(c) Peter Beard

For K.K.J. with apologies

I am worried about the fact that yesterday when
I Googled a certain poet and found an image, plain,
white-haired, middle aged, I decided I wouldn’t
like her before I’d read any poem she’d ever written,
and if this is who I’ve become, then my recent obsession
with “The Real Housewives of New York City,”
may not be a sign of the Apocalypse, but a sign that
I am reverting to type, and should stop pretending

at depth and just paddle along the slick shallow end
of the wading pool with ‘The Real Housewives,’ in their
over-stuffed, vanilla, Park Avenue apartments, with their
dinky dogs and drivers, and the occasional drunken brawl
to tangle up our Bergdorf blow-outs. Because, why not?

Except for the charity. All ‘The Housewives’ have it.
Can’t throw a fundraiser in a penthouse, townhouse, or
converted flophouse without it. Then it’s all about charity
parity, who-gave-what-to-whom in the bowl. For the checks.
In the big glass box, ninety stories up and over the island
of Manhattan. And if you like stories,

this is the place to be because in reality, it’s only
got seventy-two. Stories that is. But ninety sounds so
much better when you’re breaking the sound barrier
just to get a drink and a dry canapé. Charity is thirsty
work but coming up short? That’s my kinda party.
Why do I long for the glamourous lie, the chummy
luxury of ignorance, when I know that

today, or tomorrow, someone who calls me their mother
will go out for a walk and bag themselves a wounded rhino,
who will think nothing of charging through the kitchen,
goring bystanders and ‘Real Housewives alike,’ in their royal
blue satin Louboutin pumps, straight through their limited
edition camel crocodile Birkin bags?

And when this day arrives, will I open my mouth to sooth
the savage creature of misspent youth? To find the phrase
to ease the narcotic plague of first-ever love? Or will I choke.
On the charity I refused to swallow, the dreams I let wither
along with my face, and the time after time I have tried and
failed and failed, but still made the coffee, packed the lunches,
drove to the school with claws retracted, made nicey-nice as
the taste of blood filled my mouth?

Because this poet waiting on the other side, with her
barefaced excellent poems, understands about reality. How it
won’t be denied. How the blister you get from a five-inch stiletto
bursts the same as the one you get from crawling on your knees,
praying for deliverance and the strength to accept the charity
for yourself, and for ‘The Real Housewives,’ who really love
their dinky dogs, and fear getting old, and still need the paycheck.
And charity for the rhino, who was shielding her kids when she
was shot in the ass.

And who will sit all night at the foot of the bed, with greying hair,
and unfilled wrinkles, in comfortable shoes, and forgive us the fact
that we’re only young once, and if we get lucky we can have even
this, this plain unglamorous reality, this unvarnished glory that
waits for us all.

Mia Sara is an actress and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in PANK, Cultural Weekly, The Kit Kat Review, Forge, The Dirty Napkin, St. Ann’s Review, and others. For more please visit: http://wheretofindmiasara.tumblr.com/

1. This piece reads almost like a ritual to me: in the autumn, the narrator treks to the empty pool at the abandoned house at the end of the block, avoiding the boys who lurk in the abandoned lot, and, once she arrives at the pool, curls inward – it feels like something that happens again and again. What might we make of the places we are drawn to, the processes we repeat over and over?

Personal rituals are something I am extremely interested in. I was a furtive, emotional, mystically-minded child and I did many strange things out of varying ratios of boredom and anxiety. I hid my belongings outside, hoarded stones and other outside things inside, wrote things on my body, named the places and landmarks I discovered. The places and procedures of rituals like the one in “Pool” are huge in distinguishing the child world from the adult world it exists alongside.

2. The detail in “Pool” is beautifully stark, to the point where, to me, it seems almost desolate. It may be autumn in a back alley anywhere, but it feels troublingly like the end of the world. What inspired the setting of this piece?

I like that you picked up on the end-of-the world feeling, because I think that has a lot to do with the mood and setting I’m evoking in this piece. It comes from a full-length hybrid manuscript called BLACK HOLE that is very concerned with the powerlessness and emotional apocalypses of childhood. I’m pretty interested in the uncanny element of domesticity, the menace found in wholesome scenes.

More directly, though, the abandoned lot is sort of a scene from my childhood distorted through a nightmare lens. There was an open lot of grass in my neighborhood growing up in Idaho where my older brother and his friends used to play football. Later someone built a duplex there, but for some reason I still always thought about the green space that had been there.

3. Building on a theme: this piece is written with extraordinary precision, yet is so vivid. When crafting a story like this, what’s your process like? How do you winnow down to the essential?

Writing the stories in BLACK HOLE I focused on describing the characters’ physical sensations and their surroundings with absolute precision. I have a theory I’m working under that a child’s feelings and motivations are often hidden from herself. They way she acts, the strange behaviors she is compelled to perform, reveals the way she feels. In these pieces I want the feelings to sort of seep from the landscape, rather than my writing much about the character’s thoughts and emotions.

4. The boys in the empty lot antagonize the narrator as she passes with a ferocious, sexual force, roaring and bashing against the fence like animals in a cage; a predator/prey dynamic. What are the origins of this menace?

I didn’t have any really traumatic experiences with them in my childhood, but in my mind 12-year-old “older boys” are still exemplars of the the ruthless, the unpredictable, and the bizarre.

5. The empty pool represents a womb-like place to hide, a safe space among the vestiges of abandonment and displacement (the empty house, the lot) – “Its decrepitude is comforting.” Can you talk about this paradox at all? Is what we’re seeking just an absence of stimulation?

I think what is comforting is the breakdown in boundaries between what is “natural” and what is man-made. The fact that spiderwebs and leaves and birds’ nests can start to overtake a human structure reveals some unity. I think it is also comforting in a world–the man-made world–that is secretly fake and falling apart to see real evidence of its instability.

6. And yet, at the end of the piece, the narrator realizes that nothing can ever truly be drained, that even empty houses gather dust. What is the everything we want to leave behind but can’t?

There is a weird phenomenon that physical junk rushes in to fill any site of emptiness, of destruction. No desolation is ever left alone. Stuff–threads, leaves, dust–and animals and people invade it, absolutely irreverent. The relentlessness of time and the dispassionate gaze of history are, of course, painful. I think a lot of people are also familiar with the feeling of wanting to unload some of the detritus of personality–memories, emotions, relationships, dreams, questions, unconnected dots. So, like always, the world is objective correlative for the self: both are too full.

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I was born and raised and still live in Ohio. As a Midwest girl, I can say that Chad Simpson’s earnest yet tough story collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi does the region right. Simpson’s emotionally complex characters live in Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, and they’re all aching with this bruised hope, this blue yearning. They could be people we love. They could be us.

In one of the first stories, “You Would’ve Counted Yourself Lucky,” we meet a pre-teen playing with a flashlight in his backyard, waiting for his missing sister. Before he ventures outside the boy passes by his parents, who don’t notice him at all.

         In the living room, the boy’s mom holds her drink in the air and says in this defeated way to the boy’s dad, “Could you maybe just add a couple ice cubes to this?”

The boy’s dad rises from his chair and says, “Sure.”

We meet the boy at a pivotal time in his life. We all know puberty is a total douchebag—add to that his distracted parents and his presently-missing sister. This boy is terrifically curious and lacerated with loneliness. We follow him into the oddly intimate encounter he has with the once-beautiful teen girl next door, who is partially paralyzed because of a car accident.

          Rebecca picks up the boy’s fingers again and moves his hand down her leg to her calf. There is a divot the size and shape of a small football where doctors have taken skin at the back of her calf, and she sets his fingers inside it. The skin there is cool and completely hairless. It feels smooth in a way that skin shouldn’t.

This moment between then, during which the boy “leans forward, hoping she won’t be able to see his erection,” is delivered with such tenderness. Simpson’s unvarnished prose is always delightful, but especially in moments where characters are stunned by their thirst for intimacy.

We get plenty of that in “The Woodlands,” a brief story that broke my heart. It concerns a middle-aged man who considers pity-fucking this fantastically lonely woman he meets at a resort. It begins perfectly:

         When she said that it was just her and her birds—that her apartment was like a zoo, only she didn’t even keep the things caged all the time—maybe he shouldn’t have told her that his mom owns a pair of cockatiels. Maybe he shouldn’t have told her about the time he visited his mom a few months earlier, and how while she worked during the day, he stayed down in the basement with the television on mute, listening to her birds whistle the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show from upstairs, over and over.

 What he doesn’t tell the woman includes: his divorce, his better-hidden-but-still-present loneliness, and that his pity for her draws him to her.

         The other people at the party were better looking and better dressed than she was, and every time she tried to join a conversation circle, the people seemed instinctually to close her out of it. But still she stumbled around trying, sticking out her chin toward a group of people here and there, laughing a few seconds later than the rest of them at some joke.

Oh the banal cruelty of conferences and cocktail hours. The moments that follow between them are also mortifying, but beautiful in a naked way, like a hug that’s too tight. Simpson knows how to do desire right.

In the next story, “Peloma,” we meet a suicidal twelve-year-old girl and her steelworker father lost in their own house, unmoored by the death of the mother. We start with: “My twelve-year-old daughter Peloma kept trying to kill herself,” which is a breathtaking opener (pun intended).

Puberty is proven to be a douchebag again when “puberty hit Pell early, just after she turned ten, just after her mother’s car hit a pickup truck head-on at the top of a hill.” We feel the horror that fills him when he finds Peloma in a bathtub of lukewarm water after taking seven Aspirin, and as she stands up when he tries to say her name, dwarfing him.

We spend time with Peloma and her father again, in “Consent,” when it’s time for Peloma to start driver’s ed. She leaves the consent form on their dining room table with “Please?” written on a note. Her mother Marcella’s car accident death is the impetus for the pair’s unmooring in “Peloma,” so her father quakes with fear at the prospect of Peloma getting behind the wheel. I have so much love for recurring characters and story cycles (one of the reasons I love prestige television), so when I turned the page to “Consent” and found Peloma and her father again, I nearly swooned.

There is much more to this collection. Baseball, flooded basements, hairspray, big bottles of wine, mendacious father-in-laws, lost loves, hard-fighting women who smell like beer and cigarettes, men who mow lawns and worry, a mother shining with pride, a conflicted foster father, working class worries and dogs like Leslie and Lucky and the strong soil of Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. Tell Everyone I Said Hi is a straight-forward title for a book of stories told in straight-forward language, but there is nothing narrow about it. It’s all here.

Dawn West reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio.

1. This is an immensely physical piece; the casual, bodily damage it describes is almost difficult to read. Can you tell us about the experience of writing this? How did you know you’d succeeded in drawing out the most discomfort?

“Daddy’s Teeth” is actually a chapter in my novel-in-progress, A House Made of Stars, and I wanted this story to stand out as a moment of darkness and desperation in an already bleak narrative. I decided to make this chapter one of the shortest in the novel and use the starkest descriptions I could think of in narrating the scene, so that the moment almost seemed like a flashbulb memory in that while the moment is brief, small details such as the smell of the father’s breath and the blood he spits into a pot would stand out so much more than they would in a longer, more fully developed chapter. I had also hoped that the brevity of the chapter would intensify an already heightened moment and together with such stark descriptions would frighten readers as the child protagonist feels frightened and overwhelmed by what is happening in front of her.

When I wrote the story, I tried to frighten myself with the details. I strive to empathize with my characters as much as possible when writing, so I kept asking myself – what would make me uncomfortable, what would shock me, what would scare me? I didn’t realize the full extent of how the story could affect readers until it was published in PANK. So many friends and colleagues wrote that they had tried reading the story, but couldn’t get past the first few sentences, and it was then that I saw that when I scared myself, I could convey those same feelings to those reading the story.

2. This story, though written from the viewpoint of a child, is centered on the pain and slow destruction of the father. How did you decide to narrate the story from this perspective?

I decided to write from a young child’s point of view, because I felt that I could write scenes of trauma best from a child’s eyes. I find that a child’s point of view is less complicated than an adult’s and while the child in a story may not always understand what is happening to him/her, the audience, of course, does. In trusting readers with this understanding, I felt that I could write these scenes more truthfully than I could with an adult narrator.

3. The father in this piece not only doubts authority (“Sometimes we have to be our own doctors,” he repeats), but also the love of his family (blanching at his wife’s touch). The piece emerges as a portrait of doubt, both corporal and spiritual. What do you suppose drives this father’s desire for (or need to experience) pain? Why can’t he stand to be touched?

In the course of the novel, the father is revealed to have been abused as a child, and therefore is wary of touch of any kind. He withdraws deeply into himself as a defense mechanism, and by pushing his past behind him, attempts to establish himself as one who is above pain and grief. In being emotionless in the face of adversity, he struggles to prove to himself that he is dependent on no one – not God, doctors, or even his family. In the end, a private moment between husband and wife, he falters, because he is, of course, still human, and the wounds he fights so hard to cover are still very much real.

4. Similarly, among so many other things, this seems to be a story about touch, and connection; the ways we bring power to our bodies (whether by tender hand or skinny knife). Can you talk a little about this link between violence done to the self and the tenderness of others?

When the father attempts to cut out his teeth with a knife or when the mother attempts to comfort him at the story’s end, they are communicating both to themselves and each other. The father tries to prove himself as strong and independent and the mother as tender and compassionate, but often these communications, and thus connections, are broken and/or rebuffed. The father knocks the mother’s hand away and walks away from her at the beginning, he pulls out his teeth by himself, and when he speaks to his daughter, only emphasizes the importance of being self-sufficient. He views connection as a weakness, and therefore resists touch and love, except in private where he thinks no one else can see him.

5. I’m also struck in this story by the sense of falling apart, the accumulation of wounds. There is ruin here. Is this what the mother prays for, an end to this?

The mother, unlike the father, does long for connection, and as a result of being so often rebuffed by her husband, turns to God for love and comfort. She prays often in the novel and while the daughter often does not hear what she says, she can imagine from how the mother prays, in a sad, desperate way, that her mother asks for healing and for mercy.

6. What’s your favorite scar?

My favorite scars are from wounds either my mother or I tended to when my family didn’t have money to go see a doctor. These scars are cleaner and are far less noticeable than ones where I’ve had stitches. For example, I cut my fingers open once while opening a can, and after the bleeding stopped, my mom made splints of popsicle sticks and tightly wrapped my fingers with toilet paper and electrical tape. I wore the splints for two weeks afterwards, and today, there are hardly scars.

1. One on level, this poem is about longing, a longing that can only be dealt with in a visceral, sexual way. What is one emotion that belongs entirely to you? What things have you arranged inside yourself and built into horses?

It’s a fairly common coping mechanism to visualize grief as an object that might then be isolated and expelled from the griever. It’s a fairly common exercise in poetry, too: to concretize the abstract, to compare the world to a stage or fear to a handful of dust. In “Equus,” horses are the physical form of the speaker’s desire. Their departure signals a sense of loss and longing.

2. Horses appear in poems every so often as a marker of sexual strength or intensity, but here you do something different. Here, the horses seem to signify desire itself. Why pick horses?

Horses inhabit a space between domesticity and wildness – between tameness and danger – that I find compelling. They signify a kind of cowboy nostalgia. They wear shoes. Maybe horses work so well as figurative carriers of human experience because they’re also physical carriers of human cargo. In a poem that seeks to explore the defamiliarization of one’s own body, horses feel like appropriately strange, appropriately liminal figures.

3. Please define the term “horsebeautiful” (I think it comes from Russ Woods):

Long-necked women are horsebeautiful. Some buildings and most musical instruments are horsebeautiful. Babies and fruit aren’t horsebeautiful, but motorcycles are.

4. Can you explicate at all the word “nuzzle,” which does not appear in your poem but somehow feels appropriate?

I think this poem has more to do with “muzzle” than with “nuzzle.” The latter connotes a tenderness, a nonsexual (or perhaps postcoital) affection that I don’t think exists in the space of “Equus.”

5. In about 1492, the last of the Muslims were kicked out of Andalusia by the conquering Catholic Spanish kingdoms, leaving behind an idealized and glorified land, painted in nostalgia, that generations of poets would return to in their writing. Can you turn this into a metaphor?

I don’t know if that’s my metaphor to make. It reminds me of Mahmoud Darwish’s line, “I look out on the wind searching for its homeland / in itself…” (appropriately from Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, trans. Jeffrey Sacks).

6. RELATED: what can you do with those blank fields, those empty pastures?

To extend the metaphor, I guess you can plant some hayseeds and wait for the horses. Blank spaces can actually be very comforting for a writer, I think; they are quiet, latent, and expectant. Henri Lefebvre was talking about something else when he said, “Space is never empty; it always embodies a meaning,” but it seems to apply. An empty space is a space full of potential – full of creative possibility.

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            When a writer chooses their ground, there’s no point in fussing that a different arena might have served their efforts better. Writers ask us to meet them at a particular set of coordinates; we can show up or not. Anis Shivani has chosen the terrain of human cultural artifacts—paintings, poems, novels, films, and narrations of history—on which to restage the colonial era’s shocks, gashes and reverberations. These poems reminded me of Teju Cole’s much retweeted and reposted Twitter series “Seven Short Stories About Drones”: famous opening sentences of novels (largely, but not only, from the Western canon) ruptured irreparably by drone attack. The implications were clear and inescapable: all these things are ruined by how they were made. The war of their making must be apparent in them; all other readings are dishonest.

Where Cole maintained his efforts just long enough to bring us past the point where the point is made and to the moment where it sickens us, Shivani’s poems dig in. There’s a degree of almost puritanical relish for the tackiness and shoddiness of the hangover you get from mixing imperialism with liberalism:

“Unburdening Tennessee mountain-skies faint, then repaint
our polyester faces (denied since the seventies, Wal-Mart homes
vacant for boomeranging jibes), our nylon faces stripped
of gesture.

                                                                              …Graduates,

sit and take refuge in the emperor-president’s speech, disrobe
yourself of benign platitudes (those you learned in Shakespeare
and Plato), we’re about to launch into the journey of (corporate)
life where you find your umbilical cord stretched to infinity.
It’s a poetic world …”

For Shivani, the poetic world, our world now, is an ugly, lightless world. These poems root around in the structural ugliness of the past couple of centuries, and many of the images they invoke are ugly. But you can hear from the excerpt above that they’re also ungainly, crowded and toothy in their sounds and syntax, the shapes and shifts of their lines; they elbow and jostle their way. They make much use of forms—sonnets, sequences of couplets—that bulge at the rhyme:

“Do you not know your respective place, in the horny bowels
of wherever it is we manufacture garments and towels?”

Some poems, like “Memsahibs in India”, seem like chewed, partially digested and vomited (because indigestible, because toxic) rhetorics of colony and occupation. Shivani has also published two books of stories and a book of “Provocations, Polemics, Controversies” called Against the Workshop. The against-ness of these poems is strong and seeks itself in other cultural makers: “You willed the suburbs’ cancer to grow,” he writes of John Cheever. His“Address to Walt Whitman after Reading the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass” repurposes Whitman’s celebratory cadence to protest “a uniform sullenness, a talkless speech, a declamation promising apocalypse …”

My Tranquil War tries on many of the last century’s masks. Though Shivani resists a music of his own, “To Robert Creeley” seeks Creeley’s breath-tipping rhythms, “To Derek Walcott,” Walcott’s signature swings and landings. Inheritance is the matter. More and more as the book goes on, it seems to be asking: what on earth can we do with this, all this cruel garbage on earth, the “bloodless costume of war” that history has hung in every poet’s closet? The problem of art, his chosen arena—Shivani seems to say—is that it isn’t bloody enough, that it hides the stains that should mark it and damn it forever along with the disgusting perpetrations that enabled it. It’s as though he were applying heat to the texts and images he references and bringing out his own words, the undersigns written in lemon juice. Under beauty, ugliness; under tranquility, war. Or as though he were unwriting them, undoing any love he has for them, any influence they have on him; because of their imperial taint (whether conqueror, conquered, or complicit), vomiting them up as if only then could he, and we, stand on some pure ground.

Kate Schapira is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Soft Place (Horse Less Press). Her eighth chapbook, The Ground / The Pass / The Wave, is coming out this summer from Grey Book Press. She lives in Providence, where she teaches writing at Brown University and elsewhere, and organizes the Publicly Complex Reading Series.

1. I think there is a lot to say in this poem about ancestry, about what our forebears have built and left for us. Can you explain this at all? What’s one important or valuable piece of inheritance in your life, galactic or otherwise?

I’m very blessed to have entered a world surrounded by the family I have. Both my grandparents, the subjects of the poem, and parents, built a world for me full of endless encouragement and support.  I’m from a Midwest do-all-that-you-can-to-help-anyone-who-needs-it kind of family. I’ve inherited their humor, I hope to master its way of tackling the most trying times as gracefully as they do. A nature as good as theirs has a special gravity to it. I try to spin as brightly.

2. I see this theme, of older figures (here, grandparents, but I imagine it would serve any character with accumulated age and wisdom), painted as interstellar, as mingling and one with the hugest mechanisms of the universe. Tell me about this myth.

All the things my grandparents have seen and done are too big for this world, too big for them to understand just how powerful they’ve become from it.  I’m sure they’ve built some stars up there, filled some black holes I wasn’t ready for, but they’d never tell me if they did, they wouldn’t want to worry anyone.

3. There is some really breathtaking imagery in this poem, small moments that become huge. Can you describe one moment in your life that has suddenly made you consider the grander (the grandest) scheme of things, in a universal sense?

When my mother’s mother passed, it was a sadness I wasn’t prepared for, as these things often go. The poem is really about both sets of grandparents, the two that have passed, and the two still living. My maternal grandmother had an amazing amount of love to give and though it was never in question, it seemed to reveal itself even more when she died. It was so clear in the faces of those she held dear, just how great this hold she had on us all was. Eventually you learn that time really does come to a close. It makes all the big things feel a little smaller. It’s looking at all the universe through only the telescope lens. I’d never understood how the size of things can be altered so quickly like that previously. Despite the end that comes, some things have this miraculous way of pulling through even time, like she still does. The impact she had may have left us a bit cratered, but it gave us more space to hold all the love. It’s the anatomy of the night sky in that way, what’s beyond the surface is remarkable and overwhelming as plain (though beautiful) as it may look some evenings.

4. Which space exploration programs have you been excited about lately? Where do you see us going in the future?

NASA recently revealed plans to capture an asteroid and tow it into the moon’s orbit. With the asteroid close and somewhat controlled, they have easier means for studying it. It also provides them the opportunity to modify the heavens, making things movable for developing permanently manned outposts in space in the future. What I’ve read of it is fascinating. I think there’s plenty more to learn about Mars and we’re well on our way with Curiosity. I think children are going to want to be astronauts again.

5. Describe a trip to a space-related monument, museum, or other site.

I’ve only ever been to the Cosmosphere here in Kansas and that was as a boy, too much of it I’ve forgotten. I hope to return soon. My bucket list for space monument and museum visits is growing.

6. When you look into the night sky on a cloudless night, where are your eyes drawn first? What do you see?

It’s still hard to know where to start, though it’s probably always been the moon. I still see a face in it, the same one I’ve always seen. I’m not sure what that face looks like exactly, but I’m sure it’s wise.

MWV:  What is the relationship of the body to identity, and how does language intercede–or not? 

For me, body (corpuscle and feelings therein) and page (what for me is one of contemporary languages’ core impetuses) correlate in stippling-like processes, always approximating authenticity. Identity is the active and ongoing stimulation of a profoundly necessary simulation; a way to relate to (myself as) form. There is a continual need to keep in motion in order for the stippling from stifling.

MWV:   A figure appears in your forthcoming book Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology.  You write:  “The red of the queer mystic’s human flesh in response to the frigid temperature of the river was something that, from that event on, never left them.”  Tell me about the “queer mystic”?  

I love Luci. Luci loves you. The queer mystic of Luci (my book) is different than how I work with queer mysticism in praxis but I can certainly speak to both here.

The queer mystic of Luci is personage, a splattering of qualities across a span. Luci is an emergent pride system based in growing multiplicity and variance (by way of staying with difficult and painful content until one is able to morph it into emancipations by way of self-invented, intensive, creative attentions). Luci works with peripheral nerves (sites of intuition and insinuation) in order to slowly gain a (human?) center. Because I love Luci, I could go on. Instead I will ask you to keep an eye out for the book! It not only shatters many socially (Biblically) entrenched myths (Lucifer vs. Jesus, dad vs. son, inherited lineage vs. chosen family, etc.) but the methods by which the shattering takes place are rich with sound and image. Bottom line, Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology is a nice place to spend a little time. While you are in, Monet’s Camille Monet sur son lit de mort will come off of the wall of the museum, and disassemble its elegant picture of death in your lap as a way of enticing you to dance with it: movement here is included, is integral to the work.

Queer mysticism (in the context of my practices) involves attending to many realms ritually. We are queer because we are obscure, different from the average Joe. We are queer because our genders do not match forceful, binary-prescribed social relegations. We are queer because of whom we fuck. We are queer because of how we fuck whom we fuck. There are so many realms to attend to ritually: from how to most ethically greet the juncture between sleep dreaming and the dreams experienced and lived while awake, to absolute nurture of any and all aspects or elements with entheogenic and enlightening properties.

I work by deifying (and reifying). I approach the work in many ways (including asceticisms and excessiveness). An important part of attending exists in the clandestine and rogue rites that must take place (e.g.: eating capers excruciatingly slowly, one at a time all day long and with so much attention that you are convinced that your mouth will forevermore feel like this: a desert full of mustard, anal sex. In that overwhelm you are suddenly, henceforth enabled to count salty moments like mala beads).

I love the early Christian term “mystikos” (which refers to veiled or not yet known allegorical elucidations and analysis of Scriptures), so the notion of underground or underbelly or still-in-queue (or even kink) interpretations and applications (in non-dualism) resonates for me. It is also due to the above stated that writing is engagement of the dewy links, that composition is a way to acquire liberating relationships to my own DNA, that the flesh of the body is morphable, evermore able to be relieved by intentional enlivenment. In these feelings, page and body are felt as sites of infinity, as compulsory sides of an infinity.

If you are a queer mystic and want to talk with me about queer mysticism (or to practice it alongside a long time (and still learning) practitioner) feel free to contact me. I am passionately interested not only in commencements from within, but continual and artful creation of within. How else is there ever hope of us addressing so much without in wise ways?

MWV:  You’ve told me you have synesthesia, does this ability impact your poems and if it does, how?   

Oh my! My first bodily response to this is fear (clench) at this information about my body getting into public space. When I was younger the fact that I had perfect pitch meant that I always had to be the one to hum the pitch before any of the choirs (I sang in over the years) sang. “No more need for a pitch pipe” folks would delight: cracking jokes about me while I was right there. The fact is I don’t want to always have to be responsible for conveying the pitch, even if I already know what it is. I am having my own private bodily experience over here, it is intense, and I don’t want to be an instrument for someone else’s use.

Now, sweet Max, I know you were not trying to use me, so here: my synesthesia impacts ME in many ways. I suppose that the fact that a number is a numb color to me or the fact that touches are sounds to me are facts that someone else (a friend just said this to me the other day, in fact) might find useful as they compose their own pages, but I don’t really know what it is like to live minus synesthesia so I don’t know to what degree what impacts what in regard to it. I do know however, that if you force yourself to soften your gaze when you are staring at something that is beautiful to you, your loosening one relationship to the thing being stared at will definitely result in you seeing more in what you are staring at.

I will note my synesthesia makes it hard for me to do public readings sometimes. Bright and fluorescent lights are particularly problematic; make me see things (that are there for me, but not there for others). Environmental tone can also have dramatic impact (especially tone that does not ensure a sense of safety in it (which is not the prerogative of “readings” but can be the unintended fact of them)). How about we hug, speak gently, and touch each other more at readings?

MWV:  How does your work relate to memory?  

My work relates to memory extremely. It relates by way of extremes and in extreme ways. I am not talking about memory in the sense of it being something that is constantly looked back at or inevitably found in the past. When I talk about memory, I mean somatic activity; relation being incessantly, even maniacally built between different forms of felt content.

The two things I love most about memory (how I work with it) are images (I enjoy the capacity to trace back or forward to discover unforeseen origins—the moments when image is no longer a duplicate or a partiality but a resonant existence, a primality) and feeling/sensation. Memory is a rich residence!

MWV:  You have written about gender in playful and immensely imaginative ways.  I also understand that you identify as genderqueer. What does that term mean to you? Do you see it as a spiritual project and a literary one?  

Yes. I identify as genderqueer (as pomosexual, post-binary-genderqueer to be exact). The term genderqueer has been an emancipating term for many whom more traditional forms of binary gender identity are not suitable (or leave too much of us out). For me pomo genderqueer relates to my identity as excess. Genderqueer feels like a social space (created by way of reclamation by queers (like the word “fag” being reclaimed by gay men)) that I can infinitely relate to because it allows me to consistently qualify myself in the context of my fluctuations and specificities.

Body is all spirit for me. That might sound like a paradox, but body is not the opposite of spirit. Spirit has been the only way (I have tried many methods) I have actually gotten into my body in a way that lets me feel my body as I wish to feel it: capable of being the unconditional, thaumaturgy to my freedom (in comparison to it being taught as the pitfall, the drawback, the sin-zone).

My gender and sexual identities are certainly literary projects in that the act of self-naming and the act of accurately (artfully) naming and referring (relation) to others is why I am still here. Accurate and caring reference and regard of one another is what form is for. Otherwise I would have jumped off a cliff a long time ago.

MWV:   Tell me about hybrid identities, and about the significance of your preferred pronoun, “pleth”?  

So here’s the thing: If you are close enough to me to refer to me as you (“I love you,” “I believe in you,” “how are you?”) then you is always my preference. I mean, I am definitely a me to me, and we are all capable of being yous to others, so I think that you (connoting relation) is one of my favorite modes of pronoun.

It is true that (out of need and a desire to honor) I invented a pronoun (as a way of having replacement of the traditional “he/she” be more site-relevant for me). “Pleth” is a monosyllabization (historical pronouns (“he,” “she,” “they,” ”we” (etc.) are monosyllabic)) of the word plethora. If there were going to be a pronoun that was indefinitely applicable for me, it would have to be one that had some elbow room in it, one in which the frames of reference (re: me) could fluctuate and change, punctuate themselves continually anew. Feel free to refer to me as pleth, j/j (I am totally comfortable having my name be used as my pronoun) or you. If you call me “she” I might answer (and might feel authentic in what answering to that pronoun implies about my body in that moment) but it is also possible that if you call me “she” I will not answer, because “she” leaves too much of my me out. The same applies for “he.”

I am not a rarity in having a hybrid identity. I think that many of us have them. I also think that not all of us  (of that many) feel compelled to alert the ways in which we are referred in public space. If my body is part of the non-colonizable commons (in which all beings’ authenticities can exist and are regarded with profound respect), if I want my body to be usable and healthful public space, then the above stated are some of my needs in regard to reference.

MWV:   Which poets do you think are particularly important to read?  

I will make a little list of (only) some of the dears: Nikos Kazantzakis, Gertrude Stein, Kathleen Winter, Doug Rice, Leslie Feinberg, Marguerite Duras, (look at) Loren Cameron, (look at) Del LaGrace Volcano, Brenda Iijima, Helene Cixous, John Cage, Robert Gluck, Joan Larkin, Julia Serano, Laynie Brown, Lonely Christopher, Tristan Tzara, Nethanael, Simone de Beauvoir, Tyrone Williams, Tim Jones-Yelvington, TC Tolbert, Jason Cromwell (Transmen and FTMs), Trace Peterson, Kate Bornstein, S. Bear Bergman, and YOU, Max! Folks should certainly read your sexy and stimulating book: The Testosterone Files (Seal Press).

Max Wolf Valeria, is a poet and author of The Testosterone Files (Seal, 2006), a memoir of his FTM transition mixing punk rock, sexual politics and testosterone’s howling masculinity.   He collaborated in 2010 with artist/photographer Dana F. Smith, adding poetry fragments to a triptych of art books: Mission Mile Trilogy + 1.  His poems are featured in the new anthology of Trans and Genderqueer poetry Troubling the Line (Nightboat, 2013). 

And then a writer friend called my attention to this article on The Hairpin by Christina Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick offers some great tips on how to persevere with humor and grace in the face of long-term failure. In its own way, her article did all I’d hoped to and more.

Then a musician friend of mine posted this spot-on article from The Onion about squeezing in the work that’s most important to us in our barely existent spare time, pretty much nailing whatever else I might’ve hoped to cover.

Then I came across the New Yorker article entitled, “Cry Me A River: The Rise of the Failure Memoir,” by Giles Harvey (March 25, 2013 issue), which observes a trend of successful books by “failed” writers about their experience of having been failed writers. These books, it seems, differ from the nobody-to-somebody fairy tales like Paul Auster’s “Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure,” in that the stories don’t resolve in eventual acceptance, praise and success like Auster’s. Except of course, that once the memoir sells 10,000 copies, they do.

And then, I met this guy at a party. His name was Seymour. He heard I’m a writer and he immediately launched into giving me advice on how to land an agent (QueryTracker and many queries). I, being among the “not-yet-achieved-success” hordes try to listen quietly when people offer me suggestions that might help me change my status, so I leaned in close with the hopes of gaining that key nugget of truth I’d missed in the 40-plus other conversations I’ve had about agent-seeking. And as Seymour implored me to follow his wisdom, it was revealed that not only did he not have an agent himself, but he’d queried fewer agents than I have.

At which point I thought, “maybe it’s best to write my column about something else.”

This avalanche of failure porn alongside Seymour’s useless one-failure-to-the-other advice was enough to turn me off the whole genre for a while. There’s apparently plenty being written and said about how not to be a writer that I don’t need to add to the noise. Maybe this seems sad, but let’s spin it around. It’s an opportunity to think about what matters, always an excellent subject.

The discussion of surviving failure, begs the obvious question – failing at what? It forces me to examine what exactly I’m trying to succeed at with my creative work, what I’m trying to achieve or attain. Finding coping mechanisms for easing the pain of failure, or seeking to convert that failure into memoir sales, or somehow overcome it (win!!), all seem less like solutions than band-aids for the symptoms of the much greater problem of evaluating my creative success by the wrong standards.

Things generally work best, as in, I feel the least bad, when my first and foremost evaluation of success is – do I get to make things? Do I have any spare time, energy, ideas, inspiration, motivation, optimism, life force, vim, desire, drive, to do something beyond the minimum baseline of what’s expected and needed of me in order to exist. If the answer is yes, I’ve cleared all the biggest hurdles, and seriously, I’m way ahead of the curve. There’s a lot to revel in with that.

But I don’t believe it ends there. I’m not one to say that a maker should be entirely self-sufficient, and that anyone who seeks external validation is misguided, needy and insecure, and that only the weaklings care what other people think, etc… I actually think that critique is repugnant and sort of evil, in a particularly Ayn Randian, bootstrapper, myth of the rugged individualist, American way. As in my last post, I’ll poach a pseudo-biological argument that we, as a species, are not built to function in isolation. So yes, it makes sense for a measure of personal success to include communication – to alleviate the alienating nature of human existence, let’s say. But the desire to reach beyond more than a few people I respect and care about (“success” in some broader sense, as defined by the examples above) becomes a pure numbers game. How many people do I need to reach in order to be “successful?”

If my measure of success is earning a living making things, then I need X people at N dollars each. Or if my measure of success is having a book published by a press of certain prestige, then I need persons Y (agent) and Z (publisher) to like my work. Though “like” is not as accurate as it might have been 50 years ago. Better to say I need Y and Z to believe they can sell my book to X people at N dollars each. If my measure of success is simply about having some number of interested readers beyond what I’ve already got, then I have to ask myself why? How many readers are enough? If I reach that number, will I feel compelled to reach more, or I will then just be sated, and if so, then what? Why do I even feel a need to talk at a bunch of strangers? Or have them believe me to be searingly poignant or wry and whipsmart or unique with insight or good in bed..? Maybe I want to change the world for the better!

A close friend of mine, musician and writer David Henson – a reader, listener and supporter of my work, (and I of his) – recently said to me, “You already have the best fans you’ll ever have.” And he’s right. I mean, yes, maybe over my lifetime I’ll gain a handful more close friends and loved ones, creative people whom I have great respect and admiration for who feel similarly toward me, so they might join the ranks of my other best fans, but after thinking about things in that context, the money or critical praise, or attention of strangers seems so much less important. It is crucial, though, to have at least a handful, maybe even just one, serious supporter of my work. Someone who is actually waiting for me to churn out that next poem or album or multi-volume abstract screed. If I have that plus the spare life force thing, I am solid gold live.

And in case I lose sight of this, there’s always the fact Albert Ayler (among many others) pointed out; Music is the Healing Force of the Universe. Though I’d add that it’s not just music, but all human creativity. You probably don’t need proof to back this up (most creative makers I know feel that creative work – either someone else’s or the practice of making it themselves – has healed them, or often, saved their lives) but a recent New York Times article noted a scientific study that found singing to premature babies is beneficial to their health. Is this not changing the world for the better?

Compared to healing a premature baby, landing a book deal or getting signed by a label start to look a bit scrawny and cheap.

Scott Pinkmountain is a writer and musician living in Pioneertown, CA. His writing has appeared on This American Life, in The Rumpus, A Public Space, HTMLGIANT, and others. He has also released dozens of albums of both instrumental music and songs. He works as a music analyst for Pandora Radio. 

1. “Eastward” is very precisely located: Manhattan, Union Square, proceeding east street by street. Yet despite such a specific setting, the story reads almost like a fable, of a woman breaking free from her bounds and returning to nature. Is this a modern myth? What does it tell us about the way we lead our lives?

I’m a fan of Chekhov’s belief that art should ask questions, not answer them.  Following that thinking, I never intend to tell anything about the way we live our lives.  I only hope that this story raises questions about the containers we put ourselves in (clothing, house, city, memories, past) and what we might uncover if we step out of them, even if just for a day, an hour, a moment.  If this can be called a modern myth, perhaps it’s one about stripping away the myths we tell ourselves.

2. This is also a story about public vulnerability, a body exposed to the eyes and attentions of innumerable strangers. You describe your narrator’s body, its past and its present, but overall, what comes across is a tremendous sense of awareness. Can you talk a little about the physicality of this piece?

The body is our first and final home.  Also our most important one.  As she separates from her former shelters and restrictions, Celia recognizes that her body remains what she’s left with – and her physical awareness awakens through this realization.  By living in her body on display, she undoes her shame and relearns herself.

While writing this, I thought a lot about Galway Kinnell’s poem “Saint Francis and the Sow,” and particularly the lines, “sometimes it is necessary / to reteach a thing its loveliness.”  Celia – like all of us – must act as both teacher and student in reteaching her own loveliness.  Recognizing her body as the most vital shelter frees her from other constraints, allowing her to live herself more fully. 

3. Though this story is clearly born of the city – the crowds, the exposure, the fight between private to public – at the same time there is a yearning for the natural and the simple, as, in the end, the narrator writes, “There was a time when you needed nothing but dirt, water, sun. With those you made seeds. Now grow.” Can you tell us something about the balance between the two?

I chose New York City partially for the stimulation that confronts Celia along the way – here, there are so many eyes, so many actions and reactions, all the time, everywhere! – but also because the city is a constructed environment.  It’s an ecosystem that almost wholly eliminates nature outside of human nature: a human-designed space with completely unpredictable happenings within it.  Celia needed this kind of unnatural space to reclaim her natural state.  Her progress would occur too easily in an open field or beside a lake.  In New York City, reclaiming the natural becomes a fight.

I think maintaining a balance between the city’s complexities and nature’s simplicity is tremendously difficult, if not impossible–especially in a place like New York.  We are animals–but how much of our lives do we spend revolting against or burying this fact?  Is it always for the best that we do?

4. Reading this piece is like taking giant breaths of fresh air. As a New Yorker, what is your favorite sensory experience?

What an incredible compliment.  Thank you.  I have heaps of favorite sensory experiences as a New Yorker.  It’s hard to pick one, so I hope it’s alright if I list a few.

Walking the Williamsburg Bridge and looking out at the building-lined waterway through the cagey bars.  Spending time on any unfinished rooftop at night, with all the twinkling and rushing both below you and above you.  Sometimes light reflects pinky-gold in building windows, and it seems the reflection’s even more gorgeous than the sun itself.  Lying in grass when spring’s just beginning.  In summertime, when lots of musicians play, I love standing at the exact place in a park where I can hear two different songs at once: a banjo in one ear, a sax in another.  Every once in awhile the blend makes its own rhythm.

5. Implied in this story is a history of enforced isolation. What do you seek to break free from? Are you a lifelong New Yorker?

Though I’m not a lifelong New Yorker, I’ve always lived in the Northeastern US.  It’s important for me to live away for awhile, and I hope to in the near future.  I have inherent wanderlust that I find little opportunity to nourish.  Routine hinders me, and I’m always searching for ways to shatter or escape it in my daily life.

6. This piece is written as an instructional. Who is giving the instructions?

I’m so glad you asked this!  The voice is actually intended to be her own voice, coaxing herself on.  The way I might say to myself, “Beck, relax.  Just hit the ‘submit’ button,” she commands herself through these moments of unraveling.  This is partially her attempt to gain back her own power–she is used to being commanded, and now she commands herself–and partially meant to contribute a layer of distance between the self she’s trying to reach, and the self she’s been.