New England Review

Behind the Byline

David Ryan

NER’s Elizabeth Sutton speaks with 43.2 contributor David Ryan about juxtaposition, character development, and writing around gaps in his story “Elision.”

Elizabeth Sutton: “Elision” begins with the tranquil scene of a child’s cartwheels on a lawn and progresses ominously to a “gray-yellow” sky where “the dark tips of the forest’s pines . . . shivered silver, as if a transparent hand had combed itself slowly over them.” The contrasts and building tension in this first paragraph work so well to pull the reader into the scene. Could you describe how the contrasting elements here introduce other juxtapositions in the story?

David Ryan: Thanks, Elizabeth! I think, when I was trying to find the way into this story, I was concerned with how the opening might work as a metaphoric frame for the movement of what happens later. I don’t usually work with a plan with stories. It’s mostly intuitive. I might have a sketchy idea or metaphor, or just an image in mind, and nothing else.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa has said he finds it really useful to not just write the main idea you have at first, but to back up and, as spontaneously as possible, free-associate from some earlier point you hadn’t considered. You improvise, create a kind of transcribed dream that then moves toward the thing you know. And because you know where it’s headed, the dreamwork basically confabulates interesting connections that work towards that end point. That’s been so useful to me. But I use that idea really having no idea where the destination is, too. It depends on the piece and whatever I have to start off with.

Here, Lily’s later discovery of that strange book in the house was the only idea I had. It was the one thing that needed to happen. And given how bizarre her discovery is, I think I just sort of opened with the first ideas that came to mind—that same sense of estrangement from her known world, but situated outside the house, in the natural world. A heightened, uncanny “usual,” where the tops of trees shiver as if a hand were combing over them, just as the familiar home suddenly has something unfamiliar in it.

But even if I’m working recursively with a story—essentially feeling around in the dark for ideas that seem to hang in the limbic space of the moment—along the way certain ideas and images in the opening will start to propel the text forward. Describing the sky as the color of milk might start as a descriptive thing that rises up spontaneously. But later it might undergo a transformation into some other context that actually, in this case, becomes significant to the ending of the story. I hadn’t counted on that, hadn’t known that in advance. Something as simple as milk suddenly has a kind of animistic property, a contagious magic. Spilled milk on the floor, the way it distorts ones reflection, the way it had been hanging in the narrative memory and had come to arrive at the story’s cadence. I love playing with that—the smallest images and biggest ideas can go through this shape-shifting trajectory. And so that’s probably why ideas and contrasts in the opening manage to help shape what’s to come. I try to work as loosely as I can, but then try also to stay mindful of what the story is generating along the way.

But I do go back and revise—consider what I can connect, add, take away. You retrospectively discover connections and useful contradictions, and then just distill or expand them where it seems useful.

ES: Your story brings up a physicist’s suggestion that we “live an infinite number of parallel lives all at once.” We make choices and step from one possible future to another, moving forward into new dimensions, but the past remains a “single wake behind us.” The story takes place over a short period of time but stretches into the past and future very nicely. Could you talk a little about your use of time in the story? 

DR: This might have a couple of lateral answers, actually. Maybe together they get at something? One being that I love writers who thread the experience of a moment into a kind of vertical, spatial frame. And even in the writing process, any thread on that plane of experience might produce a new idea. The idea that there’s this nearly-vertical chain of causation packed into every single moment that can move between an action, or thought, memory, sensory perception, and so on: lifting a glass of orange juice might connect to a memory, seemingly unrelated, which triggers an emotion that pushes into daydream, which then snaps out and prompts a new gesture just as the phone rings, which prompts an action that might completely change the course of the story. That kind of kaleidoscopic, spatial experience of time, turned out and set in motion, is how we take in each moment, this perpetual process of selection between countless possibilities of experience. Any of which might start binding with others, or with some new outside reality that comes at us.

Elena Ferrante plays with that threading of experience—an action into memory into daydream which provokes an astonishing gesture or action. So does Hanne Ørstavik. There’s this collusion of the elements of experience rather than a stock linear sort of movement of “this happened, then this, then this, then this.” They so elegantly express experience as a threading of possibilities. Here I was just bending that sense of the fluidity of an experience into something Lily has heard on the radio about quantum physics. It’s different, the quantum thing, but related. But time here is relevant to how much of that threading I wanted, versus the economy of the story. It became a matter of trying to sort out when I wanted the reader to really step into the moment—that psychic threading of it—and when it might be better to use a bit of summary to push forward more expediently.

But there was a whole other reason for mentioning that physicist. The “simultaneous lives” idea is something of a figure in the carpet for what’s missing from Lily’s own sense of her life. Where, later we see the suggestion of these other lives in that book—which had been unknown to her, but are also entirely related through the connection with Paul. And this is how we all live (though in less dramatic terms, most of the time!). We don’t ever see or know all the people who are involved in our lives, simultaneously, at any moment. We put on a shirt and have no idea of the countless people who had something to do with the process of milling of the cotton, sewing it, making the buttons, etc. And each of those people (or machines) are living their own lives alongside our own—a kind of harmonic structuring of experience. We are so much more inter-connected than we could ever realize. And at any moment we might encounter one of those lives, which then could change everything in what we thought was our path. Every moment is so mutable—every gesture is loaded with a million possible paths. So that mention of time operating both simultaneously and spreading out became a formal device, another object that shape-shifted into the actual events and characters here.

ES: By the end of story, Lily and Paul‘s lives have changed. Life in the “inscrutable modern house” is tainted by the discovery of the photos in Paul’s office of the “unusually thin” woman in the “glitter platform shoes” in front of a “little pink ranch house.” The relationship is changed by the discovery of the past dimensions of Paul’s life and his “scrapbook of desperation” where faces drift “into a repository of invisibility.” Could you describe how you conceived of these characters, made them so persuasive, and view their development over the course of the story?

DR: I’m glad you found them persuasive. Lily and Christopher are actually on some level me and my daughter. She was the same age as Christopher at around the time I was first working on this. I was with her a lot during the day, and it was wonderful and so strange. She’s an only child and so my wife and I had none of that sense of understanding about how the world was going to work anymore. I suddenly understood some deeper sense of what it meant to be an animal and for this (and many other reasons) I am so thankful. That baseline impulsion toward survival, but also a strange connection to things that I don’t think I had the wherewithal to understand. With a baby, it feels like every month, from infancy on, there is a new set of things to worry about, to check. Developmental things, health issues, just daily threats that rise up from nowhere. There’s a lot of joy, and a lot of just normal life, but there was suddenly this strange sense of risk wrapped around the most commonplace things. Things I’d taken for granted. So, in writing Lily and Christopher I wasn’t trying to write “a woman” and “a son” so much as find the things that we have in common as human animals, and using that as the generative energy.

In this story there’s a gesture of urgency in the opening—the idea of an earthquake is sort of a metaphor for all the vulnerability you can feel as a parent suddenly. Christopher is maybe a little quiet for his age, and this opens up all kinds of unknowns to a parent. And few of them are resolvable, or answerable right away. You watch, and notice, and wait to see if it’s something that doesn’t go away. You’re in constant negotiation with fate. And fate remains mostly silent until it’s not. This extraordinary drive to keep another human being safe, and the similarly extraordinary counter-force you now see, perhaps for the first time with such light, becomes the surrounding world. It has the effect, a positive effect, of just heightening your experience of everything. I wanted to suffuse the story with that sense of a person—me, Lily, anyone—wanting to understand the things she wasn’t being told. It’s this sublime gap she is suddenly forced to navigate, raising this child, trying to make good on the contract of being human. Lily and Christopher were the closest thing to me trying to understand the world flying by.

The husband, Paul, isn’t much of a person in the story—it’s focused primarily on Lily and Christopher—so much as a kind of agent. I felt like he was knowable as a type, the type that seems to get away with things. Though I try to just dance around it, without letting this dominate. We’re surrounded by people who seem to get away with things, sometimes terrible things, their whole lives. But also, we can think we know someone really well and only later find out we didn’t know them at all. A lot of marriages go that way. I wanted, with as much economy as possible, to use him to convey this, to provoke these ideas.

The other people in the story are just imagined composites. Sometimes they seem to just rise up so vividly and fully formed in the writing process. Sometimes I’ll write someone I once knew, who has died, into a story. I’ll just sort of memorialize them there. But ultimately, I suppose we are every character in the stories we tell, in some form. Here in the story, I wanted these people to be relatable—with perhaps really sharp details, but not too much, so that the reader could see enough of them to then pull out the people they’ve known like this. Those people you see, and maybe even know, who pass through life and you don’t notice them, until you do.

ES: The word elision refers to an omission, something left out, a gap, like the “gaps in a trusting relationship” that Lily, the wife in the story, just accepted. Could you describe how you built the framework for a story that concerns itself with gaps. How does one write into and around erasure?

DR: The idea of elision has a few valences in this, actually. I love the way you put the question, though. This idea of writing around the gaps, treating the gaps as the center, and writing only the margins. It’s something Kazuo Ishiguro does so well. One of the central (and gapped) ideas is Paul, the husband. He is more of an idea (or like I said before, an agent) than an active participant in this story. I’ve left a lot out about what he’s actually doing, but in my own mind I had an entire operation he was involved with that was unknown to Lily. This was the challenge, to know what he was up to but not to say anything but what was necessary about it. I wanted to keep the lens on Lily. This too goes back to this general anxiety we’re probably all feeling—that there is a whole class of people who are getting away with terrible things and seem to be able to flaunt this without consequence. But what if you were a monster and had managed your whole life to hide this. Not to flaunt it but to successfully contain it, seal it off from even a spouse. To treat life as this perfect crime? Anyway, that was some of the energy behind Paul, that unknown quantity. And I think I just tried to keep that energy in the silence around the text in the last part of the story. The trick was, again, to make a really detailed etching of the situation, but to stop short of explaining the whole thing, leaving the potential there for the reader’s imagination.

And all of this led to the more interesting proposition of what it would mean to be married to someone like that. To be a good, unassuming person like Lily. To accept this level of comfort in life with the person you believe you love, and never once question the origins of that comfort. Until you did see it, maybe just a glimpse of something unexplainable. This became the driving energy of the piece, though it’s meant to vanish nearly as soon as it’s revealed. And that became the largest gap, which was also the source of a lot of the narrative’s energy. This gap, this un-understanding, it then generated all these really wonderful other gaps in the larger weave. The idea I guess was to write only the slightest context into the moment Lily discovers that book, while trying to write as evocatively of the life existing on the surfaces.

Elizabeth Sutton is the office manager and reader of fiction at NER. A recovering English major from Bennington College, Eli began her publishing career in New York City when she joined the staff of AMS Press, a reprint publisher of small literary magazines for college libraries. She later moved to academic publishing at Columbia University Press and Ashgate Publishing in Burlington. She has been a bookseller at Deer Leap books in Bristol, Vermont, and is currently a volunteer for Everybody Wins! Vermont, a reading-mentor program in the Middlebury elementary schools.

Behind the Byline

Corey Van Landingham

NER Managing Editor Leslie Sainz talks with poet Corey Van Landingham about urgency and liberation in persona poetry, the character of silence, and her two poems in NER 43.2.

Leslie Sainz: It’s my understanding that you’re in the process of, or have recently started, teaching a class about how to begin and end a poem. In the spirit of that focus, I’d love to touch on the beginning and ending of “Of the Noble and the Vile,” which, to me, traces a haunting progression towards intimacy. In the first few lines, we’re given the indefinite pronoun “one”: “A canker on the sunken cheek. / One wants to take a thumbnail to it, slough the bluing wound, / flick tongue through hollowed hole.” In the final few lines we’re given, for the first time, the second-person pronoun “you,” which can be read as both an external address and an implication of the speaker-self: “It’s something else / that keeps you up some nights / picturing, off Mykonos, / deep below Alexandria’s blue basin, / thousands of blinkless eyes.” There’s also a sense of multiplication at work—the poem first considers the cheek of a single statue, then concludes with the understanding that there are “thousands” of statues we will likely never recover from underwater. Talk to me about the process of mapping the expanse of the poem—which lines came to you first? How did you determine which beats were emotionally and thematically necessary to arrive at the stillness of this ending?

Corey Van Landingham: Thanks so much for this wonderful question, Leslie, which brings me back, and brings me closer, to the poem and its larger project. And I’m grateful that you’re honing in on those slippery pronouns, which I went back and forth on while revising this poem. I love that idea of a progression of intimacy, which also feels like an ominous progression—the poem wants to act, at first, as though its observations are objective (impossible!), unattached to any particular human, to any particular hands. But by the end of it—and it’s a fairly long poem—the human desire to touch can’t escape with such distance. Because it isn’t just something sensual, but something imperial here. Sure, humans first made these bronze objects, but if it weren’t for their initial displacement, their looting, their being lost to shipwrecks or to the general silt and upheaval of time, all followed by their re-discovery, the objects wouldn’t have corroded. I like to imagine the pristine bracelets, statues, coins shimmering whole without us. I’m glad the “you” can be read as facing externally and internally, because I certainly don’t want the poem, nor the poet, to get by unscathed.

As far as mapping the poem’s origin, I started with that line, “Free of us, bronze sighs.” This poem is part of the very early stages of a new manuscript, and the poems focus on various forms of isolation. While much of that isolation, so far, is portrayed as undesirable, I wanted to include a variety of stances. Art, in isolation—in a kind of quarantine from human economic, and aesthetic, greed—endures. So the poem’s proliferation toward the image of those thousands of eyes on the ocean floor imagines that persistence.

Regarding the class on beginnings and endings—for now, it’s only going to be a couple lesson plans, but I hope to expand that into a semester long class about not only how to open and close a poem, but also a book, as well as the beginnings and endings of poets’ careers. The idea came about after listening to a recording of Frost’s “Directive,” and being reminded of how absolutely enchanting, how mysterious and strange, that first line is—“Back out of all this now too much for us.” I mean, all those monosyllabic words, untethered to anything at first but their own incantation—c’mon!

LS: In a 2019 interview with Pleiades, you mentioned that you were working on a new project that explores the “prismatic effect” of marriage through a “transgressive, contemporary speaker.” I’d be interested to hear if “Her Thoughts on the Hereafter” came about because of this exploration, given your speaker’s direct and indirect acknowledgement that her selfhood had become irrevocably tied to her being a wife. If you’re still working on this project, has it expanded to include persona?

CVL: It did come about in that manuscript! But it also led to this newer project, as a kind of “hinge” poem, allowing me, I think, to move from one manuscript to the next. I often have this problem, as I’m winding down one project and starting another, that I end up creating a kind of liminal could-be-this, could-be-that space, where a poem could be slotted into either. In all honesty, I’m still asking myself whether “Her Thoughts on the Hereafter” belongs in manuscript three (Reader, I, comprised of poems circulating around marriage) or manuscript four (these newer poems of isolation). It would be the only persona poem in the former, and the latter is largely devoted to various personae. It might be tidier to include it with the other personae, but there’s something there, in the poem that juts out of a manuscript a bit, that I’m drawn to.

LS: Let’s stay on the topic of persona. Across your body of work, there’s a characteristic elegance, a lushness to your lyric that elevates even the most quotidian details. And yet you’ve expressed before the desire to experiment with new schticks across projects. Has writing in persona, as you’ve done here in “Her Thoughts on the Hereafter,” provided a sense of liberation from your own voice? How might writing beyond the self, ironically, reveal more about us as authors, as people?

CVL: Liberation, that’s exactly the hope. While there is much artifice, much fiction and imagining in Reader, I, it’s also my most “confessional” book. By the time I finished writing and revising it, I was so sick of that “I,” of all the me me me. Don’t get me wrong—in itself, that book was surprisingly fun (I never thought I’d say that about writing poems) to write. It felt like it captured more of myself, more of my personality, than previous poems where I was often reverting to the sound-like-a-serious-poet thing.

So I wanted to free myself of all that introspection, of the first person’s mise en abyme. But it wasn’t just a choice of perspective, or of subject matter—it was also a choice of style. What would I have to do to my syntax, my usual poetic impulses, if I wasn’t projecting from my own voice? If I wasn’t using any first person, or if I was using the “I” of another figure? It’s a challenge I’m posing to myself, trying to forge a new style, a new way of approaching the page.

That irony you mention is also connected to liberation. Freed from my “I,” I’ve found myself uttering things I may not have had the courage to in poems that are read more autobiographically. That’s part of the thrill of the mask. And even the focus of this new project is probably more personal, more revealing, than I had intended it to be. I’m a fairly solitary person—“a loner,” my mother used to call me. I’m an only child, without much family. I’m not good at maintaining long friendships. I often prefer to be alone.

Maybe writing about other people, even other objects, in solitude is one kind of communion, a way to both limn and veer away from that isolation I find most comfortable.

LS: The epigraph of “Her Thoughts on the Hereafter” names the lost Egyptian city of Thinis as the poem’s setting. This detail reminded me of the lines “There’s hope in the study of things / That a lost world might stay a little longer” from your recent collection, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens (Tupelo Press). Two questions come to mind—how did you reconcile or employ a sense of urgency when occupying the voice of an unknown woman from a lost city? And what hope did you acquire, if any, when conducting research for this poem?

CVL: Like most poets, I think, my urge to write steps from precarity, from loss, from frustration. It’s a lyric desire, to make things “stay a little longer.” And it’s also a political desire, to amplify often anonymous voices, to allow them the endurance of memory, the privilege of history. That isn’t especially novel—writers have been doing this for centuries. The question of urgency, though, comes down to singularity, to the ability to create a believable mind, a believable voice and presence, on the page. That’s the hope of research, I think—that granularity of real, lived experience. It’s something I’m still working on, merging that with a vibrant voice that can step out from dates and names. I always come back to Lucie Brock-Broido’s persona poems, how they never sound like actual speech—and thank goodness for that, or we never would have gotten the brilliant ending of “Jessica, from the Well”*—but feel like they pulse from an actual, idiosyncratic mind, a kind of hydra sprouted from poet and the persona inhabited.

Initially, I drowned the poem in narrative. I had some elaborate, murder-mystery type plot cooked up, and the poem was much longer.

But it wasn’t the circumstance of her death that mattered, I eventually realized, but the real, human (even if speaking from beyond-the-grave) gravity of losing something you love. In this case, that’s the dog.

*       Given my character, I will always be mercurial,
        a little sentimental, star-shaped & terrestrial
        divine by water, healed by air
        luminescent, inconceivably, a prayer
        a Jessica,          I sing.

LS: Lastly, I’d like to touch on form and the open fields you’ve built into these poems. I’m thinking of Dana Levin’s theory that the open fields between and around our lines represent “the expressive unknown.” This feels especially true to me in the context of your subject matter, which rests at the edge of knowing and remembering. What role does silence play in your formal decisions?

CVL: Oh, Dana Levin is so brilliant!

I appreciate how that sense of “the expressive unknown” is both intellectual and sensual (which doesn’t surprise me, coming from her). And it gestures to that felt mystery regarding white space, the field of the page, what hovers in the spaces between our lines. Silence can be its own character, creating tension with the other voice, or voices, a poem puts forth.

Especially in a poem like “Her Thoughts on the Hereafter,” which is made up of shorter prose stanzas, silence was a crucial part of the writing process. Crucial because I think of it as a kind of adhesive, allowing discrete flights of speech to interact in a single plane. In a lyric poem, especially, that adhesion is temporal. I think that may connect to your question about knowing and remembering, and how silence—and a poem’s formal decisions—relate to that. For a speaker speaking not only from beyond her physical life, but from thousands of years ago, the silence between those sometimes-elliptical prose stanzas feels like I’m tuning into an ancient radio station, catching blips of her voice floating across the airwaves before losing her for a moment in the static. I can’t—this far removed, with so much unknown about her life I’m imagining here—catch all of it, but I can tap into it, put down fragments.

And, outside of this poem, I love how silence can make a statement reverberate, how you can almost feel its wake rippling through the white space of the page.

Leslie Sainz is the author of the debut poetry collection Have You Been Long Enough at Table, forthcoming from Tin House in 2023. The daughter of Cuban exiles, she is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She is the managing editor of the New England Review.

Literature & Democracy

Gábor Schein’s “My Gate”

Budapest Living Memorial to victims of the Holocaust. Photo by Ellen Hinsey.

“What is happening now has long since been anticipated by poetry. Poetry is the sensory organ of the future.”

Hungarian poet and writer Gábor Schein examines the war in Ukraine, the concept of citizenship in the wake of corruption and collapse, and poetry as prediction in his essay “My Gate.” Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet.

[“My Gate”]

This is the first in our “Literature and Democracy” series. This quarterly column, curated by NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey, presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world, beginning with a focus on Eastern Europe.

New Books by NER Authors

Summer 2022

Read widely this season with the help of our authors! Check out our summer book roundup for 5 new books by NER contributors and don’t forget to shop these titles on our Bookshop.org page.

Not When I’m Gone by novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and critic Roger Salloch makes its debut this June from The Permanent Press. Salloch‘s essay “Provenance” appeared in NER 40.1.

O, the third full-length poetry collection by Lebanese writer Zeina Hashem Beck, will hit shelves on July 5 and is available for preorder from Penguin Random House. Beck‘s poem “Bulbul” appears in our latest issue, NER 43.2.

Coming this July from Bellevue Press is Norman Lock’s Voices in the Dead House, the anticipated ninth book in his American Novels series. Lock‘s work has appeared in NER several times, most recently in NER 34.2.


Vincent Czyz’s new collection of critical and personal essays, The Secret Adventures of Order, is out this July from Rain Mountain Press. Czyz’s essay “Collage and the Secret Adventures of Order” appeared in NER 35.3.

The paperback release of Rajiv Mohabir’s award-winning book, Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, is out this August from Restless Books. Mohabir’s poems “Immigrant Aria” and “Boy-Not-Boy” appeared in NER 38.4.

Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.

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