Twenty-five Cent Stories

On Wednesday, April 25, I attended, with much anticipation, a reading by Charles Rice-Gonzalez at Mission College in Santa Clara.  Charles was here on his West Coast promotion of his debut novel, Chulito, a love story about a South Bronx who’s all hip-hop and tough and gay. Charles, who’s the executive director of BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance), knows how to keep an audience engaged in up in the podium. His life story is compelling itself, having grown up gay in the Bronx without any privileges. One section from his book that he read from was racy by the community college young adult standards: about Chulito’s first gay kiss, tongue and teeth and all. The reading was held in the library to a standing room-only audience and when I turned to see other students who were ostensibly studying, they were all engaged in that one particular scene. I really hope this opens their minds more to tolerance.

I met Charles in 2009 at the Macondo Writers’ Workshop in San Antonio. The novelist Fan Wu and I were co-leading a fiction workshop in which Charles was one of our 12 “students.” Charles is the kind of guy–friendly and open–whom you’ll hang out with for a day and feel like you’ve known him forever. I have to mention that I had the extraordinary opportunity to meet Charles’ Mission College host and long-time friend, Donnelle McGee, whose debut novel, Shine, was just released on eBook format by Sibling Rivalry Press, and coming soon in print. Having hung out with Donnelle for a few hours left me feeling like he’s been my best friend since 5th grade. He’s that kind of guy, a rarity in the dog-eat-dog world of publishing. Shine, “told in vignettes and multiple viewpoints, is the story of a young hustler who navigates streets, sex, and family, only to discover the light of the dark can be cruel…” I look forward to reading it.

There’s no better feeling for a writer than seeing old friends and making new ones.

Donnelle, Charles, and me at Mission College

“‘L’Argent’ opens with the married, thirty-something speaker addressing himself as ‘you’ while withdrawing money from an ATM, the money a monthly ‘gift’ from his mother. We witness the solitary act knowing he’d be loath to divulge it publicly. But as both he and the poem itself expose this ‘you’ who withdraws the money, the poem becomes increasingly, ironically self-aware of the protective gap the speaker heretofore maintained between ‘himself’ and this ‘you’…”

So writes my dear friend and novelist Bonnie Nadzam about my poem, “L’argent.” Yesterday, Bonnie posted an article for The Paris Review Daily entitled, “Secrets Are Lies,” in which she discusses the subject of secrets vs private matters using two poems (the other is “Someone to be good in front of” by Sarah Vap) as the basis for discussion and dissection. Dr. Bonnie, a PhD in creative writing-literature recipient from the University of Southern California, writes eruditely and philosophically, lending gravitas to my work. Thank you, Bonnie!

I wrote “L’argent” as an obvious homage to Robert Bresson’s film by the same title. In the film, the camera follows a counterfeit bill that is exchanged in different hands and we witness the tragic consequences of those sordid exchanges unfold. Using the film’s conceit, I wanted to write a poem in which a twenty-dollar bill becomes the common ground between two different lives.

An earlier version of “L’argent” was first published in The Packinghouse Review. To purchase a copy, go here.

I will be one of many participants at the Flor y canto / Flower and Song reading at Cabrillo College at the Watsonville Center in Watsonville, CA., sponsored by Poetry Santa Cruz. My good friend Adela Najarro will host. Other readers include: Elvira Cuevas, Francisco Iniguez, Helene Simkin Jara, Danusha Lameris, Sandra Macias, Fania Montalvo, Adela Najarro, Joe Navarro, Maggie Paul, Carolina Evans Roman, Lisa Simon, David Sullivan, Ruby Vasquez, and Jose Javier Zamora.

For all the info, click here! 

A couple of months ago, out of the blue since that’s the way most things happen, I was solicited for an interview by RV West, a travel magazine published out of British Columbia. Feeling quite surprised because I have nothing in common with RVing, I finally realized that my hometown is a snowbird paradise and a travel destination for those escaping the cold. As a youngster, I was always surprised that people from around the country would want to getaway here, in blistering Indio. Adding to my surprise about being interviewed was the idea of readers of RV West reading my work. From this I learned that you never know where you’re going to find your audience. Regardless, I tried my best to promote the city of Indio more than my work or myself and for the hour it took me to finish the interview, I had become Indio’s best advocate. Most of the promotional stuff got cut out in the final article though. It really felt nice doing something good for Indio, paying it back for all the inspiration it provided me. Here’s the article: “Make a date with dates in Indio, California”

Thanks to DaleAnn Shellborn for contacting me and writing the article.

Inaugurating my new interview series, “5 1/2 Questions,” is novelist and short story writer Bonnie Nadzam. This year marks 10 years that I’ve known Bonnie and this is what I know to be true about her: She is as sharp as a knife-point and does well on standardized testing. Her long-time companion is a German Shepard named Clyde. She cares deeply for the environment. She’s a quick thinker. She has visited every U.S. state minus Alaska and maybe Hawaii. She likes to cook from scratch and once baked me a sugarless apple pie for my graduation. Born in Cleveland, raised in Chicago, edumacated at Carleton College in Minnesota (B.A.) and the University of Southern Califas (M.A., PhD), Bonnie received her doctorate this year. Short stories of hers have been published in The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Alaska Quarterly Review, and, just this August, in Harper’s. Her debut novel, Lamb (The Other Press, 2011), already hoarding all the rave reviews and Amazon Five-Stars, is released today and is already short-listed for the Center for Short Fiction first novel award. My review of Lamb can be read in an earlier posting.

This interview occurred over email on September 7, 2011. Now on with it!

John: Your first book, Lamb, has a very disturbing subject matter. And yet, the language in it is poetic, which makes the novel a very beautiful one to read. As a poet, I appreciate a novelist who pays attention to language. Were there any specific writers, poets, teachers, or books that influenced your attention to language?

Bonnie: Whatever I was reading during the time I wrote it, I circled and underlined words. After reading a few books, I’d go through them a page at a time and make lists of the words I’d circled in a little notebook. I was not ever looking for anything in particular. I was in graduate school at the time, so it was a lot of books, a little of everything—criticism, philosophy, poetry, novels.  Not always engaging philosophy, not always beautiful poetry, not always good novels.

John: Even though what comes out of David Lamb’s mouth has malevolent intentions, his dialogue is seductive and disarming, which is what makes it scary. If Lamb spoke colloquially, a lot of what makes the book great would be lost, which tells me a great deal of attention was put into his dialogue. How hard or easy was it for you to create Lamb’s dialogue, and was there a particular resource that helped you create it?   

Bonnie: If Lamb’s language is seductive, that is at least partly the listener’s/reader’s responsibility—this has been my experience both as someone who has been misleading in speech and who has been ripe to be misled by it. Both sides of the dialogue exchanges are in me. If Lamb were to speak like a true literary westerner and cowboy, which is to say, not very much, he would never be able to spin the tales of the west that he does—nor, I think, would he particularly want to.

John: I recently read two blog posts by an unpublished novelist and a well-published one. The unpublished writer was disappointed that her first novel would never find an agent, much less a publisher, after so many years of hard work put into it. It was really hard for her to admit this and let it go. The published novelist, despite having three novels, admitted to having a failed unpublished also, but was detached from it. It’s my understanding that Lamb wasn’t the first novel you finished and that you prefer this “true” first novel to never see the light of day. Why do you think it was easier for you to let go of that first novel? Was the experience of writing the second novel easier than the first? 

Bonnie: It’s true, that first novel manuscript had too much of my teachers’ voices in it. I wince whenever I look at it. It’s embarrassing.

I didn’t know—couldn’t know—that Lamb would ever be published. I wrote it not first because I thought I wanted to be a writer, whatever that means, but because there was something really knotted up in me that I had to use the rope of language to pull out. Had to. I don’t think that’s unique to me—there’s something in everyone, isn’t there?, that wants to be pulled out of the shadow. I think it’d be a scary person who said it wasn’t so.

(My note: For a little more from Bonnie about throwing away drafts, click here.)

John: Lamb was written as part of your creative dissertation at the University of Southern California. Very few writers go on to PhD programs in creative writing. What is one advantage to having written this novel in a PhD program? What was one advantage to writing it in a PhD program?

Bonnie: The only person on my committee to read Lamb before my defense (at which point it was already published and in ARC form) was my phenomenal chair and Eighteenth-Century advisor, Emily Hodgson Anderson. The great advantage of the program was in knowing that once I finished writing the novel manuscript, there’d be artists like Aimee Bender and TC Boyle and Percival Everett to bear witness, at least once. I cannot think of a single disadvantage to having been in LA at USC while I was. The rigorous critical reading and expectations, the world-class teachers, the brave friends and fellow writers, the oddness and inclusiveness and breadth of the city…I am so grateful.

John: I’ve been following your short story publications for many years now. To me, I’d say you have enough to make a collection, but you never talk about publishing one. Do you have plans to publish your stories as a collection? How do you see the market for story collections in the time of economic and print publication uncertainty? 

Bonnie: I don’t think I have enough strong stories for a collection—but maybe soon. I also don’t know very much about the publishing industry, yet—what it is, to say nothing of how it’s changing. But I can say that I’ve been amazed and impressed, this summer, by how many people there are out there writing, reading, blogging, posting, reviewing, critiquing, twittering about stories and novels.

Ultimately, I think people who love reading and writing stories will always share them. Perhaps we’ll end up doing so back in the cave, making shadows on the wall by torchlight, telling and re-telling important and life-changing stories that—like our own published books and e-books—ultimately leave no record.

John: Fill in the blank: “___________” would be an excellent choice in playing David Lamb in the film adaptation” 

Bonnie: Harold Bloom.  Or else, a dashing 40- or 50-something actor who’s tired of being pretty and wants to prove his chops.

For list of Bonnie’s publications and her upcoming appearances, please visit www.bonnienadzam.com

You can also follow Bonnie on Twitter: @bonnienadzam

Check out these great books published by The Other Press!

And you can follow my goings-on @johnespinoza

Tomorrow I will debut my new interview series, “5 1/2 Questions,” starting with Bonnie Nadzam. I figure that with over 10 years of writing and publishing I’ve been fortunate enough to forge many friendships with writers and why not take advantage of this? The least I can do is interview them. What more, as a friend, I’m privy to lots of chisme and inside information that other interviewers might not be aware of. As such, and since my friends are very sharp, I’d like to throw them doozies for questions on their art, craft, and life as writers. I’m calling it 5 1/2 questions to pare down only the most interesting of inquisitiveness, and less face it, this is the “Internets” and we don’t like anything long. But fair warning: these questions may have follow-up questions, so I’m fudging a bit. The 1/2 question will be a fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice question.

Here is my advanced review of Bonnie Nadzam’s debut novel, LAMB, coming out next Tuesday, September 13. That day I will also post an interview with Bonnie which will inaugurate a new interview series for my blog called “5 1/2 Questions.”

Lamb, by Bonnie Nadzam, The Other Press

288 pages, paperback, $15.95 U.S. / $17.95 CAN

A Literary Novel of Suspense

Bonnie Nadzam has written a book, a terrific one, that is as beautiful as it is uncomfortable. She has crafted with care a character, the eponymous David Lamb, who is charismatic as he is conniving. Shortly after attending his father’s funeral, Lamb meets Tommie in a CVS parking lot. Tommie is an 11-year old girl, all potbelly and rib cage. When Tommie approaches Lamb for a cigarette after her friends egg her on, Lamb’s reaction is to play a trick on them, making like he is kidnapping her. This happens on page 14 and my hands begin sweating and they don’t stop until I put down the book. He escorts the girl into his car but drops her off at home without harm done to her.

From this point on, Lamb and Tommie form an unlikely friendship meeting clandestinely several times over several weeks. With his father gone, his marriage dissolved, and his coworker-turned-lover, Linnie, at risk of losing her job at the firm because of her sexual involvement with David, Lamb concocts a plan to abduct Tommie to his cabin in the Rocky Mountains because “this sudden and unusual friendship—might be the only bright spot, the only break in her otherwise unscripted life.” The delusional David firmly believes the whisking away Tommie is the best thing that can happen to her. This is not hard to accomplish being that Tommie is neglected at home, self-conscious, and impressionable. Lamb buries in her mind images of undivided attention and tenderness in order to persuade her to abscond with him:

            And I’ll fry you eggs early in the morning, and butter you a thick piece of cold

            bread, and I’ll slice the bacon myself, and bring you hot chocolate, and you’ll

            sit on the wood rail fence in your nightgown, and I’ll put my jacket over your

            shoulders, and we’ll balance our plates on our knees and watch the sun come up

            while we eat. And when I have to leave the house to go work you’ll wait for me,

            won’t you? You’ll sit on the fence and watch the dirt road till you see me coming

            back home to you.

David Lamb’s language is elegant, but the undertone is creepy, and Nadzam reaches poetic heights when writing his dialogue. Lamb is what Robert Greene categorizes as a “rake” in his book, Art of Seduction: “He chooses words for their ability to suggest, insinuate, hypnotize, elevate, infect…The Rake’s use of language is demonic because it is designed not to communicate or convey information but to persuade, flatter, stir emotion turmoil, much as the serpent in the Garden of Eden used words to lead Eve into temptation.” We get the sense that Lamb’s mistress Linnie also fell victim to his rakish words.

In the book, the myth of the West is a stand in for David Lamb’s life. Lamb builds up in Tommie’s mind the West as an idyllic place of expanse, pristine wilderness, and autonomy, but instead we get barbwire, glassless windows, and “boots caked with mud and manure.” Like Lamb’s life, the West comes short of its expectations.

The plot to the novel is straightforward and moves lyrically. Lamb and Tommy leave Chicago for the Rockies. On the road at Lamb’s insistence, they must improvise new identities to evade suspicion when they must stop in towns for food and supplies; all the while, sexual tension builds between the middle-aged man and the prepubescent girl. The novel turns into one of suspense and the author is deft in maintaining it. It culminates when their suspicious neighbor at the cabin scrutinizes Lamb’s involvement with Tommie (acting as uncle-cum-niece), all the while Linnie arrives at the cabin forcing Lamb to keep Tommie furtive in a shed for over a day. Will Tommie be extracted from a grotesque situation, or will she be left under the influence and control of Lamb?

The September/October issue of The American Poetry Review is out now, which includes a special supplement of Chicano/Latina Poets, edited by Christopher Buckley and additional commentary by Juan Felipe Herrera. Featured are 12 poets and 23 poems total in the supplement:

Angel Garcia: “June Bugs and Mosquitos”; “Conversations with My Father”: “Spanish Midterm”; “Sudden Downpour”

Cristian Flores Garcia: “Lucky One”; “My Old Dear Country”

David Campos: “Strawberries”; “Drywall Dust”;

John Olivares Espinoza (myself): “Autographs”

Luis Lopez-Maldonado: “Surviving in Santa Ana”

Ruben Quesada: “Store”; “Tamale Serenade”; “The Last Text”

Sara Aranda: “Skydiving”; “Background Radiation”

Wendy Silva: “Why I Am Glad I Look Like My Mother”; “A Chicana, Age 11, Learns About the Holocaust”

Iuri Morales Lara: “Murder”; Beauty Salon News”

Yvette Luevano: “I Experienced God through a Kick in the Head”; “Asocial Mathematics”

Scott Hernandez: “The Creek”

Adriana Sanchez Alexander: “The Ending Is Enigmatic”

The poets featured are from Southern and Central California.

“Autographs” was inspired by a recollection told to me by the Mexican photographer, Mauricio Palos, my wife’s cousin. When I met Mauricio just after Christmas in 2009, I was interested in (and still am) immigration stories to use as poems. His was an interesting one because he wasn’t trying to cross without legal documentation to the U.S.; he had a U.S. Visa. He was trying to do something I had never heard of: become an illegal alien in Europe. The experienced described in the poem became the origin as to how he became a photographer. After Mauricio was deported from England in the U.K., as depicted in the poem, he tried again successfully. He lived in Spain working under the table and taking classes in photography. Today, Mauricio takes photographs for Getty Images and recently published a photography book entitled, My Perro Rano, that documents the passages of Central American Immigrants on the train rails to North America. It’s no doubt that Mauricio’s choice subject has to do with own experience living in the shadows of Spain.

You can read about his experience in his own words through this interview with Mexican Playboy, but it is in Spanish.

The arc of “Autographs” is verbatim Mauricio’s experience, yet it took me about 2 years before I could write the poem that I wanted. You see, when Mauricio, and anybody for that matter, tells you a story, it’s always in fragments and non-linear, not to mention riddled with interjections, like “Sabes guey?” Yes, the arc of the poem was handed to me, but I had to recreate the details and create a rhythm and voice for the poem. I used my experiences staying at my in-law’s house in McAllen, TX to recreate what Mauricio must have experienced while staying there earning money for airfare. I also changed the ending, which in truth was “All I wanted was a better life,” to something more poetic and unexpected.

Congratulations to all the poets featured. Thank you for sharing your personal stories. They are delightful to read even when they are heart-wrenching. I hope to be reading more in the future.

Yesterday, through my Twitter feed (I’m @johnespinoza, by the way), I came across this post, “The Cruel Side of the Desk” by poet Catherine Carter, a blogger for the reputable literary magazine, Ploughshares. In the post, Carter writes about her experience as a submissions screener (for a journal I assume to be Ploughshares) and how she started with good intentions toward the beginning writer, to becoming a more harsher judge of work submitted. The post is intended to be insightful as to what screeners of journals are looking for in work and what turns them off. For example, if the journal is run by women, don’t send in your misogynistic work. But there’s a point that Carter makes about the actual length of the work that I found upsetting:

To start with what evokes the instant rejection, there’s always…length.   I recently rejected a poem of over ten pages…single-spaced, in a ten-point sans serif font.  The journal for which I read, which I’ll leave discreetly anonymous for the moment, is an annual which comes in around a hundred pages…so the poet was saying, “I think my work is so incredible that it’s worth taking up 10% (or more, given font differences) of your entire annual publication.”  Honestly, if “Howl” came up on my screen in this context, I’m not sure I’d recommend publishing it…and most poems are not “Howl.”  The poet who can think about the journal’s probable needs is several yards ahead of one who plainly feels himself or herself above such mundane considerations.

 On the bright side of length, I’m always inclined to be a little more favorable toward the poem which can clearly fit on one page of the journal.  I always pass on a poem I like, length or no; but if I were an editor who had to make the final calls, and I had two poems I liked more or less equally, and one of them fit on a page and one of them required two…honestly, I’d probably make the pragmatic choice.  Just saying.(August 12, 2011)

Before I go on to say why this is upsetting, I’d like to emphasize that Carter pointed out that her attitudes may be “cruel.” Second, I don’t want to pick on Carter as a person, but rather treat her as a proxy for literary journals, the established gatekeepers. Carter, like comedians, is simply saying what’s on everyone’s mind, but they dare not say it. I take issue with several things in those two paragraphs. First, that long poetry has very little chance, if at all, to be published. The long poem is a dying form, if it’s not already dead, and now we know why. It’s unfortunate that long poetry isn’t encouraged by literary journals. It takes skill to sustain a long poem with interesting language and themes, not to mention having something worth saying. But if a poet knows there’s very little chance for her long work to be published, then why bother with the form? Often times the long poems I’ve come across (in poetry collections) are somewhat narrative. All the rage right now is short, lyrical, language, “only-God-and-the-poet-knows-what-it-means” poetry.  I dare a “language” poem to sustain a reader’s interest after two pages.

The second thing that Carter says that I take issue with is what she says about poets who submit a ten page poem to a 100-page journal: “I think my work is so incredible that it’s worth taking up 10% (or more, given the font differences) of your entire annual publication.” Yes, I concede that publishing a poem that takes 10% of a journal might not be practical; however, being that writing and writers is very egotistical, isn’t submitting a one-page poem that will take up 1% of the annual publication still saying “my work is so incredible that it’s worth taking up that 1%.” If Carter is trying to make an assumption about ego, then ego is ego, regardless if it’s at 1%, 10%, or 33.333%.

Carter also writes that if two equally poems compete for the last space, the publication will go for the shorter one. Now granted, I don’t know how layout works in a literary journal. If they have 100 pages and adding an additional page will cost them $100, then I can see how they would go for the shorter poem. Barring this, I just can’t imagine a literary editor rejecting a 43 line poem because the other poem was 42 lines. Literary editors should be held to a higher standard. I would like to believe that if it came down to two equally good poems for a spot, then the selection would be made by theme or voted by the editorial staff. For example, I was a fiction screener/reader for Hayden’s Ferry Review one semester. When the issue I was working on was finishing up, there were two fiction mss competing for one slot. We came together as a staff and talked about the merits of each story, sort of like a group would do in a writing workshop. At the end of the discussion, we voted for which story to be published. There was a show of hands. The majority won. Now, poetry isn’t the only genre subjected to a bias against length. While working with HFR, the editor (and editors rotate often there) once remarked that fiction within 10 pages of length is preferable for publication. I didn’t argue with the editor’s remark back then because I was a poet and had little in stake in it.

But what I do have at stake now is that half the poems I write make it to a second page. I’d hate to think that the reason why journals would take a pass on them is because of length, and not the quality of the poem or because it doesn’t suit their particular taste at the moment. I can’t imagine a poem’s length is an issue with online journals. I wonder if there’s a difference in the type of submissions between print and online journals because of this.

I read somewhere recently that Joyce Carol Oates noticed that her students were reading large tomes less and less. She attributed this to the Internet Age and she was not happy about it. If Twitter dictates that our thoughts be boiled down to 140 characters or less, why not our language art, right? Poetry is about less being more anyway.

Both sides of the conversation can go round and round. Ultimately, if publication decisions are going to be based on something as shallow as length, then writers are going to adjust accordingly. We’ll be seeing less meditative work than we already do now. If anything, it would be great to see journals dedicated to the long form, or see journals dedicating a special issue to long poems, or just making space for at least one long poem. If not, then just subtitle every literary review: “A Journal of Tweets.”

This month, Poets & Writers released their MFA rankings. These rankings are always controversial, so I won’t get into the details about how rankings are determined. What I will say that Arizona State University is ranked #21 (#20 in poetry, #23 in fiction). I’m happy with that rank.

What I find odd is that University of Arizona at Tucson is ranked #41 (#43 in poetry and #40 in fiction). What happened to U of A in the past 10 years? When I applied to MFA programs 10 years ago, U of A was ranked higher than ASU. It was a tougher program to get into, unlike ASU “who let anyone in.” I would even cry foul when another U of A grad was awarded another Stegner. If there was a reason to leave ASU for U of A, it would be for that. One would think U of A would’ve increased in rankings, having good teachers there.

I guess it only takes 10 years to turn the tables. For what it’s worth, I always see books out by Arizona State University MFA graduates. And good ones too. Bonnie Nadzam’s LAMB and Caitlin Horrocks’ THIS IN NOT YOUR CITY come to mind. I hardly see books by U of A grads, not to say they don’t publish. I just haven’t seen U of A in the jacket credits.

Otherwise, I’m ambivalent about such rankings. I guess it gives a little assurance to those students going to a particular program and it gives MFA programs publicity. But if Iowa is ranked #1, it has very little affect on those who don’t get in. Being ranked #1 is a privilege given to few. I guess in a way it reflects real life. Overall, competition is really stiff for getting into an MFA program nowadays. One should be happy, perhaps lucky, to get into one at all.