Guest Post, Kathryn Kulpa: More Than You Think You Know

“You are better than you think. A-one, a-two, a-three.” 

—Kurt Vonnegut

Remember that old chestnut of writing advice that gets lobbed at all of us—particularly young writers, particularly new writers—write what you know? I ran across it first in my teens. Rather a dispiriting command for those of us whose real lives, the lives we knew, consisted of going to boring school every day in our boring town, and maybe, if we were lucky, going to the mall. My own trips to the mall invariably ended at the bookstore, where I sought escape in reading about other lives, other worlds that were nothing like the world I knew. 

Not necessarily better worlds. I favored dystopias and disasters, perilous quests and amorphous monsters, the merest glimpse of which could blast your sanity and leave you a gibbering mindless hulk, not unlike how I felt at the end of double biology class. 

My heart is in Middle Earth
My heart is not here
My heart is in Middle Earth
Trembling with fear …

I wrote in first-period algebra, when I compared Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring to the search for the square root of a quadratic equation, and the search for the equation didn’t come off too well. (Nor did my math grades, but that’s another story.) 

I read, and re-read, Tolkien and Lovecraft and Poe and Stephen King. My high school library had volumes of the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories, going back to at least 1970. I studied them like scripture. But my own attempts to write in those genres always felt like flat imitation. At the same time, I obsessively chronicled the ordinary details of my own life in notebooks: who wore the yellow dress that made her look like “a squeezed-out lemon,” who wrote “I LOVE KENNY” on the desk I shared in third period English, prompting me to question: “Does he love you?”; which teacher made the whole class stay after school because a few kids were acting up, spurring me to add a new dictionary definition under the word “shit.” Impromptu songs and poems and comics, but I didn’t consider any of it “real” writing, just throwaway stuff. 

Only I didn’t throw it away. A quiet voice inside told me not to. I would learn to listen to that voice. 

What I remember from my first “real” writing workshop were the yellow sheets the instructor gave us with comments on our stories, comments so detailed it felt as if each story had already been published and was worthy of critical attention. I only remember one piece of general writing advice, but it stuck in my mind as a corollary to write what you know: “You know more than you think you know.” 

I can’t explain the sense of freedom and relief that advice gave me. How many times I’d discarded story ideas, telling myself I couldn’t write about X because I’d never been to Y and didn’t know enough about Z. 

If a story idea feels right, if it feels emotionally true, then write it. Researching the details can come later. In that workshop I wrote a first draft of my story “The Night Copernicus Died,” about a nuclear scientist haunted by regret. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a nuclear physicist. My only “research” for the story was a book I’d once read about the making of the atomic bomb and a manga written by a survivor of Hiroshima. 

But I’d been born into a world shadowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. I’d never known a time when that shadow didn’t haunt my dreams. As a teen and young adult, I’d wake in the middle of the night with my heart pounding, sure the world was going to end that night. I’d lie awake, making lists of all the things that made the world worth saving, fireflies and forsythia and golden retriever puppies, even though the people in it were so stupid. 

Years later, I met someone who’d been in the army during the Reagan years. “You don’t know how close we got, a couple of times,” he told me. But on some level I did know. And that feeling—that inner knowledge—was what drove the story. 

It was published in a science fiction magazine. I worried that, because its readers probably included a higher-than-average proportion of MIT grads, someone would question the science. 

No one said a word about the science. But I was forwarded a letter by one reader who wanted me to know that, while I had described the 1950s as a time when “gas was five cents a gallon,” it was, in fact, closer to 25 cents per gallon for much of that decade. 

Duly noted. 

In a more recent story, “Skater Girl at Rest,” I wrote in the voice of a former teen-movie star now sentenced to home confinement: 

Anna had always imagined an ankle bracelet would look like an actual bracelet, like the cylindrical copper coil she’d bought one year at Burning Man.

But it didn’t. It was bulky and oddly medical, with a thick black attachment that reminded Anna of a garage door opener or an old-school drug dealer beeper. It chafed her ankle and banged against her other leg when she slept and made wardrobe choices so much harder than they had to be. 

That voice just came to me, like taking dictation from a friendly ghost, yet having written it I started to worry that I’d got ankle bracelets all wrong; maybe they were discreet and delicate little bands, and what did I know about ankle bracelets anyway? 

I consulted the Google (The Google is your friend! Just not in the first draft) and found that they were, in fact pretty much exactly as I’d described them. 

You know more than you think you know. 

But what could I know about being dead? I would never claim that I know what it’s like to be dead, unless I happened to be singing a song written by John Lennon, but a while ago I became possessed by the need to write a story from the point of view of a dead person. Not a ghost, or an angel, or a spirit trapped in some interdimensional bardo. Just a regular dead person, who was dead but in some way still there, still a part of the physical world. 

I had been doing some strange reading, as I’m apt to do, about body farms and unusual disposition of human remains, and some of it was fascinating and some of it was horrifying, and the question I kept asking myself was why? Why would someone choose to have their body thrown down an elevator shaft, strapped into a crashing car, torn to pieces by animals, or left to rot in an open field? 

The voice of my narrator, a calm and reasonable voice, started speaking to me. She started telling me her story. And so I had to listen. 

They say we’ll get our bodies back whole after the rapture, but I’m pretty much done with mine—like when you’ve got an old nightgown so worn and full of holes that you’re just as happy when it rips, so you can tear it up for rags. 

The story, “A Key Into the Language of the Dead,” was published in Superstition Review‘s Issue 23. The characters and what they talk about and think about are made up. What happens to the bodies is real. 

What happens to the pumpkin is also real. It grew in my front yard. 

So yes, write what you know. That can be good advice, but don’t let it limit you to a narrow definition of what you think you know. You’ve seen things you didn’t realize you saw. You’ve heard things you don’t remember you heard. You know more than you think you know. Trust what you know. Tell the stories that beckon you, the ones that trouble you, even if they seem difficult or strange. 

And always Google the gas prices.

Guest Blog Post, Thomas Legendre: Researching the Stone

Photo Credit: www.migratingmiss.com

Many writers claim you don’t necessarily need to visit the settings depicted in your work, but for me, it’s a good excuse to travel. Perhaps my most memorable “excuse” came when I was researching a novel involving British prehistory and, for one chapter in particular (published as “Ultraviolet” in Superstition Review), some archaeological sites in Orkney.

I was warned about Orkney. “Gale force winds,” a Scottish friend told me. “Cold rain. Rough seas. The ferry ride alone will make you sick for a week. It’s not Hawaii, mate.”

But as an American resident of Edinburgh, known as “The Athens of the North” for its role in the Enlightenment, I had developed a tolerance for such extremes. And I was curious about Orkney, a group of over 70 islands teeming with prehistoric sites that are reputedly the best-preserved in Europe. I had seen photos of the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness, less famous cousins of Stonehenge. I had heard stories about Neolithic tribes, Picts, Vikings, and, most fascinating of all, sailors from the Spanish Armada who had survived a shipwreck off the coast over 400 years ago and gone native, leaving behind a strain of conspicuously dark-eyed Orcadians.

There was history there. And prehistory. And legend and myth. And a couple of whisky distilleries. But what really put my motivation in gear? The Neolithic village of Skara Brae, known as “The Pompeii of the North.”

Pompeii? Ok, it wasn’t exactly Hawaii. But I imagined a volcano smoking on the horizon.

I loaded my bicycle into my car, drove it onto the ferry—let’s call it “The Pacific Princess of the North”—and braced myself for a seven-hour roller-coaster ride. My objective was to visit as many prehistoric sites as possible and, since it was late May, use my bike as much as possible while doing it. I had filled an entire suitcase with thermal layers and raingear. But as we left port, the sky was suspiciously clear. The sea was smooth as glass. Instead of clinging to the bulkhead for dear life, I was standing at the rail with a pint of ale watching the sunset at 10 pm.

The Mainland, as it is known, is the largest island and the home of the local government. The streets of Kirkwall, established by Norse invaders during their 600 year reign, were built narrow against the infamous wind. After some wandering, I managed to find my hotel only to discover Robert, one of the co-owners, tending the bar instead of the reception desk. His attitude, at least, was in the right place.

The next morning I woke to heavy rain, my enthusiasm slightly damp around the edges. At the reception desk a woman named Carol offered encouraging words about the weather. “It’ll lift by afternoon,” she said, in what sounded like a blend of Scottish and Norwegian accents. “The Farm Report on telly—that’s the one to watch. Ignore everything else. The BBC can’t really see this far.”

The accent made sense. And so did the outlook. I had been told that the inhabitants of Orkney, separated from the countries that governed them over the centuries, had a distinct sense of identity. They consider themselves Orcadians first, Scots second. What Americans might call The Texans of the North.

Except this wasn’t Texas weather. I glanced out the window again. I scanned my list of prehistoric sites and noticed one that was far away and relatively isolated from the others. An outlier. A distant target. A good excuse to drive instead of bike. It was called The Tomb of the Eagles:  a Neolithic chambered cairn that was found with over 16,000 human and 725 eagle bones inside. These weren’t intact skeletons, but remains that had been disarticulated by way of a prehistoric practice known as excarnation. In other words, the corpses had been left exposed until they were stripped by animals, then deliberately cracked apart and interred. Archaeologists are still puzzling over exactly what sort of religious practices were involved, let alone the beliefs they signified. Photos of the tomb at the time of discovery show skulls arranged on stone shelves, along with an ankle-deep mix of ribs and femurs and tarsals, not to mention eagle talons.

But this was still 22 miles away. Wipers clicking, I drove across several islands linked by causeways known as the Churchill Barriers, constructed to thwart the Germans during World War II and still displaying the occasional mast or rusting bulk of a ship scuttled to block passage. A different kind of excarnation, perhaps.

Signs pointed beyond sheep pastures to the visitor’s center, where I checked in for a hands-on tutorial of the various relics. The Tomb of the Eagles is privately owned, staffed by guides who take an interactive and somewhat playful approach. I was encouraged to hold stone tools, to feel the contours of ancient bones, and peer closely at the upper molars of a skull that had chewed its last meal 5000 years ago. Then I went off to the tomb itself. I followed the path through fields and along a headland with the North Sea churning at the cliffs below.

It was a grassy mound about the size of an RV. The passage into the tomb was low and narrow, requiring a hands-and-knees approach—a common Neolithic feature. In this case, though, the owners had strung a rope along the ceiling of the passage, with a trolley on the floor that a mechanic might use to slide underneath a car.

I glanced around nervously. I was alone. The sea crashed and heaved at the base of the cliff. Then I crouched down and pulled myself in.

It was empty, of course, with vacant side cells and a roped-off corner that was considered unsafe. And the original roof was gone, replaced by a concrete dome with skylights. It should have been a letdown. But I thought of all the hands that had stacked the stones, the regiment of skulls, the scree of bones on the floor. I imagined darkness, the air heavy with death. And those eagle talons.

Had bodies been exposed on the nearby cliffs for the eagles to pick at? And had those very same eagles been captured afterward and sealed in the tomb? I realized this was the nature of the Neolithic—or at least the nature of the Neolithic for us. They took everything apart without leaving instructions for putting it back together again. If you want your history intact and obvious, look elsewhere. This was an imaginative puzzle. Some assembly required.

As I walked back along the cliffs the weather began to lift. I checked my watch. Noon. With this confirmation of the farm report, I drove back toward the Mainland and my appointed tour at Maeshowe, the “finest chambered tomb in Orkney,” which turned out to be another grassy mound, but larger. I was beginning to get the picture.

Maeshowe, though, has special significance. It’s located on a low stretch of land surrounded by hills—a natural amphitheater—within sight of the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, and the Neolithic village of Barnhouse. And it’s impressive.

A guide led a bunch of us down a passageway set with gigantic flagstones into a main chamber about 15 feet high. Still fresh from the Tomb of the Eagles, I recognized the look of the place. The same architect? This tomb, however, had been looted and vandalized long before discovery by our enlightened civilization. The chambers were completely empty, the walls covered in places with “runic inscriptions”—i.e., Viking graffiti. There are references to treasure and, shall we say, unprintable activities.

“Many a woman has gone stooping in here,” one of them reads. “Thorni bedded. Helgi carved,” reads another.

But probably the most remarkable feature of Maeshowe is the alignment of the tomb itself. For several weeks before and after the winter solstice, the sunset shines directly down the passage and illuminates the back wall of the chamber. Historic Scotland, which manages the site, maintains a webcam for those meek souls who want to witness it but don’t care to travel to Orkney at a time of year when dusk occurs during lunch.

I emerged to find it raining again. I pulled up my hood and hiked over to the Stones of Stenness. I crossed the bank and ditch and made my way over to the nearest of the slabs. Originally there had been 12 of them. Now there were only 4. But they had character—thin, sharp, with oblique angles that gave them a certain geological nobility. And there was a central hearth:  a stone box set in the ground, where fires had burned for ceremonial rituals and feasts. I looked down into it and imagined heat. The rain stopped. The clouds parted. The sun shone.

There was only one thing left to do. Skara Brae.

Can you handle the truth? It ain’t Pompeii. But consider this:  we’re closer in time to Pompeii than Pompeii was to Skara Brae. In other words, it’s more than twice as old. And there it was, built into a midden, which today serves as a kind of viewing platform surrounding the houses. The roofs are gone, allowing visitors to peer down into the structures. Walls, hearths, beds, dressers—all made of stone.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Tombs. Standing stones. The remains of Pictish or Viking (or both) hill forts. Wind-swept hills and roaring sea. And it was research. Really. These details are coming to you courtesy of copious notes and photos I took in the field, not to mention hours of additional writing at the hotel every night.

That said, it’s hard to claim any scholarly merit in visiting Highland Park Distillery or the restaurants of Kirkwall, one of which served a prime Orkney fillet steak with pan-seared queen scallops in a light whisky sauce, a kind of locavore extraordinaire, while another, called Dil Se, identified itself as “The Finest Indian Cuisine in Orkney,” which seemed like boasting the Best Mexican Food in Moscow. Or maybe the Tex-Mex of the North? But the saag balti and lamb tikka was worthy of any hemisphere, as was everything else about Orkney. As I boarded the ferry back home, I realized the last place I had enjoyed this much was another group of islands I had visited many years ago. What was the name? Ah yes. Hawaii. The Orkney of the South . . . But that would be a much more expensive novel to write.  

Authors Talk: Steve Howe

Steven Howe

Today we are pleased to feature author Steve Howe as our Authors Talk series contributor. In conversation with Zoe Speidel (of the Spoken Word Hour on KUNM), Steve discusses “Repossession,” his nonfiction piece published in Issue 18.

Specifically, Steve and Zoe discuss how the essay can almost be seen as a coming-of-age story, as it reflects Steve’s own awakening in Chicago, when he first learned how racism occurs on a systemic level. Steve discusses his own privilege and shares the importance of being “careful as a writer to not appropriate anybody’s viewpoint and language that’s not your own.” Steve also talks about his passion for research and reveals that “you need to do more research than ever gets on the page.”

You can access Steve’s piece, “Repossession,” in Issue 18 of Superstition Review.

Guest Post, Benjamin Vogt: Writing About Family Boldly and With Personal Truth Guiding the Way

Benjamin VogtIn 2009 I finished my first memoir. I’d worked on it for a few years, performing copious amounts of research on international garden design, horticulture, psychology, landscape theory, as well as interviewing a few family members. Well, I actually only interviewed my mom, and that was a two hour heart-wrenching session where for the first time in my life I got to know her as a person more terrifyingly real than I ever imagined.

During a visit home I was anxious. I didn’t want to broach the interview we both knew I wanted to do (and that would be the key to my memoir), but as the visit was ending she finally asked when I was going to get around to it. She often asked this of me as kid when I had the stomach flu – I held in my vomit until the very last minute, resulting in a big mess nowhere near the bathroom. Sorry. Too much info. I am a memoirist you know.

I felt awkward during our interview. I shook. I felt sweaty and cold. It was strange. I wasn’t ready for this kind of memoir – the one where you speak the deep truth by having confronted it in your lived life. A few weeks later my mom emailed me the deeper, deeper truth, saying she’d never speak it in person to me. It was the story of her siblings being beaten and molested, of her stepfather spiking her vanilla malt and trying, unsuccessfully, to molest her, too. I learned that for my family the garden was an escape, a place to center and come to grips with life.

I edited that memoir, Morning Glory, in 2010 because I knew it lacked structure, and a big part of the reason it lacked structure was because I was afraid to dig as far I needed to. It still lacks structure, and has sat idly in an external hard drive ever since. But my new memoir, which I began working on in 2009, is risking more. It’s bolder. It’s asking big questions. It’s taking a stand. All because I’m putting more of myself on the page.

I’ve taken four trips to Oklahoma to interview family and experts about state history, about homesteading stories from 1894 to the 1940s, about prairie ecology, about Mennonites and Cheyenne beliefs. Exploring my love / hate relationship with my birth state has helped me find the pain that Oklahoma represents for many cultures, human and plant and animal. As an accelerated microcosm of manifest destiny, my family helped destroy the prairie — I want to right that wrong I’ve felt in my bones longer than I’ve known how to name it.

But I’m terribly afraid that in saying the above, I’ll alienate the older members of my family who see the Plains in rose colored glasses, or that I’ll be accused of not honoring the sacrifice of my immigrant family who spoke only German. But the more I read, the more I travel, the more I remember my childhood in the hot, red dirt, I know what my truth is and that I have to speak it loudly – so loudly it hurts people’s ears and hearts. If I can’t risk my life here, on the page, alone in my office, how can I ever risk it out there? How can I live with myself if my inner and outer selves don’t merge? These questions have become my second memoir’s structure. Through a failed first book and much more active research than I ever did in nine years of grad school combined, I’ve come to gain confidence and faith in my writing and my life. At 37, it’s taken me many failures to write boldly, to write and trust my truth – and if Turkey Red is ever read by family, I will surely fail again. But I will have profoundly succeeded, too.

Guest Post, Elizabeth Frankie Rollins: I Lost a Manuscript

Elizabeth Frankie RollinsThe Lost Manuscript: A Particular Silence

This spring I lost a manuscript. A hundred and fifty pages of handwritten text that I’d been working on for a year.

We’d suffered an upheaval of the home, a bedbug infestation. To get rid of these fiends, you must evict yourself from the rooms they have taken. Defeated as soon as you begin, you must vacuum, wash, bag, roast, poison or discard your belongings. Once you have removed all evidence of yourself, the exterminator sprays down a poison that must remain on your floor for months. The bugs don’t die easy. The poison must be set down in layers. It was not these actions alone, but the required repetition of these actions, that unhinged me.

I like to write in the morning, sitting in bed. The book I’d been working on, months of research and piles of handwritten text, was kept in a binder. I always write everything by hand first, but this time I was trying an added experiment of not entering any of it into the computer. I wanted to see how organic the structure might be if I didn’t interrupt the writing for typing.

Obviously, I kept this binder by the bed.

I think I believed that my binder would be immune. A book being created feels pristine, supernatural, imperishable. But when I opened my binder after cleaning out the bedroom, the first pages were full of blood. My blood. Also, black specks of feces. Those bugs drank my blood and then shat it out in the pages of my book.

In the hysteria that ensued, I vacuumed the pages on the back stoop, thrust them under the doormat in a vortex of ripping pages, wind, weeping. After, I heaped them into doubled plastic bags. There, memory fails.

A day or so later, I realized that I didn’t remember what I’d done with the manuscript. I remarked to my husband that it was somewhere in the sea of black trash bags we had surrounding our house, filling our shed, in the Bluebeard’s chamber of our closed-off bedroom. We fondled bags. We opened them. We looked. It wasn’t there.

We had been throwing away bags of stuff marked “bedbugs” for days. I am known for my memory, which is sometimes obscenely accurate. But I couldn’t remember anything after I’d vacuumed and bagged the thing. And if I couldn’t remember, then it was entirely possible that I’d done the unthinkable, that I had thrown it away, that it was in the landfill, baking alongside diapers and banana peels.

I had spent months researching historical Tucson. Free weekends, winter break, I spent hours in historical museums, on historical websites, in libraries. I read books on WWI, on Tucson history from 1860-1920. I wrote pages capturing the mirroring sorrows of war, epidemic, broken landscapes. I birthed a Paul, an Aggi, a family.

I mentioned the lost manuscript to friends, but my telling was impassionate, distant. Oh well, I’d say, I have lots of other books to write. The friends looked at me strangely. It must be in the shed, they’d say. Aren’t you upset, they’d ask?  Are you okay? I shrugged. They told me of Maxine Hong Kinston’s fire, Hemingway’s stories lost on a train, Dylan Thomas’ misplaced manuscript (three times!), of Flaubert, burying his book in the face of oncoming war (never found). There’s internet sites listing lost manuscripts through the ages. None of this resonated with me. These lists of absences seemed strange. The truth was, the book was simply growing silent.

One day, my husband said something to me about the main character. “Paul, who?” I responded. He blanched and stared at me in genuine alarm.

As a practice, I often imagine the book I’m writing as I fall asleep, so that I can see the characters up close. When I tried this, on our squeaky airbeds in a room with blank walls and bugs in the outlets, it was as if I looked through the wrong end of a telescope. The figures were small, smaller, tiny. I couldn’t hear what they were saying or see them distinctly at all.

People asked: Would I rewrite? Would I write about the losing? Would I write something else? I gave vague answers. I decided I’d write it in some radical format: short, sharp bursts of text. I decided that I would never write it. I decided to write it without the research. In truth, the whole story had gone faint and muffled. There was nothing to be done about it. It was sinking away. But I didn’t want anyone to know that. It seemed like such a sad failure.

Bedbugs are a shadow plague, difficult to eradicate. They linger and drink and hide. Over a couple of months, our house was increasingly dissected and strewn. Our mattress and belongings roasted in the sun. We didn’t sleep well. We touched hands at night, across the poisoned floor, our hollow beds squealing. The loss of the book fell into the folds of the loss of our home, fell into the loss of our immunity.

When the bugs were finally gone, we moved our whole house around. The bedroom was a place where creatures had crawled across my face, thrust tubes into my skin, drank from my blood. There had been too many mornings where the lasting blooms of bites on my body pointed to our continued entrapment. I could not sleep there anymore. So we created a new house. Everything came off shelves, was cleaned, set up in new rooms.

In the great rearranging, I noticed that a shelf of older, handwritten manuscripts bulged noticeably. I pulled these binders out and found some thin poetry books jammed behind them. It was strange and nesty and behind all these books, there it was. Wrapped in plastic and fragile as an infant, the pages of my book. A ferocious sense of motherhood arose and I walked around the house, weeping and holding this baby to my heart.

Without meaning to, I buried it to protect it, as amulet, as saint, as bone. Unearthed to light, it came right back. Thoughts about the text streamed in as though there had been no hiatus, no terror, no muffling, no loss. The book re-entered my vocabulary.

I am altered, knowing that what is created, invented, and conceived in the mind can be silenced.

I get back to the writing nonetheless.

 

What he remembers jumbles, rolls, slides. He cannot keep it organized and understandable. He has returned, but some part of him is nowhere, is vanished, a hole. At the bar, they’d told him of their wheat-less, pork-less, beef-less, sweet-less days. He listened and nodded and had no reply. He wished he’d been there. He wished he’d stayed, folded bandages, melted tin, grown gardens. He would have himself, if he had stayed. Something to go on. What would make it different now? How would he fix things? The massive weight of all that Paul did not know rose before him. 

 Italicized text from the lost and found manuscript, titled, Are There Words for Everything? 

 

Matthew Gavin Frank discusses “Warranty In Zulu” and other projects

Superstition Review was pleased to feature Matthew Gavin Frank’s poems in our very first Issue. Recently I had the opportunity to correspond with Frank to discuss his latest published work, Warranty In Zulu. Frank has published several poetry manuscripts including, AardvarkSagittarius AgitpropFour Hours To Mpumalanga, and 6 X 6. His prose has also been published in Blue Earth Review, Plate Magazine, Brevity, Transfinite, and elsewhere.

Superstition Review: How is Warranty In Zulu different from your other works?

Matthew Gavin Frank: Warranty is far more research-based than my previous collection, Sagittarius AgitpropWarranty began as a project to engage the ways in which the exhibits of South African museums and galleries have changed since the fall of apartheid in 1994, documenting how the “landscape” of the South African art scene has changed in style, substance, and accessibility with the socio-political landscape, with the aim of uncovering a larger statement about the interaction between politics and aesthetics.

SR: What has it been like working with Barrow Street Press?

MGF: Risking overstatement: heavenly. Barrow Street is wonderfully hands-on when it comes to the editing process, design, lay-out, etc. They’re very involved, continually offering feedback and suggestion, which contributes to the rare, essential dialogue between writer and editors (who, in the case of Barrow Street, are brilliant writers themselves). The experience of working with them will likely save me a crap-load of time when it comes to self-editing future manuscripts before submitting.

SR: What was the most difficult part about writing Warranty In Zulu?

MGF: Avoiding “othering” or “exoticising” the various cultures of South Africa. In order to aid in this, I felt I had to immerse myself in the country via research and travel, many-handed observations. After numerous trips to South Africa, my wife’s homeland, and her family’s country of residence, the project became laced with the personal, the various narrators herein (many inspired by unofficial interviews, casual conversations, and folklore) engaging issues of history, identity, confused observation, the nature of healing, irrational fear, irrational love and the collision between insider and outsider voices. While not every poem in the manuscript is set specifically within South Africa (most are), each struggles with similar thematic strains.

SR: How have your life experiences (such as working the Barolo wine harvest) shaped your views in your writing?

MGF: I’ve been incorporating things from my own life into the work, more than I have in the past. In the past, I always had a great time wearing masks, playing the asshole, protecting myself. But lately, I’ve been finding greater fulfillment in taking a risk, meaning: being honest. Or more honest at least. This desire ignited at about the same time I began to feel a draw to return to the Midwest, my roots, after wandering and traveling quite a bit. Both desires can, I think, be leashed to my mother’s recent illness. In 2006, Louisa (my wife) and I had just, on a road trip (after leaving Tempe), landed in Montpelier, Vermont, and decided we wanted to live there for a stretch. On the day we were to sign our lease, we received a phone call from my sister in Chicago telling us that my mom was sick. We fled Vermont, returned to Chicago for a year, lived in my parents’ house, and took care of the family while she battled illness (and won, thankfully). This infected my writing with the honesty I mentioned earlier. Does this mean I’m being merely confessional? Attracted solely to the Midwest and the actual? It’s complicated, but no way. As if to balance this, I’m presently working on a series of short essays based on photographs I took in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a poetry manuscript based on couching the bad joke in verse. Its working title is “Your Mother.”

SR: What are you currently working on creatively?

MGF: Well, the Oaxaca book, tentatively titled, SELF-HELP, MEXICO, deals with the aftermath of living in my parents’ house in suburban Chicago for over a year, helping my family during my mother’s battle with cancer. Louisa, and I, struggling to rediscover our footing as a married-couple-in-love, fled to Mexico. Our search for ourselves, our sanctuary, our relationship, took us from the wild crowds and violent social protests of Mexico City, to the culinary jewel of Oaxaca City, and finally to a tiny indigenous Zapotec village in Oaxaca’s Sierra Juárez mountains. The manuscript, which is still in-progress (I’m hoping to finish my final tinkering before 2010 ends), is fusing the narrative storytelling techniques typical of memoir with historical and folkloric research, becoming a series of sort-of lyric essays, and situating the sense of loss and confused search of one particular young married couple within a larger socio-cultural context. In this village, we discovered an unlikely band of U.S.-American expatriates of various demographics, on grappling journeys of their own, contributing to a community both unique and ubiquitous in its quest for some version of fulfillment. I’m going to go back to the “Your Mother” project after I’ve finished SELF-HELP, MEXICO. My nonfiction book, POT FARM, about my work on a medical marijuana farm in Northern California will be coming out from the University of Nebraska Press in 2011 or 2012.

SR: What advice would you give to an aspiring author?

MGF: Travel. Eat things that scare you: cock’s combs, for example. Force perspective onto your life. Allow your memory to distort things. Write a lot, even if it’s crappy. Read a lot. Be vulnerable. Allow the act of writing to play various roles in your life: mother, father, son, daughter, lover, pet goldfish. Argue with all of them, even though you love them. I will not say, be persistent. I swear to you: I will not say it.