Scientists at the University of Liverpool recently conducted a study indicating that the brain “lights up” bigger and brighter when grappling with Shakespeare and Wordsworth than when taking in ordinary prose.

From the Telegraph:

Philip Davis, an English professor who has worked on the study with the university’s magnetic resonance centre, will tell a conference this week: “Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain.

“The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike.”

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This is the simple yet elegant concept behind Recommended Reading, a new kind of publication launched by Electric Literature in May 2012. After thirty-four weeks of careful, intelligent, and innovative curation, it remains a strong example of why literature continues to thrive in the digital age.

I met with Halimah Marcus and Benjamin Samuel, the co-editors of Recommended Reading, on a tepid evening late last September. We situated ourselves in the back garden of the Crown Inn, one of Brooklyn’s myriad drinking spots, and over tall glasses of handsome beer, spent an hour-and-a-half discussing the ins and outs of editing an ambitious literary project, and also what it means to be an editor and writer nowadays in a creative culture that is constantly changing due to rapid shifts in technology. Marcus and Samuel had just been named “Indie Lit Impresarios” by Brooklyn Magazine, titles they were flattered by, but did not make their roles any more or less crucial than if they’d remained obscure names. And they’d just finished a stint at the Brooklyn Book Festival, where they peddled branded flasks, engaged with a large portion of the New York literary scene and book-loving public, and helped co-host the festival’s opening night party, alongside Tumblr, The New Inquiry, and The L.A. Review of Books.

It should come as no surprise that Marcus and Samuel both grew up voracious readers, with Marcus ingesting Roald Dahl and C.S. Lewis as a kid, and Samuel combing through the quarter bins at consignment shops looking for his next paperback fix. Both were also destined for the writing life, and they each began their foray into fiction at a young age. Samuel even attempted to pen his own novel in the fifth grade.[1] The two met while working at Electric Literature, and then solidified their relationship at Brooklyn College, where they both received Fiction MFAs.

Perhaps the most interesting instance of foreshadowing? In 2007, long before Recommended Reading was even a thought, Marcus used a site called FutureMe.org to write herself a series of letters. She recently received them. “One of them,” Marcus noted, “said that if I was ever going to work in publishing I should just start my own literary magazine. I don’t even remember thinking that, let alone writing it.”

The following is an edited version of the conversation we had back in September. Since then, things have continued to grow for Recommended Reading, and the publication has partnered with even more key players on the magazine and publishing front—Tin House and Armchair/Shotgun, Melville House and Grove/Atlantic, to name a few—and esteemed writers like Mary Gaitskill and Etgar Keret, all in an effort to cull together the best literary pieces out there.

***

The Rumpus: Tell me about the genesis of Recommended Reading, and where that conversation started. You were both with Electric Literature prior.

Halimah Marcus: I was the managing editor, and Ben was the online editor, and there was a natural juncture to think about the structure of the magazine and decide if we wanted to change anything. Our founding editors, Andy and Scott, were becoming more and more involved in their other business, launching an app called Spun, and were no longer able to be as involved with Electric Literature. So we took the opportunity to reevaluate the structure of the magazine, and see if it was still fulfilling our mission to use digital publishing innovatively, and be on the cutting edge, to the full extent that it could. Because, you know, especially with technology, things change very quickly. And so, the publishing landscape in late 2011 was already very different than it was in early 2009, in that the model that we had championed—publishing to every platform, cutting costs by integrating digital distribution with print distribution—had actually become the standard of the publishing industry, more or less.

Benjamin Samuel: We wanted to stay innovative and responsive to trends, which has always been central to the initial mission of Electric Literature. Back in 2009 everyone said, “iPhones are going to kill publishing, and no one’s ever going to read because they’re just distracted by these devices they’re holding in their hands all the time, and by social media, and all these things buzzing around them.” But we proved through Electric Literature’s quarterly anthology that if you deliver fiction to where people are naturally congregating to consume media, that they’ll pick it up. And Recommended Reading—because we distribute directly through Tumblr—actually fulfills that in a much more natural way.

Marcus: And publishing one story a week—for free—is actually a much more organic way to reach our readers, rather than a quarterly magazine that comes out with months in between each issue. We can keep in touch with them [the readers], maintain that regular clip of reading by being on Tumblr. People can follow us, or people can click directly through to the stories from Twitter and Facebook.

Rumpus: And then, of course, your Tumblr followers can re-blog.

Samuel: Right, it increases the exposure. And publishing just one story a week also allows people to sit with a piece of fiction for a while and not feel that pressure of, There are a million other things that are coming out! So we’re not really contributing to the buzz; we’re refining things, making it easier for people to spend quality time with fiction.

Rumpus: I wanted to ask about your Single Sentence Animations, and whether those were initially part of your package, and whether you had talked about them during your initial conversations about Recommended Reading.

Samuel: The animation series started with Electric Literature‘s quarterly journal as a way to bring fiction to a new medium and a new audience. It was never conceived to be like a book trailer, which actually does not seem to be a good way to market books.

Rumpus: Why’s that, do you feel?

Samuel: Most book trailers are sort of inspired as movie trailers. And books and movies (and the way you market them) are not the same thing. Single Sentence Animations are stand-alone works of art.

Marcus: Book trailers certainly can be effective, but the temptation to just depict the story often gets in the way, and they can turn out cheesy. So that’s why we have a Single Sentence Animation model, where we choose a sentence, and then the animation is inspired by the sentence, and influenced by the story, but not trying to depict the story.

Samuel: The actual idea came from Scott Lindenbaum, who’s one of the founding editors, and those weird animations of the MTV logo in the 1980s. We’ve been doing them since 2009, and now we’re actually going to be featuring Single Sentence Animations on this new MTV animation show.

Rumpus: Oh, wow.

Marcus: Or they’re featuring our animations. Edwin Rostron animated the Steve Edwards story from Electric Literature, and then the Ben Marcus story for Recommended Reading. And he actually said that he was inspired by the old “liquid television” MTV animations, and then they [MTV] came back and licensed his animation, so that was a neat little circle. Now we do the Single Sentence Animations for the original fiction that we [Marcus and Samuel] choose for Recommended Reading, so that’s one a month. And we did them for almost all of our Electric Literature stories, which means we have over thirty-five animations now.

Rumpus: What’s your process on collaborating with animators and artists, and getting them to do these Single Sentence Animations?

Samuel: It’s sort of fifty/fifty. Sometimes we’ll find an animator whose work we really admire, and we’ll approach them. Other times, though, animators will get in touch with us and say, “How can I get involved in this series?” A.M. Homes actually had an animator in mind that she wanted to work with for “Hello Everybody.” That animation has gotten thousands of views, and has been shared quite a bit.

Rumpus: How did you come to choose Ben Marcus’s “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” as your first story? Because that was an editorial pick, on your part.

Samuel: We wanted to have a story that, right out of the gate, was phenomenal. We both read it independently, came into the office the next day, and were both speechless about how good the story was.

Marcus: And it was a little tricky, because we got it on submission, I think, for Electric Literature. So we had to go back to them [Ben Marcus and his agent] and pitch the idea of Recommended Reading. And fortunately both Ben’s agent and Ben were really into the idea—very supportive of the free fiction aspect, and also the aspect of supporting other presses. So that was really fantastic.

Rumpus: Piggybacking on that, what has been your favorite story that you’ve published so far?

Marcus: I think, for me, it probably would be a toss-up between two that I wrote introductions for. I mean, there might be a time when we both feel equally passionate about a story—we have to fight to the death over who gets to write the introduction. But the Helen DeWitt story, “Recovery,” and the A.M. Homes story, “Hello Everybody.” Both really great stories. The Helen DeWitt story, I think, is—well you could say this almost about both of them—but so unusual and wonderful. I just feel like she circles and spirals in on something really true and devastating and great, so I love that story.

Samuel: For me, the Seth Fried story. I really was thrilled to be able to publish that, because I’d read his collection, and it really sort of changed the way I thought about my own writing. And shifted what I thought I could do with fiction. He’s really great at writing things that are of the genre fiction bent, but are stories that anyone can appreciate, regardless of where they think their taste lies.

That, and the new translation of Clarice Lispector that we ran in our first week. You and I read her in Ernesto’s [Mestre-Reed’s] class in college.[2] The translation came out with New Directions. If you’re familiar with literary fiction, and work-in-translation, then you know their brand, and you know that you can trust the stuff that they publish. But, especially in the States, people don’t read literature-in-translation enough; it’s just not on our radar.

Rumpus: I was at the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday, and I went to the PEN translation panel, and people were just lamenting that fact. They said something like only three percent of international literature is translated into English. Which is unbelievable.

Samuel: Publishing under-represented writing is important to us, which is part of why we’re distributing on a channel that’s pop culture; we’re using social media so we can deliver directly into the mainstream. And so we’ve published Clarice Lispector, and Samanta Schweblin (through PEN America). We also have seven very short stories by this great Israeli writer named Alex Epstein, featuring illustrations by David Polonksy of Waltz with Bashir.

Marcus: And Peter Stamm. In late October, Kevin Brockmeier will be the guest editor, and we’re going to be reprinting a story by an Italian writer, Dino Buzzati. It’s been out of print since 1987, and it’s been translated into English, but it’s just a long out-of-print collection. And apparently a lot of his work is untranslated.

Rumpus: Something that I love about Recommended Reading is the power you have to consistently present all this new or undiscovered work to a vast audience of young readers. I often think, in addition to only three percent of the work being translated, how much of that is actually being read by young people? People who are not even in college yet, or people who are in college but maybe won’t take a literature class that’s Latin American literature, French literature, whatever.

Marcus: Literature-in-translation’s not even taught very much in most colleges.

Rumpus: Right. That’s so true.

Marcus: Unless you specialize.

Samuel: Since we’re publishing one story a week, we can really highlight our writers. People are much more likely to give a writer they’ve never heard of a chance when they don’t have the impression that they’re taking a risk.

Marcus: We really want people to be able to discover authors through Recommended Reading. I’ve heard people say, “Oh I’d never heard of Clarice Lispector, and then I went out and I got her book. I’m reading all her stuff now.” Or, “I found Office Girl. I’d never read Joe Meno before.” Another friend of mine was really turned on to Peter Stamm, and got that collection. So that’s the ideal situation for us when we’re partnering with these presses.

Rumpus: I have to say, as a writer myself, and as somebody who took a slew of literature courses in college, there are some writers who I didn’t even know when I was going through your stories. And it was such a pleasure to be introduced to such wonderful voices.

Marcus: We’re discovering new writers ourselves. There are so many people out there, there’s no way you could know it all. So it’s fun for us, too.

Rumpus: Who’s been your favorite discovery?

Marcus: I might go with Clarice Lispector. Because I didn’t know her work, really. I’d heard of her before, but I hadn’t read her. What she was doing and when she was doing it was particularly remarkable. Especially as a woman. There are male counterparts that have gotten more attention, historically.

Samuel: I think the Samanta Schweblin story, as well, was a wonderful discovery for us, in that she was not a writer that I’d heard of before. A lot of Spanish and Latin American literature is drowned out by these larger voices, like Javier Marías and Bolaño and Márquez. And I think that’s what people always conceive of.

Marcus: Borges.

Samuel: Borges, yeah. So, it’s good to find those voices that are waiting to be heard.

Rumpus: The model for Recommended Reading seems to be so community-based, where you invite writers, editors, and individuals who work with or run indie presses and magazines to assist with the curatorial process. How has it been to collaborate with so many people who care as much about the survival of literature as you do?

Samuel: We’re not alone in our love of fiction. As readers, we’re part of a large community. As independent publishers, we’re also part of a large community. And for us, it’s important to be able to say, “Here’s a great magazine that we admire—that people should be reading.” With Recommended Reading, we’re able to co-brand, expose magazines and their editorial vision to new readers, and help others share our appreciation for literature. It’s important because that’s how literature gets discovered: through these small presses, or these magazines. And they should have a larger audience.

Marcus: And on a personal level, it’s been rewarding to get to work with people like Bridget Hughes and Hannah Tinti—you know, these publishers and editors who I admire tremendously—and get to know them a little bit through working with them. And then, also, it’s been equally rewarding to work with some of the writers who I haven’t actually gotten to meet—we’ve just corresponded on e-mail. For example, Aimee Bender’s recommendation of Steven Millhauser: that was such a cool view into her inspiration. I really felt like I learned something from her picking that story.

Samuel: It’s great also to see these literary giants looking eye-to-eye, on some level.

Marcus: Or just to know that Steven Millhauser said, when [Bender] picked his story, that he didn’t even know that she’d read a syllable of his work. That’s so cool to have a window into that—he got to learn that she loved him.

Rumpus: On top of connecting readers with writers, you’re connecting writers with writers. So you’re acting as this very nice mothering figure in the community. And also, it’s great, because this shows that the sense of community extends beyond New York. I think that in the States, especially, it’s really easy—and maybe I’m making a generalization—but those commenting from outside the community might say, “Oh, literature in America is New York. That’s where publishing is.” And here, you get an L.A. writer like Aimee Bender, or Samanta Schweblin—all these writers who are in-translation. That’s really wonderful.

So, switching gears a little, I wanted to talk about your editor’s note for “Recovery,” actually.

Marcus: Okay.

Rumpus: You said much of that time was spent “trying to understand the feeling the story gives me, that some central mystery of discontentment and ennui—something I didn’t even know was a mystery to begin with—has been explained.” I was wondering if you guys, individually, could encapsulate your experience of reading really great fiction—

Marcus: Oh, that’s a hard question.

Samuel: You’ll run out of battery…

Rumpus: Because as a writer, I feel like when I read fiction—when I read a sentence, and it hits me in a certain way, I have this indescribable moment of…the world just kind of stops. And maybe that’s a really terrible way to put it—a cliché. But, what are those moments that make you jump out of your skin, where you’ve read something so incredible, you just want to run out of your office, down the street, and tell the first stranger you meet? (Which you effectively do every week.)

Marcus: I have a very physical reaction when I’m reading something accomplished, which is particular to when I’m reading submissions. Because we read a lot to find work to publish, and it becomes discouraging when the next pub date is bearing down on you, and you haven’t found something; there’s that aspect. So when I start to read a story that I suspect is great, even in the first line, and then I start to learn is great, and I start to know even before I’ve finished it that we’ve found something, my heart races. And I’ll sweat. Like, I really get physically excited.

Rumpus: Have you ever cried?

Marcus: Have I ever cried… I’m sure, yes, but I have to think about when. That’s a good question. We try not to tell each other what our reaction to a story is before the other person has read it, which is challenging when you’re really excited.

Rumpus: Do you have this moment where you pick up a story and you’re like, “Ben. Okay. I want you to read this by the end of the day!”

Marcus: I want to say, “Read this! Just read it right away!”

Samuel: When Michael Cunningham guest-edits, we’re publishing what he calls an “invisible classic from Canon B.” It’s an excerpt from Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk. And we both came into the office after having read it, and we were both quoting different passages from memory.

Marcus: Actually, we were quoting the exact same sentences.

Samuel: Yeah. And for me, I normally get tortured by that, because you read a great sentence, and you want to remember it, and you want to take out your pen and highlight it, or write down that passage somewhere. But it’s a conflict, because it takes you out of the story to do that. But then otherwise it’s gone. You let the pages pass by and…when it’s good I want to be able to find it again. We both had similar reactions, too, to the Ben Marcus story.

Marcus: Yeah.

Samuel: I read that Ben Marcus on the train. Reading in public can be very distracting, but I was so immersed in this story, and when I finished it, I wanted to turn to this person sitting next to me, this complete stranger, and say, “You have to read this.” And one of our friends and readers, Matthew Doyle, read it on his iPhone while he was also on the train, and when he got off the train someone shouted, and he was so startled—he was so in the world of the story, the fact that there was this world outside of it took him by such surprise—that he dropped his phone and shattered it. And it was as if the impact of that story was expressed through his shattered iPhone.

Rumpus: Wow. So did you guys foot the bill for the new iPhone?

Marcus: No.

Samuel: We’re an indie publisher.

Marcus: Yeah, no way.

I’m still thinking about your crying question, because I know there was one story that did make me cry, and I’m trying to remember what it was. It might’ve been “Three,” by Marc Basch, from Electric Literature. I’m made to cry pretty easily by film and reading, so it’s not that notable.

Rumpus: It just happens all the time… Speaking of having those visceral reactions, something that really propels me when I’m reading is voice, and Recommended Reading is no exception to this. I specifically remember when I was going through these stories again—which was actually done in a period of three days, by the way.

Marcus: This is interesting. We should interview you about that.

Rumpus: I read your stories as though I was reading a collection, and so it was interesting to see the curatorial process at work through that. Anyway, voice: “Cattle Haul” comes to mind, specifically, and “North Of.” And then the Katie Bellas story, “Glissando.” The stories just punch you in the face with their nuanced, affective narrators. I feel like reading voice—to me, it’s similar to when I’m watching a film, and an actor I love is onscreen, and their performance style is so haunting, I feel like I could watch them eat a sandwich and still be satisfied.

Marcus: Unless it’s David Hasslehoff.

Rumpus: I don’t feel like I’ve ever looked at David Hasslehoff and been tempted to watch him eat a sandwich.

Marcus: Well there was a video of him eating a sandwich. Bad reference! Scratch that from the record!

Samuel: Old meme!

Marcus: Old meme.

Rumpus: I feel this way when I read fiction: when the voice is so mind-numbingly good, it almost doesn’t matter if anything happens. If there’s a plot or story, per se, because I’m just so sated by that internalized monologue, or at least language that cuts to the bone of who that character is. What elements of fiction propel you along, as editors but also as writers?

Samuel: Certainly voice plays a large part in it, especially because that’s often the first thing that you’re exposed to. I’m a little less concerned about having this interesting plot drive the story. Both Ben Marcus’s story and Seth Fried’s story are instances where not a lot happens. Seth Fried: a man is literally floating through space. And Ben Marcus’s story is a man alone in a room, typing. And so voice is incredibly important in those instances, because if the voice is boring—if the voice doesn’t give you reason to pay attention—the story loses its authority.

Marcus: But if it’s done well, you don’t notice if there’s not much of a plot.

Samuel: Exactly.

Marcus: You feel as if there is a plot. Because I would never say that plot is not important—it’s essential. But I don’t think plot is enough to make a story interesting. Plot is necessary to hold a story together, and make it comprehensible, often, but it definitely does not guarantee that the story is interesting.

Samuel: There are also the ideas that a story addresses, too. And the elements of life that it’s trying to capture.

Marcus: That’s something that I really responded to in “Recovery”: the ideas that the story was addressing. In “North Of,” too. It has a big “wow” factor in the beginning—that Bob Dylan is coming to Thanksgiving dinner—and certainly events at dinner happen during the story, but it’s over the course of a day, and it’s more concerned with capturing a moment in that character’s life.

Rumpus: For me, the best moment in that story actually has nothing to do with Bob Dylan—he’s not even in it—and that’s the scene in the diner, between the sister and the brother. When he comes and picks her up, and she’s run away from home…

Samuel: And they have this moment.

Marcus: Bob Dylan doesn’t matter in that story as Bob Dylan. He serves to contextualize the story within American pop culture. Which I’m finding is a quality I’m drawn to in stories—contextualization within society. They all do it in so many different ways. “North Of” uses Bob Dylan; “Glissando” uses the market crash of 2008. “Space Traveler” extrapolates what the working-class society will look like in the future, but the main device in that story is a movie star. In “Hello Everybody,” you have this L.A. plastic surgery culture…or “plastic culture,” as you could call it. I love that relevancy, which is one of the things that makes it new, makes it different. It’s saying something that no one’s really said before, about now.

Samuel: They’re like the thoughts you didn’t really know you had.

Rumpus: How does being an editor—especially one who reads others’ work so closely, because you have this one-story-a-week publishing schedule; and you guys are only picking one per month, a story that’s just coming from you—how does that help with your own writing? Being such a close reader?

Marcus: My literary heroes are changing. And the way I want my fiction to be is changing. I’m just trying to wait that out, because I’m a little bit impressionable right now. I don’t mean in my youth, but I mean, this month. I don’t want to copy anybody, because that’s always going to make you fail. You just end up doing an imitation of someone else poorly, rather than your own thing well. It’s helpful to identify mistakes and clichés and things that you see all the time, and just get more workman-like and practical about your own writing: cutting out things that are lackluster. I’m hyper-aware of needing to write something that’s attention-grabbing and unusual. And so, in some ways, that’s making me slow down a little bit.

Rumpus: Are you concerned with things like first sentences? Last sentences? I’ve been to a bunch of short story panels where writers have said that the first sentence in a story is so important. And the language in a short story is so important, because it is, by nature, brief, and everything needs to be exact and perfect for that particular story.

Marcus: I’m more concerned with first sentences, but that’s something you worry about last. If you’re worried about writing a good first sentence first, you’re an idiot. You’ll never write a story.

Samuel: Sort of jumping back a little bit: when we were still doing the quarterly anthology, we had these teams of readers, and we would send them five stories a week, and the idea would be, You pick the story you think is great, the story that you think is publishable. And there was one reader who I was working with, and just for months, he didn’t find anything that spoke to him. And I sent him an e-mail and was like, “I’m sorry you haven’t found something yet.” And he was also a writer, and said, “It’s actually great, because these stories that aren’t speaking to me are ones that I can see improving my own writing.” He could see a reflection of himself in them, and the mistakes that he makes, and where he stumbles. The other side of that, though, is, on the editorial side: you spend so much time reading, worrying about the magazine, that your own writing often falls to the wayside. But when I find myself reading a story that I love, the first thing I start thinking is, I’ve gotta start writing again! That passion of writing, that feeling of accomplishing something, you can experience through another story.

Rumpus: Our managing editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, is always saying, “Don’t be precious with your words.” And I was wondering, when did you get over that voice in your head that says, “No one wants to read your work,” and does being an editor help with that? Are you less afraid of the community now that you’re a fairly substantial part of it?

Marcus: I have to phrase my answer to this carefully because I worry I’ll change my mind after I say something. There are certainly still people who would intimidate me with their talent and with their reputation. Absolutely. But then also feeling comfortable approaching someone, to ask them for a story, or even to write an introduction for their story, is very different than feeling confident about people reading your own work. They aren’t even in the same ballpark. But there is also a thing—if someone read a story that you published, and they thought it was crappy, then they might think, What gives them the authority to choose fiction? But, you know, hopefully people aren’t jerks about that. Because those are different skills.

Samuel: Submitting your work is a brave act. Right? I mean, you’re exposing a very private part of yourself, because everyone writes in isolation. And sending that out to an agent, an editor, to a magazine—whoever it is, it’s pretty frightening. But at the end of the day, we’re very fortunate that we get to talk to a lot of these editors who are at the top of the game, and they’re all people. They have normal lives, more or less. And it’s not just this anonymous thing, where you send your manuscript—where you hit “send” on your e-mail—and then it just goes to some faceless giant who’s in charge of your literary future. It’s people who just genuinely care about literature. And that’s a great thing about being on this side of publishing: where you get to see those editors, and know that they’re all good people.

Rumpus: I feel like no one ever talks about winding down. Again, Isaac once admitted in an interview we published that, at the time, he slept with his computer in his bed, and he would wake up in the middle of the night just to check his e-mails, and also to make sure things were publishing on time. So how do you divorce yourself from this thing you love, and have a life outside of it? And also work on your own writing?

Marcus: I don’t know…call me in six months.

Samuel: I personally haven’t worked that out yet. I’m trying to establish a schedule that’s more conducive to it: waking up earlier, so that I’m not checking my e-mail the first thing—because EL and that mindset is the first and last thing that I consider every day. I want to be able to write, but I haven’t written since we graduated from our MFA program. I’ve tinkered, but nothing substantial. And actually, at our commencement ceremony, that was the same—was that the day before we launched our first issue, or the day of?

Marcus: The day we graduated.

Samuel: So we were standing in line, waiting to get our diplomas, and our very first issue was out there without us being able to—

Rumpus: All this stuff was happening live—people were responding to it—and you couldn’t even watch it happen.

Marcus: It was a long ceremony. We have iPhones…we checked them.

Rumpus: Who are some editors that you look up to?

Samuel: Dave Eggers has been a hero of mine since I was a teenager. I still look up to everything that he’s done as a writer, and as an editor, and as someone that’s in charge of this whole literary empire that people respect and love. I’m pretty much a fan of pretty much everything they [McSweeney’s] do.

Marcus: Hannah Tinti, who writes, as well as edits. And I had her as a thesis tutor, and so she was really supportive of my writing, as well, and I was able to get some advice about balancing writing and editing. Also, Roxane Gay, who seems to do everything, and she writes essays about really important topics that often are not getting attention, or the right attention.

Rumpus: She’s a powerhouse. Talk about editors…yeah, people are people, but then it’s always cool to meet your heroes. I met Sheila Heti recently, who’s a personal hero of mine, both because she’s the interviews editor of The Believer, but also because she’s immensely talented and smart and isn’t afraid to experiment and take risks. She started Trampoline Hall, which is an excellent project. Anyway, when I met her, I made such a fool of myself! I went up to her and basically told her how great she was for five minutes. And this was before I’d even read How Should A Person Be?

Samuel: It’s always surreal. And when we were first starting Recommended Reading and approaching some writers that we admired to help us get this off the ground, Jim Shepard was one of the first people that we contacted. And the idea of sending an e-mail to someone that you hold in such high regard…I kept asking myself: Are my commas in the right place?

Marcus: But then you find out he’s the nicest man alive.

Samuel: He is the nicest man alive. But I changed the way that I use my commas in salutations in an e-mail, because his were better.

Rumpus: How does he use his commas?

Samuel: Well, I wrote, “Hi Jim,” which was enough…for me it was crazy just to write to him at all.  Like, “Hi Jim Shepard!” Like, holy shit. But he wrote back, “Hi, Ben.”

Marcus: Kevin Brockmeier also wrote, “Hi, Halimah.” But I don’t know. That’s one of those things where when the incorrect usage is in the language for a long time, it becomes accepted.

Samuel: Sure. But I think Jim Shepard noticed.

Marcus: You think he noticed?

Samuel: And I regret neglecting that comma. But I’m sure he’ll forgive me.

Rumpus: So not putting the comma is actually incorrect. We’ve all just been writing e-mails incorrectly.

Marcus: I don’t know—we’d have to look this up. I’m not prepared to go on the record about this.

Rumpus: Halimah, before you came for this interview, Ben and I were talking about Brooklyn, and I guess fairly recently, it’s become this thing that it’s a “literary hotbed,” and we were talking about how that’s kind of funny, considering it’s been a literary city for a while. But I wanted to know: how important is the geographical specification of Brooklyn to who you both are as writers and editors? And also, do you think Brooklyn is correctly being pegged as an epicenter for all things “cool” and “exciting” that are happening in literature nowadays?

Marcus: It’s hard for me to imagine ever writing a story that’s set in Brooklyn. Or I certainly wouldn’t now write a story that’s set in Brooklyn. I’ve only lived here for two years. I don’t feel an attachment to this place in that kind of profound way. But it is a really exciting and great place to live. And on a certain level, all the speculation—is it the epicenter of literature?—it’s just about who lives here and who publishes here. And rent is too expensive in Manhattan—

Samuel: Yup.

Marcus: —and it’s a densely-populated city, and so people live in Brooklyn. It’s not maybe the magical phenomenon that everybody makes it out to be. But, you know, New York [and] L.A. have long since been the cultural epicenters of the two coasts. San Francisco, too, I guess. And that’s because they’re the most densely-populated cities. So yeah, it’s trickling into Brooklyn because no one can live in Manhattan, or rent office space in Manhattan. Maybe in a few years it’ll be Queens. In fifteen years, Queens, and then we can cultivate Staten Island.

Samuel: You’re absolutely right: it’s that the rent is cheaper. There are a lot of people here, and it’s a very creative environment, and you’re close enough to this publishing hub. There are great bookstores. There are a ton of writers around. But it’s also—it’s kind of okay to be broke in Brooklyn.

Marcus: It’s really helpful, though, to be able to meet people face-to-face as a writer, as an editor, as a publisher. You can’t always convey the same sorts of things over e-mail or even over the phone that you can convey when you meet face-to-face. That’s definitely a benefit that I cannot deny.

Samuel: And having readings and stuff. Knowing there are a ton of writers nearby. But that’s not to say there’s something magical about Brooklyn, that great literature is happening here because of something that’s in the water.

Marcus: It’s funny, I lived in Philadelphia before I moved here, and I was interviewed for an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the literary scene in Philadelphia, and I was defending it, and saying it was great, and how I wasn’t going to move. But anyway, I moved to Brooklyn, and now when I look back, there was nothing going on in Philadelphia. So who knows? You’re just into where you are, that’s my point.

Rumpus: Because this also comes up in a lot of conversations about writing, do you feel like where you each individually come from has had a lot of impact on what you’ve written, and how you’ve written it?

Marcus: It has to.

Samuel: There’s no way around it.

Rumpus: Tricky question: in what direction do you see literature heading?

Marcus: Death! No, just kidding. They asked a similar question for “Brooklyn Lit” [the issue of Brooklyn Magazine featuring "Indie Lit Impresarios"], and it was specific to Brooklyn, but I kind of have the same answer, which is that I think the digital versus print conversation is getting tired. I’m already tired of it. We go to panels, and people ask the same exact questions. I really see an organic relationship between digital publishing and print publishing. And so I’m hoping that that will catch on; this kind of dichotomy won’t be so rabble-rousing. But that’s more the future of publishing, rather than the future of literature. So if you want me to say something about the future of literature, you can come back to me.

Samuel: I probably don’t have a very intelligent answer to that. I’m not a literary critic or anything. I just like good fiction. But it’s promising that people are reading more than ever before. And a lot of that is to the credit of digital publishing, and the availability of it. Everyone can now pretty much carry around an entire library with them wherever they go. I guess you could look at trends, and the popularity of certain books. But I don’t think that really works. Fifty Shades of Grey sold millions and millions of copies, but I don’t think that’s the future of literature.

Marcus: I don’t know if you could predict one style becoming the norm.

Samuel: But you can predict that people are going to rip it off for years to come.

Marcus: That’s true.

Rumpus: I guess where my question is coming from…and this was a conversation that was being held when I graduated from college in 2009, and then I actually left the country, so perhaps this is moot. But I think there was a lot of concern, at least at the time, with our generation’s DIY mentality, and how there are emerging writers who seem to want to break the rules without really knowing them first. And then they’re writing all these very self-conscious and confessional books, and publishing them. I did notice a boom in that kind of writing. To me, what people were talking about, at the time, was young writers were receiving accolades for implementing some very Dadaist techniques: they were, in a way, destroying literature and acting like they were building something new from its ashes. But then other people were giving them flack for giving emerging writers a bad name because this was happening. So voices were getting lost.

Marcus: I sort of take objection to attributing anything like that to the term DIY, because I think the over-confessional, unedited aesthetic that you’re talking about is more a “LiveJournal” thing. And DIY is what makes indie publishing possible a lot of the time. The DIY values and principles are what enable us to publish something like Recommended Reading. Do it yourself. Don’t fucking hire someone for every single thing—do it all yourself. So I just want to separate that off the bat. I also don’t think it’s possible to give emerging writers a bad reputation. Because they’re all different.

Samuel: Right, there’s always that movement of people who are trying to shake things up and do something new. And when that movement catches on, there’s a new movement that’s trying to upset what had gone before it. But in terms of what you’re talking about—this very self-conscious stuff that’s very “me”-centric—

Marcus: Isn’t that essential to literature?

Samuel: It is essential to literature. But something—I forget who pointed this out—but they were looking at author bios, and it used to be, “So-and-so was a forest ranger, and then they worked on a cattle ranch, and did all sorts of crazy things.” It was sort of like, writers went out and lived life. And now if you look at author bios, they’re often similar in that, “They did their MFA at this school, and now they live in this city.” And so there isn’t that diversity. And this person—this isn’t my opinion—but this person also extrapolated that to say, “If you look at a lot of novels, work is not mentioned a lot. It’s this character doing things, and work is never brought into question.” I don’t know if that’s a movement. I don’t think that’s also the future of literature, but that might just be the effect of the rise of MFAs.

Marcus: I also don’t lament the loss of fetishizing odd jobs. No one cares that you worked at a hot dog stand. There was recently this letter published that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his niece or something, that said, and I’m paraphrasing (probably very inaccurately), “You have to just lay your soul on the table, or else you’re not going to write anything worth a damn.” And I think that that’s true. So if something is unsuccessful, it’s not definitely because it’s over-confessional.

Rumpus: What do you enjoy most about the editorial and curatorial process?

Samuel: Very clearly, it’s being able to champion a work of literature that you truly believe in. Something that we’ve always held very close to our mission as a publisher is discovering new writers. And so being able to find a voice that hasn’t found its audience yet is a wonderful thing for the writer, and it’s a wonderful thing for us.

Marcus: I agree with that, and then: I love my job. I’m so excited—I love going to work.

Rumpus: That’s so amazing to hear. It’s just really incredible, and I don’t hear it often enough.

Marcus: It’s funny, because people always talk about, “Oh, you have to find something you love and do it.” Or some stupid cliché. But, yeah, when you do something that you love, it feels like you’re tricking someone. I feel like I’m getting away with something.

Samuel: We occasionally have these moments when we’re focused on the mechanics of publishing an issue—coding, making sure that everything’s good, marketing, and all that stuff—and then we’ll still have a moment of, Holy shit—our job is awesome!

Marcus: Or sometimes we’ll have a moment of, What the hell did we get ourselves into?

Rumpus: What are you reading now? And what do you turn to when the ideas aren’t moving and when you need to make everything fluid again? Like, when you’re blocked. What are those books you go back to, or authors that make you remember why you love to write?

Marcus: I just finished A.M. Homes’s new novel—which is really long, so it took me a while to read—but that was an exciting read, and a chaotic novel in a really interesting way. I don’t imagine that she’s the type of writer who had everything on a Post-It note—because that would be the most schizo-looking wall. But it all works.

And I always go back to Carson McCullers. She’s probably my favorite writer. I go back to her short stories and her novellas and also her novels.

Samuel: Right now I’m reading Alex Epstein, who we’re publishing next month. He writes these pieces of micro fiction, which are almost like a distillation of what a story is.

Marcus: We only read people we publish these days.

Samuel: Yeah, it’s a lot of “whoever’s on submission is who we’re reading.”

And the book that I go back to often is Moby Dick. I just reread it for the third time this summer. Someone recently described it as an alternative Bible, and I think that’s a great way to look at it, because it’s about life and it’s about death and it’s about so many things. It’s also very funny. I was e-mailing with Matt Kish recently—who did that illustrated Moby Dick—and we were talking about, “If there’s anything that I want to believe in, it’s something that has a sense of humor.” It was only on this third reading that I realized that it’s actually a very funny book.

Marcus: That’s when you know you’re losing your mind: when you’re reading Moby Dick for the third time and you’re laughing.

Samuel: That’s the book that I love; it can address all the elements of life and not be the traditional Bible.

Marcus: I also go back to Bartleby The Scrivener, if we’re on the Melville kick.

Rumpus: Do you guys have any questions you want to ask each other?

Marcus: So my question for Ben is, did his friendship almost break up over e-books? I know the friend that he’s talking about. I smell an exaggeration.

Samuel: It is a hundred percent true. And to be fair, he—my friend Alex—was working on the Obama campaign at the time, and he was moving from city to city, and to carry all these books with him was crazy. The Kindle was recently-available, so he bought it. But…I love books. I loved books at the time. I continue to appreciate that visceral quality of turning pages and having a book that weathers and ages with you. But Alex would get into these heated arguments, because that was also the height of “the Kindle is going to kill literature,” and I totally bought into it. And so I got into fights—like almost screaming matches—with Alex over it. He was betraying something that I believed in.

Marcus: Seriously?

Samuel: Yeah.

Marcus: That’s so hot-headed.

Samuel: And he’s a reader. But we were both on different sides, and liked to argue. It’s great to have a serious debate about something like that. Of all the things you’re going to fight with your friend about, the future of literature is a pretty good thing.

***

[1] In an e-mail exchange after our interview, Samuel confided, “I was reading a lot of science fiction at the time, Bradbury and Michael Crichton (what I considered ‘grown-up books’), so I started writing The Last Crusoe, a book about Robinson Crusoe’s descendant getting marooned on some distant planet. I filled about thirty pages in a composition book before I discovered that they’d already made a movie about that in the ‘60s. I remember feeling defeated when I saw it on TV, but I think I decided that they’d done a pretty good job with it, so conceding didn’t feel so bad and I enjoyed the process anyway.”

[2] Full disclosure: Samuel and I attended undergraduate together at Sarah Lawrence College, and were lucky enough to take a year-long Latin American literature course that almost exclusively featured an exemplary reading selection.

***

This year, Electric Literature will begin publishing novels, and on Valentine’s Day, will release an e-book version of Sam Pink’s Rontel. You can read an excerpt at Recommended Reading.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with McSweeney’s Publisher Oscar Villalon
• Real Talk from Your Editor
• Recommended Reading
• Charged Sentences
• Practice Restraint

In her third book, Heroines, a genre-defying battle cry about forgotten and suppressed women in literature (as well as her role in the gendered story of her own life), Zambreno’s mirror is more relentless and reflective than ever. A scholarly treatise for readers who never cared about scholarship, and a memoir for those who have had enough with the insularity of simple confession, Heroines synthesizes the raw passion of a diary with the relevance and scope of nothing less than the history of literature. As 2012 nears a close, I’m hard-pressed to think of a book I’ve read this year that obsessed me more in the moment, rippled out as much into my daily life and conversations, or left more powerful aftershocks.

***

The Rumpus: My favorite quote, out of a book I marked the living hell out of with a red marker, underlining things on almost every page, is this: “To be a woman, perhaps, is always to be a foreigner.” It’s an incredibly provocative and evocative line. Yet women are fifty-two percent of the human population. How is it possible that, even now, a group that makes up the majority of the species can remain the perpetually foreign Other? Can you walk us through this line, and explain what you mean…which seems, really, to encapsulate much of what the rest of the book, through rigorous scholarship as well as intimately confessional memoir, goes on to interrogate?

Kate Zambreno: I love the idea of your furious marginalia—love the idea of a book being transformed by your own remarks, to become this dialogue. I drop that line, I believe, at the beginning of the work, when I am narrating moving to Akron, Ohio, with my partner John, a rare-books librarian, mostly to detail my voluptuous sense of alienation, and how I explicitly felt marked as an outsider/foreigner, mostly because of my extremely short hair and the fact that my uniform at the time veered into what I might lovingly call butch-witch. So the idea of being stared at, of being aware of myself from the outside, of cultivating that…the concept of the girl or woman as foreigner is basically the main idea of my novel Green Girl, which centers around an American girl in London, based partially on my own feelings of foreignness while living abroad, conflating that as well with what it’s like to be a girl walking down the street. And with all of this I’m engaging directly with Simone de B in The Second Sex, the idea of “Otherness” as a category of human thought, the idea that to be marked as Woman from the outside is a sort of doubled subjectivity, perhaps a way of living in bad faith. One can transcend that state, of being less aware of being looked at, or needing to be witnessed. I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.

This is not just in gender, of course, this experience of being Othered in a given society; it’s the effect of a way of thought that’s hierarchical and produces strangers and strangeness in those not seen as normative—to be queer, transgendered, non-white, fat, differently-abled, to be anything that’s not marked on the outside as normal. Simone de B and Frantz Fanon both rereading and furiously writing in Sartre’s margins—and asking post-WWII how a white woman or a black man can be differently marked from the outside, viewed by their stereotypes, and how that experience of awareness can produce this sense of doubling, this being hyperaware at times of one’s bodyness, or one’s beauty or ugliness. That’s why I still think there’s a feminine condition to be written about (although of course there’s not one singular female experience, there are a chaotic multiplicity of them, all needing to be told). I think, however, the condition of being a woman, or at least a girl, is being aware how one is viewed from the outside. That John Berger line from Ways of Seeing I quote from in Green Girl—that a girl is always almost hyper-aware of herself, she sees herself weeping at the funeral of her father.

Rumpus: Heroines alternatively seduced me, challenged me, and infuriated me. I was obsessed with it—I e-mailed friends about it and babbled about it on telephone calls. It was, without question, one of the most compelling texts I’ve encountered this year—relentless in its exploration of the ways women have been marginalized in the history of literature, and the social implications of that history. It’s a subject I thought I knew a lot about, and yet there were many things in here I didn’t know. Much of the book grew out of your blog, Frances Farmer Is My Sister, but did you have to do extensive research once you knew you planned to write this book? Or had you already investigated and unearthed so much about the lost female voices of Modernism—among other things—that you were able to just sit down and let this stuff pour out? The tone of the book feels extremely raw, beautifully fragmented, subversively poetic…it doesn’t read like something that was written in tandem with researching “facts” and then finding ways to get them in there.  How long did it take you to write Heroines, and was the process as fast, furious, and raw as it reads?

Zambreno: Wow, thank you. It’s really gratifying, that experience of feeling read, especially when you have been working in a vacuum on a project. The genesis of the book actually began years before I ever started the blog, which I’ve been keeping rather sporadically now for about three years. I started reading for this project about seven to eight years ago, when I began inhaling the work of modernist women writers and, then, their biographies. It began when John and I lived in London, in the first year of our marriage, reading Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, for the first time, and then continued upon moving back to Chicago, where I began reading the biographies of the wives: Zelda, Vivien(ne), also the biographies of their husbands. It was a complete possession and obsession, which intersected exactly with what Virginia Woolf might call my “apprenticeship” as a writer, which existed in those beginning years in constant journaling.

For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me—I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage. At the time, I framed the work as a fictional notebook called Mad Wife, somewhat in the mode of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina or Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, but inspired by the journals of Sylvia Plath, Viv Eliot, Jane Bowles. The notebook authored by an anonymous woman with a husband name John (cue “The Yellow Wallpaper” reference), who feels literally like she’s possessed with the mistresses and madwomen of Modernism. Possessed like Sylvia Plath’s dybbuk, the soul of a former suicide. I began the blog as a way to try to further notebook these ideas, when I began to reread and think about the texts of the male Modernists and how the figure of the hysteric or madwoman was rendered within them.

About two months into writing the blog, Chris Kraus contacted me about writing a book about the women of Modernism for Semiotext(e). She was reacting to these long, vomitous pieces I was writing about Modernism on the blog. I began working on the book that would become Heroines, simultaneously while going through two book tours in two years for my first two novels. The blog changed into more of a diary, a reflection on being a published writer, meditations that formed some of the end of the book. Writing Heroines, writing a book on assignment, was a tormented process for me—I went through at least three major rewrites in two years. It was my consumptive, constant thing I was doing: writing, rewriting, rereading. I mean, the first draft I turned in to Chris, which I worked on for an entire year, was an almost 100,000 word manuscript adapted from these blog posts, that were quite bloggy. That’s what I thought she wanted. It was all quite contemporary and thoroughly a hot, hot mess. I met with Chris during my first rewrite and she wanted me to only keep the first couple of chapters (at the time, there were chapters)—which were taken almost verbatim from this Mad Wife manuscript. Almost the entire Part One of Heroines is based on the frame for the novel, and in a way, is the novel.  Part Two, set in the South, and looking at what happens in the Fitzgerald marriage as a central case study, ending with a meditation on the contemporary, is almost all new material I wrote in that solid year I was rewriting for the second and third time. Almost none of it, except for some scenes and lines, originated on the blog.

For the book, for all the manifestations of the book, I read constantly. And by the time of the second-to-last rewrite, shut up in a loft in Durham, North Carolina in January, with no teaching work on the horizon, I read at least one hundred books—theory books, biographies of even marginal figures, I reread everything; I took five legal pads of notes rereading Foucault’s History of Madness, I had one-thousand pages typed of research notes. I mean, I thought for a while, since I was on Semiotext(e), I had to be like Deleuze and Guattari, or at the very least a whipsmart doctoral candidate. Then I realized that I had to keep it vernacular, personal, deeply felt—that this was a weird idiosyncratic form of scholarship. And finally, though, for the desired rhythms, I had to depart from the research and just write, not even referring to notes. Part One was worked on and worked through for so many years that that’s probably why it has that sense of incantation, which was intended, as that section I wanted somewhat modeled on the sense of voices and possession in “The Waste Land.” Part Two, which is more of a collage work, somewhat channeling the spirit of a Tumblr, or a fragmented notebook, was also rewritten over and over. So, I guess, sometimes, if I discovered something through blogging, that made its way into the book, it did feel like that glorious sensation of automatic writing (Feel, then Write, then Push Publish on Blogger). And there are some sections (Chris called them “biographical rants”) where I did feel like I was channeling something. I mean, I think the whole book is about channeling, is about me feeling like I was channeling. But the labor, the labor—was actually quite slow and painful. Any ease is deceptive.

Rumpus: I kind of want to get my only…I guess, “negative” response to the narrative, out of the way, which had to do with a kind of frustration that this was being narrated by such an obviously brilliant woman writer, who had opportunities and privileges that were clearly not afforded to women in the Modernist era, and yet that that narrator—you—seemed to continually walk willingly into situations that clipped your wings, and then express a kind of feminist outrage about it, you know?  And maybe some of my response to that had to do with my own experiences as a younger woman/writer, too. Like you, I followed my (male) partner around for his academic career early in the relationship…like you, I lacked a terminal degree and was chronically underemployed, often anxious to the point of debilitation, and spent a lot of time thrashing around in angst rather than actually writing. I mean, I could go on here about similarities, but I guess my point is that sometimes what gets most under our skin in terms of agitation is recognition, and I felt like I recognized my young self in much of your story and was sometimes angry at what I saw. No one had forced me to follow a lover across the country and live in a rural town. No one had forced me not to pursue a degree that would offer me more gainful employment. No one was forcing me not to write more, when in fact I had scads of free time. I had a huge crisis after getting married, where—like you—I had fantasies of running off, being Anaïs Nin so to speak, having affairs…yet no one had forced me to marry, and most of my female friends, in fact, did not marry as young as I did.

I ended up feeling at times, reading your story, as though women like you and I have had opportunities never afforded to the so-called “hysterics” or “madwomen” of Modernism, and ultimately we both have taken those opportunities—but as younger women, it seems we both struggled with a kind of scripted identity as “wives” or as self-destructive Girls, obsessed with the melodrama of our own oppression or ruin. Sometimes I felt it was unfair or wrong to compare women like us to Zelda or Vivien(ne) or Dora or what have you…that it was grandiose to view our choices as similar to their forced institutionalizations or the externally imposed erasure of their stories. So before I even talk about all the things I love about Heroines, I guess what would you say to that kind of skepticism…to the reader who might see your plight as a young woman as just, you know, a privileged white girl with a good education, making excuses? Like, if you want to have your affair, honey, go have it. If you want to leave Akron (or in my case, Hanover, New Hampshire), leave. Fuck all that and write your book. Live free. What’s stopping you?

Zambreno: I really like Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” that she sees as an aspect of our national identity—the choosing to stay in a sort of stuckness because we always convince ourselves something is going to change. The state of “cruel optimism” has a personal as well as a gendered slant—I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s why Friedan’s Smith-educated housewives milled in miserabilism and martinis. This is the essence of that old saw, “the woman question”—how is a woman, who has been trained to be self-sacrificing, to lose herself in love, to not want to be alone—how can she shake off the effects of such training and be free? This is the “double bind”—we want to be free, we want to be LOVED. I have sacrificed for love. I have been aware of this sacrifice. I have written a book trying to agitate around and expose these ideas of sacrifice.

But I think the real effects of oppression is silence—is not writing—which I think is a re-occurring theme in Heroines, as I look at the mad wives and mistresses as more contemporary versions of the muted hysterics. I have never been ultimately silenced in my relationship with John. I might complain in the work about not writing, about feeling agonized about not writing, because I cannot deal with isolation, about feeling a sense of block, but obviously, even if you were going to regard Heroines as somewhat fictionalized, the notebook is the work, the writing about not writing is the work. I have been incredibly prolific as a writer in my relationship with John. I was not a novelist before I met John. We encouraged each other, absolutely. For me, encouraging his career meant picking up and moving to where he wanted to go to graduate school, for his first posts after graduate school. These moves were not without some bitterness and reflection to power inequities.

But except for the idea of my mental stability being jeopardized by our constant moves, a pattern we have only just realized, and in our personal life are trying to fix, John has been pretty empowering. He’s theoretically quite feminist, even though it doesn’t always come through in practice (I would also charge myself with that—theory is so different from messy lived-in practice). He has always encouraged me to teach less, to work less, so I could write. My writing has always been considered extremely important, even though I make slim-to-no money at it, and we were broke, living paycheck to paycheck for the majority of our decade together. He always encouraged me to get a terminal degree, if I wanted to. I actually applied to Ph.D. programs two years in a row—I didn’t get in anywhere, but John would have moved with me if I did. Likewise, if I really wanted to go have sex with someone else, John would probably deal with it. We’ve talked about this before. The problem is, with graduate school and affairs, I’m just too lazy. I wish I could be someone that has wild affairs—all of my favorite nonfiction novels are about these wild affairs and postmarital agonistes—but to be honest, I’m someone that doesn’t deal well with instability. All of my wildness is in the writing. I have discovered I have to be orderly and boring in my personal life to be wild in my work, to reword Flaubert. It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath. And the book, the writing, has always been the thing. We have an extraordinarily open relationship. We talk about everything. I wrote this book, which puts him I think somewhat in a vulnerable position—a book that he was the first reader and indefatigable editor on, a book he believes in, and he never told me to change a single thing.

I do say in Heroines that John and I, with our constant moves for academic posts, are more like the generation that came after the Modernists: Mary McCarthy moving to Chicago for the summer so Edmund Wilson could take the temporary post at University of Chicago, Elizabeth Hardwick moving to Iowa for Robert Lowell. I think Heroines is partially about the transatlantic Modernists as a fantasy, a mythology, and moving and the constant strain of moving is a repeated rhythm in the book. I was moving around and giving up jobs for my husband, all while making a living teaching women’s studies. Part of Heroines is exploring this irony, of sometimes feeling like I was playing the self-sacrificial wife role, of choosing to occupy the subaltern, the economies of all of this, while considering Elizabeth Hardwick’s idea that the wife should sacrifice to the literary genius, in her essay on Zelda Fitzgerald. But I do think in terms of mental health, one can compare a wife depressed at home with the hysterics’ and the mad wives’ treatment. I think, in some ways, we are just talking about different levels of confinement. Substitute Xanax cocktails for hydrotherapy and a rhythm of the rest cure. We don’t institutionalize as often anymore, mostly for insurance reasons, but when I had my post-college freakout, my psychiatrist at the time wanted to commit me. I have been on that brink many times, before John. And a lot of the way privileged women who have broken down have been treated, even now, ties into Victorian ideas of moral insanity—that it’s their fault, they need to shake out of it, they need to adjust. I mean, god, if you’re a privileged white girl, why are you so depressed, right?  People are depressed for many reasons, one of which I think is how we have been taught to react to trauma, to stress. I go under, I hide, I implode. I always have. I do think this has a gendered component.

Also, to be isolated at home, to be bored, to sometimes forget an identity outside of the daughter/wife role—I think this is definitely what afflicted the wives of the Great Men of their generation, as well as the Viennese dutiful daughters. I am just mirroring this, and in some ways, it’s because of the sense of projection and possession through the process of reading, another concept in the book. I think the hysterics became ill because that was the only socially accepted way to freak out, to rebel, to abandon one’s role. They were also fucking bored. Madame Bovary is one of the major narratives in Heroines that I am sending up and paying tribute to—I imagine the first Mrs. Eliot and Mrs. Fitzgerald as Bovary’s of a sort, suffering from Madame Bovary’s disease  (“until other, more ominous ones were diagnosed and even more ominously treated”). And I send myself up rather ridiculously as a Madame Bovary stuck in the provinces in Akron, developing an addiction to historical romance novels. I mean, it’s a frame in the book. But regardless of my fears of passivity, I actively transcend the passive fate of these women (these wives especially who never surrendered their love or sense of sacrifice for their husbands)—my agitation against any accepted written identity through writing the book is my rebellion. An early review of the book really focused on how I kind of luxuriate in the personal narrative—and suggested that I should read a newspaper, because people are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature. But to me the book is intensely political, and my rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots. Also, I’m questioning what it means to be a woman writer in our society—for I am home because I am a writer, but sometimes, when I’m not productive (productivity: the expectations of capitalism), I feel like a terrible housewife, or a sick person. There’s a sense of play about all this in the book, how it moves and is mired in gender roles.

Rumpus: There’s a moment in the book when your husband John says to you, “I erase you. That’s the worst thing I can do, is erase you.” It was a fascinating moment for me because on the one hand, John seems—in the text and what you’ve just said here—to have been enormously supportive of you, a genuinely great guy and creative collaborator. In other ways, he seems to have been codependent in the way of many young couples, which isn’t unusual…but in that moment, this moment of believing—buying into the belief—that he has the power to erase you…well, I was troubled. I wondered whether sometimes this kind of thinking only serves to make a man feel more powerful than he really is, and whether the belief in their own patriarchal power, while on the surface a shameful and awful thing to a sensitive modern man, ultimately can be ego-stroking and gratifying in some ways. Does that make sense? John wasn’t Fitzgerald or something—he was just a young guy early in his teaching career, living in a small town…did he really have the power to erase you? I mean, wow—what a rush for a man…do you see what I mean?  You exist only because of my evolved political consciousness and my choice to hear you rather than erase you. Fuck, what a…creepy turn-on for young men to believe themselves that all-powerful. When really, you don’t seem terribly erasable to me.

Is this kind of thinking—I mean, how does the John of Now see those early dynamics, I wonder? How do you see them? Does every man in a relationship with a woman always need to be…cautious in this way? Is male power always such a given and underlying force in every relationship? Is it our male lovers’ responsibility not to erase us—are they still so goddamn powerful that we have to rely on their magnanimity in order to have our voices heard?

Zambreno: I think you’re being more than a little unfair to John (which might have something to do with how the husband character named John is represented in the book, which is and is not him), although I admire the righteous indignation in your question. To try to answer your question, Heroines is an extremely referential text—it lives on and builds and breathes through so many other literary works—and in Part One I am deliberately playing with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” as well as “The Game of Chess” section of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” while also meditating on the editing notes Viv Eliot and Ezra Pound marked on this section. So in the long sections where I flashback to the rather apocalyptic fights John and I had in the early years, I am both borrowing the language of the messy marital feud in “The Game of Chess,” as well as collaging this with a close intimate reading of that section of the epic poem, as well as a fragmented biography of the real-life couple, all mirroring this with our own marriage. The claustrophobic domestic space in “The Game of Chess,” Vivien(ne)’s voice: “My nerves are bad. Yes. Bad. Stay with me.” Etc. That gorgeous repetitive rhythm that builds to hysteria. I am poeticizing, as well as documenting the almost mythic marital feud—how we are setting each other on fire and making everything worse—the roles we play in that. And I am reflecting on, when we had these early fights, how John would become quite masculine, stoic, cold, and that would actually instigate me to become a screaming harpy, throwing things, becoming a demon woman. And I am trying to write to how even though I am exhibiting the obvious violence, the paternalism, the silent treatment, is actually a method of discipline and control, and ultimately its own kind of violence.

Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land”—“He Do the Police in Different Voices.” But some of that is theatricalizing—I make quite plain in Heroines, that the experience of reading the bios of these subjugated women was becoming a head trip, that I was projecting onto John these domineering qualities. We were playing, in the ways we fought and dealt with conflict, with these mythical roles (which I think are the poison of the gender binary). There’s that line in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which is a send-up and satirizing of traditional male-female roles in the 19th century: “John laughs at me, but one expects that in marriage.” I quote from this in Heroines, to describe an accelerating process in our fights (which have become more rare). That is the erasure I’m describing. The immediate intimate erasure of the day, when I am too furious and upset, and I cannot write, while John manages to keep himself. I see this happening in the relationship with the Eliots. Vivien(ne) catalyzed Tom—as Virginia Woolf wrote, he was one of those poets who lived by scratching and she was his itch—she catalyzed this magnificent hysterical work, while he somehow saved himself. She lost herself. She went mad. She was lost.

I think John’s comment about the knowledge that masculine rhetoric and disciplining is a form of erasure (the transcript between the feuding Fitzgeralds) is quite self-aware and empathetic—he’s acknowledging power roles, also acknowledging the effects of violence, his role in it, even though he is often the sober, sane one in our conflicts. The John in “The Yellow Wallpaper” points his finger at his wife and says, “You need to control yourself, you need to behave.” John is recognizing his role, he is trying not to demonize me. When I get too worked up about things I have always escaped into catatonia—which I describe in the book. He’s reacting to that specific, daily erasure. The erasure of depression. The going inwards.

And obviously the difference between me and John and these Modernist marriages is that as opposed to Paul Bowles or Eliot or Fitzgerald making use of the “marriage material,” it is me in Heroines who is making John (with his full collaboration and consent) a character, who is using and analyzing scenes from our marriage to look at the way that masculine rhetoric can be a form of violence. The book is the power. This is the subversion. The narrator in Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick sets about to solve heterosexuality. I guess that is part of my project, as well. Or really I’m exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.

Rumpus: As you know, my first novel was inspired by Freud’s “Dora” case study, and you have aspects of this in your debut novel—also published by Chiasmus Press, whose co-founder, Lidia Yuknavitch, now has a novel called Dora, too. It would be fair to say that the hysterics have exercised fairly enormous power over the feminist imagination. One of my favorite moments in Heroines is your interrogation as to whether or not Hélène Cixous, who is a kind of foremother of the feminist lens on hysteria, simply “valorizes” Dora and does “not appreciate her suffering,” as the theorist Catherine Clement argues. I see novels like Yuknavitch’s Dora as very much continuing Cixous’ position of asserting that Dora “is the name of a certain force, who makes the little circus not work anymore” and insisting that “Dora broke something.” I think my own work, and yours, perhaps leans more towards Clement’s direction.

You write, “What did these women break except themselves?  They who were ultimately contained.” You’re clearly captivated by the significance of the hysterics’ stories, as am I, but you don’t seem to be mythologizing them as revolutionary heroines. I think of the fact that Ida Bauer, the real “Dora,” was, when interviewed years after she terminated her therapy with Freud, proud and boastful of having been one of Freud’s clients, and that she remained afflicted by severe physical ailments, had become deeply embittered, and ultimately died young. Ida’s possible bisexuality or her rejection of Herr K or her refusal to let Freud define her…if these things were acts of rebellion at all, precisely, they did not alter the course of the rest of her life. No patriarchy seems to have been disturbed. It seems, rather, to have been an example of the way female violence is perpetually turned inward, as you discuss elsewhere in Heroines. Given all this, why do you think the hysterics continue to fascinate and compel us? What is it about their truth that remains genuinely important and instructive to young women?

Zambreno: I love everything you say here. I also love Clement and Cixous’s sniping at each other in The Newly Born Woman—it is one of my favorite exchanges ever. I think, like with the narrative of Zelda, our fascination as writers with Freud’s female case studies deals with language. In Heroines I compare the male-authored Modernist novel to the psychoanalytic case study, in both it is his words written about her suffering. She does not get her own narrative. Or if she does, hers is read with suspicion, his is dominant. So perhaps we are always filling in the gaps, trying to imagine her story… I think the experience of madness is a form of revolt. Or it contains this potential. I definitely think it can break something—it disturbs the order of the day, the good daughter becomes wild and angry. But the language of psychiatry immediately contains, takes back up. The Freudian hysterics’ rages, agitating somehow against the oppression of the family, are described as “absences,” that she is absent herself. He takes down her confession—he names and contains her, he wants to place her back in her role in the bourgeois family—this also happened with Zelda: her reeducation training in the Swiss asylum, how to go back to being a good mother and wife. And the experience of madness is not ultimately a successful rebellion, even if can disturb the order, the placid smiling mask ripped off, Frances Farmer kicking and screaming, putting down “Cocksucker” as her career. She is seized. She is medicated. She suffers, intensely.

I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics—even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route. When compared to Vivien(ne), Zelda is more of a victor than a victim (to use one of Elizabeth Hardwick’s categories in her case studies/critiques in Seduction and Betrayal). She fought, she used language to insist on her sovereignty as a person and as a writer. She lost, but at least she fought. And the book, Save Me the Waltz still survives, in all of its unedited glory, hurried as if to somewhat avoid the censoring machine that was going to kick in full force later. Vivien(ne) might have fought, but ultimately her whole identity was about being Mrs. Eliot, and she despaired over losing that role.

Rumpus: One fascinating thing about your scholarship and psychological investigation of some of literature’s male pillars concerns a kind of curious chasm or hypocrisy in how male writers like Flaubert and Eliot appropriated emotional excess in their texts, yet believed, at the core, that “art is best if depersonalized.”  In some ways this makes little sense, as many of these writers wrote deeply autobiographical work, and most of them were, it seems, every bit as predisposed to excess and instability as their wives and mistresses.  Yet they held themselves—and ultimately the women in their lives, who were artists themselves as well as muses—to a kind of impossibly dispassionate standard that caused them to fetishize “hysterical” women in their texts, and draw from such women’s intensity in life, and yet to ultimately marginalize and reject these traits in women as too out-of-control, too unfiltered, and thereby not only dangerous but un-artistic.  Can you explain that a bit here…if so many of literature’s Great Men were drunks and bipolars and neurotics, why did they deify the idea of the Dispassionate Artist, and vilify women who suffered from very similar symptoms of “excess” they themselves knew so well?

Zambreno: Yes, it’s a total contradiction, and I really like how you encapsulate it here—I can’t do better—but it’s a huge discovery/movement in the book. If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It’s all about rhetoric, about official narratives. And something I ask in Heroines is—who controls these narratives? Who has historically written the narrative about how someone should behave, the narratives of psychiatry, about how someone should write, the narratives of literature? Eliot’s criticism I think of as defending and controlling how his work was read—his theories regarding how literature should be depersonalized, his condemnation of excessive emotions in literature. This project successfully disciplined and shaped how his work has been read and has also shaped the mainstream literary discourse, even today. It is a preventative measure. “Suppress Everything Suppressible,” he said to his literary executor, about the letters to Emily Hale, about the first marriage—and that I see as such an ethos of literary Modernism. It allows the great male writers to draw from autobiography, such as in Flaubert’s case the details of his love affair with Louise Colet, while distancing the personal, making them seem like genius godheads. I mean, Madame Bovary is one of my favorite works of literature—but why all of this vampirism, this draining of these women’s life stories, while pretending they don’t exist afterwards, these women who also identified as writers? What is the effect of being made a character if you are a writer? (As happened with Zelda, with Jane, with—well, with all of them).

What’s harrowing to me is how endlessly we repeat this demonizing in these biographies that simply repeat past history, and don’t even analyze ideas of mental illness at the time, such as how schizophrenia was such a catch-all for the bad woman, who deviated from her assumed sexuality or wife role, who with her moods or her lack of mores did not behave. Someone who is writing a biography on Fitzgerald wrote me about Zelda: “I mean, though, she was crazy, we can agree on that, can’t we?” It’s amazing. I want every literary biographer to read Foucault on mental illness. And then to read Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady. So they can stop playing armchair diagnosticians that just send up the already-accepted social order. For, on the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them (a big exception is Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf; her chapter on “Illness,” dealing with refusing to use the language of incompetent doctors, is one I read again and again). The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: “The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize—too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries.”

This all gets at a central inequity in our culture—who has power, who is seen as genius, who gets to name. Also how difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman. So women in these traditional roles were more oppressed, because their husbands were their fathers and their doctors. But the thing is, women were seen by their very nature as ill. Silas Weir Mitchell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s doctor who popularized the “rest cure,” which her story satirizes, claimed, “The man who does not know sick woman does not know woman.” Intellectual strain was thought to be detrimental to a woman’s nerves; she was encouraged to do nothing, or simply domestic tasks. This was the way they were all framed, once they were taken up. While Eliot could make himself sick over and over again—be put in a sanatorium to deal with nerves, but still allowed to write, because he’s the genius. Eliot and Flaubert were allowed to become geniuses, were considered geniuses by the women in their lives before they actually wrote much, were tended to—treated, yes, but still allowed absolute authority. And freedom. I mean, you write earlier, of John, “He wasn’t Fitzgerald.” But Fitzgerald wasn’t Fitzgerald. He failed a lot before he became Fitzgerald. It was really crucial to these geniuses that their artistic output was considered of primary importance in the family. I think genius can have a lot to do with nerve. And permission.

Rumpus: I was absolutely riveted by the Fitzgeralds as you reveal them. Zelda had her books heavily edited more or less against her will, at Scott’s insistence, because he was threatened by her using any material whatsoever that was similar to his own literary terrain, even though both writers were culling from their own—shared—life, and the material was no less “Zelda’s” than his. He forbids her writing about the Riviera, about psychiatry, about Switzerland. I think about contemporary literary couples—Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer come to mind immediately—where there has been some talk about their material overlapping, and it’s clear that there’s intense literary collaboration and idea-sharing going on behind the scenes, and I feel like—wow, I guess what seems sort of tragic to me is that this driving belief on Scott’s part that a writer had to be a kind of singular Genius sprung fully-formed from the head of Zeus…that writing autobiographical material or sharing ideas and art with one’s wife was diminishing, rather than natural and human, and perhaps something that would even add to the reading experience and to the cultural discourse around the books. He believed Zelda sharing any of his material somehow completely discredited him and that she needed to be “stopped,” rather than allowed into the discussion—and it seems to me like much havoc was wrought as a result of the egos and overwhelming insecurity of some of these male writers. Scott says, in a horrifying and mesmerizing transcript of their couples’ therapy, “Her theory is…that a girl has just got to get along, and so she has the right, therefore to destroy me completely in order to satisfy herself.” He views her actions, her art, and her Self as completely about him. He says, “Whether you write or not does not seem to be of any great importance.” It’s harrowing. Doctors and editors agree with him. They not only do, in fact, erase her, but they demand her complicity in her own erasure. Can you talk a bit more about how and why this was possible?

Zambreno: Going back to an earlier question, about excess and the godheads…I mean, the reason they could be excessive while also policing and disciplining and naming the women in their lives as ill is patriarchy. Patriarchy is having the power to name. To put others in the Realm of the Proper, to reword Cixous (I think)—she is my property, she must behave properly. I think of the character of Rochester in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea—he’s raving mad and paranoid, but he names his wife as the ill one, as the immoral one, as the mad one. He has the power to name her, he is the controlling husband; the doctors corroborate, the narratives of mental illness corroborate—these narratives which were so gendered and often about disciplining and punishing those who escaped from their circumscribed role, the laws were not on their side.

So Fitzgerald was able to punish Zelda for veering outside of his preferred territory as muse, confidante, wife, helpmate—his “complementary intelligence,” as he phrased it. All of the institutions of the time were on his side, in terms of what a wife should do, how a woman should act. All those enthralled to the Fitzgerald mythology endlessly repeat that Zelda was schizophrenic, diagnosed by Eugene Bleuler, who coined the term and visited her briefly (Zelda, in turn, called him as an imbecile). Yet Bleuler’s theories tied into all of the 19th century ideas of moral insanity—that Zelda’s “illness” was due to feelings of inferiority and egomania. In order to have a “normal marriage” she needed to give up her “inflated ambitions” and engage in “activities appropriate to her talents and tastes.” And so she is named, she is constantly surveilled, she is warned not to work too much on anything.

I mean, though, you have to wonder, why was he so threatened? It really freaked him out. What was so criminal about Zelda reclaiming her own first-person, taking her own story as her own material? I think she temporarily agitated against the privileged terrain of the novel—the magic of the novelist as spinning narratives and characters out of thin air. For if she was to circle around her same period of breakdown, of being institutionalized in the Swiss asylum—if this was published before Tender, it would somehow ruin the illusion that fiction is not derived from life, the transcendence that Flaubert insisted on (this is what I think finally “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” meant: she was not based on anyone—he created her, she was him, he was possessed by and possessed her). For the female characters in his novels that were based on her, he drew from her diaries, her letters, her spoken language—I think he was terrified of the comparison. He needed to keep her a character, he needed to stay the author. She threatened something. She temporarily disturbed the order of things. He was so jealous of his material—her life. These women are so often written in the legends as vampirizing these husbands—draining them dry. Zelda. The vamp. But I turn it on its head—looking at how they were vampirized, without being immortalized.

Rumpus: You write about Elizabeth Hardwick’s criticism of some of the feminist-minded demands or complaints of other women writers of her generation. Hardwick writes about the Twinship of literary couples like Scott and Zelda, yet argues for the necessity of an “amputation,” really. She writes, “Still, only one of the twins is real as an artist, as a person with a special claim upon the world, upon the indulgence of society.” Not only does this seem a bizarre position to me—why couldn’t both be real artists? And why is anyone entitled to a special claim on the world or the indulgence of society?—but it seems a classic example, of course, of members of any oppressed group cannibalizing each other. Often, women—not just in literature but in business, in any field—seemed to believe that only a small handful of “exceptional” women could be granted access to the Boy’s Club, and therefore it was necessary to kick all other women off the ladder and let them fall into the pit…that every woman had to fight for what was perceived as only a few rare spaces at the table. Do you believe this is still happening today? I mean, I think of the way thinkers like Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe seem to have achieved a kind of cultural notoriety for throwing feminism, or women’s issues and women’s writing, under the bus. Is one of the surest ways for a woman to achieve recognition as a serious thinker and writer still to essentially denounce “women” as a group and to seemingly identify more strongly with the myth of the singular male genius?

Zambreno: Elizabeth Hardwick is a major figure I circle around in Part Two, both as a critic and as a writer, twinning her marriage to Robert Lowell with Zelda’s marriage: both of them these Southern women, both who were brilliant writers, who were made into characters (“Lizzie” vampirized as the harridan ex-wife in The Dolphin cycle, her phone conversations and letters taken, unknown to her). I think on some level she’s writing about her former marriage in her essay on the Fitzgeralds, this central relationship in her life. Seduction and Betrayal is a work on literary women and female characters (Sylvia, Zelda, Ibsen’s characters, etc.) that she wrote originally in essays for The New York Review of Books after Lowell had left her for yet another writer, Lady Caroline Blackwood. It is written as all third-person objective, but threaded throughout there’s this covert commentary on her own marriage to a genius. I can’t figure out whether it’s a “tacit act of revenge,” as it’s been characterized, or a tacit acceptance, or maybe more of an ambivalent meditation on literary marriage. It’s such an infuriating yet often brilliant work to me. In it I think maybe she’s accepting that genius is devouring, because Lowell was devouring. But also, Lowell is the mad one, like Zelda (although I think Fitz was equally mad, especially in his breakdown period), so it’s hard to know what she’s really saying. I’ve read the essay countless times. I mean, she was the one who was amputated in her relationship. She was so self-sacrificial in her relationship with Lowell, which was chaotic, sometimes abusive, and often humiliating, especially with his many affairs, a re-occurring sign of his periodic breakdowns. She only wrote her novels before or after her marriage to him. But Sleepless Nights, her novel that she wrote later in life, is one of my favorite works of literature.

Not that she and her contemporary, Mary McCarthy, the brilliant girls, weren’t guilty of girl-on-girl crime. They definitely were. They were murderous to Anaïs Nin, who became too intimate with Edmund Wilson after his divorce from McCarthy. Hardwick’s review of Anaïs Nin’s first, self-published book, that Wilson raved about in The New Yorker, is incinerating. They were also catty towards the mere “wives” of the Partisan Review crowd, like Diana Trilling. They wanted to keep up with the boys. They didn’t want to define themselves as feminists. Well, I think Hardwick did maybe later on in life. But to be a feminist was to complain, to be angry.

That said, I think Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy were absolutely brilliant. I mean, perhaps Hardwick’s sneering ecstatic review of The Second Sex could be seen as the level of reactionary of a Roiphe or a Paglia, but that was an earlier piece she later felt more ambivalent about.

The concept of “girl-on-girl crime” is perplexing to me, and it happens in many ways. There are those, as you said, who refuse to identify with women as a group, preferring the shade of the mythologized men, who want to keep up the status quo. But also, too, in Heroines, I talk about the dismissal of Anaïs Nin and Jean Rhys by many Second Wave feminists, for writing about their selves so nakedly, for writing women that are not entirely empowered. So it’s not only women who proudly don’t identify as feminists who are culpable of this crime (like Mary McCarthy who fumed: “Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships—someone always wins”).

Rumpus: It seems to me that we live in a time that’s extremely fragmented on the nature of women’s writing. On the one hand, you write, “Memoir is a woman writer’s forbidden and often avoided continent,” and you argue—notably from a personal angle when you discuss the reception of (the unnamed) Adam Levin’s debut book contrasted with your own experiences as a writer—that men are still embraced for work that requires ego and ambition, such as a 1,000-page novel, whereas women would likely be castigated and mocked for a similar effort. And yet, that said, while I see truth in that argument, memoir also seems to have become a woman-fueled genre in many ways. Women are the prime readers/purchasers of memoirs, and certainly write many of them, too. Blunt narratives of female sexuality, ranging from Rachel Resnick’s Love Junkie, to Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart, to Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water seem to pour into the marketplace regularly. I have actually heard male writers remark that if a man wrote an entire book about his sexual excesses, he would be seen as a dull braggart, whereas all a woman has to do to get attention is write about her sex life. (Notably here, I want to say that in my view, male writers like Junot Diaz, Steve Almond and Stephen Elliott are still very much expanding the terrain of male sexuality in literature…but even as a feminist I might agree that a male writer needs to be pretty extraordinarily talented these days to attract an audience for explicitly sexual writing, whereas there is, I think, a certain gawking and fascination whenever women write about sex.)  And although I see the recent efforts to pigeonhole so many women writers into the “Chick Lit” or “Women’s Fiction” marketing categories, within the terrain of literary fiction, it’s hard to think of a more ambitious or intellectually challenging trade writer than Jennifer Egan, who ran away with prizes even in a year when she was up against some of the proverbial golden boys of the industry, like Franzen. What do you think about these seeming inconsistencies in the way women are being culturally received right now? Are we in a time of upheaval, in which we seem to be all over the map?

Zambreno: Oh, god Adam Levin. I really have nothing against him. I was so fucking embarrassed when that Bookforum review focused on him like he was an ex-boyfriend of mine—which he is not! He is a peripheral figure I knew from my fuck-up days in Chicago, when we were both starting to be writers. And also the implication that I was, like, so jealous and bitter about his success. That would be inaccurate. Well. Maybe it’s not terribly inaccurate. I don’t think I am. The section when I reference him (without naming him), it’s a woven anecdote in a larger section that’s a meditation on David Foster Wallace’s posthumous treatment in the media, which I view as a canonization, and wondering whether a girl could write and publish a massive book like Infinite Jest. And also thinking about the idea of genius and the canon and how these ideas seem so masculine. In the anecdote, I’m largely sending up and making fun of myself. I find myself boasting to him that I have a novel coming out when I run into him years after knowing him, and he smirks and he’s like, “Yeah, I do too, mine is 10,000 pages,” or however long it is. And mine of course is this eighty-page nervous little novella published by an experimental feminist press. So the section is about ego, and about permission, and about freedom. And I am mirroring myself more with Zelda, who had something approaching the identity of a small-press novelist, versus her husband (Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist, Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty). Where I think about the system novels (Pynchon, etc.) that have become so canonized, and that there are few massive literary tomes authored by women that are considered these great genius texts.

I wonder at the sort of permission and ego that’s needed to write that much, and wonder whether women lack that, because of the shame and guilt we are taught to internalize when we write about our own experience, because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, we don’t want to be bad—Woolf’s angel in the house, because of the way that we handle rejection. All that nerviness to write a book that fucking size. And to say—I am worthy of being read. I mean, one has to be convinced of one’s genius. I also look at how someone like Fitzgerald reacted to rejection versus Anaïs Nin or Jane Bowles or Vivienne Eliot, who took it so fucking personally—well, because maybe it was personal—and sometimes stopped writing. I don’t think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature. D.F.W. can take the life narratives from those he meets, Fitzgerald can take over his wife’s hospitalization experience as his own material; but they’re almost never accused of not being literary because they’re drawing from real life. Or they pretend it’s all made up from thin air. I find that such a central myth of fiction, that it’s drawn from thin-air—maybe some of the conceptual writers don’t draw from life, but everyone else does. We vampirize others, making others characters, and there’s some responsibility in that.

So I’m asking what prohibits women from writing these massive texts. I also don’t think they are given the freedom—I don’t think these audacious works by women are written, nor are they published. I know for my part Green Girl was certainly not Infinite Jest, but I was rejected from like seventy places and finally was advised to cut the book in half, which I did. No one wanted to publish my big book. I was advised to write more like chick lit, that the work should be short and sweet and manageable. Also, I think with the case of Adam Levin I was analyzing how he was reviewed when his book came out—so much has been written about how women are not reviewed, but less is written about how they are reviewed, what other writers they’re compared to in the bodies of these occasional reviews. Levin was compared to the hyperverbiage of D.F.W., D.F.W. was compared to Melville. I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women. While I’m glad to exist within that tradition, it remains somehow outside of the tradition of the Great Books. Canon, which comes from the Greek for “measuring rod.” It’s all so phallic. These big books.

As for memoir, I think it’s wonderful that there are books like Chronology of Water.  I do think it signals a positive upheaval, I do think Lidia is pushing against the memoir form in a powerful way with that book. But I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon. And Lidia’s book was still not published by a trade publication, although published by a good and supportive press. The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not “great literature.” I mean, I view memoir as a marketing category. In Modernism, these genres were more confused. Is Berlin Stories a memoir? Is the entire oeuvre of Henry Miller? The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism—she is reviewed, as opposed to her book being reviewed, often dismissed as being unlikeable (Exhibit A: Sheila Heti; Exhibit B: Chris Kraus). I write in Heroines: “The disgust for Anaïs Nin is the disgust for the girls with their Livejournal.“ I think that still holds true. The existential crisis of Ophelia, as opposed to Hamlet, is not seen as heroic. With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged. With Jennifer Egan, and Zadie Smith, I would counter that they are exceptions, seen as great literature, because they write women and men—they write a panoply of characters, this seemingly entirely fictionalized and androgynous world, which even Woolf held up as the truly transcendent fiction. I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged.

Rumpus: You write, “The girls I have known whose narratives have never been told—I feel such a responsibility towards them.  Towards my former self as well.”  I recognize this intense and beautiful sentiment, too. I grew up below the poverty line in urban Chicago and the girls I was raised with—well, there are only two girls I know of from my elementary school class who went to college, and of the entire school there is only one other person I know of from my years there—a guy—who went into any kind of artistic field that would attempt to give expression to our collective experiences. Many of the young women I was raised with were molested, physically abused, raped, introduced to drugs by people far older than themselves—a few OD’d or were murdered while we were all still in our teens. Plenty, of course, also went on to live decent, happy lives, if not lives that exactly encourage them to share their stories of origin with the world. I’ve always felt a great responsibility, and perhaps even what would be called “survivor guilt,” in terms of wanting to explore their stories and voices in my work. And just the other day, I got a piece of fan mail from another writer I know’s mother, who is a high school teacher, and told me that she has been recommending my collection, Slut Lullabies, to the more troubled girls she teaches, and telling them that girls like themselves are the heroines of my stories, and that they have a voice and can tell their own stories, too. It was probably the most gratifying letter I’ve ever received about my writing. Will you talk a little about how you feel your old partner-in-crime, Molly, influenced your writing with her death?

Zambreno: I can imagine how gratifying that letter would be, Gina. I grew up in the much more privileged, lower-middle-class, Catholic, Chicago suburbs, although I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside. After college, where I had a rather spectacular breakdown my senior year, I drifted for years, and identified mostly as a fuck-up. Although I think of this period now as my first training as a writer. Where I met women rather brutalized by life, when I worked on and off at overnight diners, my fellow waitresses supporting countless children; the ones who got abortions and had to go to work the same day; the one who came to work with bruises because her gang-leader boyfriend beat her up; the prostitutes who frequented the diner; the old diabetic ladies who would sit at the counter spooning up their hot chocolate. As well as the string of girlfriends I lived with who identified mostly through being intensely unhappy, like I was, struggling to force ourselves to go to our wage jobs that we felt alienated by, struggling with our toxic love affairs. While knowing, unlike those we worked with at our meaningless jobs with our piggy bosses, we were quite privileged, that we had gone to college, that we could transcend our status, if we could fucking figure out how.

For years I lived rather medicated and muted—I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it. As I write in Heroines, one of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself. We both went to school together, waited tables together, lived together, diagnosed each other, discussed our various psychotropics, our abnormal psychology (she was a psych major), and did all sorts of drugs together as well. She was so intensely unhappy. I knew this the whole time I knew her. Yet she never communicated it. Not even to me. She was there for everyone else. She was always smiling. She signed her suicide note with a smiley face. This haunted me for years—she was partially the basis for my Dora-daughter, Maggie, in O Fallen Angel, a meditation on female passivity, among other things, the turning violence inwards.

I am writing this other essay now that partially deals with a girl I lived with back in those days who didn’t go to college, who was ten years my senior, a drifter who struggled with mental health issues, as we all did, all mixed up with a twinned obsession with the actress/director Barbara Loden and her film Wanda, and I’m really trying to reckon with ideas of culpability in making someone else a muse. I write in Heroines that making someone else a character can be a way of stealing life from them, but can also be a way of loving, of seeing, of paying tribute. I hope what I do when I draw from other people’s lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.

Rumpus: I’d like to talk lastly about the blogging community you’ve found, where women encourage and support one another to tell their own truths. You end the book with a battle cry, saying, “If I have communicated anything to you I hope it is the absolute urgency to write yourself, your body, your own experience…I ask you to fight against your own disappearance. To refuse to self-immolate.”  How do you think the next generation of aspiring female writers, growing up with such a vibrant blogging and independent publishing community, will experience their ability to write themselves? Are things deeply improved, or is this still just a tiny corner of the culture, whereas most of what girls are exposed to remains even more hyper-feminized and unrealistically glamorous images of “perfection” than was true for those of us growing up in the 1970s-1990s?  What are some of the blogs and books you would recommend for young women who don’t see themselves reflected in the popular culture and are hungry for role models that don’t involve self-immolation?

Zambreno: In terms of reading suggestions, hopefully Heroines serves somewhat as an alternative canon, and I do even have a bibliography in the back of blogs that were in my community while I was incubating the book, like Bhanu Kapil’s blog or Suzanne Scanlon’s blog, whose books I would definitely also recommend. I’ve also since discovered a community of quite brilliant Tumblrs that I would definitely characterize as feminist, often queer but also not entirely empowered, in fact sometimes self-immolating, but circling around this self-immolation. The second part of that quote after self-immolation in Heroines is basically (I don’t have it in front of me)—“or choose to self-immolate, to launch yourself as a glorious spectacle in outer space, to die and resurrect.”

I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.  And analyzing our relationship to our bodies and our desires for perfection, how socially circumscribed this perfection is. I mean there’s just a multiplicity of identities online, some anonymous or pseudonymous or heteronymous like Pessoa—a range of genders, posting runway shows while wrangling with queer theory, or grad students writing about depression or shame or issues with eating as well as gorgeous meditations on literature. The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable. I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don’t get it. I am curious to see what books will emerge from all this writing online that’s the result of those who grew up pouring their feelings out on Livejournal or Tumblr—excessive, sometimes automatic, sometimes enraged, emotional, while also quite intellectual—or if formal books will emerge at all, if that’s not the point of these unmediated raw spaces. I’m excited by the possibility.

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“Poetry videos, short story videos, live readings, spoken work performance, audiobook links, animated storytelling videos, documentaries about writers, book trailers, author interviews, and anything else you can think up that combines literature and other media.”

(Via GalleyCat)

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On this note, University of Nottingham philosophy professor Gregory Currie takes a stab at wtf literature actually IS, now that cognitive psychology has apparently shuffled in with some snarky empiricism to take the reins in the Revealing Our Inner Selves department. He takes some time to bat around the term ‘Serious Fiction,’ noting that if its seriousness is meant to be seen in light of its revealing of truth, 2011 could ask us to apply the laws of thermodynamics to Paradise Lost. And that might not work.

But, not being a hater, Currie sees this seriousness as an ‘exercise in pretence’ (Brit spelling), and serious authors of fiction as expert builders of worlds with variables dropped in and out for us to draw conclusions on the truth and humanity inside. Safely, without having to question the efficacy of our choice of learning strategy. Yay English Major.

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I just picked up my copy at the bookstore where I work. Most bookstores with a decent magazine rack should carry at least a couple copies. At least the ones in San Francisco do. But even then it can be hard to find.The essays I have read so far have excited and unnerved me by the eloquence of their outrage towards the intellectual and ethical crises facing our country. One of their biggest targets is the Internet, or at least the Internet’s maddening ubiquity in all aspects of social life, and techno-hedonism in general.

The revival of the magazine was due in large part to what the editors and publishers viewed as some unfortunate trends in contemporary cultural discourse:

“Print is dead they say; we double down in our commitment to the printed word.  Brevity is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality. . .”

A few stand-outs in the current issue include Naomi Klein discussing the ten year anniversary of her seminal book No Logo, several articles on the way we talk about the Internet and its mystifying technology, a couple poems by Jack Spicer, an article about Nelson Algren’s Chicago and some disarming articles  on the recent financial meltdown.

There are also a couple of short stories and a few full-color photo essays, one of which documents, for all you ruin-enthusiasts, “feral houses.”

I think magazines like The Baffler deserve all the support they can get, whether from devoted readers or writers or charitable foundations or just stores like ours that are willing to carry it. Foisting quality printed matter that is engaging, intelligent and timely onto the public shouldn’t be as hard as it seems to be.  But these are interesting times, clearly, full of interesting challenges.

In size and scope, The Baffler has has all the structural integrity of a well-bound book that you can leaf through time and again; content-wise, it amounts to an eclectic anthology of cultural criticism and art by people often working under the radar who are devoted to sorting out the myths, lies and debacles of our society.  And in doing so they provide something much more enlightening.

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He removed it with no scarring, and insurance paid for it, so I guess I can’t complain too much, but man, did he have to be such an asshole?

Why are so many doctors such jerks? Most likely, it’s because of the way they’re trained to think. But now, it seems, some  are trying to remedy the problem by getting doctors to read literature. (via)

Said one doctor: “If you want to understand what someone who is dying is going through, the highs and lows, the emotions, read Tolstoy’s `The Death of Ivan Illyich.’ … One hundred years before Kubler-Ross identified the stages of dying, Tolstoy had it.”

Reading literature helps doctors to understand their patients, to empathize with them, and to better comprehend the less concrete aspects of illness and the experience of living. One study showed that these programs made significant gains in doctor performance and in the doctor’s overall well-being.

“So much of the expectations on them are black and white, to have an answer. (Literature) helps them fit into that hard space, of not necessarily knowing the answer,” says Elizabeth Sinclair, the coordinator of the program in Maine that started this trend.

All of which is, undoubtedly, a good thing. But now that it’s being conclusively shown that the humanities actually do amazing things for people whose job it is to save lives, could we maybe get some funding over here? (And I’m not even going to get into what the humanities could do for lawyers, politicians, bankers, marketing consultants, and other empathy-deprived groups)

Because right now, as someone about to go on the job market in the humanities, I can tell you that it’s looking bleak. Humanities budgets are being cut worldwide, and humanities teachers are being cast aside like an ex you accidentally slept with again after a long night of drinking.

Politicians and other education funders seem to think that humanities teachers and practitioners are like leeches,  creepy-looking blood-suckers that feed on the funding sources of other, more sensible, more practical, more hygienic positivists. But now it turns out that, like leeches, we’re actually helpful sometimes. So maybe they should keep us around? Maybe we could even teach them how to stop being assholes.

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Just because there’s this marvelous tool for helping readers to understand your story, doesn’t mean your story has to be crafted around the tool.”

At io9, they’re talking about the advantages of using genre as a tool, especially in regards to sci-fi.

Lately I’ve had my mind blown by viewing experiences, themselves, as falling into “genres”, and the most persistent genre thus far has been “dark comedy.” Which I suppose falls under the larger heading of “gritty realism.”  I do fully intend on having some “science-fiction” experiences in the near future, especially when 2012 comes.

(Needless to say I feel lucky to have many experiences that qualify as “erotica”, even if the other consenting party (my girlfriend) still views them as “slapstick comedy.”)

I think the slipperiest genre, in terms of writing, and one that I’m extravagantly guilty of is “magical realism.”

I also think that magical realism is the genre that is, in terms of life’s weird messiness, the most realistic.

When in doubt, think of the weirdest things that have every happened to you and then wonder: would the generic literary critic consider these experiences as realistic as what happens in a Raymond Carver story or as realistic as what happens in a novel by Julio Cortazar?

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“These things, writing and reading, are never, I don’t think were ever, ever meant to be exclusive from anything else. I think they were always meant to be part of the grand fabric of life.”

Until last year, The San Francisco Chronicle had the nation’s youngest book review editor toiling in its basement. Oscar Villalon, 37, had arrived internally from the paper’s copy desk and had scarcely looked the part. Broad shouldered and rigged at several inches over six feet, he walked with dipped shoulders and resembled an outside linebacker with the USC Trojans, his alma mater that he rooted for religiously.

The man loved football, video games, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and literature on about equal footing. Casual expertise with Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy got him his first job in professional journalism. When we spoke, he had just finished rereading Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.

In September of 2009, Oscar Villalon became the publisher of McSweeney’s. I spoke to him recently about the state and future of book reviewing, reading and literature’s place in our contemporary culture.

The Rumpus: Tell me a little about your new job and your decision to take the position.

Oscar Villalon: As the publisher here, my responsibilities are varied, but the primary one is to make sure the business is healthy, financially, and that we’re growing. What made me take the job was the idea of working with incredibly talented people who embrace new ideas, and it’s always nice working for a company whose products, if you will, you were already happily devouring.

Rumpus: How did you end up on the books desk at the Chronicle?

Villalon: They were searching for a deputy for a long, long, long time, and for various reasons just couldn’t find one. And basically my boss at the time, she more or less called me into her office and said something along the lines of, “Hey, you read a lot.” Again, you’d be surprised, these papers do not have a lot of big readers. And by reading, I mean stuff like, I brought in, because I started very late with this, but I was reading William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and I had my paperback with me and I’d read it on my lunch breaks, stuff like that. And I think that got noticed by the art critics, like, “William James. You don’t see that a lot.” But again, it’s not like—as anyone who’s read William James would know—it’s not daunting. This is very accessible stuff, it’s just fascinating and it’s a shame that more people have not read William James, but it’s not like I was bringing in stuff in Sanskrit that was very specialized and pretentious. I mean, it’s William James. It’s like, if you want to know about your civilization, you’ve gotta read this book. This guy, he was laying down the groundwork.

Anyway, so they said, “You know a lot about books. Do you want the job?” And that was it. I didn’t apply. I certainly wasn’t sought out, beyond the building. I just happened to be ten feet from my boss. There’s no way you can plan it. That’s just luck.

Rumpus: What is the biggest misconception the average reader has about working in publishing?

Villalon: You don’t get to read on the job. Ever, unless the servers have all crashed and you have no choice but to read while they get fixed. So that means you do all of your reading at home, on the weekends, etc., time for which you do not get paid. No, it’s not a hardship compared to most jobs, but yes, it’s a demand on your time that your spouse and child may not find as necessary as you do.

Rumpus: That seems to be the cultural struggle of our age. Never enough time for everything we want to expose ourselves too. And there’s an idea—and I think it’s largely put forth by people that are a generation older than us—what I call the sort of mono-media idea. It’s that people who like books cannot be people who have space or time like television, cannot be people who like to go to the movies. That different forms of culture and media are in vicious competition with one another.

Villalon: Right. When I was a teenager, for example, I listened to a lot of music. I watched a lot of TV, and I watched as many movies as I could. But I read too. It never occurred to me that these things were incompatible.

Now having said that, it was clear to me as a teenager, though, that reading was incompatible with popular culture, just in the sense that no one read. Let’s be honest, read for recreation.

Rumpus: You mean amongst your friends?

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