Anyone seen the Joyce Carol Oates MasterClass trailer that begins, "The great enemy of your writing isn't your own lack of talent. It's being interrupted (pause) by other people."
No. Nope. I'm so not into a writer who had no children telling me that the enemy of my writing is -- well, for all intents and purposes -- the people I love. 
This feels so incredibly damning for writers who want to create lives with lots of crying, barging-in types. And even more damning for writers who have already created lives with lots of loud, laughing, crying, barging-in types. 
It sets up such an adversarial relationship between children and work. It's from another generation. And I completely reject it. 
"Constant interruptions are the destruction of the imagination," Oates goes on to say.
No. They're only destructive if your process has been built around long uninterrupted fields of quiet and solitude.
If your process was forged in loud, messy, dinosaur-infested, stained, un-showered, sour-milk stenched, scraps of paper, long-stare while making peanut-butter sandwiches, your process is solid. 
AND I'd add that the blur of your own world -- with its wounds and bad dreams and longing and fresh terror and fear and love -- with your written world ... that blur is rich. Lean into it. 
AND if you're lucky enough, one day, to get some time when the interruptions ease up -- and the kids build their own loud beautiful hard scary wonderful challenging lives and share them with you -- you'll find yourself in that field of uninterrupted time and you know what you'll do? 
You'll self-interrupt. You'll look for the blurred terrain. You'll long for the harder days -- you'll long for a kid to barge in having cut holes in a flowered comforter to make an amazing full length cape -- even though you're thankful for quiet. 
Nah, Oates, you got it all wrong.
I'm not a better writer despite those interruptions by other people. 
I'm a better writer because of them. 
They weren't the destruction of my imagination. 
They are the stuff my imagination was made of -- is fueled by.

a poem.

Your World is Harder than Mine: Instructions for Children Heading off to School

If your dream comes to life
and the houses
on our street lift themselves up

and walk off

on their leggy stilts and find different
roosts
          before you come home from school

I will meet you at
the spot in case of fire
under the dying pine -- whose roots are not legs.

But promise me:
if the gunning madman
appears in the schoolyard and your teachers

shout the warning
Shark’s in the tank! Shark’s in
the tank!
pick up your dreamy head and run

on your stilty legs
to the herd’s heart. 
Only I will tell you how to survive:

Let the other children take the first shots.
I will find you
under the pile of bodies -- alive.

[I wrote this poem for my children after a school shooting almost ten years ago. I consider it a brutal poem, one written before we started telling children to run at the gunman. It first appeared in Ploughshares, guest edited by Terrance Hayes. It's now collected in the book Instructions, Abject & Fuming.]

Julianna's latest essay is now up at Oprah Magazine...

"By the time I was ten, I was my mother’s confessor. My older siblings were teenagers or already out in the world. I was the only one left, and she was bored and a little lonesome—or maybe, for the first time, she had the bandwidth to reflect on her own life and childhood. She would keep me home from school to do banking, play casino, and tell me the darkest stories you’ve ever heard...."   Click here to read the rest. 

If you like this one, it's part of an anthology, WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON'T TALK ABOUT, which includes essays from some absolutely brilliant writers. Enjoy. 

the fascinating podcast

so the good people at THE FASCINATING PODCAST invited me in to talk creative process. AND we created a 25% off discount code for their listeners. 

(psst -- if you want 25% off the audio series ... the code is: FASCINATING .)

enjoy! 

new weird work

I've got a new weird story up at CONJUNCTIONS --
"THE GASLIGHTER'S LAMENT."

(I wrote it for you.)

Powerful poet whose work I just happened upon... Here are four amazing poems on Harriet Tubman up at OXFORD AMERICAN.

More on the poet herself, Ashley M. Jones received an MFA from Florida International University. She is the author of Magic City Gospel and dark / / thing. She directs the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham.

My essay, Modern Love

My essay "Play Role Reversal with my Therapist" which first appeared in the The New York Times Modern Love column has been voiced by Oscar-nominated actress Isabelle Huppert. You can hear her along with an interview from me, here. This is the original art that accompanied the piece -- by Christopher Silas Neal. I love it so much -- we framed it and have since moved eleven times or so ... I wonder where it might be...

CreditChristopher Silas Neal

What my mother and I...

So excited to be included in this antho WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON'T TALK ABOUT.

This lineup that I love:
Michele Filgate -- the fearless editor!
Cathi Hanauer
Melissa Febos
Alexander Chee
Dylan Landis
Bernice L. McFadden
Lynn Steger Strong
Kiese Laymon
Carmen Machado
Andre Aciman
Sari Botton
Nayomi Munaweera
Brandon Taylor
Leslie Jamison



PRE-ORDER AVAILABLE NOW -- COMING IN APRIL

Faves

When two books have NOTHING and EVERYTHING in common.... 

Martin Chronicles...

Colson Whitehead & Stephen Chbosky blurb your debut? Kinda sweet. I found THE MARTIN CHRONICLES to be funny, tender, honest. If you're jonesing for oming-of-age NYC-'80s nostalgia, check out John Fried's heart-brimming novel.   

Leading Men

I loved and adored LEADING MEN. It's a novel I will never forget. It left a vivid, startling impression that is psychological, sensual, and profoundly moving. 

Castellani showed great boldness in taking on the real life love story of Tennessee Williams, and yet Castellani seems to slip into these lives with expert ease. 

What we see, in the end, isn't a literary giant and all the love and loss that surrounds him, but something far more universal -- our own human joy and suffering in the name of love. 

Hugely recommended. Pick it up at your fave bookstore! 

Break the Bones...

I haven't been able to blurb as many books recently -- swamped and eyes-blurred by piles of research -- but this one... damn -- it's great and weird, a strange rush.

This is what I said:

"A tour-de-force of the imagination. Hicks has created a world that is beautifully and brutally surreal and yet, at the same time, BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES stands as a hyper-realistic psychological portrait of the death of the American factory town. My own identity as an American was disturbed and changed by this novel; some dormant understanding was shaken awake. This is a stunning and profound debut."

It's not for everyone but it is SO VERY MUCH for readers who want a fresh take on the American experience of the dying factory town. 

1/2 Dozen for Lise Haines

It's my great pleasure to share with you the keen insights of Lise Haines as we shine a spotlight on her new novel When We Disappear. Here are a half dozen questions and her brilliant answers. 

Q: I despise the pervasive myth of inspiration – the idea that an entire book can exist simply because of an accumulation of inspired ideas – but I don’t deny that inspiration exists. There are things that have no other explanation. Was there a singular moment of inspiration for this book?

A: I’m with you, Julianna. Inspiration is a gift but we show up for the job and dig in regardless. Finding a novel is about curiosity for me. In When We Disappear, one of the things I’m trying to understand is how someone commits a terrible act and lives with this reality. I’m certainly thinking about what trauma does to people but in this case, I’m even more interested in the person who has to stand in front of the mirror knowing what they’ve done. So it was a slow building fire rather than a bright flash.

Some writers hate to write. Other writers love being engaged in the creative process. How would you describe your relationship with the page?

For me it’s like swimmer’s high (or runner’s high) where I go into a zone. It’s one of the most pleasurable things I know. If I’ve cleared enough off my calendar, I can write for hours and days on end and find it hard to stop.

Have you learned to strike a balance between your writing life and the other aspects of your life?

I’m not sure any novelist can say this unless they have ample funds or the kind of support that allows them to unplug from the working world for large blocks of time. It’s always a scramble and too much of my writing time is carved out of my sleep life. It has to come from somewhere.

Faith. Do you consider yourself religious? If so, how does that manifest in your work and/or your process?

No, not religious. I think a great deal about the spiritual side of life and I’ve been a meditator for decades. I do see it thread through my work. When I was in Prague recently, I had the chance to go on a ghost tour. The guide talked about his lack of belief in anything beyond the tangible but he said he was uneasy about the possibility of ghosts in this dark, cool underground passage. It might have been just a line, but he seemed awfully sincere. I can relate to the idea of belief and questioning that belief, in tandem. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the real and the unreal, and what it is to be a compassionate human being.

Are you a writer of place? Is place always one of your main characters?

I care intensely about sense of place. I hope that comes through in my work. Two of my novels are set in Chicago where I grew up. It’s such a great and complex city. One of the protagonists in When We Disappear is a photographer. Chicago is a perfect place to wander with a camera. I just saw an exhibit at the Art Institute called Never a Lovely So Real, photography and film in Chicago 1950-1980 that was like walking into my childhood. Now I think of myself as tri-coastal. I live in Boston, and I spent years in Southern California. I often wonder where I’ll land in the end. I’m forever looking for where I belong, maybe that’s why it has to be so vivid.

What project of yours was the easiest writing of your life? And, flip-side, which one was the most like wrestling bears? (And could you tell before you started or did they turn on you, for better or worse?)

No, and I don’t think anyone could tell after the fact. My first published novel, In My Sister's Country, was the quickest. My daughter was very young and I wrote when she took long naps. When We Disappear took the longest. I could tease out many factors to explain the difference but mostly it comes down to time and support. A story I published in Agni, spring 2018, “The Missing Part,” had the kind of beautiful speed I delight in. My second published novel, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity became the book I tore down to a single chapter before I started anew. Girl in the Arena, my third, was one of the quicker books I’ve written. The bottom line is to get it right and to hell with time. 

•   • .  •

Lise Haines is the author of four novels: When We Disappear (Unbridled Books, scheduled June 2018) for which Tom Perrotta writes, “Haines is a novelist of great empathy and penetrating insight;”  Girl in the Arena (Bloomsbury), a South Carolina Book Award Nominee; Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (Unbridled Books), a Book Sense Pick in 2006 and one of ten “Best Book Picks for 2006” by the NPR station, San Diego; and In My Sister's Country (Penguin / Putnam), a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize, which The Boston Globe called “an authoritative fictional debut.” Haines’ work has sold foreign, film and TV rights, including options by HBO and Denver & Delilah. Short stories and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals including Ploughshares, Agni, PostRoad and The Barcelona Review. She was a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Award. Haines has been Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard and is currently Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston. 

A brand new weird story of mine is up at Quarterly West. It's about sentient sinkholes, a fierce Girl Scout, and the impermanence of life.

So wonderful and strange to have this story up at Terraform. I wanted to write about the future of sex, the tenderness amid some of the horror. I’ve written a good bit about prostitution, historically but never speculatively. Anyway it’s here, it’s free. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve written so I feel a little at my fringes.

Introducing Debut Novelist Spencer Wise

The hilarious and brilliant Spencer Wise -- a graduate student of mine from way back -- has a debut novel that's just hit shelves! (Up-and-coming novelists -- check out the imprint; it's new and thriving,)

THE EMPEROR OF SHOES has amazing blurbs. Here's my addition to the long list of accolades.

"Brimming with comedic genius, The Emperor of Shoes is a commentary on American naivete and willfully blind greed that speaks to our collective human history of oppression and inhumanity. Wise opens us up with humor then refuses to pull his punches. He remains hopeful -- against diminishing odds -- about love and the sacrifices we make in its name."

(Also Spencer happens to be incredibly generous -- he's worked, one on one, as a mock-producer with the FSU MFA screenwriters as they prep for a week of meetings in LA. A wonderful gift of his time and insights into story. So thankful.)

love and androids...

A quick Q and A at Agni about my short story THE VELVETEEN LOVER, an AI sex-toy re-envisioning of THE VELVETEEN RABBIT.... as one does.

A Poem to the 63% of White Women Voters of Alabama who Voted for Roy Moore

I see you, whipped hair and tears,
and imagine the staunchest among you
as having suffered
and swallowed so much that your are full --
all u can eat buffet full -- of what has been done
to you
against you
and you have lived with it so others should
live with it
for some greater good you see in your mind's eye.
And the others who followed
sheepishly
who fall asleep and gnash and rationalize
and gnash, I see your jaws knot as you speak
on TV. What is that ache that heaves
from time to time
in your clenched chests? 
My first thought, always and again
and again
is that he reminded you of your Daddy
or your grand daddy
or your uncle or your manager
or that boy
or that train conductor that time you traveled
alone from Alabama to Alabama
to Alabama
because no matter where you go in America
it's always still Alabama. 

1/2 Dozen for Mike Smith

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Mike Smith's beautiful memoir, And There was Evening And There was Morning. I finished it late at night and scrawled my thoughts in the near dark. I called it a sweeping love story that was also about loss and hope and renewal. What I love most is that it isn’t a book about learning to let go but instead learning that the heart can expand to hold more love.

And now... a 1/2 Dozen Q and A with the author, Mike Smith: 

I despise the pervasive myth of inspiration – the idea that an entire book can exist simply because of an accumulation of inspired ideas – but I don’t deny that inspiration exists. There are things that have no other explanation. Was there a singular moment of inspiration for this book?

Smith: In many ways, this book began the day of my stepdaughter’s diagnosis, when my first wife’s book, Demanding Our Attention, happened to arrive in the mail, finally published three years after her death. This was, perhaps, the most improbable coincidence in a series of parallels between my wife Emily’s illness and death and the treatment and recovery of my 11-year-old stepdaughter, also named Emily, during the first year of my second marriage. Here’s a little bit from early in the memoir:

At some point during the calmer hours after admission, I remembered the most improbable coincidence of a small package resting on the bedside table beside my stepdaughter, who was lying on the bed with her eyes closed. It had arrived in the mail that afternoon, and in the urgency and panic of the day, I’d just tossed the package on the van’s dashboard. I’m not sure why I’d brought it inside with me, though I knew what the package contained—a copy of my first wife’s book, Demanding Our Attention: The Hebrew Bible as a Source for Christian Ethics. 

The book’s title appeared in black block type, like her last name….Inside, the front matter included a dedication to our daughter and son, as well as forewords by the Biblicist Yvonne Sherwood and ethicist Jean Porter, and Emily’s own preface, written before she was diagnosed. Reading her words at that moment, her voice came back to me in such a palpable way that I was grateful I was sitting down. 

Emily had just finished up her first year of teaching at Georgetown University when she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer, three weeks after giving birth to our second child, Langston. She was an ethicist and, as the book description states, her book suggests that by “placing ourselves in relationship to such complex, challenging, perhaps unresolvable sacred texts,” we can “learn to relate authentically and ethically to others.” One of the central motifs of my memoir is that my first wife’s book became for me, in the turmoil and trauma of my blended family’s difficult first year, a guidebook and abiding source of solace.

What kind of child were you, inside of what kind of childhood, and how did it shape you as a writer?

This just came up during my annual summer trip back home, where I told my skeptical parents that I viewed my childhood as ideal! And I do. There was a divorce and relocation to another state when I was five, and a relatively speedy remarriage, but our future stepfather was our first friend in our new home. He lived in the same apartment building, and my brother and I used to go over to his place to watch Saturday morning cartoons. We actually introduced him to Mom.

Money was always tight, and I went to nine different schools between kindergarten and the start of high school, but all this did was deepen the bond between me and my brothers. I ended up attending the same high school as my first wife, but we never met, which was probably a good thing. I was a mess, and not at all sure of who I was or who I wanted to be. This has become clear to me now that I have daughters in high school and college, who, in very different ways, manage to convey genuineness and a poise I try not to envy.

Have you learned to strike a balance between your writing life and the other aspects of your life?

I’ve learned I must, but I haven’t quite managed it yet. In the memoir, I talk about my “golden month,” those weeks in late spring when school is out for me, but not Jennifer and the children. I begin all my large projects during this month:

It’s the first of June and I am, as usual, restless. I’m nearing the end of what I call my golden month, the four weeks every year between the semester’s end at Delta State University and the last day for the public schools. Jennifer is ready to say goodbye her fourth grade class and our kids are itching to greet their summer. The year is 2014, which means I’m enjoying my fourth such month and regretting, again, that I haven’t found a way to make the most of my time. In three days, school will be out, the kids will not sleep in as long as I hope, and so my mornings will no longer be my own. Every year, I’m torn by whether I should embrace this development or not.

Faith. Do you consider yourself religious? If so, how does that manifest in your work and/or your process?

I’m afraid my “spiritual journey” has been as haphazard as my early education. As you might imagine, faith or my struggles with it, come up often in the memoir. In another chapter of the memoir that deals with two separate and distinct experiences I had during my wife’s illness, I talk about this.

One morning, near the end of Emily’s first hospital stay, I promised her I would convert to Catholicism. This sudden decision was consistent with my religious biography. I have suffered through baptismal ritual four times. Growing up, my family moved from Quaker to Presbyterian, Baptist to Moravian. Every time we joined a new congregation, I experienced a rush of conviction and strode down to the font to reenact my rebirth in whatever faith had flushed my face and swelled my racing heart. When I returned to the pew, my family kindly hid their smiles. My parents finally settled on the Episcopal church, but I was in college then, so remained unclaimed, vacillating between the tenets of my childhood and unbelief, steadied only occasionally by guilt.

Are you a writer of place? Is place always one of your main characters?

Not consciously. In fact, before tackling this project, I might have argued that I was a writer of place, despite my intentions. As a poet, I’m more intrigued by questions of form, not that “place” can’t be a formal question. Perhaps it’s that I believe a writer’s preoccupation with “place” can sometimes suggest ownership of that place, which is dangerous.

When you live in the Delta, two hours by car from the nearest airport, you either find yourself covering a lot of ground in your daily life or you don’t. It’s almost always a matter of economic means. I live in the Delta but I’m not from the Delta, so this is a tough question for me. Given how homogenous much of America has become, if a writer is not lucky enough to be born and raised in a place saturated with peculiar human histories or geographic extremes, is she obliged to seek them out as poet-tourist? Conversely, if you were born in, say, West Virginia mining country, must it become a central concern of your own writing, even if your writing sees that place as the Mount Moriah of your biography? As you can see, I’m as unsure about this as about most things.

What project of yours was the easiest writing of your life? And, flip-side, which one was the most like wrestling bears? (And could you tell before you started or did they turn on you, for better or worse?)

Excepting the memoir, which I don’t believe I quite chose as a project (so feel unable to think about in terms of easy or hard), the “easiest” project I’ve undertaken was probably my role in another book that comes out this fall, Contemporary Chinese Short -Short Stories: A Parallel Text, edited by Aili Mu. The “easiness” for me was absolutely the work of my wonderful collaborator, who had been developing this anthology for 10 years. I learned more than I can say here about process, and had the opportunity to think about translation in ways I hadn’t quite before.

Aili and I corresponded by email and phone several times a week, arguing and compromising, building trust, and a rhythm to our work. About midway through our project, I began to see our strategy of collaborative translation as analogous to the way a reader might come to any translated text, an act which requires nothing more than an earnest desire for understanding and a willingness to allow that understanding to remain, at times, elusive. As my first wife argues in her book, a reader ought to be prepared to encounter a difficult text much the way she engages the people to whom she is obligated to give ongoing attention in her life. In 21st century America, I think, the translator’s willingness to act as intermediary and proponent for both author and reader stands as bulwark and buttress against the entitlement of empire. Given the continual paucity of works translated from other languages into English, and our current obsession with borders and separateness, the present moment cries out for such an approach. 

The hardest project is still the two anagrammatic cycles that make up my second poetry collection, Multiverse. The first cycle is comprised of 24 poems that all use the same 952 letters, so, for instance, in every poem there are exactly 6 “k”s, 125 “t”s, 1 “j,” etc. In the second cycle, I responded to 16 pieces by American writers using only the letters of those pieces. I composed by hand, painstakingly marking off letters on endless sheets. The composition of these projects was separated by exactly five years, and though I believe I nearly went blind, those months are very happy ones in my memory, as they were also the months leading up to the births of two of my five children, Virginia and Langston.  

•   •   •

Mike Smith directs the Honors Program at Delta State University. He has published three collections of poetry, including Byron and Baghdad and Multiverse, a collection of two anagrammatic cycles. His translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust was published by Shearsman Books in 2012, and he is co-editor of the anthology, Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text, published by Columbia University Press. Together with software engineer Brandon Nelson, Mike created and curates The Zombie Poetry Project at www.zombiepoetryproject.com. His memoir, And There Was Evening and There Was Morning is published by WTAW Press.

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