I recently had the chance to ask Kyle a few questions about his craft.
 
Who inspires you?
 
Inspirations change over time–not only the writers themselves but the media and genres you consume. So I’d say—over the most recent ten year period—Alan Moore (author of the Watchmen comic series), Miyamoto Musashi (legendary swordsman and author of The Book of Five Rings), poets Nikky Finney and Solmaz Sharif, emcees Kendrick Lamar and Phonte Coleman, bands Idles and The Dø.

I’ve noticed that in many of your poems you use humor to address serious issues. What inspires that approach?
 
I never think of myself as properly “funny”. (I fear that consciously being confident about that actually inhibits the work it takes to actually be funny.) But I think poems—any piece of art really—calls you to be the artist you need to be to create that poem. Sometimes there is readily available irony in a serious matter, and that poem may call for you to be funny because, let’s be honest, people don’t come to poems to learn morality or to learn how to become aware of their own political blind spots. But poems can do that to you when you are willing to internalize them for a different reason—be that the humor or be that the language or the form. I always like to remind myself and others that “art” is “artifice”—there is something consciously fabricated or contrived about it. We know where reality is, and most people don’t walk in that direction. Art is a portal to a different engagement with reality. So you can travel through a humorous poem about something dire and come out on the other side more willing to see and walk towards the darker human realities. Maybe.
 
Do you think that being based in D.C. influenced the political nature of your most recent book of poems, Honest Engine?
 
I don’t believe in that political / personal dichotomy. Almost everything we do is steeped in our battles for equality and representation (or for some maintaining their advantage in terms of privilege and power). If anything—contemporary D.C. being such a superficially political city (as far as party politics are concerned)—I think living in D.C. helps sharpen my perspective on what is sincerely concerned with the lives or fates of people and what is a performance of concern or outrage. D.C. is full of (well-paid) political performers. I never want to be that. I want to be someone living his way into writing sincerely about how real individual human lives are impacted by the policies of our national and global leadership.

I’ve heard that you’re working on your next book of poems. Which themes are prevalent in that book/what can readers expect?

The new book, Anagnorisis, is an attempt to speak frankly to the politically dominant American audiences about how it feels to be who I am at this moment and how it felt to have so much disdain for my particular humanity (urban, blk, male) collectively expressed by the electorate’s support of the current president. I always assumed modern Americans would not go that far to express hatred, fear, and resentment. But since they did in electing (or allowing the election of) this president, then I need to be honest about the lived ramifications that event has had for me and other vulnerable populations I am close to. In different ways, many of the poems express this sentiment: I have lost faith in you and this is why. If that faith is ever to be restored, I will need a good reason. I will need to see effort.

What do you think being a successful writer entails?
 
Success—you have to think about that professionally and artistically. Professionally, it will be different for everyone depending on which bourgeoisie goals you do or do not seek to attain as a “professional.” Some people need to win certain awards and fellowships or publish in certain venues. Others maybe just want a book with their name on it. You set—and adjust—your own professional goals over time. The artistic goals are met—or failed—one work at a time. I’d say a successful poet continues to find ways to challenge themselves while maintaining a healthy relationship to the process of making art. (Self-destructive art making practices aren’t “successful” to me.) It’s really a challenge against the self. You are the only one who knows the scope and depth of your intentions, and therefore, I’d say, you are the only person who can judge your artistic success and hold yourself accountable to those standards.

 
For more on Kyle Dargan, visit his website, or buy his newest book, Agnorisis.

Charlotte Smith is a writer and artist living in Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently a student at Towson University, where she majors in Mass Communication and minors in Creative Writing. Charlotte hopes to use art in many forms to make sense of the world, particularly the social issues that she sees affecting herself and others in daily life. She is particularly passionate about the rights of women and minorities, and likes to work with publications that are committed to sharing their stories. More of her work can be found online at Lithium Magazine, where she is a staff writer.

Timothy Taranto is the author of Ars Botanica, a gorgeous memoir exploring—in the form of letters to his unborn child—the intimate details of self-image, love, and loss through the realities of Alopecia, an ending relationship, and an abortion. Writer Karen Russell called it “a gorgeous hybrid” and “one of the most wrenching and honest accounts of falling in and out of love, of moving through a season of grief” that she has ever read. Grub Street’s staff read it last year in a creative nonfiction class, and so when discussion arose about a judge for our high school contest, Taranto’s name rushed forward from our collective unconscious. He Skyped with our class, and a year later we find ourselves still saying, “It’s like what Tim said….” His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and now Grub Street (he generously gave us an original illustration of Ursula K. Le Guin as a bean pod mutant). He corresponded with Macy Meyer, one of our nonfiction editors, by email.

When did you start writing?

I grew up painting and printmaking. Both of my parents are artists, and my father ran a print studio when I was kid, so my brother and I were always drawing on his light table, shooting our own screens. My mother is a representational painter, and she’d set up still lifes for us in the dining room. I was very happy kid, creatively speaking. It seemed natural to pursue visual arts, so I enrolled at Cornell University to study painting. As much as I loved my studio art classes at Cornell, I also loved all the courses I took that were in other departments: courses in the classics and archaeology, art history and natural sciences. I even took fly fishing! Surprisingly I didn’t take a single creative writing class that whole time. My interests outside of the studio led me to a career as a science teacher. I taught earth science and biology for several years in New York City at a private elementary school. I loved it. I loved my students and my co-teachers. But I wasn’t making art and there was something inside me that felt unsatisfied. So in my late-twenties, when I started writing essays and short stories, I started to feel a sort of personal and creative joy I had not known since childhood. I would go to open-mic sessions around the city and read my writing aloud. It was mortifying, but I received really enthusiastic receptions most places, and that encouraged me to keep at it. The first story I wrote was about fishing for bluefish. Not knowing much about anything in the literary world, I went to my favorite bookstore and looked at the lit mags and picked the two I liked best: Saint Ann’s Review and The New Yorker. I submitted to both and while The New Yorker never wrote back (surprise) the Saint Ann’s Review agreed to publish me! Still not knowing much about writing, I googled “creative writing MFA” and from there learned about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I sent a manuscript of four more fishing stories and sixty dollars to Iowa and was admitted. I have been very lucky and very blessed as an artist.

Do you think Ars Botanica is a concrete example of your style or voice? Did your voice change during the writing process? Do you think your voice is different now?

More and more, I tend to think of voice and style as being fluid and metamorphic as opposed concrete and fixed, career-wise. I feel that Ars Botanica was a faithful representation of my style and voice during a particular turbulent emotional epoch in my life. A mentor of mine explained once how temporality and proximity do a lot to inform voice and tone in a piece of writing. To write about something from the distant past, the tone may likely be melancholic or elegiac, but to write from within the eye of the storm, to write about events as they are unfolding around you, that can capture an energy or urgency that time could no doubt work to erase. With Ars Botanica I was very close to the blast radius of the events that I was writing about. I was writing to discover how I myself would make it through. When the act of writing is a journey of discovery for the writer, I feel the reader can more readily share in that experience as well. To answer your second and third questions, I guess I feel that voice may vacillate across the landscape of an artwork, from the first page to the final sentence, but more often those transformations occur over the editing process. A good editor nurtures the work as it evolves toward a coherent aesthetic vision, and usually that means the work settles upon its true and cogent voice. My voice is still mine, but it is no doubt different now. Why? Because the act of creating changes you. Writing Ars Botanica changed me and as a result transformed my voice a little. I could not have written my second book had I not written my first.

Was the editing process what you were expecting? Last year, when you spoke to our lit mag advisor’s nonfiction class, you said, “You can only see sixty percent of your writing. You can’t write alone.” How did you discover that? Did that change your writing process?

Totally. I believe you need good friends who are good readers of your work, as well as dedicated editors to help you hone your art into its fullest form. I mostly discovered this from failure, hubris. My friend Kate recently encouraged me to write an epilogue to my novel. I knew as soon as I read her suggestion that it was the right one. Good literary advice doesn’t so much feel like an epiphany, like a solution lobbed out of left field, than it does feel like a remembered truth. You know it when you see it, in your heart and gut more than in your brain. I sat down that night and wrote the epilogue that I knew my book deserved. As soon as Kate read it, she said, “There it is.”

Was it hard to find the right level of intimacy to share with your readers in Ars Botanica? Did you have an audience in mind? Did you ever want to change the truth? Did you set out wanting to include your Alopecia, the detailed relationship, and the abortion, or did those events find you along the way?

The events found me along the way, for sure. But I don’t know if I wanted to change the truth so much as I wanted to conceal it. Initially, I tried to pass the manuscript off as fiction. In no way did I set out to write about the abortion, the intimate details of my relationship, or the painful and private history of my body. But all of those events found their way onto the page because the person I was writing for at the outset was myself. I may have said this before in one way or another, but the art I needed at that time in my life had not yet been written, so I had to write it myself. The fact that this book has proved meaningful to so many others along the way makes me believe that there was, amid all those personal details, some true and universal understanding of what it means to love and to lose.

How did you start writing Ars Botanica? (Kind of a broad question, I know.) Was there one quote that popped into your head and started the whole thing? Did you start with the letters to Catalpa? A certain scene or exchange of dialogue?

I honestly don’t remember. I know the bike crash was the first narrative scene I wrote. I was trying to organize and categorize my emotions in writing as a way to cope long before I knew it was a book. I wrote letters to Catalpa but that was something private and almost shameful. It was months before the two collided and became one project. The other lines, the drawings and the poems I was making during that time, they were brought in later. And these decisions came about as a result of having good readers and good editors. I know where my second book began though. I was reading a Paris Review interview with the legendary novelist and editor William Maxwell, and he said the genesis of his book So Long See You Tomorrow came from a childhood memory that still made him shudder. It was the memory of not giving comfort to a classmate who had also lost a parent. I asked myself what events from my past still haunted me. There was a memory of being an altar server in the 90s and how one of our parishioners was dying of AIDS. Thinking of it made me cry.

How much hindsight perspective did you allow to influence the voice of the narrator and the flow of the book? Did you want a more reflective style or in the moment?

Good question. I feel that the novella sections, the more traditional first-person chapters, are for sure more reflective. The letters seemed to have a greater deal of immediacy though. Maybe this is a good example of what I was hinting towards earlier, how a piece of art may possess multiple tonal shifts and occupy different vocal registers. 

What are you reading?

I just started a novel by Chia-Chia Lin, The Unpassing. She was a classmate at Iowa, and I loved her short stories and so far the novel is fabulous. As a matter of fact, I not so long ago read your professor’s second book, twice, and have been raving about it to everyone who’ll listen. Also, Jim Harrison’s collected poems from Copper Canyon, The Shape of the Journey.

Can you share a little about what you’re working on now?

I just finished my first novel, it’s called Mammoth. Like Ars Botanica, it gave me an artistic space to meditate upon certain poignant and restless emotions. I’ve spent a lifetime grappling with obesity and struggling with negative body-image issues, eating disorders. There isn’t a lot of conversation occurring for men who are carrying these burdens though, so this book became that for me, an artistic space to at least start that conversation. As a result, I was able to create a narrator who is not only sharing those struggles, but living the life I never did, the life of a visual artist and painter. This book has been really healing for me. I’m really excited to see it in print.

The sketch of the flower (on this page) first appeared in Ars Botanica.

What do you find most fascinating about creative nonfiction? Why do you write it?

I think what attracts me to creative nonfiction is its capacity to bend genre and take on many different forms. It can be anything it wants or needs to be. It often seems that nonfiction can move through time and space in flexible and unconventional ways that other genres can’t. Seeing genre-bending nonfiction books really clued me in to what was possible as a writer—that it wasn’t always about the narrative or if the facts of one’s life are “interesting.” I also think I’m drawn to it because growing up, I had never heard that nonfiction can be “creative.” Even in my AP Literature class in high school, we never read essays or memoirs. I’m not totally sure why I write creative nonfiction. I’m naturally drawn to it—my fiction has always sucked and my poetry is pretty bad too. I think I’m just drawn to true stories, and I also sort of lack the capacity to make things up. I grew up in a very isolated area and spent a lot of time alone, and I’ve always been very shy and withdrawn. It seems totally counterintuitive to my personality to write nonfiction, but I also think it makes sense. It gives me a voice that I never had before. I’m always trying to make meaning out of my experiences, for better or for worse.

How long does a story or experience stay with you before you decide to write it down?

It depends. I’ve written experiences as they happen, taking notes in my phone or in a notebook. Lately, I’ve been writing about my childhood more, looking back at experiences and kind of trying to decode and analyze them. I know it’s often better to have distance from your experiences before you write about them, but I think there’s also something to be said for lack of distance. I think writing when you’re still in the middle of an experience can still lead to something fascinating and beautiful, just in a different way. I wrote both “Sleep Study” and “Persistence of Vision” when I was still very close to those experiences, and I wonder how they would have turned out if I would have waited or sat on them a bit longer. I guess it all depends on what kind of essay you want to write—something more reflective or something more swirling and emotional? For example, I kind of hate “Sleep Study” now—the language seems overdone, and since I was so close to the experience it was very hard for me to step away from it and really think about what it meant (or if it meant anything at all.) I cringe at the way I thought about the world when I was eighteen, but I think that there’s still something to be said for the essay. There’s a very raw, emotional quality to it, and I almost wish I could “untrain” myself to get at that quality the way I was able to then.

“Persistence of Vision” mentions photography and film-making. How did aspects ofthese fields alter the way that you constructed the essay?

I was a film major at Towson, and I wrote this essay during a time when I was completely frustrated with everything about the filmmaking process. The artifice, the way a scene is constructed to manipulate the viewer. I was also frustrated with the idea of visual shorthands—I was always being told that I complicated things too much in my films, that viewers want to rely on old symbols with fixed meanings. I was having trouble communicating in that medium. “Eliminating the unnecessary” was an idea taught in a lot of my film classes. I regret not adding the line “but what if the unnecessary is more interesting?” to the essay. I also wanted to think about my own reasons for wanting to be a filmmaker, that essential voyeurism and exploitation. I used images to capture and alter my version of reality, to romanticize the friend in “Persistence” and make him into something he wasn’t. I also thought that looking at the arcane but essential structure of old photography and film techniques would be an interesting lens (ha) for looking at the friendship in the essay. I really loved this idea that by the time your eyes settle on an image, in reality, it’s already gone, moved on. I was fascinated by illusions and how essential they are to the optics of moving images, and the way blank space and emptiness plays into that illusion.

“Sleep Study” is so poetic. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, which poets have influenced you the most?

When I wrote “Sleep Study,” I was a very unexperienced writer. One of my main goals in writing it was simply to communicate what I saw and felt in an honest way. I think the language just kind of naturally followed that impulse, although I do think it’s overdone at times. I was also trying really hard to emulate Maggie Nelson, and at that point, Bluets was the only book I’d read that could qualify as poetry. I’m really interested in “hybrid” work, things that straddle the line between nonfiction and poetry and even fiction. Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Anne Carson’s Nox are huge influences on me, books that are sort of impossible to categorize. Those were the first few books that I found when I realized what kind of writer and reader I wanted to be—books that totally defy and bend genre, and I re-read them often. Nick Flynn’s poetry has also been a huge influence on me—his use of language and repeated images are incredible. I love his poetry book Some Ether as well as his memoirs!

You entered a competitive M.F.A. program right out of undergrad at Towson. What’s the transition been like?

It’s been difficult! I did take a year off after graduating from Towson—I don’t think I would have been able to make the jump to an M.F.A. without some kind of break. Since starting the M.F.A., I think I’ve had to change my expectations about what I’m trying to get out of the M.F.A. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and I wonder if I should have waited longer before jumping into it. The best part about it is the feedback from peers and professors, and the push to really make writing a full-time job. I went from writing about once a week to writing at least 4 days a week. Before starting my M.F.A., most of my essays came about because I was stressed or overwhelmed by some other aspect in my life (a shitty job, a film thesis, etc.) It was a way of escaping into what I really wanted to be doing with my life. I like that I’m writing more, but it’s been a huge change from the way that I usually work. I have to turn in a lot of work that I’m not necessarily proud of for everyone in my classes to read—it’s a very vulnerable position to be in.

What’s the most helpful writing advice you’ve ever received? What’s the worst?

The best writing advice I’ve received is to read a ton of books and literary magazines, and really tune in to what’s going on in contemporary literature. This is advice that I used to ignore—I was never a huge reader until pretty recently, and it was always a struggle for me to find books I liked. Once I was able to find “my books” though, it was impossible for me to stop reading. Reading widely has really helped me develop my writing and opened up my eyes to new ways of doing things. I don’t know if I’ve ever received “bad” writing advice. I think there’s sometimes this idea in nonfiction that older is better—that if you’re young, you don’t have the authority to tell personal stories. I want to push back against that—I often think the writing itself (as opposed to content) is the more interesting part of the essay anyway.

What are some of your favorite literary magazines?

DIAGRAM was one of the first (online) literary magazines I ever read, and it’s one of the best! I also really love Tin House, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, Guernica, Sundog Lit, The Believer, PEN America, phoebe, So to Speak, and of course Grub Street.

What does literary success look like to you?

DS: I think it really depends on the phase of life and my writing that I’m in. Overall, I think literary success is defined by getting your work out there, being published, winning awards, etc., but that has so many steps in front of it that I have to think smaller so it feels attainable with where I am in the world. Right now, working full time and settling into post-graduation life, my version of literary success is just getting anything written at all. A snippet, an idea, a character profile, anything where I can say I made a form of progress, no matter how small.

What is your favorite place to write?

DS: I’ll write just about anywhere, especially now that I’m trying to find any moment I can for it, so I’ve never had a favorite place. I’ve learned to just keep writing materials on hand no matter where I’m going. That being said, I definitely find my best flow happens at home. I’m already more of a homebody as a person, plus it’s nice to not worry about my surroundings like I do if I’m out writing. If it’s going well, I lose a lot of awareness of the rest of the world, which isn’t always practical –I’ve missed train stops, not noticed people speaking to me— and I can get loud with my frustrations or breakthroughs, so sometimes it’s easier to have those at home.

How long have you been writing?

DS: Definitely not my whole life, but at this point most of it. Maybe ten years now? I was very anti-reading and writing as a kid, but I got deep into the vampire book craze happening around my middle school years and suddenly had all of my own ideas that I had to do something with them or else I’d go crazy. I got into poetry not long after that, which helped me make sense of playwriting when I got to college, and now I jump between the three.

What inspires you?

DS: I know this is the typical answer, but it can be anything. My brain latches onto random moments, so it’s whatever stands out enough for me to catch it. Song lyrics, a location, my emotions. I daydream all the time, so when I zone out, thinking about a scene or poem, I end up subconsciously pulling from what’s around me. Writing has also always been very personal for me, and my life really influences what and how I’m writing, which is good since I can always pull from that, but it can also limit my perspective, so I try to be careful with that.

What projects are you currently working on?

DS: I’m working on a few things, which is great and terrible at the same time. I fell hard for sestinas as a form so I’m working on a themed collection of them. I have a full length play in its very early, baby stages of writing. I’m still negotiating what I want it to be and how to write it, so it’s in the back of my mind while I sort that out. My main project is a novel that I’ve actually been working on for a long time, but it’s just now taking the shape I want it to. I spent a lot of time trying to edit it into what I wanted, but I finally gave in and started a whole new draft. It’s made a huge difference and given me a freedom I didn’t realize I was missing, so I’m really excited about it.

How did your time at Towson prepare you for “adulthood”?

DS: Being at Towson was a big step forward, since I got to figure out what I wanted my life to look like for me. Knowing all of the small day to day management, like how to not eat out all of the time, keep a budget, have a cleaning schedule, do meal prep, made transitioning out easier because I knew how to use my free time to get things done. It also taught me the type of person that I am and the type space that I need to be happy and productive, which sounds simple but goes a long way in ensuring your peace. I also can’t thank my mentors enough, especially in the theatre department. I left knowing my career options as well as how to network and reach them, and that’s been invaluable.

Do you have any favorite literary magazines? If so, what are they?

DS: I don’t have a favorite, and that’s mainly because when I read one, I skip around, reading what catches my eye rather than reading the entire thing. I know that’s not the idea of them, and I do love reading the full collection and seeing how those pieces connect, but I always end up speeding through to find the works that I’m excited about, so sometimes I just skip ahead all together and pay more attention to the individual work than the magazine. That is something I want to be better about, and it’s a good exercise in learning more than just what interests me, which can feel tedious, but serves me and my writing in the long run, and that’s always what I’m focused on.

– James Hancock, online nonfiction editor

JH: The poem takes place over the course of a year. Why did you choose to split the narrative into the four seasons?

MT: On a practical level, breaking the narrative of Dear Almost into the four seasons gave me an organizing structure. It made the daunting task of writing a book-length poem—of trying to write one, since I’d never done it before—feel do-able.

I tend to write in a collage-like way, getting phrases and images down in my notebook, drafting a line or two at a time, then going back to see how they can fit together into a poem. That works fine for shorter poems, but in this case, I had pages and pages—a whole notebook full of stuff—and I was struggling with how to shape it into a poem. A lot of what I’d written had something to say about the landscape or the weather, so there were certain seasonal cues that made it natural to go back through these pieces in my notebook and think, Well, okay, that’s a spring image or That’s really a winter line, isn’t it? And again, this just made a big undertaking feel a little smaller and more manageable.

One some deeper level, I realized that following the seasons is also a natural way of charting the grieving process—the way the seasons keep circling along, and how that echoes the way your thoughts and feelings circle back again and again as you try to make peace with a loss.

JH: Dear Almost serves as a letter to your own almost child. Your grief is almost always indirectly discussed, either through metaphor or during certain moments, like where you try to imagine what your child would have looked like when she was older. What inspired that approach?

MT: Well, one of the things I admire about classical Chinese poetry is the way that a poet like Wang Wei or Meng Hao Jan would write about the seasons or the landscape as a way of describing his own inner weather. Adopting a variation on that approach appealed to me, and offered a sense of shelter, as I tried to find words for this feeling of loss. I didn’t imagine I could write directly about our almost girl for more than a few stanzas at a time without the poem becoming maudlin and unbearable, for me and for the reader. I don’t think I realized it fully at the time, but after the book was finished I could see how that approach might also make the moments of direct focus and address more powerful.

JH: You brought up classical Chinese poetry as an influence for Dear Almost. In the poem, you also talk about a visit to China, as well as the Chinese heritage on your wife’s side. Has the presence of Chinese culture and East Asian poetry influenced your previous works before?

MT: Oh, absolutely. I’ve been an avid reader of Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation for a long time. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve tried to learn from these amazing poems and model certain aspects of them in my own writing. Two of the books that mean the most to me as a writer and a reader are David Hinton’s anthology, Classical Chinese Poetry, and the Essential Haiku, a wonderful gathering of translations of Basho, Buson, and Issa, edited by Robert Hass.

Of course, my experiences in a cross-cultural family as well as the opportunities we’ve had to travel to China and Japan have influenced my writing too—in terms of what I write about, but also more broadly in the way I look at the world through my poems. Many of the poems in my previous book, This Time Tomorrow, also take place in China and Japan.

My mother-in-law, Mrs. Fong Koo, makes several appearances in Dear Almost, including during a car trip to the Chuan Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York. A section of the poem also takes place in her neighborhood in New Jersey, where all the streets are named for poets. She passed away recently, and some of my fondest memories of her involve our conversations about poetry. A lifelong reader of poetry, she would share with me poems clipped from her Chinese-language newspaper, which publishes a poem in each issue. We would also sometimes look at two translations of the same poem and she’d ask me which English version I thought was a better poem in English, and why. We both owned copies of Poems of the Masters, Red Pine’s translation of a classic Tang and Sung dynasty anthology and compared notes on favorites. For us poems were a common ground on which we could talk—across generations, languages, cultures and geographies. I miss her. I know as I continue to read poems in translation I’ll always wonder what she would think of them.

JH: You’re an established poet, but unlike most writers who happen to be professors or editors, you work in corporate communications. Despite the vast differences between the two, are there any similarities? Has your work in communications ever influenced your work as a poet, and vice versa?

MT: It’s funny to think of myself as established. Mostly I just feel old. When I was looking at MFA programs 20 years ago, I had thought I would go into teaching—it seemed like that’s what everyone did after getting an MFA. But I had been working in corporate communications for several years already, and so when the MFA program I attended turned out not to have any real opportunities for us to teach, I just kept doing the kind of work I’d been doing all along. And in many ways, it’s turned out to be a day job that complements my poem writing.

There do seem to be some similarities between corporate comms and teaching. For example, I give my colleagues writing advice and sometimes edit their press releases. People tend to come to me with grammar or punctuation questions. Saying more with fewer words, seeking clarity, and coming up with memorable phrases are important in both modes of writing.

Probably the most direct influence of my corporate work on my poem-writing occurred years ago when I was working for a PR and marketing agency in Detroit and wrote a poem about a break-of-day photo shoot I helped with for a taxi cab brochure.

JH: Dear Almost is an incredibly personal poem, much more so than your previous work. Was it purely circumstantial, or was this already a natural progression for your writing?

MT: For me it was a case of writing what I needed to write. I can’t remember when I started to write about this loss or decided that I would write about it—I just remember being already in it: writing about her, to her, trying to find words for this loss I’d never imagined. And you’re right; it was intensely, painfully personal. It’s still hard for me to read from this book.

I don’t know if there’s a progression. Probably any writer is the wrong person to answer that question about their own work. But for over a year now I’ve been writing poems for a new book, a sequence about a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and just after, in which he loses most of his family. The very first spark for this came from reading Jean Follain’s poems. I was blown away, wanted to write my way into a landscape like I’d seen in his poems, and just started dreaming this up. Maybe because of that I felt sure for a time that this would be purely a work of imagination, disconnected from my own life—which would be a relief after working on Dear Almost for so long. But of course, that’s never true. As I’ve written deeper into this boy’s story, I find myself writing about fathers and sons, what it means to be a parent, how it feels to lose people you love… themes that of course draw directly on my own experiences and emotions. You can’t ever really escape these things, can you?

JH: We’ve discussed the personal nature of your poem, but I feel that there’s also a universal experience that can be found within your grief. Do you expect parents who have experienced similar events will be able to look to Dear Almost and feel like they aren’t alone in their struggles? Was that ever one of your intentions while working on the poem?

MT: I’ve heard from a few people who read the book and felt a sense of recognition, found some comfort in it, and shared their stories with me. I’m humbled by that. I’m gratified to think I’ve been able to express thoughts and emotions they recognize and feel too—that, like you say, none of us are alone in this. It does seem like miscarriage is something that just doesn’t get talked about much—or that it’s sometimes seen as something to just get over and not dwell on.

So, I wanted to describe my experience as a would-be father. I wanted to find the words for what I was feeling—for this loss—because it felt as if no one had written something I could relate to. I was writing for myself, first, but also with the hope that when other people read the book someday they’d find meaning in it too. Of course, that’s always my hope.

Matthew Thorburn’s book, Dear Almost, has recently received the Lascaux prize. In addition to Dear Almost, Matthew Thorburn has also published several other poetry collections, such as This Time Tomorrow, Every Possible Blue, and Subject to Change. He is also due to have his upcoming book, The Grace of Distance, published by next fall. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and the BRIO Fellowship from the Bronx Council on the Arts.

Photo by Curt Richter

Interview by James Hancock, 2018-19 Online Nonfiction Editor

Paula Whyman’s story collection, You May See a Stranger, explores the life of Miranda Weber. Quick-witted and hyper-observant, Miranda is, as the jacket copy describes, “a hot mess.” In one story, for example, she has a sexual awakening in the display tent of a sporting goods section. Whyman has skillfully crafted a collection of self-contained stories that also speak with one another. We’re with Miranda from her late teens through her late forties. We watch her date deeply flawed men, struggle with the fate of her sister who’s developmentally disabled, and witness the crack cocaine epidemic in her hometown of Washington, D.C. No matter the situation, Miranda is always searching, always looking for the fine details in others’ personalities, making acute guesses about their thoughts and actions, never afraid to crack a joke no matter how tense things become. In every story she’s a little older, but also a little wiser. By the end, You May See a Stranger becomes an impressive example of a collection of stories that manages to continuously build on itself, with Miranda becoming a character who has gone through not just one, but multiple arcs in a natural progression through the course of her life.

Paula Whyman has published stories in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other literary journals. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, and is also the founding editor of Scoundrel Time. She recently received the Towson Prize for Literature and read on Towson’s campus. After her visit, she and I corresponded by email to discuss her writing process.

JH: At one of your readings, you said that you knew from the beginning that Miranda’s story would be told through connected short stories. Why is that?

PW: I wanted to touch down at certain points in the protagonist’s life and examine them closely. I was interested, especially, in the obscure moments that stay with you for reasons you might not always understand, and how they eventually fit into the larger picture. Why do you recall one situation or moment or experience and not another that may seem to an outsider to be more significant? Sometimes we don’t figure out the meaning of things like that until well after they’ve occurred; sometimes we never do.

I always imagined a nontraditional structure for this book; I wanted to leave some open spaces in time. Between the events that take place in the stories, time passes. Events occur that are not on the page, and, as far as I can tell, they don’t need to be on the page for the reader to get a sense of Miranda’s lived experience. The reader fills in what might have happened, what seems to have happened. The gaps are part of Miranda’s story.

I see the narrative of a person’s life as a series of linked stories; stories we tell about ourselves and stories we tell ourselves.

JH: Miranda’s life isn’t run by men, but most of her experiences are greatly influenced by the relationships she’s in at the time, along with the choices she makes in relation to them. Why did you choose to highlight those moments in Miranda’s life?

PW: This may sound simplistic, but our lives are influenced by our relationships, and we come to an understanding about ourselves in part by examining our behavior through that lens—the relationships we choose, and those we’re born into. Miranda’s intimate relationships illuminate character and show evolution (or lack thereof) and, especially, track the theme of “judgment” that’s introduced in the first story by the teacher in her driver’s ed class. Will she develop good judgment, as the teacher suggests is important for driving a car—but also, no surprise, when it comes to driving one’s life decisions? Also, it was fun writing the sex scenes.

But Miranda’s most important relationship in the book is with her sister. I see Miranda as someone who needs to define herself as different from her sister and someone who, at least some of the time, feels guilty about her sister, so to some extent she punishes herself by getting involved with men who don’t treat her well. On the other hand, good relationships make for dull fiction. As others have explained more famously and pithily.

JH: You just brought up that Miranda’s relationship with her sister is the most important one. What went into creating her character and developing their relationship throughout the writing process?

PW: The way I develop any character is by writing about her, writing a lot of stuff I don’t end up including in a story but that is indispensable for my own understanding. I wanted to make sure I got Donna “right.” I didn’t want her to be pathetic or angelic or unrealistically wise or any other stereotype, the way some developmentally disabled characters are portrayed in fiction. The story “Drosophila” shows Miranda as a teenager watching out for Donna, while it also flashes back to when Miranda and Donna are kids together and demonstrates the cruelty Miranda is capable of. I was curious about the way both of those strands exist in sibling relationships, and writing that helped me understand Donna’s character, and Miranda’s, in a more fine-grained way. I also think that having a sister, especially a disabled sister, makes Miranda seem a little less self-involved. Like, she has a reason for being the way she is at times, for building a wall around her heart.

JH: Most of the short stories in your book are told in a similar style and structure. What made you decide to change the narrative to third-person perspective in the last two stories?

PW: There are two stories in the second half of the book that are written in third-person point-of-view. (The final story returns to the first-person point-of-view that characterizes the rest of the book.) Although the book is arranged chronologically, I wrote the stories out of order. Those two third-person stories were the first ones I wrote knowing that I was planning to write a whole book of linked stories focused on a specific protagonist, the person who turned out to be Miranda (though at that point I hadn’t named her). I decided to start working on this project during a stay at Yaddo. I drafted those two stories one after the other, each in less than ten days, which at the time was perhaps the fastest I’d ever written a story that ended up working.

I wrote the story set in Mexico first (“Threat Potential”). I remember talking with my housemate at Yaddo about it, saying, I know they’re going to a ruin like Coba, but I don’t know what will happen there. I assumed it would be something bad. So, I wrote that draft (it eventually went through many more drafts), and then I came down with a terrible stomach bug. This illness happened on the day my housemate left the colony, and before a new artist moved in. I was completely alone in a house that seemed haunted (everywhere at Yaddo is haunted). I spent most of the night lying on the floor in the bathroom. Once I could claw my way off the bathroom floor and look at solid food again, I drafted the story about Miranda and the psychologist.

In both of those stories, the protagonist is called “the mother.” Because that’s where she is in her life. Her kids are at an age where that’s her primary identity, and she’s completely focused on them—over-focused, especially in the Mexico story. She’s distanced from herself. So, the third person seemed appropriate. In the doctor story, she’s too busy dwelling on her own past to focus on the problem at hand, what’s happening with her daughter, and she seems self-absorbed. She is transitioning away from the extreme focus on her kids, that distanced self. Not necessarily at the right time for her daughter, though.

When it came time to publish the book, Mike Levine (my editor), Dan Menaker (my agent), and I discussed whether those two stories should be revised to first person. In fact, I’d tried them in first person myself, much earlier, once I realized the other stories would be in first. But to me they work better in third; they do what they’re supposed to do. Mike and Dan agreed. It was a short discussion.

JH: In addition to writing, you also run the online literary journal Scoundrel Time. How has working as an editor influenced or inspired your own writing?

PW: I worked as an editor in various capacities at magazines and in scholarly book publishing for eight years before I went to MFA school. I can’t overemphasize how much I learned from those editorial positions. I think that background has made me more attentive to certain details, attentive to consistency and structure, to trying to tease out and develop ideas, themes. To me, it’s fun–I love editing the work of other writers; probably there’s something seriously wrong with me. I see an essay or a story as a puzzle that has many possible solutions, and I like the challenge of helping an author reach the best possible solution that is true to that person’s vision.

In college, other students paid me to edit their papers. I enjoyed it so much that I remember staying up late working on these other papers rather than working on my own. Plus, beer money.

Still, it took time for me to develop editorial judgment about my own writing. The MFA program helped a great deal toward that goal.

The downside–fiction writers often talk about having to block out the “editor” voice when writing a draft, and that’s true for me. I must let go of any ideas of perfection that the editor in me tends to reach for, or I’d never be able to start…or finish.

JH: You mentioned seeing stories as “puzzles with many different solutions.” What were some other “solutions,” or directions you could have taken Miranda and the other characters, that popped up while you were working on You May See a Stranger?

PW: The linked collection itself, what should go into it and how to structure it—that was a puzzle with many possible solutions. My concept of the book evolved over time. When I started planning it, I didn’t realize the sister would be as important as she turned out to be. And for a long time, I thought the stories would be told by different people in Miranda’s life—a parent, an ex, one of her kids, and so on. I started to write a few of those stories and then realized that the book was really Miranda’s—that it belonged in her voice. Giving myself permission to stay with Miranda’s perspective was a big deal. Then, I spent time wondering whether the stories should appear in a different order. They’re chronological, but within each story, the narrative jumps around in time, so in a way it would be okay to mix them up. You might get a different perspective on Miranda if you read the stories out of order. After all, I wrote them out of order.

When I’m writing a story, I have a few pieces of the puzzle to start but I don’t know how they fit together. Like in the story “Transfigured Night,” I knew Miranda and Devin were planning to go to a concert, but I wasn’t sure they’d ever actually get there. They might just keep arguing about having kids and miss the concert completely. Then I wasn’t sure what piece they’d listen to at the symphony, until I heard the Schoenberg myself, and right away I knew. Then I had the idea that something bad had to happen, because there was a feeling of foreboding that needed to be fulfilled, but I didn’t know what would happen to them or how bad it would be. For that story, I wrote a lot of material that I didn’t use to find the pieces that fit. 

JH: With this being your first book, where do you see yourself going with your writing from here? Are you interested in doing another collection of short stories, or do you see yourself writing a novel?

PW: I am writing a novel. It’s dark humor, set in the approximate present. It’s called Head Games. I’m also writing a memoir called A Hole in the Heart.

Several years ago, I was writing a different novel. I kept getting ideas for stories, and these ideas kept gnawing at me, so I’d set aside the novel and write a story instead. I wrote a lot of stories that way. Still, I kept sending myself back to the novel I was working on. I had this idea that my first book “had” to be a novel. But once I drafted those two stories at Yaddo, I decided to give the linked collection a chance; I gave myself permission to write the stories I felt like writing. That was a good decision.

Right now, I have no desire to write a short story. It’s an odd feeling; I’ve been writing short stories since I was nine years old. I’m sure I’ll write more stories later on, but right now, I’m driven to write the novel and the memoir. I’m torturing myself a little, but I’m also having fun with it. Which, if you don’t have fun, what’s the point?