Apostrophe Cast News

Our reader this week, Kristen Iskandrian, took some time to answer a few questions about janitors, how her life compares to J. Lo, and The School.

AC: First off, you mentioned recording this piece in front of your cat. What’d she think of things? Lose any hair over it?

KI: She looked at me very warily and occasionally yawned. She thinks schools are overrated. She’s from the streets, the school of hard knocks, so she has very little patience for my maudlin tendencies. At the time I recorded this, she’d just been to the groomer for the first time, so she didn’t have much hair to lose.

AC: What noises are most common in your house?

KI: Meows when the Chairman is hungry, which is a lot. Music from the stereo or from a real live guitar. Water running—why is the Brita thing always near-empty? Me talking to myself and/or pacing. Laughter. I wish my answer to this question was just “gargling.” We should do more gargling.

AC: You also mention that this project seems possible infinite to you. There is the old maxim that a story is never done–but if it never ends….is that invigorating, daunting, or just Borgesian?

KI: As someone who likes to be finished with things, it is daunting. As someone who realizes that the compulsion to “be finished” often can be limiting, crippling—it is invigorating. As someone who wishes her name was a commonly used adjective, it is Iskandrianian.

AC: You say that the school “the School sits, in my imagination, suffocatingly asprawl” and this made me think of sweating. You mentioned that with this piece, “unsteady selves—younger, student, cast-off selves—and the narrator self—belatedly ubiquitous and omniscient—respire. Maybe expire.” I sometimes think that writing has a lot to do with sweating–and I liked that this work was acting as a vent for your consciousness.
This is lovely. While listening, I kept thinking “perspire.” Especially as sweating is the release of toxins. Do you sweat when your write?

KI: I sweat when I get nervous, and very occasionally, to my great delight, my writing makes me nervous.

AC: I swear I’ll get off your intro, but I also had to note that the description of the narrator, “the “I” who sees but who has also already seen, who learns but who has also already learned, who strives but who has also already quit,” hit me in the gut as a description of teachers. Your narrator strikes me fully as a student. Am I unnecessarily forcing things into corners?

KI: I’m happy you noted that. I think it’s quite possible that this student has been a teacher, too, and then of course, nothing makes you a student like being a teacher. Teaching, for me anyway, necessitates this strange return to the first learning, the primordial hand-raising. You become a bifurcated creature, transmitting the information with one mind and receiving it with the other And so, this is a mutable, multifarious “I.” One thing your question gets at is the use (and abuse) of time in this work. When I write other kinds of stories, I find handling time to be quite onerous—I suppose many fiction writers do. So it was fun, here, to flatten it out completely, to create within a simple past tense the potential for an every-tense, a simultaneity that could account for the way the narrator knows things that the narrator can’t possibly know.

AC: I maybe wrong–but I am set that your narrator is more student/child based than the adult world of school. I bring this up because I think you get to the specific consciousness that school provides to kids. I was thinking how, as kids, all of us are incredibly aware of our surroundings, and incredibly sensitive to them. Though I know more words and ideas now, as I kid, I never felt like I was feeling or understanding at a lower level. Our extreme consciousness seems to be in a constant in our lives (that sounds idiotic, like I am saying that we are alive or some shit). What I mean is–I don’t remember feeling any less engaged with the world as a kid, or much differently than I am currently. Things were spooky, weird, pretty, all that jazz. The School’s attentions capture this for me–highlighting the startled minds that are considered grown up, but which are actually with us from the beginning. This adds to a bit of the myth and infinity of the piece for me. Any ideas about this? Was that a long enough question for you?

KI: This again brings up for me the connections between time, consciousness, memory—the Proustian inclinations we indulge every time we try to recall a thing as it was. The school is my madeline, I guess. What is so tantalizing about childhood is how gone it is, how impossible to “accurately” conjure. As children, we don’t watch ourselves the way we do as adults. Until a certain age, children feel feelings; they don’t think about them, their significance, their proximity to other feelings, etc. Imagine being able to recognize beauty or horror without judging it, without being able to judge it! The narrator vacillates between neutral description and pained contemplation, inhabiting, again, a double or multiple consciousness. I like neutrally describing things. I’m not sure if this was a long enough question for me. How long can you go?

AC: What are your thoughts on the new CBS show Kid Nation? If you’re unfamiliar–here’s the website: http://www.cbs.com/primetime/kid_nation/. Wikipedia’s got a page too, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Nation.

KI: Someone emailed me a link about this from Gawker. I watched it and felt confused because I didn’t know what the premise was. I still don’t. At a couple points it made me laugh in a deranged way.

AC: Did you ever talk to the janitor when you were in the lower grades?

KI: Only a few times, and only, I think, to say thank you. I was constantly saying thank you. I remember his belt buckle very well. At least, I think I do. Maybe that’s something I’ve created over the years. He seemed so mighty to me, and mysterious, and a little bit terrifying.

AC: On school–does it feed you as a writer–do you ever want to leave? I’m thinking of Jennifer Lopez talking about dancers once–“it’s a hard life–but it’s a beautiful life.”

KI: It feeds me, yes. I do want to leave. And yet I’m not sure I can.

AC: What is the most common reason you are tempted to get up from your desk when you are writing?

KI: A combination of hunger and frustration. And sometimes I just bore myself and would rather pace.

AC: Also, what are you doing with the rest of the week? Tell us about it.

KI: Tonight, I’m giving a reading as part of Vox reading series. The poet Sabrina Orah Mark will be reading also, and Brian Connell, to whom I am married, will be playing some songs. After that is over I will feel relieved and probably hungry. Tomorrow we are getting on an airplane. We will be attending the wedding of one of Brian’s cousins in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where Brian’s father’s side of the family lives, minus Brian’s father, who lives in Oregon. Brian’s father’s side of the family minus Brian’s father owns and operates Connell Funeral Home, founded by Brian’s great-grandfather in 1919. Here is a link, since you shared some with me: http://www.connellfuneral.com/main.php?page=history
I am hoping someone will give me a midnight tour.