In this installment of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of memoir, my guest is Sandra Beasley, who has actually been featured at Beatrice before—in 2010, her poem “Making the Crane” appeared on the site as a way of introducing readers to her collection I Was the Jukebox. Now we’re talking about Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl, which combines the story of her own life experiences dealing with severe food allergies and a broader medical and cultural overview of what we know about allergies and how we deal with them as a society.

“Food isn’t just sustenance; it’s a way that we bond. And so if you think of all of the times in childhood, all the celebratory events, all the school-organized things—I mean, even the little things, like every month I would win the contest for reading the most books in my class, and my reward was a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. And, you know, in four years of elementary school, nobody ever thought to say, ‘Maybe the girl who’s allergic to pizza, that’s not the best reward…’ Food gets used in all of these different ways, and even now as a grownup, things like traveling on my own, things like dating, things like possibly thinking about having my own children or babysitting my friends’ small kids… it’s all affected by food.”

Listen to Life Stories #8: Sandra Beasley (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

For those of you who don’t know who Sara is, here’s a quick rundown: She’s a former editor-in-chief at Publishers Weekly, and used to run the books section at O Magazine; she’s also the author of So Many Books, So Little Time, a memoir detailing her attempt to read a book a week for an entire year. Although I never reported directly to Sara when I was writing for PW, I did have a fair amount of contact with her, and I’d also see her regularly at book fairs and writers’ conferences—in some cases, we’d be speaking on the same panels about making it in today’s book world… or, for that matter, whether today’s book world is going to make it. She loves books, and from what I’ve seen, she recognizes that books depend upon a thriving publishing industry, and a thriving retail market, if they’re going to flourish.

What does it mean, though, to be the “editorial director” of Amazon.com’s book section?

As some of you might know, I worked at Amazon.com’s book department in 1998 and 1999—not in the position that Sara just accepted, but one or two levels below it. And I hear where Jacket Copy book blogger Carolyn Kellogg is coming from, wondering if we can really call this an editorial gig. I don’t know how Amazon envisions Sara’s job as it exists today; what I can tell you about my job nearly 15 years ago was that my lateral colleagues and I did have a lot of what was called editorial autonomy in terms of choosing the books we wanted to promote, and the ways in which we got those books reviewed, whether we wrote the reviews ourselves or assigned them to freelancers. At the same time, we knew full well that we were working for a bookstore and that the overall mission was to sell books. So, recognizing that just about every book has an audience, I generally made sure to find a sympathetic reviewer for each book, somebody who could explain why you would like that book if you were the sort of person who would like that book. (It’s worth noting that I specifically managed—we didn’t say “curated” in those days—the politics and current events sections, so that specifically meant finding reviewers who could advocate for books that held positions antithetical to my own views.)

There were exceptions—I wrote a not-insignificant number of negative reviews when I was Amazon, for books that I believed were so awful that the responsible thing to do was explain why they were awful—and I never caught flak for that. As long as my section was selling books at a decent clip, and I coordinated with the “store-wide” promotions, I was left to my own devices. In retrospect, it seems obvious that I was in marketing, but that’s not the way we tended to think about it then, nor was it the way we were encouraged to think about it—even when Amazon introduced a co-op program, with publishers paying for sponsored placement of books, it was initially presented to the editors as something that would be integrated with their own sense of which books were worth featuring, not something to which their sensibility would need to conform.

The editorial team of Amazon.com Books was one of the departments targeted for layoffs in early 2000, in what looked from my then-outside perspective to be a shift in emphasis from Amazon.com’s “authority” as a source of book reviews to encouraging greater participation in the “community” of customer reviews. (This was around the time customer reviews started having that “Was this review helpful to you?” survey tacked on; I always suggested it would be a lot more interesting to have that question asked of the “staff” recommendations.) You could make a case for the pendulum swinging back in recent years: Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog was an interesting way of restoring a strong “editorial” voice. So when I see PW describe Sara’s new role as “[giving] a fresh look and voice to the books home page which may include writing a column and talking up books both on the site and at public events,” I have to admit, that sounds like an “ambassador of literature” to me. And though I’d always figured it should be a role that wasn’t linked to any one retail outlet, the reality of the situation is that Amazon.com is one of the biggest players in the book world, and one of the few capable of committing to the resources an ambassador of literature would need to have any meaningful impact. And, given my familiarity with Sara and her passion for books, I think there could be a lot to look forward to here. I wish her luck in the new position, and we’ll see what happens next!

Nick Antosca: We’ve probably only met in person three or four times, but we’ve known each other a while via the tubes. And now we have books coming out at the same time from Lazy Fascist Press—both pretty weird books. You co-authored Anatomy Courses with Sean Kilpatrick. Collaboration’s a tricky thing… I have a writing partner for film and TV work, but I’ve never tried it with fiction. How’d Anatomy Courses come about for you and Sean?

Blake Butler: Sean and I had known each other online for a while, I think, and talked a bit, but never really met or anything more than a handful of emails or such. I’d read his work, though, and felt really compelled by his tone and approach to sentences. We certainly shared a certain panache for the grotesque not just of image but of banging words together, I think. If I remember correctly I emailed him and mentioned that it might be fun to try to write something together, just to see what would happen. I don’t think we realized until somewhere in the middle we were writing what basically (in my mind) has the structure of a novel, though one destroyed of most everything but language and a few recurring ideas about the bodies and locations that the nastiness takes place in.

I think I sent him a page that would be the first page of the book in a document and then he wrote what ended up being the second page, and we just took turns like that back and forth over something like 10 months it seems like, each adding to where the other had left off, but always beginning a new page. We always alternated pages, and the way we seemed to take cues in the flow of it was more semantic, often, than plotwise; the ground continued shifting as we went, which made it fun. I learned a shitload watching Sean’s process: he’s a super meticulous editor, and a voracious revisor of his own work, in a different way than I am, and so each time I got the thing back I’d often find he’d gone through and fucked with sentences all throughout his prior parts, stacking them and beefing them out and manipulating the phrasing and the space. Sometimes he’d get so caught up on a single sentence he’d work on it a week and send it back with a note saying he didn’t want to hold me up, and I’d do mine in like an hour and send it back and he’d go into the sauna again; each iteration just kept getting more and more ornate and fucked and I loved it. We both did our thing and stole from each other and smeared each other around in our own passages, kind of forming a structure out of machine shit.

Finally one day he sent one of those couple of sentence sections saying he’d been staring at the sentence for a week and couldn’t stop tonguing it or something, and I read the sentence and it lopped my head off, and that was the end of the book. I don’t think we ever intended to make something publishable really, and I’m surprised we found a publisher in Lazy Fascist; and of course, once that came about, the revision circus went into hypermode for us both, and the book really started to eat itself.

What about The Obese? That book seemed to come out of nowhere for me, after Midnight Picnic. I hadn’t heard you were working on anything and began to wonder and then all of a sudden there was this new novel, seemingly much quicker than the gap between Midnight Picnic and the one before it, Fires?

Nick Antosca: If you look at the publication dates of my books, it probably seems like I just take three years to write these thin, odd little books, when in reality what’s happening is that I’m writing other books that never get published.

Between Fires and Midnight Picnic there was a weird, loopy novel that’s in a drawer somewhere; between Midnight Picnic and The Obese there was a bad novel that I discarded (a small section of it was the seed of The Obese, though), and then another novel that I wrote and love and have never been able to get published. After that, I started doing more screenwriting and moved to Los Angeles, and then in a very short period of time I wrote The Obese, harvesting an old idea that had been brewing. When I think about how much I’ve written versus how much I’ve actually published, I have to very quickly redirect my thoughts to happier things, because down that path lie madness and an application to law school.

The Obese was one of those ideas that comes to you and delights you even as you’re thinking, well, I can’t write that. Which means, of course, you have to write it. It comes from a conversation I overhead in which these two very skinny women in Bryant Square Park were talking vicious shit about a fat person they knew. And I’d been reading Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds.” So, that happened.

I know some people have been offended by The Obese. One lady on Twitter said she wanted to track me down and punch me in the face. I feel genuinely conflicted when I read stuff like that. There’s a part of my personality that really wants to please people and another part that is reckless and curious and wants to kick over anthills. But I also know it’s death to think, “This won’t offend somebody, will it?” while writing.

How much, if at all, do you think about the reader while you’re writing? Do you worry about sickening or offending readers? Do you worry about pushing them away with the density or opacity of your language, or do you primarily write for your own tastes? You write some seriously challenging stuff, both in terms of form and content; who are you writing for?

Blake Butler: I don’t think I think about who I am writing for beyond the instant, though I do think about writing in phases. Usually the first draft I am trying to think of nothing, to be completely removed even from myself. I’ve found the less I can not only know about what I’m doing, but also the less I try to control it beyond impulse and word to word shifts, the more happy I am with what comes out. It also leads to more interesting configurations of language, for me.

But I also tend to work in bursts and breaks. I like to get up a lot while I am typing and come back when I feel the mood hitting me again, and then stop again before I feel futile. The internet helps me in that way, in that it can be a palette cleanser (or destroyer), and I’m able to keep forgetting and coming back to newly the things I’m playing with.

Editing is also important, as are the jumps between those spurts, which is when I think I try to write like a reader: not like any reader, but by the reader that I am. I am trying to both surprise myself and defeat myself at once, which makes it keep pushing through me in a weird way. I trust myself enough that in the end it will either come out how I want, or I will delete it. Once I’m in the zone I’m pretty good at staying in the zone, for a project, though like you I also will throw off a lot of stuff that never ends up going anywhere. Controlling yourself as a reader, in the way of “Would I be interested in this if I hadn’t written it” is I think super important, and maybe not mentioned enough.

I’ve always found it awesome that you read so many screenplays. I know you also write a lot in that mode, and I wonder if studying the scripts and the films themselves and being active in that area affects how you write fiction?

Nick Antosca: Reading and writing screenplays has definitely affected my fiction-writing, but I’ve always had a “cinematic” sensibility anyway because I’ve watched movies obsessively—especially horror movies—since I was little. Put it this way—as a novelist I turn more to movies than to poetry for inspiration.

When I first started writing fiction, though, I didn’t believe I knew how to build a structured story. It seemed like math to me, and I’m bad at math, and also at planning. Or at least I was then. But screenplays require structure. In a screenplay you’re not really dealing with prose as an art—it’s strictly a tool—so your structure is your art (and to a much lesser degree, so is your dialogue), and I had never really regarded structure that way before. I guess I saw storytelling as a craft, like woodworking, not an art, which in retrospect feels laughabl naive/ignorant. Storytelling now seems to me the highest and most fundamental art.

Also, I feel like if you’re a fiction writer toiling away solo on your novel and you’re stuck on a tough passage/chapter/problem, you can find yourself edging toward what feels like a creative get-out-of-jail-free card—the desire to justify settling with a less-than-ideal solution by saying to yourself, essentially, Well, it’s not perfect but it’s ME, and this is my writing and mine alone, and when I read the great iconoclastic writers I like, sometimes the weird/messy/sloppy parts are the parts I like best, because only THEY could have written those. And that’s just your laziness talking. Writing for movies and TV, which is a very collaborative experience, teaches you not to cheat like that, because smart people you’re working with will point out the problems, and you will be forced to confront them until they are well and truly addressed. And that’s a good thing.

It’s always fun to switch from screenwriting to fiction writing and back again, because they exercise slightly different muscles. But it’s the same arm.

In this edition of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I chat with Jenny Lawson, also known as “The Bloggess,” about Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. We talked a lot about how the blog has connected her with her readers in very powerful ways, and about how she uses humor to write about painful experiences:

“I’ve always felt like if I don’t laugh at the things that are happening, especially the most tragic things, then they win. There have been very few points in my life when something happened that was so bad that I couldn’t laugh at it… Really, for me, humor has been a life raft. It’s helped me to get through it because whenever I feel like there’s no way that I’m going to be able to get over this, there’s something so freeing and wonderful about writing a joke about something that seemed like this terrible monster that cuts it down to size and makes it something that you can deal with…”

We also talk about how she got into collecting stuffed animals despite all the traumatic taxidermy-related incidents of her youth, and I let the interview run a few minutes longer than usual so she could tell the whole story about the time a PR agency tried to get her interested in a Kardashian wearing panty hose and wound up being embarrassed from one end of the Internet to the other. Good times!

Listen to Life Stories #7: Jenny Lawson (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

A few months back, I had the pleasure of meeting Wiley Cash at a luncheon his publisher, William Morrow, hosted to alert some folks to his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home. As he was telling us about the book, he mentioned something about the multiple first-person perspectives he used to tell the story—like an early chapter written in the voice of the local sheriff— and how he’d actually explored a few other possibilities from among the other characters, which he’d had to abandon for various reasons. And I thought to myself, “That’s a really cool insight. I bet a lot of people would be interested in hearing about this.” And, luckily for me, he thought it was a great idea as well.

“I didn’t know Pastor Chambliss had killed my big brother until later that night.”

This is the first line I ever wrote for what would become my first novel. It’s also the first voice I heard when I sat down to write the story; it belongs to Jess Hall, the nine-year-old younger brother of an autistic boy who’s smothered during a healing service in a little church in the mountains of North Carolina. The original plan was to write a short story from the perspective of Jess, a young boy who witnesses something he never should’ve seen, something he can’t quite understand. But then a strange thing happened; other characters wanted to speak—they wanted to tell their stories, they wanted the opportunity to defend themselves or to blame others or to apologize for the mess they’d made of things.

In this chorus of voices, I heard Adelaide Lyle, the eighty-year-old church matriarch and the community’s moral conscience. She wanted to tell me that she’d taken the children out of the church a decade earlier when the worship services turned deadly after a woman died from a snake bite. Adelaide wanted me to know that she felt responsible for the spiritual and physical wellbeing of the children under her watch, and that she never imagined such a tragedy could befall one of them. She wanted me to know that she’d stood up to Carson Chambliss once before, and she wanted me to understand that she wouldn’t be afraid to do so again.

I heard the voice of Clem Barfield, a local sheriff with his own painful past who’s called upon to solve the mystery of the young boy’s death. He wanted to tell me that he wasn’t from Madison County, that he’d always been an outsider, that he’d always been suspicious of the little church down by the river with the papered-over windows. He wanted me to know that his own life had been touched by tragedy years earlier when he lost his adult son, and he wanted me to understand that it takes a lifetime to build equity in loss, that only parents—not a church or a community—can fathom the pain of losing a child.

I heard the voices of other characters too. The first was Ben Hall, the boys’ father, a man whose pragmatic approach to the world left no room for miracles or the hand of the divine, a man who’d grown suspicious of his wife’s passion for the church and its mysterious leader. I felt Ben—I felt his confusion and his anger and his loss—and I could see him, red-faced and furious with his eyes full of tears as he tried to explain himself through his rage, but I couldn’t quite hear him as well as I heard the other characters. Perhaps this is because he lacked Jess’s emotional distance and confusion, Adelaide’s world-weary perspective, or Clem’s rational melancholy. Or perhaps I just couldn’t understand Ben, a man roughly my own age, because I don’t have children of my own, and like Clem says, I can’t imagine what it is to lose one.

I also heard the voice of Jimmy Hall, Ben’s father and the boys’ grandfather, a man who’d only recently returned home after decades away, a man who carried the burden of being indirectly responsible for the death of Clem’s son, a man whose rage could only be quelled by the booze that fueled it. Jimmy was a man who made excuses, a man who blamed others for his own poor decisions or indecision, a man who would never take responsibility for the pain he’d caused. Because of this, he wouldn’t stop talking, no matter how desperately I wanted him to. If I allowed Jimmy Hall a piece of the narrative pie, I knew he’d crack open a beer, light a cigarette, wait for his turn to speak, and then spill the beans about every major plot point from the beginning of the novel to the end.

“But Jimmy,” I’d say, “readers read toward discovery; they don’t want to be told what happens at the end as soon as they begin reading a novel.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Jimmy’d say, and he’d take another drag from his cigarette and spit something into the gravel at his feet, eyeing me the entire time as if he couldn’t quite trust me. The feeling was mutual.

By the time I realized that I couldn’t truly hear Ben’s voice and that I definitely couldn’t trust Jimmy’s, I’d already written hundreds of pages from their perspectives; I’d built important parts of the story based on knowledge only they possessed. There were things about their voices I loved, and that’s what made the decision to cut their narratives so painful. But, because it was so painful, I knew it was the right thing to do. I’ve never once regretted that decision.

Cutting those two voices from the manuscript left Jess, Adelaide, and Clem to tell the story, and once the revision dust settled I realized they were the only ones who could tell it. These were the only voices the reader needed to hear in order to understand the tragedy and the effect it had on the community. Jess’s voice bears witness to both his wonder at the power of faith and his guilt for questioning its role in his brother’s death. Adelaide’s voice resonates with the purity of belief, and hers is the only voice that can speak for the community as it attempts to heal. Clem’s voice is the voice of the skeptical mind, the mind that grasps toward a certainty grounded in fact and evidence. Perhaps Clem’s is the mind of the reader as well, a reader who understands what it is to be an outsider, who arrives on the scene after catastrophe has struck, who wades through a chorus of voices to uncover the truth.

In the sixth installment of Life Stories, my series of podcast interviews with memoir writers, I spoke with Kambri Crews about Burn Down the Ground, her account of growing up as the hearing child of deaf parents in a rural Texas community. One of the first things we talked about is what motivated her to tell this story:

“I work in the comedy business, and a lot of comedians—when they would find out about my story—they would kind of salivate, almost, over these awesome stories that I had, growing up in the wild, in the woods with these deaf people. Because they’re always mining their lives for material, their day-to-day lives or the past, to try to find something funny to say on stage. And here I’m sitting on this treasure trove of material, and not doing anything with it. Everyone just kept saying, ‘You’ve got to write a book, you’ve got to write a book!’”

It’s not all laughs, though: As her parents’ marriage falls apart, the teenage Crews is forced to observe as her father’s behavior turns increasingly violent—including a brutal assault on her mother that is dismissed as a routine matter by local law enforcement. Decades later, long after Crews had put her hometown behind her, she found out that her father was now being accused of attempted murder, and she needed to decide whether to steer the police towards the files on that earlier incident. (It’s not a spoiler when I tell you that the memoir is framed by a contemporary account of visiting her father in prison.) Because the interview took place shortly after the revelations that Mike Daisey had fabricated several of the details in his dramatic monologue “The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs,” we also talked quite a bit about the obligations of truth telling in memoir. It’s a great conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Listen to Life Stories #6: Kambri Crews (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

Love, An Index is the first collection of poems by Rebecca Lindenberg, and it depicts her relationship with another poet, Craig Arnold, who disappeared in 2009 while hiking on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabujima, where he was conducting research for a book of poems about volcanos. As she told The Believer, Lindenberg was well into the writing of the poems when Arnold vanished, “at that stage, as you can imagine, the direction of the book changed dramatically, as did my feeling of urgency about it.”

Lindenberg’s verse takes on a variety of forms in its encyclopedic examination of the emotional impact of losing a loved one, and of trying to carry on. Private lexicons, footnotes without an anchoring text, collected quotations, Facebook status updates—no one style can contain her grief, or her joy, or her memories. I was so glad when she agreed to be the first poet in far too long to contribute to Beatrice’s “Poets on Poets” series, and the insights she brings to Arnold’s poems in the essay that follows are powerful.

I have, in my life, many vital poetic influences. The effortless, energetic intelligence of Frank O’Hara, who moves so easily between erudition and emotion, between intimacy and spectacle, and who teaches me so much about how poetry—given a certain kind of permission—can play; D.H. Lawrence, who seems to hold a kind of arch lyricism in one hand and an almost grueling candor in the other; Anne Carson, whose writings define and defy genre, steeped equally in the profound mythic resonances of Classical scholarship and the serious whimsy of Gertrude Stein; C.D. Wright, whose infinitely inventive projects include some of the move evocative and muscular writings from a place of female physicality that I’ve ever read; the mad mystical intensity of Hart Crane; the fragmented ecstasies and invocations (and arguments) of Sappho; I feel I could go on and on.

I’m deeply influenced by magnificent teachers, some of whom could twist each other into paroxysms of disagreement, and I am influenced by my own negotiation of their disagreements. But for almost a decade I shared the central conversation about poetry in my life with a man who was first my friend, then my beloved partner, and always my favorite interlocutor on the subject, the late Craig Arnold, and it’s his work I wish to consider for a few moments here.

Craig’s first book, Shells, was chosen by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and Merwin praises Craig’s work, “in [its] unwavering fidelity to pleasure, a kind of affectionate confidence in enjoyment, in both the running chatter and the irrational magnetic rightness of the senses.” And of course, that’s true—Craig was, as a poet, in enduring search of experience, in the most elemental sense you can conjure for that word. And language, for Craig, was a sense as visceral as touch or taste with which to feel the world, and feel himself moving through it.

This place, the border of the self, was where Craig lived and wrote. But it is a place of incandescent hypersensitivity, and so it is a tenuous, dangerous, volatile place. I think in Shells, Craig was trying to understand this place and in so doing, found himself often retreating from it, or trying to raise the poem as a kind of force-field before it. To my mind, one of the great gifts of Shells is the exploration of personae and performance they include—there’s something almost Browning-esque in these pieces.

They are a collection of monologues and soliloquies that perform aspects of the self, each one a little larger than life—the playful bravado of “The Power Grip,” a poem in which a male friend gives the rapt speaker some misguided pointers (literally) for cunnilingus, or the confident imperatives of “Scrubbing Mussels,” or the almost-burlesque confessions of “Why I Skip My High School Reunion” are all Craig, but they are “life plus ten percent,” as George Saunders might say. Poems like “Locker Room Etiquette” and “Great Dark Man” investigate the relationship between gender and performance—when is it masculinity? When is it masculinity plus ten-percent? Even, to some extent, the formal dexterity of these poems puts on a kind of show. It is perhaps in the long, beautifully-wrought narrative couplets of “Hot” that we come closest to understanding and seeing the machinations of this book—a story of a man who wanted so badly to feel more, more, more, he hurt himself beyond the capacity to feel at all.

This is the book’s attendant anxiety, I think, and it is consciously, carefully, elegantly woven throughout. As much as this book is a celebration of sensuality, it is about death, dying, about loss and about losing one’s connection to the world at that tenuous, fragile, border of the body. Elegies to Ian Curtis and Jeff Buckley, and many unnamed characters who people these poems help us to understand a hunger for feeling as a way of staving off a fear of mortality, or perhaps, a determined effort to make the most of what small time any of us has. There are passages of sensual virtuosity in Shells, like “I cross my legs, letting the instep nest/ the swell of your calf…” from the poem “Scheherazade,” and the following lines, from “Artichoke”:

“Under the bamboo steamer there’s a slick
of emerald-green water. I watch you pull
the petals off, each with a warm knot
of paler flesh left hanging at the root.
A “loves me, loves me not” sort of endeavor…”

But fashioning these moments onto others, much more steely and philosophical, is a deep and questioning intelligence that calculated every gesture in this collection, just so. These observations of mine, they are nothing Craig would not readily admit to, though later in his life, he would admit to some of them with a bit of a wince.

When Craig and I met, Shells was published and he was at work on his second book, Made Flesh. We talked about it a lot, by which I mean, every day for almost two-and-a-half years. I remember the first version of the manuscript he showed me—it was operatic and beautiful and rapturous and confusing. After about a year, he went back and reworked some of what was at first a single book-length poem into several long poems, in sections. Some of these he worked into metrical form, many he did not.

But before I describe what these poems mean to me, I’ll let you hear what Craig himself had to say about them. This is from a letter he wrote while he was in Colombia on a Fulbright Fellowship in the fall of 2008, right around the time Made Flesh was published:

“As a poet my practice marries a fondness for classical poetry and poetics with a fascination for the more exuberant strains of postmodernism… This new book engages with some commonplaces of archaic mythology—Persephone, Orpheus—in the revisionary tradition of H. D., Robert Duncan and Anne Carson. It reaches for images, emblems and stories that might help reconcile the self to the experience of being mortal, flesh and vulnerable, and to find in that reconciliation not only melancholy but joy. Stylistically the book has been somewhat of a departure, owing as much to Frank O’Hara as to Ovid, his desire above all to communicate the magnetic immediacy of lived experience.”

Almost as the movement from the title Shells to that of Made Flesh suggests, Craig’s work softened, became somehow more humane. The poems are, in scope and substance, more ambitious and yet somehow, at the same time, humbler. In “Couple from Hell”, which begins with similar gestures to some of the poems of Shells, the poet-speaker assumes the persona or character of Hades, the female character in the poem becomes, of course, Persephone, but then there is a turning away, a shedding of persona, an admission of having tried too hard to make a script or story out of something real that is, therefore, unwieldy and unpredictable and in some ways unfinishable, writing into the poem’s final lines:

“…You were never the lord
of a lightless kingdom     any more
than she has ever been its queen
and the world you talked into a prison
suddenly seems to be made of glass
and your eyes see clear to the horizon
and you feel the molecules of air
part like a curtain     as if to let you pass”

Here, in Made Flesh, there’s still something of Robert Browning—but this is not the Browning of “Porphyria’s Lover”—it’s the Browning of “Two in the Campagna”. Consider these lines from earlier in “Couple from Hell”:

“…across the pathway, threads of silk
glint in the sun      at the end of each a spider
still wet from the egg     spins out a dragline
and sails off into the breeze
The air is so bright and busy
your whole body feels it
a puppet weightless on its wires”

Now put that alongside the Browning poem mentioned above, which yes, Craig knew, almost infinitely well-read as he was. The second and final section appear below:

II
For me, I touched a thought, I know
     Has tantalised me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
     Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

XII
Just when I seemed about to learn!
     Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern—
     Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

In Made Flesh, the same sensual virtuosity that’s visible in Shells comes rapturously into its own, unafraid and audacious. And Craig believed that poets should be audacious—should aspire to move a reader, should aspire to be soulful and memorable and brave, should aspire to write poems worthy of the world they purport to evoke, which (for Craig) was full of wonder and sublimity. And his audacity might be the thing that most influenced me—I am nowhere near as brave, and he would say things like, “Don’t write to publish poems; write to change everything,” that I would almost certainly never feel right saying. I remember asking him once, what was his opinion about those who had a problem with the “lyric I” and he replied, almost without hesitation, and grinning evilly, “I think they’re a bunch of pussies.” I remember thinking, “Oh my goodness,” and I also remember laughing out loud.

Craig did not, I think, imagine he could ever live up to his own aspirations, but he lived by them nonetheless. And in his audacity, I have found permission—to take risks, to make attempts at truths, to trust my instincts, to listen for the language of things, to take on the mysteries that seem too unwieldy, too unmanageable, too impossible to ever hope to language, knowing you’ll never do it, believing that those vast, unlanguage-able things are still worth trying to write about—love, grief, death, gods, loss, the perplexity of trying to language love or grief (or Tuesday), and perhaps above all, the material transcendence of living in the world. And Craig, in all his audacity, always found these immense things in the most startling minutae—artichokes, grapefruits, moths. And he found mystery in a hidden bird, in a train ride, in a phone number. It was—and in his poems, it will always remain—a very powerful kind of magic. I’ll close with a poem in which, I believe, that magic is wholly evident. It is an unpublished poem, from the last collection Craig was working on when he disappeared in 2009—a collection he conceived after D.H. Lawrence’s tremendous Birds, Beasts, and Flowers—a book we both loved.

Very Large Moth
by Craig Arnold
     after DHL

Your first thought when the light snaps on and the black wings
     clatter about the kitchen     is a bat

the clear part of your mind considers rabies     the other part
does not consider     knows only to startle

and cower away from the slap of its wings     though it is soon
clearly not a bat but a moth     and harmless

still you are shy of it     it clings to the hood of the stove
not black but brown     its orange eyes sparkle

like televisions     its leg-joints are large enough to count
how could you kill it     where would you hide the body

a creature so solid must have room for a soul
and if this is so     why not in a creature

half its size     or half its size again     and so on
down to the ants     clearly it must be saved

caught in a shopping bag and rushed to the front door
afraid to crush it     feeling the plastic rattle

loosened into the night air it batters the porch light
throwing fitful shadows around the landing

That was a really big moth     is all you can say to the doorman
who has watched your whole performance with a smile

the half-compassion and half-horror we feel for the creatures
we want not to hurt and prefer not to touch

In this episode of Life Stories, my podcast series of interviews with memoir writers, I talk with Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. We talked about the personal circumstances that led her, in the mid-1990s, to make a solo hike from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon-Washington state line, and what she learned about herself when she decided a decade later to write about that experience. We also talked about Strayed’s recently revealed status as the author of the “Dear Sugar” advice column at the literary website The Rumpus, and whether anonymity was liberating, in terms of being able to take creative risks with her writing voice:

“I think at first it was, because I did have some doubts; I thought, ‘Well, who am I to give anyone advice?’ And I thought that if I completely bombed at it that nobody would ever have to know that it was me. But once I started doing well with it, I did feel like the anonymity was getting in the way. A lot of readers who wanted me to stay anonymous would say, ‘I fear that once you’re no longer anonymous, you won’t feel as free to write as intimately as you do. And, of course, I knew the sort of stuff I was writing as Cheryl Strayed was very open and intimate, and I would say, ‘No, no, trust me.’ …

There were some things I couldn’t quite write about because it would just give it away so much to anyone who’d read my work. And so many people who had read my work, by the end, were guessing. I would say hundreds of people by then had written to me to say ‘You must be Dear Sugar.’ So it was really high time to come out, because it was one of those things everyone who knew kept a secret but inevitably… somebody was going to make a tweet and say, ‘I know it’s Cheryl Strayed.’ So I came out right when I felt like it would have all come out anyway, and it hasn’t changed my relationship to the column whatsoever. I feel like I still will write it the same way, with the same freedoms and constraints that I always have.”

Listen to Life Stories #5: Cheryl Strayed (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

(And to learn a bit more about Wild, see my write-up for USA’s Character Approved blog…)

I’m looking forward to reading Aimee Phan’s first novel, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong. Earlier this year, I talked about recognizing the need to read outside my embedded biases, so that’s certainly a reason that Reeducation caught my eye, but it’s not simply a matter of filling out a bingo card of ethnicities. I’m also considering the genre Phan has chosen, the family epic, and though I haven’t had the opportunity to think this completely through yet, I’ve got a hunch there’s a lot somebody could say about the literary intersection of family and history and the ways in which such stories have been received based on the author’s gender. (When you read Phan’s essay, for example, you’ll notice that all the benchmark novels she mentions are by women.) And I’m also just looking forward to reading it because I’ve heard great things about it, and I’m always on the lookout for a good story!

When people ask me what my novel is about, I sometimes feel like I need to apologize for the simple answer: “It’s about a family…a really big Vietnamese family…” I can imagine some readers’ eyes glazing over, already presuming to know what I’ve written, and I want to tell them that mine is different. That this immigrant family, of the many we’ve seen in contemporary ethnic literature, is also worth learning about.

The epic family saga is a familiar narrative in the immigrant novel, and for many reasons, I should have avoided it. After all, writers of color, especially Asian Americans, have already covered and mastered this genre decades ago. Do we need another Joy Luck Club? Another Woman Warrior? Dogeaters? The Namesake? Instead of trying to poorly imitate a classic archetype, why not conquer new territory and demonstrate that Asian Americans can move beyond the immigrant family tale?

And certainly many contemporary writers of color have done that. There are plenty of Asian American writers who have pushed outside the expected boundaries with excellent, innovative prose and poetic achievements. So why, when starting my first novel, was I inextricably drawn to writing about a multigenerational family?

Because you cannot ignore what inspires you, what motivates you to write. For the last ten years, the narratives that have filled my head and heart, that have driven me to create and revise over and over again, have been the tales of two extended Vietnamese families, perhaps because these voices were the ones that inspired me to value storytelling in the first place. I remember as a child going to family reunions or Christmas celebrations, amazed at all the lives that fit into one house, how my grandparents, aunts and uncles all had tales of tragedies and triumph inside of them, and how they all related to the way my cousins and I were growing up in America.

This is why the family saga feels so compelling, because even in our small interactions with our parents or siblings, we play a role in an ongoing, vast history that can feel both overwhelming and intimate. And for me, this history couldn’t be recounted by only one character such as Cherry, even if The Reeducation of Cherry Truong is ultimately about her journey and discoveries. Despite her determination to learn all her family’s secrets, my main character couldn’t and shouldn’t know everything. Other family members had to step in and fill the holes of the narrative that Cherry could never learn of or understand.

Yet, it is a lot to ask readers to invest in a multitude of characters, to dive into the heads of so many perspectives. Readers often prefer following a single character throughout a larger novel—it tethers them through a winding plot, and provides an intimacy that perhaps a multiple perspective narrative cannot offer. Why risk confusing readers, if I could simply write the novel from a single point-of-view? Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone?

Perhaps. But for me, the novel is much richer, more inclusive, in allowing other characters to speak for themselves, for readers to hear from voices other than our main protagonist. And even with these other characters (there are a total of six narrators), we realize there is still much more to these families’ lives that we will never know. I believe that is what makes the family saga so inspiring and… epic. It is the writer reaching as high and far as she can, knowing she cannot detail everything, but acknowledging that there is still more out there that we can learn.

In this installment of Life Stories, my series of podcast interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of memoir writing, I talk to Tim Anderson, the author of Tune In Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries, his account of leaving Raleigh, North Carolina, to teach conversational English in Japan. Anybody who’s given some thought to self-publishing should pay particular attention to the second half of this conversation, as Tim discusses why, after a number of rejections, he decided to put this book out himself, and how it wound up catching the eye of Amazon Encore, an Amazon.com publishing imprint that specializes in finding self-published books that are on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough and signing them up, then giving them that extra push.

Listen to Life Stories #4: Tim Anderson (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).