Painting by Margaux Williamson
We are honored to present a lecture by Sheila Heti given to an audience of 9 people, most of them young women, in far western Canada at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, on November 23rd 2006, in the afternoon.
In this lecture, Heti reads from The Middle Stories and Ticknor, answers questions, and wrestles with issues of craft, responsibility, and invention.
Dear Richard,
Lo, in the east, an interview looms, leading the people to the mountainside where the poet awaits. The hopes and fears of all the years are lining up at the microphone with carefully vetted questions. So, pull on your socks, clear your throat, and get some wisdom ready, this is your APOSTROPHECAST INTERVIEW.
This electronic mail interview will be published unedited. Only questions you do not answer will not appear.
1) Where were noodles invented, and does it affect where you decide to eat noodles?
I think they were invented in China but I prefer Thai, Pad Thai. For cold noodles, sign me up for Vietnamese. I’ve been known to eat ravioli from the can, cold, standing over the sink. There’s a local place that serves homemade Ramen but when I go there for the Ramen I end up getting the Unagi Bento.
2) I was reading an article in an art magazine that used bewildering arguments but was essentially just defending the market value of a painting. Is rationalization always self-deceiving?
Bewilderment is the goal of art. Why not make it the goal of art criticism?
3) What is your favorite Olympic Sport? Why?
I like the individual events because I am a lone wolf and there is no “wolf” in “team.” Swimming, gymnastics, shot put. Mostly I’ve been watching the Land War Competition between Team Russia and Team Georgia.
4) Do you have any rules about how you write about your family or lovers?
For lovers, I won’t use real names. My father has asked that I not write about him until he’s dead, which I ignore. And my mother doesn’t care, as long as she comes off as a fancy lady, which she is anyway. More accurately, I’m a fan of emotional truth. Facts deaden the imagination. Lately I’ve been writing about a brother I don’t have. And the Moon, who talks to me.
5) In a poem you wrote called “You Are Jeff” (Crush, 2005) you talk about bruise cream. I have always wondered about that. What is bruise cream? Is it like Ben Gay or Icy Hot?
Bruise Cream — like The All-Night Butter Store — is a mythical creature.
6) What do you think of Matthew Barney? Would you ever think of having Matthew Barney use a piece of yours as the basis for a screen play?
Matthew Barney is non-narrative. If he used a piece of mine, no one would be able to tell. His work is strong. I would get gay married to him and/or give him high fives.
7) What is the worst meal you have ever eaten? Who do you blame for it?
Red Lobster. Red Lobster.
8) What poem should someone read if they have just been rejected from their college of choice?
Dream Song 14 by John Berryman: Life, friends, is boring…
9) Do you root for one airline over another, or one softdrink company over another?
Jet Blue has cable. As for softdrinks, I like to root for the underdog: Go Royal Crown Soda! I was on the front lines during the cola wars, so I’m probably biased.
10) What weapon would you choose for a duel?
The Chevy Malibu.
Yrs,
Thank you,
GBB
DANIELLE: Pony, we’re in mid-conversation, mid-project co-writing a very disgusting, blissful novel called Wonder Animals Very Beautiful and Sad, so let’s start the interview right where we are…you recently noticed that we’re both “mining horror to find kernels of happy within the great horror. So there’s the inversion of terror that kind of insists on hope.” Case in point, that moment in your short story “Wolf Rainbow (A.K.A. the Beautiful Actual)” wherein the narrator’s estranged, straight-laced, cancer stricken sister joins narrator and boyfriend on psychedelic-laced rock star tour bus. Sister gets dosed, bares her mastectomy scars, harangues narrator for ruining her life, and then they all share this joyful moment wherein the bassist gives Sister some new age sunrise head, and it’s ridiculous and it’s so beautiful. These humans can hardly engage with the
horrible loss that’s ramming itself down their throats, but somehow that drug-addled night has the redemptive power of John Cusack holding the boombox aloft in 1988. Same lonely-hopeful-convinced feeling, radically different story. How’d you do it? And why do we do it? Are we morbidly optimistic? Are we dark angels Pollyanna?
ALISSA: Wikipedia, in its greatness, (although I’m an athiest, I do strongly beleive that if there is a second coming, Jesus will arrive in the form of a user-defined internet encyclopedia) describes the IBM POLLYANNA PRINCIPLE, and I quote, “The IBM Pollyanna Principle is an axiom that states “machines should work; people should think.”This can be understood as a statement of extreme optimism, that machines should do all the hard work, freeing people to think (hence the reference to Pollyanna), or as a cynical statement, suggesting that most of the world’s major problems result from machines that fail to work, and people who fail to think.” So here we see how extreme optimism can be interpreted as cynicism, which I know I have a lot of. So I think the fun is riding that line. As in, Dear Reader: I know this is Terrible. But what if we look at it This Way? Does it become Something Else that’s maybe Beautiful? In college, I had a poetry class where a student (or maybe it was a professional example; I conflate the two) had an image examining the beauty of blood-filled gauze in a hospital trashcan. Okay, gross? Everyone in the class thought it was gross, but this kid really saw it. Is it like that ubiquitous plastic bag in American Beauty? If you smoke enough pot, bags can turn into angels. Bags can turn into angels anyway. Finding beauty in the tragic is where creativity comes in. Perhaps just finding beauty in beauty and tragedy in tragedy is in some ways “failing to think.” There is absolutely a masochism. I do feel a duty—and maybe sometimes, even a pleasure–to create situations that are horrible. When my work is criticized, it’s usually for being overly sentimental. Which is both fair and unfair and true and false. I try to write and live in feeling that is really concentrated. I constantly think about how my husband will die one day and I will die one day, and want to hold him and squeeze him without taking any breaks, ever. For me, not thinking about it would be like giving up. I know it isn’t healthy, but I find it better than feeling like I’m going to miss out because I was watching a sitcom instead of experiencing the full brunt of my mortality. And it pays off to me. I really love my beloveds. I don’t take them for granted one moment. I cry when I see monkeys, etc. Doing less would probably be a waste. So lets talk about death in your work. First, maybe, we could talk about the covers before getting beneath them, because there is a lot of death in the covers. The front of your first collection, Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull, 2005) is very Steinbeck, showing a distraught looking female (which happens to be you) dragging a male across a barren field. When I first saw it I thought: they’re starving; he lost the bet on who would be slaughtered and cannibalized and she’s taking him out back to the shed to do it. The metaphorical Shed could very well be the cover of your second book, My Zorba (Bloof Books 2008) which has an unwieldy axe centered amid a poppy, neon-uterine pink background. Both invoke images of tragedy, death, and maybe murder (were you going to kill him, on the cover of PYT? confess, or don’t). How did you decide upon these covers? Why the need to make them both funny and sinister?
DANIELLE: Hey, I just thought of this–let’s say what we were doing right before we sat down to answer the questions. I was just reading this novel and baking whoopee pies. Okay, question: Well, in real life, that PYT photo began as part of a series Christa Parravani was doing–folk tales that didn’t actually exist–and for most of the shots Jed (Jedediah Berry, novelist phantasm) was dragging me through the field. I wanted a turn dragging. I don’t know–was I taking him to the shed hole (my toddler says this out of spookville nowhere, “Mama, it’s time to get in the shed hole. There are wolves in the forest.”), or was I burdened with his survival? It’s a Third Wave folk crisis. For Zorba, nothing less than the hatchet would do. Shanna Compton made that color pink for me special! There’s a lot of gut cold serious rage and disgust in the books, but I don’t think they’re aping masculine forms of violence. It’s not Tomb Raider in there. You know what movie I adored as a kid? Mommy Dearest. I thought it was scarier, funnier, and loads more likely to happen to me than The Shining. I think what Sianne Ngai has to say on The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde is indispensable…and I think about
what Hannah Arendt says in On Violence. Something to the effect of, where there’s no power, violence fills the void (uprisings and the like). When I first read that, I wondered how that might explain the conspicuous lack of violence in places where women are and/or perceive themselves as devoid of power. I’m very curious about what woman-committed violence looks like, how it gets done, gets portrayed–Snapped, Monster, and Laura Sims is working on a new book of poems about women who murder… At the same time I read On Violence, I was reading Russel Banks’s The Darling. Banks describes Liberian child-soldiers dressed in women’s nightgowns and clown wigs, toting semi-automatics (or so I remember it…). Apply the Arendt: What’s the least powerful, most vulnerable human we see in USAmerican media? I’d argue the small African child in the Save the Children commercial, wan smile, distended belly, needs only your seventy-five cents a day to survive? Now, age the child a couple years, put him in a burlesque/military costume and hand him a gun. Give him a child-soldier name, like Blood Maggot. What, by those same cloying media standards, is more terrifying than the armed, angry, and outrageously costumed black child-soldier? I’m talking about images here–the commercial images, Banks’s images–the way these visions are used to play the reader. To talk about the live subjects from whom these images are derived, well, that’s massive. But the point here is that when I became aware of how diametrically opposed, how intimately linked these images were, I thought more seriously about the tactics used to create them. How do you freeze the gaze on that which the viewer feels s/he overpowers, and then mutate that image until it forcibly unseats the viewer? More than death, which concept I have a very hard time focusing on, I’m obsessed with how one might respond to pain and violence, especially in their less obvious incarnations. You know what I want to talk about now, though? Both of us just moved from the East Coast to the Western Frontier. I’m in Wyoming, and you’re in Las Vegas. What’s it like for you?
ALISSA: I just came back from the Star Trek bar at the Hilton, where a Quark impersonator complimented my husband’s beard and made both of us feel great about his masculinity. I think, in general, Vegas makes one feel great about his masculinity. I do like the west-ness. The nature side is: we’re in a desert, we need to stay by water or we could perish. The surreal side is: look at these lights and think about how people come here and spend more in a weekend than we will make in our lives. Basically, I feel very small and mortal here, and that’s probably a good thing, since I am both. I’m not sure yet how it will affect my writing. All my relatives assume I’m going to start working on a noir gambling novel (I just saw my husband’s glasses on the night stand, put them on, and realized I can’t see through them at all. It kind of scared me and made me worry that his day-to-day view of the world is radically different from mine). I think the stereotypical feelings Vegas inspires are great for writing though…the vulnerability, the sense of danger, the feeling that luck might strike. This is what I like about living here so far. Being inspired by a place doesn’t usually translate into using it as a setting for me; I like to write more character-focused, universal sympathy-seeking stuff as opposed to regionalism. What type of Wyoming writer do you think you’ll be? How much does place usually factor into the narratives of your poems?
DANIELLE: I was just looking at the link for hair hats you sent me. How much does it cost to get your hair made into a hat? I think I should get mine sculpted into a tiny antelope, of the sort they have out here. But I will probably have to wait until my hair grows out. Place doesn’t figure in my work in any obvious scenic way, but you can’t live in Wyoming unconsciously…it’s rugged. 7, 500 feet elevation, it snowed the first week of June, and the wind blows something fierce. When I was a kid, we spent a lot of time with my dad’s family in Arizona. My Great Uncle Bill, sailor with the mouth to prove it, always got one of the few buffalo hunting licenses in the state. One Christmas, he dug a huge pit in the backyard and cooked a buffalo, an elk, and a wild turkey, most of which my Great Aunt Jeanine turned into kick-ass burritos. Their tiny dogs were named Chico and Niña. My dad’s eldest cousin was a Tucson sheriff, and the youngest a Hollywood stunt man with a gorgeous house in the desert in which he installed those kind of movie
theater aisle lights along the baseboards so his cats wouldn’t strain their eyes in the dark. We’d hang out with them, and then drive a million hours out into the desert looking for ghost towns that didn’t exist (or my dad couldn’t find), with nothing but warm Mountain Dew for sustenance. My brother would carsick vomit on me, and the sun would set in this outrageous spectrum of colors I’d never seen before. That was my first taste of the
West. What happened in your family car when you were a kid?
ALISSA: It was very low-key, void of siblings and vomitings. My parents are big on interior worlds, we kind of each had our own (Father’s: fishing, Mother’s: God & the Afterlife). Mine was usually daydreaming about boys at school who would never be my lovers. It is tragic how children often learn about how they can’t have everything they want through people who refuse to be their friends or people who refuse to be their lovers. Most of my life has always been pretend, where I’m either daydreaming it or reading it, or now also writing it. I still daydream, but not in the sweeping, defensive/protective ways I used to. When I lived at home and had no lovers. Speaking of kids, you have an amazing daughter who is certainly an artist, particularly an emotional artist. For example, she’s totally romantic. Do you find any of the protective aspects of motherhood coming out in your writing? Does the urge to keep things magical and safe, or to defend against the bad worm its way into your work any more than it used to now that you have a child? I watch Law & Order, CSI, Most Evil, The First 48, Murder, She Wrote, Cold Case Files, and a variety of other crimesolving television programs because I’m interested in the concept of justice, which seems to have something magic and mythic about it, maybe just because as a child I was often told stories where justice would magically find and punish evildoers. In your writing I feel like the justice happens not necessarily in the outcome—which is often still v. tragic—but in getting to describe the badness, knowing and exposing it through a gaze it’s not normally subject to.
DANIELLE: I’m having the hardest time answering this! I’ve deleted three responses already (in part because superstitious nature disallows typing of certain doom-laced words in conversation not poems). I’ll say, witness is the only sort of justice that makes any sense to me. The rest attempts to console victims and prevent future outbreaks. Overwhelmingly sub par, especially considering most of the world’s horrors are committed by entities too amorphous, powerful, and/or disguised to ever come in contact with justice. Mothers often become walking catalogs of such horrors—all the things we must fear for our beloveds. One of the reasons I like to be awake all night is that I like someone to always be on guard. I try to let my kid grapple with the underbelly at her own pace, but she’s pretty intense and she has to live with me. I don’t want her to develop the same anxiety level. Thus far, my most successful method is to try to ensure that her joys outweigh the frights. We’re all very very easily amused here, and it is hard not to feel a bit cheery when you are wearing a tiara and an elephant’s trunk, pretending to build an ice-cream dance party fort, and then eating actual homemade ice cream in a kooky flavor and so on. And lotsa love, of course. I don’t know, maybe it’s even creating something of a safe perch for me, or a breathing space—sometimes I catch myself feeling downright comfortable. And then I panic, and all’s right with the wrong again, wry grin. I think that’s one of the things I find so exciting about your writing—that it can explore the SADDEST THINGS EVER, but also delight in the purely RI-DICULOUS. Another thing I find exciting: the way your work assumes we readers recognize the vital importance of subjects we know get written off as trivial in the mainstream. Girls, tiny dogs, ugly ponies, etc. How did you get started with this carnival of unjustly diminutized agents?
ALISSA: And I feel like the joys outweigh the frights in your writing, too, which says a lot because you often tiptoe into scary spider-filled regions. The imagery and syntax you use make these bizarre new connections and reidentifications (chocolate wigs, prenatal nimbus) so that even if something painful or disturbing is being described, the reader doesn’t feel that traditional urge to dissociate or distance because we have all these brilliant descriptions that prime notions of wonder and safety to grab onto as footholds, even if every unsafe poems. As for assumption, perhaps it’s an important part of fabulist writing—sort of via the Peter Pan theory that if you think you can fly, you can. I have wheelbarrows full of disbelief-suspension tokens when I read, I pop one in right after the other, and I guess I tend to write for those who do the same. I love science fiction movies but sometimes I find the books hard to read because they try to rationally explain everything—the technology, the newfangled wonders of the future. There’s a justification there that can open room for doubt. Plus my biggest goal is always to be tender, to invite tenderness. So I guess my main interest will always be to write about wounded creatures, the tinier and uglier the better. And you, your character creatures, especially the human ones—they often present themselves through these great still images of searching, categorizing, engaging in behavior best described through strange hybrid verbs. When I read your poems, I often feel like the bizarre landscapes the characters find themselves in are a result of their specific and highly individual emotions, a product of their hand-wringing. We both live in situations of relative domestic bliss: why don’t we write romance novels? Or is that exactly what we do?
DANIELLE: Can you hear my partner laughing his ass off? Because I think he’d say living with me is less like domestic bliss, more like living with ‘roided out porcupine. But that’s a good question. So, we both work pretty raw. What do you do to numb out or comfort yourself? I like any sort of tv that’s not meant to be funny, and a couple sorts of tv that are meant to be funny, but most of the funny tv is based on a feeling of embarrassment that I can’t be a party to. Right now, I prefer documentaries, and actually the less fraught the better. I like disgustingly oversized slices of cake, or four slices of pizza at once. I like systems of organization. I like to make seasonal crafts with my kid, though it is very hard not to get too focused on my own snowflake and miss the part where my kid has created a glitter glue construction paper nest hat. I like to put salt on everything: bananas, chocolate, cream cheese. I love to cook, though I tend to get manic-OCD about it. I like to walk very swiftly and anonymously. I do like to cuddle with my kid, and sometimes my dog, but not really anyone else. I can feel everyone else’s stressbrain when they cuddle me. I l-o-v-e novels, but only the sort in which I get caught up, which is not directly related to the canonical quality of the novel, so it’s often hard to find the right new novel. Today, Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow is keeping me occupied. It’s got rusalki, Decembrist’s wives, celestial cows. You?
ALISSA: I like to read or watch dramatic murder sequences, and then of course there’s cuteoverload.com and cuddling with my Chihuahua (sometimes I have to force him to cuddle. But I can because I’m bigger than him). It’s hard to write and have all these good & bad feelings simmer up and then go do something normal. A lot of times I’ll go to the grocery store at 4 in the morning if I need a break from writing…I write wearing aged pajamas while teasing up fluffs of hair so it’s not uncommon for me to get up from the desk and look in the mirror and realize I look like I’ve just been freebasing street drugs. So then I go buy cereal with marshmallows and try to restore some kind of normalcy. But I guess that’s the good part, there isn’t any normalcy. We are off-kilter, neurotic dark angel Pollyannas.
For this reason and that (all excuses, we know), Apostrophe Cast was unable to coordinate an interview with this episode’s reader, Ms. Sabrina Orah Mark. We hope this recording for From the Fishouse will satisfy that deep urge for MORE MARK that we know you feel after the Acast reading.
If you are itching for the stray personal details we pry out of our interviewees, we have it on good authority that Ms. Mark enjoys the music of Billie Holliday and bringing huge sacks of french fries to parties. She attended the University of Georgia at one point and has excellent furniture. Her website is www.sabrinaorahmark.com.
This fortnight, we bring you a reading by Garth Risk Hallberg, from his novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family.
About the Novella:
“In sixty-three entries and an accompanying website, A Field Guide to the North American Family offers a collaborative portrait of two fictional specimens. Photographers contributed this edition’s lavish illustrations via afieldguide.com, an ongoing, networked internet community. Though the novella’s entries can be read straight through, alphabetical headings and cross-referenced design also enable readers to move through the narrative as they see fit.”
The Download:
We’d like you to move through Hallberg’s narrative as you see fit. Click here to download the 10 field guide entries read for Apostrophe Cast–then play them straight through or set to shuffle on your mp3 player or however you’d like.
Dear Matt,
I wonder where you will be when you read this interview email? Will you be checking your blackberry on the back of a jetski in the Dead Sea? Will you be in an internet cafe in Amsterdam eating a cone of fries with mayonaise? Who knows . . .
Dear Guy,
I am sitting in my home office in Plattsburgh, NY. Not very exotic. I just played tennis, so I’m wearing shorts and a bit sweaty, so that’s something. It’s a difficult life I lead.
Who is your favorite Civil War general? Why? Have you ever grown a large beard?
I am from Virginia so this is a very important question, one that I have pondered for many years. I’m also obviously going gray on this one - besides, Union generals, barring Grant, pretty much blow. I’m tempted to say Lee, as I grew up in the same neighborhood. Jeb Stuart has the great ’stache and hat. But I will go with Jackson; the combination of old testament personality and unbridled enthusiasm. Plus, his death, shot by his own troops, is the ultimate irony for the Confederacy. I have grown a decent beard several times, not large like a hobo beard or anything. My problem is I don’t have much upper lip growth, so I look like a Mennonite.
Do you still have a copy of the first poem you ever wrote? When did you write it? What was the title? What was it about? Will you publish it or any part of it here?
I believe I do have a copy of a poem I wrote in 5th grade. It involved a creature called an “Arn” that was like a huge rainbow-colored dog with a rhino horn. I had a sophisticated internal rhyme sceme and an illustration to accompany. I won some kind of award for it. The “Arn” liked to play with children, but then they all left him for some reason and he wandered off alone. Even as child I was steeped in pathos, or something like it. That poem will never see the light of day again.
What poem should a person read if their loved one is going away on a long trip?
This is How Memory Works
by Patricia Hampl
You are stepping off a train.
A wet blank night, the smell of cinders.
A gust of steam from the engine swirls
around the hem of your topcoat, around
the hand holding the brown leather valise,
the hand that, a moment ago, slicked back
the hair and then put on the fedora
in front of the mirror with the beveled
edges in the cherrywood compartment.
The girl standing on the platform
in the Forties dress
has curled her hair, she has
nylon stockings - no, silk stocking still.
Her shoulders are touchingly military,
squared by those shoulder pads
and a sweet faith in the Allies.
She is waiting for you.
She can be wearing a hat, if you like.
You see her first.
That’s part of the beauty:
you get the pure, eager face,
the lyrical dress, the surprise.
You can have the steam,
the crowded depot, the camel’s-hair coat,
real leather and brass clasps on the suitcase;
you can make the lights glow with
strange significance, and the black cars
that pass you are historical yet ordinary.
The girls is yours,
the flowery dress, the walk
to the streetcar, a fried egg sandwich
and a joke about Mussolini.
You can have it all:
your in that world, the only way
you’ll ever be there now, hired
for your silent hammer, to nail pictures
to the walls of this mansion
made of the thinnest air.
Do you have a favorite relative?
Yeah, that would be my grand-uncle Forrest. In the 1920’s he had his throat cut from ear to ear and walked through the mountains in a snow storm holding his neck together. Later some sheriffs shot him in the gut. Then a few years later a rival dropped a load of logs on him, crushing nearly every bone in his body. He lived. He was bad-ass, as they say. I just wrote a novel about him and his brothers (one of whom was my grandfather) titled The Wettest County in the World which comes out in October from Scribner.
How would history be different if William the Conqueror had lost the Battle of Hastings?
Certainly the English language as we know it would be quite different as we wouldn’t have nearly as much latinate influence. The cultural influence is hard to parse out. Perhaps we’d have more reverence for Odin and the Norse pantheon. Saunas would be more popular?
Were you raised in an organized religion? What influence has it had on your work?
I was raised a Lutheran. The influence is minimal. (that is a very “Lutheran” response)
When was the last time you ate a steak and how rare was it?
Last week I had an excellent grass-finished organic t-bone from a local farm up here in northern New York. The marinade: oil, vinegar, garlic salt, pepper, soy sauce, a spoon of horseradish. Done over charcoal, medium rare to medium, buttered potatoes on the side. Outstanding.
How important is loyalty in your life? Are you loyal? To what/who?
I am a Boar according to the birth calender thing you sometimes get as a placemat in Chinese restaurants. We are fiercly loyal, and “prone to marital strife.” This doesn’t seem to make sense to me. Also, how come the Boar is like the only animal with such a specific fault? Its not like we are “impatient,” or “stubborn.” Prone to marital strife? That’s bullshit.
Which of the female Peanuts characters do you find most attractive? Has this changed as you have aged?
I’ve always been a bit partial to redheads. Peppermint Patty is certainly fiercly loyal. I’ll bet she is also a Boar. She is one of the truest, most fervent romantics in the peanuts pantheon. Her pursuance of Chuck is astonishing. And, she’s a phenomenal athlete. Her name is Peppermint Patty, who has a name like that? The name tells us so much about her. Is she named after the chocolate mint treat, or what that candy named after her?
What is your favorite flag?
I like simplicity and order in my flags; I like a direct symbolic gesture and a two-color scheme. Austere, something easily recognizable on a smoke-filled battlefield. No text or little pictures. Something like the classic red English cross on a white field. Scotland. Denmark. Finland. Sweden, though the blue is little soft for my taste. Is there a flag that more directly announces the personality of its people than the German flag? Though I’m not limited to straight lines - Japan is interesting. But if forced to choose, I’m going with my ancestral homeland, France.
These are the best interview questions I’ve ever had.
(Anytime)
Thanks,
-Matt
Bon Voyage,
GBB
1) Have you ever stepped foot in a public school? Did you get a case of the shingles from doing so? Seriously–why a career (and studency) in private schools–what’s the big draw (God?)?
I went to a Catholic grade school called St. Margaret’s, near Philadelphia. It was a baffling experience. When I received the sacrament of Reconciliation (confession), I made up all of my sins. Lied. What had I done?! Nothing! I was 7 years old, for cryin’ out loud. They forced lies from my mouth! But I remember that in Catholic school whenever we were in any way rambunctious or unruly, the teachers would look at us admonishingly and say, “Quiet down! Whattdya think this is…public school?!” This, undoubtedly, has led to my understanding of public schools as centers of absolute mayhem. Well, that and 80’s movies and all the shootings and low test scores. So when it came time to teach, I hardly considered public school at all—private’s what I’m used to and where I feel most comfortable talking my talk.
2) You reference Roxette in a song. What are your memories of Roxette (God?)?
Them being robbed of Billboard’s top spot on the Hot 100 in 1990 by Wilson Phillips’s “Hold On”. Total bullshit, man. “It Must Have Been Love” is about a million times better.
3) Could you give me three adjectives describing your premonitions about this ongoing election thing?
This is a strange question. It assumes that I have premonitions about the election that can be described adjectivally. Which I don’t.
4) What’s the first concert you attended?
Bob Dylan and Tom Petty at the Philadelphia Spectrum. I was 8. My parents took me and my three siblings. I remember a few things from that concert: (1) Bob Dylan not playing “Mr. Tambourine Man” even though someone had thrown a piece of cardboard paper with the words “Mr. Tambourine Man??” drawn on it; (2) there were kids behind us smoking marijuana and my dad turned around and asked them to stop and, though I had no idea what marijuana was, I was aware that my father had committed a concert faux pas; (3) my parents saying on the way home that it wasn’t a good show and me privately disagreeing with them.
5) Why should I visit Crawford, GA? And if I go, where should I eat?
You should visit Crawford, GA, to visit the only traffic light in Oglethorpe County. It’s beautiful. Don’t eat anywhere. Just enjoy the light.
6) Do you think the family that sings together stays together?
Absolutely.
7) What’s the first book you fell in love with?
Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective.
8) What’s the most common book your students fall in love with?
The Great Gatsby. And lemme tell you, after all these years, it really is a beautiful book.
9) Haircuts–hassle or little bit o’ heaven?
Hassle doesn’t even begin to describe things. Haircuts are my hell—so much can go wrong. In life I am most nervous immediately before, during, and immediately after a haircut. I have left haircuts, telling the barber/stylist that my hair looks great and gone directly to another haircut place to have the situation remedied. The whole process is absolutely terrifying. If I could cut my own hair, I would; but I really can’t—there are skills involved that I simply don’t have.
Ms. Liisa Hantsoo of Columbus, Ohio is the winner of Apostrophe Cast’s first contest. She wins a fabulous new copy of Cecily Park’s Field Folly Snow. Here is her prize-winning photo:
. . . The man left before I could leave him
Some other noteworthy entries:
I Lost My Horse by Patti Souza, San Jose, Calif.
Wire, Metal, Hair by Angela Shinagawa, Portland, OR
Thanks to everyone who sent in an entry. Keep checking back for more contests in the future.
This week special guest interviewer Cecily Parks gets tough with Nida Sophasarun (above). I once drove around Baltimore with them listening to Bombs Over Baghdad by OutKast. True.
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Look for the one with the well-defined calf muscles.
Congratulations, you get a chance to enter the first ever Apostrophe Cast Contest. This is going to be fun because there’s a prize.
How Do I Play?
Illustrate Cecily’s poem, “I Lost My Horse.” E-mail your illustration (drawing, photo, found art etc) to choi@apostrophecast.com, putting “Contest” in the subject line of your email. We’ll post our favorites to the blog as they come in so check back and help us decide on the winner.
I Lost My Horse
I was looking for an animal, calf or lamb,
in the wire, metal and hair along the fence line.
Wire, metal and hair and there, in the gully, a man
I was pretending was dead. I pretended
to leave him where the woods met the meadow,
walking fast because I’d left my horse lashed
to a fence I lost track of two valleys
ago. Like a horse, I shied from the dead.
Here, calf. Here, lamb. I listened, wanting
(without my horse, or calf or lamb) to be
whipsmart rather than wanted. I wore orange
on antelope season’s first afternoon
and waited for the click that means the safety is
off. When I spoke, my story was about picking
skulls clean. I wanted everything to be
afraid of me, the horseless girl who wanted
to kill a dead man again. The white bed
with a window behind its headboard became
ice on the meadow road and a tree to stop
a truck dead. I meant to trace my boot steps
back to the fence where things went wrong,
find my horse mouthing the bit, tied up by her
reins. I looked for the horse because she looked
safe enough to love. I looked for the calf
or lamb because there was no calf or lamb
The man left before I could leave him, and I pretended
the world was afraid of me because I was alone.
You can hear Cecily read this poem and others from Field Folly Snow by listening to the current episode of Apostrophe Cast.
How Long Do I Have To Submit?
We’ll take submissions through Thursday, May 8th, and announce the winner soon after.
And, what do I win?
Well, the University of Georgia Press has kindly donated a copy of Cecily Park’s Field Folly Snow for us to give to our winner. Field Folly Snow is one of the volumes in the inaugural VQR Poetry Series.