Interview with Alissa Valles, author of Orphan Fire

Alissa Valles' Orphan Fire (Nov., 2008) received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which wrote: "Valles's terse, learned, harsh collection is one of the standout first books of the year." Claire McQuerry recently interviewed her, and the interview is published here on the Four Way Books blog for the first time.

Claire McQuerry: From what I understand, you were raised in a multilingual home, and I know you have done quite a bit of translation work, most notably the Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert. Yet, unlike work by a number of multilingual poets I can think of, the poems in this collection almost never slip into your other languages. Have you purposefully avoided this? In what ways do you think your multilingual background manifests in your poetry or influences your approach to writing?

Alissa Valles: I feel that to slip into other languages (either in speech or print) is a form of either snobbishness or laziness – either you are showing off or you can’t find the words, or both. Although I owe a lot to Pound, I find his kind of phrase-dropping irritating. Yes, some things are untranslatable, but a poet’s job is to push his or her own language farther, to expand it. Shakespeare didn’t quote; he assimilated.

English is my first language. I was born in Amsterdam but taken to the US almost immediately. I learned Dutch when I was eight, when we moved back to Holland. In my teens I started translating Dutch poets: Faverey, Achterberg, Kopland, and the wonderful South African poet Ingrid Jonker, who wrote in Afrikaans, which I can read but not speak. For me the impulse to translate came from being plunged into a new language element and wanting to draw correspondences back to my bedrock language, which was English. One basic reason not to do this in my own poems is that virtually no one knows Dutch. It’s not like throwing in French or Spanish words. No one (except maybe my mother) would get it if I did mix my languages.

Multilingualism, which may soon be the rule rather than the exception in the U.S., does fuel a private inquiry into the nature of language, and maybe that shows in what I write. It turns some children into little epistemologists. Polish and Russian are acquired languages for me, and I have been reading and translating Polish and Russian poetry and prose quite a long time, but I still don’t really understand how they may or may not affect what I write in my own name.

CM: There is a tension in your poems, particularly in “Orphan Fire,” regarding the limitations of language and communication. The speaker wants pure, unrestrained expression but recognizes that “what is real” and expressible are definitive particulars: “the place on the wall someone’s hand wore away, a cat’s eye….” Earlier in the poem the speaker also recognizes that there are limits to what language can accomplish: “you can’t find/ a word in any language that would/ both bind a man to his own world/ and lead him, trusting, into another.” Some of these limitations seem to be linked to the boundaries of what the self can know and therefore express: “So far it is my eyes, my judgment and my searching that speak these words to you” and, later, “tell me to what oracle/ I pay tribute, who is speaking through me.” There is, of course, an epistemological uncertainty inherent in such recognition. Yet, your closing poem in the book, “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” insists, “there are things only I can tell you.” Do you find that your background in languages informs your sense of these limitations in language, and your poetics? How do you reconcile the fact that individual perception and experience are both limiting and enriching, particularly in terms of the poem as communication?

AV: Studying languages certainly contributes to a sense of the boundaries of language, but it also forces you to think or dream about a possible underlying unity, some kind of deep grammar, built into the mind. I for one am very susceptible to metaphors drawn from the Chomskian theory (or myth). At the same time, language is so bound up with “who we are” that it makes a good framework for exploring the ambiguities of selfhood.

As for Herodotus (“So far it is my eyes…”), the next phrase in that passage is “From this on, it is the accounts of the Egyptians that I will tell to you as I heard them….” It’s about two kinds of speech, one based on one’s own sight and sense, and another which relies to a great extent on things we have heard (or read) and take on the authority of others. I think one of the reasons that contemporary poetry, at least in the U.S., is so hesitant to venture beyond the personal is that there is a great confusion about tradition, about who speaks ‘through us’. What is called postmodernism – at least in literature -- has tended to deepen the confusion, while veiling it, I think.

CM: In your introduction to the Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, you consider his poem “Apollo and Marsayas.” You suggest this poem is built around the sound that the flayed Marsayas makes—A. One vowel—arguing that Herbert’s refusal to sound this cry out is an important part of the poem’s complexity, that Marsayas’s pain finds its expression instead in “a series of metamorphoses.”

I compare this to your poem, “In the North (Westerbork),” which presents a series of harsh images that describe a landscape lacking any human presence. “Westerbork” is inhabited by personified things: “a stick probes the exhausted mouth of morning,” “the North shaves and washes in its cold mirror,” “The wind…wanders,/ a wakeful child in a house deserted by the elders.” The only living thing in the poem appears in the last line: “an oriole…punishing its one vowel.” While the anthropomorphized landscape echoes the lives of victims, the poem ends on the act of victimization and its resulting utterance: “one vowel.” This is the only sound in the poem. The landscape points to the unvoiced pain—wind rubbing its face raw, trees clawing at earth and air—but the oriole’s vowel is unsounded, only described. Can you speak to this? In what ways do you see “Westerbork” as being in conversation with Herbert’s poem?

AV: I think my poem, at least on the conscious level, is more directly in conversation with Stevens’ poem “The Course of a Particular”, an extraordinary poem that describes a bleak landscape, and a cry which is ‘not a cry of divine attention,/ Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.’ But there may be a connection with Herbert’s poem. Of course the scary thing about “Apollo and Marsyas” is that the cry seems actually to murder the landscape, rather than entering and animating it, as it does in the original myth. Both poems are about the failure or refusal to participate in a pain not “ours”.

But my poem is mainly a response to the specific landscape, or one of the landscapes, in which I grew up. Westerbork is a place in the province of Drenthe in the north of the Netherlands near where we had a house for a number of years when I was a child. It was the site of a camp that received refugees from Germany in the thirties and was then turned into a transit camp for the huge numbers deported deathward during the war. That countryside in winter is extremely bleak. Van Gogh painted it in dull shades of brown and grey. I don’t know what the oriole is doing here, but it’s not helping.

CM: As I just mentioned, the landscape in “Westerbork” recalls not only the atrocities inflicted upon individuals, but also those inflicted by individuals. I see this lack of denial paralleled in “Ev’n in Their Ashes (Srebrenica).” This poem weaves in echoes of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” yet while the speaker of Gray’s poem imagines his way into the lives of the churchyard’s dead, the speaker of “Srebrenica” does not imagine herself into the victims’ experience.

Instead, in the closing lines, the speaker seems to consider the massacre from the perspective of the killers, to whom the victims are like sheep “bleating…under a knife.” I think too of Frank Bidart’s poem “Curse,” addressed not to the victims of 9/11, but to the terrorists — not identifying with them, but entering into their perspective, nonetheless. Did you choose to do this consciously? Would you consider this a part of your approach to witness poetry?

AV: I have to say that I resist the notion of ‘witness poetry’. It makes no sense to me to separate off a category of historical events that require or deserve ‘witnessing’ by virtue of their extremity. I write about violence in the world because it’s part of everyday reality. In the 1990’s both London, where I studied, and Amsterdam were awash with ex-Yugoslav’s of all descriptions and I had a lot to do with them, in various capacities. The Dutch Institute of War Documentation, for which I worked after college, did the official investigation into the responsibility of the Dutch forces for the Srebrenica massacre. I felt the report was too complacent, and (like many others) I was angry about it. The poem I wrote was simply a continuation of conversations I was having at that time. I was trying to describe the people I knew, the ones who got away. You came across both thugs and victims, and they were both haunted by images of violence, sometimes the same images.

CM: Place seems to be an important element in this book: you have poems set in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Warsaw, Chicago — and there is a definite sense of the particular qualities of these physical environments. (The snow’s “white sheets” on Vasilevsky Island, “windows lit up/ with pink neon” in Amsterdam, bark peeling from the plane trees in Paris, etc.). Do you find place/setting to be an impetus for your poetry? How does place factor into the way you conceptualize this collection?

AV: I’ve moved around a lot, first under parental duress and then by choice. Places come to embody certain experiences or discoveries which themselves are logically independent of place. I don’t usually like poetry driven entirely by the thrill of foreign travel. I’ve written mainly about places where I’ve lived and worked for a length of time - with the exception of ‘San Juan del Duero’, a little poem that came out of traveling in Northern Spain with my mother. But the country looms large in my family history, and for me there’s a huge charge in visiting Spain. The book’s middle part is a kind of travelogue, it starts inside the house in San Francisco where we lived when I and my brother Gabe were kids, and it ends in the city where I was living when I finished the book, Warsaw.

CM: In the stunning title poem for this collection you allude to creation mythology, particularly the notion of a fall: The epigraph, from Blake’s “Song of Thel;” a child’s dress, like wings, “without memory of a fall;” the “Constant fire, passing into the created world,” which destroys its end and encounters the pain of limitation. These allusions seem to work as metaphor for the distance between the openness of possibility and constraints of reality. One specific manifestation of this distance is the separation of the self from other selves: “the nearest you get to purity is the pain/ of division.” While these lines literally describe the pain of birth, the physical separation of mother and child, they also figure the pain present in the separation of the self from any other self.

In what ways do you see poetry, another act of creation, as undoing or in some way healing that rupture between self and other? In addition to the creation mythology of “Orphan Fire,” art and artists, composers, poets, other kinds of creators, figure significantly in a number of the poems in the collection. Could you discuss your sense of the myth - and the act - of creation as they recur in Orphan Fire?

AV: In trying to give an account of birth, one can find it helpful to invoke a creation myth – and to understand birth as a kind of recapitulation of that story. On the other hand, perhaps creation myths are a [projection] on world history of the experience of being born – being first divided from the mother, and then from the self by consciousness. But I am not a psychoanalyst, nor do I build any coherent mythology.

I used the Hebrew beth, an expression of creation-as-division: the first letter of the Hebrew Bible corresponds to the number 2, according to the counting Cabalists, and has been read to mean that everything in creation is dual. The experience of being born seems to be so traumatic that people spend their lives seeking for a pre-birth condition of unity. Some artists do in their art. For my own part, I do not experience writing as healing.

CM: Fire is an important motif in the book, and in the title poem, especially, it’s connected with creation mythology. There is that line in the poem’s first section in which you describe this mythological fire as “twice orphaned, by gods and by earth.” What brought the notions of orphanhood and fire together for you, and how did you arrive at this marriage for the title of your book?

AV: I’m trying to describe a condition of existing outside of an intelligible relationship to God or nature. The Greek word orphanos means simply ‘bereaved’.


Claire McQuerry writes and translates poetry. Recent publications include Double Change and Harpur Palate, where she was a finalist for the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize. She lives in Seattle.

Alissa Valles is the editor and co-translator of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998 (Ecco) a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year in 2007. She was born in Amsterdam to an American father and a Dutch mother. She grew up in the U.S. and the Netherlands and studied at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies in London and later at universities in Poland, Russia, and the U.S. She has worked for the BBC, the Dutch Institute of War Documentation, the Jewish Historical Institute and La Strada International in Warsaw. She has contributed to Polish Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2007), The New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008), Documentary Theatre on the World Stage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and served as editor for the web journal Words Without Borders. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Verse, and elsewhere.

Interview with Kevin Prufer, author of National Anthem

Jeremy Spohr, an MFA candidate at Arizona State University, recently interviewed Kevin Prufer, whose 4th collection of poems, National Anthem has just been named as one of Publishers' Weekly's Best Books of 2008.

JS: What gets you started when you sit down to write? Do you generally begin with a line, an image, an idea? When working on a book, to what extent do you purposely hinge poems together, letting a previous poem inform the next through image or theme, or does this happen naturally, almost unconsciously, through the immersion of your process?

KP: I’m terrible at starting poems. I’d rather do almost anything else. I pace around the room, type a line, delete it, type another, delete it. Usually, that’s all I’ll do in an evening, start and delete ten or twelve poems, never getting more than a line or two into any. Once I find something I’m happy with—often beginning with a line borrowed from elsewhere, then, later, revised off the page—the writing becomes easier. At a certain point, perhaps eight or ten lines in, I generally stop and ask myself, “who exactly is speaking here?” and “why is he speaking?” and “what’s the back story here?” Those are important questions for me. They keep me focused on what the poem is trying to do. They keep me imagining an actual audience for my poetry, which is important.

I understand that this also ties the poems down to certain narrative lines and moments, which is perhaps not the most fashionable way to be writing right now. But I continue to believe that most every good poem has buried in it somewhere the seed of narrative. Sometimes the narrative isn’t directly stated in the poem, but is implied by the speaker’s urgent need to say the poem. What caused that? Isn’t that a narrative?

Putting together a book is an entirely different sort of process, made easy for me only because I’m an obsessive sort of writer. I’ll become fascinated by an image—the moon burning, a parachute falling through the sky—and it just keeps sneaking into my poems, over and over again. And, in a broader sense, I can’t seem to help writing about empire and about death. These are endlessly interesting to me and even when I try to write away from them, I end up returning. So, ultimately, I’m never thinking about a complete book when I’m writing poems, but they do tend to fit together nicely once I start compiling them. And the links you notice are certainly there; it’s just that they don’t rise to the surface until I start assembling a pile of finished poems into a collection. Before that, they’re just obsessions.

JS: Let’s talk about “The Enormous Parachute.” It covers the suburbs like a synthetic, post-apocalyptic snow. It homogenizes the light and is responsible for the deaths of migrating birds. There is an attention to burial in National Anthem —the snow that covers the planes on the airstrip, the piled leaves that bury children, the rotting apples that bury the boys in their trucks—and I read the expanse of parachute as another covering, a sort of burial. There is, after all, a dead man hung at its center. The poem, a series of letters written by one of the covered, enriches and informs readings of other poems in the book, such as “Caravaggio’s Bent Narcissus” and “The Excavation of the Children of the Czar.” I also note that the cover of National Anthem is Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, partially wrapped. Can you discuss this sense of burial, or covering, in terms of National Anthem’s specific themes?

KP: Well, these are certainly things that I’m very conscious of writing about and, in retrospect, I think they function in two ways in National Anthem (and perhaps in my next book, too).

On the one hand, the book is largely about empire, our expanding empire, in particular and the force we exert on the world. Images of “covering” certainly function to reinforce that theme, the way we manage to cover up the world as we expand over it, the way we cover it with our gaze.

But that sounds didactic. I’m just as interested in what I’ve always taken to be one of Whitman’s great questions, that is: where is there room for the individual American in the vastness of America, in the sweeping political and social forces that surround us. “The Enormous Parachute” is, for me, a sort of love poem, in which the yearning of the speaker manifests itself in the giant parachute that appears to have covered his entire world, at the center of which a dead paratrooper hangs. But the parachute (as it does in several other poems in the book) also suggests airplanes and a war, hinting at that struggle that I often worry about when I write: how important are we? Are the speaker’s loneliness and love really meaningful to anyone but himself? Can we really distinguish ourselves by our acts, feelings, selves, against the overwhelming forces of the world? This yearning is very large for the speaker, but it’s meaningless for the rest of the world with whom he cannot share it, even in the letters that, ultimately, he never sends.

I suppose that’s also a question behind so many of the so-called elegies in the collection and behind the other poems you cite: we cannot help but obliterate ourselves against the enormity of our world. But, finally, I hope the book suggests that this isn’t an excuse from political thought or action. And I hope, too, that it doesn’t mean we’re meaningless in the world.

JS: Read together, “Ars Poetica” and “There Is No Audience For Poetry” suggest an innate force in poetry to speak against power despite doing very little to change the nature, or structure, of that power. Is this an adequate reading? What does poetry make happen? Can you discuss your take on the poet’s political responsibilities? Would you say that the celebrant, the “light-in-the-eye” speaker in “Ars Poetica” who drops “love notes” is engaged in a political act?

KP: That’s a very adequate, if sad, reading. And, yes, I’d imagined the guy in the trunk to be the poet and the people driving the car to be, I don’t know, the American voter, our elected officials, the mob. I think you’re right to say those poems speak against power while acknowledging that we’re mostly really too tiny to make much happen, those of us sitting in our studies writing our useless little poems, locked in the trunks of cars banging that tire iron against the walls trying to get someone’s, anyone’s, attention. Depressing, and for the record, I don’t always feel that way, even if the poem does.

Ultimately, though, I think that expecting poetry to change the world in any immediate, political way is a mistake. It misunderstands where the art is most powerful. I’ve always felt that great poetry—the kind of poetry we all want to write—doesn’t really rally the troops, get out the vote, or provide answers. At least not now, in this country. Instead, poetry seems to me to be an art form uniquely suited to expressing or examining complexity, to asking difficult questions rather than answering them. I’m thinking of Emily Dickinson, whose great poems seem at once to believe in an all-powerful God, to doubt His existence, to worry about his absence and fear his presence. She never takes a side there; instead, she displays for us the complexity of the question, suggesting how and why we might know God and the afterlife in simultaneously conflicting ways. Understanding Dickinson—or Bradstreet or Eliot or Bishop, etc.—often means holding conflicting positions in mind simultaneously as we try to understand or know things that are, finally, not completely knowable.

But, of course, while these poets don’t “make things happen” in the way I think most people would understand the phrase, they do help us understand the world around us a little better, they help us see the big questions in ways we might now otherwise have seen them. They have helped us understand who we are as a very complicated culture, what our ideals and fears and beliefs are. In this way, they are tremendously important. They do make things happen.

As regards my own poems and politics: Yes, my subjects are often very political, but hopefully not simplistically so. I loathe our current administration, would love to see our rather jingoistic sense of what is means to be American revised — but I’m not delusional. I hold the poets I mention above as models because I’m interested in expressing the complexity of what it means to be an American alive at this time, in an increasingly deceptive, shaky, maybe malevolent empire. When I write, my feelings are primarily ambivalent; I find myself writing about outrage and beauty with equal fervor. I hope, one day, to have a fraction of the influence on the way we think about ourselves as any of the poets I mentioned above.

JS: There is that wonderful last image in “Mechanical Bird” of the “neatly feathered” mechanical sparrow that has replaced the heart, “the bird in the chest/that sings these words to it/that beats its wings against the ribs’ restraints.” For me, this image inverts the boy pounding inside the car’s trunk and serves as an example of an interesting ambiguity in your work. I find myself wanting some clear demarcation between the organic, natural body and that of the mechanical, or the synthetic product. But there is no easy distinction in National Anthem. Airplanes are the mirrored image of a dying bird. Cars are compared to the human body where hearts whir like motors. Raindrops are hypodermics, and ice leaves a circuitry on windows. I think also of those lines in the title poem: “What was the body but a vessel, and what was the store but another, larger vessel?” These lines extend this lack of clear distinction to the structure of institutions, so that even a shopping center seems to be an animate, natural phenomenon with which we are in relationship. There are blurred limits, then, between the individual organism and the machineries of culture. Will you discuss the central ideas behind this ambiguity?

KP: That’s a difficult question mostly because my sense of the answer varies from poem to poem. In a very general way, I’m interested in the idea that our culture is an extension of ourselves, both good and bad. That we can’t really talk about who we are (as a collection of individuals) without talking about what we’ve created. Machinery often seems like a useful way of communicating this—that we are like these complicated, God-created machines that create other synthetic products and machines. That’s our function; it’s absolutely who we are and how we define ourselves as we move across the landscape.

Conversely, even as we look at the natural world, we come to own it, transforming those raindrops into hypodermics, that ice into circuitry. So the metaphor of “synthetic things” or “machinery” works both ways.

In the title poem, the shopping mall is just such an ambivalent sort of object—a thing simultaneously beautiful and soulless that we have created. We are both, the mall and the speaker, these mirroring vessels filled with goods, both created things, the speaker in the poem unable (and not really wanting) to be extricated from the objects of his culture.

That’s one way machinery and created objects work in the poems, though not the only way. After all, I wrote these poems one by one over a period of several years. They’re inconsistent. And I certainly don’t mind if readers see them differently.

JS: There is a cinematic quality in much of your work, a framing of visual images that flicker and drive the narrative forward. I’m thinking of “Apocalypse,” “We Wanted To Find America,” and “A History of the American West,” among others. Have the visual arts—film and painting in particular—influenced your work?

KP: They definitely have, especially film. When I think about poetry—my own and others’—I like to imagine the accretion of images the way a film director might. Why, I ask, did the camera tilt here? Why did it come to rest there? What kind of story is being told by the progression of images one atop the other, and how are we, the audience, being manipulated by these directorial choices? I came to writing poetry through fiction writing and almost always see my writing—even my most condensed, lyrical poems—as narratives unfolding.

Curiously, though, I almost never find myself thinking about particular films or works of art when I write, with the exception of the poem “Caravaggio’s Bent Narcissus,” which I wrote particularly for a friend who was editing a feature on ekphrastic poetry at Prairie Schooner. If she hadn’t asked, I probably wouldn’t have written that poem—and even as it is, I sometimes think it’s connection to Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus is almost arbitrary, except that the painting inspired it and is alluded to in the end.

JS:I’d like to ask a question about form. In the forward to The New Young American Poets, an anthology you edited, Richard Howard writes:

Ours, then, is a generation of poets that knows not the Law, and though the results of such ignorance are often brilliant, and certainly worth our delighted attention, we shall discover that the poetry of the moment…is a literature of desperate measures, dreadful freedoms that only the strongest and most resolute talents can endure.

As a poet who spends a great deal of time reading contemporary poetry, can you speak about our “dreadful freedoms” that Howard alludes to, the potential hazards and/or benefits to being a “generation […] that knows not the Law?” What is your background with forms? Do you feel it is important for younger poets to learn and experiment with forms?

KP: I remember first reading Richard Howard’s statement, thinking it delightfully ambivalent and smart about these freedoms we’re all supposedly enduring. And it makes me think about a panel I was recently on at Indiana University. Someone in the audience asked about rules and forms and Jean Valentine, who sat next to me, said something to the effect that one of the things that drew her to poetry was that there were really no rules.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I decided that there are, in fact, lots and lots of rules and we devise them and break them at our peril. Every good poem, free verse or not, is also a formal poem, in that it takes a formal position, a stance, as it articulates itself to the reader. And every good poem is also formal in that it has a shape, often invented by the poet, that, ideally, works hand-in-hand with what the poem is trying to do. Here it begins, here it turns, here the line speeds up or the rhythm falters, here the poet has inserted a little slant rhyme or unsettling sonic dissonance. These are all formal decisions and if the poet’s not aware that he’s making them, well, he’s probably not writing very well.

This doesn’t actually contradict Richard Howard (or, for that matter, Jean Valentine, who is very smart about poetry), but it does add another perspective to what I think they’re after. I suppose the terrible freedom Howard refers to is the freedom to devise our forms, though once we have we end up working within their rules.

Inherited forms first brought me to poetry. I loved the bravura of the villanelle, sestina, ballad, double dactyl. I still enjoy writing sonnets, several of which will be included in my next book. One thing that drew me to these when I started writing—and still draws me to them today—is the feeling of inevitability they create in the reader. We know the sonnet must end on something like the 140th syllable and we can feel it coming, though the poet (hopefully) moves us or surprises us within the confines of that inevitability. We know whether the next syllable will be weak or strong, we know that here there will be a rhyme and over there will come a corresponding rhyme. Much of the musical terrain is familiar to the reader, and this creates a different kind of freedom in the writing. Because many (though not all, certainly) of the formal choices have been made already, I feel freer to concentrate on the manipulation of the form rather than it’s invention; it focuses the mind and sharpens the ear.

So, yes, I also think student writers should write in inherited forms. Absolutely. And it’s best if they don’t think of it as a sort of exercise, but approach those forms with the same ambition that they have for their other poetry. A poet who cannot compose a sonnet is perhaps not a very dexterous writer. Either that, or she hasn’t quite familiarized herself with the tradition in which she writes.

Well, perhaps that’s a bit harsh—but somewhere inside me, I half believe it.



Jeremy Spohr is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University.

Kevin Prufer is the author of Fallen from a Chariot, The Finger Bone, and Strange Wood. He is the editor of PLEIADES: A Journal of New Writing. He is the recipient of an individual fellowship from the NEA, three Pushcart Prizes, and two George Bogin Awards from the Poetry Society of America. He is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC). He lives in rural Missouri.

Eileen Pollack Interviewed

Eileen Pollack will be reading from In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas at several Jewish Book Network events in the Fall, beginning excitingly with the Jewish Literary Festival taking place in Washington, D.C. from September 14-24; Eileen will read on Monday September 22nd at 7.30p.m. You can read a glowing review of In the Mouth in the San Francisco Chronicle here.



An interview with Eileen, conducted by Catherine Bates, follows.



In the Mouth is a collection of short stories and novellas. How do you distinguish between the two different forms? Do you think about length at the beginning stages of the each piece? Do you have a preference between the two forms?
The novella is my favorite form – it offers the clean, simple structure of a short story (one main character facing one central conflict as that conflict moves through one pleasing narrative arc, exploring one central thematic question, usually from one dominant point of view) while providing much more space in which to work out all of the above. As you can see, I’m a maximalist, in terms not only of language and thematic meditation but also plot. Even in my short stories, I tend to work with as much plot as some literary writers provide for an entire novel. So the novella length allows me to take my time and not give in to the temptation to scrunch in a novel’s worth of material in 25 pages.

And yes, I do tend to know which form a piece will take before I start out. If an old man tells his son that he needs to be circumcised before he dies, you’re not going to be able to accomplish the circumcision – let alone convince your readers the story is remotely plausible or explain why the old man needs a circumcision, literally or thematically – in fewer than forty pages. This was especially true since I knew “The Bris” was going to have a fairy-tale structure: the king asks his son to perform a difficult task, and the son must surmount daunting obstacles, trying at least three strategies before he succeeds (in fairy tales, everything comes in threes!). With “Beached in Boca,” I knew I was writing two intertwined stories, each so dramatic (an elderly father with AIDS, a father who’s murdered a secret lover) I would need lots of pages to do them both justice. That said, I wasn’t sure if I was writing a forty-page novella or a full-length novel until well into the project!

And now that I’m writing this, I have to admit that I also love the story form … for the sheer beauty of its compressed brevity, accomplishing so much in so little space. And stories are easier to publish on their own, in magazines. If not for the wonderful literary journal SubTropics, which doesn’t balk at printing long works of fiction, “The Bris” wouldn’t have come out on its own and won a Best American!

Could you talk a little about your writing process for a short story collection? I know you have written novels as well. How does the completion of a collection differ from the completion of a novel?
I write my novels all at one go, and even though this might take three to five years, the book spans one discrete period of my life and by its nature focuses on one central theme. But the stories that end up going into a collection might span decades of my life, in and around the novels and works of nonfiction. All the while, I’m moving through different periods of my life, facing different challenges as a person and as a writer. At one end of In the Mouth, my son was being born, while at the other end, my son was approaching manhood and my father was dying. The challenge is to find the common themes that span several eras of your life. In this case, I tried to put together the collection before I’d written “The Bris,” with a far different story (“Breaking and Entering”) in its place, and I couldn’t see the unities. Then I wrote “The Bris” and took out the one story that didn’t fit, and suddenly everything came together and made sense, all those parents and children, all those secrets, all those questions of what parents and children give to each other, or can’t give, what we can or can’t give to lovers and total strangers …

How does the title speak to the larger themes in this collection?
Well, as I said, the parents and children in this collection keep many secrets from each other (and from themselves). In the first story “The Safe,” the main character is keeping her passion for her son’s physical beauty a secret from her husband, her son, her father, everyone, while she’s also starting to wonder if something was wrong about her own father’s physical responses to her when she was a child.

In contemporary American society, a secret of that nature demands to be explored and made much of: Oh, no, maybe your father sexually abused you! Oh no, maybe you’re sexually abusing your son! But by the end of the story, the narrator is as unwilling to explore those so-called problems and pathologize her feelings for her son (or her father’s feelings for her) as the father has been unwilling to open the safe in the basement of his office. Once I had that image – the safe that might or might not be opened to reveal its secrets – I also saw the image of the dentist peering down his patient’s throat to see what he can see about the patient. In the safe, in the mouth … what do we really know about what’s inside anyone else, even people to whom we’re closely related?

And there’s the idea of nursing a child, which comes up in “Milk,” when Bea stares at her son’s mouth and gets freaked out because he’s asking something of her that she doesn’t think she has to give. Or getting kicked in the mouth. Or, well, all the sexual connotations of mouths and what goes into mouths. That said, I have to give credit to my friend, Marcie Hershman, who actually suggested the phrase when I was hunting for a title! All I did was see the wonderful rightness of her suggestion!

Florida reappears in these stories. What role does place have in this collection? How aware were you of the physical settings of these stories while writing the collection?

Setting is everything to me when I write. I tend to make up plots, but I always work with real settings. The setting is the world of the story, by which I mean the culture. Every detail, every object and image and ritual of that world has to strike me as rich in poetry and sociology. There are people who are insiders in a given world, people who are outsiders, and most of the conflicts in my stories (and novels) occur because of some sort of clash between the insiders and the outsiders. The Catskills, where I grew up, certainly qualifies as a world unto itself. But that world died, and most of the older people who used to live there retired to southern Florida. They took some of their own customs down there with them, but they also created new ones. The gated communities of Boca are so rich in ritual, language, a certain well-defined set of values … That’s what I need to create a world. But I didn’t want to stay on the stereotypical surface, the way Jerry Seinfeld does when he takes his characters to Boca (though I do laugh myself sick when those episodes come on in Seinfeld in reruns); I wanted to explore what was going on inside characters like Milt Rothstein, a seemingly mild-mannered dentist from upstate New York.

The body is intricately woven into the plot of these stories. Hospitals and dentist offices often house some kind of heartbreak. The characters’ struggles are connected to the body’s limitations. Could you talk about the importance of the body in your writing?
Honestly, I never thought of that before in relation to my work. I’m someone who lives most of her life inside her head, so it always comes as a big surprise to me that I even have a body. Then again, I’ve always been very active and athletic, and I’ve had a great many physical setbacks in the past ten years (I recently had to have part of my spine replaced!). Having a baby and nursing him and taking care of him is a very physical activity, absolutely saturated with powerful emotions. And caring for my dying father and declining mother in Boca have been powerful reminders that we all have bodies. I suppose that what you’re reading here is a chronicle of my growing realization that no one can live solely in her head! You’re reading the stories that came out of the collision between the life of the mind and the life of the body in my own history. Oh, and I suppose that I realized that one of the main ways I connected with my own father was sitting in his dental chair (and filling in as his dental assistant) … and that sitting in the chairs of other dentists now that he’s dead is an emotionally wrenching and very physically upsetting and scary experience.

A lot of these characters really stuck with me. In some of the stories like “Milt and Moose,” “The Safe,” and “Milk,” the protagonist reaches a deeper understanding or a startling realization only at the very end of the story so the reader is left pondering over these quiet, but vast changes. Do you think these characters share similar struggles?

I do. I’m not a fan of stories in which the epiphanies are small. As I said earlier, these are characters who are trying to figure out what to do with their secret lives. They’re also facing conflicts over how much they can give to other people, even the people they love most. In real life, I’m a complete and total egotist. Yet I’m also someone who feels called upon to give, give, give. I live with that conflict every waking moment, and most of my non-waking moments as well (I am plagued by vivid, disturbing dreams), so it makes sense that my characters would share similar tensions in their lives. The trouble is, most of the startling realizations and vast changes we undergo in this life tend to last for a day or a week before most of us need to go through the whole disturbing business yet again.