Arun Budhathoki (Daniel Song). Photo courtesy of Arun Budhathoki.

An introduction to poet Arun Budhathoki (Daniel Song), from Kathmandu, Nepal. Founding editor of  The Applicant, a Kathmandu-based journal of literature and art, Budhathoki is also currently working on his second book of poems and a novella. When asked about his writing process, and where he would most want to live and write, Budhathoki shared, “I do not want to live in one place. Boundaries and geographic restrictions restrict creativity, at least in my case. That’s why you find my poems based in different places.”

Quick Facts on Arun Budhathoki (Daniel Song)

• Home:  Currently, I live in Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Comfort food: I am choosy about food and always prefer delicacies. I say this because we live once, and my spiritual dad always says that we should work hard and eat like a king. I have many favourite foods but I like roasted pork, homemade beef curry, Korean food, sushi, and fish.
• Top reads: Of all the poets born so far, I like Sylvia Plath the most. Other favourite books include And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, The Waste Land by T S Eliot, and The Dream Songs by John Berryman.
• Current reads: The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath

What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve submitted my manuscript for a second poetry book to a publisher, and I’m also waiting for my novella to be published.

Who do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

I grew up reading works of famous poets, and I always wondered what kind of people they must be and how they could write such masterpieces. For me, an ideal reader is someone who can understand what I write even if they don’t relate to where I come from. Just because I come from the land of the Himalayas doesn’t mean I write about mountains, or only talk of politics and poverty. An ideal reader is someone who can get into the text without scrutinizing the writer.

“Just because I come from the land of the Himalayas

doesn’t mean I write about mountains,

or only talk of politics and poverty.”

What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

I am inspired by Plath and somehow write in the confessional genre. However, my writing is unique in the sense that I capture the events surrounding me, and I give a different touch to emotions. Readers who have encountered my work often tell me that they find uniqueness in what I write. This is what keeps me writing.

What does poetry mean to you?

I still remember the first time I wrote a poem. I was in my classroom and I saw rays of light passing through the ventilation. Immediately, I scribbled my first poem. Since then I haven’t stopped writing. Poetry is enlightenment to me. I see the world and write the world through it.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I do not have a specific time to write, but I often write during night or morning. I usually write in my room. I’m not the kind of writer who takes a notebook and goes around observing and writing. I observe first, meditate, and then write.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

Usually I don’t listen to anything, and if I do, then I listen to music that’s related to what I want to write about. There are times I only listen to instrumental music. I rarely listen to something because I feel poetry is music too, and I do not want the external music to affect the internal music.

“I do not want the external music

to affect the internal music.”  

When you’re having trouble getting started on a poem, where do you look for inspiration?

I keep being inspired by what I see and feel.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

I am not philosophical, but the reason why I write is that I want to express my feelings and emotions, and also to record the events of my life.

How do you balance content with form in your poems?

My poems generally shape up as I write. If I thought too much about making a balance between content and form then the outcome would be much different than what it should be.

Do you generally write poetry only in English, or do you write in another language first and then translate your poems?

At my book launch, one Korean poet asked me whether I think in Nepali or English since I write in English only. I think in English while writing, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think in Nepali at all!

Is there a quote about writing that inspires you?

“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine.”

These lines by Marianne Moore motivate me to write. I, too, dislike poetry at times because not many read it, and somehow that gives the feeling that it creates nothing. But writing poetry always gives a sort of satisfaction.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Keep writing. Do not get discouraged by rejection. The tragedy of being a poet is often that the poet’s work is only recognized after death.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

Poets are mad. Think twice before writing! I thought to myself, better write and become mad than not write and become mad.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Time! I need to make time to write as I often get engaged in the daily mundane and I fail to scribble. But I have kept the habit of writing one poem every day. This is the challenge for me—write a poem every day.

“Write a poem every day.”

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

I like to live my life! The most important thing is to live life; writing comes secondary. Words are like wind, and we are dust. I personally feel that writing and living should be balanced. Let’s live and write, but not die by writing only.

About Arun Budhathoki (Daniel Song)

Arun Budhathoki (Daniel Song) was born in Kathmandu. He went to Hyderabad, South India for undergraduate studies at Nizam College, and then to the University of Northampton, United Kingdom for a master’s degree. He is nomadic in nature and does not wish to live in one particular place for a long time. Budhathoki’s poems have been published in The Kathmandu Post, in the anthologies Weather and Journeys, and in ezines Kritya, MadSwirl, and more. He runs a Kathmandu-based journal of literature and art called The Applicant. Budhathoki published his first book Edge, and is working to publish a second poetry book and novella.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Arun Budhathoki (Daniel Song)." Words With Writers (May 9, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/05/09/arun-budhatoki-daniel-song/.]

Hazel White. Photo by Marissa Bell Toffoli (2012).

An introduction to Hazel White, author of the poetry collection Peril as Architectural Enrichment (Kelsey Street Press, 2011). White holds degrees in philosophy and literature, and has also studied crop agriculture and landscape architecture. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from California College of the Arts. The author of 11 gardening books, Peril as Architectural Enrichment is her first book of poems.

These two pursuits of White’s were recently fused for a UC Berkeley Botanical Garden symposium in February 2012. White described the experience as “an enormous moment. I was challenged to integrate what had previously been two separate parts of my life: the experimental poetry, and my commercial writing about landscape architecture. I made a presentation that was a sonnet, and it was a collage of prose, poetics, and  philosophy, all around landscape architecture.” For readers of Peril as Architectural Enrichment, White’s background as a garden and landscape author seems absolutely fitting. In her poetry, the natural world intertwines with an intellectual and philosophical world to create thoughtful tension as the narrator searches for balance and an understanding of her place in this space.

Quick Facts on Hazel White

• Home: San Francisco, California
• Comfort food: roast potatoes
• Top reads: A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein; the Origins of Architectural Pleasures by Grant Hildebrand; and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Rusty Morrison, Kathleen Fraser—the whole group of women experimental writers.
• Current reads: Rusty Morrison’s work

What are you working on at the moment?  

Two collaboration projects, actually. One with poet Denise Newman, and it’s an installation for an arts festival at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden this July. Our project is called Botanica Recognita: Signage to Facilitate a Greeting. We’re having a lot of fun playing with the idea of how people encounter plant signs and with a longstanding philosophy of beauty that recognizes beauty as an experience similar to a greeting. We have a sort of sense that people greet the beautiful plants there, and then look to the signs but the signs don’t work in that realm. They work in a scientific categorization realm. So, we’re putting poems on plant signs that speak to a greeting of human consciousness across the porous interface with nonhuman intelligent animation.

The other collaboration has to do with an artist residency in Connecticut called I-Park. It’s 450 acres of woodland, meadows, and a lake, farmhouse, and artist studios. At a symposium last February, the founder of I-Park put me in touch with artist Mie Preckler, who did a trail on those 450 acres 10 years ago. I’m going back to Connecticut twice this year to compose a sonnet-like, layered piece addressing Mie’s trail. I’m excited about that. It’s very definitely halfway home for me and it’s going to be wild for me to write to that landscape.

And a third thing, I’m still trying to write the essay that I went to California College of the Arts (CCA) in order to write. A teacher told me the sad news at the end of the first semester that she thought maybe I could write it in five years. Well, now it’s been seven and I think I’m writing it now. Talk about humbling.

How has your background with gardening and landscape architecture influenced your poetry?

It all comes out of my experience as a child growing up on farms in remote parts of England. Peril as Architectural Enrichment, the first poem in the book addresses the architecture of my childhood experience. There’s the house, there’s the tree, which I climb and from where I can look down on the comings and goings, and there’s the landscape. When I was no older than eight, I’d walk three or four miles at least into the hills by myself. I had what I think of now as a deep, uncanny life outdoors. Life was actually very boring, and it was very isolated. The activities were the coming and going of light, the shelter on one side of a hawthorn hedge, the movement of animals and birds, and what was in bloom.

“I had what I think of now

as a deep, uncanny life outdoors.”

My interest in gardening was because the garden, the way I define it, is an interface between the house and the wild. It’s a place where we are still working out our relationship to the wild. To write about gardening is to write about what’s at stake in that relationship, especially to write about landscape architecture where this space has been designed. The best landscape architects recognize that there are deeply held feelings about wanting to live at ease again in one’s habitat, which is the landscape.

When I went to CCA, I had already had one life-changing experience. At that time, for the last twenty-something years I’d been writing about landscape architecture and gardening. One day, I opened a glossy magazine and saw a photograph of a garden that was designed by Isabelle Greene in Montecito, California. I had this incredibly strong experience, a conviction that I would do whatever it took to stand in that space. It was a physical thing, and that started this whole set of steps of taking myself to that space. Two years later I stood there. I could read landscape architecture pretty well by that time; I could say why something was working well and why I felt the way I did, why I wanted to walk over here, and why I didn’t want to walk there, and how it was all engineered. But when I stood in that garden, I couldn’t understand it. At that point, I started this whole journey of trying to figure out what was happening in that space, and that led to poetry. I started at CCA hoping to write that essay. 

What do you hope readers will take away from your Peril as Architectural Enrichment?

It would be a dream to be able to write poetry that had an effect, a physical effect on the body of the reader.

Who do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

The ideal reader would be any reader who finds something in the work. But, I have an attachment to ordinary people. I tried to write about these deeper landscape things in ordinary gardening books. I grew up working class, so the intellectual world is still a little daunting to me.

When you’re struggling with a poem, where do you look for inspiration?

I turn to something that’s usually already arrived on my desk, because before being stuck, on a whim, I’ve bought this rather strange thing. A book about animal architecture, for example. Once I spent about $45 on this book about animal architecture and it was very, very boring. I regretted it hugely for ages. I’d always had this fidgety thing that something I needed was in this book somewhere. One day, I was writing and I got stuck, and I picked up that book again. Finally, I’m in the index and I realize this is why I’ve bought this book: there are all these verbs that have to do with building. All these fabulous verbs related to how animals build!

Where would you most want to live and write?

Well, I had a fantasy, and I did actually pursue it, of renting a sweet cottage in the English countryside where I grew up. I once thought I needed that, you know, to return, to not be an immigrant. So I did that, but I couldn’t write there. I’ve learned that I needn’t be precious about the place, or how I feel.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I have a complete routine. I write early in the morning, before I’ve had any conversations with anyone. I have an office across the roof, under the eaves of the house, and I write there in the mornings. I don’t think that I could write at any other time, so strong is that habit.

What do you listen to when you work?

Yeah, for a long time now, I listen to Philip Glass.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

“To see how a body wants to move

in space before habit claims

its movements.”

I’m a longtime student of Alexander Technique. For me, it’s about overcoming habit to see how a body wants to move in space before habit claims its movements. I’m very interested indeed, and this is part of my writing about landscape—I’m only in a small way interested in landscape as an idea, as a social construct—my work is about the experience of landscape prior to landscape becoming a construct. I’m trying to get below the level of habitual, trained response to what movement exists beneath. For example, it’s been found that we love a combination of shelter and a view, and we will walk toward that space. And peril is one of the pleasures identified as being essential to architecture. So, my philosophy about why I write is, I guess, that it’s an expression of an almost animal nature of being in habitat. On the one hand I would like to write more clearly, and on the other hand I would like to go farther into a sort of limbic writing that’s more feral.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

I remember at CCA one of the teachers said write about what you know. I recognized in the end that I had gone to CCA wanting to become somebody different than who I was. At that time, landscape wasn’t very interesting to anybody. I wanted to escape it. I wanted to be different, to be urban and smart, say. But I ended up writing about the thing I know.

What advice would you give to the aspiring gardener?

I was teaching a class recently called Beginning Again in the Garden, and I was trying to teach people about all this sort of stuff. If you just go out into the garden as a practice, and follow how your body wants to move in the space—first you pull a weed, right? And then, things become so sweet in relation to how the dirt feels and how wet the weed is that you take off your gloves. And you stay out there for ages. To value that experience as being why you garden means that you will keep gardening. Whereas if you keep thinking I need to rip up the lawn and do all this stuff, you don’t go out there at all.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

“That when I feel uncomfortable,

I keep writing straight into that place.”

That when I feel uncomfortable, I keep writing straight into that place. When I’m lost and things aren’t working, and I get irritable and agitated, that I should probably just keep going right down that way. Not to let my feelings run the show.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

I think being in a place where I don’t know what I’m doing and where I’m going, which is pretty much the place where I’m writing always. You know, I don’t know what I’m writing, I don’t know why I wrote that line.

In Peril as Architectural Enrichment, there’s one line on a page that says, “Throw the fruit out of the tree!” I wrote that one day and I knew that it had a place in the work, but I was horrified that I would have to write a whole sequence of things to establish that line in this work.

When not writing, what do you like to do?

I’m a parent, and I’m a white parent of an African-American child, so I do a fair amount of study, training, and work around anti-racism and whiteness and racism. I actually hope one day that will come into my work.

About Hazel White

Hazel White grew up on farms in the southwest of England. After finishing degrees in philosophy and literature at Warwick University, she studied crop agriculture at Bridgwater College Center for Land Based Studies, and then, through University of California, Berkeley, Extension, landscape architecture. White also earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing at California College of the Arts. She’s the author of 11 gardening books, published by Sunset Books and Chronicle Books. Her first book of poems, Peril as Architectural Enrichment, was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2011 and was a poetry finalist in the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year Awards. Poems from it were previously published in Verse, The Denver Quarterly, Blink, and Tarpaulin Sky.

Buy Peril as Architectural Enrichment, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Hazel White." Words With Writers (April 16, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/04/16/hazel-white/.]

Peril as Architectural Enrichment by Hazel White (Kelsey Street Press, 2011).

Brian Griffith. Photo courtesy of Brian Griffith.

An introduction to author and independent historian Brian Griffith, whose new book titled A Galaxy of Immortal Women (Exterminating Angel Press, 2012) ties mythology, archaeology, history, religion, folklore, literature, and journalism into a millennia-spanning story about how Chinese women—and their goddess traditions—fostered a counterculture that flourishes and grows stronger every day. Griffith’s previous books are The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History, Different Visions of Love: Partnership and Dominator Values in Christian History, and Correcting Jesus: 2000 Years of Changing the Story.

Quick Facts on Brian Griffith

• Brian Griffith online
• Home: Near Toronto, Ontario, in a condo.
• Comfort food: Iranian kabobs
• Top reads: Joseph Campbell, Riane Eisler, Starhawk, Vandana Shiva, Naomi Klein
• Current reads: Jane Goodall, Hope for Animals and Their World

What are you working on at the moment?

A book on “animal wars,” about how different cultures have different associations with the same animals, and how there’s probably more room for improvement than we assume.

Where did the idea for A Galaxy of Immortal Women come from?

Back in the 1980s and 90s, I got excited about work by Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler on the Western world’s prehistoric “civilizations of the goddess.” I wondered how cultures like that could be trashed and forgotten in the march of progress. Then it dawned on me that China has many popular cults of goddesses, and that basically, China’s civilization of the goddess never died. Their goddesses, such as Guanyin, Xi Wang Mu, Chen Jinggu, or Mazu, represent something little seen in the West—religious traditions built by women, for women. And these traditions have survived without facing deadly persecution. They were never erased from the record. Maybe most Chinese people have had too much respect for their mother’s values. I got curious and studied this for some years. And slowly I realized that the women’s religions were just one aspect of a huge counterculture within the world’s biggest society. It’s a whole alternative “Yin” version of Chinese civilization, with its own visions concerning balance, partnership, health, and human potential. I found the myths, insights, heroes, and saints of this counterculture to be refreshing and powerful. I began to see this counterculture as a gigantic force for good in the world, which is only growing stronger. I wanted to learn about that, and share some stories about people I can really admire. 

“I began to see this counterculture

 as a gigantic force for good in the world,

which is only growing stronger.”

Who do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

I wish it was translated in Mandarin and read by thousands of Chinese factory girls. If a few hundred copies circulated around Saudi Arabia, I’d love it even if I didn’t know. I wish retired couples who are curious about Tai Chi, Daoism, or Buddhism would pick it up. Last, I wish it was required reading in tons of women’s studies or comparative religion courses, especially in Riane Eisler’s Center for Partnership Studies.

What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

I hope people will gain a greater appreciation for Chinese women—what they’ve come through, what they’ve stood for, and what they’ve achieved. I hope readers enjoy the stories and find something they’d like to explore further. I hope people gain a more critical and creative eye concerning what they respect. Because in China, warlord rulers commonly claimed to be the central objects of their people’s loyalties. Confucian officials claimed to be the official spokesmen of their civilization. Eldest males commonly claimed to be the primary figures in their families. But who has believed these claims? Most of the women described in this book have not. And I hope that readers take away a greater sense of creative independence in choosing who they believe, who they learn from, and who they are. One thing I don’t want is for people to assume the book proclaims female superiority. Because most Chinese women have wanted real partnership rather than a struggle for superiority.

“I hope that readers take away a greater sense

of creative independence in choosing who they believe,

who they learn from, and who they are.”

Where and when do you prefer to write?

In the mornings. It starts out good and things go downhill from there.

Where would you most want to live and write?

You know, writing requires a lack of distractions, and there’s no place like home. If there’s nothing but a strip mall in the snow outside, that is actually quite conducive to the practice. 

What do you listen to when you work?

Absolutely nada.

Do you have a philosophy for, or an approach to, how and why you write?

I believe that my mind is like a small flashlight, which forgets whatever the beam isn’t presently shining on. Therefore I need help. Whenever I see something of note, I must make a note of it. I must collect the notes on used paper torn into quarter-pages. Then I comb through the piles of notes, subdividing them into what somehow goes with what. Only then will connections appear. Only in repeated drafts with more cards will the story round out, and acquire far more memory than my head will hold.

Beyond that, I’m fascinated by the ways cultural history influences us, and how collective experience offers insights for the future. I basically agree with Riane Eisler that our history is an evolving competition between values of partnership and values of domination. In one story we are fighting over who’s on top. In the other we are exploring how good our relations can get.

“I’m fascinated by the ways cultural history

influences us, and how collective experience

offers insights for the future.”

What kind of research did you do for A Galaxy of Immortal Women?  

I just read everything listed in the references section [aka pages 292-306 of the book!] and took several shoeboxes-full of notes. I know a few women of Chinese descent, but I was too shy to say much about the project to them. My publisher (Tod Davies) and some other friends of friends offered good advice. 

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Read lots, take notes, keep the notes somewhere, have some personal adventures, read through your notes.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

I didn’t get much advice. But when I read Joseph Campbell, I wanted to write like that.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

I tried to lighten up a bit, and focus more on what I appreciate than on what I oppose.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Hang out with my wife.

About Brian Griffith

Brian Griffith is an editor and writer living near Toronto, Ontario. A Galaxy of Immortal Women (Exterminating Angel Press, 2012) is his most recent work. Previous books by Griffith are The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History (2001), Different Visions of Love: Partnership and Dominator Values in Christian History (2008), and Correcting Jesus: 2000 Years of Changing the Story (2009).

Buy A Galaxy of Immortal Women, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Brian Griffith." Words With Writers (April 4, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/04/04/brian-griffith/.]

A Galaxy of Immortal Women by Brian Griffith (Exterminating Angel Press, 2012).

Allan G Johnson. Photo by Paul Johnson.

An introduction to sociologist and writer Allan G Johnson, whose latest novel is Nothing Left to Lose (Plain View Press, 2011). Johnson’s first novel was The First Thing and the Last, and his nonfiction books include The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, and Privilege, Power, and Difference. Since 1972, when he received his PhD in Sociology, Johnson has worked on issues of gender, race, and social justice.

Quick Facts on Allan G Johnson

• Allan G. Johnson’s website
• Home: A small town in the northwest hills of Connecticut.
• Top reads: Jane Kenyon, Louise Erdrich, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
• Current reads: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1

What are you working on at the moment?

Writing a new novel and finding a publisher for a novel I completed last fall.

Where did the idea for Nothing Left to Lose come from?

I’ve been working to understand men’s violence in all its forms for many years, first as a sociologist and now as a novelist, in this and my previous book, The First Thing and the Last, a story about domestic violence. In the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War, I saw a father and son interviewed on the nightly news in Detroit—the son was resisting the draft—and I suddenly became aware of how powerful the relationship between fathers and sons can be when it comes to masculinity and violence and war. I never forgot what I saw going between the young man and his father, how complex these situations are, and how important are the ties between parents and children making such profound moral choices about how to live and the kind of human being they will be, choices that echo across generations.

What do you hope readers will take away from Nothing Left to Lose?

A deeper sense of who we are, what it means to be a human being, what that calls on us to be and do. And to question what makes war possible—even inevitable—time after time, and the terrible toll it takes on people’s lives, the few we know about, the ones we see, and the many we do not.

“A deeper sense of who we are,

what it means to be a human being.”

 Who would you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

Someone who appreciates literary fiction, not only the power of story but the beauty of the language used to tell it. Someone who believes in diving deep toward an understanding of the human condition, especially when that path takes us to places we might rather not go. 

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I always write first thing in the morning, before anything else has a chance of taking over my mind. I have a quiet writing room in a far corner of our house. It looks out into the woods. No phone, no internet, no distractions.

Where would you most want to live and write?

Right where I am. 

Do you listen to anything while you write?

Just the flow of the story and the voices of my characters. For years I’ve had a card sitting on my writing table with the word “Listen.”

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

I write first because I love language, not only the power of what it can say, but also the sheer beauty of it, the rhythm and pace and arc of a line, as with music. And because there are stories that choose me as much as I choose them, that call on me to render them in the best way that I know how, as honestly and completely as I can.

How has your background as a sociologist influenced your fiction?

It’s had a lot to do with the kinds of stories I’ve felt called to write, although the novel I’ve just finished is farther from my sociological sensibility than the rest (I’ve written five, two of which have been published). At the same time, I learned early on to separate the sociology from the art so that I don’t fall into making a point or conveying a message rather than telling a story, which is my first obligation as a novelist. On a deeper level, of course, the two are inseparable since every character lives in some kind of social context that shapes who they are. All of which means that while I’m writing, I’m not thinking about the sociology of anything, and yet it cannot help but inform what I pay attention to and what I make of characters and their lives.

“While I’m writing, I’m not thinking about

the sociology of anything, and yet it cannot help

but inform what I pay attention to.”

Is there a quote about writing that motivates you?

The poet, Jane Kenyon, was once asked what the job of a poet is. I think her reply says as much about the writing of serious fiction as it does about poetry. “The poet’s job,” she said, “is to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in such a beautiful way that people cannot live without it; to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name.” That is what I’m always trying to do.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

I don’t think they have. My goal is best expressed by my response to the previous question, and I expect that will be my goal for as long as I write.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Read the work of good writers and, of course, write, every day if you can. Don’t worry about getting it right the first time. Learn to love revising. “Words are not precious,” an editor once said to me. “There are plenty more where those came from.” So, cut, cut, cut. Also, writing poetry is good for developing a sense of what language can do and as a source of discipline. You learn to make every word count—earn its place or out it goes.

“Learn to love revising.”

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

In addition to the above, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” which I believe comes from G K Chesterton.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

When someone reads something I’ve written and calls on me to change it in ways that, at the time, I don’t believe I know how to do. I’ve learned to step back at times like that (and breathe) and then wait, because eventually I will come to see what needs to be done and how to do it. I know more than I think I do.

About Allan G Johnson (in his own words)

I was born in Washington, DC, in 1946 and lived for two years with my family in Norway. When I was eight we moved to New England where I did the rest of my growing up. I wrote my first (very) short story when I was ten years old. I wrote poetry and short fiction all through high school, winning awards for both in my senior year, and continued writing on into college. Going to graduate school and earning a PhD in Sociology was a detour away from my art that lasted a decade or so. I think I was trying to figure out who I was and what was happening in the world, which was in a lot of turmoil at the time with the war and the civil rights movement. I came back to fiction when I left full-time teaching in 1980, but I had to earn a living and so I wasn’t able to take it very far. I came back to my roots as a writer about 15 years ago when I started working on my first novel, The First Thing and the Last.

Finding a publisher for The First Thing and the Last was an ordeal not because publishers faulted the novel on its merits but because they were disturbed by its realistic portrayal of domestic violence. I had an agent in New York who stayed with it for almost six years and seventy submissions before giving up. It was a hard lesson in the way the publishing industry works and what it has become.

Buy Nothing Left to Lose, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Allan G Johnson." Words With Writers (March 14, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/03/14/allan-g-johnson/.]

Nothing Left to Lose by Allan G Johnson (Plain View Press, 2011).

Bhuwan Thapaliya. Photo by Rehal Kharel.

An introduction to Nepalese writer Bhuwan Thapaliya, who works as an economist, and is the author of four poetry collections. Thapaliya’s books include the recently released Safa Tempo: Poems New and Selected (Nirala Publication, New Delhi), and Our Nepal, Our Pride (Cyberwit.net). Poetry by Thapaliya has been included in The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry and Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry, as well as in literary journals such as Urhalpool, MahMag, Kritya, FOLLY, The Vallance Review, Nuvein Magazine, Foundling Review, Poetry Life and Times, Poets Against the War, Voices in Wartime, Taj Mahal Review, and more. When asked if there is a quote that motivates him, Thapaliya shared these lines: “Luck lies in bed and wishes somebody to bring him his tea every morning when he wakes up after a long sleep. Labor wakes up from his bed and heads towards the kitchen to make his own cup of tea every day after a brief slumber in peace.”

Quick Facts on Bhuwan Thapaliya

• Bhuwan Thapaliya’s website
• Home: In the lap of the Himalayas. Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Comfort food: Most Nepalese food followed by pizza, burgers, chicken sizzler, and pasta.
• Top reads: A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, Annapurna Poems by Yuyutsu RD Sharma, The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
• Current reads: Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan, Grand Pursuit by Sylvia Nasar

What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently working on my debut Novel, Nepal Dreams, based on the positive power of thought and its practical implementation in the contemporary world. The book will hit the market in 2013. In the book, I aim to strengthen some of the economic responsibilities of the individual as an important service to mankind in a nation trodden by massive unemployment and psychological poverty. I am trying to practically prove that the chain of negative thought cannot be allowed to go astray, as I believe that positive thoughts are needed if we are ever to build up a healthy global society. To sum it up, I argue in the book that for many people the future of Nepal looks dismal, and they tag Nepal as an underdeveloped nation, but in the contemporary world the word “underdeveloped” doesn’t only denote the poor nations; it also implies that economic growth is promising in these nations too. Nepal has potential, however, Nepalese people must refresh, unlock, and stretch themselves against all odds to explore new avenues of thought so that more ideas can pop in to make Nepal prosperous in the future.

What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

“There is an urge toward social progress,

toward peace and solidarity,

toward global love and understanding.”

Anyone who reads my work may notice that there is an urge toward social progress, toward peace and solidarity, toward global love and understanding. I believe that the globalization of love is the cry of this century. You may well exclaim in astonishment: can the globalization of love ever be realized? My answer is, yes.

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is, to me, the blood that circulates in my veins. It is the very foundation of my survival. Writing poetry is not only a mere hobby for me, it is my way of life. It is not merely a transient desire of my mind. It is the eternal desire of my heart. Writing takes me into a different world, and I share my visions and my opinions with all in order to boost the morale of the Earth. I have a unique love for poetry, and my works are symbolic of my utmost devotion to poetry.

Poetry is not the product of my solitude. I write poetry to liven up my spirits. It inspires me to sing, laugh, hope, and dream. I believe in poetry, and poetry is an important part of my personal belief system—to me, this is what a poet’s life is all about. Furthermore, I think poetry is the medium of the emotional cooperation from one heart to another, from one soul to another, from one truth to another, from one dream to another, from one race to another, from one religion to another, from one generation to another, from one language to another, from one nation to another.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

“I get off my comfy couch,

get out of my room,

and go out into the real world.”

I don’t belong to the brood of poets who write regularly while sitting in a drawing room. I write in different places and locations. I believe in reaching out for something larger rather than waiting for it to come to me, and considering so I get off my comfy couch, get out of my room, and go out into the real world. Hence my poems are an examination of the world around me, and my poems evoke characters, events, and landscape with rich use of visual details. I write most of the time because I have a one-track mind and the only vehicle that runs on it is poetry.

It’s been said writers can do their work from any place, where would you most want to live and write?

I agree with you here. But most writers don’t live life the stereotypical way. A true writer lives beyond the confines of mystery, remote from the womb of destiny, above the landmines of race, caste, religion, history, and nationality, in the salubrious garden of humanity, and they breathe through the medium of writing.

I live in Kathmandu, Nepal, and I feel quite lucky to have been born here. I would love to live and write here forever if my job as an economist permits me to do so. I don’t loathe villages; the glimpses of everyday city life fascinate me. Children going to school, a smile on the face of a woman tempo driver, an elderly man having tea at a roadside tea stall, a dog basking in the sun—I could continue on and on. Fortunately for a person like me, Nepal has it all—from urban bustle to a rural retreat. Nepal is a historical adventure, an ancient nation with a big, friendly heart. It’s very vibrant and full of life. It’s always on the move. It twists and turns. It surprises. No matter where you look out the window, there is some attraction. People are everywhere, and so are the dogs.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

I am a diehard music fan, and most of the time I listen to songs from Iron Maiden and Megadeth while I write at home.

When you’re having trouble getting started on a poem, where do you look for inspiration?

My struggles in life are my biggest inspiration. This gives me the determination to work harder in life, and fortunately I don’t have to look further than myself to start a poem or two. Furthermore, I mingle with common people a lot, and from them I also draw inspiration. Sometimes I stroll alone in the narrow lanes of Kathmandu, and find inspiration from lonely hearts, jagged and crestfallen, which vibrate with humanity’s offbeat vigor, defining it in constrained demeanors.

How do you balance content with form in your poems?

Poetry is not only about meter and rhyme; to me it is more about people and their lives, their tears and smiles. I look more at the content than the form, but I do attempt to justify the substance in the content through the form of my poems. A conflict arises at times between content and form; there exists between the two a strong reciprocal relationship with dependencies.

Do you write poetry only in English, or do you write in another language first and then translate your poems?

I generally write in English.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

“Don’t be intimidated by darkness.”

Don’t be intimidated by darkness. Darkness has some light of its own. Doesn’t a dragonfly use the cover of the darkness to emerge from its larval skin and dry its wings to fly by morning?

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

“Paint the canvas of your dreams with the blood of your sweat, for you are the Picasso of your own life.” My dad gave me this advice a long time ago, and it’s my mantra for success.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

For me, one of the biggest challenges is finding a balance between a full-time job and writing. Most of the time I am busy with my economics work, and I am not at all an organized person, so finding time to write in the midst of a hectic schedule has been a challenge all these years. Gathering enthusiasm to write between the constant demands of work isn’t easy to do.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Most of the time I am writing, but I spend my rare free time watching sports, listening to music, and being with my small core circle of friends and family.

About Bhuwan Thapaliya

Bhuwan Thapaliya was born in Kathmandu, Nepal and is one of the most widely read Nepali poets writing in English today. Thapaliya, who works as an economist, is the author of four poetry collections. His books include the recently released Safa Tempo: Poems New and Selected (Nirala Publication, New Delhi), and Our Nepal, Our Pride (Cyberwit.net) narrative verses of love, peace, and human understanding. Poetry by Thapaliya has been included in The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry and Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry, as well as in literary journals such as Urhalpool, MahMag, Kritya, FOLLY, The Vallance Review, Nuvein Magazine, Foundling Review, Poetry Life and Times, Poets Against the War, Voices in Wartime, Taj Mahal Review, and more. Thapaliya has read his poetry and attended seminars in venues around the world, including South Korea, the United States, Thailand, Cambodia, and Nepal.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Bhuwan Thapaliya." Words With Writers (February 17, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/02/17/bhuwan-thapaliya/.]

Lowry Pei. Photo by Vaughn Sills.

An introduction to Lowry Pei, author of the novel Over the Fence (TheWriteDeal.org). Pei’s first book, Family Resemblances, was published by Random House in 1986. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories 1984, The American Story: The Best of StoryQuarterly, and his book reviews have been published in the New York Times Book Review. Pei’s unique point of view owes much to his unlikely origins as the son of an engineer from Suzhou, China, and a schoolteacher from a small town in Kansas. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, and teaches writing at Simmons College.

Quick Facts on Lowry Pei

• Lowry Pei’s website
• Home: Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Comfort food: linguine with clam sauce
• Top reads: Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples; Walker Percy, The Moviegoer; Charles Dickens, Bleak House; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men.
• Current reads: Queen of America by Luis Alberto Urrea

What are you working on at the moment?

Since the beginning of the school year, I’ve mostly been writing comments on my students’ work. I taught two creative nonfiction classes in the fall, and I’m teaching a fiction class, and a writing pedagogy class, this spring. I wrote about 55,000 words of comments last semester, which is not unusual for me. I was trying to write an essay on the difference between encountering a text on paper and reading it on a screen, but nearly everything I said about this turned out, on second reading, to be obvious. Still, there’s something that needs to be said about the thingness of a text, now that it can no longer be taken for granted.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a story I wrote about a year ago is thinking about becoming a novel.

Where did the idea for your novel Over the Fence come from?   

Over the Fence came from an image that stuck in my mind and wouldn’t stop recurring. In it, I seemed to be standing in the backyard of the house in St. Louis where I grew up, looking at the back fence with weedy vines on it, an ornamental plum tree that grew there, and the brick-paved alley that ran behind the fence. Nothing special was happening in this scene; it was daytime, quiet, no one around. It was the most ordinary image in the world, but it kept occurring to me. A story often starts for me as an image that won’t go away; it seems to me that the image is alive, is an awareness. While I am looking at it, it is looking back at me. The story, somehow, is in the image. As Joan Didion said, “N.B.: You don’t tell it, it tells you.”

“A story often starts for me

as an image that won’t go away.”

A transformed version of the image occurs at the end of chapter 5 of the novel, but in a larger sense the novel literally involves digging into this image, as Lucas digs a giant hole in his backyard and stumbles upon a way to get into a spirit world.

What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

I was thinking about that pretty hard when I was revising this novel, and in the end I came to this: I want readers to take seriously their duty to their secret self.

I think about a novel thematically at the end of the process, not at the beginning. When I thought about Over the Fence this way, I realized I was saying that there are two very different things that go by the name of love: desire plus power, and desire plus trust. It matters a great deal not to mistake one for the other.

Who do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

One thing I’m sure of is that my books are not written for a moralistic reader, or for one who is constantly passing judgment. In this novel in particular, I’m writing for readers who are willing to let the unexpected and unrealistic coexist in their imagination with the most everyday kind of reality, readers who like to take the risk of believing something that’s hard to believe. From early on in Over the Fence, I wrote knowing that to some people it would look like the silliest damn thing they ever read. But I couldn’t let myself be stopped by that. I could only write for readers who are willing to climb downward into the deeper layers of the self.

My ideal reader is at home with loss, and remembers what it’s like to have a hope that admits of no compromise.

My ideal reader deeply loves ordinary day-to-day life, is not bored with it, is not blasé.

I think for the ideal reader, reading is a secret assignation with the self.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

In my writing shed in Prince Edward Island, Canada, in the summer. In my shed there’s no internet and no phone, and outside is a meadow that ends at the shore. It can’t be beat.

I need to know that I can look forward to a large block of time with few interruptions or obligations, a time when I can live inside the world of my creation for hours every day. Once I get going, I can write for most of the day, with breaks for naps and lunch, day after day. I can’t write a novel by working an hour a day; the writing is no good and I just end up frustrated.

Where would you most want to live and write?

I couldn’t live in Prince Edward Island year-round, even if we had a place that was winterized; the winter would be too long and too isolating. I think I would stay right where I am, in Cambridge.

Do you listen to anything while you work?

Nothing except the ambient sounds of the outside world. I need quiet so I can hear what the voice in my head is saying.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

I think writing is something you do because, for some reason, you have to. Writing is self-causing.

Mario Vargas Llosa, in Letters to a Young Novelist, says “dissent from real life, from the world as it is  . . . is the root of the novelist’s vocation.” And this: “Authenticity or sincerity is for the novelist: the acceptance of his own demons and the decision to serve them as well as possible.” I think that’s what I have done.

I do my best to follow Ray Bradbury’s two-word piece of advice: “Don’t think.” For me, the imagination always does something other, never what it is told. There is no point in trying to tell it what to do. My job when I’m writing a first draft—and I have to remind myself of this every day that I write—is to listen to the little voice in my head and write down what it says. The thinking, and there’s a great deal of it, should come later, during revision.

“The imagination always

does something other,

never what it is told.”

For me, planning what I’m going to write only works when the plan is provisional, conjectural, and I am ready at any moment to see that the plan was wrong and chuck it in the trash. All plans are proved wrong by the writing itself. As soon as I begin to write, what I actually write diverges from what I meant to write, what I dimly envisioned.

How do you balance content with form?

For me, the crucial formal element of fiction on which everything else hinges is the way that it’s narrated. If I can get the narrating voice of a story right in my mind’s ear, if I can be the source of that voice and write through it, the story can get told. All my novels are in first person (some with multiple narrators), so the narrating voice is coming from a character. I am writing from within this character, being the narrator-protagonist as I tell the story, and the story is the narrator’s story; in this way content and form merge.

Of course there are many other aspects of the shape of a novel that come under the heading of form, and for many people, content means theme. For me, all of that is subordinate to, or subsequent to, the reality of the story-world. I don’t think “I will write a book of a certain shape,” nor do I think, “I will write a book with a certain theme.” I believe a story starts from four essentials: a character, a place, a situation, and a narrating voice. When those are known, when those have attained rightness, then the story unfolds from within itself. Shape and theme are things that follow, that emerge; they do not determine the story.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

I think it has gradually come home to me how hard it is to say neither too much nor too little. I know it’s usually impossible to say what one means by hitting it head-on, but at the same time, I realize more and more that subtlety is not an end in itself, not necessarily a virtue.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

There are many, but here’s something that has been posted on the bulletin board in my study for years. These are notes from a workshop given by the late poet Deborah Digges:

Art lives in: the bumbler, the unfit, the shadow.

The “I” must be violated, shattered, the distance must be broken—you are both the dreamer and the dreamed—you are acted upon by the world.  The insistence that you must stay in control must be broken—the hope is that you will get lost.

You write from the unsocial, the anti-social, the sub-social—you write NOT for the culture’s approval—you leave even the reader behind, or risk leaving the reader behind, for the art.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Don’t aspire to “be a writer”; if you’re a person who has to write, you will. When you’re about to fall asleep and a sentence comes to you that feels exactly right and you absolutely don’t want to get out of bed and write it down—get out of bed and write it down. Make a final decision that you’ll do that. That is the kind of commitment you need to make to your work at all other hours, as well. Do it, because you love it.

“Lose yourself in the work.”

Forget yourself in the work, lose yourself in the work. Be ruthless on behalf of the work, learn to say no to things that matter less than the writing. Find readers who will tell you what they really think—you can’t learn to write without readers. Don’t let your writing stand or fall on the question of whether you get published; don’t outsource your legitimacy as an artist to publishers. Learn to legitimize yourself in your own eyes, do whatever it takes, because you’ll need that to sustain you over the long term.

Learn some kind of meditation. Writing and meditation are very similar mind-disciplines.

Constantly ask, “Why not? Who says I can’t?” The limitations you place on yourself are the most constricting of all. You must create yourself creative. The first thing the imagination must create is itself.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

I think it might have been the advice, which I got from Kathryn Marshall, the author of My Sister Gone, that I should try writing my first attempted novel in the first person. Doing that taught me that I had to write from inside the character, made me learn how to do that, so that for the first time I was truly writing fiction.

Is there a question you find surprising that people ask you about your work?

What surprises me is that sometimes readers understand or react to a character in a way I never imagined when I was writing. The character I thought I knew inside and out becomes, in a reader’s mind, someone I don’t recognize—now that’s surprising.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

The hardest thing is being between projects, feeling like I have nothing to write, nothing to say that I haven’t heard myself say before, waiting for something to come and not knowing if it ever will.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Teach, cook, ride my bike, watch baseball, build carpentry projects. And read, of course.

About Lowry Pei

Lowry Pei’s first novel Family Resemblances was published in 1986 by Random House (Vintage Contemporary, 1988). His story “The Cold Room” appeared in Best American Short Stories 1984, and “Naked Women” appeared in The American Story: The Best of StoryQuarterly. He has published short stories, essays, memoirs, and criticism, and his book reviews have appeared in New York Times Book Review. His unique point of view owes much to his unlikely origins as the son of an engineer from Suzhou, China, and a schoolteacher from a small town in Kansas. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, and teaches writing at Simmons College.

Buy Over the Fence.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Lowry Pei." Words With Writers (January 25, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/01/25/lowry-pei/.]

Over the Fence by Lowry Pei (TheWriteDeal.org, 2011).

Patrick Duggan. Photo by Marissa Bell Toffoli (2011).

An introduction to poet and writer Patrick Duggan. Originally from New Hampshire, Duggan has studied writing and literature at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts and California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is also a National Poetry Series finalist, and Duggan’s poems have appeared in Shampoo, Beeswax Magazine, 26 Magazine, Oranges and Sardines, Mirage: A Periodical, Monday Night, Noö Journal, Parthenon West Review, and The Inman Review.

Quick Facts on Patrick Duggan

• Home: San Francisco, California
• Comfort food: pizza
• Top reads: Frank O’Hara made me realize I could write in my own voice. Federico Garcia Lorca—he’s the poet who got me into poetry, and he showed me the beauty in the world that I could create in poetry. Garcia Lorca showed me that I could write things that were personal and in my own voice, but also absurd and beautiful at the same time. Ted Berrigan taught me how to give form to poetry, and also taught me that performing a poem can give it a life. George R R Martin, who wrote the book series A Game of Thrones; I have a lifelong love for fantasy novels. Robert Fisk is one of the most powerful journalists and political writers I’ve ever read.
• Current reads: Louis Zukofsky’s A, a monster of a book. I tend to write long poems so I’ve been interested in reading other poets who write long manuscripts to see how they handle it. Also, a fantasy book called The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

What are you working on at the moment?  

I am working on very small things. I’ve spent about eight years writing long poems, series poems, poems 60 pages long, poems linked by refrains. I hit a wall about two and a half years ago. I couldn’t think of anything to write. I couldn’t write in long form; I was having horrible writer’s block. So, I started writing small postcard poems. I did like 120 of them and mailed them to friends. After the second year of this, I was still feeling like I hadn’t written anything, but I had—they were just small poems, a form I had never worked in before. I feel like I’m coming out on the other side of something and that I’m able to write new things.

“I feel like I’m coming out on

the other side of something

and that I’m able to write new things.”

Over the last few years I’ve had to completely rewire how I think about poetry from an editorial sense. I used to write pages and pages of poems, and pick out longer things that I could continue to riff off of. Lately, I’ve been using my editorial eye to just pare things down to really get to the bare bones of the poem, the most essential things. It’s been so hard to do that. I’ve had to retrain myself, but it’s now feeling like something I’m getting my head around. I always have one eye toward how things will look in a manuscript, and I’ve been thinking about a book of small poems. There’s a really great book by Trane DeVore called Dust Habit, and that’s a book that sort of inspired me to start the postcard poems.

When you’re struggling with a poem, where do you look for inspiration?

Usually, I sit down at a coffee shop or a bar and I just kind of stare off into space until inspiration hits me. Other times, I will go to my bookshelf, pick a random book of poetry, and just start reading through it. And other times, I will listen to music. Some of the best lines I think I’ve written over the last several years are actually misheard song lyrics. I either have to sit and force myself to continue working on something or grab other books of poems to jog my creative process.

I don’t have any firm writing habits, aside from trying to write often, which I don’t do enough of at the moment. But I know a lot of people who have these great writing habits. When they’re working on a poem and they’re stuck, they have ways of writing out of that bog. I’ve always been one of those poets who, when I’m writing in my notebooks I could just write whatever comes into my head without thinking through it. Then I go back and edit from that. When I’m actively working on something, after I finish that first random editorial process, when I have to create with something specific in mind I always hit walls. It’s frustrating, and I don’t always have the tools to write my way out. 

What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

I hope people read my work and they can relate to it. Not all of it, but I hope that almost anyone could read my writing and find one thing in it that they can relate to, like one human experience, one bit of nostalgia, one bit of forward thinking hope, one image, one experience. I don’t think that there’s anyone who could read my writing and really get and love every single word because I don’t get and love every single word. But I hope that people can find moments of joy, sadness, beauty, and ugliness, and all that.

Who do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

I don’t know if I have an ideal reader for my work. Okay, when I say that, I feel that’s not exactly true. Thinking back on my writing, I reference a lot of my own life—the music I listen to, art I’ve seen, cultural moments from my own life, things related to politics—and so I don’t really think of having an ideal reader, but I think that probably someone who has had a similar life experience to mine would get more of the references. And even if that’s the ideal reader, they might not appreciate it, or they might have a different opinion of the things that I reference and talk about.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I prefer to write at coffee shops or café bars. I do my best writing in the late afternoon or early evening, like between 4pm and 7pm. It’s kind of funny to think that way, but it’s true. Whenever I write at different times during the day, I’m less productive. Normally, I like to sit and drink coffee or have a glass of beer or wine and spend like an hour and a half journaling, and then edit from there.

Where would you most want to live and write?

There isn’t one place. I’d like to have a comfortable home with a fireplace and an enormous selection of good bourbon for my home base. If money were no object, I would spend two months each in different parts of the world traveling and living. But really, I’ve lived in different parts of the country and I’ve traveled to a few different parts of Europe now, and there are different things I see everywhere I go that I love, but I’ve never found a place that’s ever felt like home to me.

What do you listen to when you work?

There’s two answers. When I’m writing, I’m usually out somewhere since I have a hard time writing in my own home, so I don’t have control over what I’m listening to. It could be anything depending on where I am. If I’m editing at home, I usually listen to alt-country, alt-folk, a lot of alt; I need music that won’t distract me. I like quiet indie music to edit to. When I’m at work, or I have headphones, I listen to punk and metal sometimes. When I’m writing I need things that can fall into the background but that I like.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

 ”I can’t not write.”

I write because I have to. When I was a little kid, I wrote and illustrated my own stories. Through growing up to the present, I’ve always written. I can’t not write. Even if my manuscripts are never published I’ll still keep writing because I have to. I write whatever comes to mind in my notebook. Sometimes it’s thoughts and feelings about the day, sometimes it’s quotes or bits of poems, or just song lyrics I’ve heard. I just write whatever I feel like in my journals and then I cull poems out of that. I’ve always written, but editing my work into poems is something that I’ve had to learn to do.

How do you balance content with form?

That’s something that has changed for me over time. I went through one phase where I was writing almost entirely prose poems, and in that case I wasn’t balancing form. I went through another phase of journaling, writing everything in prose, and then pulling out lines for poems and breaking them where my natural cadence fell. The way that I speak, I tend to stammer and stutter with my words. When I was little, I spoke incredibly fast and I also stuttered sometimes, and I still have some of that in my voice.  When I was writing to create poems in my own voice, often the lines broke where my train of thought paused or my cadence broke. Sometimes that made for really long lines, and occasionally two words on a line. Balancing form with content is something that has been a lifelong learning process for me.

Form is something that I didn’t think was important when I first started writing, and now I really enjoy form. I enjoy seeing how the form that words take on the page can inform your reading of it. Form is my friend now, especially since I’m working on smaller, more sparse writing. But what got me into writing was really more prose or prose poems. I learned form, but I couldn’t really execute it in my own writing. I still write in long lines and in prose blocks, and then I pull out the form from there.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

I would say two things. Read a lot, and don’t just read things that resonate with your own writing. Ask your friends for recommendations, go online and get ideas—just read everything. The more you read, the better writer you will be. I have yet to meet anyone for whom that was not true. The other piece of advice I would give is to not be dissuaded, especially if you’re a poet. Poetry is a niche art; it’s never going to be appreciated by a lot of people; it’s never going to be financially rewarding. It’s an art that a lot of people do for themselves.

I write poetry because I love it and I always will. Whatever accolades I get from it is from the community of poets that I know. I’ll probably never see a dime from it. I can’t think of any positive adjectives that go along with doing something for yourself, but it’s self-affirming; it’s also kind of vain in some ways, and selfish. If you want to write poetry, it’s not going to be your job unless you’re very lucky. Don’t be dissuaded. You can be a poet and be true to yourself, and you can make it doing other things.

“You can be a poet and be true to yourself,

and you can make it doing other things.”

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

Read a lot. The best advice that I’ve gotten from a bunch of different sources is when you’re editing your own work, put it down and come back to it later. Give yourself time away from your writing. The more distance you have from your writing, the better your editorial eye will be. That’s certainly true for me.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Honestly, the thing I find most challenging is getting my work published. I send out a lot of writing to poetry book contests, small presses, and journals and stuff. The most challenging things about writing is keeping that up diligently. I have work in maybe a dozen journals, and I don’t have a book published but I was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, which is awesome. Those are all great accolades, but I literally have more than a hundred rejection slips. For that one amazing finalist thing, I have been rejected from some 30 book contests. The most challenging thing is keeping faith. If I send my work to a poetry press, they’re also getting thousands of other submissions a year. Having confidence that my work might not be published, not because it’s not good but because of other circumstances—that’s challenging. It’s challenging to be able to say to yourself, I might go the next 60 years without seeing a book published, but that doesn’t mean that I should stop writing.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

When I’m not writing, I love to read. I like to go out to new and awesome meals, and make new and awesome meals with my girlfriend. I like going on long walks and bike rides, and stuff like that. I like museums and galleries. It also seems like the older I get, the less time I have to do those things. I don’t do enough of all the things that I just listed. A lot of my off-work, off-writing time is spent reading. I escape into books to relax.

About Patrick Duggan

Patrick Duggan is originally from New Hampshire, and has studied writing and literature at Emerson College in Boston, MA and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. He is also a National Poetry Series finalist, and his poems have appeared in Shampoo, Beeswax Magazine, 26 Magazine, Oranges and Sardines, Mirage: A Periodical, Monday Night, Noö Journal, Parthenon West Review, and The Inman Review.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Patrick Duggan." Words With Writers (January 16, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/patrick-duggan/.]

Yon Walls. Photo by W A Moody.

An introduction to writer Yon Walls, who recently published an ebook called The Sultan’s Cook (Smashwords). The ebook includes three sudden fiction stories written after Walls returned from Istanbul, Turkey. Walls is a poet, diarist, and novelist originally from Kentucky. She’s lived in California since 1972. Walls holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College where she received the Zora Neale Hurston Writing Award twice. From 2000-2008, she taught college-level English and literature in the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley areas. In 2002 and 2007, she was a teacher and writer-in-residence in Hiroshima and Kofu, Japan. Since that time, she completed Island of Swallows, a collection of poems about Japan. Walls is currently a contributing editor for Tertuliamagazine.com.

Quick Facts on Yon Walls

• Walls’ ebook The Sultan’s Cook
• Home: Sacramento, California
• Comfort food: Moist cake with lots of real buttercream icing.
• Top reads: Well, classics—Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide, Quicksand by Nella Larsen, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Not so recent, Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto; and very recently, Orhan Pamuk’s, The Museum of Innocence. And the just recently list goes on—I’m always discovering new regional writers. One surely to remember is Sholeh Wolpé, a poet and translator.
• Current reads: The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson, and the wonderful Harry Belafonte memoir entitled My Song. Some amazing essays by Toni Morrison, some lovely short, short stories, edited by Irving and Ilana Wiener Howe. I will soon reread some poems by Sonia Sanchez, and during the summer I discovered Tablet & Pen, an important and amazing anthology of work by Middle Eastern writers edited by Reza Aslan. Oh, and a wonderful collection of poems, Life on Mars by Tracy K Smith.

What are you working on right now?

I’ve just finished my first novel. Nearly two years of work. Lots of research. I think it’s solid. A well-respected editor with Simon & Schuster really likes the book, but what publishing home will finally sign the work, I’m unsure. It will be published and of course it’ll probably morph in the future. It’s the hardest writing work perhaps I’ve ever done, but proving to be the most satisfactory. Also, I’m generally having to get smarter about the business end of things—the bones of getting published and by comparison, the writing seems tame. I’m also re-editing a collection of poems written a few years back about Japan (it’s just weeping to be published), and keeping my personal journal updated. I have years and years of journals. Just mostly trying to keep interested in work already written that needs to be reviewed and met all over again.

I have recently been testing the water as a self-promoter of my work through the ebook medium. It’s exciting and I’m also learning much about the new frontier of publishing for committed writers who don’t always fit the traditional publishing mode, and who are really motivated to get their work out to readers. The Sultan’s Cook is one such little book. It’s just three stories in the sudden fiction genre that I think will resonate with some fiction readers, especially readers who also like traveling to physical places in books, or who like traveling in general. The stories are set in Turkey and are about the nature of desire as dictated by historical forces, about dreams and the human need for beauty. If readers like them enough, I’ll write more of them.

What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

That the planet and humans are complex, and although our brains are magnificent organs for calculating and measuring things that need to be measured, much of our relationship to the environment is through feeling—the emotional body sensor that can give us great meaning. Poems and stories are sensory and can give us meaning. I think my work is often ethereal, but it’s concrete, too. I would love to have my poems translated from English into another language someday. Also, many of my poems are best spoken aloud. A prism created through another language can be something very different. Recently, I was thrilled by and for a writer I respect much who has been published in Turkish—a lovely new perspective.

Who do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

A generous one, and a reader who wants to discover something—something far away or very close or something that makes them ask questions. A reader who reads as if their life depended on it.

“A reader who reads as if

their life depended on it.”

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I write at home, usually in the little hours of the mornings, early, after or before I’ve been struck by something—an atmosphere or incident that speaks to me. And, sometimes lately, I write because there’s something to be finished, something that needs to be carved out and completed.

Where would you most want to live and write?

Today I’d like to be writing in Istanbul again, just being in that little coffee shop I remember with the wide-mouth white cups. And yesterday it was London; weeks before, I had the thought I’d want to return to Kyoto on a summer night and write. Maybe one day I’d like to live for a few months in a small ancient African village, a peaceful one and beautiful, and write. But, today I’m here and it’s the best.

What do you listen to when you work?

Nothing. Just silence. Silence is beautiful.

When you’re having trouble getting started on a poem, where do you look for inspiration?

Poems are usually always difficult, not difficult like writing a novel, just different. For example, I like playing with punctuation. It sometimes gets me going until the poem invites me to be inspired by something. Or maybe it’s just a single vivid word. And no matter how small or long the poem, it has to carry a truth of  meaning. I’m inspired by this fact. Sometimes it’s just so hard to believe in what you’re creating because of the artist’s need and fascination with the new. I always want to create something I haven’t encountered before.

“I always want to create something

I haven’t encountered before.”

How do you balance content with form?

For me, first content consumes all. Once I’ve got the pulp of the content of a poem or fiction work, I consider form. Content without form—some understanding of an architecture—is a loss for the writer.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

For the last year or so it’s been: What If? It’s actually two words of a title of a book about the writing craft.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

“Find your voice and learn to love it,

and learn to wait.”

Find your voice and learn to love it, and learn to wait. I’d also say, perhaps there are more good writers than ever before, and more than ever before places to find a home for your work. And finally, the challenge and elusiveness of it all never ends. It’s just who you are—what it becomes.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

Well, the first advice wasn’t advice but something my grandfather did. He would recite Poe’s “Annabel Lee” to my mother as a child. She told me the story and it rubbed off—my love of drama in writing—my expectation of it. In the adult world of writing, I was advised to keep doing it and give more. The work is the writing. And, I remember when my third grade elementary school teacher introduced me to Emily Dickinson and I walked a very long way home that day reciting a poem she wrote because it was mysterious. I think writers have to accept that part of what they do comes from that mysterious place or simply is mysterious. Maybe in this day and time, nothing is mysterious, but it has to be. Nature is mysterious, even in light of the fact that now Einstein’s theory of relativity is being challenged by quantum physics.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Really getting to the core of what you’ve trying to say and to say it well, even when no one’s reading it, when you’re obscure.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Since returning from Japan almost a decade ago, I’ve studied chanoyu, the art of the Japanese tea ceremony (that simply translates, hot water for tea), and I practice it. I love good American and International film, watching the garden grow, and spending quality time with the people I love and the other writer I live with.

About Yon Walls

Yon Walls is a poet, diarist, and recent novelist native of Kentucky. She’s lived in California since 1972. Her most recent work, The Sultan’s Cook, a little ebook collection of sudden fiction, was published with Smashwords.com in 2011. Her poems have appeared in Syllogism, Parkway Journal of Hiroshima, Japan, Niedergasse and numerous other journals. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. While at Mills she received the Zora Neale Hurston Writing Award twice, and in 2002 adapted Two Ways To Count to Ten and The Magic Bones for children. In 2004, she was selected as a writing participant of the Voices of Our Nation Foundation at the University of San Francisco.

From 2000-2008, she taught College English and Literature in the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley areas. In 2002 and 2007, she was a teacher and writer-in-residence in Hiroshima, and Kofu, Japan. In 2009, she completed Island of Swallows, a collection of poems about Japan. Walls is currently a contributing editor for Tertuliamagazine.com and working to publish her first novel.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Yon Walls." Words With Writers (December 30, 2011), http://wordswithwriters.com/2011/12/30/yon-walls/.]

Sarah Schulman. Photo by Marissa Bell Toffoli (2011).

An introduction to Sarah Schulman, author of The Mere Future (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009). Schulman’s numerous books include the novels Rat Bohemia, Empathy, and The Child, and the nonfiction book The Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project, and she is currently organizing the first US LGBT delegation to Palestine for Winter 2012. Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at CUNY, College of Staten Island, and was awarded a Brown Foundation Fellowship from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her other awards include a Guggenheim, Fulbright, and the 2009 Kessler Award for her “Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies.”

Quick Facts on Sarah Schulman

• Sarah Schulman’s ACT UP Oral History Project
• Home: Manhattan, New York
• Comfort food: Well, I’m in San Francisco. I like the burritos with salsa verde at Alabama and 24^th Street. That would be my San Francisco comfort food.
• Top reads: Carson McCullers, Rabih Alameddine, Caryl Phillips, Vivian Gornick, and Claudia Rankine. I like Funeral Rites by Jean Genet.
• Current reads: Lady Painter, the Joan Mitchell biography by Patricia Albers; Open City by Teju Cole

What are you working on at the moment?  

Well, I’m working on a lot of things. I have a book coming out in the fall of 2012 from Duke University Press called Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. It’s a political memoir that’s basically about how the rise of the gay movement in Palestine is going to transform secular politics in Palestine, and that’s going to transform Arab politics and therefore global politics. I am predicting and feeling that it’s a key movement to emerge at a very key time. I’m anticipating a lot of great consequences as a result.

I just finished a new novel. It’s called The Cosmopolitans. I wanted it to sound like a Henry James novel. It’s a remake of Balzac’s Cousin Bette. Cousin Bette is about a spinster who is wronged by her family and wants to get revenge. She destroys everybody and everything, and in the end, she wins. That was the plot I started with but I set it in Greenwich Village in 1958. I was born that year, and it’s set in the building I was born in, and in fact it ends on the day of my birth.

In the process of writing, it also became an answer book to a second novel, which is James Baldwin’s Another Country. Because of the milieu and the time, The Cosmopolitans is about interraciality, bohemianism; it’s about straight people and gay people interacting with each other. Suddenly I ended up in the same territory as Baldwin’s Another Country, only the difference was that my female characters are real and his aren’t. I thought, wow, this is a book that’s speaking to both Balzac and Baldwin at the same time. I’m really happy with it. I’ve been working on it since 2003.

Where did the idea for The Mere Future come from?

I had this sentence: “Passion escapes me on the hot sun porch.” I just had that and I didn’t know what to do with it. I believe it became the words of the article that the main character writes about Glick. She’s only allowed eight words for the article. That’s what I started with, and I just started justifying it. I was feeling very free.

I’ve written 17 books and each book is in a different style. But, I’ve written another book that has a similar impulse to this one, which is called Empathy and came out in 1992. It was also highly formally inventive. I think form really has to come organically from the emotions at the core of the piece. Sometimes you’re just in a territory where nothing that’s known is appropriate for that content, or that emotional impulse, so you have to invent it.

“Sometimes you’re just in a territory

where nothing that’s known is appropriate

for that content, so you have to invent it.”

In this case, since the subject is the future, you can’t really write a novel about the future using language of the past. It doesn’t make any sense. I guess Anthony Burgess proved that in A Clockwork Orange. But what is the language of our future? And it’s the mere future, not the far future. I wanted it to be like something that we’re on the precipice of linguistically. There’s texting fragments and email, and all that. Then, there’s the incredible speed with which slogans and marketing and advertising creep into conversation, and people internalize that. And then, there’s like channel surfing, where you can completely understand what’s happening in two or three words. So many of the paradigms in entertainment are repetitive and you can trigger them with very few words; they don’t have to be full sentences. All of that is the language of the future. It’s a language of reduction. But, I didn’t want to just do that because it’s boring—it’s flat. I took that kind of minimal, associative, reductive language but I made it sort of funny and interesting, and a little smarter than it normally would be. I stylized it up. That’s how the language part came to be.

You know, it was written in 1999. It took 10 years to find a publisher. It looks like it’s about Obama, but it actually had nothing to do with that. I was writing about the future, and there were certain trends that I could see were coming, and people who were reading the manuscript couldn’t see that those trends were coming. It was only when the trends had actually already come that those people could then understand the book. It sort of defeated the purpose of it, but I’ve had that experience before. Sometimes I write with a 10-year gap.

What do you hope readers will take away from The Mere Future?

Of course, I want them to enjoy it. I would like them to feel okay about reading slowly. It’s not a long book, but some of the sentences require thought. You can’t glide over it; it’s not a skimming kind of book. You know, I once read Colette’s autobiography and it took me three years. And I think that’s okay. It’s like the slow food movement, but it’s the slow read movement. 

Who do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

I think there are all different kinds of readers, but two in particular that I notice. One really wants to be told things that they already know. They find that very comforting. They want familiarity, which they’ve confused with quality. If it’s not already known, they become angry and frustrated, and they think it’s bad or wrong or they reject it.

Then there are readers who, if you offer them something they’ve never seen before, they’re ecstatic; they live for that. And that is my ideal reader, just in general. They want the experience of being expanded. I kind of think that’s the difference between art and entertainment. People come home from work and they turn on the TV to not expand, to live in a state of repetition, familiarity, and comfort. But art is something that changes you, it doesn’t just repeat.

“Art is something that changes you,

it doesn’t just repeat.”

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I can really write anywhere. Given the quantity of how much I write, I’d better be able to. I don’t have a set time or anything like that. It’s always been that way. 

Where would you most want to live and write?

Well, I love New York City. I was born there and I’m a second-generation New Yorker. My expectation is that I’ll die there. I really don’t want to live anywhere else. I live in a six-floor walk-up, and one of my dreams is to live in an apartment with an elevator.

What do you listen to when you work?

It depends on what phase of writing I’m doing. I rewrite a lot; I’ll do like 10 to 12 drafts of something. For rewriting, definitely NPR. For composing, either NPR or nothing. It’s like white noise.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

How I write? I think I’m a natural. I experience it entirely as biology, some kind of a neuron thing. I don’t attribute it to any kind of will or character discipline, or anything like that.

Why? I don’t know. It’s my natural state. It’s like I’m an animal and that’s just how I do things. I’ve written so much, and I started writing when I was six. I spent my whole life writing, and that’s how I live. It’s not like I don’t do anything else, but it’s easy for me. I just do it a lot and, I don’t know, it’s a way of life. It’s like people who know how to sing—they just sing. I don’t have that. I’ll never have it.

How do you balance content with form?

It’s always been an organic relationship, even before I knew that was the case. With my first book, I remember I was interviewed in 1984, and someone said, “I see you used pastiche,” and I said, “What is pastiche?” Somehow I had a post-modern impulse, but I always thought it was because I was uneven. I kept trying to make it even, and I couldn’t. Then I found out that was post-modern and that it was okay.

“The more I’ve learned about form,

the more I understand the choices I have.”

The more I’ve learned about form, the more I understand the choices I have. There have been times when I’ve said, all right, I’m going to try to write a bestseller. I go to the store, and I try to pick out the least obnoxious bestseller, and then I can’t read it. I’ll think, I’ll just write something that’s even, but I’ve never been able to.

Is there a quote about writing that inspires you?

Audre Lorde was my college professor. She told my class to write this down: “That you can’t fight City Hall is a rumor being spread by City Hall.” That’s one of my mottos. You might think it’s not about writing, but it is. The only reason you think you have to do things a certain way is because the people who are invested in it being that way are telling you that. It doesn’t mean it’s true.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Well, it really depends on the person. It’s so hard. Do you mean professionally or artistically? I mean, I hate MFA programs; I think they’re terrible for the culture and that they hurt people’s writing. On the other hand, if you are a working-class person or an unconnected person, you have to get an MFA. Even if you do, there’s no guarantee. I teach in a City University of New York, and my students are mostly working class, and I’ve sent like three students to MFA programs in 12 years. Very few have gone. Those students have been ultra gifted, but then when they get there, they’re so fish-out-of-water because they’re the wrong class, and the teachers don’t mentor them. So even though they get the MFA, they still can’t get the goodies from it. But if they don’t get that, forget it. I think in class terms, you have to have it. If you come from the upper middle class, or upper classes, if you have connections and relationships in the social apparatus, perhaps you don’t need it.

“The best way to be an artist

is to make art, see art, and talk about art 

with other artists.”

In terms of artistically, the best way to be an artist is to make art, see art, and talk about art with other artists. If you’re a writer, I’d say read, go to readings, write a lot, meet other people and talk to them about what they’re doing. That way, you accrue eclectic influences, and that’s the most important thing. The problem with an MFA program is that it homogenizes people’s influences. If you accrue eclectic influences, you have a much better chance of crafting something that’s organic to you. The groupthink is antithetical to what our practice is as writers; that’s the problem—homogenization and the branding.

I was very lucky that I met many wonderful, fantastic writers and talked to them, and have had conversations with them all my life. I pulled it together that way, and that’s been very special.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

I was a waitress for 10 years, and I had published two books. Not only did I not go get an MFA, I had never even heard of an MFA. It’s an age thing. The MFA just wasn’t the thing at that time. I was a waitress in the first coffee shop in Tribeca. So Tribeca was gentrifying, and certain artists were coming in for breakfast because it was the only coffee shop. I waited on Yvonne Rainer, and Meredith Monk, and Isabella Rossellini, and all these people, for their eggs. A lot of these artists would talk to me, and I told them that I’d published two novels, and they told me that I needed to get an MFA.

I enrolled in this city college program, which actually was an MA, but I didn’t know the difference. I go the first day, and the teacher was Grace Paley. She has everybody go around the room and read something that they’re writing. I was writing my third novel and it was a first person lesbian narrator. The other students thought that the narrator was a man, and I thought, oh no, this is going to be two years of hell. I got really scared. After class, Grace was like, “Sarah, come to my office.” So I go to her office and she goes, “Look, you’re really a writer. You’re really doing it. You don’t need this class. Go home.” I went home; I never went back. Well, she completely saved me, because I would have been destroyed by that. It was the best thing anyone ever, ever said to me. I’m so grateful, my whole life, for that.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

I have too many ideas. I’m behind, like, years behind. I want to hurry up. Now I’m 53, I can see the clock is ticking. I’ve ramped it up a lot. This year, I had two new paperbacks, and two new hardcovers come out. But, I really have a lot of things I want to do.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

I like to consume art. I live in a world where I have a lot of friends who are artists. So, I like to see work that my friends have made or that they’re in, or talk to them about what they’re making, or read what they’re doing, go to their studios and rehearsals. I do a lot of that, and look at cuts of their movies and talk to them about it. I just love being involved in all of that.

One of my favorite things about New York City is that it’s one of the places where ideas originate. You hear the idea and you engage in it with the person who is originating it. It may be years before that idea is a product that somebody else can buy on a bookshelf or see in a movie theater.

And I’m a teacher, so I have a full-time job. I’m very invested in some of my kids. I care a lot about what happens to them, and a lot of my kids are in a lot of trouble, and they have all kinds of problems, so I have to really care. This is at a city university.

About Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman’s books include the novels Rat Bohemia, Empathy, and The Child, and the nonfiction book The Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project, and she is currently organizing the first US LGBT delegation to Palestine for Winter 2012. Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at CUNY, College of Staten Island, and was awarded a Brown Foundation Fellowship from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her other awards include a Guggenheim, Fulbright, and the 2009 Kessler Award for her “Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies.”

Buy The Mere Future, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Sarah Schulman." Words With Writers (December 27, 2011), http://wordswithwriters.com/2011/12/27/sarah-schulman/.]

The Mere Future by Sarah Schulman (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009).

Mehrdad Balali. Photo by Marissa Bell Toffoli (2011).

An introduction to Mehrdad Balali, author of the debut novel Houri (The Permanent Press). Originally from Iran, Balali spent 17 years living in the US before returning to his homeland to work as a journalist in 1991. A decade later, Balali’s press pass was revoked and he was banned from working as a journalist in Iran. He continued to cover events in the Middle East for international news agencies, including writing about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and ultimately returned to the US in 2005 to write fiction.

In Houri, Balali relays a coming of age story about Shahed, an Iranian boy raised in poverty, who finds himself constantly torn between his devoted mother and his larger-than-life, exciting, but often thoughtless, father. Despite all odds, Shahed is able to move to the US for college, where he struggles to make his way as a young man. When Shahed returns to Iran for his father’s funeral, the story unfolds as Shahed confronts childhood memories and a drastically changed Iran. Stark scenes informed by the journalist’s experiences underpin Balali’s engaging and moving novel. Shahed’s tale is rooted in Iran’s history, full of life and heartache.

Quick Facts on Mehrdad Balali

• Mehrdad Balali’s website
• Home: Central Coast of California
• Comfort food: sushi
• Top reads: Henry Miller is the only person I can think of at this point that I really like and who influenced me in a lot of different ways. I like a lot of different writers. I don’t have any particular all-time favorites. I like Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Malamud.
• Current reads: Eileen Goudge’s Garden of Lies

What is your history as a journalist?

In 1991, after the first Gulf War in the Persian Gulf, I went back to Iran after 17 years of living in Los Angeles, California. I started working for an English language newspaper called Tehran Times. I learned about media in Iran, and the inner-workings of a newspaper office. Then I got a job with AFP (Agence France Presse) and worked with them for six years. While working for AFP, I was also a contributor to The Economist. In 1999, I moved to Reuters.

After I had worked at Reuters for one year, the Iranian government banned me from working and revoked my press card. Reuters had to move me out of Iran because they thought I was in danger. They moved me to Dubai to cover Iran from afar. After September 11, 2001 when US–led forces attacked Afghanistan, they sent me to Afghanistan. I made two trips to Afghanistan and stayed for about a month each time. When Iraq was attacked, then I was sent to Kuwait. I was there for four months covering the invasion of Iraq. After that, I was in Bahrain for two years, and then I left Reuters and returned to the US, where I’ve been living and working as a writer since.

What was the reason given for why Iran revoked your press pass and banned you from working as a journalist?

The government wanted information from me that I didn’t have. It seemed like having a press card was a privilege, not a right, that was given to people who were willing to cooperate. They said I was not cooperating with the authorities and that’s the reason why they took it away. 

How was life on the road as a journalist?

“You never know when you are

 going to land in hot water.”

It was very exciting, but at the same time very scary. You never know when you are going to land in hot water. I got a lot of enjoyment and excitement out of it, even though at the same time it was stressful. I wanted to make it as a good journalist, so I was willing to risk it. But in the end, I paid for it with my health because it really gave me anxiety.

How long did it take to leave behind the anxiety?

Well, once in a while it still happens if I’m under stress or something. Luckily, I have a personality where I can put things behind me and look toward the future. At this point, I’m kind of severed from that part of my life.

What languages do you speak?

Farsi and English fluently. I also studied Arabic for three years when I was in the Middle East.

When you were reporting, what language were you writing in?

Always English; it’s actually like my native language. That’s what I’ve been reading since I was 20. It’s the language I’ve always written in. I’ve never written in Farsi—I’m not good in it.

How has your background in journalism influenced your work in fiction?

It influenced it a lot. In the beginning, when I was writing the first chapters of Houri, and I showed it to friends, they told me that there was a lot of journalistic style in my writing and I should change it because it didn’t work in a novel. I had to be very conscious of that, and keep working on it to be able to change it.

“Journalism taught me to think clearly,

to be terse, be to the point,

and sensitive to what makes a good story.”

Journalism, especially the news agencies’ styles, taught me a lot of things: to think clearly, to be terse, be to the point, and sensitive to what makes a good story. In that sense, it really helped me. I just had to change the language that I used in the novel to be less journalistic prose.

Do you miss your work as a journalist?

Yes. At this point, I have a son and I want to be close to him while he is still in high school. Once he is finished with school, I’ll be free to go back to that profession. But yes, I miss it and I want to go back to it someday.

What are you working on at the moment?  

I’m working on a fictionalized true story. It’s about a young man, 22 or 23, of Iranian descent who thinks he’s a woman. The story is about a transgendered person, and that’s all I can say about it at this point. Right now, I’m trying to clarify what I want to do with this book. I’m getting ready to rewrite the first draft and start from another point in the story.

Where did the idea for your first novel, Houri, come from?

My father. He died in 1978, about a year or several months, before the revolution in Iran, My father was a womanizer, a happy-go-lucky person who loved to go out, and was a bit of a reckless debaucher. The characters in the book are exaggerated, of course, but the idea came from the way I saw my father when I was a child. I combined memories and reminiscences with some fantasies to create the character of Baba, the father in the book. The boy in the book, Shahed, is kind of myself as a child; but he’s also fictionalized. There’s a lot about him that was not really me. Many other characters are also driven from characters I’ve known in my life, and I fictionalized and stylized them.

So, the idea for the book comes from the question, if my father had been alive after the revolution when all the fun was being ditched, what would have happened? How would he have taken all of these things? It was this thought that drove me to write about Baba and a kid.

Are there scenes in the book that you also drew from what you witnessed as a journalist?

Definitely. The events that take place in the 1980s, when Shahed is an adult, are almost all driven from my own experiences, and some were based on stories that I’d heard from people I trusted. These were real events, but I stylized them to fit the fictional narrative. Also, the name Shahed means witness. He’s supposed to be a witness to life. It’s really more common as an Arabic name than a Persian name, but I liked the meaning.

What do you hope readers will take away from Houri?

I just hope that readers will enjoy the story. It’s a human story about a little boy, and the way he sees his life. Sometimes we don’t pay attention to children and their world; we think that because of the way they behave, they’re not aware and conscious of things, or that they’re just on the margins of life. But it happens a lot that children are keenly aware of their circumstances, and so keenly observant that they see things deeper than we do. When I was writing about the child, I was putting myself in the skin of a twelve-year-old boy, and the way I saw and perceived the world at that age. At that age you might not draw sophisticated conclusions from the chaos around you, but you feel and are affected by it intensely. You may feel sad, or happy, but you just can’t analyze the situation the way an adult would.

I think Houri is a universal father-son story, a child torn between the values of his devoted mother and the charm of his charismatic albeit selfish father. Baba’s world is filled with fun color and beautiful women, but he has no sense of family responsibility. Mama, on the other hand, is totally committed to her children, but her world lacks sparkle. The boy finds himself caught between the two worlds. Where does his allegiance go? Definitely to the mother, it turns out, because he understands it is the mother who makes the sacrifices, who is the victim in the relationship.

What I witnessed as a child really shaped my view of the injustice and gender inequality, at least in that part of the world, when I was growing up. I looked around myself and there were people like my uncle, who was a very good man, very good husband, and very loving. But at the same time, I could see a lot of women who were victims of their male-dominated society, tradition and laws. Many of these women were forced to get married, like my mother, at the age of 14, because they had no other opportunities in that society. And she would end up in the hands of a man, with no free will of her own, even though she’s very intelligent, beautiful, and resourceful. I became very sensitive to this issue of gender inequality. 

Who do you picture as the ideal reader of Houri?

I think women tend to feel more affinity with the book than men. Some readers might find it a little culturally remote, but I think as they read on they get brought into the world of the book.

I have read lots of reviews, and I’ve seen some conflicting comments, but most of them are positive. The people who didn’t like the story said it was too sad. And everybody hated Baba, but I didn’t mean to make him hateful. He was a man of his passions; he had appetite, he had a passion for life. It was just that he was too spoiled, and had little cultural education. He had no sense of his responsibilities. I wanted to show the vibrancy in him, the life in his warped personality to make up for his callousness.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

Because I have a full-time job, I usually write on weekends, and sometimes after I get home from work. In other words, whenever I can.

Where would you most want to live and write?

I really like where I live. I don’t think it really matters where you live. You have to find a way to be content. I used to be a very restless person, but a measure of contentment comes with age, I guess. You learn to make your peace with your surroundings.

“You learn to make your peace

with your surroundings.”

What do you listen to when you work?

I love music. I have a collection of about a thousand songs from all different genres. I love jazz, and listen to a lot of that, but my taste is not limited to that. It depends on my mood and the song.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

When I write, I’m completely involved in the act of writing and I don’t feel time pass. It’s the ultimate relaxation for me. If I have any worries, I forget them when I’m writing. I’m most entertained when I’m writing. I don’t necessarily enjoy my time at a party or crowded places. I enjoy hiking or just spending my free time reading and writing.

“If I have any worries,

I forget them when I’m writing.”

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Discipline is very important. You should also immunize yourself against rejection, because every writer is likely to face that at some point. Write for yourself, for you own pleasure.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

The best advice came from an agent that I approached. She told me not to rush it, to wait on publication until the book is really ready.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

The most challenging aspect of writing for me is the command of the English language. I wish I could express myself better. I wish I could write with more flair, but it is not my native language, and I have to really think about every line I write.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

I like to spend time with my friends.

About Mehrdad Balali

Mehrdad Balali is an Iranian-born American who returned to his homeland as a career journalist in 1991. He worked for the next 15 years for international news agencies, covering social and political upheavals in the Middle East. After being banned from working in Iran, he covered events in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf States, and eventually returned to the US to spend his time writing fiction.

Buy Houri, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Mehrdad Balali." Words With Writers (December 12, 2011; updated February 6, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2011/12/12/mehrdad-balali/.]

Houri by Mehrdad Balali (The Permanent Press).