Vermin on the Mount

CONVERMINSATION WITH ALLISON CARTER

The latest installment of Converminsations features hybrid forms specialist Allison Carter. Photo by Harold Abramowitz.

JIM RULAND: What are you going to read on June 14?

ALLISON CARTER: I plan on reading some work from my book, A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, and some work from the project I'm working on right now. The project might be called Ways For Going (Or For Making Go). It's a project of ghost poems – poems for and by ghosting subjectivities.

JR: That sounds really interesting. Can you tell me a bit more about “ghosting subjectivities?”

AC: I think of ghosting subjectivities as minds or parts of minds – or maybe 'wills' is the better word – that, for reasons beyond their control, flicker in and out of a situation, either by accident or on purpose. A will that can absent itself at will. That situation could be life.

JR: When you teach your class on hybrid forms, what do you tell your students they will be doing?

AC: Instead of focusing on the word “hybrid,” we tend to talk more about the idea of inventing new forms.

JR: Are they resistant? How do you make them comfortable?

AC: Because I have always taught this class in an art school with awesome students who are well-versed in traditions of experimentalism and interdisciplinarity, most of my students have been not just comfortable, but totally excited about the idea of discarding structures like “short story.” They find the class to be a useful venue in which to explore concerns they are pursuing in their native métiers (music, film, etc.) in another format, and many bring their sonic, performance and visual skills to the table, both as writers and as critics.

JR: What kind of models do you use?

AC: This past year we started out by reading Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School. This book demonstrates over and over what kinds of formal inventions the class is intended to foster – the idea that with every character, story, concept or theory, there is an appropriate form that a writer/artist can derive from the materials they are dealing with. This kind of loose modeling, I think (hope!) makes experimentation safe, and demonstrates that experimentation can have a very definite purpose – that it doesn't have to be a negative act (non-conforming), it can instead be actively coming up with what, formally, needs to be done in order to accomplish a particular kind of communication/action.

JR: I think I already know the answer to this, but does it bother you when you see work labeled as “experimental” as if “experimental” is a genre unto itself with its own rules and tropes?

AC: Yes! CalArts put on a conference a few years ago in which I think it was Matias Viegner who proposed that we reconsider the idea of the experimental in terms of the scientific roots of the word. I like to think that a literary experiment is writing that, like a scientific experiment, combines new materials or speeds or sizes or methods to discover or demonstrate something integral to the fabric of the world.

JR: Is there a specific work that, for lack of a more precise phrase, gave you permission to experiment with form?

AC: The Autobiography of Red by Ann Carson. The way Carson uses lyric to compress and then explode her story was amazing to me when I first read it, and continues to amaze me every time I reread it. There is a strangeness, a simple strangeness to her writing. Her language works like an extraction - the nucleus from the cell - and then her storytelling becomes a series of nuclei bumping and ricocheting instead of just a man walking along. You still have the teleological movement of narrative, and the story-pleasure, but underneath that is this tension and, again, ricochet. It still blows my mind.

JR: I love how you use ambiguity, like how "Sometimes" in The Nests is used as a refrain. And in "Either/Or" you say "Either/or is not a holy construction but a human one." Is your work a response to this?

AC: To put it flatly, I think that the state of humanness is often characterized by a state of both-ness. I am interested in language that allows for a both-ness (again, a ricochet) and that still enables forward motion. For the last several years I think my writing has been struggling with a sense of an inward collapse of both-ness. In The Nests I try to consider the nature of the pull that draws people to stagnate -- how we can slowly lose a sense of inner tension, or freeze into the tension, like carefully placed magnets (an always-sometimes). With The Nests I am looking at domesticity, as I was in A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, an obvious, but I think still very important locus for questions of movement and freeze.

JR: It’s kind of ironic that domesticity is a trigger for the collapse of both-ness since it involves the union of two people. Or maybe it's not ironic at all...

AC: I think that domesticity is a perfect place to examine how hard it is to keep up two-ness. For some reason, for some people, the instinct is to collapse into one. It's not possible for two people to actually crawl inside each other (try drawing that!) but often we want to. You're left with two grownups sort of half sticking out of wombs/nests that they've fashioned out of their partners. Or one person made up of all eyes, and one who is all mouth and hand. And then what happens to desire? And movement or the potential for change - a necessary condition for desire?

JR: Western culture has been on an either/or track since at least Aristotle and its only speeded up with the integration of Boolean systems in our machines. It’s a binary world!

AC: In "Either/Or" – and in a lot of this new project (Ways For Going (Or For Making Go)) I am trying to look at how to balance a both-ness, a tension, a conflict, and still move, but not with the purpose of resolution. Ghosts are interesting to me for this reason - their desires that aren't bound by death.

JR: What's the strangest experience you've had at a reading?

AC: The release party for Maximus Kim's One Break, A Thousand Blows! featured fish being squeezed out of the inside of a paper box (Gina Clark) - and wrestling (Daiana Feuer & Gerard Olson). So far, when I've read, things have been pretty tame. Probably the strangest thing would have been a collaboration with Beth McNamara that involved fabricating a life-sized doll in front of an outdoor music festival audience in Eagle Rock. Maybe this reading will take the cake?

Come hear Allison read from her work on Sunday, June 14 at 8pm at the Mountain Bar.

CONVERMINSATION WITH OLGA GARCIA

 

The latest installation of Converminsations features Olga Garcia, and L.A. writer who works in multiple genres and languages.

JIM RULAND: What are you going to read on Sunday, June 14?

OLGA GARCIA: I'll be reading from my book Falling Angels – a couple of poems and a short excerpt from one of my stories. I would also like to share at least one of my newer unpublished pieces. Even when I do make selections prior to a reading, I like to feel out the audience and event once I'm there. Since I write in English, sometimes in Spanish, and mostly in Spanglish, language is always something to consider at readings. Many times I've made a careful selection and then completely changed it at the last minute because of the vibe and the audience.

JR: Do you think in Spanish and then translate as you write? What is this process like? Do you dream in Spanish as well? Are there times when the words just come to you in English?

OG: My parents are both immigrants from Mexico and because of this we grew up speaking mostly Spanish at home. Although Spanish was my mother tongue, English (heard and learned from TV, school, friends, the streets) was ever-present in my upbringing as well. Growing up, it wasn't uncommon for me to have conversations with my sisters or friends that began in English and ended in Spanish or vice versa. This is still true. And it isn't uncommon for my thoughts and dreams to be bilingual too. This braiding of languages is an integral part of who I am, so therefore it's inevitable that it ends up in my writing.

JR: Your book, Falling Angels, reflects this mish-mash of English and Spanish. Are you consciously making these choices in order to portray the multicultural scenes you're describing as accurately as possible?

OG: When I mix my languages in stories and poems, I'm doing it quite naturally, the way I hear it in my head or sometimes in my dreams. I have written some pieces entirely in Spanish, as in the monologue "Ana Leticia Armendariz: Matando Cucarachas," a piece about an immigrant woman obsessed with killing roaches. Writings that come to me entirely in Spanish are always gifts, as they are rare. I'm much more confident when writing English, since it's the language in which I received almost all of my formal education.

JR: So you don’t translate your work?

OG: I try not to. If something comes to me entirely in English, I want to let that be what it is. The same is true for the Spanglish. For me, it's been important to write in what Gloria Anzaldua called "our living languages," because ultimately languages are mirrors of who we are and where we come from. Having said this, I also don't want to pigeonhole myself. What I love most about language is that it is dynamic; it's in a constant state of flux and evolution. I feel blessed to have two languages to draw from when I write, and I look forward to seeing how my voice and my play with language continue to evolve.

JR: You write both poetry and prose. Do you have a preference?

OG: My true love is and always has been poetry. My prose is more accident than anything else; it's often been birthed from monstrous poems that got too long and out of control. A sure sign that I prefer poetry is that I'm usually thinking in images and rarely about something like plot. I like that poetry can capture moments or emotions (creative snapshots) without having to create an entire narrative. I also love the challenge of condensing an idea/emotion/story into a poem and playing with the line breaks.

JR: Is one more difficult than the other?

OG: I think writing prose and in particular a novel is extremely difficult. I'd much rather grapple with images and try to successfully express something in a haiku. The novel intrigues me, though. Every time I read a good novel I'm in awe and ask, "How did the author do that?" It's definitely inspiring.

JR: Does some material lend itself to one form over the other?

OG: Yes, definitely. Even though I prefer poetry, I have several poems that were just suffocating in their stanzas. No matter how much I edited or experimented, it just didn't work because the genre was all wrong. I play with form a lot when I write. In a way it's maddening because I will take something completely apart, put it back together differently, take it apart again, and then after many versions I often end up returning to the beginning. But it's because of this "playing" that several of my poems have morphed into stories and, on a couple of occasions, even plays. I've also had the opposite happen--a story taken apart and put back together again morphed into a poem.

JR: In one of your stories, "Assault with a Deadly Donut," you visually present a collage on the side of a truck. Was this challenging?

OG: It was actually a lot of fun and cathartic to write. All of the incidents of police brutality mentioned in the collage are taken from true events. What I really wanted to point out in this story is the ridiculousness of some of the justifications for police brutality. In the story, Turo, a donut maker and vendor, gets shot for holding a donut, thus the title "Assault with a Deadly Donut." The story is meant to be funny, but it also attempts to highlight injustice. Turo's story may seem far-fetched, but it is no more ridiculous than the real-life stories of a deaf man getting shot for holding a rake or a black woman getting shot for holding a screwdriver. Regarding the visual collage in the story, some of the incidents mentioned targeted immigrant Latinos, so those postings had to be written in Spanish. Other incidents involved African-Americans, so those were written in English. What was more challenging than the English/Spanish thing was working on creating different voices in both languages, so that each posting ended up sounding like a different person. Brent Beltran of Calaca Press gave me the idea of adding graphics to the collage and that took this portion of the story to another level. I was really happy with the end product because it became a page of testimonies that gave voice to the often voiceless.

JR: What's the most unusual experience you've had at a reading?

OG: I guess being invited to a reading and not reading is somewhat unusual. This past week I was invited to read at the Leimert Park Village Book Fair. I was supposed to read at 1:30 and I was very excited about sharing my work there. Yet when I got there it was obvious the book fair had a life of its own. My slot to read never arrived, but I did very much enjoy the deep fried catfish and the band that was singing, "We Want the Funk! Gotta Have the Funk!"

Come hear Olga read on Sunday, June 14 at the Mountain Bar in Chinatown with Amy Wallen and Allison Carter.

ENDLESS SEWER

It wouldn't be summer without a sewer full of Vermin! Come to the next Vermin on the Mount on Sunday, June 14 at 8pm. Also, check back next week for interviews with Allison Carter and Olga Garcia!

CONVERMINSATION WITH AMY WALLEN

 
The latest installation of Converminsations features San Diego writer Amy Wallen who has very good reason to be excited about tonight's American Idol results.

JIM RULAND: What are you going to read on June 14?

AMY WALLEN: Since I'm not sure what I'm working on novel-wise right now, I have about three things in the works, and since I’m so focused on DimeStories, I thought I might promote that by reading a couple of those.

JR: How did you become the worldwide leader in 3-minute stories?

AW: Five years ago San Diego Writers, Ink asked me to host a prose open mic. I said sure, BUT I wasn't going to have a featured reader, and I wasn't going to have a situation where you had to sit through someone reading for 45 minutes about their horrific childhood. (Boy will I be embarrassed if the other readers at Vermin on the Mount are reading about their horrific childhoods.) The SDWInk folks said it wouldn't work. I said give me three months and if it doesn't work I'll do it your way. Five years later, not only are there multitudes flocking to the abusive and cruel 3-minute rule open mic, but we now have Dime-Offs and showcases and podcasts are in the works. I'm not saying I was right, I'm just saying.

JR: Is DimeStories five-year anniversary coming up?

AW: Our fifth anniversary is October 2 at Swedenborg Hall!

JR: You have a reputation for being quite strict with the time limit. What are some of the more extreme measures you've taken to enforce this rule?

AW: Oy, the worst was when I had a couple of blue-haired ladies in their Rockports accost me one night. But I didn't back down. This was early on. One of them wanted to read their entire short story (I'm sure it was 45 minutes of their horrific childhood) and so they needed more than 3 minutes. Sorry, I said, that's the rule. Well, they put their little nubby wrinkly faces right up to mine and started telling me how the story wouldn't fit in three minutes and I said they'd have to find another venue. Then one of them stomped their rubber-soled shoe on my instep and waggled their uvula at my nose as she screamed that her friend had to read her entire story. Go someplace else, I said, or just find an excerpt. At this point I was backed up against the wall of mirrors at The Grove, but I wasn't going to be softhearted just because they only had about seven more years left to live. “You don't understand!” the stomper yelled. “No, YOU don't understand,” I said back (I, of course, never raised my voice because I'm telling my side and that's how I remember it.) “Then we're leaving!” they shouted. "Happy editing!" I said sweetly as their Rockports skidded out the door.

JR: That sounds pretty awful.

AW: Another time I had a woman reading a story that she had won a Pulitzer for. The timer went off and she kept reading. So after about 30 seconds I beeped the timer again and sidled up closer to her on stage. She kept reading. After another 30 seconds I got closer and closer. She kept reading, but held her hand up to me as if to say, "Just hold on!" At 5 minutes and the audience glaring at me, I stood right next to her and whispered your time is up. She nodded but kept reading. Finally she finished. So when she stepped down the audience would hardly applaud. I said, "I guess when you win a Pulitzer you don't have to pay attention to time."

JR: Most people seem to welcome the rule...

AW: We rarely have many folks go over time anymore. I've earned the moniker, "Time Dominatrix." And they are the Time Submitters, because they return month after month for more abuse and they bring their friends and family to endure.

JR: I'm curious to know if you're up for talking about the whole American Idol thing.

AW: If I can't exploit this whole American Idol thing then it has been a complete waste of my integrity. I like to think of myself as having that cushy seat on the inside that I could watch the whole thing, but I wasn't so involved that I was blinded by the starlight. So, ask me anything and everything and I'll give you the National Enquirer truth.

JR: Okay, so let’s get this out of the way: What is your relationship to Adam Lambert?

AW: I'm two apostrophes away: Adam's Dad's girlfriend. Or, as I prefer to say, I sleep with Adam Lambert's dad.
 


Amy offers some helpful instruction to Adam's police escort.  

JR: How is American Idol different than a Dime-Off?

AW: Great question! Our DimeStories judges don't slice the reader open and smear their entrails across the stage and backdrop. Although I do occasionally pistol whip the reader with my timer if they go over three minutes.

JR: Authors often comment on how weird it is when their characters go out in the world and take on a life of your own. What's it like to see someone close to you go out achieve super stardom?

AW: Mostly it pisses me off. I'm the jealous sort. But then I think, “How the hell can I exploit this?” Seriously, I love Adam and I get giddy seeing how well he's done. He has always said he wanted to be a rock star, and I just had a hunch that if anyone could figure out how to do it, he would. Watching how the show works from the inside, how the songs are chosen and taken away and reassigned, Adam's been a big inspiration for me. I watch him and I think, "He knows exactly who he is with every song, no matter if it was his choice or not, he makes it his." At 27, that's amazing. At 45, I have no idea who I am from week to week, story to story.

JR: Evaluate Ryan Seacrest as a host.

AW: Annoying. But I also see that he's in some way a good friend of Simon's and I have the greatest respect for Simon. Simon is always stick-to-his-guns on how it's about the talent and not the frivolity. Ryan's a little milquetoast for me. And having seen his jokes posted on the teleprompter for him, and him not really using much imagination, I'm disappointed. Then again, someone else is writing those jokes, so I shouldn't blame the empty cartridge.

JR: What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen at American Idol?

AW: Simon walks around the dark backstage with a very tall young gofer right behind him holding a flashlight over Simon's head so that he can see in the dark.

JR: What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen at DimeStories?

AW: At an anniversary party about two years ago I looked up from the lectern and in the audience two men had wrestled one of the audience members to the ground and they were dragging him out the doors of the building. The show must go on! So, I called the next reader and we kept going even though the sirens wailed when the police arrived, and then again when the ambulance arrived. Turned out the guy whose reading had been more a rant than a reading had been about to go ballistic and the "bouncer" guys decided to take him out before he took us out. We had to get a restraining order. But we never stopped reading!

Come see Amy read an all-star selection of DimeStories from her celebrated series at The Mountain on June 14.

SUMMER OF VERMIN

Summer is nearly here but you don't have to wait a second longer for the Vermin on the Mount summer schedule. On Sunday, June 14 at 8pm come to The Mountain for a night of irreverent readings from three multi-talented writers.

AMY WALLEN is the author of Moon Pies and Movie Stars and the organizer and impresario of DimeStories.org.

OLGA GARCIA is a widely published L.A. poet whose work includes the collection Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas.  

ALLISON CARTER lives in L.A. and is the author of the book Fixed, Formal Arrangement and the chapbook Shadows Are Weather.

Check back soon for interviews with all three of our writers! Plus, be sure to circle August 23 on your calendar and get ready to celebrate the Five Year Anniverminsary of Vermin on the Mount!

You've been warned; don't be bitten.

CONVERMINSATION WITH CHIWAN CHOI

The newest edition of Converminsations features L.A. poet/novelist/writer Chiwan Choi.

JIM RULAND: What are you going to be reading on April 5?

CHIWAN CHOI: I'm not quite sure yet. Which I'm sure is a horrible thing for a host of an event to hear. But normally, I'm completely unable to decide until the day before the reading, if that. However, I think I have it narrowed down to a couple of possible things. One would be a section of a novel I've been working on for...ever. My second option is to read a series of horribly raunchy and obscene poems. However, I'm pretty sure that if I finish this new short story, that's what I'll read. It's got all kinds of things in it, like a bathtub, a broken foot, and a knife.

JR: What’s the novel about?

CC: It's called "Dogs of Los Angeles" and it's broken down into five loosely connected sections. The first four chapters take place right toward the end of Summer '01 and the stories revolve around teenagers, dealing with the cold realities of both the streets and the homes. The last section takes place in the present and it focuses on a man in his thirties whose life may be unraveling, but he can't quite tell because he doesn't know what the value of personal tragedy is in a post-9/11, international economic collapse time. So I'm interested in reading a few pages from that...

JR: You work in a number of genres. Do you favor some over others for periods of time or do the ides dictate the form it will eventually take?

CC: My writing life started with poetry. It was when I was still very uncomfortable with and lacking confidence in my limited vocabulary. I was in high school and I'd been made to read the god-awful "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck and, even though I knew even then that the book was a piece of shit, the experience made me feel like an idiot who didn't know what writing or reading was. Fortunately, as many young people have, I discovered Bukowski and his poems opened up a giant door. Poetry written with words I knew! At this time, when I was 17, I met a teacher named Jack Grapes who really changed my life. He taught me everything I know about writing. I still go back to him, 20 years later, whenever I can to take his classes.

JR: What if someone forced you to choose?

CC: If I had to identify myself as a specific type of writer, I’d say "poet." That's what I've known the most, written the most, and loved the most. But right now, this novel is challenging me in incredible ways so I feel most comfortable with that form.

JR: Are you sure about that?

CC: You know what? Fuck that. I love journal writing the best. It's simple, honest, and I can get to things really quick.

JR: Is it a time-based thing?

CC: As far as how long ideas take to get to page...with poetry (relatively short poetry) I don't think about it. When I start writing a poem, it's the first time the words / thoughts / ideas in it have crossed my mind. The exception is "The Flood," a fucking poem I've been working on for about seven years now and is now up to near 50 pages. Good god. I don't know what the fuck got into me. Should have never started on it...but I did. Now I’ve got to keep at it until I feel it's absolutely finished. With screenplays and plays, I think about a character for a month or two, trying to really live the lives, before I start picturing scenes and events. But in most cases, poetry or prose, I think I am thinking on the page. The page seems to be a good place to figure things out.

JR: Tell me more about your web site Siberia/LA.

CC: The name of my blog used to be "fictionalized memoir about things that never happened." That title came to a few years back when I was living in New York. I was at a fancy party that New York magazine threw and there was this guy there, a very young author named David Amsden, who is an editor / contributor at the magazine and had a big crowd of people around him. Anyway, he was the Star because he had published his novel, "Important Things That Don't Matter," when he was like 22 or something. You know, he's one of those guys that on the back cover, some reviewer has designated him "the voice of his generation." So I'm standing there with my friend who also works at the magazine and she was all sad and jealous because Mr. Amsden was young and already famous. And to make her feel better, I said, "Forget about his stupid book. What kind of title is that anyway? I got a better one. Fictionalized Memoir About Things That Never Happened, a Novel." So that was my original title for the blog.

JR: That’s a very funny story that has absolutely nothing to do with Siberia…

CC: Yeah, I know. I recently changed it to Siberia because of 3 things: 1) when my wife first moved to LA, we were sitting one night at Mani's Bakery on Fairfax and she said, "Damn, this is the coldest city in the world!" 2) I have a friend, like a little brother, who is obsessed with visiting Russia and getting as close to Siberia as possible. 3) This city is so impossible to survive sometimes. It is a hard hard place. You can't imagine how easy I found New York to be after having survived childhood, teen years, adult life in Los Angeles.

JR: That’s funny, I feel the same way about San Diego. It was true 20 years ago when I was a sailor and it’s true now. Not that it’s any of my business, but are you done with New York or are back in L.A. for good?

CC: I THOUGHT I was done with New York...but my wife and I have been recently talking about moving back in 5 years or so. We've started planning our escape from Los Angeles again. I'm sort of burnt out on this city, as much as I love it. Don't get me wrong. I think there is a FAR greater writing community in Los Angeles right now than in New York. But I'm tired of having a car. I'm tired of having no parks. I'm tired of the cops who do nothing but give out jaywalking tickets in downtown. And then, hopefully one day, where I really want to live is Barcelona.

JR: When you read the phrase “favorite poet,” what poet flashes to mind?

CC: Bukowski. He's been the most important in my writing, in my passion for poetry, in my feeling of belonging. Most people, including completely educated and talented people, don't give him enough credit for making poetry real to people like me, who was always told that poetry was too sacred for me to delve into. It's not like he wrote the way he did because he couldn't write like Ashbery or Pound or anything. He just chose to write that way because that's how he could get to it as fast as possible.

JR: Tell me a poem that all humans should know at least part of.

CC: There are many, although I'm not a big fan of reciting poetry, your own or those of others, in the middle of a party. That's just bullshit. But, I think everyone should at least have read "Notebook of a Return to a Native Land," by Aimé Césaire. It's been a life-changing work of art for me.

JR: What’s the most unusual reaction you’ve ever gotten at a reading?
 
CC: Central Library. I forget what year. Maybe '99 or 2000. It was during National Poetry Month. A lady who was in the same writing workshop as I was used to work at the Library, scheduling events and such, so she asked a handful of people from the class to read one night at the Library. I was very excited. So a few days before the reading, she sends out a memo saying that there was going to be a meeting, sort of a rehearsal meeting.

JR: A rehearsal for a poetry reading?

CC: Naturally, I skipped it. Then, I am having lunch with two people who did attend the meeting and they tell me what it was really all about: the lady was making sure that NOBODY would bring in any obscene material. No curse words. Nothing. And this, for National Poetry Month, because nothing says poetry like censorship, right? I was pissed. So I did what any sane person would have done: I proceeded to write about seven new poems, short pieces, all in first person written in my journal writing voice, all from the point of view of a pedophile. I had a poem about sitting at the park just watching a young boy on the swing. About being at home trying to hide things from my girlfriend. About watching a family at the beach. About saying hello to a little girl.

JR: But no swearing?

CC: No curse words. Anyway, there were about 150 to 200 people at the event that night and while I'm reading, I just hear shuffling in seats and groaning. No applause. And when I'm done and walking off the stage, the lady just wants to kill me. And here's the answer to your question. Afterward, while I'm standing in the lobby alone, a young woman comes up to, stands in front of me for a few seconds, and says, "Um...I just wanted to let you know that...well, I have a close friend who is a counselor and you should really go see him. Here." And she wrote me her friend's phone number, gave it to me, and walked away. That's it. The most unusual reaction: being told I needed a counselor.


Come see Chiwan Choi read something that (hopefully) has nothing to do with pedophiles on Sunday, April 5 at 8pm at The Mountain Bar.

APRIL VERMIN BRINGS SPRING SQUIRMING

 

CONVERMINSATION WITH DAVID FRANCIS

The next edition of Converminsations features David Francis, author of the literary thriller/family saga Stray Dog Winter, which was published by MacAdam/Cage late last year.

JIM RULAND: What will be reading on April 5?

DAVID FRANCIS: I’ll probably read the opening of Stray Dog Winter.

JR: Your novel begins with a journey by train to Moscow. When you made the trip, did you know right away that it was "material" that you would use some day? Was it all as shockingly oppressive as you make it seem?

DF: Yes, in 1984 I traveled by train from Prague through Poland and the Ukraine, and sensed it as a very particular experience. No foreigners, just strange Slavic characters and landscapes like something out of Turgenev, but with a bizarre, oppressive Soviet pall over everything. I knew I wasn’t supposed to take photos but I wanted to capture it. When I arrived in Moscow, I (like Darcy Bright in the novel) was escorted into custody, my camera confiscated and film exposed. Still, the images really stayed with me but not because I consciously planned to write about them – I wasn’t yet writing at all. I began my first novel, The Great Inland Sea, more than a decade later. And even when I started Stray Dog Winter in about 2004, it grew as a story of a boy and his half-sister in Australia – it actually came as a surprise when she got a fellowship to paint the industrial landscapes of Moscow and I saw him so vividly on that train.

JR: The two story lines of the novel – the narrative present of Cold War Russia and the back story of your protagonist's youth – run along parallel tracks as if to suggest that one's past is always with us, that it informs our every step. To what degree was this intentional?

DF: Initially, I was afraid I was writing two novels, one in Australia, an unusual family love story, and one in Moscow, a weird literary mystery. But the characters were clearly the same in both and so I just kept writing them, following them until the past so truly informed the present Russian story. Eventually, they began to fold into each other, the past, more episodically revealed, catching up with the present at a moment when the suspense element takes the story over. I never set out to write a mystery, or dare I say thriller, underpinned by a family saga; I wouldn’t have been so ambitious.

JR: When Darcy Bright gets in way over his head you abandon the Australia storyline. It’s as if you’re saying there's no going back to what got him there, to what made him who he is. It's just him and his wits and his instincts. This, too, seemed carefully crafted.

DF: Yes, the story is carefully crafted, sentence to sentence and scene to scene, but it was genuinely written in an organic fashion – that’s how I write – so I can’t pretend to have plotted or structured it all very cleverly. I just stayed close to Darcy and experienced his childhood, his adventures in his twenties (well, misadventures) in Moscow and just tried to really be inside his world, his wits and instincts, and to follow where they took him. Sure, I drew somewhat on my own experiences, but allowed Darcy to be much more than I (I’d love to say “me” here; wish it wasn’t wrong). And while I believe at some level, whether we’re conscious of it or not, “all art is exorcism” (as Otto Dix once said), Stray Dog Winter is not strictly autobiographical. Still, it contains a kind of emotional truth for me and I think that’s crucial. To be writing to find out what I feel about something and to be telling a story I really need to tell.

JR: Was there a scene or experience abroad that you'd intended to include that you had to take out?

DF: My Australian and US publishers bought the novel at the Book Fair in Frankfurt simultaneously and were on the same page editorially – they wanted to “up” the suspense factor. So I undertook a re-write, investing heavily in the tautness and intrigue while keeping the pacing and poetry. I took out any scene that didn’t propel the story forward, some of which were based on Moscow memories – one at the circus, one in the GUM department store. What was sad was that, in themselves, those chapters really worked but they didn’t quite move the narrative sufficiently, so they were jettisoned. I also added some chapters to further develop and balance the Australian story.

JR: Now that you've succeeded in writing a such an ambitious book, do you think you'll try it again? Does writing a technically challenging novel raise the bar, so to speak, or is it a matter of the story setting its own parameters?

DF: I wouldn’t intentionally do it again, but I suppose something as challenging could unfold. My New York agent is keen that I write more suspense but I’m not sure that’s me in the long term. I’ll just write what I write and see. Since I finished Stray Dog Winter, I’ve been working on short stories, some of which have been published, which is fun. One of these stories has ignited and is becoming something longer. I may also end up with a collection of linked stories.

JR: You say that you weren't writing when you went to Moscow. Is there a moment that you can point to where you "became" a writer?

DF: A part of me that wants to believe I’ll really become a writer when it becomes extremely lucrative (ridiculous, I know). Another part believes I am a writer because I write what I want to or what I need to, not what I think I should or what others tell me I should. But maybe the moment I felt I became a writer was when my first book, Agapanthus Tango (as it was called internationally) was released – it came out initially in the UK and my first review was in the Times Literary Supplement, and my London agent emailed me a copy. Then it was reinvigorated when I received a six-month literary fellowship to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. And in Paris I feel like a writer, or when I’m on tour or at book festivals, then I come back here to L.A. and toil away, and feel like a phony again, wondering “Who on earth will read this?”

JR: A few weeks ago Terry Teachout characterized a brief stint working in a bank as "one of the most painful experiences of my life." As someone who "punches a clock" (disclaimer: I've never actually punched a clock, although I've assaulted a few radios) for a living, I find such remarks out-of-touch and insulting. What's your reaction?

DF: I have always juggled a day job “lawyering” with writing, and prior to that a horse life. I’ve left my law job for periods when my passions have taken me elsewhere, riding on an Australian equestrian team in Europe in the 1980’s, and more recently going on book tours or writing fellowships, but I’ve always come back to the safety of the law, as much as I’ve resented it. When I returned to my office in L.A. from six months writing in Paris, I couldn’t stop crying, and there’s no crying in public finance. I’ve always dreamed a writing life might free me, sustain me financially – when The Great Inland Sea sold in lots of countries and then the film rights were optioned, it looked promising. But I’d have to produce a book every two years and rely on it being successful enough that I could avoid a day job. For better or worse, I’m not that kind of writer. I’m pretty slow, and suspicious of books that are finished in less than three years. In fact, my day job has been a godsend: a place to go with air-conditioning/heat, where I interact with “normal” people, and get a salary that allows me to write what I want. I was always fearful that being a lawyer would stifle any creative (as much as I hate that word) possibilities, but the legal writing is different enough and I think the discipline helps me. I wonder whether I’d rather be traipsing around teaching writing all over the place like my friends do, but that’s also painful and less lucrative. So I think the Teachout piece is a bit naïve and unrealistic for most of us, especially in this economy. He has the luxury of life as a critic and that’s great for him, but how many of us sustain ourselves publishing novels? He writes biographies which is probably a safer bet, but I love the idea of creating something from whole cloth, a less derivative thing, from my own experience and imagination. For now, I need a day job to afford to venture into the vagaries of fiction.

JR: Is it easier to write about your native Australia, living and working elsewhere?

DF: Maybe there’s a perspective about Australia I experience from this distance, which allows me to write about it in a particular way, a way that might not have emerged had I stayed there. My first book was set mostly in very rural Australia and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, my second between less rural Australia and Cold War Moscow, written from L.A. or Paris, and also some re-writing back on the farm in Australia. I’ve tended not to re-visit places I’m writing about while I’m writing, but prefer to rely on skerricks (an Australian word meaning skerricks) of memory to spawn the scenes – I was tempted to go to Moscow to re-familiarize myself as I wrote Stray Dog Winter but a writer friend from L.A., Les Plesko, who was writing a book about Budapest, visited Hungary for “research” and felt it skewed his inherent feel for the book. It was being molded from images and memories from his childhood there, and was sort of frayed and dissipated by the new reality of Budapest thirty years later. Still, while I doubted I’d write about America if I was still living here, since I finished Stray Dog Winter, I’ve been writing some stories set in California, three of which have been published which is fun, and two of which are funny, kind of.

JR: You've written beautifully about the impact the fires in LA had on you last year. How have you dealt with the fires that have ravaged southeast Australia? Will you write about it?

DF: My family farm is quite near the fires in Victoria, about twenty miles from one of the big ones. My sister now runs the place and it has been really scary, the impact of the climate change and the ferocity of the wind and heat, the fact that so many fires are being deliberately lit, and the awful loss of life. Images of horses and kangaroos on fire tearing through the bush, people being incinerated in their cars after having collisions in the smoke. Oddly, I’ve recently written three stories with fires in them, one in Australia, one in L.A. during the riots in the early nineties, and another in Santa Barbara at a monastery where I retreated to write on my birthday last year and was evacuated as the Montecito Hills were incinerated. The last has become a bigger story, less about the fire and more about a man turning fifty. My first book had a fire in it also, in a corn field in Maryland, deliberately lit by Callie, the female protagonist who had a history with conflagration. I now have a sense of a new story about the recent Australian fires, written from this distance but from the point of view of a young aboriginal arsonist.

JR: What's the most unusual reaction you've had at a reading?

DF: My first reading in Paris was at The Red Wheelbarrow, a wonderful English bookstore at the bottom of the Marais, near the river. I read from Agapanthus Tango, and then a wonderful French writer Alain de Fosse, the translator, read the same piece in French (from Le Tango des Agapanthes – an even more obscure title in French). It was all very literary and I felt like I’d arrived, and then we opened it up for any questions and this very intellectual-looking French woman put up her hand. She looked at me quizzically and asked me where I bought my shirt.

Here's David Francis reading at at St. John's Cathedral for Melbourne Writers Festival. Come see him in far more secular surroundings at the Mountain Bar on Sunday, April 5 at 8pm.

CONVERMINSATION WITH GARY AMDAHL

Gary Amdahl and his pet squirrel, Dr. Sugerman, reflect on the current crisis in book publishing.

Welcome to Converminasations, the first of what I hope will become a regular feature of Vermin on the Mount: conversations with future Vermin performers and members of the Legion of Vermin. The first guest is Gary Amdahl, a transplant to Southern California from the Midwest. In 2006. Amdahl's short story collection Visigoth won the Milkween National Fiction Prize. He followed that up in 2008 with I Am Death, also from Milkweed, a "collection" of two very unusual novellas. As you'll soon see, he's been keeping busy...

JIM RULAND: What are you going to be reading for us on April 5?

GARY AMDAHL: I thought I’d read seven or eight explosive pages jam-packed with family fun from “Peasants,” which is the other novella in the I Am Death collection. Here’s why: I get to use my award-winning southern accent in the service of a character who’s a crazy entrepreneur, grandson of a Huey Long style politico, and an outright genius who can’t keep his shit together or his ass out of mental institutions. He’s got nearly total recall of the complete works of every philosopher sociologist theologian psychologist since Erasmus and he cannot shut up. Lives with a hair dresser in a trailer in Orlando and calls up my main character (tellingly named Rasmussen, isn’t literature fun) to lecture him on Emerson and Jungian heroes, such as Rasmussen’s boss, who is secretly channeling big money to the crazy genius, who in turn seems to have a Svengali-like hold on this dopey but undeniably effective funding mechanism, and “the collapse of the consciousness into sensitivity,” which is how he refers to shit murderously hitting the fan. It’s not something you hear on The Office or in any office, but I did in mine. Got it all on tape. But it’s not a documentary: more like The Office as if written by Henry James who is also a womanizing alcoholic.

JR: It’s been nine months since I Am Death was published. How do you feel about it?

GA: I Am Death is simply a book that has not gotten its due. Oprah has repeatedly denied she knows anything about it, even though it’s a Negative New York Times Bestseller that hasn’t sold many thousands more copies in thirty languages around the world. This is a book that friends have moved proactively on, helping friends steer clear of it. I offered free copies to my students and only got a couple takers. No, this book, this green island, this I Am Death is not dead, and I am going to prove it by reading the mad scene from it, along with the death of Ophelia. And I haven’t even begun to speak of the prescient splendor of the pre-Sopranos Chicago mafia novella…

JR: Where did that story come from?

GA: A friend of mine, Jack Hayes, was a reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago in the late 80s. One of the “capo di tutti capi,” died, and there was a scramble for ascendancy. Jack started to work on a story about it, then got a job as Midwest Correspondent for Life Magazine. He said, “Maybe you can make a novel out of this,” and gave me a pile of raw material, background stuff, deep research, transcripts (some of which in the novella are real, some of which are not). Raw isn’t the word: rich, and for me, incredibly provocative. I had a pretty limited understanding of the mafia: bad TV shows and Coppola’s great movies. Scorsese’s Goodfellas came out in 1990, and it was both revolutionary, generally speaking, and perfectly timed, specifically for me. Nicholas Pileggi adapted his book for the screenplay, and he was somebody Jack had talked to. Two things happened for me: I began to see Mafiosi as ordinary men (old hat, I know, in a post-Sopranos world, but this was circa 1988-1992) and their “criminality” as just one end of the spectrum of ways in which human beings govern themselves. Chicago’s municipal government was particularly saturated in that way, and it was easy for me imagine a couple of smart, powerful, deluded, abusive men thinking they could go legit in a big way, that they could move from coercion to actual governance. (Blagojevich and Burris are just another couple chapters, fairly banal in my view). I was really eager to write a fable along those lines because my jaw was still hanging on the ground over “Iran/Contra” and the way an explicitly illegal government had slipped in place behind our legal government. I was also browsing in early American economic history, and was interested in the way the ethics of the local marketplace had been shattered when technological revolutions in transportation and communication made marketplaces effectively ungoverned by a local, human-scale sense of right and wrong: violence is inherent in commerce, and the mafia seemed like a completely natural extension of business.

JR: I'm curious about the novella format. You can do more things in a novella than you can in a short story, but you get your resolution much faster than you would in a novel. They seem like an accidental medium and are viewed as short stories that went long or novels that ran out of steam. Do you agree? Did you set out to write novellas?

GA: Yes, I set out to write novellas. The misunderstanding of them (I agree with you, either stories that are too long or novels that aren’t long enough) is tragic, a vicious circle of categorization and commodification and uniformity of product that no longer makes sense to anybody but which we can’t break free of. I hear people talking about wanting to make an investment of time, I guess, and a minimal kind of attention, in a story when they buy a book, and the novella, I dunno, makes them feel like they’re not getting full value on their entertainment dollar. It’s horrifying and stupid. Imagine a gang of Russian financial wizards (bright boy bankers and slavically suicidal hedge funders, with “an interest in the arts,” telling Tolstoy that “The Death of Ivan Illych” is, at 40-45 pp., neither fish nor fowl and therefore unpublishable: pad it, Leo old man, or gut it—all stories can benefit from cutting, da? Or the learned playboys who sold out to the world media congloms (exception: the late great James Laughlin and New Directions) straightening Saul Bellow’s lapels, “Saulie, Seize the Day looks so…I dunno, slender propped up next to Augie March, I mean, come on, fella, you see what we’re saying…we want a man’s book. Novellas are for women’s magazines.” And anyone suggesting Joyce’s “The Dead” is too long or too short ought to be sentenced to live without that masterpiece for ten years. It’s all categorizing (a means of escaping the thing itself by naming it) and marketing (“Readers don’t want to buy novellas, sorry.” WELL WHY THE FUCK WOULD PEOPLE DRAW THE LINE THERE??? “I don’t care how good it is, seventy-five pages leaves me feeling uneasy….”

JR: For a while, it seemed like novellas anchored short story collections either to give the collection more gravitas or to showcase the writer's potential as a novelist. What is the role of the novella? Does it have a future?

GA: Hard to say what has a future in the book biz. I mean, maybe even books don’t have a future in the book biz. But I gotta believe there are cycles and swings of the pendulum like everywhere else. Stories will be judged as either good or bad or somewhere in between, not as fictitious or non-fictitious, as a novel or a novella, as true or false. Actually: the distinction will be made, must be made, between true and false, just not along the lines of the current “fake memoir” scandals. There are truthful novels and fraudulent memoirs. Bullshit is bullshit. Tastes will change and markets will follow or vice versa, or they won’t. Maybe we’ve got decades of suffering ahead. I luckily consider myself primarily a reader, a reader of old and forgotten books, so unless they are burned or quarantined, I’ll be okay. As a reader. As a writer…? Murky period ahead of x-rated infantilism. I will have to create a new marketing niche, “Old Adult,” or just go all Emily Dickinson on everybody.

JR: Well it's not like mainstream publishing is all that receptive to short story collections either. I suspect it's all driven my marketing, which needs to be able to describe a book in seven words or less, like a freeway billboard. They can't sell it if they don't know what it is.

GA: It’s true. Editors and Publicity Directors get two minutes to pitch each book in their catalog. It’s worse than Hollywood. In Hollywood, you can say picture this and it’s actually meaningful. Book biz, you just throw your best seven words at the center of the room and hope somebody hears it. Mainstream publishing is receptive to maximized profit, like every other (short-sighted) corporation currently dragging the USA down the toilet. Used to be an extremely low-overhead biz, with profit margins at 1½-3%. If a book sold well, you had a steady, slow, small profit stream (Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered is one of the greatest books I have ever read.); if it didn’t sell well or sold outright awfully, like Moby-Dick, say, you took a small one-time loss. Now, in the wake of the global media empires thinking for a horrifying moment that books could profitable just like every other kind of entertainment, we have huge overheads that must be fed with profit margins beyond 15%! As much as 20% or christ, who knows what the top is. We know what the bottom is: it doesn’t work and mainstream publishers are being handed their asses like automobile-makers. But the worst part is: to get maximal profit, you have to be able to predict your biz. To predict, you need to standardize your product and streamline its manufacture. You, for instance, enter into agreements with large chain bookstores: they will feature your books if you can guarantee minimum sales and bigger discounts than you give to independent stores. The chains begin their horrifying lives having virtually every book currently in print, on their shelves, waiting for eager readers, luring them in, we’ve got it all, step right up, everyone’s a winner, bargain’s galore. Once they’ve established what kind of book sells best…the rest are disappeared. Just like dissenters in any fascist state.

JR: I think one of the misperceptions people have about writers with more than one book published is they think the writer's got it all figured out, they know the lay of the land. But publishing is like the Grand Canyon. When you're standing at the edge you can appreciate its majesty. Hell, you can almost see the other side. But once you go down into the canyon it really starts to open up. It's bigger, stranger, and much more baffling than you realized.

GA: Unless you’re a corporate entertainment product specialist who pumps out the same bullshit book after book—because, don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the writers, who are just trying to make a living, nothing wrong with that, because people eat bullshit up like it’s mashed potatoes and gravy. Real writers do not know from one sentence to the next, much less from one book to the next, how things are going to shape up. Real writing is about finding out what comes next, not recording predictable fluctuations in the plot as per previous analyses, not taking dictation from Bozo the Clown at Random House.

JR: Is it true that you were once a motorcycle racer? Did you have to dress like those guys in the A-Ha video?

GA: It’s true that I intended to. I went from a nearly straight-A student to a nearly straight-F student, and was in real danger of not graduating from high school. I was working in a warehouse so I could a buy a van to cart my motorcycles around and enough speed to keep my tongue raw and my eyes bugging out. I had an Ossa shortracker and a primitive Suzuki motocrosser, stock, but a racing machine. I had them long enough to feel real speed and to learn that I was not nearly as dedicated or capable a mechanic as would be necessary to be even competitive as a back-marker. I had zero aptitude for the hard work of racing. I was, as Mark Van Doren said of the Shakespeare who animated Macbeth, into “sensation and catastrophe” (a theme, by the way, of AMBBB). Wasn’t exactly clumsy with tools, but not what I would call competent either. Haven’t seen the A-Ha video. Am I very much not sophisticated? Very old? I had authentic “motocross socks” made by Hang Ten, which I think was mainly a surfer biz….

JR: How is writing more dangerous than riding a motorcycle?

GA: Riding a motorcycle, you generally hurt only yourself—and that’s when things go wrong. When you write, you hurt people near and dear to you, without meaning to, without wanting to, and even in some cases without even knowing it—and that’s when things are going well. The damage I may or may have not done, may yet do, to myself honestly doesn’t register in me. I feel like my psyche, my soul, is there to be put in jeopardy, to go, as the Buddhists say, to the places that scare it—if of course the pursuit is of truth and beauty! Then I am quite sure there will be some serenity, in the end. If I trash my mental health in hopes of becoming rich and famous, well, I deserve mental disease. But my loved ones…? The pursuit of truth and beauty sometimes strikes me as pitiless, remorseless, and mean….

JR: What are you pursuing these days?

GA: I am publishing a novella called “Across My Big Brass Bed” in Agni Review this spring, which will cover my sex life from 6-12, when I get it on (this is 1968) with my social studies teacher. I am continuing the story and making it a full-blown (heh) novel, featuring in part two adolescent love-life and motorcycle-racing which culminates in me murdering—accidentally—some gal’s estranged husband; and then moves on, part three, adult love-life as a street bandoneón player attempting to arrange and perform all of Bach’s cantatas on bandoneón, flute, guitar, with occasional singing. I read a piece of it to the Creative Writing and English faculty and their students, out here at U Redlands, where I live, and I stupefied them all with the length and complexity of the sentences. They’re good sentences, man, don’t get me wrong, I stand by them—they’re just not right for a saloon reading series…you know, I’ve got my cock in my social studies teacher’s mouth, and in another part of the sentence I’m rhapsodizing about Karl Popper’s great pre-hippie book, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Hard to follow. I could rehearse but I think it’s still going to be a slog.

JR: I wasn't aware that 6-year-olds have a sex life.

GA: That’s GOOD. Keep thinking that.

JR: Do you have another novel in the pipeline?

GA: Across My Big Brass Bed joins another novel, The Daredevils, which I thought was done but is being revised, and they make up the first two parts of my “Anarchism Trilogy.” The third novel is called The Treaties and is set mainly on an Indian reserve in northwestern Ontario, Grassy Narrows. There are no character or plot carry-overs, but I just realized that all three are about people trying to live free of coercion: good coercion bad coercion indifferent coercion, the whole system. Better to dream and wander, and starve if that’s what it comes to, but do not under any circumstances command or obey.

JR: What's The Daredevils about?

GA: Set in San Francisco and Minnesota just before and after the U.S. entry into WWI. Main characters are a “mill girl” from Thread City, Willimantic, Connecticut, somewhat along the lines of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in her precocious intelligence and personal charisma, who starts a stampede strike more or less accidentally and gets taken up by IWW organizers on their way to the big strikes in Lawrence, MA (wool-workers), and Paterson, New Jersey (silk-workers), who meets a motorcycle racer (1912-1916 was the hey-day of steeply banked board tracks) via the radical crowd centered around Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, Max Eastman, etc. They leave New York, set up shop in San Francisco, and meet a young aristocrat—easiest reference would be to the Kennedy family, who wants to be—is—an actor. Acting is not necessarily incompatible with politics, but our aristo is honest. He wants to be an honest actor. With greasepaint and footlights and rehearsed lines and hammy gestures. Despises even the Progressive Bull Moose politics of his family (and his father’s friend T. Roosevelt), falls in love with the mill girl as the motorcycle racer slowly succumbs to the quite horrible physical beating he has taken as a daredevil and consequent addiction to…yes! Morphine! After the Preparedness Day Parade bombing in San Francisco (patriotic prelude to US entry into the war, blamed on “anarchists” (read: labor organizers) Tom Mooney and the less reputable but equally innocent Warren Billings, they all end up in Minnesota, which a shadowy but fully-sanctioned “watchdog” group turns the state into a fascist playground in the name of…? Yes: homeland security.

JR: What's the most unusual reaction you've gotten at a reading?

GA: Applause.

 
Don't miss Gary Amdahl at The Mountain Bar, Sunday April 5 at 8pm.

SAY CHEESE...

This image comes from Goodloe Byron, the dementedly genial genius behind Brown Paper, a publishing concern about which I'll have more to say later. It's sharp, strange, and bristles with unspeakable intensities. (You'd be advised not to make too much of the figures embedded in the noise.) It pretty much sums up the feeling here at Vermin HQ these days, which is another way of saying: Hold Fast, the fun is about the start...