Interview with Ander Monson

The following is an interview with Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities, and the poetry collection, Vacationland.  Ander is editor of DIAGRAM, as well as a professor at Grand Valley State University.

Dan:

Hello Ander, thank you very much for taking some time from your busy schedule to respond to some questions today.

Ander:

Not a problem. It’s late, my wife’s asleep, I’m in my great antique Sleepy Hollow chair watching snow come down.

Dan:

You are the wearer of many hats – fiction writer, poet, essayist, teacher, and editor, not to mention (I believe) book designer, at least on a recreational level if not more.  Are there spreadsheets all over the house and car keeping you on track in all of these endeavors, or do you utilize some other method?

Ander:

True. My attentions are many. I have lists and little hats. A lot of caffeine. A flexible schedule and probably too much work ethic, if you define work as anything I enjoy doing that has a potentially literary result. I try to let what I’m doing spill over into my other projects as best I can—thus creating a strength from what could appear otherwise to be weakness.

Dan:

You grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and then found yourself in school in Alabama.  How big of a shock to your system was that?

Ander:

I was looking for something different—a departure from the midwest, where I’d mostly lived (aside from Saudi Arabia), and Alabama seemed like too odd of a project to pass up. And there’s plenty weird down there, my favorites being the Cross Gardens, the Coon Dog Cemetery, and the Ave Maria Grotto, with the world’s attractions in miniature, to scale, made from bottle caps, and tiny tiles, and marbles, and such. Really awesome stuff actually. But much about the deep south is similar to the far north—the isolation, the rural life, the wilderness, the importance of weather, the extremes of temperature. I found it to be similar in a lot of ways to the Upper Peninsula—the two are much more alike than they are like coastal culture. Still, being down there, away from snow, was what really started to crystallize the projects (Other Electricities, Vacationland) for me, in my memory, my mythology.

Dan:

When you attended the Alabama MFA program, who were your professors?  Do you find yourself using any of their methods while you teach today?

Ander:

It’s hard to avoid it when you’ve had such great professors—particularly the eminent Sandy Huss, who worked closely with me on OE, with her love of the page/the book as artifact, as technology, and the always-great Michael Martone. It’s odd—I feel like I was the perfect student for that program, for these teachers (also poet Joel Brouwer, fiction writer Wendy Rawlings, print maker and typographer Steve Miller, and poet and rubber-stamp-master Bruce Smith). Even before I got down there I was on the same page as they were in terms of what I didn’t tap into then as my teaching methods, but which now seem that way: my interests in provocation, in sensation, in trivia, and type.

Dan:

Have any of your classmates from Alabama gone on to publish as well?

Ander:

A number of my friends from Alabama have books that have just come out: Sophia Kartsonis just won the Wick Prize from the Kent State University Press. Josh Bell’s great poetry book came out from Zoo Press last year, Tim Earley’s book of poems is just published (a review copy is sitting on my desk), Paul Guest won the New Issues Prize for a first book, and now his second book is coming out this year. Eliot Khalil Wilson’s The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go was published a couple years back by the Cleveland State University Press. Plus there’s Jennifer Davis, who won the Iowa Prize for Fiction, Mike Mejia, whose novel, Forgetfulness, just came out from FC2, Leah Nielsen... And more, and more, and more. It was an extraordinarily productive time for the program, maybe just a great convergence of the right people in the right place. I was part of a crowd who was having a ridiculous amount of success, and it was coming fast. For a couple years I was in the mix with my friends who were all winning first book prizes and getting published, and I was quickly becoming depressed—not jealous, since they are lovely writers, but certainly envious. And many of my friends shared finalist status with me for a bunch of prizes, including the Tupelo Prize, which my Vacationland finally won. I consider myself very lucky to be part of this crowd. I’m still sort of dazed from it.

Dan:

Last year had to be a  big year for you – Other Electricities published by Sarabande Books and Vacationland by Tupelo Press.  How difficult was it to not walk around with a nearly ridiculous grin all the time?

Ander:

It was, no doubt, a good year. However, to counteract the effects of the outpouring of public adoration, I’ve developed this robotic exoskeleton which protects me from its effects on my psyche. Otherwise I might become really intolerable. Perhaps I am there already but no one will tell me so. That’s a good feeling.

Dan:

How long had you been sending these two manuscripts out before you got the good news from the two presses?

Ander:

Vacationland has the more straightforward editorial history, in that I sent a version of it out for two years while I tinkered with it, and it was near-miss a number of times. This is a common story in the poetry world now, I think, perhaps regretfully. I split it into two manuscripts and sent both out, and one of them, now titled Elegies for Descent and Dreams of Weather, got the nod a year later from Tupelo, though they wanted it to go back to its original title, which was problematic because the title poem (“Vacationland”) really took on too much weight, and it wasn’t good enough to stand up to the attention, I thought, so I wrote a couple more, and worked the book into this new shape, which is how it stands.

Other Electricities has seen probably three or four significantly different iterations. Originally (and some of this is detailed on my website, otherelectricities.com) I had done the book as a trilogy of sorts, all forming this one large world, constructed in collaboration with a book artist, Kris Ingmundson, who did these great and very creepy/lovely bindings of the works for her MFA in Book Arts thesis project. OE then made up my thesis project for my MFA (both of us were at Alabama—another one of these great convergences) as three separate books. One was recognizably about 2/3 of what Sarabande published as OE. Another was this huge index piece, done as its own book, which was the first iteration of what became the final actual index to OE (this index now shows up in a book of essays my agent is trying to find a home for, and the index just found its way to a really amazing multimedia/interactive iteration in the new issue of Born Magazine). The third book was this even more lyric and dense book mostly addressing the question of the armless brother, who plays a role in OE. There were some poems that folded out, broadside style, of the books, too. I later put the chunks together, designed and laid out to work as their own book artifact, as OE, which I sent to agents, which was promptly rejected (it had pictures, many complained; it was obscure; it was really, really weird), albeit with some mild interest. Later on, after striking out there pretty seriously, I cut the armless brother third out, and revamped it a bit, and sent it out to Sarabande and another couple places. Sarabande was excited about it, and I worked heavily with Kirby Gann, my kickass editor there, to find its shape, even as they toned down some of the more experimental elements in the editorial and production process (for starters, their design is significantly less visual than mine was). But both books found a home within a month of each other. That was a celebratory month.
 
Dan:

Did you work with an agent with these books, or did you send out manuscripts on your own?

Ander:

I addressed this a bit in my ramble on the last question, but I tried to agent OE originally first with some initial interest (probably mostly because of the publishing history of the individual pieces and a couple high-profile folks picking my work to win contests, etc.), but that came to nothing. I spent a summer working this angle before going back to it to pull back from some of the really overtly difficult stuff. I sent it to a couple contests, and to a handful of presses (big but mostly small) myself. Then Sarabande took it to its chest, and thus.

Dan:

From the Other Electricities website, I see there was a project with the book that involved goatskin and special designing.  Can you elaborate on what you were doing, and what led you to it?

Ander:

Man, you and I are on the same page. I took Printing I in the Book Arts MFA program, also at UA, and while I found that the work was too demanding for me (I was too impatient, I think, to really approach typesetting everything by hand), it was an immensely useful experience in terms of how I think about the page, type, and design. I did this great letterpress broadside for C. D. Wright’s reading at Alabama that I actually printed with a cross-section of a piece of wood. I was really pleased with that. And I did some work with linoleum reduction cuts, and with the interplay of text and image. I think this really added a lot to what I do otherwise with InDesign and Pagemaker and such (I do some web design and book design as you alluded to earlier, book covers for the University of Alabama Press, Del Sol Press, and elsewhere). While there I worked closely with Kris Ingmundson, and she found something in my work that she got really excited about, so we worked on these weird books with amputated (her term and invention) bindings, designed to give you a sense of unease when holding them. These came out of this idea of amputation and of the armless brother character. So for her MFA thesis we did six (seven maybe) books, three of which I did the interiors for (done with a laser printer and Pagemaker), and three of which she did the interiors based on my text. She bound them all, and they form an unbelievably unsettling set. I think I’d like to see them find a home in a good archive at some point. I wish I had some more pictures, too, but I’ve only got a handful at this point. The whole project made a lot of sense to me, because I was trying to write this book (these books?) that explored the whole idea of book as artifact, including images (the radio schematics) and elements that repeat throughout the text, accruing, and offering other sorts of constellations for readers to explore. And then with Kris we made this physical thing, this aggregation of codexes.
 
Dan:

There are numerous radio schematic designs placed throughout Other Electricities.  The fact that something like that made it into the book tells me it was probably pretty important to you as I assume it just creates one more potential problem for the publisher. What was it about these schematics that had you needing to include them, both in the book, and more specifically, in the locations within the book that they ended up?

Ander:

The schematics come into the book for several reasons and are, to my mind, essential to the mythology of the book, of the place, and of its characters. I wanted to have more than just text in the book—I wanted for it to be a visual, designed experience as an artifact in itself, as a thing, not just as a bunch of pages filled with text bound together that we call a book. Which is partly why OE plays with the idea of the book and all its technologies (the index, the ToC, the character list, etc.)--I wanted to think about the book as subject, not just as object. Too, radio’s everywhere in the book, emanating through all the characters, all the weather, and all the loneliness, and I was trying to find ways to provide other threads for readers (and the characters, in their ways) to follow. The visual elements—which I discovered by accident, which is how many good things happen—seemed like a perfect way to add this mystery to the book, this other, visual, element, and as I explored those further in revision, the “Dear...” voice got attached to them, and this whole constellation of connections manifested itself. There’s so much isolation in the book, but also connections, both in actuality and in desire, and the more I thought about it and wrote and designed, the more this whole other matrix became integral to my vision of the book as a novel, not just as a bunch of disconnected stories. It’s a sort of love there, I think, these images—they are a mystery, but they’re also attached to the “Dear” voice which is a comforting voice, something that these characters don’t otherwise get a lot of from the world.

Originally I had a lot more of them in the book, and they intruded more into the text, but that both created bigger design problems for the press and its designer and worried them from an editorial standpoint, just how to approach the book with pictures in it, and also how to keep them from overwhelming the text. So we compromised, and cut, and added. I kept working until I could find ways to connect these beautiful images—and I do find them beautiful (I even featured them, and a bunch more, in my magazine DIAGRAM in one of our first few issues)--to the mythology or whatever you want to call it of the place, the characters, the fictosphere, the world.

Still I do wonder about the possibility of doing some sort of deluxe edition of the book, a director’s cut of sorts, with all these elements as I originally saw them at some point in the future. Though really it might be smarter to listen to my editors as they provide a necessary restraint, keeping me from becoming too self-indulgent...

Dan:

Did you discuss at all with Sarabande Books the fact that you look at Other Electricities as a novel?  I ask because I’ve both read and heard you state this, but the cover pegs the book as stories.

Ander:

Not really. I had always thought of it as a novel, but as a really weird novel. I do think it works much better as a novel than as stories. I was operating under the assumption that Sarabande didn’t really publish novels, so that it would be better to keep it labeled “stories”, only to find out afterwards, when I did a reading with my editor Kirby Gann in Chicago for Bookslut that they would have been very hip to that idea. Who knows how that would have affected the marketing of it, and the ways in which readers approached it and connected to it (or not). Either way the book does blur genre boundaries, and I like that about it—even self-consciously playing with memoir at times, and with the conventions of the novel, of stories, of fiction, and of genre. So the labeling/mislabeling does create a useful tension, and is often a good talking point. I mean, the novel can do so much, but often the novels I read are pretty tame in terms of the risks they’re willing to take. That made/makes me sad.

Dan:

Were you involved with the cover selection for Other Electricities?  I was surprised to see the cover is from a photo taken in North Dakota.  Was there no similar photo from the UP that could have been used?

Ander:

Not that we could find. The image is perfect for the UP, but came from elsewhere. My ideas for the cover were more grandiose, I think, than Sarabande had the budget for—I envisioned some kind of double-cover where we’d see a photographic likeness (maybe the one we ended up with) with some kind of overlaid circuit diagrams on it in a different light-reflecting ink. Etc. You can see where they were resistant to this grand plan.

It’s strange how difficult it was to find a cover that I loved (and I’m still not completely thrilled with what we have), considering that I do cover designs all the time for books I know only partly, or know not very well. I found it much much much more difficult to find the cover for my own work.

Dan:

Big 32 is a great story, both in what you tell, and in how you tell it.  Was the story always written with that structure, or did it come during some revising? 

Ander:

The structure came early on in that story—maybe even from the first sentence. And the structure gave the story its shape, and a lot of its drive/arc. I often find that finding the structure for the story lets me find the story. It’s like that Richard Hugo quote: you found the town, now write the poem. It’s probably my favorite in the book, though it doesn’t perform (read aloud) as well as some of the others do. Weird how that works out.

Dan:

The website, www.otherelectricities.com/oe has some further stories, or segments not included in the book.  Were these selections that were removed from your manuscript, or written after the book was accepted/published?

Ander:

All of those were either in earlier versions of the book or were written for the book in revisions, but didn’t end up quite fitting, so they got cut. When I was thinking of the website for the book, I wanted badly to offer readers real extras that hopefully aren’t lame. I loved reading Mark E. Danielewski’s tour-de-force House of Leaves, and went to the website hoping for so much, and I came back very disappointed. I didn’t want the site to just be a bunch of promotional crap for the book—how dull. So I put a lot of the cut stuff in there (plus some of the material on there—those postcards, etc.--was created for the website only).

Dan:

Some of the stories almost seemed to be you challenging yourself to be able to do something.  An example would be Dream Obits for My Mother in which every sentence starts with either who or whose.  Another would be the The Organization and Formation of Blizzards as Seen by Satellites in which the sentences start with a word that begins first with the letter a, then sentences that start with the letter b, and so on up through z.  Did these stories start off with these ideas, and did you write them almost as challenges to your abilities?

Ander:

It varies—the Organization one was conceived with that structure in mind. In the Dream Obits I wasn’t even conscious of the structure, exactly, but wanted to find ways to work the repetition, to create this accumulating effect. I do work in that way though—I love the challenge a good title or a good structure can create for the story (or poem—this happens a lot in my poems too). For me it creates a real energy, and then the key is to find a way to realize it and not just leave the reader cold (which is the problem with a lot of so-called experimental fiction, at least in my reading).

Dan:

Your work, both fiction and poetry, involves a great deal of repetition, be it in topics, or even word choice within paragraphs and sentences.  What affect do you see the usage of such repetition having on your readers?

Ander:

I’m not sure. I go to repetition because I like the trance of it, the reassurance of it, the increasing complexity of revisiting these words, images, and characters. It’s my own little cosmology, and because of indexing the book, the frequency of the repeated motifs became more apparent, as did omissions. I am an obsessive writer, an obsessive person, and so this comes out in the writing. And it also helps to create another kind of skeleton for the book, a more circular method in the prose, rather than just straight building action—climax—denouement. 
 
Dan:

Did you write the poems that are in Vacationland around the same time that you wrote the stories in Other Electricities?  They almost seem like companion collections.

Ander:

I think of them very much as companions to OE, though the murder/murderer/murderee does not show up in Vacationland at all—either a strength or a weakness, I’m not sure which. Some of the ideas are certainly expanded or revisited in the poems (and certainly the emphasis on form crosses over nicely). It seemed to me that if the presses were going to publish the books simultaneously, then they should somehow be related, work with (or within) one another. Some of the poems in that book are older than the work in OE, and some are newer. I was building them at the same time. The seed of OE, the armless brother character began for me in poems, close to a decade ago, though I didn’t realize what it meant or had inside it at the time.

Dan:

Besides all of your writing, you are the editor for the literary online journal, DIAGRAM.  The site is well named as the diagram itself of each issue is worthy of readers visiting.  What ratio of time spent goes towards the design of the issue as compared to the reading, selecting and editing?

Ander:

I don’t think of it as breaking down into component parts, but it’s probably in the area of 1/3 in design, conception, and production, and 2/3 in editorial and reading. The design really includes all the time I spend scavenging Salvation Armys and Goodwills and used book stores and garage sales for books, too, and thinking about the idea of the thing.

Dan:

Why another literary journal?  What does DIAGRAM offer readers and writers that other journals out there do not?

Ander:

DIAGRAM is pretty different in terms of its conception and design (and content, too) from many other (especially online) literary journals, even moreso when the magazine debuted in 2000. I had come from a much larger operation where I edited Black Warrior Review for a year while working on my MFA, and I worked there with a staff of about 40, a long institutional memory, and a 25 year tradition behind me. I didn’t find it stifling, exactly, but when you work with editorial committees, you publish the work you can agree on, which isn’t necessarily the best, most unusual, or most exciting. It was instructive for me (and enjoyable, too), but when I finished my tenure there, I wanted to hatch something that I was in complete control of, and thus: DIAGRAM. Though we now have a staff of almost ten people working with us, too. Still, the magazine is interested especially in form (sound familiar?) and in work that blurs or bends the edges of genre. There aren’t that many magazines exploring these ideas specifically (though we do publish traditional work too if it rocks us), and not many with this really overt visual element (not to mention the occasional sonic work we gravitate towards), and as soon as we had a couple issues, the magazine took off very quickly. Which indicates that we’ve found...something...I’m not sure what, exactly, but a lot of like-minded people out there in the world.
 
Dan:

What author or authors have submitted work to you at DIAGRAM, unsolicited, that caused you a reaction of “I can’t believe so and so knew about us yet.”?

Ander:

We don’t get a lot of work by writers whose names I recognize (though that happens later when authors we’ve published go on to bigger glories), which is sort of great, partly because that way there’s no urge to say oh I loved X’s work, and we’ll publish this even if it isn’t up to her usual quality. Partly too there’s the excitement of coming across work completely blind that just destroys you, which is the ideal editorial experience. We have had the chance to publish some people I really like, though often that’s more through solicitation: the Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, Lucy Corin, Peter Orner, Ben Marcus...

Dan:

You also have a website, www.upinmichigan.org, that tracks literary events within the state, reviews works of authors from, or working in, Michigan, etc.  How long have you been planning this?  Do you foresee it linking to the various universities and booksellers in the area to increase awareness?

Ander:

That is absolutely the plan. I’ve got some seed money from my university to build this thing in the next six months, and we’ll see where it goes. I really feel like writers from the Great Lakes need to do more to band together promotionally or whatever, because we—like the Southerners, who are great at this kind of thing—have a literature, a literary tradition, too. And I want more people to know about it and be proud of it. So it’s starting with Michigan, and it’ll eventually spread out into all things literary in the Great Lakes region. That’s our criterion—the state has to border on one of our big bad wet bastards. (One has to draw the line somewhere.)

Dan:

What are you working on these day?  More fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or just a solid all of the above?

Ander:

I’ve just finished with a collection of odd essays called Neck Deep, which my agent is sending around. I’m always doing all of this, but my focus has moved a bit towards the prose forms at the expense of more traditional lineated poems. I am working up a second book ms in poetry, and I’m trying to revise that original first third—the armless brother third—of OE for possible publication. More interestingly I’m working on new stories and what looks like the beginnings of a novel. It’s hard for me to focus exclusively on just one of the genres, as my reading and writing (and thinking) doesn’t work that way.
 
Dan:

Lastly, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Ander:

Probably The Wu-Tang Manual by The RZA. If not that, then Lucy Corin’s 2004 novel Everyday Psychokillers: a History for Girls, which is probably the best thing I’ve read this year (aside from my recent foray into the work of Georges Perec).

Dan:

Thanks again Ander, and I hope you’ve been enjoying your LBC experience!

Ander:

Oui, oui.