Your fiction and your poetry seems to be chronically referred to as “experimental”…
“Chronic” is a good word for it…
...and that seems to be juxtaposed to the term “conventional,” and these two terms keep cropping up. I’m interested in finding out what those terms mean to you, and why do you feel that “experimental” is used to describe your writing in general?
For me they’re troublesome—very troublesome—but I think it’s an effort on the part of people who need to define writing in terms of genres, in terms of categories, to do just that. It seems to be the convenient way of dealing with things that are in the marketplace. It’s “black” or “experimental” or “feminist” or “historical romance” or whatever. Basically we live in a culture that requires these definitions. It’s kind of a tag. I’ve agonized over tags, and I think there’s no way around them, so I don’t fight them anymore. Those are labels that are either useful or detracting at times, depending on where you are at the moment or where the customer is at the moment, or where the researched or book reviewer is at the moment.
What’s the connection to your writing? Why do you feel it’s termed “experimental”?
Because, I guess, as the reviewer said in yesterday’s L.A. Times, it’s because there is a tradition of Afro-American fiction and poetry, and that tradition has been—in fiction, especially—realistic, or naturalistic. “Social realism” is what it’s generally called. It means that Afro-American writers have traditionally made a sociological or psychological—and it’s usually both—examination of the so-called black experience, which is another term that has no meaning whatsoever.
There is no single black experience. There are certain kinds of cultural aspects of the experience of black people generally that might be summed up in that way, but it seems to minimize the importance of diversity within the culture. That’s just one of the troublesome things about labels. The minimization.
Well, the terms are double-edged. Reviewers can employ them in an effort to valorize certain writers’ work—experimental can be avant-garde and “fresh”—or they can marginalize writers through the same labels.
Yes, and this is exactly what happens, normally. Especially with Afro-American writers, or even any so-called subcategory of writers in this culture: women, Native American, Asian-American—whatever. It’s generally considered “the other” division. There is a kind of crossover point, too, at times. It seems to me that the ethnic identity of a writer is not what causes that kind of definition to take place. We have examples of that—Frank Yerby, Willard Motley—just in looking at black writers. There’s always been a concurrent tradition of black American writers who have not at all concentrated on the elements that cause Afro-American literature to be defined as a subcategory. Yerby, as you know, every book he wrote was a bestseller, but they were poplar novels—romance novels, essentially.
I think the defining element takes place at one level of decision on part of the writer—what an individual writer chooses to write.
It’s also possible to write out of an ethnic experience and at the same time transcend those definitions, just as Ralph Ellison has done. Toni Morrison has done that. Also Alice Walker. That happens because the writer has tapped into some elements of the human experience that transcend the merely cultural. Now, when a writer does that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that society is going to pick up on that and bring the writer into the mainstream; that doesn’t necessarily happen. A writer such as Charles Chestnut, for example, was never really brought into the mainstream as a celebrated American writer.
You dedicated your novel Emergency Exit, published in 1979, “to the people whose stories do not hold together,” from a quote from Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises in which he writes, “I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.” What did that dedication means for you in 1979, and further, what does it mean when a story doesn’t hold together?
I was trying to justify the structure of that book, which was a system of fragmentation, but a system nonetheless. In other words, a fragmented form that was essentially a unified, coherent entity. I do believe art has to have form. As William Carlos Williams said, “There is no such thing as free verse.” There is really no such thing as a free novel, it’s not like life. Life is kind of formless and pointless at times, but a novel really can’t be that way, just as a poem can’t be that way.
There’s an organizing intelligence? A structuring…
Yes. It has a kind of internal integrity. It’s like a leaf or a tree or a rock, or anything that can be seen to have its own intelligent system. In using that dedication I wanted to justify my form in that novel. I think it was probably the most radical novel I’ve written in terms of form, and therefore the least accessible, and commercially the least successful. But I don’t know whether the novel itself is a success or a failure; I don’t know that about any of my books. I haven’t felt the need to write that kind of novel again. Once I’ve been down a river, I just like to travel another way.
How do you make decisions about writing prose and writing poetry? How do you traffic between genres?
That’s a good question. The biggest secret I have is that very often I will take about a dozen poems—or maybe two dozen poems—and work them into a novel in some way. Or vice versa. There are chapters sometimes that don’t work in a novel and I’ll throw them into a folder and a month or a year later and eventually get a poem out of a chapter that didn’t work in a novel. There are some short stories that are more borderline than others, obviously. As in my latest book, Fun & Games. Some of the older things are certainly more borderline—bridging the two forms—than others.
Does teaching nourish your writing?
I think so. In terms of my life, it gives me a way of getting out of the loneliness that surrounds writing as an activity. And I feel that it’s a good balance, a good intellectual balance. It’s a good way of going into the world and being involved in the world. It’s constructive and educational. As long as I feel that I’m learning something, then it’s useful; I have a kind of selfish motive to teaching: I love to learn. Teaching is important for me in that sense; I feel engaged.
What do you actually teach when you teach creative writing?
Well, I’m not teaching writing, really. Usually when I’m teaching creative writing I’m trying to conduct—coordinate, really—a workshop in which there’s an atmosphere generated, an atmosphere, when it’s working, that should give the participants the opportunity to discover what they need to discover in order for their writing to go forward. When I’m dealing with people who have a lot of talent and a great need to write, then it’s ideal, because that’s when the method works best. When I’m dealing with people who will probably not become writers, then my goal is to try to create the same atmosphere and hope that they will come away from the workshop experience as better readers, at least, because they’ve learned how a text is put together, and how it’s taken apart. That’s all I expect from those who aren’t specializing in creative writing. In all cases, it’s a worthy goal.
I want to shift gears and talk about some of your work more specifically. In your novel Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, published in 1988, the material is drawn from the life of a Zuni woman living on the fringes of her native culture. Where did the idea for the novel come from?
It came out of the failure of another novel I was writing at the same time. That novel was about an Afro-American singer, and I realized that I needed some distance from it—some cultural distance—so I needed to be able to look at culture the way you would look at a chessboard, maybe, or at a foreign language—let’s put it that way—that has understandable, structural parts. So, there was my fascination with the Zunis.
I lived in Colorado for twelve years, teaching at the university, and I spent a lot of time in the Southwest and on the Navajo reservations. I became accustomed to the culture, and absorbed a great deal. Essentially, the novel came from another route. I had been fascinated with the Zunis for a long, long time because of their history. There’s a mystery there. No ones know, for example, where their language comes from, for one thing. They may be the descendant of the Aztecs; that’s one theory. But I was especially interested in their rebellious nature, and in their resiliency. Anyway, I had enough distance so that I could look at them as I would look at something under a microscope. There was a kind of structure, a kind of system, that was attractive to me. So I did the research, which took a couple of years, and I took my previous character and changed her a great deal. She evolved into Painted Turtle, but she became a very different kind of person, though she retained the sadness—but she also lost a lot of the despair; although Painted Turtle has some despair, she’s triumphant. She transcends her condition, and she has much to deal with but she doesn’t give up.
What about the role of the male narrator, Baldwin Saiyataca?
That was a purely technical decision. The first time, I tried Painted Turtle in a first-person narrative, and it didn’t work. I tried it that way and I could not make it work in her voice. Saiyataca was in the story, so I resolved the problem by rewriting it from his point of view. Maybe because I felt more comfortable with a male narrator at that time, I don’t know. Anyway, he was a half-breed—half Navajo and half Hopi, and as such, he was in trouble. And Painted Turtle was in trouble, too. They were both in trouble; they couldn’t find a place to be anywhere, and I think that’s really one of the subtexts of the novel—it may not be a subtext, actually; it may be the main point. But they’re looking for a place and a way to be.
I noted, too, a recurring theme of shame in the novel, and this interests me a great deal. Was this theme a conscious construction, or did it evolve out of the characters themselves?
I think it evolved naturally out of the situation the characters were in. Shame is an essential element in all human experience, I think. I used to think of shame as a Judeo-Christian phenomenon, but as I learned that it’s universal, that shame and guilt seem to be motivating factors in the formation of a great many systems of thought, feeling, religious expression.
I’m reminded of a poignant scene in the novel where Painted Turtle is riding the bus to Albuquerque and a young blond girl is sitting in the seat next to her. The girl turns to Painted Turtle and asks her, “Are you Indian?” and Painted Turtle says, “Yes.” The little girl then asks her, “Do you live in a tepee? Do you wear moccasins? Do you dance?” The young girl has her particular set of assumptions about the world of the Indian, and Painted Turtle is sealed off from the world of the girl because of those assumptions. And Painted Turtle is shamed as a result of not being able to bridge that gulf between her culture and the girl’s.
I think that’s one of those unfortunate things that gets in the way of seeing how we are all essentially, at the deepest level, the same, except for our cultural differences. What happens is that the cultural differences become, somehow, more visible, rather than the equally significant universal elements.
In your latest book, Fun & Games, from Holy Cow! Press, over what period of time were these stories, these fictions, being written and gathered?
Well, the oldest story in the collection is called “Old,” and that was written when I was about twenty-five. It was never published before.
That’s the story of the elderly white man who was lived in the same neighborhood for thirty years and is distressed that is has “turned black.”
Right. I would say the stories come from a period of twenty years. The most recent one was “My Mother and Mitch.”
When you mentioned earlier that some of the older stories in Fun &
Games bordered on poetry, which ones in particular were you thinking of?
I was thinking of the middle stories—the ones about relationships—and those in the last section called “Triptych”; I think of those as prose poems. And “Fun & Games,” “My Mother Visiting”—I think these are a little more playful. I felt a sense of freedom from conventional form, where I could create a more lyrical kind of system.
How do you define prose poetry?
Prose poetry… I’m not sure. I would say that it seems to have about it a kind of self-consciousness; the language seems to be as important as anything else going on in it. In prose poetry, language seems to have the intensity of language in poetry, a concentrated quality. But this can be tricky, because if a person normally reads fiction and turns to this sort of writing it can become very disturbing, and they can be thrown off guard and confused.
I think it’s very important, as a reader, to discover what a piece of work intends to be and to read it with a sense of respect for the writer’s intentions. This doesn’t happen often enough, I think. Not many readers have the kind of open-mindedness that’s called for. We read for taste, mostly. If a piece of fiction isn’t immediately captivating, on our own terms, we dismiss it. It’s too much work. Very few of us come to a piece of writing with the intention of giving it a chance to talk to us; we would rather talk to it.
We do this with people, too.
Yeah. You know, Flannery O’Connor said you can assume that nobody is going to give a damn about your work. In other words, no one is dying to read your work. From there, you work with the challenge that’s set before you—which is to find a way to engage the reader—but I think those of us who are involved in writing and teaching writing work our way into being more diverse and generous, in terms of what we read. We’re a little more willing to allow a piece of work to talk to us.
What about the long poem, Surfaces and Masks¸ that Coffee House Press put out in book form. Is this the first long poem you’ve published?
Yeah, this is the first. I wrote it in Venice, and it was essentially a journal poem that I kept while living there. It turned out to be a record of what I was reading and living and thinking and feeling every day. That’s where it came from. I just finished a big novel that grew out of that Venice experience. It’s half poetry in a way—the protagonist is a poet—and a lot of his poetry is in the book, just as Painted Turtle’s songs are in that book. It resolves any possible dormant conflict, for me, between prose and poetry. I can constantly work at both in a way that is unified.
I want to end with a quick question about small-press publishing. You mentioned to me that you would much rather publish with smaller presses, and I was hoping you’d elaborate on this.
Well, it doesn’t always happen, but when it does, the experience can be very satisfying in that there is one-to-one, personal, caring contact with the editor. With Fun & Games, the editor, Jim Perlman, was in touch with me nearly every day by phone. The chances of that happening with a large press are almost zero. With the larger presses, of course, you have advantages: distribution is better, the book can be found in bookstores—though not always. I mean, just because Random House publishes it doesn’t mean it’s going to appear in a bookstore. But in general, publishing with smaller presses is usually satisfying on the personal level.
Alice Scharper currently serves as dean of Educational Programs for English, Arts, and Social Sciences at Santa Barbara Community College in California.
>via: http://www.pw.org/content/an_interview_with_clarence_major
(me with Adèle and her team, at their workshop in Kiambu)
