Vol. III, No. 9, February 27, 2012

Readiness Practice: A Poem by Kate Fetherston

Mar 022012

READINESS PRACTICE

Fighter jets loop fat chalk
marks on a turquoise

sky while I’m daydreaming
out my third grade

classroom window. The air raid
siren blasts and Mrs. Fisher hollers,

“Kids, get under your desks, arms
over your heads!” I crouch beneath

my pink metal bomb shelter, eyes
squeezed shut, waiting for the end. This

is what the last minute will be like,
I narrate to myself, The bomb

drops just like that, an enormoid
ball of flame bigger than the sun, but

it’s like reading The Weekly Reader out
loud and my mind drifts. Through

the classroom’s open door insects
pop and click. Weeds reeking

in desert sun: stinkweed, goat heads,
and alfalfa by the tether balls where

I practice praying to see if
it works. Please, make Dean Posey

love me. But he turns his buck-toothed
smile toward that nasty Cindy Mercer

and a sonic boom shakes the swings when
he asks her to play kickball. I punch

the deflated yellow ball against
its whining pole, hard, and I picture

the shrunken ball sucked away and
swallowed by a relentless

heaven. The fragile thread attaching
me to gravity

snaps and I whoosh into space,
whirl farther and farther above

this little earth, crash into John Glenn
and the Cosmonauts. Cracking open

one eye, I peek at my desk’s moonscape
underbelly of gum wads and dried

snot, wondering if the sky has
a ceiling like my bedroom at home

with its glow-in-the-dark stars, and maybe
you smash into it when you die, but what’s

after that? Now, Mrs. Fisher’s voice
slams me awake, “Children, readiness

practice is over. Your arithmetic
test is next.” And, climbing back

into my seat, I smell eraser
dust. Cindy Mercer’s eating paste

again; Dean Posey throws up
his baloney sandwich, and everything’s

back to normal.

—Kate Fetherston

———————————-

Kate Fetherston’s first book of poems, Until Nothing More Can Break, is due out from Antrim House later this spring. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Hunger Mountain, Nimrod, and Third Coast. She co-edited Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience, (University of Iowa) and Open Book: Essays from the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, (Cambridge Scholars Press). Kate holds an MFA from Vermont College and was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize in 2008 and 2010. She’s received Pushcart nominations from 2002 to 2011. Kate is a psychotherapist in private practice in Montpelier, Vermont.

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Rodrigo Gudiño and Vincent Marcone’s “The Facts in the Case of Mr Hollow,” introduced by R. W. Gray

Mar 012012

Directors Rodrigo Gudiño and Vincent Marcone’s “The Facts in the Case of Mr Hollow” is a creepy animated film that zooms and pans in a visual waltz of details and in certain moments even lurches impossibly into the photograph looking to collect together the clues of the crimes it depicts and obscures.

In the first frames the camera holds on a letter that notes that “enclosed is the original photograph . . . look closely . . .” Our instructions are clear.

A perspective that can, against the laws of physics, explore the photograph is what entices me here. The animation plays with image and depth in the same way the protagonist Deckard (Harrison Ford) did in Bladerunner with his Esper photo Analysis. In both cases it becomes possible to enter the photograph, see around corners, overcome the limits of the photographic perspective.

Part of the allure of this is narrative for me: the odd pleasure during family holidays when I tell an old family story from my perspective and my little brother chimes in with some detail I’ve forgotten, something my memory left out or maybe could not see from where I was standing. To be able to break past the limits of the photograph’s perspective offers a similar extended and layered pleasure.

Another part of the allure here is simply voyeuristic: what if the limited field of vision of the camera or even our own line of sight could be overcome. The perverse pleasure of seeing becomes unstoppable.

Ultimately, the narrative in this photograph disappoints a little, particularly the final reveal. But it’s an animation experiment, a visual play, that should be celebrated. I defend this in the same way I defend Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000), a film told in four frames, each comprised of a single feature-length shot, all four shot simultaneously in a ballet of cameras (each trying to avoid recording the others as they and their characters come across one another.

The subject matter disappoints but what it accomplishes in terms of showing us new ways of seeing, on the technical and aesthetic levels, warrants tribute. If only someone would make a horror film using the same technique now.

“The Facts in the Case of Mr Hollow” was nominated for a 2008 Genie Award in Canada, screened at festivals across the world, and won “Best Animated Short” at the Fantasia Film Festival.

– R.W. Gray

Professor O’Blivion Rides Again: Noah Gataveckas

Feb 282012

Last time Noah Gataveckas appeared on NC he was burning books. Here now, with pleasure, is Noah channeling Marshall McLuhan in an excerpt from his Symposium: A Philosophical Mash-up, a work-in-progress Noah describes as “a postmodern textbook/encyclopaedia of philosophy, discussing the issues of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, etc., in a semi-systematic manner. The twist that makes it ‘postmodern’ is that it ‘simulates’ various rhetorical styles of philosophy-writing in doing so (e.g. Platonic dialogues, Thomist theology, Pascalian pensees, the Hegelian System, Nietzschean polemics, Wittgensteinian Tractatus-style lists, etc.). It is an attempt to show the poetry in philosophy. It tries to synthesize research with original composition, but doesn’t use footnotes. Instead, it relies on sections I’ve called ‘Metawords’ that ‘simulate’ conversations between various thinkers over the years, relying on their actual statements, juxtaposed in such a way that it creates a ‘symposium’ of ideas, flowing naturally from one to the next. (I got the idea from the way that DJs are said to ‘mash-up’ multiple songs into a single flow, regardless of source or genre.)”

I wish to speak to you about the nature of media.

How do I intend to do this? Through a medium.

That is: I speak, you read/listen. We meet at the nexus of the text.

That is: a formal structure that conditions where and how me and my message are reproduced and represented. For texts are bundles of codes, systems, formulas, alphabets. None of which you or I have any say in creating—except when we do, which is never. Therefore we speak only in inherited languages, on public phones through community trunks.

You might state: ‘But what difference does it make? Either way the speech gets spoken.’

The point is not what gets spoken, but the way.

That is: if you want to listen to what I have to say, you have no choice but to perceive me in this given fashion. And that means I’m immediately assimilated into your past memories and experiences with this immediate medium.

This, of course, is what you – yes, you, the reader/listener – are undergoing right now as you read/hear me write/speak.

The point is that a series of implicit, unnoticed bodily rituals and unconscious expectations are built in to your perception of me and my message. As such, they can play a distortive role, depending on what you have come to expect from this sort of visual/auditory medium.

Not to mention the medium itself—which, by the way, is my message. Due to the internal apparatus contained within the machine—built into its very fibre—which reconfigures the dimensions of how you and I communicate—which distorts the ratios of how you and I experience language and thought—the bureaucracy of knowledge that is technology—along these lines do me and my message get distorted, too.

Because of this I must necessarily lie. But it also means that I can’t but tell the truth.

This distortion – some of which is a natural result of your personal exposure to the medium, some of which is due strictly to the formal structure of the medium – determines your evaluation of what I say and what it’s worth. Perhaps even more than what I actually say and what it’s actually worth.

If you were to hear me on the radio, see me on TV, read me in a book, and talk to me in person, I would come off alarmist, crazy, cryptic, and intense, respectively. Yet I am all/none of these characteristics.

What I say transcends truth and lies. It exists in a third category. It is elevated above falsity, yet stuck below truth. How is this possible, you ask?

The answer: medium is magic.

But here’s the important question: is this me more real than that me? Where is a message most true: on radio, on TV, in print, or in person? The new world disorder cannot be denied. Truth has become fragmented, fractured, outsourced to automated processes and foreign interests. If you or I are going to make any sense of the situation, we’ll have to extend our theorizing to include those objects that are in the real world which emanate ourselves back to us, like pre-emptive mirrors. Technology acts as if it built us—it pulls us in every direction at once—we are extended ever-so-slightly outside of ourselves…

Media are the extensions of humanity. The psyche has blown up into a multitude of self-regulating information systems. Caught in the skynet of cyberspace, society reorganizes its thoughts and feelings to fit within the virtual schema. It upgrades to Life 2.0. Our public discourse now consist of tweets, txts, bells, beeps, and blue teeth. Everyone is interrupted by the internet. The public mind now hangs in the air like a new dimension, adding social and symbolic depth to the fabric of space-time, distorting humanity’s experience of reality in strange new ways. Idealism coexists simultaneously on top of materialism.

And so the world has accelerated to the point that one gets left behind in one’s own life. We’ve learned to play catch-up with our digital shadows. As opposed to forging ahead, more and more we feel ourselves getting carried along. This may occur against our will. The best protest we can manage is to clot the dataflow. But even this is an unwinnable war. Either tune in or drop out; that is to say, go native, like so many Doomers are planning to do by the time peak oil rolls around. But they will learn that there is no turning off in the age of eternal daylight and twentyfour-hour news broadcasts. Our lives are at the whim of the integrated system.

The new norm for consciousness is distortion. We are always getting blown in one way or another by the prevailing winds of the media landscape. We resist—and we get stretched to new extremes. We seem to have lost our sense of rationality, and now blow tattered in the breeze…

The eyes look through the television, the ears hear through the stereo, the mind thinks through the printed word. All three senses are combined when processed through the computer screen. A new ontological sphere is opened up in this supermedium. All it takes is participation on the part of the audience and, in return, they are taken to another world consisting of its own physics and logic(s). A second life awaits inside the experience machine.

If our senses were outsourced to different media, then what of the mind? Its dissemination goes back to the dawn of civilization. Knowledge was outsourced to libraries, memories to keepsakes and photo albums, character to fashion and accessorizing, anxieties and fears to religions and superstitions, and emotions to the theatre, music, and poetry. Now we are always outside of ourselves. The mind’s little driver has developed schizophrenia.

We live in the age of extended minds. It no longer makes sense to say that the mind is hidden from view. It is now available for public consumption, as advertised on Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, etc. We now enter the noösphere: the mind has projected past our bodies, taking on a material reality that transcends private cognition.

Our technologies do more and more of the thinking for us. Soon enough we won’t have to think for ourselves. This faculty will be outsourced, just like our abilities to sense and feel and know have already been turned into audiovisual technologies and token narratives and online encyclopaedias. Download to the hard drive, register, install, and activate—iThink will manage all cognitions automatically, leaving you free to play solitaire.

The past is trauma. The future is inevitable. The present is all we have, and all we have is a remote control to flip between channels. All flicker and flash. But it doesn’t matter that there’s 57 channels and nothing on—we still watch. (We find the static comforting, like a laugh track.) The rule of the 21^st century is that we’re plugged in from birth unto retirement and beyond. ’Til death do we logout…

Dedicated to Marshall McLuhan

—Noah Gataveckas

———————————————

Noah was born in Oakville, Ontario, in 1985, and educated at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. After moving to Toronto to work as a DJ in the entertainment district, he rediscovered his love of reading and writing. He is the author of poetry (“Silence”, “The King of the River”), journalism (“Hijacked: The Posthumous Reinscription of a Socialist in Canadian Consciousness,” “Digital Theft in a Digital World”), polemic (“Why Occupy? An Approach to Finance Capital”), theatre (Five Star), and a book-in-progress entitled Symposium: A Philosophical Mash-up. He lives and works in Toronto.

The Road: Fiction by David Helwig

Feb 282012

Over the last decade David Helwig has published a number of books, ranging from novellas such as The Stand-In and Killing McGee to the longer narratives in his story collection Mystery Stories. All these explore the possibilities of middle length narrative forms. “The Road,” another of these continuing explorations, comes from David’s new book, Simon Says. Simon Says is made up of seven stories in dialogue that take place at moments throughout the life of one man, Simon McAlmond (1935-2010). They present his life through the complex texture of dramatic speech in which nothing is merely told in narrative form, but a great deal is overheard. What is said by Simon, to Simon, and about Simon creates a subtle and complex portrait of a life; the reader is set to learn by observation, to draw conclusions that are never forced.

David is an old friend and an amazingly prolific author of poems, translations, stories, novels and a memoir. In 2007 he won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Prize for distinguished lifetime achievement. In 2009 he was appointed to the Order of Canada. His book publication list is as long as your arm. He founded the annual Best Canadian Stories which he edited for years. Biblioasis will publish in 2012 a collection of David’s translations of Chekhov stories, one of which appeared on Numéro Cinq. See also his poems on NC here and here and here and here! His new fiction book, Simon Says, from which this story is taken, will be published later this year by Oberon Press.

The Road

(1985)

We should go back.

Fuck off, Simon.

This is crazy, Janice. It’s pitch dark. You’ve already fallen down once.

I’ll have a black eye and my face will be covered with bruises, and I’ll tell everyone that you hit me.

Don’t be ridiculous.

And everyone will believe it, Simon.

No they won’t.

You have a reputation.

Not for that.

You have such a reputation. You remember that concert at the university you took me to last year. When I went off to the toilet. I just wanted to be alone. Sometimes it was like that when I was with you. I felt so crazy I couldn’t stand anyone to look at me. And while I was sitting in my little cubical, just letting myself be quiet, two girls came in, you know, chattering, and the one said to the other, ‘So what else are you going to do this year while you’re writing your thesis?’ and the other one said, ‘I’m going to have an affair with Simon McAlmond.’ I started to shiver, like I was freezing. I couldn’t come out until I knew they were gone. Then I thought I should have opened the door, so I could see who she was. Who was going to have an affair with you. I knew ever since then I couldn’t stand it any more.

People talk. It doesn’t mean anything.

They know if anyone gives you a look, you’ll look right back.

Let’s stop this now, my love, and go back to the cottage.

I’m not your love. So just fuck off, Simon. Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.

You really think we’re going to walk all the way to the city?

Well, the battery on my car is dead, and yours is trapped there in that little narrow driveway, so what else can I do?

You should have remembered to turn the car lights off.

Well I didn’t. Stupid Janice. I had things on my mind. I finally worked up the courage.

In the morning we can get your car started.

Go back if you want. I’m not.

This is crazy, you know. You’re going to trip and break that long elegant neck.

Crazy Janice. Well it’s better than going back to the cottage and letting you get me into bed. I’m never doing that again. It’s over.

Some things are never over.

That’s what you’re going to tell me. Kiss me on the eyes. Run your hands through my hair.

Some stories end and some stories don’t.

You and me I suppose?

That’s right.

Bullshit, Simon.

No.

If you thought that you should have stopped passing your dick around the community.

You said ‘Leave your wife,’ so I left my wife. What else is it you want?

You were with Catherine last week.

We have children. I visit them.

Until three in the morning.

You’re making that up.

No. I have evidence. I have reliable testimony.

You have your own jealous suspicions.

I have spies, Simon. They watch you and report to me.

Private detectives, I suppose.

Very private. And they do it just for me.

I greatly hope all this nonsense isn’t true.

It’s true, Simon Dippydick. I have you watched.

And just who would do this watching and besetting? I suppose they hide behind trees and garbage bins.

Henry.

Who’s Henry?

Cerise’s son. She brings him into the store to move boxes of books and tidy the back room. He adores me.

Who doesn’t? I’m sure that’s why half the customers come to the bookstore. All the men who claim they want you to tell them about the newest John Irving or Tom Wolfe or Margaret Atwood, and they really just want you to talk to them.

Henry’s very loyal, Simon. He’s my little horny robot. I used to notice how he’d bump into me sometimes, sort of by accident, out in the stock room, and I’d just smile and send him out for coffee. I knew what he was doing and I let him, and now he’ll do whatever I want.

You’re trying to convince me that you sent some pathetic juvenile out to dog my footsteps.

He’s very good at it. He makes notes.

And as a reward you permit him to cop a feel now and then in the storeroom.

Don’t be crude. He thinks I’m beautiful.

You are.

Oh you say so. You always say so. It’s part of your technique.

We all think you’re beautiful. Every man you pass on the street.

Except the ones who think I’m ugly.

You just tripped again.

How do you know?

I could hear.

I didn’t fall down.

You could.

So? It’s dark.

Watch your step, and stay in the middle of the road.

Just leave me alone.

This is dangerous, Janice, walking along here in the dark. Apart from being insane. We should go back.

My first boyfriend thought I was kind of ugly. ‘You’ve got a really weird face,’ he used to say.

Why did you bother with him?

He was very popular, and I was this misfit who studied dance and couldn’t talk to anybody. I liked it that he paid attention to me. I thought he was cute. He said the way I wagged my tail when I walked gave him a big hard-on.

All that dance training.

Muscular ass.

What about your husband?

What about him?

Did he think you were beautiful?

For a while. Then he kind of lost interest. That was when I started dance classes again. And then he moved to Dawson City and I didn’t.

I’ve often wondered whether beautiful girls become dancers or whether dancing teaches them how to be beautiful.

So have you had sex with a lot of dancers, Simon Dippydick?

Only you.

So you say.

The truth.

How far is it to the highway?

Another couple of miles.

How far is that in kilometres?

Three and a third.

Do you remember the night we spent in a motel somewhere up here? We didn’t sleep. Hardly at all. When you first got me and you were showing off.

I don’t remember.

You must.

No.

Really?

Dreams are like that.

You think it was a dream? Seems like it now. Long hot night. Do you think this is a dream, the two of us stumbling along on a dark road through the woods, you begging me to forgive you?

I haven’t begged you to forgive me.

Why not?

There’s no reason.

So easy to forget. Oh so easy.

Watch your step, the hill’s getting steeper.

I don’t care if I fall down again. Just more evidence that you abused me. Threw me on the ground and dragged me over the stones.

Why do you say those things?

Because that’s what you do, you abuse me. You can’t keep your eyes off other women. We walk into a room, and it’s like we’re in a brothel, and you’re checking out the selection. ‘Is she to your taste sir, or would you like something a little more plump and comfy? More heft in the bosom?’ Can’t keep your eyes off them. Or your hands either. ‘What are you going to do this term?’ they all say. ‘Oh, I’m going to have an affair with Simon McAlmond.’

There’s been nobody else for two years.

Except your wife, and probably a couple of late afternoon quickies with obliging undergraduates.

While you’re in the back room letting Henry fondle you.

I don’t let him go that far.

There’s been nobody else.

I’m going to quit the bookstore anyway. I don’t need him anymore.

You’ve been there what? Four years?

I’m tired of working for Cerise.

It’s not a bad job.

I know just what I’m going to do. I’m going back to school and become a dental hygienist. They make good money, you know, and they’re in demand. Everyone is obsessed with perfect teeth. Imagine me bending over some sweet-looking young thing, her mouth’s wide open, and I push aside that dainty pink tongue, to scrape away the gumbo, and whenever I want to, if she makes me mad, looks like some girl you’d like, I scrape a little too hard, so it hurts her. ‘Just another couple of minutes,’ I say, and go back to tormenting her. Poking away at the sensitive places. Or it’s a big guy with tobacco breath and a thick red tongue who thinks he can handle pain, until I find an exposed root and go to work on it. I see the panic in his eyes as he lies flat out in the chair, me safe behind my white mask, my rubber gloves. And I imagine it’s you.

The first time I saw you, I thought to myself, ‘She is so very lovely, but she might be a little strange.’

You couldn’t wait to get me into bed. You thought I’d be so hot.

That’s right.

Simon! What’s that noise?

A bird.

Scared me half to death.

A whip-poor-will.

A what?

Whip-poor-will. That’s the sound they make.

What’s it doing out here in the night?

They’re night birds.

They’re damn loud.

Yes. You don’t hear them all that often.

There he is again. ‘Whip-poor-will.’

They’re members of the goatsucker family.

You’re lying.

No.

Goatsuckers?

Yes.

Go suck a goat, Simon.

They fly above the trees at night, eating insects. Huge open mouths. I suppose that’s how they got the name.

Go suck a goat. Oh ouch, ouch . . . damn.

What?

I twisted my ankle.

We really have to go back.

Far enough now that there’s no point.

It’s not that far.

No, Simon, you reach a certain place and you can’t go back. I learned that when I finally quit dancing.

Maybe.

Your children never liked me, did they?

They don’t really know you.

I’ve been around for quite a while.

But you hardly ever see them.

Kind of spoiled. That’s what I thought the day we went to that movie with them, that Indiana Jones thing. Spoiled brats. Especially Lorna.

As are you, my love. A spoiled brat.

I’m not, and I’m not your love, not any more, Simon. It’s finished.

So you tell me.

I came all the way out here to say it, and I did.

Yes.

And I’m not spoiled. I pay my way. I wanted Henry to spy on you so I let him bump up against me in the back room

Very romantic.

I know what’s fair. And you don’t.

You don’t think I pay my share.

That`s just money. You always pay the bill in restaurants. But that just makes me feel like a whore.

You keep changing your rules. What I’m supposed to do or not supposed to do.

There are no rules.

No?

You think you have rules. You think you have all kinds of rules.

I try to have certain standards.

Standards.

Yes.

What about the sex standard? Am I good?

Yes.

Am I the best you ever had in your life?

Probably.

No other girl gives it like I do.

True.

But you don’t care enough to say so.

I’m sure I have.

No, you just take me to Toronto to nice restaurants and pay the bill, and we shack up in some classy hotel. Or we go to Montreal and you offer me hand-made leather boots. At first I liked being your whore, but now I don’t.

It seems I can’t do anything right.

God, I’d like to have you in the dentist chair. I would put that steel tool so far into the sensitive roots of your teeth that you’d scream and beg and cry like a baby.

Why?

Because you sneak off and screw your wife.

Your friend Henry is a liar. He tells you what he thinks you want to hear.

You never loved me, not once.

So what am I doing out here on this dangerous steep rocky road through the Laurentian Shield in the middle of the night, stumbling along with you while you try to walk all the way back to the city? Which you will never be able to do. And which is insufferably stupid.

So I’m stupid. I was never smart enough for you, was I Simon? Not like those little university geniuses in their lace panties.

I didn’t say you were unintelligent. I said you were being stupid.

And you think I’m a weakling.

No, I just think it’s twenty miles or more and your feet will give out.

What about yours, Simple Simon?

I’m sure they’ll give out too.

Well why don’t you just go back now?

Because I don’t want to drive along here in the morning and find you lying on the road wounded or dead.

You could handle it. You have that boy scout emergency pack in the trunk of your car. You can deal with anything.

That’s for winter.

If we’re talking about stupid, what about that plastic case with the folding shovel and the candle and matches and a chocolate bar.

Prepared on the best advice.

So stupid.

Whatever you say.

Maybe when I get to the highway I’ll hitch-hike.

It’s two o’clock in the morning. There won’t be anybody on the road.

There’s always somebody.

Not somebody you should be accepting a ride with.

You mean it might be some big bad man who expects little Janice to put out in exchange for the ride. Well little Janice is prepared to take down her pants in those emergency circumstances. Better than going to some motel and letting you put the moves on me.

Maybe we should stop talking for a while.

So stop. I don’t care. Turn around and go back to your cottage and settle in there for the winter.

We’re selling the cottage.

Why?

Splitting things up. It seemed simplest.

So where will you take your women?

I’ll take them to Toronto, and we’ll shack up in some classy hotel.

And you’ll give them the whole routine.

Probably.

‘Oh you’re so beautiful, and you’re so unusual . . . take off your clothes’

Perhaps.

Oh fuck you, Simon. Go back to your cottage and jerk off. Phone the next girl on your list. Do whatever you want, but leave me alone.

Out here at night in the dark.

Yes.

I don’t think I can leave you here in the middle of the woods.

Well you have to leave me somewhere. You have to listen to me and understand that. You have to leave me somewhere, even if you truly think I’m the most beautiful woman in the world.

When we get to the village I’ll get two separate units in the motel, and in the morning we’ll find a garage and get your car going.

Don’t be so helpful. Just go.

In the morning.

Oh fuck off, Simon. Just fuck off.

—David Helwig

—————————————————–

Double Exposure: An Interview with Darin Strauss — Richard Farrell

Feb 272012

Darin Strauss is an American writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of three novels and one book-length memoir. Strauss is married to the journalist Susannah Meadows, and together, they are the proud (and busy) parents of twin, four-year-old boys.

Strauss’ 2010 memoir, Half a Life, won the 2011 National Book Critics Award and was excerpted in GQ and NPR’s This American Life. Half a Life chronicles the aftermath of a motor vehicle accident in which Strauss was the driver. His car struck and killed a young girl whose bicycle swerved into the road. Cleared of any wrong-doing in the accident, Strauss writes about the effect of this traumatic event which haunted him for twenty years. Hailed as a “masterpiece” and as a “memoir in its finest form,” the book has garnered critical acclaim and was named ‘Best Book of the Year’ by NPR, Amazon.com and others.

Chang and Eng, Strauss’ first book, was published in 2000. The novel, which tells a fictional story of the famous real-life conjoined twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, met with widespread critical acclaim. Set in Siam and antebellum North Carolina, Chang and Eng bravely explores the concept of self and other through the lives of the eponymous Siamese Twins, who came to the United States, became farmers, husbands and fathers. Strauss’ unflinching exploration of the twins’ story, told from the point of view of Eng, won many major literary awards and is currently being optioned for a movie. After Stauss’ second novel, The Real McCoy, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. His third novel, More Than It Hurts You, was published by PenguinPutnam in 2008.

We speak over the phone. I reach him early in the morning and he asks if I can call him back. He is getting his boys ready for school. We talk amidst the street noise of rush hour New York, as Strauss goes for his morning walk through Brooklyn. At one point, I reluctantly offer up that I’m a Patriots fan. His New York Giants have recently defeated my favorite team for the second time in a Super Bowl. He is gracious in victory. I tell him that my son cried for fifteen minutes after the game and he says that I’m the second person who has mentioned this phenomenon. Being a parent changes the way we enjoy sports, in addition to how we live our lives. He is generous and quick with his responses. Once again, I’m reminded that even the most successful writers, and Strauss is clearly one of these, retain a sense of wonder and humility at the practice.

Richard Farrell (RF): Is there a spiritual tradition from which your write? How do ideas of spirituality and religion affect how you approach your work?

Darin Strauss (DS): I don’t know about that one. I’m not a fully LAPSED Jew. I do believe. But I don’t go to temple and I don’t speak Hebrew. I’m a very secular person. I suppose the closest I come to a true spiritual tradition might be the literary tradition. For me, there’s something almost liturgically intense in the best writing. Someone like Tolstoy or Bellow. People like that created texts that have an important gravity; they pull on my brain the way the Talmud would pull on another Jewish person’s brain. I think Tolstoy is the best writer we have ever had. I’m sure he wouldn’t be impressed by someone like me saying that – big whoop, right? — but for me, there is something spiritual about being engaged with reading a work of literature like that.

RF: You wrote three novels before Half a Life was published. Beyond the thematic material, can you talk about the process of writing non-fiction compared to writing fiction?

DS: I find in memoir it is harder to make a coherent whole—I mean an artful structure. The great and popular writer David Lipsky helped me significantly in structuring the book. I was lost with it. He said do this and change that–he actually did some real stuff in there for me. The material in the memoir was so close to me personally I couldn’t see it. Ask any sea captain: When you are too close to something, it’s hard to get perspective.

In fiction writing, the difficult stuff is testing to see if what you’re writing is believable. For the memoir, that problem vanishes: it’s the truth you’re working with. I just had to figure out how to make the structure of it work.

A lot of people have asked me why I didn’t just write a novel about what had happened? I chose to do it as CNF because for me, fiction has a kind of narrative playfulness about it. There has to be fun involved in fiction, even if its fun played out in a serious way. There’s a gamesmanship to it. All fiction writing involves intellectual play, in other words. I didn’t feel like I could do that with the memoir. It would have been disrespectful to the memory of the girl who died. The thematic and textual art-making in fiction would’ve disrespected the actual events of an actual life.

RF: You’ve talked about being sensitive to critics and reviewers. Does that, for lack of a better word, anxiety, ever work its way into your writing? I suppose what I’m asking is, does your sensitivity make you defensive at all?

DS: I can wall off certain demons. I do read reviews. I mean if I’m going to be reviewed in the New York Times or the Washington Post, I’m not strong enough not to read the review. But it does affect you. You become sensitive to the slights. But I’m good at walling that part of myself off when I write. The reviews don’t get in there, into that place where I’m writing.

Maybe if there was a bad review that seemed to understand my writing—that got at the very specific flaws I know are there—that would bother me more. I think most writers—most of us non-genius writers –know deep down what our flaws are. But I haven’t had a bad review that focused on what I feel are the secret, weak parts of my work. I haven’t had a critic that made a point that could make me think to be a better writer.

RF: I want to ask you about writing sex scenes. I’m thinking specifically about the scene in Chang and Eng where the conjoined twins have sex for the first time to their new brides. I found this scene (really two back to back scenes) highly erotic (and well written). Rather than being turned off by the oddness of the situation, I found myself identifying with Eng in a very personal way. Besides accepting a compliment to your writing, can you talk about how you approach sex scenes, or scenes of physical intimacy in your writing?

DS: (Laughs and points out my inadvertent pun on ‘back to back’) I knew that was going to be one of the main questions of the book. How were they able to father 21 children? I knew I had to address how they had sex and that it was going to be essential.

Sex scenes always create a problem. And they have to serve the story. You can’t just stop in the middle of a scene and forget everything—just for a little textual thrill. I mean, it’s best not to be merely prurient about it. Here’s an analog to sex-scene writing. I think of a scene where a character walks into an ice cream shop. You have describe things that matter, but you can’t stop the forward motion of your story just to have a six-page description of the sprinkles and the cone. How the sprinkles and the cone move your story along, how they affect your particular characters in ways that are particular to them—that’s a good scene.

For that sex part in Chang & Eng, I focused on the conflict between those two men and the trouble with having your brother constantly with you. There was no intimacy, nothing was ever private. But I also wanted to conceive the sex scene as something that could get at what was special about this thematic material and this plot. So I made Eng in love with his sister-in-law. But he could never tell her or touch her because the woman’s husband—his brother—was always with her. The sex was an extension—or an elucidation—of the problem.

RF: Do you have (or did you) other writers you modeled yourself after? Who and how did you escape that influence? How did you get out of its way.

DS: I’m always picking up new influences. You certainly don’t stop being influenced. Zadie Smith said something like, ‘A writer should approach the library the way an eater approaches the buffet table.’ Like: I’ll take from this, from that, and also from that. That cobbled-together meal ends up—if you have enough various dishes in there, in various quantities—being something unique to you.

The writers influential to me include Tolstoy, Nabokov, Lorrie Moore, Martin Amis, John Cheever, Isaac Babel, V.S. Pritchett. Pritchett isn’t read much anymore but he was a great writer and a critic who kept writing late into his eighties. David Foster Wallace too, and Roth. A dash of Updike, a touch of Chekhov.

So I’m always reading and being influenced. I don’t think that ever stops.

RF: How important is voice to you in writing?

DS: It’s important. If there’s a morality in writing, it’s in the voice or the style. Nabokov made that point, and lived it, too. I try to see what other writers do, and to figure out how to do it myself.

Nabokov was great at compressing metaphors. David Lipsky teaches his students to look at what Nabokov does with metaphors and try to find ways to use that. Or David Foster Wallace, and how well he uses incredible modifiers to jazz up the prose.

But, to get less craft-lessony for a second. When I read Tolstoy, it’s a chance to take a ride in the brain of a genius for a few weeks. That’s the part that movies and TV can’t get at, because you are always watching the pictures with your own eyes, and having your own observations. Which I’m guessing are limited than Tolstoy’s. But if you read Tolstoy, you really are existing in his brain, getting the full strength of his thoughts. I think of it like brain vitamins.

RF: My last interview was with Anthony Doerr. He also has twin boys. I hope it’s not something in the well water. How has being a parent effected your writing?

DS: (Laughs) It’s made me have less time to write! My third book was about someone harming a child. But now when I get to a place in a book, maybe it’s harder to go to the cruel places. But I don’t think it’s affected my writing in a negative way, beyond having less time.

RF: In Half a Life you say, “Things don’t go away. They become you. The trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past or future.” James Joyce wrote that “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” How does writing help this? Does writing about the events offer a glimpse of freedom or only soften prison of the past?

DS: That was an allusion to a T. S. Eliot quote. But writing does help; it has been helpful for me. I used to subscribe to what William Gass said, that if you write well it cannot be cathartic, because you are working too hard. But after writing the memoir, I have to say that either Gass was wrong, or I didn’t do it well. Because it was completely cathartic. It has helped me smooth over the psychic bumps which accumulated from the accident. It helped me heal. I didn’t want to be a self-help book author, but I guess if you write well about these kind of things, the book can be self-helpful, in a way.

RF: What are you working on now?

DS: David Lipsky and I are collaborating on a young adult adventure series. I’m also working on a new novel that’s a mix of everything I’ve done to this point. The book is contemporary and historical and even a mix of fiction and non-fiction.

RF: In your opinion, can writing be taught? Also, and I think these questions are related, is it perseverance or talent?

DS: I think this whole argument, writing can’t be taught, is ridiculous. Yes, few people are super-brilliant writers once they graduate. Is that really a useful expectation, though? You don’t graduate from law school and instantly become Clarence Darrow! Does that disqualify law school? If you do not graduate among the top one percent of lawyers in the world, did law school fail you?

Does an MFA make you, magically, Philip Roth? No. It’s not a practical degree, but I tell students that if you really want an MFA, go where you can afford to go. Go to a school where you can get money to attend.

I also think you need to go to school where the writers you like teach. The economic truth of writing is that you’ll likely have to teach, even if you do publish your books. Even the incredibly successful writers, for the most part, teach. Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safron Foer and Zadie Smith all teach—in fact, they’ve all taught with me at NYU.

But if you can’t afford it, don’t go. You won’t just be able to hang a shingle on your door when you graduate and start making money. But, certainly, yes, writing can be taught. You will improve, you will—if you work hard in grad school—get closer to the last limits of your potential. If you go into it with that expectation, and you know there are no guarantees, and you still want to go, and can afford to go, and end up getting into a good program, then do it.

RF: Keith Lee Morris once wrote, “A father is anyone with answers to the questions that keep you awake at night.” I interviewed him and asked him this question. I’m now going to ask you: Do you think this is the writer’s task, to answer the questions that keep us awake at night? (Interviewer’s Note: Morris, in his answer, talks about exploring and not having all the answers. I didn’t want to give him a bad rap on this one!)

DS: No! It’s a nice line. It sure sounds good. Here’s a plainer one. A father is someone whose sperm helps create a child. I don’t know—I don’t have many answers.

The truth is, fiction writers shouldn’t have too many answers. Debate team captains have answers. Literature is its own way of thinking about things, as Milan Kundera said. Stories that purport to have an answer are not fiction; they’re propaganda. It’s an easy thing to say the answers. Literature transcends answers. Its job is not to tell you what’s right or wrong, but to show how everything is a little bit of both.

—Richard Farrell