Alisa Koyrakh, author of the essay “Tomorrow We Travel,” talks to nonfiction editor Elizabeth Kadetsky about history, reverie, and the role of research in lyric nonfiction.

Elizabeth Kadetsky: “Tomorrow We Travel” brings readers on a desultory, emotional journey through physical spaces scarred by the traumatic history of the Holocaust. There is a nonlinear, intuitive quality to the structure, creating an almost dreamlike, dissociated landscape for the reader. We move through the traumatized lands of Eastern Europe, Russia, Austria, and Germany alongside you and experience the almost surreal juxtaposition of the everyday with that of living history. Often, the transitions from the past to the present are jarring: “I go shopping,” you write, after visiting a former synagogue that is now a museum for Jewish history. You so effectively create a structure that mimics the effects of trauma for the reader. Was this conscious on your part, or did you arrive at the form intuitively?  

Alisa Koyrakh: To be honest, I didn’t know I was writing about trauma. I certainly didn’t plan to. As I mention in the essay, I was in Prague to work on my novel. I thought by going alone to a foreign country, I would retreat into my own inner world. I thought it would be safe and quiet in that world. Instead, the exact opposite happened. I felt careened into the physical world. But writing this essay wasn’t quite intuitive, it was more like a compulsion. The very early sections of the essay came from several Facebook posts—I almost never post to Facebook or social media platforms and so it was strange that I was suddenly sharing my thoughts and experiences in that way. I thought the loneliness had gotten to me. I had moments of respite, of course, when I was with Kate or my cousin or when Colin visited. But mostly I was alone. I thought I was losing my mind.

During that time, I was reading Maggie Nelson’s books about her aunt who was murdered at a young age; so my break from dealing with my own painful inheritance was to read about Maggie’s. I’d read about the horrible violence one man did to her family and then switch to researching exactly how cyanide pills worked. It was a very dark time for me, and yet I somehow reveled in it. I can’t explain. The original essay is much longer than the published version. When I came home and gained a little distance and renewed a life with Colin, I was able to reread and shape and think critically about what would give the words a proper arc. I had to ask very pointed questions and find a way to give myself and my readers a sense of closure within the essay. But yes, for most of the experience of writing this, there was no thinking involved, not in the usual sense. My “thoughts” were the ways in which I circled the synagogue in that shopping center or stared at paintings in Vienna. I suppose when you’re experiencing trauma, you don’t really know what’s going on. I did the everyday things, bought eggs and picked out nail polish colors, but I was saturated with the history of these places. I didn’t know how to ignore the history, even though at times I really wanted to.     

Maybe I love to write because I can’t stop thinking most of the time. Writing is my respite from thinking and yet it’s the only way I can think straight. I don’t know how to make sense of that. 

EK: You powerfully juxtapose reverie and reality throughout. At times, the reverie is so rich that it becomes almost another form of reality, for instance when you shift from a description of your pleasant apartment in Prague to an imagined scene among imagined former tenants there. “Maybe an elderly couple lived here before World War II,” you write. Later, that imagined couple becomes just “the husband and wife.” Still later, it is as if you have inhabited the consciousness of Magda Goebbels when you imagine giving cyanide to “your” six (imagined) children. This technique stretches the language of nonfiction. Imagination is real, and yet somehow, nonfiction too often sticks to hard and fast reality. How did you come to this technique?

AK: When I began my research, I worried a lot about how a sane person could come to murder their own children. I thought the only way I could understand it was to do it. So I did it. I also felt sorry for the Goebbels girls, which in turn stirred up my Jewish guilt. How dare I spare any sympathy for the families of Nazis? To work through those feelings, I had to put myself in the bunker and see if these children did deserve my attention. It is difficult for me to claim this as a technique because it’s actually the way I tend to live my life and make decisions. If I’m not sure that I want to meet friends for a drink, I’ll take turns picturing the different evenings I could have. If I’m not sure that I want some chocolate cake, I imagine myself eating it in order to decide. I’ll even mimic taking a bite. Colin laughs whenever I do it. I conjure scenarios for myself all the time. They are part of my ordinary reality, so they have to be part of any nonfiction I produce. So to say that the building I live in is somehow more real than the mind I spend my time in just doesn’t make sense to me. We all live in our fantasies and our physical world and move between them all day long. So they’re both forms of truth. Imagining how the young artist Stepan felt in Terezin admittedly reveals more about me than it does about him; as long as that distinction is clear, I think anything goes.  

EK: Late in the essay you mention Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, a YA novel published in 1988 in which a twelve-year-old Jewish girl drinks too much wine at a Passover seder, then opens the door for the Prophet Elijah and steps into an alternate world in which the Holocaust is about to happen; then, she becomes trapped there. I found your reference to be so satisfying, particularly because of the way you as the author are continually inhabiting individual experiences from the Holocaust—just as Hannah does, if more supernaturally, in The Devil’s Arithmetic. You mention that, later in your life, you were less interested in YA depictions of the Holocaust because they “removed the events from reality.” I would be curious to hear more about your sense of the range of possibilities for depicting “unspeakable” horror—your take on the notion that certain things are “indescribable.” What is the role of un-literal representation, and do you see your work as a part of a conversation about where the bounds lie, or what, even, they are? 

AK: Some of the people closest to me have alternately referred to the piece as both an essay and a story. I don’t really bristle at either of those classifications, mostly because I would have a hard time classifying it myself, if I ever wanted to. But that does mean that I have to ask myself if there’s any such thing as nonfiction. More interestingly, I have to ask myself if there’s any such thing as fiction. Most importantly, I have to ask myself if I think this debate matters. I’ll maybe save that for later.

At the age of twelve, I was reading fantasy novels with concentration camps and Holocaust fiction with magical cities. I was also reading many nonfiction accounts of the Holocaust like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Despite all this reading, nothing prepared me for standing inside the crematorium at Terezin. So I think it has nothing to do with the fact that some books were fiction and others weren’t. Given the sheer unbelievability of very real events in our immediate past, un-literal representation is often the only foot we have to stand on. Oscar Wilde almost certainly didn’t mean it when he said, “The only real people are the people who never existed,” but his point is clear. We need our minds to create realities because most often reality is too surreal. There’s some comfort that in the realm of literature all genre can quickly become part of the same structure, the same imaginative world. 

Facts, data are so easy to manipulate too, right? Even with a balance sheet, you can tell any story you want. So for me, the distinction is not between fiction and nonfiction, instead it’s only the following: there are people who tell stories for personal gain and greed and there are people who tell stories to connect with others and understand human nature. I judge great literature, whether we call it fiction or nonfiction, by how well it does the latter.

EK: Your mother is a winning character throughout your essay, offering wisdom and humor. At one point, you express, with irony, frustration at your mother’s “trying to live vicariously through me.” Of course, so much of the essay is about transposing one’s own experience into the lives of others, and using that transposition as a vehicle toward empathy and achieving a deep understanding of history. I was wondering what factors led you to choose to include your mother, who figures in only a small portion of the narrative. Did you think of her as a figure who could offer dramatic irony, and did you see her role in the narrative as fulfilling other textual functions as well?

AK: I’m so glad you say she’s a winning character. I worried a lot about my portrayal of her and what she would think after reading it. My mother is the person I love and respect the most and understand the least, and unfortunately for her that means I’ll be writing about her for a long time. I imagine I’ll be able to understand her better if I get to have children. In that sense, I’m very curious how raising children could affect my writing. After reading the essay, my mother’s friend told her that it was a love letter to her. I think there’s a good argument to be made for that. It’s just amazing how technically small a mother’s current role in your life can be and yet how she can still loom over everything. Loom of course has a negative connotation, which I don’t mean to imply at all. In this essay she keeps me grounded. She puts me in my place. If she’s a device she’s there to remind the reader not to take the narrator too seriously. And you’re right to point out the irony—transposition is such a big part of this essay, and there I am accusing my mother of trying to do that. That’s another way I think my mother, as a device keeps, me in my place. 

EK: I loved your use of research. At times there was a feel of an existential mystery. If only we could find out exactly what happened to the man who lived on your street in Prague and was born in 1895! Were Ottla Kafka and Stepan Pollak on the same transport to Auschwitz? In the same gas chamber? This fascination with the particular detail is juxtaposed against the flatness and misinformation that you encounter at so many of the Holocaust museums and memorials in the region. And yet the particular details, in the end, lead down vague pathways toward confounding unknowns. What thoughts do you have about the role of archival research for the lyric essayist? 

AK: I am at once a lover of words, of the sounds they make when they’re put in the right order, and someone deeply concerned with the ways that words are used to lie or misinform. I like to speak clearly. In my religious days, when I attended seminary, we did an activity there: we were asked to write down our top twenty values, then winnow the list to the top ten, then the top three, then to one. The last value I had left was “Beauty.” I could not cross out that word, I just couldn’t. I remember being frightened of myself in that moment. How could I choose Beauty over Truth, over God, over Family? Was I confessing in that moment that I cared for lyricism over truth? Maybe, but I think that’s because to me beauty is more “real” than truth. In that moment, I think some part of me realized I wouldn’t be religious forever. Today it seems like no one believes truth exists anymore. Truth never really existed, not in the way that I think people wish it did. 

The truth is, I miss Stepan so much even though I’ve never met him. I worry about how Franz would have handled Ottla’s death, even though he died before the war began. I worry for Karel, the man from my street, though I know next to nothing about him. I love Gonda deeply and have often imagined him holding his baby son inside the gas chamber. I worry about the husband and wife I made up, who I imagined living in my apartment, even though they never existed. Sometimes, I just choose to think that they did.

But the question was about the role of research in lyric essays. I never thought about either of those labels in direct reference to this work. I researched what I wanted to know and wrote what I needed to understand. Of course many beautiful essays have been written without any research. But I think that archival research does have the effect of grounding the lyric essay, making it somehow more immediate. Perhaps an obsession with facts combined with a love for the sound of language leads to a kaleidoscope form that is more reflective of everyday life. Our minds are both filled with our own individual music and the pressing clatter of outside information.

Subscribe and support New England Review.

ALISA KOYRAKH received her MFA in fiction from NYU and studied Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She lives in Chapel Hill where she is finishing her first novel. Her essay in NER is “Tomorrow We Travel.”

ELIZABETH KADETSKY, nonfiction editor at NER, is author of the forthcoming lyric memoir The Memory Eaters (U Mass Press, 2020), the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (Nouvella Books, 2015), the story collection The Poison that Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014), and the memoir First There Is a Mountain (Little Brown, 2004).

Poet and novelist Jenn Givhan talks to Angela Narciso Torres about overhauling the word “mother,” ideas of empathy poetics, and her new poem, “Lila,” in NER 40.2.

Angela Narciso Torres: In a recent interview, you talked about developing your own “poetics of motherhood”—something you explore in your first book, Landscape with Headless Mama, and beyond. In “Lila,” the characters are a mother and a daughter coming of age. While the mother is more of a “supporting character,” she is clearly a huge part of this daughter’s identity—her nurturing, her superstitions and religious beliefs, even her loving chiding at the end—providing a kind of protective shell for the daughter to push against as she comes into her own. How has your own daughterhood, and, more recently, your motherhood changed or influenced your poetics?

Jenn Givhan: I’m struggling to find time to answer these questions (let alone work on any of my writing projects) this summer, as both kids have been home with me all day (I teach online classes from home as an adjunct), and it seems the older they get, the more attention they need. Perhaps there’s something about motherhood poetics encompassed within this dilemma, within the chaos of my fuzz-addled and exhausted mother brain. 

In Landscape with Headless Mama, readers might expect that the mother figure is primarily my mom, and that I am primarily the daughter, but this is not the case. Throughout the entire collection there exists blurring of voices and perspectives, and I think that blurring between mother/daughter is what most encapsulates my poetics. I’ve been an official “mother” in our society’s definition of the term for twelve years, since perhaps my son’s birthmother handed him to me, from her birth canal to my arms, as I was the first person after the doctor who held him. With women’s bodies continually policed and persecuted in our still-patriarchal society, some people might secretly (or not so secretly) counter that even then I was an “adoptive mother” and it wasn’t until I birthed a living child that I was a “mother.” Though of course most people will never voice this aloud, I spent enough time as a woman unable to birth living babies and then as an adoptive mother to understand our society’s deeply-woven, often-hidden but still very rigid constructions of “motherhood” (and policing people who identify as mothers is still America’s favorite pastime). I need to write an entire essay sometime about how I truly believe the word “mother” needs an overhaul, stretched wider and sinuous enough to encompass those who do motherwork and give motherlove yet are not given the credit they deserve (let me hear it for the grandparents, the aunties, full-time stay-at-home fathers, the members of the LGBTQ community who might not feel welcome with the gendered connotation of the term “mother,” and those who have taken on the responsibilities of childrearing, along with the childless and/or child-free people who serve mothering roles in their communities, and I could go on and on). 

All of this to say, while my motherhood and daughterhood poetics might seem to have been woven separately, at distinct times in my life, the fuller truth is that I’ve always been a mother, in the sense that mothering means to feel responsibility for and to act on that responsibility toward the caregiving, nurturing, and life/emotional sustenance of another human being. As the child of one alcoholic/abusive parent and another emotionally traumatized/anxiety-ridden parent, both of whom loved and tried to protect me fiercely even as they struggled within their own desperations and failures, I learned early on to mother—them, my siblings, myself, those around me. 

Motherhood poetics means perhaps empathy poetics, and thus encompasses a much vaster perspective and set of voices and concerns than people might generally come to think of as motherhood poetry. It is docupoetics, yes, putting to paper the daily experiences of parents and children, giving voice and space and attention to the domestic space, seeing the inherent politics and power and drama of the parent/child relationship and the family dynamic, seeing women as active agents in that space, all of which I think are as necessary as ever, given our current political climate which continues to seek out regressive policies for women, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ communities, and the list goes on. A black woman in Alabama was charged with murder after she was shot in the abdomen and thus miscarried her fetus (though, thankfully, prosecutors dropped the charges). Latinx children came home from their first day of school the other day to empty houses, as their parents were rounded up by ICE raids, and untold numbers of others are sleeping on cots or concrete benches in detention centers without their families tonight, after months of separation. I fear every day for my two small loves, Latinx and black children growing up within the hateful rhetoric fomenting and subsequent hate crimes escalating around the country, from the White House to the border towns where I grew up, and everywhere in between. So I believe that documenting our experiences has always been important, and perhaps more so now. 

But beyond the voicing of our familial/domestic experiences and the places in which questions of science/power/politics/identity etc. interact with our daily concerns, motherhood poetics (in my own poetry and the work of those who feed my soul) is intersectional and creates spaces for the liminal, the unspoken and unspeakable, the under/mis-represented, the chided and belittled. Motherhood poetry is sometimes written off as only for mothers, as sentimental or confessional. And like any writing through any lens, poetry that focuses on the motherhood experience can be narrowed, can be written ineptly by poets who haven’t honed their crafts or wrestled with their duende. But motherhood poetics done well should be called motherfuckinghood poetics, the way that Cheryl Strayed as Dear Sugar in The Rumpus tells us to write like a motherfucker, with all courage, with all strength, getting down on the kitchen floor and wrestling with the second beating heart within ourselves, or, as Lorca would say, haunting death’s house, struggling at the edge of the pit, in that wound that never heals. And yet the paradox is that the mother (at least, the mother in my own work and life) must survive this, must find a way to heal the wound, if only to get her babies to the other side, safe. That second beating heart must continue beating, that festering wound must heal long enough to keep the child alive. And there within lies the crux of motherhood poetics. My dear friend, fantastic, powerful mother poet Leslie Contreras Schwartz, writes of mothering the world to end mass shootings, as she wrestles with continual fear stemmed from the uncontrolled beast residing in this country, the NRA and the greed politics that feed it. She writes of mothers sometimes barely holding ourselves together, sometimes not holding ourselves together, and still trying to hold those vulnerable growing creatures entrusted to us. I would say that Contreras Schwartz’s poetry is an example of motherfuckinghood poetics that I aspire to, and expresses what I’m trying to articulate here about intersectional poetry that does the damn work, that digs deep and keeps digging and finds no easy answers and will have none of them anyway. 

Since I had children, I was able to tap more explicitly into the traumas of my own childhood, to find a road toward healing, to heal the past so I could heal the present and thus my children’s future. Motherhood poetics is multigenerational and has the power to effect concrete change in the world. But I don’t think one needs to adopt or bear children to tap into this ability. And the potential for cleaning out wounds and healing across generations, for changing hearts and lives, for slipping into the liminal spaces and seeing across borders (of flesh and blood, of imagination and reality, of past and present), and perhaps most important, of crossing those borders as though crossing bloodwaters and birthwaters—that potential energizes motherhood poetics and is available to all who are willing to get down on the kitchen floor and wrestle. 

ANT: I so admire your use of image and metaphor in this poem. The title of the poem, “Lila,” is the main character’s name, and poem’s central image is the calla lilies in the first line. Their blooming becomes a metaphor for this daughter’s coming-of-age, with all the tensions, angst, body image insecurities, and defiance that often accompany this turbulent stage. But the lilies (“the funnels of their flared hearts, little throats opening”) also embody the voice that instructs her to “open the book . . . the book I want to write”—insisting on another, perhaps deeper kind of blooming. Can you tell us more about the genesis of this poem and how you came up with this metaphor?

JG: My dear friend Alicia Elkort and I collaborate on poems together, have written a chapbook and plan to set to work on a YA novel, and we’re thinking of a novel-in-verse, as we’ve both read and adored Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, a bildungsroman set in the barrio of Harlem, featuring the dazzling sassy voices of Xiomara and the girls in her neighborhood. 

We’d been thinking of a YA novel for a while, and when we read Acevedo’s work, we felt emboldened to speak in the language of our poets’ hearts, and set for ourselves an exercise of writing the voices of our respective main characters, who would also stand in as our memoired girl selves, the girls back when we were growing up, who needed to hear our grownup voices telling them You’re strong, you’re powerful, you’re a warrior who will thrive and empower others someday. Keep singing. 

Lila was the alter ego self / character who emerged for me, and I’m currently trying to get Alicia Elkort to move to New Mexico to be closer to me so we can finish our projects! 

The calla lily is a flower I’ve always loved, for its champagne-flute shape, its slimness that grows into a full skirt, its trumpeted opening, that speaks to me of dancing (I was a ballet dancer and then a cheerleader, though since puberty I’ve been thick and sometimes full-out fat, still always athletic, and I didn’t have a body positivity movement back then to help me at all) and singing/speaking out loudly and clearly (something else I did with sass as a girl, though I wish I’d have known more about poetry and the arts and the opportunities for young people to articulate their thoughts and emotions and share those with others). So the calla lily image grows from what the shape and gestures of the flower conjure within my imagination and memory. 

And then deeper than that, the flower represents death and rebirth, symbolizing my best friend Renee, who drowned when I was fifteen (she was seventeen). Ironically, this was the flower at my wedding (I married shortly after turning twenty-one, still in many ways a girl working through my identity as a young woman). As I delve deeper into Lila’s story, the calla lily and the book she needs to write will take on these connotations of death and rebirth, and will speak to the underbellied underworld she will traverse as she comes to realize her own power as a girlwoman and dancer/poet. 

ANT: This poem is deeply rooted in your Mexican heritage—the calavera, the image of La Virgen, the maize man, and Mami in chanclas speaking in Spanish. How much of this poem, and of your poetry in general, is drawn from your personal life, cultural background, and family experiences?

JG: As I alluded to in my articulation above of motherhood poetics, the mothers in my poems (and “Lila” is no exception) are comprised of the many voices of mothers and mothering figures whom I grew up with, the nanas and tías and abuelas both in my own familia and in the families of those I’ve loved, such as my ex’s family, with whom I spent much time learning to cook and speaking Spanish and being the Mexican hija my own mother was not fully allowed to be since her mom and dad (my grandparents) tried hard to make their family assimilate to American values and culture to spare their children from the ridicule and racism they’d experienced growing up in poverty and speaking primarily Spanish. Still, deep in our family’s veins, within the home, all of this culture has always existed, and came full circle to thrive again when I was a girl and my grandparents felt safer in expressing their culture (as opposed to when my mother was growing up). So for instance, I would always hear my grandparents speaking Spanish to each other and other Latinx peoples, though my mom only knows a handful of Spanish phrases, songs, dichos (sayings), etc. My grandfather, when he retired and began taking care of my young cousins, taught them Spanish, and they, this youngest generation, are now fluent, a fact I lament since I wish my mother and I had also learned from my grandfather, who speaks gorgeous, perfect Spanish. 

I speak Spanish at home to my children though I don’t feel comfortable speaking it much outside of the home because mine is so broken and pocho (whitewashed) and often grammatically incorrect. But the way the Mexican mothers in my poems speak to their children more often resembles the way I speak to my own children and the way my ex-suegra speaks to her children and grandchildren than the way my own mother speaks to me (though I try to capture my mother in spirit, and the deeply religious vein is certainly true to life as my mother is probably the most devout Catholic I know). All of this to say, my Mexican culture is so important to me, and whether I’m expressing my own personal experiences or those of the gente in the places I’ve lived and loved, I think it’s necessary now and always to sing our truths, to never be silenced. I’m passing on our family’s traditions to my babes, and my grandma even told me last New Year’s that my posole rivaled my uncle’s, so I think, with my grandma’s stamp of approval, in both poetry and life, I’m doing well! 

ANT: You recently released your novel, Trinity Sight (Blackstone Publishing 2019)—Congratulations! This novel comes after four full-length poetry books and several chapbooks. What struck you most about the differences between completing a novel as compared to a book of poetry? What aspects, if any, of your poetry writing, helped you in the completion of this novel?

JG: The poetry comes most naturally, ha! The noveling often feels like work, where the poeming is like breathing. The poems often happen at the subconscious level, and with at least one book for instance, Rosa’s Einstein, my most recent collection from University of Arizona Press, I sometimes feel as if I wrote the poems (merging physics and fairytale and girlhood and borderland Latinx identity) in my sleep, and they magically appeared on the page. With noveling, I have to plot. I have to sketch out exactly how I’ll get to the ending, though my characters often show up in unexpected moments and decide to do outrageous things (like fly off to New York for a writing scholarship) and I have to follow them (I used part of my NEA grant in 2015 to fly off to New York for the first time ever because my protagonist of my forthcoming second novel, Jubilee, up and flew away)! So with both the poetry and the fiction, there is magic happening at the subconscious level that I’ve allowed in after honing my craft (I have read dozens of books on writing novels, though I’ve earned all my formal education in poetry). But it still always feels more like home when I’m writing poetry. 

I do love a good novel, though—love to stay up past my bedtime and follow a character through her dark alleyways as she strives for her heart’s desire too often thwarted, and I have things to say as a writer that lend themselves more aptly to prose. But I’ll preach this ‘til I die, I believe at the heart of all things, we all of us writers are poets, concerned with language at the level of language. Poets tend not to have to consider “plot” as such, though poets and fiction writers are still both concerned with desire and what the speaker/protagonist wants more than anything or believes she will die without, or even will die without. Deep desire and narrative arc, the hero’s journey-esque mythology, that Jungian archetype guiding us through most story—these are just a few of the “fiction-writing” lessons that have grown and stretched and buttressed my poetry. I’ve been seriously writing novels as long as I’ve been seriously writing poetry, so the two are interlinked. And as a poet-at-heart who writes across the genres, I encourage and challenge all writers to get in touch with their poet-at-heart, the lyricist who joys in the sensory image, and takes lessons from the structuralist muscles of the prose-writer, that shapefinder. We shapeshifters. 

Write on, y’all world crossers. Thank you so much for reading. 

Jenn Givhan, a Mexican-American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Rosa’s Einstein (Camino Del Sol Poetry Series, 2019), two chapbooks, and two novels, Trinity Sight and Jubilee, both forthcoming from Blackstone Press. Her poems have appeared in The Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetry, the New Republic, Crazyhorse, and Kenyon Review. She has received, among other honors, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, and New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, chosen by Tyehimba Jess.

Angela Narciso Torres serves on the editorial panel at NER. Her poetry collection Blood Orange won the Willow Books Literature Award. Her work appears in Colorado Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Jet Fuel Review, Water~Stone Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Steve Almond has been publishing fiction in New England Review since 2000. He spoke with editorial panelist Evgeniya Dame about his new story “How Can You Be Happy?” which appears in NER 40.2, and about the never-ending writer’s quest for “ecstatic bewilderment.” Read on.

Evgeniya Dame: The state of happiness is rare in literary short stories. When did you decide to lead Craig, your main character, toward a happy moment?

Steve Almond: Oh gosh. He’d suffered enough. The guy needed some joy. That’s part of the point of the story. We walk around in this culture telling ourselves that we’re after contentment and bliss. But that’s basically a crock. What we’re after, more often, is the feeling of being alive in the ways that are most familiar to us from childhood. Craig gets into an unhappy marriage and struggles to be happy because he saw and absorbed that growing up. I do get that most literature focuses on moments of anguish or trauma or sorrow, because those feelings are unresolved. They stick around. Happiness doesn’t have to explain itself. But it’s a part of the human arrangement, too, and I wanted Craig to get a taste of it. He’d earned it, I felt. Not because he’d suffered, but because he’d made some effort to understand the nature of his suffering.

ED: The punishment Trent chooses for his father—relegating him to the neutral pronoun It—seemed unexpectedly cruel, terrifying, and also logical. Once I read it, I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this form of insult before. What gave you the idea?

SA: A friend of mine went through something like this, being reduced to an It, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I felt so awful for the guy, and for his son, who was clearly in pain as well. As a dad I was like, “Omigod. That is the worst sort of insult. To have your personhood annihilated by your own child.” 

ED: Your narrative style maintains such a perfect balance of compassion and detachment. We are close to Craig to feel the pain of his failing marriage and disastrous relationship with his son, yet not so close that we don’t wonder occasionally: maybe it’s his own fault. How do you regulate your narrative, especially point of view, to achieve this effect?

SA: Hmmm. I’m glad to hear I do this regulating, but not sure how I do it. I’m just trying to pay attention to Craig’s experience and to present all that he’s up against, all that he’s trying to do, but also not to let him bullshit me. That’s how you have to be with all your characters: ruthless and tender. Nobody’s a villain or a hero. We’re all some vexing mixture of the two.

ED: It’s interesting to think of your relationship with characters in such terms. How does it work with someone like Trent, who isn’t trying to be likeable? Have you ever come up with characters who did try to bullshit you, or who proved challenging otherwise?

SA: Trent makes himself tough to love because he’s in a lot of pain. That sentence applies to every human being on earth. I’m with Claire Messud on this: we don’t go to literature to make friends. We go there to encounter characters who are alive in the same screwed up ways we are. Honestly, the reader isn’t interested in our good habits of thought and feeling. They want to know that they’re not alone in their woundedness. As for characters who bullshit me . . . yes, of course. But the catch is that you can’t really bullshit a bullshitter. Or, to put it more bluntly: we’re all bullshitters and therefore unreliable narrators.

ED: I find your story endings . . . majestic. They remind me of bridges in songs, when the melody suddenly lifts off, except that your endings have truth to them and are both inescapable and unpredictable. What’s your process for writing a story ending?

SA: I’m so glad to hear this! I really worried that the ending was flat. I think most writers struggle with endings, because we feel that we have to really “stick the landing” and that self-consciousness makes us push around the language. With this story, I just wanted to grant Craig a moment of clemency, self-forgiveness, the pursuit of an innocent pleasure. 

ED: So, how do you know when the ending is right?

SA: You don’t. I often write right past the ending. Or I get that performance anxiety and overwrite the thing. What I do know is that a good ending should stay with the reader, even haunt them if possible. I’m thinking about the last paragraph of the short story “Guests of the Nation” by Frank O’Connor. That final burst of language and feeling has stayed with me for decades.

ED: You mentioned elsewhere attending many readings when you first moved to Boston. Could you speak of one or two that left the most impression?

SA: That’s a tough one. I’ve seen hundreds. I especially loved the poets, honestly. They read at Blacksmith House—my pal Camille Dungy, Frank Bidart, Louise Gluck, Robert Pinsky, Thomas Lux, Tony Hoagland. Such intensity. It was like being drunk on language, on feeling.  

ED: I love Tony Hoagland! I recently finished “What Narcissism Means to Me.” How did reading and listening to poetry influence your writing?

SA: I think it just hammered home the idea that courage and efficiency are what matter. Poets strip down and spring-load the language. They get rid of all the extra words. And they celebrate the ecstatic and bewildering. That’s what I’m always aiming for: ecstatic bewilderment.

ED: Your favorite thing to do when not writing?

SA: Hanging out with my kids (even when I’m reduced to an It).

***

Steve Almond’s most recent book, William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life, is about the novel Stoner by John Williams, as well as “reading and writing and the struggle to pay attention to our lives.” He is also the author of God Bless America (Lookout Press, 2011), The Evil B. B. Chow (Algonquin, 2005), and My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove Press, 2002). For more information please visit his website stevealmondjoy.org.