by Stuart Hopen

In the 1930s, a combination of cheap paper and cheaper thrills unleashed a volcano of creativity. This was the age of the pulp magazine, the quintessential literature of the Great Depression and fertile breeding ground of a uniquely American mythology. Digging through this now ancient archive, one finds the ancestors of the comic book heroes who still walk the Earth today. There is no mistaking the familial features Batman inherited from The Shadow, or that Superman inherited from Doc Savage.

Among this fabled company strode a character named Jimmy Christopher, who starred in a pulp entitledSecret Service Operator #5, America’s Undercover Ace. A forebear of James Bond, he even fought a bullion-obsessed villain who wielded a golden gun and tried to rob the Federal gold reserves. Popular Publications used this title to draw attention to what they considered the pressing concerns of the day; the 125-page pulp was a virtual soapbox, a bloody pulpit, a makeshift urban almanac cum popular gospel that combined espionage, military action, pseudo-science, shady politics, international affairs, sociology, and economics, and delivered dire warnings of growing national weakness and lurking sinister adversaries (foreign nations, secret societies, and cults) intent on destroying the Republic.

The authors (there were at least three, who all wrote under the house name of Curtis Steele) prescribed ways to avoid the dread terrors painted on its covers and marauding through its pages. Americans were admonished not to exhaust their resources in pointless foreign wars, but rather to fortify their shores against both insidious infiltration and overt attack. They were told to cling to their cultural values including hard work, ingenuity, reason, and science.

Many of the issues, which appeared once a month, now seem prophetic. The stories written between April of 1934 and November of 1935, for example, foretold the destruction of the Pacific Fleet by an unnamed Asian power, as well as an armed conflagration called “World War II” which devastates Europe and a crisis created by the U.S. squandering its domestic oil resources, which leads to a malignant dependence on foreign oil.

America, humbled by the Great Depression, was assessing its vulnerabilities. The magazine attuned itself to cultural anxieties about loss of power and prestige, the fears that haunted the nightmares of our citizens at the time. Knowing how Rome and other great civilizations had been overwhelmed by barbarian hordes, the authors raised the specter of that fate befalling America.

The magazine’s covers, painted with classical skill by John Newton Howitt, frequently featured bearded warriors in feathered helmets and beaten breastplates or chainmail, arms bared to display massive muscles. This vision of barbarians at the gate is epitomized in the opening scene of “Master of the Broken Men,” in which primitive tribesmen interrupt the annual ball of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Decorated in war paint, the half-naked party crashers hurl spears into the throng. The Vice-President, in attendance, faints.

Other issues conjured horrific scenarios of barbarians of a different sort, those who have enough science and engineering to construct fantastically powerful weapons, but who use these skills without the refinements of civilization. They erase skylines and fleeing multitudes by turning a universal solvent to military ends; they terrorize the population with an invisible aerial fortress capable of hurling destruction upon a thousand cities and towns; they turn American cities into arctic wastelands using a ray that halts molecular motion; they rip holes in the ozone layer, admitting destructive cosmic rays. Here we find the birth of the techno thriller, decades before Ian Fleming’s Moonraker.

Frederick C. Davis, who wrote the first twenty issues of Secret Service Operator #5, took pains to affect an air of scientific legitimacy with extensive footnotes, which are often dry and distracting. But Davis was also capable of whipping technical details into a dark and violent poetry, achieving surrealistic effects that evoke the power of dreams.

In “The Green Death Mists,” men mysteriously choke to death amid inexplicable storms when a new kind of electrical generator turns the atmosphere to ozone, causing both asphyxiation and strange color transformations:

. . . a gloomy hue appeared, surrounding the roaring planes. It spread swiftly to envelope heaven and earth in its mystery. Through it the sun shone blood-red. Jimmy Christopher saw the wings of his plane blending from gray to a pinkish brown! . . . The spreading water of the Bay was turning a deep purple . . . On the wings of the plane the cocarde of the U.S. army became a meaningless symbol. . . . his skin was green, his lips brown, his eyes a deep red!

Operator #5 faced numerous threats associated with exotic religious cults, whose dangers lay less in their theological trespasses, and more in their allure. Jimmy Christopher tells us, “Religion strikes deep in the human heart.” Aware of the capacity of religion to transform not only individuals but whole societies, Davis played to fears that America’s tolerance of diverse religions would make it susceptible to attack from within.

“Invasion of the Crimson Death Cult” begins with a thunderstorm over the desert that allows 500 illegal aliens to cross the Rio Grande. A strange phenomenon causes a paralysis of thought on the part of the onlookers, described in religious terms as being beyond pain and pleasure. The cult of Kosma, a variation of Zoroastrianism, commands a mysterious force that shatters concrete. All over America, families bankrupt themselves with donations to the cult. Converts are so numerous, Congress is able to pass a law condemning Christianity and opening the national treasury to the leader of the cult. It turns out that a weaponized version of ultrasonic waves has been causing all this trouble, battering down buildings (principally churches) while inducing a deeply disoriented effect on the human brain, misinterpreted by the masses as a religious experience.

In “Army of the Dead,” the threat to religious values comes from science itself: “The Master of Death is granting to human beings, in actuality, what religion only vaguely promises. . . . a continued, certain life on this earth!” In other issues, the threat comes from one of the vulnerabilities of democracy, a susceptibility to deceitful leaders. “Blood Reign of the Dictator” features a scene in which the newly elected President of the United States repudiates the Constitution at his inauguration, and promises to use unfettered power, which he has just granted himself, to eliminate poverty. The on-looking crowd cheers wildly.

Operator #5 had much in common with one of Popular Publications’ other best selling characters, the Spider. Both heroes spoke many languages and both were protean masters of disguise. But the two expert fencers, whose names rang among the Salles D’Armes, seemed more like foils for one another. The Spider was written with tongue thrust proudly into cheek, while Operator #5 relayed his messages with deadpan earnestness.

In Secret Service Operator #5, no effort was wasted on character development. The stories were peopled with archetypes and personifications, principally motivated by their national allegiances, or their inclination to virtue or vice, like characters in medieval morality plays or folk tales. Jimmy Christopher bore a scar resembling an eagle in flight on the back of one hand, a symbol that dictated every choice he makes.

There were strong emotional attachments between Operator #5, his girlfriend, Diane Elliott, his twin sister Nan (a perfect doppelganger but for gender), his father John (a retired agent with a bullet lodged near his heart), and his plucky Irish kid sidekick, Tim Donovan. But these bonds served only one structural function: to lend drama to the moments when each must be offered for sacrifice to the higher calling of duty to country. “Diane, I’m sorry I murdered you,” Jimmy Christopher said once when he was forced to abandon her to gain a military advantage. She would, in that instance, be reprieved, for there was an authority somewhere that was seemingly satisfied with Jimmy Christopher’s willingness to make the sacrifice, in and of itself. Yet the reprieve always came, with biblical conventionality, at the last possible moment.

In Ron Goulart’s An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine, Davis said, “I don’t remember how long I kept Operator #5 going . . . several years, anyway. Eventually, it just got to be too much.” One wonders just what exactly got to be too much. The demands of keeping a vigil on advancing technology and international politics? Or the outrageous level of intensity the plots had reached?

After Frederick Davis surrendered his burden, the writing chores shifted to Emile Tepperman, a veteran writer of Secret Agent X, who was a competing publisher’s boring version of the same character. The drop in quality was immediately obvious. Tepperman frog-marched Jimmy Christopher through the next five issues, culminating in an apex of tedium in “Crime’s Reign of Terror,” a generic tale about a gangster trying to consolidate the mobs in America.

And then something extraordinary happened with the next issue, “Death’s Ragged Army.” At the start of the story, it seems as if months or even years have passed since the previous issue, but on a subtler level, centuries have passed, for the story is told in the format of a future history, from a time in which the events have become embedded in the nation’s consciousness. Invaders from the Purple Empire (a thinly disguised Germany) already hold all of New England and most of the Eastern Seaboard. Canada already has been defeated, and Maine has been depopulated by a poison gas. The President has fled to a ramshackle courthouse in Jacksonville, Florida.

So begins the epic generally known as the Purple Invasion, which tore through the next thirteen issues. It is sometimes called the “War and Peace” of the pulps, but there is no peace within these 780,000 words. Tepperman took some of the premises and themes of the earlier Davis stories about foreign invasions, and enlarged them into a vast, sprawling, post-apocalyptic horror novel with a closer kinship to King Stephen than Count Leo.

Jim Steranko, in his History of the Comics, gives us a thumbnail version of the Purple Invasion:

Operator #5’s betrayal by army officers, the President’s suicide, Diane’s rescue as she is about to be hung from the Liberty Bell on the 4th of July, a gold train attack, a fantastic naval battle, the destruction of the Panama Canal, American forces pushed beyond the Rocky Mountains, the use of plague bacteria, the Purple Fleet’s onslaught of San Francisco . . . the suicide charge of the Canadian Lancers, the destruction of Pittsburgh’s steel mills, the Purple National Anthem, the American revolutionary army rallying at Death Valley, their push toward Los Angeles and the destruction of the Purple Navy, the fall of the Purple Empire and the rebuilding of America.

Not to mention the wall of living crucified children, Diane tied to the treads of a tank, the torture and martyrdom on the gallows of the Supreme Court Justices, the mothers who surrender their virtue to the wanton appetites of the invaders in vain efforts to save their infants who end up on bayonets anyway, and the rage and grief of the men who find the evidence of these deeds.

Tepperman describes the army that rises against the invaders as a parade of iconic images:

Old farmers, crotchety with rheumatism, swinging upon their shoulders antiquated muskets which had seen service in the early days of American colonization of the West; youths still in their teens, too young to serve with the American Defense Forces in the Rockies but not too young to join enthusiastically in a plot to strike a shrewd blow at the enemy; women, many of the wives and daughters of the Americans who had died in battle—all of these flocked from miles around to serve under Operator #5.

One issue after the fall of the Purple Empire, Tepperman departed from these pages. Perhaps Secret Service Operator #5 became too much for him as well. In any event, the title was not long for this world. Another “Curtis Steele” would take up the pen, but America had already been conquered, and recaptured. It was well past the point of being too much.

There is much in the pulps that will prove distasteful to the modern reader. The rhetoric-driven dialogue often reads as unintended satire, sometimes of the wafer-thin characters and sometimes of the propositions they so fervently promote. In their zealous advocacy of American isolationism, which history would shortly prove utterly wrong, the authors were not above stirring up ethnic and racial biases and resorting to crude stereotypes. An editorial from the February 1936 issue contained a statement that affects an affable air of tolerance, but is fraught with troubling ambiguities. “Americans don’t care what a man’s father or grandfather was, as long as he’s first and last a true American.” Meaning what, exactly?

Even with all of its flaws, however, Secret Service Operator #5 remains a unique artifact, infused with raw American folklore and nightmares. It provides intriguing glimpses into the terrain of the cultural subconscious during the Great Depression, a time not entirely unlike our own.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

HAYWIRE
Thaddeus Rutkowski
Starcherone Books ($18)

by Elizabeth Moore

Haywire, Thaddeus Rutkowski’s autobiographical third novel, delivers the dark and humorous moments of the life of a Polish-Chinese-American boy growing up in 1970s Appalachia; it is an insistent, nearly aggressive, reminder that the combinations of mixed race individuals and the struggles they encounter are limitless. Add an abusive, unemployed, idealistic, and alcoholic father to the equation and we have our protagonist—let’s call him Thaddeus, as he seems a clear stand-in for the author—who ingests abuse, bigotry, and isolation throughout his life.

Told in the first person, Rutkowski’s short, declarative sentences offer an unemotional view. The ease with which Thaddeus tells his story creates the dark tone that this novel subtly achieves. Thaddeus reveals the events of both his childhood and adult life in the thick of things, without the tone of having already processed and judged them. Reaching deep into truths about racism and how abusive childhoods bleed into adult life, Rutkowski presents the reader with a highly specific and often terrifying landscape that is universally accessible.

The specificity of coming from a Polish father and Chinese mother, as Thaddeus does, does not narrow the scope of this work but instead expands it. Rutkowski attempts to show that people of mixed race often fit in nowhere and spend their entire lives searching for identity:

I wanted to join an Asian fraternity. I wanted to visit a house during Rush Week and meet the brothers. I wanted twenty Asian guys to come to my door unannounced and say, “We’ve chosen you.” I wanted the young men to reveal the secrets of their society, the rituals that would link us for life. I wanted to pledge my brotherhood by reciting verses from Li Po and Tu Fu. I didn’t find anything like an Asian fraternity. I did, however, find a math club that had many Asian members.

This displays one of the highlights of Rutkowski’s novel: his skill at presenting stereotypes and ignorance with humor, as in this instance as well: “When he met me, my roommate said, ‘I heard your name and thought you’d look like a football player. But you look more like the cook on Bonanza.’”

Part of Rutkowski’s allure as an author is his ability to relate horrific information through a nearly unaffected voice:

My father made a series of paintings of my sister. I didn’t see him working on them; I saw only the finished products. The canvases stood on the floor in my father’s workroom, next to a window filled with bottles we’d dug from the dump. In one painting only the back of my sister’s head was visible—her hair was smooth and black. She was looking out a wood-framed window at a landscape. In another scene the back of her nude body is shown. Two careful brushstrokes defined her buttocks. She was standing in front of the same window, looking out . . . He didn’t ask me to comment on the paintings.

Individually the forty-nine short chapters read fast and dream-like, like abstract prose poems, seemingly without plot or direction (or even character names for that matter). Each chapter shows Thaddeus as older than in the last, yet Haywire achieves a unique structure where chronology is more intuitive than actual. Names and ages and exact locations take a backseat to the tone and immediacy of the situations described by the narrator. Somehow Rutkowski does not confuse or mislead the reader with his strange chronology and gives all the information needed to follow this unconventional plotline.

The novel can be divided into three parts: Thaddeus’s abusive and confusing childhood, his college years, and his adult life, full of unemployment, pot smoking, and sex addiction. In the forty-seventh chapter (“What we had in Common”), Thaddeus meets his future wife, and in the last chapter (“Night Journeys”), Rutkowski leads the reader through a series of waking dreams:

On my way up the mountain, I find the slope is not only steep, it’s vertical. There’s a steel ladder I can hold on to, but even when I’m holding on, I’m afraid of falling. I look for a place to rest, a flat area where I can get off the ladder. But I don’t see any ledges wide enough to stand on. Moving sideways would lead to empty air. So I keep climbing.

Spanning almost four decades, Thaddeus’s story becomes clear once the book is finished: It is a long road to feeling right in one’s own skin, especially when that skin doesn’t know anything else exactly like it.
 

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HAYWIRE
Thaddeus Rutkowski
Starcherone Books ($18)

by Vincent Czyz

Faulkner’s now-famous quip about Ernest Hemingway—“he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary”—was just as famously rebutted by Papa: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” In Thaddeus Rutkowski’s Haywire we get the worst of both worlds: there is nary a complex sentence in this novel, and emotions are just as rare—as least for all but the last third of the book. The book’s nameless narrator—the only constant character in the novel—flounders aimlessly in the first 200 or so pages, and never cries or rejoices, never gets angry or frustrated, never laughs or anguishes over anything, turning what would have been better off as memoir into bland fiction.

The back cover claims that Haywire is “composed of 49 flash stories,” which recount the experiences of the unnamed narrator—whom I’ll call Thad for convenience—following him from childhood to maturity. The novel starts out in rural America, covers college, and finishes up in a “big city.” For reasons I can’t fathom, Rutkowski avoids names as much as possible, so we don’t know where Thad grew up (although we can guess it’s Pennsylvania because that’s where Rutkowski grew up). Nor do we know the big city (although we can guess it’s New York because that’s where Rutkowski ended up). Like the author, Thad is also a writer who sometimes paints, and, has a Polish-American father and a Chinese mother.

Unfortunately, the “flash stories” are not stories at all; they simply record, like blog entries, what happened on a given day or over the course of several days. Worse, a good number of them read like they were written by someone who hasn’t yet reached his teens: “On a chilly day, our father decided it was time to gather the butternuts that had fallen from the tree in our yard. He told my brother and sister and me to put on gloves and old shoes and follow him outside.”

The prose drones on in this monotone for virtually the entire book. There is no narrative arc to the individual stories—which are in fact merely incidents—and none overall other than simple chronology. Thad does not have a very interesting life. Here’s one of the highlights of his childhood: “In the house, I played loud music on my father’s turntable . . . The sound might have carried down the street to neighbor’s houses, or it might not have. I didn’t check. I just listened to the notes blasting over me. Some songs made me happy, while others made me sad. I played both kinds.”

The “action,” such as it is, takes place in mostly undescribed space and is performed by faceless characters, generally referred to as “my friend,” “my siblings,” “my spouse,” etc. When Thad goes to college, we never find out his major and although we see him in a couple of classes, we have no idea whether or not he likes them. He falls into the habit of smoking pot, takes his habit with him after he graduates, and eventually goes to rehab. Finally, toward the end of the book, his half-hearted search for someone to tie up emerges as a bonafide obsession, but even then his desires are handled clownishly:

I had acquired my first such implement [a horse paddle] at a harness shop. I grew up among plain folk, farmers mostly, and I bugged out when I saw that they used buggy whips, riding crops and horse paddles in their daily lives. In short order I learned to whip myself into a lather. This froth extended to my monkey [penis], which was always ready to get lathered up.

Pleased with his metaphor, he presses on: “When excited, my monkey was a harsh master. He was King Dong . . . I let my chimp go ape.”

Eye-rollers such as the juvenilia above seem to constitute Rutkowski’s idea of how to break up the tedium of the writing. He even manages to make an acid trip seem dull: “I looked through the mist at a traffic light half a block away. The incandescent colors, changing from green to yellow to red and back to green, fascinated me. Raindrops sparkled as they fell past the disks of light. I stood there for what could have been an hour, watching.”

In the end, Haywire comes off as a thinly disguised memoir composed of writing that is pathologically lazy. Incidents—not “stories”—don’t particularly end; they just drop off like wooden soldiers marching over a precipice. Although Rutkowski grew up before the Internet came into vogue, one can’t help but wonder if the blog wasn’t his model here, as there are many parallels: something is deemed worthy of being recorded simply because it happened to the blogger; an effort is made to make everything bite-size; there’s nothing distinctive enough in the writing to call a voice; there’s no attempt to refine raw material. (I am speaking generally, of course; many blogs have distinctive voices that display wit, irony, and humor, and some are downright eloquent.)

As fiction, Haywire is a dismal failure. As memoir, it might have amounted to something if only the author had been as interested in his material as he wants us to be.

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Sapphire is among the most uncompromising African-American writers of our time—a poet and novelist who understands racism at its core and women's rights as essential democracy. Before her novel Push (Knopf, 1996) was adapted for the screen as Precious, it won the Book of the Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award, among many other honors.

As she has recounted on various popular media, Sapphire had refused at first to have a film based on her book, because she didn't want the vision of the character she'd created to be distorted and stereotyped or exploited. She wanted a film that would offer a sensitive image of true-to-life characters so that the audience could see what made them and not just pity them. Sapphire has said in many instances that she wanted the audience to view Precious with empathy, but didn't want black women to feel ashamed. And so she resisted for a long time allowing a movie to be made.

Eventually, Sapphire felt that Lee Daniels (Monster’s Ball) knew how to incorporate both the good aspects and the dysfunctional aspects of the black community, and that he would be able to render Precious as a free individual with the ability to overcome her ordeal on her own. Judging by her recent interviews, Sapphire seems happy with the actors cast for the film and believes that the production was true enough to her book to allow her characters to live and breathe in all their intended dimensionality.

Sapphire’s new novel, The Kid (The Penguin Press, $25.95), is a sequel to Push; it begins with Precious’s son attending her funeral after her death from complications from AIDS. Precious has nurtured Abdul into boyhood, but now Abdul is cast into the foster care system. Though Precious broke the cycle of abuse, Abdul’s new circumstances cause him to be victimized both physically and sexually. What Abdul suffers makes him into a victimizer of others, giving psychological validity to Sapphire’s portrayals of character and experience. The Kid is an indictment of society’s failures to protect the innocent with adequate social services, but Precious’s love for her son ultimately has a positive effect on his life. Though Sapphire is often criticized for the graphic quality of images in her writing, she chooses to shock and awaken by being forcefully naturalistic. The following interview, never before published, took place in my writing studio in Brooklyn Heights in 2005. It's interesting, with the publication of The Kid, to go back and see what Sapphire had to say about the world of her memorable character Precious.

Daniela Gioseffi: When I compiled my book On Prejudice: A Global Perspective, I found there’s a morbid curiosity that whites have about blacks, and I wonder what you’d say about it. Whites want to imagine that blacks are closer to the freedom of their animal natures, and that they destroy themselves with animal libido the way whites don’t dare to.

Sapphire: I think that sort of curiosity actually is at the heart of racism. Part of what Thomas Jefferson might say in his justification for slavery would be that blacks are three-quarters human, and technically, therefore, still animals. This false idea of projecting a more intense form of human sexuality onto any one category of human beings—I won’t say “race,” because I really don’t believe in the idea of race. I believe we’re one human race.

DG: Yes, only one race, scientifically speaking, as I write in the introduction to On Prejudice, and the different varieties of secondary characteristics, having only to do with skin tone or shape of eyes and such, but not with basic genetic structures.

S: Yes, so this projection of anything that has to do with putting the animal aspect of humans solely in the province of black people, I think, is basically racism. I think that we’ve suffered horribly because of it. Some of us even internalized the concept—and have even bought into it ourselves: I remember a newscaster talking about blacks being superior at sports. Now, if this was Europe, and he was talking about soccer, or if this was Scandinavia, and he was talking about swimmers, it would be a different story. That newscaster was being racist in a subtle way.

DG: He was stereotyping blacks as more physical, more animal, better at sports than at intellect. He was excluding the existence of great African-American intellectuals, scientist, writers, and the variety of talents within any given group.

S: Yes, exactly. It’s part and parcel of the idea of whites as superior and blacks as inferior. I don’t think that there’s any truth in the concept that we have an unbridled sexuality. I don’t think that we are animalistic. I don’t think that we are more feeling. I don’t think that we are more emotional, you know, than any other people. But I think that the idea that we are so is part of the justification for our continued subjugation to racism.

DG: Well, suffering on the part of any ethnic group can give that group an emotional soulfulness. Calvin C. Hernton writes a good deal about the idea of the exotic sexuality of the black man, and how the fear of that has caused the white man to oppress the black man. But I haven’t read what Hernton wrote about the problem for black women, have you? He’s an important writer in terms of the issue of sexual stereotyping and prejudice in general. He’s an interesting poet, too, and should be better known.

S: Calvin is a very important writer, and a fine person, a very fine person. He was one of the first black males who openly addressed sexism toward black women, and who really talked about there being a sexist culture within our subculture, as well as within the general population. He observed and proved that black women were victims of extreme sexism. So that was revolutionary when he first wrote about it. Everyone is saying it now, but when he was first writing, other people weren’t explaining the issue. He was very open about black women experiencing a different oppression aside from racism.

DG: In the introduction to On Prejudice, I write about the fact that it’s been proven by science that there is only one race, the human race, but that scientific fact is not understood enough in the popular mind. It’s what Darwinism is all about; as far as I’m concerned, we should all be building monuments of worship to Darwinian science instead of born-again religiosity of any extreme kind. And Darwin’s ancestors were abolitionists for generations. His grandfather, Erasmus, formulated a theory of evolution to prove that there’s only one human race. Darwin sacrificed much to prove the theory of how we all come from the same gene pool, some 250,000 years ago in the heart of Africa. Anthropologists and biologists agree on this point, from Gordon Allport and Ashley Montague to the time when Dr. W. E. B. Dubois wrote “Prospect of a World without Race Conflict” in 1944.

S: Yes, all human varieties can reproduce. The reason cats aren’t considered dogs is because, unless it’s in The National Inquirer, you just don’t have little, you know, kitten-puppies. They can’t breed. But human beings of all varieties are able to procreate.

DG: Something like 40 percent or more of the Africans who had been brought here as slaves were now intermixed, and all had so-called “white blood,” and a similar percentage of whites have so-called “black blood” . . . everyone’s all mixed together genetically anyway. It’s silly to talk about race in our day and age. There are good and bad people of every sociological subgroup. Yet I wonder how these issues affect your writing and readership. Do you find that whites respond equally well to your books as blacks? Or is the response different?

S: I actually think that my readers are varied. There’s a response to the work that’s different among people of color. Most often, when people of color approach any of my books, they’re not questioning the reality therein. They know these situations exist for them, though it may be over the top, in artistic terms, for whites. Whites may never have heard of cops riding round looking for a “Gorilla in the Mist,” a black person to abuse in the night. Blacks don’t say, “Whoever heard of anything like that? Who ever heard of someone in the Los Angeles Police Department singing: “Let’s Kill a Nigger Tonight,” and spending a twelve-hour tour of duty riding around trying to assassinate a black man? Have whites heard of cops sighting an African-American male and singing out over the patrol, “Gorilla in the Mist”? Black people are not going to say they never heard of such a thing, but many white people are going to say, “This is over the top! If the police are bothering these people you can be pretty sure they’ve committed a crime.” So, there’s really a different reality for some of my readers.

DG: I understand what you mean, because I taught black students who related such horrendous happenings to me.

S: At the same time, when most women read the poem, “When Mickey Mouse was a Scorpio” or the scenes between Precious and her abusers in Push, her mother and her father, or some of the poems in Black Wings and Blind Angels that deal with sexual atrocity toward women, very few women are going to say, “I don’t believe that. Who ever heard of anything like that happening?”

DG: Yes, because the statistically validated abuse of women throughout history is well documented and goes across the so-called “color line.” Though no doubt in American history it’s been worse regarding slave women. Some men can’t imagine how widespread it is to this day.

S: There are still plenty of men who think that portrayals of the sexual abuse of girls and women are over the top; that women writers are exaggerating, but the statistics are out there. 40 percent of women say they were sexually abused as children by a father or stepfather or gardener or uncle, but it’s not as much a reality in men’s lives. Many men can’t imagine what it means, the repercussions of it. Many men cannot imagine that 99 percent of the homeless women—the heroin addicts and such that are on the street, those there as sex workers—were probably abused as children. Men cannot imagine that many of them are in their situation because of sexual abuse and rape they experienced as children or girls.

DG: The end result when sexual, or violent, or even verbal, abuse is not dealt with is low self-esteem, lack of purpose or belief in the decency of people, mistrust, paranoia, and depression . . . This result is almost a certainty if the traumas are not dealt with, are not given psychological help. And there can be real physical injury to the reproductive system and sexual organs that lasts a lifetime; that too is not taken into account or spoken of enough.

S: Exactly! Many men just can’t believe what someone like Precious goes through in Push. They can’t believe how rampant such problems are for women.

DG: I find this is sometimes true with even the most compassionate, thinking men. They can’t believe the statistics are as huge as they are. One just has to read 19th-century history when every large city in the world was surrounded by a poverty-stricken ghetto of women, as well as a red light district of so-called “damaged” women who had children out of wedlock, who had been raped or abused, and who were raising their kids in the slums with no recourse to a living other than prostitution. Every large city was edged with ghettoized slums of poor, husbandless women and their so-called “bastard” children. We certainly know now about the way the black woman slave was used and abused by the “Massa,” and how many children were born of that. I understand that Toni Morrison has turned Beloved into an opera because she feels that it requires the music, the drama, and passion of opera. What’s the name of that woman who had to kill her child that Morrison wrote about in Beloved?

S: Sethe in the movie? The woman Oprah Winfrey played was Sethe.

DG: Yes, Sethe in Beloved is roughly based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner. The book's epigraph says: "Sixty million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade—but Beloved was based upon the life and struggle of a real woman.

S: Oh, yes, there was a notorious trial about Margaret Garner.

DG: And Margaret Garner’s child might well have been the Master’s child! So, “Sethe” could say (let’s use her generically, for all the slave women who experienced rape): “Not only have I been abused and raped to give birth, in pain, to this child, but now they’re going to make this child into a slave, even though my baby is the child of the Master.” I mean, one can see the insane sociological configurations, the utter inhumanity of the institution of slavery and its unspoken practices, it’s total destruction of the institution of family—so much worse than we were taught in history in our school days, because our textbooks never went into the morally depraved horrors of it. We never read about how Thomas Jefferson had slaves and a sexual affair with an enslaved woman under his ownership.

S: And we can add the less spoken story, or the really silent story. So, if master felt free to leave his house and go out to the slave quarters and get Miss Minnie Mae, would not some master have felt just as free to go rape Bobby? And Johnny? And Saul? And Jim and Paul? We know that was happening, too.

DG: One wonders, how much has civilization really progressed in terms of man’s inhumanity to humankind? I think of it: what you had was a black son of a white master being lashed to death by hiswhite brother, the slave keeper. Slaves were not allowed to name their own children or have surnames. The child was often taken from the mother as soon as it was weaned and sold to some other plantation owner to prevent filial bonding from occurring—which is why I get really upset when people from their high-and-mighty perch say, “After all, it’s been over a hundred years for those people to get their act together!” But, void of financial means, and without the strength of family identity and love given to a child, without knowing who your mother or father was, with no “forty-acres-and-mule,” as Lincoln had promised before his assassination, before the carpet-baggers and greedy profiteers took over things after the Civil War—what is there to help one overcome anything?

S: Exactly. And when they say, “Oh it’s been over a hundred years”—it’s as if there was no Abner Louima! No Amadou Diallo, and those cases of brutality committed just very recently! It’s as if they are saying: “It’s been over a hundred years, and all assault stopped!” It’s been over a hundred years, and there has been unremitting racism ever since the slaves were “freed.” It’s not as if slavery stopped, and the powers that be said, “Oh my God, we’ll give these people a break!” It’s more like slavery stopped, and “Now, we’ll lynch ‘em,” and “Now, we’ll form the Klan,” and “Now, we’ll disenfranchise them,” and “Now, we will not allow their children to go to school during cotton-pickin’ season.”

DG: There’s still slavery, and sweatshop slavery, and child labor slavery and sexual slavery of women and children and boys all over the globe. It’s a monstrously inhumane world still in many areas—including places in the U.S.A.

S: Yes, and, “Now, we’ll take Abner Louima in, and shove a plunger stick up his ass.” And “We’ll shoot Amadou Diallo forty-one times!” Even if we had boots to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, the minute we bend over we’re getting kicked in the teeth. It’s happening to this day, despite that some of us have been successful and fulfilled and listened to as writers by some of the enlightened populace. Despite that some are multi-millionaires like Oprah Winfrey or Denzel Washington, or that there’s a larger black middle class today.

DG: Your poem “Gorilla in the Mist” shows that sort of brutality is still going on. As a matter of a fact, at Long Island University in the 1980s, when I was a professor in the remedial writing program, I would get students who were working hard to go to school and make something of themselves. African-American boys would come up to me and say they had been taken on a so-called “joyride” by the Brooklyn police, and this in New York City, the most diverse community in the world! And these young men would tell me they’d be walking home from college with their books, or walking home after their night job for paying their tuition, and the police would pick them up, take them somewhere, for no reason, beat them up, and dump them out. It was called a “joyride.” Cops would just go looking for some black kids to put the fear of death into the community.

Some years ago, I tried to do what you’ve done more recently—write empathetic stories about my students’ lives, to create understanding in the reader and to give their stories a voice. There is much of this in your writing. You become a voice for the oppressed. You tell their stories from the first-person narrative position. You portray all sorts of different characters in monologue, and that frees you to be a more imaginative writer.

S: Well, the book I’m working on now is totally in the voice of a young boy, and I’m living in his body, and trying to experience his sexuality. I have to use my own experience, but also some imagination, because I’m basically a feminine woman and my experience with men is female. I haven’t exactly experienced what men experience no matter how many men I might have slept with, so it’s interesting, just imagining being in this boy child’s body.

DG: There’s something I want to ask you about, which is the rift in the black community between male writers and female writers. Ishmael Reed, for one, was angered by the brutal male characters portrayed by successful black women writers. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison both became very successful novels around the same era that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple became a Hollywood success. Many African-American women were writing very successful books about sexual, physical, and mental abuse, and Ishmael Reed wrote, “Why don’t they ever write about a decent black guy who’s a good father, and give the world that image of us?” What would you say?

S: Well, I’ve heard that, but those very same books also contain some decent black men. I was in a writers’ group—I’ve been in many writers’ groups because that’s how I work well, I’m a collaborative person—and I was the only African American in a certain writers’ group writing some fiction about the New York City experience of a black person, and one of the white women got up from her seat and said angrily: “Why is it that none of you people ever write about the good white people?” And then she went on to say how some relative of hers, in the 1960s, had been hit over the head in a freedom march. So, perhaps, what authors like Ishmael Reed have to understand is that there are legions of white people who are angry at him! And, angry at James Baldwin! And angry at Richard Wright! When you read their work you basically read about the bad white man who’s oppressing, and ball-cutting, and humiliating, and all that. That’s the question we might want to ask. Why didn’t James Baldwin? Why didn’t Reed? Why didn’t any of them write about the good white people?

DG: How much are black male writers writing positively about black women? I have to stop and think . . .

S: Well, let’s see: Let’s examine Richard Wright’s Native Son. In Native Son what do we have? Doesn’t Bigger Thomas cut up and throw a white woman in the furnace? Isn’t that what happens? And in Another Country, doesn’t Rufus beat up a white woman so badly that she goes insane? Isn’t that what happens? Who wrote that? That’s a black man portraying black men.

DG: This idea of yours is really interesting, because I remember my daughter and I going to see The Color Purple in Manhattan, and it was almost all white people crying their eyes out, identifying with black people in the film—that is to say identifying across the color line, as if it were not particularly relevant. My daughter and I were crying our eyes out. And we looked around us, and we saw all these white people, crying over black people’s lives. After the movie, with our eyes still blurry with tears, we got on the westside train going uptown, towards Columbia University, where we were going to get off and visit my brother-in-law. We forget to change trains, and we got out, and were in the middle of Harlem. It was just a poetic moment; you know? We looked up, engrossed in talking about the movie, and there we were, two whites in a train full of all black people. It was a good lesson for my college-age daughter: It was late at night and suddenly there was the sensation of what it’s like to be in the minority.

S: Do you know what I remember? I recall in 1994 being at the National Black Literature Conference, and Sonia Sanchez was up on the stage. I was facing forward, and I heard a black male voice behind me say, “Hey man, we better hurry up and get in there before the bitches get everything.” They were talking about awards at the time or something of that nature. I looked behind me to see who had said that, and two black authors who shall remain nameless were talking. So, sexism, is everywhere, too? That’s jealousy, isn’t it? The idea that there’s a piece of pie and there’s only so much that anyone is going to get and not enough to go around! And what’s standing in the way is not racism, but “the bitches.” So, that attitude is out there, too!

DG: I see what you mean, but jealously is always everywhere to a degree.

S: Yes, jealousy is everywhere a reality, but those black male authors worried about the so-called “bitches” getting everything didn’t get that they are writing about white men putting their foot on their black necks and stereotyping whites because that’s the sphere of their existence.

DG: It’s a pecking order with women usually at the bottom, and people write from the sphere of their experience with the world around them, whether it be within or without of a subculture.

S: Exactly! Those black authors talking about the “bitches” getting all the awards writing about nasty black men need to have a white person come up to them and say, “Where are the decent white people in your books?” Then maybe they will stop asking black women where are the decent black men in your books. So, the answer is, we’re all just writing about what’s happening to us. Black women are writing about what is happening to them within their world.

DG: Yes. I was going to ask why you’re now taking the persona of a young black male. Certainly there’s a pecking order in everybody’s suffering, and children are on the bottom . . .

S: The bottom of the bottom is defenseless children. I should say that this novel is about a black child growing up. I take him as far as his twenties. As women, we’re close to the vulnerability of young men and boys. Then they grow up and become strangers, right? We all know that experience: like, “Who the hell is that? I knew him when I was changing his diaper. You know, when I was fixing his lunch bucket. And now he’s grown up to be a macho stranger.”

DG: It’s a subtle metamorphosis that happens because of the cultural impact and peer pressures. As men grow they tend to repress their vulnerable emotions for the sake of macho power.

S: No one is going to deny themselves power. If the conditions of the powerless are horrendous, and as close to death as you can get and still be alive, then there is nothing to lose. So when a man becomes a man, one of the first things he has to do is turn against the females who raised him. And some people do it nicely, and some people do it like Clarence Thomas did it, you know, by putting down their mothers.

DG: Projection of one’s own inadequacy or self-hatred onto others has a good deal to do with prejudice of all kinds. I looked particularly at the last poems in Black Wings and Blind Angels and you accept your aloneness, your responsibility for your own life and your own feelings of being broken, and that’s the thing you’re writing about in that book—aloneness. I identify with that, because no matter how close I am to others, as a writer, I always feel very alone. I heard you read the poem about Violet, about how work was just as important to her as love.

S: Yes, I think that that’s an important realization for a woman artist. I think that part of what I was dealing with was not extolling or pretending it’s an ideal situation, because obviously it seems that the nature of being human is interaction with other people. But, I have come to some acceptance, and it’s an amazing acceptance for me, because there’s nothing in the culture that teaches us that we can be a whole being, without relating to a man, and also on some level, without being a mother, you know what I mean? When I listen to women talk about these situations, motherhood and relationships, marriage, and such, I am filled with wonder. I'm sure it can be absolutely wonderful, but I haven’t experienced that on some level. And, I still feel good to be alone and have my work.

DG: Yes, I feel we all need our own cart to Push, as Freud said: “Work and love; love and work.” I feel that work can be good on its own, but love needs work, too. (Laughs.)

S: Yes, I acknowledge the need for love and relationship. There are things I don’t have, but I am still a whole human being. And I have chosen my destiny. My destiny to be a writer would be the same whether I had a man in my life or not. Whether or not I had children, I am going to do this! I am going to write. I am going to be an artist. I’m going to dance. I’m going to learn language. I’m going to write. So it would be nice if I had a supportive partner. It would have been nice if I had children, but I didn’t.

DG: Well it ain’t over until it’s over. In the meantime . . .

S: I don’t have a dog either (laughs), but I manage to keep on writing.

DG: You’re also doing a good deal of teaching—I went to one of your classes at the Bowery Poetry Club—and I’m sure you’ve put a fair amount of your mothering instinct, or nurturing instincts, into being a teacher. Can you talk about your philosophy of teaching? I remember you quoted Raymond Carver, and you said, “If it happened, use it.” That’s why I felt good in your workshop because I don’t need formalism; I need to get out what I’m afraid to say.

S: Exactly.

DG: Tell me a little bit about your philosophy of teaching. It seems mixed with an idea of healing, of getting at what is blocked, or hurting.

S: I have an MFA in poetry. And I don’t have a PhD in literature. I’m a reader, but I couldn’t call myself an academic scholar by a long shot. I am very much interested in the process of writing. In addition to reading literature, I’ve also studied with people like Allen Ginsberg. I’ve studied with writers who combined Zen and writing, meditation and writing. I’ve studied with Natalie Goldberg. I was a student of hers, in workshops, for over a year. All of that is involved in how I teach. I don’t know about publishing, and I don’t know about the process of writing a novel or short story, but the actual act of writing, I think, has a great deal to do with feeling, with emotional release.

DG: Emotional release seems central to Push.

S: Exactly.

DG: In the “each one, teach one” class, you have each student tell her story in her own style of expression, her persona. It's so much more poignant than if you'd attempted to write in the second person as character description. These monologues are very powerful.

S: The characters come to life in their own voices.

DG: You said that you were influenced a great deal by Ai and her poem monologues?

S: That technique plays into my “Gorilla in the Mist” poem—a dramatic monologue. It has to do with the work I'm doing now: taking on the persona of the character I'm writing about, writing in the first person. It's like using poetry to create a short novel, a little drama, creating a whole world through the voice, not as a novelist, setting the theme, plot, whatever. The dramatic monologue has to rely completely on the voice of the character to create the scene, the drama, the plot, the theme, everything.

DG: It certainly creates intimacy with the audience, because we all see the world through our subjective eyes. If the listener, the viewer, can get into another's skin and see the world through the eyes of the character in the book, or on the stage, then empathy can be achieved.

S: Exactly.

DG: With the character Precious Jones in Push, one begins to feel her inner life, even though she might be completely different on the outside from the reader or listener or viewer—one begins to live in her skin and feel her feelings through her voice. You do write about a teacher, Ms. Rain, but we don’t get into her as much. Is Ms. Rain white, or black? I’m not sure I remember, or knew. I think she is black in the book.

S: She’s black, but in many ways, in the book, she is what a good teacher should be—she’s somewhat invisible. And you know, that was by design, and also, in the novel, I was really trying to have the heart of the book be the character Precious. Like in that story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” you know, where that heart is pounding all the time . . .

DG: Edgar Allan Poe’s story.

S: Right, Poe. The pounding heart of the book is Precious. And all the other characters are slightly in the background.

DG: But I really felt Ms. Rain as an important influence.

S: Oh yeah, she was an important influence.

DG: And even the name “Rain” is like being washed clean.

S: And being nurtured . . . you know, without rain there’s no growth. So, we know that she’s vital to the story, but the thing that I was not going to have in that book was “Up the Down Staircase,” where the white teacher in black Harlem takes center-stage, and “Oh, here I am, the noble teacher, here to write about my poor little nigger students.” You know? I didn’t want that condescension. I wanted her to help in finding the question and giving the means—you know what I mean? The means. So that someone like Precious should be able to leave Ms. Rain’s class and write her own story. She shouldn’t need the teacher, finally.

DG: Well she does actually . . . in her journal, writing her final poem, where she’s still hoping she’ll stay around long enough to raise her baby, and that a cure for AIDS might be in the future . . . she’s going to let that tiger inside her bloom, and she’s not going to let anyone put her down. I think anyone can identify with the character. And that’s what makes it such a good book; it’s a journey of the soul that anyone can identify with.

S: And people do. I mean, I was in Antwerp, and this young woman came up to me, and she was just ecstatic. I just looked at her. You know how you can just look at people and see what they are about. Basically this young girl was upper-middle-class, if not wealthy, eighteen years old. And she said, “Oh I just loved the book. I identified with it so much.” And I thought what is she trying to tell me, what did she identify with in this horrendous story? And she says, “Oh I had a happy childhood and everything I needed, but I just identified with it so much. I just felt like the character was me.” And so I said, “Well, what was it about the character?” Also, this girl was very thin and pretty. I said, “What was it about the character you identified with?” And she says, “Precious was born on November 4, and so was I.” And I was just . . . you know? She really identified with this character, and she had never had these experiences, so she had to find one little thing that she could latch onto, that she could have this communication with, that would allow her to bond with this under-class, abused character because what was similar to her in this character was not the birth date, but maybe this girl was who Precious might have been her had she not been abused. Because, there’s a spirit to Precious! You know, there’s happiness, an effusiveness that’s there despite everything, that isn’t even there with her other classmates who have experienced less misery than she.

DG: Yes, she’s got a spirit that people want to identify with, because it’s the spirit of self-actualization, of survival after horrendous experience.

S: Exactly. Of transformation!

DG: Emerson wrote about it. And Emily Dickinson wrote about it. And Whitman wrote about it. Many African-American writers have written about that spirit to survive, but yet, in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, her little Pecola, doesn’t survive the way Precious does.

S: No, it’s sad, ultimately . . .

DG: Pecola falls into insanity and misery, but that’s what’s different about Precious—as horrific as her story is, it comes out on the side of hope. Not with peaches and cream happiness, but it does come out on the side of hope.

S: Yeah, she still has her problems. We have to deal with that—and I wish I could write a book as beautiful as The Bluest Eye in that way—but we also have to deal with the fact that Precious comes on the back of, not just those books you mentioned earlier, but on the back of several decades now of knowledge. What we know now is that child abuse is devastating, but it doesn’t have to kill. That wasn’t always known. People now are dealing more with the resilience of the soul of the child, it seems. Do you know what I mean?

DG: No, I’m not really sure. Perhaps, it’s just different with different character analysis. Somehow, some have strength to endure and others don’t.

S: While child abuse is deadly serious, what really kills you . . . I’ll just be blunt. If your father rapes you at two years old, you probably will not die, although some children do. But if your father leaves you in a trash-can at two, you will die. So abandonment, in some way, assures that you will die. Abuse, many, many people suffer. And what we’re dealing with now is really . . . People are actually naming a post-incest syndrome, a post-traumatic stress syndrome related to rape and abuse. We have this understanding, a set of behaviors almost, that can be identified with rape survivors. I know a modern psychologist who is dealing with survivors is not going to be shocked when they read Billie Holiday’s biography. How she behaved in a self-destructive way is in keeping with what happened to her. Instead of looking at her the way white male writers look at her (and most of her biographies have been written by white males), which is looking at her as a victim, a woman who is knowledgeable about what it means to have been abused as a child and survived will look at Billie Holiday as a survivor because we know now that many women who have experienced what she has experienced usually die, usually become addicts, usually do not survive or make something of themselves. And, back in her day, you know, there was no psychiatric help; when Billie was raped, she was arrested. So, she didn’t go to therapy; she wasn’t removed from the situation or helped . . .

DG: I understand, because I never spoke or wrote about my rape by the Klan, for my civil rights activism, until I was over fifty, and it happened when I was nineteen years old. I finally wrote of it in story form in “The Bleeding Mimosa” in 1995—thirty-four years later.

S: Exactly. Women didn’t tell or seek help back in those days, as they do now.

DG: I didn’t want to talk about it. I came from that generation where you wore lipstick, girdles, and bras, and held everything in, and you didn’t talk about it. You practiced feminine denial, so as not to be looked down upon, and you didn’t tell. And mostly I didn’t tell to save my father’s life, because he had that Italian attitude that “a ruined daughter will never get married,” and you know, he had a weak heart, and had a heart attack just prior to my experience and he didn’t want me to be an activist for fear that something bad would happen to me. I never told my father. I never told my parents. I dealt with it all by myself with no psychiatrist.

S: We paid a tremendous price for what we couldn’t say.

DG: Yes, and that’s what’s great about women’s literature in our time—we’ve begun to tell it all. I remember the Jewish-American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in a poem: “What would happen if a woman told the true story of her life? The world would break open.” Or words to that effect.

S: And, remember now, this is what men are trying to get us to shut up about. “Why don’t you write about the good men?” They tell us. Well, we’re writing what we need to write; it’s effing keeping us alive. If you want to write about the good men, you go rent you a room and write about it. We’re writing the literature that we need to write to live. We have paid dearly for this. We have paid dearly with our lives, with reduced self-esteem, with reduced possibilities.

DG: With nightmares.

S: With awful nightmares! With, you know, secondary abuse. There have been the women who have abused their own children, or gotten into situations blindly, recreating the abuse for their children by choosing the wrong men and ignoring what’s going on like their mothers did.

DG: As if it was normal for the child to be abused as they were.

S: Yes. Then there’s been the generation of women who’ve been abused, and never married and didn’t have children because of it. There’s no one who has been through this experience who hasn’t paid mightily. I mean, it’s taken the same toll that racism has taken. So, given what we’ve been talking about . . . I question a writer who isn’t writing about it.

DG: Exactly. It’s the underbelly, and unless we face it, we’re never going to be cured of it. All that Victorian repression that Whitman and his whole generation experienced, it only created illness and a lack of self-realization. When you Push things under the rug, they get sicker and uglier.

S: And also, we haven’t dealt with the whole story of Whitman. I think that’s what June Jordan was alluding to in her essay on Whitman that we just read for an audience at the Brooklyn Historical Society today. You know, not only are we not reading him, but we’re not dealing with his full biography. There was one point where Whitman was actually tarred and feathered for homosexual sex, and then he was run out of town. Where’s that written up?

DG: I’ve heard several Whitman scholars dispute that incident as rumor, but nonetheless, how much do we talk about how Whitman died in poverty from a stroke, selling his poems on the street from a basket, and how he never made any money to speak of from his writing? And yet, he is the voice of America’s “Democratic Vistas” read all over the world. It’s what’s so great, that I see now, that women are actually being successful as writers and making a life as a writer by telling the truth.

S: Exactly. Also, what we’re doing right now—we’re sitting in an apartment that you bought, for yourself to write in. Not a place that you bought for your grandchildren to come visit, not for you to cook and knit in and raise kids in—but that you decided to put at the center of your life literature. That’s amazing!

DG: Yes, a place for my books and my work. I’m old now, and I have one grown daughter, but this is my place to work and write in. What would be left for me after raising my daughter if I didn’t have my work? I’ve ultimately got my work to rely on, to keep me alive and well.

S: Being here is really meaningful. This conversation that we’re having right now in your writing studio is really meaningful. Imagine, at my age, a woman like me would not be seen at another time and place as a vital functioning person. Right? I would be a spinster, I would barely be able to come out of my house. You understand: an unmarried woman, without children to take care of her? There was great stigma attached to that.

DG: And look what you’ve done with your art. You’ve taken better care of yourself than any parent or any man could.

S: I believe that.

DG: You should. You have made a life. You are listened to, and people hear what you have to say. You are healing yourself and others with your writing. And you’re getting truth out there in everyone’s face. I feel that some of the most vital writing of our time is being written by African Americans, because their political truth is so “right on.” It’s like something we always lived with and always knew. We’re just waking up as a country. Middle class people are just coming alive. I mean, they thought they had a vote. They thought their opinion mattered. And now the middle class has shrunk. The theory of revolution is that it only happens when the middle class gets so oppressed it joins the poor, but the problem for me, as a literary critic, is that I don’t see enough cross-fertilization. There is plenty if you go downtown to the Bowery Poetry Club—but I mean, uptown! How many white writers are really taking the time to write literary criticism and analysis of black writers? And vice versa? There needs to be more cross-fertilization. Maybe there is among the younger generations. What would you say about that?

S: Well, I think that there are two things that happen. What I see a lot is that black writers of the middle class have the same issues as anybody who is white. They are still thinking: “This story of ‘Gorilla in the Mist’ or Precious Jones is over the top.” They cannot imagine that a policeman would shout, “Come here, Boy!” to an innocent young man walking down the street these days. “Get in my police car!” They can’t imagine that the innocent boy would be driven to the river, and beaten, and thrown out on the ground, for no reason at all. Unless they are gay—gay men can imagine that abuse. You know what I mean?

DG: Prejudice is in everybody. The best of us fight it hard, but it’s in everybody. You’ve got certain feelings because you’re black and I’m white. I’m scared of offending you, or you’re probably thinking that some of the time I’m trying too hard to be real with you because you are black, that I might be a bit condescending, or something.

S: Right. Right. It’s always there until people know each other thoroughly, and maybe then it’s still there sometimes . . .

DG: Yes, to be honest, if I walk down the street, and I see a group of black youths walking along or a black guy walking toward me and it’s night, I try really hard just to walk by him like anybody else, but it’s difficult. I’m scared of reverse racism. I might just see that he’s a dignified guy, just walking along. But, there’s always that little fear, and that’s been bred into us. My mother would scare us: “Don’t go out at night. Those black boys are going to rape you.” You know? But she was just a poor, ignorant woman in a ghetto of one kind next to a ghetto of another kind. So, for her, she felt that when you’re next to the blacks that means you’re poor, too. She couldn’t deal with it. My older sister would bring home recordings of Billy Eckstein, and my mother would say, “What are you listening to that niggerfor?” You know? And here would be this handsome man singing with this gorgeous mellow voice, but my mother just felt, “Well, you’re pulling me back down into poverty again by listening to a black guy.”

S: Right, right. Exactly.

DG: So my sister had to hide her records, and finally she ended up a racist herself. But there’s all those subtle pressures. Did you know Doris Jean Austin, the novelist who died young, not so long ago?

S: I only knew of her.

DG: She died rather young of ovarian cancer. And she gave me my first big New York Times review for Women on War. And we read our work together, and I took her and Grace Paley out to my alma mater, Montclair University, for a nicely paid reading and we became friends.

S: Right, and what happened?

DG: Well, we’d go out to dinner, and she’d want to go to an expensive restaurant and I couldn’t really afford them and didn’t like to spend a lot of my resources on eating out, but I couldn’t tell her, because I was afraid of condescending to her, or I thought maybe she thought that’s what I expected, but if we’d been the same color, I just could’ve said, Hey, Girlfriend, this place costs too much! I could have felt free to be more open. And then, before she died, she wanted me to bring her a pack of cigarettes in the hospital, and I didn’t want to because I didn’t think it was good for her, so I said I would come with the cigarettes, and I just never did, and then I heard she died a few days later, and I felt terrible. But, if we’d been the same color, I’d simply have said: “No, I can’t bring you cigarettes, Girlfriend, but I’ll come and see you with some fruit or flowers,” but I didn’t, and so I ended up feeling guilty, instead. You know? It was a difficult thing to communicate with direct honesty. Anyway, I’m just saying that along the way I’ve had black friends, but really living an integrated lifestyle isn’t easy.

S: It still isn’t easy.

DG: Maybe among us poets, it’s easier?

S: Well, I don’t think it’s easy among any people, in general, but I think part of it is that we’re the only culture that expects things to be easy. Once I accepted, in a way, that friendship is difficult, that it’s challenging, and that it’s painful, it stopped being a problem for me. I got rid of the people in my life I couldn’t deal with. You know what I mean? There are some white people I just cannot deal with. And others, I’d just realize that there’s going to be challenges in the relationship to overcome. I had to explain this and that; I had to; there are even ways I had to let my white friends know that their children can and can’t talk to me in certain ways. I don’t have to say these things to my black friends. Know what I mean?

DG: I think I do. I just hit on something about Push that is different than Maya Angelou’s and Toni Morrison’s novels mentioned earlier—there’s more of an integration of society in Push, because in that “each one, teach one” classroom, where all the students have suffered a common abuse, they’re a mixture of backgrounds and cultures.

S: Right, right. It’s a truly urban atmosphere. Precious is not a southerner living in a segregated society as in Morrison’s or Angelou’s books. Our first educational encounters for Precious, are actually with the white school teachers: Mr. Witcher, the teacher who kicks her out of school, Mrs. Lichtenstein? Then Precious goes into the alternative system, and in her classroom there are actual challenges. She’s a victim, but if she’s to grow, she’s going to have to deal with her own xenophobia. Remember, she can’t deal with the Jamaicans or Hispanics or anyone at first. Precious also has to deal with her own homophobia. On her first day, she is confronting all of these people, and if she is to hold onto all of her prejudices, her hatred, she will not survive, she will perish—because in that room, the homosexual will help her. The “coconut head” will help her. The light-skinned Hispanic girl will help her. These are people she has formally perceived as her enemies or competitors for the few crumbs on the table, but if she does not resolve these prejudices, she and they will not survive. If we all do not resolve these problems, we will not survive as the human race.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

by Paula Bomer

Jen Michalski is the author of the short story collection Close Encounters (So New Media Press, 2007) and the editor of City Sages: Baltimore (CityLit Press, 2010). In 2010 her novella May/September won Press 53’s award for best novella and was subsequently published in Press 53 Open Awards Anthology 2010 ($16). The story of a very young woman and a distinctly elderly woman embarking on an unexpected love affair, May/September is emotionally touching, but it’s not without edge. Straightforwardly written yet with beautiful attention to language, this is a work that is truly radical rather than clever or sensational. In the following interview, Jen was kind enough to talk to me about May/September and discusses what constitutes pushing boundaries in subject matter in 2010, among other things.

Paula Bomer: When you started May/September, were you planning on writing a novella?

Jen Michalksi: This is actually the second novella I’ve written in two years. They don’t start out as novellas, but I guess I have this preconceived notion of novels being long and complicated, and the novellas I‘ve written are just very long stories. I have to wonder, though, because I’ve been involved with the small presses for so long, which publish so many chapbooks, whether the shorter form just evolved from that exposure (and their expectations). I do feel more comfortable writing a novella than a novel. I hope, in the age of Twitter, it catches on.

PB: When one thinks of a May/September romance, one generally thinks of an older man and a younger woman. An older woman and a younger man even seems shocking. But you take it one step further in presenting the relationship between a quite old woman and a woman in her twenties. Were you aware when writing it how far you were pushing the boundaries of conventional subject matter?

JM: I was more aware of the ageism part of it, the Harold and Maude, than the lesbian part. I should add the disclaimer that this story came to me as a fully formed dream, and I woke up and struggled with whether to actually write it. Even though you don’t write for anyone but yourself, you don’t want to waste months or a year on a story that you’re just going to put in a drawer. It wasn’t something that I thought anyone was interested in reading, and yet the dream really affected me and intrigued me. When the “voice” of the story came to me, I sat down and wrote it over the course of a few months. But even then I didn’t know what to do with it. It was a sincere story, but I struggled with the idea of people responding to some sort of “shock” value associated with it. But the response hasn’t been like that at all—people who have read it have responded to it in the gentle, sincere way that I wrote it.

PB: Alice, the young woman who has been hired by Sandra to help her blog/write about her life, is openly gay, and I love the way this doesn’t shock Sandra, whose sexual identity is less defined. Even though she grew up in a time when being gay wasn’t openly accepted, Sandra understands that things have changed. She isn’t bitter, but she’s contemplative. The backbone of this novella is Sandra, at the twilight of her life, looking back—sometimes calmly, sometimes with intense emotion. What inspired that? Did that sort of structure come organically?

JM: The novella for me really is Sandra; I wanted to tell her story honestly, with anger and fear and longing. She says to Alice early in the novella that no one writes about old people, that “no one cares about us.” But she is all of us. The structure came about for me to be an impartial observer, to be entirely in these women’s heads, with the flashbacks mingled with present-tense conversations, even mingled with each other’s thoughts. I wanted the reader to become part of their narrative.

PB: Irony can be—and in the case of this novella, really is—a subtle tool, a way to show how life often doesn’t work out how we intend it to. Sandra’s daughter wanted Sandra to write about her life, but when she finds out Alice and her mother are sexually involved, she’s angry and worried and hurt. Sandra, though likable, isn’t very appreciative of her daughter and it struck me that the elderly rarely are of their children. It’s just so hard to grow old and need help, it’s lonely and frightening. Is Alice sort of a final gift to Sandra?

JM: Sandra and her daughter have never been close, and it’s a concern for both of them, in a way, because Sandra is slated to spend her older, vulnerable years with her. And so Alice is a gift to Sandra in that she shows her that she can be vulnerable, that she can love, but it’s a slap in the face to Sandra’s daughter, who wonders where this Sandra was all her life. But she’s always been there—neither of them wanted to find her. But I hope that the reader is hopeful for mother and daughter in the end.

I think both the young and the old tend to underappreciate the other. Neither thinks the other understands their unique challenges, but we all sort of go through the same things. It was sort of a challenge to me, coming from a close-knit family, to write about a mother and daughter who aren’t close, and to write it from the mother’s point of view. But I understand their fear and pride in not extending the olive branch. I’ve seen so many broken families operate on this principle. And I feel so sad for them. It was hard to write Sandra and her daughter without wanting to make them kiss and make up at some point, but they never do.

PB: Let’s talk about Alice a little bit. The way you structure the novel, in the third person omniscient, we get to see what she’s thinking about as well. Her feelings are protective of Sandra, but genuinely loving. She also seems a little tentative though, and overwhelmed by the distance between them. When writing from her point of view, how complicated did you want to make her feelings for Sandra? Do you feel these emotions are largely because of the age difference or just because people are complicated?

JM: I think Alice may have welcomed the diversion a little since she’s clearly mourning the loss of her girlfriend in the beginning, but the realization that she cares for Sandra is shocking, and the fleetingness of it hits her even harder because she will be the one watching her lover disintegrate. She will be the one left behind. She‘s already lost her father at a young age, and she knows how devastating it was for her. But, to her credit, she decides to pursue the relationship anyway. And she is hurt in the end, but not in the way she expected.

PB: In May/September, there are few to none of the power structures (sexual, social, economic) usually seen in such romances. Alice does get paid by Sandra and taken to a concert, but it's not the tie that binds. Were you intentionally avoiding talking explicitly about these structures?

JM: I didn't think about it as much as one might for a more typical relationship, I have to say. I felt like, when creating Sandra and Alice, I viewed their power struggle in terms of their deficiencies. Instead of people who wind up exerting power over each other (Sandra because she is rich, and Alice because she is young and beautiful), they are broken people who wind up completing the other in unique ways. I also think, that because neither come into the arrangement expecting the relationship to happen, their guard is down a little in that aspect. The real problems for them occur when they try to visualize themselves together in space, and all sorts of problems happen—the uneasiness at brunch, the problem of access at the hospital, perceptions of Alice's coworkers and ex-girlfriend and Sandra's daughter.

PB: When I think of lesbianism in literature, writers like Jeanette Winterson, Djuna Barnes, and Alice Walker come to mind. I wonder if they employed experimental or modernist techniques because the radicalism of their subject matter made it hard for them to write straightforwardly about gay women. In that regard, is the fact that your novella is written in a more conventional narrative form in some ways an advance for gay writing?

JM: I felt that I wanted the story as bare and straightforward as possible, even with the stream-of-consciousness parts. I’m so glad you’re more of a comparative lit person than I—I don’t usually think about which writers I am responding to as a writer, although I did think for when I began that the voice had a very Mrs. Dalloway feel to it, maybe because it’s a similar story. And another writer, Tara Laskowski, compared May/September to Woolf and to Alice Munro, who is very contemporary. I guess I don’t agree with your premise because I don’t view it as a “gay” story—I think of it as a love story. I also think about it as a life story; what happens when someone stops living and then starts again? I think of it as a story about regrets but also risks.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

Interview by by Rachel Levy

Alta Ifland’s collection of stories, Death-in-a-Box, was awarded the 2010 Subito Press Prize for Innovative Fiction. Lyric, grotesque, and subtly humorous, the stories in Death-in-a-Box are at once highly conceptual and surprisingly dramatic. Ifland is also the author of a bilingual (French and English) collection of prose poems, Voice of Ice (Les Figues Press), and a collection of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World (Ninebark Press). Her prose and poetry has appeared widely in magazines and her website can be found at www.altaifland.com.

Rachel Levy: What I find so exciting about the stories in Death-in-a-Box is that no matter how many times I read them, they maintain an uncanny sense of unfamiliarity. In part, I credit this experience to the way your work challenges expectations for short fiction; it seems that you deliberately favor voice over character, conceit over narrative, and abstraction over concrete description. Is challenging the reader’s expectations something you consciously set out to do?

Alta Ifland: Absolutely not. A few times in my life I wrote stories in which I consciously experimented with a form, but—not accidentally—most of these stories weren’t very good. I will use here an expression I normally hate because it is generally used by Republicans, who argue they know something from their guts. Well, I wouldn’t recommend using your gut when you make judgments about the life of the polis; in literature, on the other hand, a good story or poem is written from one’s guts—that is, from a dark place which doesn’t necessarily follow everyday logic. This means that, when you write, you write because whatever comes to you—and it’s something thatcomes from somewhere else (rather than something you do)—comes in that particular way. I should add that I don’t believe in some kind of “muse.” I use this expression “comes from somewhere else” in opposition to the idea of “craft,” i.e., the idea that to write means to craft something by using certain techniques and working very hard (a puritan idea). Crafting is, certainly, an important part of what a writer does, but it is the most inessential one. For me, to create means to open yourself to something else and toa somewhere else. You may call this “somewhere/something else” “the unknown” or “the sacred” (which is different from “the divine”) or “mystery” or “silence”—you may even call it “God” (though, personally, I wouldn’t use this word).

Now, to come back to your question, the problem with “the reader’s expectations” is: what kind of reader? Who is the reader? I always write for an ideal reader, and that reader is me.

RL: And what about William Carlos Williams’s notion of leaving the reader naked—or, as I experience it, momentarily breathless, a term I’ve stolen from Paul Celan? Is it unreasonable or inappropriate to demand that every story leave the reader in a momentary state of exposure?

AI: Well, obviously, you can’t demand this from every story—even in the case of the same writer. But I think a writer should at least aspire toward such a beyond, and if he/she does, then the reader will notice. Every true literary piece is a transgression because it transgresses the realm in which we normally live and it pushes us into the unknown.

RL: I’d like to talk about your use of the personal pronoun “I,” particularly the way this “I” manifests and speaks in two first-person stories, “Twin Sisters” and “False Memories of Not-Myself.” Both narrators have lost their twin siblings, and these losses become manifest in the respective narratives not only as black holes but also as “imaginary doubles” (a phrase from “Twin Sisters”). The effect is quite haunting, and seems more endemic to poetic utterance than to the fictional narrative. In other words, where I expect to find character (and everything that term portends), I encounter in your fiction only a speaking voice, an “imaginary double,” an estranged “I.” The Changing Man in “False Memories” suggests that the narrator should see a psychiatrist, but I get the feeling that these stories work against psychology, or exist in the absence of psychology. How do you conceive of the reader encountering such absence? What is the desired effect?

AI: This is the problem with the “average reader.” Most readers still have the expectations instilled in us by the literature that was being written about a hundred years ago—psychological novels. And when they read something that is simply not written in this tradition they appropriate it within the only tradition they know. By the way, most book reviewers are, from this point of view, like “the average reader.” This kind of (mis)appropriation is, as far as I am concerned, a problem of literacy (or lack of it). It is simply the result of the fact that most readers—and this includes many writers—don’t seem to be aware of the fact that, in the history of literature, psychology existed only for a limited period of time, and that this is not the only way of writing literature. As an example, imagine that one would read “Little Red Riding Hood” with the expectations of psychological literature and would blame the “author” for not giving us a lifelike description of the girl’s feelings and state of mind. Even the most uneducated kind of reader knows that fairytales were not conceived in this way, and it would be stupid to have such expectations of them. And yet, fairytales can be very profound and insightful.

I don’t really have an effect in mind, but probably, if I were a reader, I’d say that I feel both a feeling of estrangement and of identification with the narrator—at the same time. For me, feeling two opposite things at the same time is part of what literature should inspire, since literature is in its essence ambivalent.

RL: In “No One’s Voice” you describe “an impersonality of the voice,” which you call “the essence of true literature.” What do you mean by that? And is that what you strived to achieve with these first-person narrations in Death-in-a-Box?

AI: This is a very good and difficult question. I mean, difficult to answer in several words. I once wanted to write a book that would answer the question: what does it mean to create (and, specifically, to create as a writer)? I never wrote the book, but I did a lot of research and gathered a lot of quotes from many different writers of various nationalities, and some of the greatest 19th- and 20th-century writers have made statements to this effect: Borges, Mallarmé, Flaubert, Lispector, Beckett, Calvino. In many writers it’s not explicit, but the idea is there in indirect forms. It is a desire that is, I think, specific to monotheist cultures, and represents a (conscious or unconscious) identification of the writer with an Absolute, God-like force. It is, of course, specific to modernity—so my statement about “the essence of true literature” should probably be restricted only to this period.

I didn’t really have a particular goal in mind when I used the first person. I think I usually use the first person when I identify more with the character, which is not to say that what the character does or feels is necessarily something I did or would have done.

RL: If “true literature” achieves an impersonality of voice then what happens when a writer falls short of this achievement? Or, in other words, is there such a thing as “false literature,” and can you describe it?

AI: I think any writer falls short of this achievement because absolute impersonality is, shall we say . . . divine? If God could write he would achieve absolute impersonality; we can only strive toward it.

I would call “false literature” the literature written with another goal than that of literature itself. I mean, “true” literature is, or should be, pure insofar as its goal is itself; but if, when I write, I follow some formula that has been successful before, or I write something because I was told that this is what “the readers” want, or the agents, publishers, literary juries, etc., then, what I write has another goal, which will eventually corrupt my writing. Of course, none of us is entirely pure—Kafka was probably one of the few writers who could claim purity—but we should strive toward that. (I know I am using a lot of obsolete, maybe even slightly ridiculous, words here: “purity,” “divine,” and I feel the need to put them in quotation marks; but it may be that one cannot really believe in Literature unless one believes in some obsolete notions.)

RL: I’d like to discuss the role of place and/or placelessness in your fiction. Many stories in Death-in-a-Box take place in unspecified or vague locales. Setting is sketched in, it seems, only when necessary—and even then, I feel as if many of these stories exist in the timeless and placeless world of the fairy tale. Signposts abound, however, when one shifts one’s sense of place from “geographic” to “literary”; names like “Fernando Pessoa,” “Clarisse Lispector,” and “Yasunari Kawabata” serve to chart out a literary landscape of sorts in which the stories exist. Do you consider Pessoa, Lispector, and Kawabata to be your countrymen? What other writers and artists inhabit your literary homeland?

AI: I think the question of place, and in particular that of origin, is one of the major questions in literature. Literature used to be written from a particular place, and the writer used to be a voice that spoke in the name of a people (think of Hugo or Goethe). Today it would be ridiculous to claim that you represent a nation—except maybe in some so-called “emergent literatures.” Most writers today aredisplaced: many of them literally, others figuratively. But this doesn’t mean that the question of origin is still not important. This question is essential to any act of creation: there is a reason why all creation myths are myths of origin. The desire to create is, I think, unconsciously tied to the desire to go back to an origin. This may or may not be our birthplace. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard links the desire to create to the desire to go back to the place where we first engaged in daydreaming (daydreaming being viewed as our first creation because it takes us to other possible lives we might have had). He gives the example of the space where, as a little boy, he used to daydream, and says that whenever he feels compelled to write, his mind immediately takes him there. The desire to go back to an origin is one of the primal human desires. Now, if you are a writer who comes from a different country, going back to an origin obviously means going back to your birthplace. In my case this is often true, though I should add that the “origin” is always mythologized. I am not a big fan of realist, literal descriptions of places. I think a writer with a strong voice twists the real in a way that transfigures that particular place, it takes it from its particular environment and, by bringing it closer to the dream-world, paradoxically, it makes it more universal. Think—in painting, for instance—of Van Gogh: he always painted “real” landscapes, but the result is not realist at all. Or think of fairy tales: they are so universally accessible because they don’t follow a realist logic.

And, to answer your question: yes, I do consider Pessoa, Lispector and Kawabata my countrymen—but simply in the sense that we share the same (literary) space. Pessoa was, by the way, the first modern writer who claimed that his nation was his language. And Celan, whom you quote, not only doesn’t have an origin—his “roots” are in the air, as he says in a poem—but he didn’t even have a (single) mother tongue. His first languages were German and Yiddish, but later he mastered perfectly Romanian and French, and he was a very good translator from the Russian. He could have written in several languages, but he only wrote in German. Why? Because one can only be a “true poet” in one’s mother tongue (his words). The poet who didn’t really have a mother tongue and a place of origin was very faithful to his supposed mother tongue (German). This is not only Celan’s paradox: it may be the paradox at the heart of any “true” writer: the knowledge that any origin is a myth, but, at the same time, that in order to create you need some kind of grounding.

Other artists/writers who inhabit my homeland? Among the Americans: Saul Steinberg (who was, by the way, the emblematic artist obsessed by the impersonality of the creator—think of his obsession with masks and faces covered by plain, brown, paper bags), Steven Millhauser, Lydia Davis.

RL: Does conceit play a large role in your creative process? Many stories in Death-in-a-Box (i.e. “House of Time” and “Going Back”) use strong fictional conceits to communicate meaning and to structure narrative. Do you begin with conceit? Can you speak a bit about your process?

AI: The answer to your first question would be “sometimes”—though I am not sure this is necessarily good for a writer of fiction. Having lived in France and written and read in French for most of my life, I can’t help comparing that literary tradition with the English one, and I can say that the French tradition is much more open to ideas and abstractions than the American tradition. I’ve had this discussion with other American writers and they don’t always agree with me, but I think I’m right: English literature is generally more dramatic; the stories are more plot-oriented, and the plots are much richer. If in this country you write a story or a novel without a plot, and which is very cerebral, it is categorized as “experimental,” while in France this is very common. This is not to say that contemporary French literature is better—on the contrary, I think most of it is pretty bad—but it is more open to ideas. But, paradoxically, because abstraction or conceit is less common in American fiction, some American writers value it more than they probably should. I mean, a writer could have great ideas, and yet, be a very bad writer.

Now, the two stories you mention, “The House of Time” and “Going Back” were not written in a way that tried to prove anything—and I think this is the trap of a writing that would begin with a conceit, as you say. “The House of Time” was inspired by some other story—a very different story, in fact—by a Russian writer whose name I don’t recall. It was a realist story that stayed in my mind because of its atmosphere, and it had to with a house in which women gave birth in early 20th-century Russia. This is the way I begin many of my stories: inspired by the rhythm or the atmosphere of another story I read. But my stories are so different from the stories that might have inspired them that no one but me would know their origin. And “Going Back” was simply an inner monologue. I just put on the page the thoughts that came to my mind at that particular moment.

I think your question hints indirectly to another question: what does it mean to “tell a story”? It seems to me that for many American writers “telling a story” means describing things and presenting characters in various situations without any critical reflection, as if one couldn’t tell a story while thinking critically. On the other hand, contemporary French writers have the opposite problem: they think too critically, that’s why they are bad storytellers (with the exception of their writers from their former colonies, who come from oral traditions). There has to be a balance between critical or analytical thinking and poetic or synthetic thinking. One doesn’t exclude the other.

RL: So which contemporary writers and/or theorists are you reading at the moment? Are there any new writers who inspire and challenge you?

AI: As a graduate student I read a lot of French and some German philosophers (I studied continental philosophy in France). Not any more. I now read mostly contemporary world literature. There are some very interesting writers in Japan, Hungary, Poland. Many of them are women in their forties. I’m inspired by writing that can accomplish two things at the same time: take me to a different place (this would be an “entertaining” function) and make me think. Usually, people think of these two functions as separate because they associate the first with “escapism” and the second with hard work (critical thinking, etc.). But for me they aren’t separate—maybe because, like Bachelard, as a child, I spent a lot of time daydreaming, and daydreaming is an activity that combines escapism and imagination with thinking.

Or, another way to answer your question: the writing that inspires me is literally writing . . . that inspires me. What I mean is that whenever I read a writer who triggers my admiration I immediately feel inspired to write. That particular writing makes me want to take a pen in my hand and create something similar. That’s why I think it’s dangerous to read bad literature: in the end it will “inspire” you, i.e., it will put its bad mark on you. We are what we read.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011