the idea of confessional poetry and fighting that label, there was a lot of shifting away from writing about the personal life, childhood in particular. Some poets never stopped, and I admire them for it. These days I say to hell with the fear of being called a confessional poet. The current state of this world necessitates the claiming of one’s individual, human experience and telling about it.

 

Hank: Finally, I just want to say congratulations on publishing this collection with such a prestigious press.  I found myself engrossed and researching birds and awful dudes.  So, my final question—you’ve done birds and surgery.  What’s next?  Is your next collection going to be themed around some central idea or life event?  I remember Louise Glück telling our creative writing class not to worry about the collection as we wrote poems, that poems from a single mind will naturally coalesce into a collection—as I look over my work, I wonder if she underestimated how scatterbrained I was.  Do you worry about the big picture when you write poems?  When did you start with Wing, and what are you working on now?

Kristin: I guess if you set out to write a project book and you research something to that end, then you would have the bigger picture in mind, but I don’t think about it when writing individual poems. I usually don’t even think about the bigger picture of the poem itself. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. I like discovering similarities in a bunch of poems from one author. In a creative writing workshop, I’ll sometimes ask the students to submit poems anonymously, and they’re surprised when I can identify who wrote each poem. Poets all have tells. They’re what make a reader fall in love and keep coming back to more of their work.

Kristin: Right now, I’m mostly reading. I started writing the poems in Surgical Wing in earnest when I began the PhD program, but some of the poems are revisions and reimagined pieces from years before that. As a writer who isn’t especially prolific, I don’t expect to put together a new collection anytime soon. I read somewhere that an accomplished poet—I can’t remember now who it was—writes four poems per year, so that’s my current benchmark: one poem per season, one per chamber of the heart, one per section of a waffle.

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Kristin Robertson is the author of Surgical Wing (Alice James Books, 2017). Her poetry appears recently in The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. She has received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Lucille Clifton Memorial Scholarship to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Tennessee, the University of New Orleans, and Georgia State University. Kristin lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Hank Backer teaches English at the University of Tennessee.  He recently graduated from Georgia State University’s creative writing program, where he worked as an assistant editor for Five Points and a poetry editor for New South.  He’s been previously published in Red Paint Hill, Loose Change, Sixty Six: A Journal of Sonnet Studies, and The Rectangle.

Emerging Writer—Jason Schossler

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JasonSchosslerJason Schossler’s first book of poetry, Mud Cakes, is due out from Bona Fide Books in 2011. He is the inaugural recipient of Bona Fide’s Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize, and the 2009 winner of Reed Magazine’s Edwin Markham Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in The Sun, North American Review, and The Antioch Review.

[Grist]: Many earlier poets held professional careers outside academia–Williams the doctor or Stevens the insurance VP, for example. But that trend has changed in the last fifty or sixty years as poets have more commonly embraced the academy. You yourself work as a freelance legal journalist. What are the advantages of working in a field separate from poetry, the academy, and how does your professional experience inform your writing?

[Schossler]: Freelance writing doesn’t really inform my poetry. But the lifestyle does. It frees me up to make my own writing a priority. After college I worked full-time as an editor for a legal news publisher and I remember how drained I felt trying to write creatively after an eight-hour day at the office. All I wanted to do was fall asleep in front of The Simpsons. So after two years there I decided I’d had enough. I took the bull by the horns. I stepped down from my office with a window and negotiated a deal to freelance for the company while earning my M.F.A. in Fiction Writing at Temple University. Things went well, and here I am, years later, doing pretty much the same thing for money that I did during graduate school. I also have kept my foot in the door of academia by working as an adjunct professor at Temple. That’s where I see a correlation to my own work. There’s a troubleshooting component to analyzing a piece of writing by a student. You often need to access where the language or structure is breaking down and figure out how it can be reworked. So it goes with poetry. I always tell my students that writing is all about revision. The better ones are often aware of that or quick to accept it. Guiding and encouraging promising young writers is a great gig. Plus it gets me out of the house and talking so I don’t become that guy in a robe who grunts and half nods at his neighbors when fetching the morning newspaper off the porch. The obvious drawback to freelancing and adjunct teaching is that money can get tight as jobs come and go. I’ve eaten a lot of spaghetti. But right now I wouldn’t have it any other way.

[Grist]: Your work covers some diverse ground. Many poems speak in the personal mode, telling what might be considered “autobiographical” stories about family/childhood. Others, such as “For Wile E. Coyote,” engage an imaginary persona. Throughout it all, your work demonstrates a fondness for pop culture—Wonder Woman, Wile E. Coyote, The Karate Kid, and Star Wars (in particular). Would you begin by speaking to your aesthetics in terms of this diversity? What do you feel is gained by this engagement? How does pop culture contribute to your aesthetics–to what you hope to accomplish via poetry?

[Schossler]: Drawing on pop culture is something I’ve done for years now with increasing frequency. Back when I was an undergraduate I held a secret desire to write about the Millennium Falcon or Gene Simmons. But I also wanted to be taken seriously and felt that a five-stanza meditation on the moon of Endor could be the kiss of death with literary editors. So I just carefully picked my places–a child narrator glancing at his Darth Vader wristwatch in a short story; an allusion to Superman in a poem. It wasn’t until around 2004 that I started taking my fandom seriously after talking with poet Daniel Nester when we were both artists-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Dan had just published God Save My Queen: a Tribute, and I really admired how he had taken his fanaticism with the band and turned it into a suitable topic for poetry. I also found it very encouraging that he had found success coming from a similar aesthetic. Nostalgia is a very strong emotion in art. It can serve as a kind of backstage pass to a collective generational memory. But in my case I think it’s more than that. I don’t think there is a way for me to accurately evoke my childhood without bringing pop culture into the mix because it was such a big part of my experience growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We were the MTV and Atari generation. The death of Mr. Hooper in 1982 was something of a cultural touchstone for us. In those days cable television was still considered a novelty. And I’m willing to bet I wasn’t the only teenage boy in America who tiptoed downstairs after midnight to catch a pair of boobs on Cinemax. Of course the trick to writing about these common experiences is not to assume too much. For every reader out there who knows Kashyyyk is the name of Chewbacca’s home planet, there is another who doesn’t know Han Solo from a ham sandwich and couldn’t care less. So in the end the poem still has to work on its own accord and not depend on nostalgia in order for it to have emotional resonance.

[Grist]: Nostalgia can be a tricky emotion in art, and not just because of a reader’s lack of familiarity with a reference. As you note, it can’t be depended on as the core emotion of a poem. However, its use seems advantageous to your project, so what can nostalgia add to a poem? How can it be advantageous to the emotional resonance and, simultaneously, how do you avoid the obvious pitfall of sentimentality?

[Schossler]: I never use nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Sure, it’d be nice to find a way to work my old rope swing or my grandfather’s hunting dog Gretchen into every poem that I write. But that isn’t very interesting, per se. Instead nostalgia is better utilized when it evokes a particular time and place, not only to add texture to the poem, but also to put things into a larger emotional or thematic context. I know for a fact I wasn’t the only kid on the block who heard Budweiser’s “bring out your best” jingle echoing in my ears every time I ran with the football. On one hand that’s just a fun and quirky coincidence. But on the other, an argument could be made that it reveals maybe a larger pattern in our culture, how, even at an early age, we are encouraged more and more to construct our identities through entertainment and consumption. I never start off thinking about these kinds of connections. I start with a memory or idea, toy with it every which way, and then go from there. I might recognize that a nostalgic element is ripe with cultural significance, and sometimes I will exploit it if it enhances what I’m trying to achieve with the poem.

[Grist]: You began your writing career publishing fiction. How does that preparation in narrative inform your work, and how does the act of story-telling involve your sense of nostalgia?

[Schossler]: My roots in fiction probably have a lot to do with why my poems are so often driven by narrative. Though I do sometimes break away from it, I’m generally a creature of story. I think that’s why I’m such a big fan of the poetry of Raymond Carver. That same accessible narrative voice in his prose is very much alive in his verse. More important I think studying writers like Carver and learning to craft my own stories taught me an appreciation for the economy of language. I’ve always been a stickler for details, and as I developed as a fiction writer I found myself becoming increasingly interested in getting every word precisely right. It was this kind of intense focus, a meditation of sorts, that made poetry very appealing to me. I wanted to start breaking down the littlest moments. It wasn’t enough anymore to simply write that the evening was “thick with fat mosquitoes.” In Northeastern Ohio we called them “Canadian Soldiers.” And how could I possibly talk about Canadian Soldiers without mentioning the way they made Rickey Henderson crazy in left field when the Athletics were in town to play the Indians? These kinds of things are rich with possibility, and sometimes significance, but they clog up a story. So I started giving them their own stage away from the traditional demands and expectations of storytelling. I soon learned, of course, that poetry comes with plenty of rules and demands all of its own. But I still find it incredibly liberating in its immediacy and intimacy. I have a hard time believing I could ever write an entire story about mosquitoes. Plus, seriously, who would want to read that, other than my mom? A poem is another matter. It lets you dive right into things and get out before you overstay your welcome.

[Grist]: Speaking of narrative and nostalgia, would you be willing to speak about your experiences at writing colonies? How do they fit into your practice as a writer, and how have they shaped what and how you write?

[Schossler]: My process tends to stay the same when I’m at a colony. Because I am able to write nearly daily at home, I keep my regular hours while I’m in residence and take advantage of the rest of the time by getting to know some of the other fellows. Being at a place like the Ragdale Foundation or the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts is a tremendously enriching experience. It gives you the rare opportunity to meet writers and artists and composers at various stages in their careers who are just as serious about their craft as you are. Fellow residents also tend to be very warm and supportive regardless of their level of accomplishment and are eager to provide feedback on each other’s work. Then there’s fellows who don’t want to talk shop at all, but are very happy to sit down to a game of Scrabble after dinner. I’ve now been to VCCA on four different occasions and can say with some authority that the visual artists tend to be ruthless when it comes to board games. Talk about pressure. One evening I caught a pretty famous novelist–who will go nameless–hide the “Q” under her leg because she didnÕt want to get stuck with it at the end of the game. Considering I had just turned over an E tile to use it as a blank, I didn’t rat her out. We were playing against two painters. It’s a writer thing.

[Grist]: Jason, thank you for sharing your poems and your thoughts with us. What might we look forward to seeing from you in the near future?

[Schossler]: I’m happy to say I am the winner of the 2010 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize. The award includes the publication of my first book of poetry, Mud Cakes, due out in 2011 from the award’s sponsor, Bona Fide Books. It also comes with a free trip to Lake Tahoe for a reading to kick off the book’s publication. The Editor and Publisher, Kim Wyatt, notified me only a few weeks ago about the prize, and I am still trying to get my mind around it. For years I dreamed of writing a collection of short stories or maybe a novel. The fact that my process transformed me into a poet, and has now brought me here, is surreal. One of the things I’m most thankful for, in addition to all of my family and friends who have supported me over the years, is that I had the time to go through this change, which, early on, was a real creative struggle. It also helped me find my voice. The six years it took me to write Mud Cakes wasn’t just about poetry for me. It was about finding the right balance between autobiography and nostalgia and good old fashioned white lies. That artistic symmetry I now enjoy so much is something that may lend itself to other projects in the future. Which, of course, will go undisclosed.