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.
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