12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kirsten Allio

Kirstin Allio received the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her 2024 story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press, LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction finalist), Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa Press), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition). Recent stories, essays, and poems are out or forthcoming in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Annulet, Bennington Review, Black Sun Lit, Changes Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Guernica, Guesthouse, Harp & Altar, The Hopkins Review, Interim, New England Review, The Paris Review Daily, Plume, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, Subtropics and elsewhere. Her honors and awards include the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the American Short(er) Fiction Prize from American Short Fiction, chosen by Danielle Dutton, and fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She holds an MFA from Brown, and lives in Providence, RI.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, Garner, is a morality tale set in 1920s New Hampshire that chronicles an individuated, city sensibility encroaching on tradition and communal repression in a small rural town. A mystified layer or two deeper, it’s a rape novel. I learned, by writing, that I write in search of moral clarity. If there’s a moral formulation for being an artist it’s shaky, but the sense of calling is true. Becoming a writer with my first book stuck me in the moral crosshairs between service and self-fulfillment, where I remain.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

That feeling of being both enchanted and overwhelmed by reality, and wanting to grasp it, understand, metabolize, reproduce it… An analogy for realist fiction for me is the still life. A vase. Just a vase—that leaps off the table, rolls, shatters, recombines—that’s a novel.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am slow. Time itself is a key player, a creative agent. I mean that time actually does the work of composition and editing for me. I’ll typically take a flurry of fragmentary notes, impressionistic, outside the habitat of my office. Many stories start on trains, or sitting in somebody else’s park, somebody else’s city. Layer by layer, over years, I build up a story.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I usually know whether any given material—and it could be as small as a single image, or an exchange, or a glob of language—is a poem or short story or a novel. The seed material is sensitive to genre, as if it had a DNA. I have never turned a poem or a story into a novel. A novel has never turned out to be a story. I don’t know why this is so unerring for me.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love to read out loud, and every single time, I’m shocked by how effective an editing tool it is, a truth serum. When I read from published work, I always edit at the last minute, and then again in real time, and it kind of kills me, because of course it’s too late to change on the page, and then I vow to read out loud at all stages of writing…

So in that sense, public readings are essential to my writing process, and I’m grateful to friends and strangers who attend.

I shrink, however, from explaining my work, from claims of aboutness. Of course meaning isn’t finite, can’t be depleted, but I have a fear of foreclosing, cauterizing infinite meaning if I suggest one meaning or another. I’m also just not very fluent in summary. I could never write a book report in grade school. I feel there’s a risk of betraying the fiction if I talk about it in the language of nonfiction, or conversation, or explication—if I translate it into that unholy aboutness. Or maybe I’m the actor who has a really tinny, tiny voice, who’s just kind of a bimbo outside the film. I don’t want to disappointment readers.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Theories of the human condition! Theories of feminism—the koan-like question that opens The Second Sex, “Are there women, really?” Injustice, technology, nature, time.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

When a writer or a philosopher comes up with some gem of a justification, I’m the first to scribble it down on my napkin. Hannah Arendt, in Men in Dark Times: “The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.” Art saves lives, and that kind of thing. I am always, always trying to justify my place on the planet. I can justify a calling—I feel I have one—but I cannot justify art-making as separate, isolated from, or even above service to humanity. So there I dwell, unjustified, called, uncomfortable, writing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

It’s a rare pleasure. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Surely something that hit in the moment and then evaporated…

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories to novels)? What do you see as the appeal?

It’s easy and necessary.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write as much as I can, every day. I’m always fighting to write, and I’m endlessly greedy.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

In recent years I’ve been experimenting with collage. It’s an admission of defeat, and a real-time commitment, to kick writing out of my office and take over the floor, the desk, every surface cluttered with cuttings. Detritus. I keep all kinds of old pictures and papers. I have a 3-D collage on an old fencing mask I’ve been working on for 10 years with beads and feathers, odd jewelry and Lenin lapel pins from a summer in the USSR when I was 14. I’m awed by how much time it takes to make decisions in visual art. Part of the process is watching time dilate and get sucked into the void.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Gertrude Stein: “And then there is using everything.”

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

No fixed work—what’s important is the slowly, tectonically shifting stacks of books that fill my office.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

That’s a wolf of a question hiding in sheep’s clothing! I realize I’ve been fixated on returning to things I’ve let lapse, picking up threads and weaving old time into the present. I have never grown a garden. I would like to have the kind of time to try.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I was a great waitress. I wanted to be a dancer. I could have taught high school and grown that garden in the summers.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I had early, obsessional love affairs with first, the cello, and then modern dance. So I recognized the feeling when writing swept me off my feet. That was 30 years ago this fall—1994, I had transferred to NYU from dancing—the institution at the time took “life experience” credits, the jackpot of financial aid—and I walked in to a creative writing workshop, having never heard of creative writing. That first class was all it took, thanks to Professor Chris Spain. I wanted to get those feelings into words in my bare hands.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I have just seen the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It’s called Look Into My Eyes, and it’s a new documentary by the painterly, underworldly, hauntingly brilliant filmmaker Lana Wilson, about psychics in New York City.

I hated Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos until I loved it, at the very end. It is a novel built for its ending, when an anti-love love story gives way to grief for the lost communist dream, for an East Germany that might have veered away and solidified against capitalism to become what seems like an oxymoron, a humane nation. In Erpenbeck’s telling, the pull of plentiful, cheap goods and the similarly cheap frisson of competition were too strong, and here we are.

20 - What are you currently working on?

An experimental, hybrid story constellation of tautly coded iterations, inter-referential lyrics, frame-grabs from a contemporary collective subconscious—working title Matter and Pattern. Theme and variation are the dangers of emotional rationality, the violence of common sense, feminist philosophy and aphorism, female experience as negative space. Pattern acts on matter, matter provides content for pattern, language is both analysis and synthesis, thinking and knowing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Rosa Alcalá, YOU: poems

 

You, Supplicant

Over sashimi tostadas and chelas, you tell your girlfriends about the time you kneeled on the carpeted stairs that led to the bedroom of the guy who dumped you, pleading. O, his long hair—his thinness—like Jesus! They said they couldn’t see it. “You, for a man, begging?” And how his roommate gently lifted you to your feet, an act of kindness like so many meted out in those days by men adjacent to another man’s destruction. He was trying to pull you from the image of yourself, not as beautiful but as a supplicant before beauty. A penitent whose suffering was the deep and persistent condition of being a woman. It was, like dictatorship, like First Communion, a perversion. You didn’t say this to your girlfriends. You moved on to translation problems, and your humiliations remained fuzzy backdrops, like bookcases in author photos.

The fourth full-length collection by Texas-based poet Rosa Alcalá is YOU: poems (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2024), “a collection of prose poetry exploring the intergenerational inheritance of gendered violence.” In a striking assemblage of lyric scenes composed via a suite of hefty prose poems, Alcalá writes on age and of distance, gendered violence and teenaged exploration, focusing on points along the path from child to young woman to becoming and being the mother of a young daughter. “What I mean to say is that this book is still about my mother,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “How It Started, How It’s Going {An Introduction},” “that in the absence of her I mothered myself all over again with worry, / which is how I mother. // I spoke to myself, the only recourse when you’re / invisible.” Alcalá composes her poems through an accumulation of direct statements that unfold, unfurl, each sentence another card placed, face up, on the table. She is showing you her cards, more often than not as a warning. “Everything was lies,” she writes, as part of the poem “You Lie,” “and there was nothing / to keep you from your own fabrications, no eternal fire.” And then, how to warn her daughter without gifting her a new trauma; how to protect without offering frightening tales of what could happen, or what had happened to her.

The “you” of Alcalá’s title suggests both singular and the multiple, from the narrator’s emerging self to the multitude of male abusers to the narrator’s daughter, instead directed as the second-person “you” spoken by the narrator to and of the narrator. “Run into a school if a man is chasing you. Run into a church. Fall in love / with art and mess up your dress.” she writes, to open the poem “Your Mother’s Advice.” These are direct statements offered as wisdoms and warnings to the self, offering as both witness and document, declaration and exclamation. “That it was the only / thing you had to give.” she writes, as part of the poem “What You Knew About Virginity,” “That once you handed it over, you could never get it / back.” Alcalá writes that this is a book about her mother, but really, this is a book about her daughter, and attempting to clarify and come to terms with the past in order to properly communicate those concerns, without offering trauma, to her own daughter. “In the early and lonely days of mothering,” she writes, to open the poem “You & the Dying Languages,” “when you felt old at forty-one, / you’d examine pictures posted of homegrown arugula, read updates on / a chicken coop’s constructions, the adoption of a baby goat.” The poem offers a frustration of feeling useless as a new parent, unable to offer her daughter the language of her forebears, but in a further poem, “Your Daughter Refashions the Flag into a Crop Top,” we see how the narrator catches her daughter’s reactions, her confidences, writing: “Cecilia once thought she had to choose between poetry and painting, but / she no longer believes this and is recovering what was lost, rejected, sto- / len. To your daughter you bequeath what was left of the flag, and reject- / ing its unflattering form, she refashions it into a crop top to show off / her midriff. She’s on the verge of something, that beautiful precipice.” Through a sustained line of gestures and clear, perfect prose, Alcalá’s lyrics reach across the details of a life for the sake of questions, lessons and survival, working to break through cycles of inherited violence. “Because your fathers fled a dictatorship only to set up their own,” she writes, to open the poem “While Your Fathers Did Second Shifts,” a sentence that seems to hold the space of an entire universe within, “and / took with them the belief that a woman shouldn’t enter a bar unless it / was an emergency and had to use the pay phone, you shared with your / cousins one eyeliner pencil, applying in rearview mirrors the blackest / breves to lower lids.” This is a collection of incredible strength and wisdom, much of it hard-won, but one that emerges out the other side, stronger for having not only survived, but thrived.

Eleni Sikelianos, Your Kingdom

 

Our cells recall ancient chemical joys and traumas, pre-life, while our limbs remember salamanders. A poem remembers our past in language and posits a future in the simplest sense, like a to-do note, hoping that it will be seen at some point hence and remind us of something worth knowing, feeling. It is an ecosystem that, like any functioning system, should deal with its own shit.

 

If we let phyla be taken over by its bedmate and homonym, phylla (leaves, petals, sprouts, sheaves, sheets of paper), we clear a silent space where we are all bound together and leafing from the same roots. If we take it further, to its homonymic neighbor, philo, we fall into love, with all our living friends, and with the dead left in traces

                                    under oceans and in rivers and lake beds

The latest from Providence, Rhode Island-based poet Eleni Sikelianos is Your Kingdom (Minneapolis MI: Coffee House Press, 2023), a collection that follows nearly a dozen of her published books-to-date, including You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (Coffee House Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], Make Yourself Happy (Coffee House Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and What I Knew (Brooklyn NY: Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Offering “an ode to our more-than-human animal origins,” Your Kingdom works through a strata of language and layering, blending genres and perspectives both human and animal, and into the geologic. “The face like a magnet draws to itself / animal parts,” she writes, to open the poem “In the Great Hall of Bones,” “rabbit paw / veal gut / pig light // to the eye & the skin & the teeth & the tongue / to echo the chaos of mouth // more crumpled mammal than / daylight [.]” A master of holding the smallest of moments within such a lyric expanse, Sikelianos articulates a humanity intricately and impossibly connected to all other life on the planet, citing evolutionary and contemporary connections that can’t be denied or dismissed, especially if we are all, somehow, to survive ecological disaster. “you are not the only you to invent orchestration,” she writes, as part of the title poem-section, “all the syntax in mouse song sounding out some- / where between bird-syllable and your thumb scrubbing a glass clean // as you hum in the kitchen / and wipe the dishes [.]”

Composed across seven sections set as lyric clusters or long poems—“First of All,” “In the Museum of Contemporary Anatomy,” “Your Kingdom,” “Polishing the Animal Mirror,” “Bestiaries on the Lamb,” “All the Living Living Together (Reevolutionize)” and “Deevolutionize”—Your Kingdom is an open and expansive book-length lyric, and her approach and tone through subject is comparable to works by Canadian poets Don McKay or Adam Dickinson, writing an engagement with science and natural histories, although wildly different in lyric structure. “In the strata of the rock is recorded,” she writes, as part of the expansive title poem-section, “some of your earlier story through some scraps of it / are lost, you read it / in ocean silt: it would have been better / to go hermaphroditic or / parthenogenetic but you adapt / to the instability of two-sexed / reproduction with / glee, warm-blooded and arisen / from the loving filament [.]”