Sam Pink - Mixture of anger and dead babies and umbilical cords. It alternates swiftly from humor and playfulness to isolation and sadness

Sam Pink, Frowns Need Friends Too! (Afterbirth Books, 2010)

"A unique perspective on urban life, presented as short snapshots of prose, this book by outsider author Sam Pink defies traditional categories or conventions. Including such subjects as "I Heart Unending Paranoia," "Because You Know You're Avoiding Going Somewhere But Don't Even Know Where Yet," and "I'm Not Going To Change My Clothes Today," Pink's collection is bizarre, funny, and original."

"One of my favorite new writers is a crazy guy named Sam Pink. He’s brilliant and funny, sometimes sad, always genius. His new book is called Frowns Need Friends Too and I’m going to plug the crap out of this book every day for the rest of my life because I think everyone who checks it out will agree with me: Pink is definitely going places. I can’t wait until the day I can say I knew him when he was a wiseass little shit only a handful of people had read. So, check it out." - Gina Ranalli

"Sam Pink told me before he wrote Frowns need Friends Too he traveled to the Upper Peninsular of Michigan in the middle of winter. He bought a snowmobile and traveled deep in the American forest. Sam Pink sat under a tall coniferous tree in the zazen and meditated for 40 days and 40 nights. During those forty nights the devil made him work each new day at a different occupation. One day he was a marketing agent making a commercial for Nike, one day he was a stock broker on Wall Street. One day he was he was a politician for a congressional restrict in Nebraska, and on other days he was a poor white factory worker in the Rust Belt making small plastic parts, a Mexican picking fruit in California, a black person that had made and became a nurse with a good 401K plan, then he became a billionaire with tax shelters in the Caribbean, he was a poor black crack head walking down the street with nowhere to go and nothing to do, a soldier hunting down terrorists in Afghanistan and finally one of those people that shop at Wal-Mart that scare normal people with their obesity, bad outfits, and mid 80s hair style. The devil made him try all these jobs and said, “Which job do you want Sam Pink? And Sam Pink replied, “You will never recover from how you treat yourself?” Sam Pink stood up, stretched, yawned, and walked out of the forest to a local bar in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He found several men and women sitting in a bar drinking draft beer. He sat at the bar and said, “I forcefed you smegma with my fingernail and we sat naked on the tile floor- carefully avoiding every emotion. We became normal again.”
A middle-aged woman at the bar with stretch marks on her belly from having three kids said to Sam Pink, “I don’t want many friends because I am too weak for that kind of work. I am too weak to have friends.”
Sam Pink Replied, “It is okay to hurt someone’s feelings. It is ok.”
The woman smiled and lit a cigarette.
The oldest man in the bar who didn’t know the difference between the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center said, “I don’t know what I am doing.”
Sam Pink smiled and said, “But sometimes I accidentally tell the truth. One day I will fulfill my greatest aspiration when I walk down the sidewalk and take off my pants and beneath the pants there’s another pair of pants and then I keep walking, never returning to retrieve the previous pair of pants.”
The people in the bar felt his words and knew this was bad. They could not allow such words and contamination of the youth to take place. Sam Pink saw there faces and said, “I’ve felt stupid and fake every time I’ve apologized.” Sam Pink laughed.
One of the men at the bar pulled out a hand gun and shot Sam Pink several times. Sam Pink laid on the floor of the bar and thought that the floor was dirty and said, “It will never be over.” - Noah Cicero
Sam Pink, I am Going to Clone Myself then Kill the Clone and Eat It (Paper Hero Press, 2008)

"There may be something dreadfully wrong with Sam Pink. His brain clearly isn’t wired right. It seems at least slightly possible that he is the illegitimate offspring of Andy Kaufman and Jean Paul Sartre. His new book, I am Going to Clone Myself then Kill the Clone and Eat It, is composed of pieces that you want to call poems, but that aren’t quite. Sometimes he approaches prose, but never quite makes it there. These pieces are each a mixture of something like poetry, prose, epigrams, non-sequiters, lists, instructions, weird jokes and absurdist musings.
If I were to attempt the impossible task of comparing Pink’s work to something that came before, I would say that he is a much smarter Jack Handy, but even that doesn’t quite explain it. Reading the book I tried to draw comparisons to Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes and some of Woody Allen’s writing (both are much tamer than what Pink offers). At his best, Pink is insane. Consider the following from his Poem(?) ‘I Will Produce a Meaningful Moment in Your Life then Stop Communicating With You So You Feel Hurt’:
“Your breath smells like gumballs.
That makes me horny.
I will pull your skin over a streetlight and inspect it for flaws.
Don’t look at me.
I will donate my organs provided that my large intestine (undamaged) will be used as a snorkel.
My friend died in the toilet.”
The absurdity is almost unbearable, but then later in the same poem he moves toward beauty:
“When the moon spills, sleep in its belly.
In a womb finely-threaded.
In a pink hued swamp kept body-temperature.”
Nearly every piece in the book is like this. Pink constantly juxtaposes the painfully strange with the painfully beautiful. He has drawn several perfect renditions of the existentialist view, that life is absurdly tragic. In one of the best pieces he insists that:
“If I ever decide to shoot myself in the head I will make sure to stuff my mouth with confetti so that it looks pretty for no one.”
That sentence alone would have given Camus a chuckle, I am sure. Maybe the best thing about this book is that while you are reading it you are never quite certain if you should laugh or scream at what is on the page; the same reaction we have toward life.
Any Cop?: Pink is brilliantly weird, but certainly not for everyone." - Nathan Tyree

"If I hadn’t gone to AWP, I might never have read anything by Sam Pink. Someone had told me he wasn’t a real person, that he was a pseudonym for someone else. I guess that turned me off from reading his stuff. I don’t know. I don’t really remember. But then one day at AWP I got bored and walked over to the Dogzplot table where Barry Graham shoved Sam’s book into my hand and told me to buy it. “Sam’s right there,” he said, pointing at this dude who looked like a cross between Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and my college boyfriend, Evan. He had a hood up over his head and was gnawing on his fingers. “You should have him sign it,” Barry said. It was kind of a dirty trick. What else could I do? I didn’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings. So I bought the book and had him sign it and the next morning, alone in my hotel room with a pot of shitty hotel room coffee and nothing good on TV, I flipped the book open and started reading.
Maybe if I’d been familiar with Sam’s writing all along, if I’d read the pieces that constitute the book here and there on various internet sites over the past year or two, I wouldn’t have felt so knocked out by them. It’s impossible to tell. Reading any writer’s work as a whole is an entirely different experience than reading one or two pieces by them at random, and, in Sam’s case, it has the potential to kick the shit out of you. Which is exactly what happened to me. I read the first and last (it’s called “Dead Horse.” It’s not online. Suckas. But I’ll give you the first line, “If I ever find a dead horse, I am going to beat the fucking shit out of it.” Nice, huh?) pieces in the book and after that I knew I was going to read everything he wrote from now on.
Not that Sam Pink is for everyone. The lazy man’s comparison I guess would be to Bukowski but only because in both cases, their writing is completely raw and stripped down and honest to the point of being potentially offensive to the easily (or not-so-easily) offended. More than Bukowski, however, Sam’s writing reminds me of Kurt Cobain’s or Eminem’s, with a mixture of anger and dead babies and umbilical cords. It alternates swiftly from humor and playfulness to isolation and sadness. You might read a piece through the first time laughing your ass off, but if you stay on the page long enough, let the words really sink in, you soon realize, hey, this isn’t funny at all, actually, this is really fucked up and sick and heartbreaking as hell. I guess reading Sam Pink is sort of like watching a scene in A Clockwork Orange or Reservoir Dogs. One second you’re yucking it up, not a care in the world, and the next your mouth’s hanging wide open, no sound is coming out, and you can’t believe what the hell just happened.
I wish Barry could personally force this book into each one of your hands, with Sam lurking in the corner, looking equal parts scary and vulnerable. In lieu of that, I offer you this excerpt from a piece in the book called “I Am the Dictator”:
We decided that freedom could be a dangerous thing in our fort utopia so some form of political structure was needed. I said plutocracy but you countered with dictatorship and I quickly said, “I call dictator.”
You shrugged and allowed it because I was the dictator and if you fucked with me, that’d be it. Our first task was to enact the systematic exclusion of all unwanted elements. We created death camps. One for everyone. We killed everyone.
After the exterminations, you said you felt sleepy and you lay down on the fort floor and fell asleep. I put my hand on your stomach and it was warm. Inside was something. To that something went the blood of your body.
I ate another handful of cereal and pulled out a bunch of plastic bags from my pocket.
I laid the bags out on the floor and straddled you.
I slid my forefinger and middle finger into your mouth along the crease of your tongue. My fingers felt warm inside. My stomach and groin tightened.
You continued to breathe and I put my mouth by yours.
I said, “I am the dictator.”
Then I put my whole hand in your mouth and began pushing it down your throat. Your throat was tight and smooth. I got an erection. I kept my hand narrow. The mechanical hand searching for a stuffed animal.
And Now Sam Pink Answers Some Questions:

What brought you to writing?
- the bad people made me do it. they are mean. the bad people make me sleep too long or they don't let me sleep. the bad people look like air.
the other answer is, no one would play pogs with me anymore.
What if I want to be the dictator? Will that be a problem?
- maybe there is an infinite amount of dictators and they state themselves into power in every conversation. elizabeth ellen, you can become the dictator. you have to dislike yourself so much that you're distracted into being mean to someone else. then you have to actually like it.
That sounds like a lot of work. I changed my mind. I don’t want to be the dictator anymore. When did you first start publishing online and how did you come to find the places where your work is published?
-the first thing was published maybe a year and some months ago. the places either asked for work or i sent it to places i liked because of steady value, like LAMINATION COLONY,NO POSIT, ROBOT MELON, COCONUT POETRY and DOGMATIKA.
Would you really beat a dead horse if you came across one? Or is that just a figure of speech?
- i found a deer skeleton on the side of a lake two summers ago and i showed it to someone, and the someone kicked the spine and some bones fell off and we walked away. that is a true story elizabeth ellen. you know, elizabeth ellen, i think we're going to make it, you and me kid.
What do the people in your "real life" think of your writing?
-from the way i am thinking about how i remember these people thinking out loud about the writing, it seems they don't care at all and they seem to know that that would be how i would write something. i only ask someone what s/he thinks by getting really close to his/her face and pressing my forehead into his/her forehead unblinking, and repeating the word "huh" over and over.
You know how in "Painful Gender Reassignment Staple Gun Steroid Injection Maternal Crucifixion" you say, "I will claim you as my own when everyone else disclaims you"? Is that true? Do you really mean that? Or are you just bullshitting me?
- elizabeth ellen, you know it is true. elizabeth ellen, i will claim you as my own when everyone else disclaims you. why would i bullshit you elizabeth ellen. you know it is true. the writing you are referring to is an autobiographical account of my twenty second birthday which i spent in a garage alone, trying to reassign my own gender with tools and hormones. the hormones didn't work because they were just empty tylenol capsules filled with gasoline.
A lot of your pieces, though unquestionably comedic, also have a romantic feel to them. Do you consider yourself a romantic?
- i am going to use an answer countdown for this question for no reason other than possible entertainment: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1--
i think everything that is said in the book is paralleled by something that says the opposite. so it says nothing. but it makes sense to me because i can't figure anything out. it makes sense to me to feel one way, then immediately feel the opposite.
Well, I think this is what’s so compelling about your writing. And why it’s both laugh-out-loud funny and extremely powerful and honest. It’s also what sets it apart from everything else. I feel like you’re incapable of writing bullshit. Or untruths. Everything you write feels very stripped down and immediate and raw. Do you edit your pieces after you write them? How long do you typically spend working on a piece before sending it out?
- if i read something i wrote and get the sudden urge to breakdance, then i know it is ready to be sent out. i haven’t sent anything out in a hot minute though. i think i want to. i like journals. cool journals make my life less poopy.
Did you have a particular person in mind when writing these pieces?
- i thought this question three times in a row and i kept answering it the same way so here it is: yes. yes, elizabeth ellen (special note for elizabeth ellen: this is going well, i think people who read it are going to like it, i really do. will you play mariokart with me, i can beat you don't yell at me when i pinch your knee)
(special note to sam pink: I don’t know. I get the feeling people online are all too ready to hate. and argue. And be assholes. So I assume many people will be making mean comments before they’ve read half the interview. (Oh man, I sound really cynical here. Why am I so cynical, Sam? Actually, there are just as many nice, supportive people online as mean, argumentative, asshole ones. So to answer your question again, I’d have to say, I think some people will like it and some people won’t. Also, I just realized I put all my questions/comments in bold so that I seem more important than you. Think it’s working?) I do not know what mariokart is. Therefore, no promises, re: yelling. I guess you just have to take your chances.)
elizabeth, you have become the frosting on the generic poptart i eat with a burning stomach in the morning when i don’t know what i am going to do with the day.
What's with your obsession with dust/hair/dirt/fingers/bones/intestines/insects/dead leaves/eyelashes? Are you really Kurt Cobain? Did you fake your own death like Elvis?
- i don't know what's going on. i only remember feeling one intense moment of need for my mom and that was when i was seven and i started at a new school and i didn't want to do it and i cried walking in and i held her arm tightly. i felt stupid and weak. sometimes i believe that saying, 'i hate myself' is the only thing that can be said truthfully.
So you are Kurt Cobain then.
- i am tupac.
Do your genitals really stay up after drinking whiskey as you claim in "I Am the Dictator"?
- the only thing that softens my genitals is the kind of sadness you get where you keep thinking, 'i am an ugly idiot.'
Man, now I feel like an asshole for asking. Your answer made me sad. You were supposed to say something funny there, Sam. Are you trying to break my heart or what?
- i just imagined your heart broken and it looked like when a nerf football gets ripped in half and doesn’t really fit back together.
What sort of email do you get in response to your pieces? Do you get an equal amount of love and hate? Do chicks seem to dig you more or less than dudes?
- i don't get a lot of emails but the people who email me are always nice. people are very polite. it would feel strange to open an email that took time to express a dislike for me. i would be confused. i vaguely think that i have received more attention from chicks than dudes, but maybe dudes are being all quiet and shit when the chicks are just like, 'fuck the dudes i'm finna say something' but then dudes overhear and are all, 'hell nah chicks' and then the dudes make mean faces and get more quiet, but the whole time, chicks continues to email, and you know, really present a case for their superiority, casting dudes to a role of insignificance compared to chicks. though i think what i really happening is that dudes are presenting themselves as chicks to fool me into thinking more chicks like me so if I brag then dudes'll be like 'no you're wrong because we are the chicks you idiot' and then dudes will laugh while chicks remain an inconstant part of my life.
Or maybe you’re actually a chick like J.T. Leroy and the jokes on us.
- i am actually an improv group from chicago. we take turns. that’s why the material is always different.
What inspires your writing?
- feeling like a small rock in a Home Depot bucket hidden in someone's garage.
So if one day you woke up and suddenly felt like a big rock, do you think you’d no longer feel compelled to write?
- i think if i woke up a big rock i would think negative thoughts about myself until i was a small rock again. then i would maybe be interested in being a big rock again.
Why Slayer? Why not Metallica or Anthrax? Also, are you a Satanist? And/or my college boyfriend, Evan?
- this is sincere: it isn't 'why not _____?' it is 'yes slayer.' i have never been listening to slayer and thought, 'this is stupid i don't like it.' i think there's a point during the anthemic 'altar of sacrifice'during which tom arraya says, 'enter to the realm of satan' and is then followed by one of the song's eight whammybar solos. need i say more. I don't ironically like slayer. i genuinely like slayer. to answer you last two questions: i, as satan's spirit, inhabited the body of your college boyfriend [experiencing first feelings of the interview not going well]
Do you write every day?
- Yes
You've published a couple plays. notably, one in mlp press. Why plays? Who do you think you are, Eugene O'Neill?
- i think i actually remember the reason. the reason was that i wanted to write longer things that were like fiction but i didn't like to write paragraphs and have to write out full ideas. it is easier. if i were eugene o neill i would buy a coat with huge pockets, or like i would sew giant purses into the coat and then fill the pockets or purses with copies of 'the iceman cometh' and i would let them drop out around people and be like, 'oh, huh, what's this shit?' while holding my driver's license next to the book.
elizabeth ellen, eugene o neill accomplished more than i ever will by blinking once and then thinking about it.
The thing I find maybe most interesting about your writing is your ability to make the reader feel they know you intimately, without ever revealing anything personal about yourself. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? There are no specific details about your mom or dad or ex girlfriends or childhood or sex life. And yet, by the end of the book, I totally felt like you were one of my best friends and I’d known you a very long time. So either I’m a total sucker (and, believe me, there’s plenty of evidence to support this theory), or you’ve pulled off something almost impossible to do when it comes to writing (or both. Why can’t there be both?). Are you conscious while writing of retaining your personal privacy? Or are you just uninterested in revealing personal details about your life history and those who play(ed) a role in it? Do you think you will ever write something that includes those sorts of details?
- i am glad you feel like you are my best friend. my goal is to make that happen with everyone then use everyone for like, free rides and places to sleep and food. i consider the work to be all about my personal life, just not in a direct way. i am proud of my ability to be mean to myself, so i feel like i am not interested in protecting myself and maybe that’s a friendly quality because i don’t want to be a liar to people. i think the phrase “i am not important, so be nice” all the time." - Interview with Elizabeth Ellen
Sam Pink, The Self-Esteem Holocaust Comes Home (Six Gallery Press, 2009)

Molly Gaudry - Cubist Fairy Tale: rags, hunger, wish fulfillment, magical dresses, the loss of a mother, rebirth, but set in different landscape

Molly Gaudry, We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious Press, 2009)

"There is no more perfect place to be than in Molly Gaudry’s tender, dirt-floored novel(la), WE TAKE ME APART. Oh cabbage leaves, oh roses, oh orange-slice childhood grins: this book broke my heart. Its sad memory-tropes come from fairy tales & childhood books. With language, Gaudry is as loving & careful as one is with a matchbook... when wishing to set the whole word on fire." - Kate Bernheimer

"Molly Gaudry’s debut evokes the spirit of iconic fairy tales that have transported readers for centuries. Her variations on these themes delineate the psychological journey from girlhood to womanhood. But WE TAKE ME APART is more than a retelling. In it, Gaudry reconstitutes the essence of what makes fairy tales compelling, & she does so imaginatively & with great attention to language, the earmarks of poetry." - Christopher Kennedy

"It’s gossamer & emotional, but it’s also a story of transformation over space & time, a story of love for mothers, partners, food & lace. It’s a story that slips between fable & experience, but seems somewhat unsure which is which." - Mathias Svalina

"It appears to be maybe the dissection of a young woman's mind, where language spawns chains of images and feelings that accumulate with the movement of the text. I like the way the piece lives in the borderland between prose and poetry, which serves the stream-of-consciousness-ness of it well. Gaudry makes good use of repetition and makes poetic use of technical language blended into the text." - Josh Maday

"Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart is a dazzleflage of a book. The stuttering disrupted language of this cubist concoction disappears before your ears, sinks into your eyes. This aggressive dress camouflage reweaves Gertrude Stein's rewoven grammar of worsted silk-screened gabardine into a fully ripped patois-ed pattern of stunning wonder." - Michael Martone

"Back when I first set about to become a book editor, Molly Gaudry is the kind of uncommon writing talent that I idealistically hoped/expected to semi-routinely discover and cultivate. But I spent enough time on the trade book publishing scene to understand that having something like this come across an editor’s desk is much more of a red-letter privilege than any kind of a right.
An epic poem of epic mastery, We Take Me Apart centers on a girl (the narrator) who grows into a woman who grows into a heroine. And like most bona fide heroines, she remains nameless and fanfare-free.
Brought up in an undisclosed non-American country, the narrator introduces the reader to the inner workings of the socioeconomic class divide through the eyes of a child who’s a member of (what’s considered) the wrong caste. Her only nearest and dearest is her mother, a domestic worker who cooks and cleans for wealthy families. So predictable are their days and hours that they “have no need for a timepiece.”
Despite all of the material suffering, the narrator is raised to “scrub away” the unkind words of “fine tall ladies with short tempers.” When other children tease her about the way she looks or when she overhears one of the snobs in her midst “define play clothes as rags,” it’s her mother’s words (assuring her that her appearance “was not so bad”) and her mother’s actions (anointing her with a homespun crown of red leaves, declaring her a queen) that stick.
As the narrator segues into young womanhood, she develops into a gifted seamstress, someone who stitches together disconnected pieces and fragments to make them whole. A random male houseguest whisks her away from home, gallantly offering to pluck her from the bleak tedium, and help her launch a more lucrative dressmaking career. He becomes both her lover and her entrée into the world of creature comforts.
She’s not the only impoverished ingénue to run off with the first seductively solvent male stranger that saunters along. But this narrator isn’t as emotionally vulnerable as many of those who have stood in her “canvas sneakers.” And it quickly becomes pretty clear that this inner strength and groundedness—a “single red leaf was worth more to [her] than a dozen red roses’ petals scattered on [her] bed with pink candles all around”—is moored in the wholeness of her mother’s unshakeable love. As soon as she realizes that her knight has a few too many chinks in his not-so-shining armor, and their honeymoon period comes to a violently screeching halt, she cuts her losses and takes her wanderlust elsewhere (with the couple’s household dog in tow). An itinerant seamstress weaving in and out of setting after setting, and new experience after new experience, she gathers the fragments of each setting and experience to stitch together a self-made tapestry of a life.
There are some who never stop nursing their grudges about the indignities their hardscrabble journeys have hurled their way. But this narrator-heroine chooses to become a healer instead of a hater, leveraging her craft into a singular art form. For example, she designs (avowedly impermanent) dresses out of flowers, to make other women feel distinctively stylish, attractive, and “protected,” if only for a day.
The same visions of community empowerment lead her to fantasize about taking a messianic mission trip with her mom, flying over huddled assemblages of people who have had to struggle the way that they have, to “take away all hurt” and “wash them at length with [their] tears until there is no longer any such thing as complication in their lives.” A seamstress of the human situation, she won’t abide by the notion that there are any prescribed limits to mending bits and pieces of scraps and fragments into something respectably whole.
Much like her flower dresses, this heroine’s seemingly indefatigable stamina turns out to be impermanent. The lurking, hulking ogre of pain eventually succeeds in pushing itself into the forefront. Yet even then, she takes her edges off by losing herself in flashbacks of her “kind,” “capable,” and “never disappointed” mother—her own, stitched-together pain management system.
There’s a languid, yet firm, Marguerite Duras quality to Gaudry’s writing and, like a Duras masterpiece, We Take Me Apart is as savorable as an expensive, hard-to-come-by bottle of Burgundy. This is the kind of book that you not only can read in one sitting, but one that you probably should try to drink in all at once, slowly and solemnly, in order to fully appreciate the adulation-worthy undulation of Gaudry’s verses. Don’t settle on taking We Take Me Apart apart—submit to the majesty of its wholeness." - Kadzi Mutizwa

"Inspired by fairytales & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart, is the first novel(la) from J. A. Tyler’s mud luscious offshoot. Described by Gaudry herself as a “novella in verse,” the book does indeed read like a lengthy, narrative poem in spite of the author’s hesitation with the latter label. While there’s little punctuation, followers of mud luscious will immediately notice the publication’s calling card—ampersands replacing the word “and”—as well as the all-caps dialogue. For example, “I once asked BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GIRL IN THE GLASS DRESS & Mother’s answer was JUST COUNT YOUR LUCKY STARS YOU’RE SAFE IN BED & NOT A COOK FOR A RICH MAN”.
Story-wise, WTMA contains three characters: the protagonist daughter, her mother, & the daughter’s significant other. Though much of the book is in first person, it shifts to second when referring to the daughter’s love interest. Successful, too, is Gaudry’s adept use of voice, which changes as the main character grows older. I also enjoy the language she employs, drawing attention to diction & repetition a la Karen Lillis’s The Second Elizabeth & Peter Markus’s Bob, or Man on Boat.
Because the text alludes to other works of literature, those unfamiliar with such references won’t have quite as full a read as those who do—a gamble on the author’s part for sure, but one that doesn’t significantly alter the plot. Lamentably, the narrative meanders in the middle, lowering the dramatic tension that the beginning sets up so well. The end, however, is a saving grace. Not only is it unpredictable, it’s a refreshing jolt that avoids the formulaic by refusing to stoop to a happy (fairytale?) resolution for the main characters." - Jason Jordan

"The remarkable thing about love is how it operates as an entity—something born miraculously with a fast unraveling life span. Love lives, dies then haunts. The human body seems merely a house within which love can sully the sheets and leave its fingerprints on everything. Molly Gaudry’s protagonist in We Take Me Apart houses a love that ravishes her interior until all that’s left is a frame—walls with gaping wounds for anyone to enter. The last lines of the book reads, “Listen / if nothing else / I am at least a woman who has known & loved / the company of a lamp in a dark & empty room.” Lines such as these expose humanity’s exquisite vulnerability. Gaudry’s work implies that life, at its most essential, is the memory of love, hope, and the rooms it has occupied.
The plot of We Take Me Apart is made from reconstructed fairytales that center around the lives of three women: a mother, daughter, and the daughter’s lesbian lover. The lover leaves, the mother dies and the daughter is abandoned with no desire to experience more loss. Gaudry’s prose does not offer the comfort of a “Happily Ever After.” The novella ends with the main character cutting out her own eyes to prevent anymore ghosts—or rather memories—from overwhelming her. She has had enough. She wishes to remain with what life has already given her— to make time for reconciliation with her past.
It is the novella’s twisted fairytale quality that gives the reader the feeling that he or she has just had their umbilical cord cut a second time. The ending is necessarily visceral and suggests that there are multiple realities—that loss births its own children in us that require nurturing. Gaudry’s novella is a reminder that love is intangible and it demands our undivided attention. By gouging out her eyes, Gaudry’s character becomes a kind of ghost. She can no longer see our world. She has resigned herself to the past entirely.
We Take Me Apart begins with an homage to Gertrude Stein and could be read as a reinterpretation of the three-line poem, “A Carafe that is a Blind Glass.” This approach is an act of pure courage on Gaudry’s part. Only a brave and talented writer would dare mess with the perfection of Gertrude Stein. Add this offense to your favorite childhood fairytale being reimagined and We Take Me Apart reads like a novella about to implode. And yet, as if by magic, the story holds even as the narrative spins out of control.
Gaudry writes:
If there is a how to describe the what
I feel then a dead-red-roses-filled &
fingerprint-smudged carafe on the center of a
table in the center of a room in the center of a
house in a place called before the stitching years
where I have long collected dust
forgotten skin
fallen hair
sloughed cells that nowhere rise with the
entrance of a body
yours
perhaps
There is something brutally honest in Gaudry’s interpretation: she does mess with perfection and does so quite well. She continues by writing, “they stir me into steaming cups until I am gone.” Just as the three-line mastery of Gertrude Stein’s poem is gutted, the main character is consumed by her acts of self-sacrifice. Where Gertrude Stein was perfection, Molly Gaudry is human which is, in and of itself a different kind of perfection.
Not only does We Take Me Apart reimagine the works of others, the novella revises itself as it is being read.
This can be seen in the lines:
WHAT I WANT IS TO TASTE WITH
DELIBERATION THE WAY A
QUIET MEADOW BECOMES DIMMER AFTER
A WETTING AROUND THE EDGES
I said this not long ago for no reason really
except that by taste with deliberation I meant
hope & by quiet meadow I meant baby & by
dimmer I meant calm & by a wetting I meant
pink lips & by around the edges I meant clamp
mother’s breast
a revision
then
of what I want
which is to hope the way a baby becomes calm
after pink lips clamp mother’s breast
Truth is flexible in We Take Me Apart and evolves as the main character recreates herself after each loss she survives. This flexibility of truth adds to the sense that multiple realities are co-existing in Gaudry’s book. What one means is not what one says. What one feels is not necessarily mutual. That doesn’t make the words and / or feeling any less real. Gaudry’s character seems to be collecting herself—to be housing multiples of herself from different stages of life. The book shows adulthood to be our multiple selves craving wholeness.
I wish I could say for certain I knew how Gaudry does it. She uses such simple language to create an epic and moving tale. We Take Me Apart is an exercise in empathy for the reader. It is pure song and story. This book is a gift." - Nicelle Davis

"It begins, “Long ago,” and so you know that Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart is going to be a fairy tale of sorts. But the next part of the sentence, “in a different version,” signals clearly that this will not be a tale you’ve heard before. And the repetition of that key phrase, in a different version, lets you know throughout this wild novella that this will be no comfortable, well-worn tale.
Sure, it’s full of the familiar trappings of the fairy tale: rags, hunger, wish fulfillment, magical dresses, the loss of a mother, red roses and cabbages and rebirth, both literal and figurative. But this is a different version, a different vision of the landscape that lies between girlhood and womanhood. Like the very best fairy tales, its heart is the dark forest that comes wrapped in lovely, evocative language, beautiful word pictures.
It’s clear immediately that the narrator is telling her tale from a distance. She is locked away now, it seems in some kind of institution, in a place where the plates “are not of the shattering kind.” And so right away we know this tale has no bright Disney ending.
The story is that of her passage from childhood into adulthood, and coming to terms with what being a woman means, to others and herself. Like Rapunzel, she is fiercely protected by a mother figure, and like the fairy tale maiden, she leaves the mother figure for a man. I was almost reminded more, though, of the version of the witch from Sondheim’s Into the Woods. She alone knows the danger of the woods, of men, of women alone in the dark, and yet even she can only protect her daughter so long before protection becomes a prison. Gaudry’s narrator reminds us that though we heed the warnings, we will eventually leave the nest and be caught by the pain of growing up and old.
The idyllic fairy tale, at first, is intact: we are introduced to a mother and daughter living humbly–but mostly, it seems, happily. Gaudry writes:
I quite often felt as if we were
two women in a garden in a famous painting
sitting as we were beneath a parasol of petals
protecting us from the sun
But then, appropriately arriving in a rainstorm and in need of a bed, the stranger appears and the mother and daughter duo is broken apart:
But then you came along & in this version
happiness was my hoped for ever after for us
One of the greatest strengths of the novella is Gaudry’s mastery of language. This “novel(la),” as it’s described on the cover, is really a prose poem; the language comprising it ebbs and flows, drifts and spurts and sometimes dries up almost entirely, in a manner that gives a clear urgency, but also a backwards pull, the gravity of nostalgia, to the narrator’s prose.
All childhood becomes a fairy of sorts to adults, and adulthood is myth of sorts to children. We don’t know quite what lies there; it’s undiscovered country. And Gaudry’s use of silence surrounding the words perfectly captures this unspoken unknown. As Calvino wrote:
Myth is the hidden part of every story, the bured part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
The silence, the wet white space around the burn of language, reads at times as if a character from Beckett had crawled or hobbled into a fairy tale–the kind of Beckett character that keeps his or her silence, only to suddenly wax eloquent in manic bursts. Consider this passage from We Take Me Apart:
when she spoke her words were a flurried rush from the shallow space mistaken for her throat
scratched
papered
I begged her not to speak & learned the actions of her bidding
Did them because I could not bear to hear her voice
Which in the past had been the bursting of winter into the green of spring but had become a memory in the middle of her bed in which she rested no like vegetables in a salad but vegetables in canned soup
The language can be florid and fluid, but also economic, sometimes achingly so. Phrases like this one: “Gratitude is a cousin to the squeezing of a heart” are sadder in their brevity than a full paragraph could ever be.
Gaudry also plays, skillfully, with contrasts throughout the novel. The use throughout of food and fertility, often coupled together, stands in stark contrast to the images of death and endings in the book. Consider this passage:
I like to think of those women growing larger with the growths of grapes and cherries and apples inside them
anything but citruses
of course
for I had given up citruses
Food is both a source of life and a path to endings, just as fertility itself leads to birth but also, eventually, to death.
Gaudry uses this same double contrast with food when the narrator returns to her mother, who has now gone from strong to weak and wasting. The narrator explains how she can’t even call her mother “Mother” anymore, because “Mother” is, in her vocabulary, a strength word. Instead her mother finally must go by her real name, and the foods associated with her have changed as well. She says:
Mother had been black cherries in a bowl& Susan had become chewed up & pit-spit out & Mother had been days & Susan was seconds…Mother had been pepper & Susan was the mistake the ruins a meal
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the narrator would choose food metaphors for her mother and herself; throughout the book, as here, the women’s worth always seems measured by others, literally parceled out and spooned up and sifted and served, as shown here:
the well-known people
they scoop me with a tiny spoon
you are the spoon in me dividing me
and in phrases like, “they stir me into steaming cups.”
Of course, there is no eventual savior for the women in this novella, after the mother’s death and a ghastly final act by the narrator. But though destroyed by the past, the narrator’s happiness is also salvaged, a little, by the grace of myth and memory. “When I think of Mother now,” she says, “I think of us as little women wearing white dresses with red ribbons woven into our hair.”
The child and the woman have merged, have gone back to the days of innocence to live in memory and in a woman’s strength, gone back to being whole, unparceled and able to eat the reddest fruits once again. Gaudry’s beautiful story is ultimately a tragic tale, but a kind of redemption mingles with the sadness: you can never go back again, but you can wander the halls of the permanent past for as long as you like." - amber noelle sparks

"HTMLGIANT: Can you explain your decision to write a “novel in verse.” How do you differentiate this from a narrative poem. What is verse to you.
- The term “novel in verse” was introduced to me by Abigail Beckel, of Rose Metal Press. We were chatting over drinks at some bar in Baltimore, and Abby mentioned Peter Jay Shippy’s novel in verse HOW TO BUILD THE GHOST IN YOUR ATTIC. Interestingly enough, it’s billed as a “book-length poem” on the Rose Metal Press website. Go figure.
Anyway, at that time, I was working on an early draft of WTMA. Though it doesn’t much resemble the final product, that first version was what I thought to be too long to be a poem and too short to be anything else. So when Abby said, “novel in verse,” I thought, “Damn, I guess that’s what I’ve been working on.” I consider that woman an angel of some sort, sent to make my life make sense. Having that term led to a breakthrough, truly.
I’m hesitant to provide an answer about verse and what I think it is. I feel I’m not really qualified to give it a crack just yet. Maybe in a few years, after I’ve taken a few more poetry courses, filled in this big gaping hole in my literary education. From 1999 to 2006, I was always, in some way, involved in a literature or fiction writing course or group. In my time away from school, I seem to have developed an intense interest in poets and poems. I plan to apply to MFA programs this year, and all of them for poetry. I’m looking to find my answer to “what is verse” as well.
Would you say there are any precedents to this book that you had in mind when writing WTMA... What I mean is, when constructing your book, did you have any previous book in mind that guided you. I believe you already answered this maybe by stating you didn’t even know what you were writing. But what about other books, irrespective of form. and also, I am now interested in personal motive if you had one.
- When I first began WTMA, I did not have any external guidance except Anatomy for the Artist, from which I borrowed chapter titles. That was the beginning, but then I scrapped the first version and moved on to something totally new, from scratch. I borrowed a lot of words from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and started threading them together, into a new narrative.
Personal motive: I think, looking back now, I wanted to be in love. I thought about how being in love, theoretically, could put a person back together again. I thought about how a person might be taken apart. I said, “we take me apart” over and over and over as I drove fourteen hours from Chicago to Philadelphia, and when I arrived, after I closed my fingers around the key to that room I’d rented, I began to write.
I get a sense that maternity and its residue in the child are important themes here. Am I wrong. Elaborate.
- You are not wrong. I’m very glad you picked up on this theme, actually. One of the storylines that never made it into this manuscript is that the speaker/narrator intensely desired to have children. Instead, I suppose, she creates other things. And she later returns home to take care of her ailing mother. The roles of mother and child are reversed, for a time. And I wonder if, perhaps, as a result of maternity (and the lack of maternity) “and its residue” within her, she turns to destroying her mother and then herself.
What do you do when you get nervous.
- If in public, I wear too much makeup and pace. If in private, I wear sweatpants and bunny slippers and pace.
You use second person in this book. Since in second person, the object of the narrative was witness to what happened, second person seems to me to be about confession. Am I wrong here. On page 66 you say “the idea of again binding two or more parts to/make a whole thing/to put together stitch by stitch” i think this evidences what i am trying to suggest about your themes. that “stitching”, which could be seen as a writing act, is the way to take parts, which can be seen as memory or individual consciouses, and make them something new, something new that will still bear the marks of its combination (stitches). I think this is further suggested by the title, “We Take Me Apart.” the title is inclusive, and references parts. That in this taking apart, or invesitgating, two people are involved, and the stitching is the book.
- Is the second person about confession? I’m not sure. I lifted the use of this particular kind of second person from Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. And before I had anything else, I had the title, We Take Me Apart. And the question was, “Who are ‘we’?” I knew I didn’t want “we” to be too simple, with just two people, so I thought, “How can I have more than two people who take a person apart?” This led to a mother, a daughter, and the daughter’s love interest.
The lines you reference are really interesting; you are very perceptive, Senor Pink! I mean, I had never thought of “stitching” as writing. I always thought of “stitching” as, you know, sewing. With a needle. With thread. But in this context, yes, it really does work the way you suggest. Thank you for that. That is really lovely.
Continuing with the thread/stitch/writing metaphor, on page 68 you begin, “a great many things are strong/thread/for instance/which can be snapped in two with a quick pull/can also be wound into binding that cannot be broken.” I think this, to borrow from the title, takes apart the earlier concept of stitching. More specifically, you took apar what was taken apart. When something is stitched, it was once less than itself, and was brought together. It is still two or more things but seen from far enough away is only one thing. Does this represent further effort to explore relationships? If a break in a relationship, like thread, “can be snapped in two with a quick pull”, is it better to entwine slowly with another, to ensure strength in bonding. Speak on this.
- Wow, this is a difficult question to answer. The relationships in WTMA are central to the story. They are, as I seem to be bludgeoning to death, the meaning behind the title’s “We” and “Me.” I think, perhaps, that the relationship between the daughter and her mother is strong, wound and entwined, whereas the relationship between the daughter and her lover is easily snapped, easily broken. Yet, both are formative for her; and each lives on to haunt her, long after they no longer exist. The speaker is clearly weaker without these two others in her life.
On a personal level, I’m just not sure. Most of my relationships–and I don’t necessarily mean romantic–have snapped “with a quick pull.” Whether due to moving around so much or being a very private person, I’ve had few lasting relationships. Despite this, those that have endured have certainly benefited from slow entwining. I think in this sense, “entwine” means to in some way have suffered through and survived something together. I guess this is where strength comes from. Odd, then, that something so desired–strong human connections–happens so often as a result of pain and suffering.
It seems like fairy tales, maybe pieces of fairy tales, are incorporated in WTMA. What is the place of fairy tale in WTMA, according to you.
- Certainly, key objects from the more well-known fairy tales (and, of course, the more well-known versions of those fairy tales) have been recast in WTMA, just as key words (objects) from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons were also recast. As for the place of fairy tale in WTMA, I consciously borrowed the rule of three. There are three main characters (a mother (she), her daughter (I), the daughter’s love interest (you))–and they are the collective “we” in “We Take Me Apart.” There are also three main settings (a village, the rest of the world, and a ward), as well as three main time periods (childhood, adulthood, old age). Fairy tales, too, are almost entirely rooted in the women’s sphere, usually very domestic, so I also borrowed that. But I wanted to subvert the heterosexual fairy tale romance storyline by including an ungendered love interest. And, of course, I hope I was able to escape the need for a happy ending.
In any case, it all started with Stein. There was a lot of food I didn’t really know what to do with. “cocoa,” for instance, made me think of “cocoa bean,” and “bean” made me think of “pea” and “The Princess and the Pea.” Usually, some food item led me to some fairy tale. All of it was very much like this, with the word associations, etc. It has turned out to be a useful method for me. The project I’m working on now uses words from Jeanette Winterson’s story, “The Poetics of Sex.”
I remember reading something about you teaching writing and environmental issues. What is the discipline of your mind when trying to discuss writing and environment, how do you bring the two together and from what perspective environmentally.
- It’s true. I’m not much of a theorist–not yet, anyway–but in the years to come I hope to be able to contribute to the field of ecocriticism (the study of literature and the environment). Unlike most ecocritics, however, I’m interested in representations of the natural world that aren’t realistic. There is a place for magical realism in ecocritical discourse, and I intend to be someone who speaks out (or writes) on its behalf. Take, for instance, the rain of flower petals in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the rain of fish and leeches in Kafka on the Shore, the (unsurprisingly, yet still beautiful) metaphorical (but literal) rain at the end of Blindness, and the many forms of rain in Scorch Atlas. Although these rains are not the product of realists, not the product of environmentalists (or nature writers), is the message any less clear? Rain isn’t always cleansing; it isn’t always symbolic of rebirth. This is what ecocritics, I hope, would want people to understand. Texts like these are important contributions to this field, I think.
Here’s the kicker: I’m no nature lover. I don’t hike, I don’t camp, I don’t fish, I don’t hunt, I don’t garden, I don’t commune. I’m an indoor type of gal who enjoys, occasionally, a walk on a path, a cabrewing trip, a county fair. Still, I believe in the balance of our ecosystem, in the reality of global warming and potentially catastrophic and irreparable climate change. As human beings, we need to have more awareness of and care for the natural world. Engaging in literature and exploring its relationship(s) to the natural world, publishing stories and poems that do the same (Willows Wept Review), I hope to help (maybe subconsciously) create that awareness (among other bookish and indoor types, who don’t care any less than the next person).
Does fairy tale have a specific tendency for environmental address.
- Absolutely. And what a good question, Sam! You get bonus points!
Nature is perhaps the most consistent character in fairy tales, across the board. If not as character, then certainly as setting. There are woods, fields, meadows, moons, bodies of water, magical animals and trees. I worry that the Disney versions of the fairy tales we know only help to perpetuate this problem of ours–how we humans so sorely mistreat the rest of the world’s creatures. In these versions, the natural world and all its inhabitants serve to aid and/or rescue the human characters (the pumpkin chariot and seamstress mice in Cinderella, the boar’s heart in place of Snow White’s). This goes back to Christianity’s creation myth, does it not? God provides animals (and plants) for Adam (man) to name and possess. They are his to do with as he pleases; they exist to serve him. It’s something to be aware of, is all I’m saying–the why and how we got to where we are today. Literature may play a larger role than we’re willing to admit, and if this is true then literature must also do what it can to undo damage. Which is, of course, where ecocriticism comes into play." - Interview with Sam Pink

"DE: Describe to me how this novella in verses came about? It’s available for pre-order now, and hits for real in December? What’s it like working with JA? One of the coolest things I’ve seen, blurb-wise, is “With language, Gaudry is as loving and careful as one is with a matchbook… when wishing to set the whole word on fire.” How does reading that feel?
- The novella in verse came about as a result of my move to Philadelphia in February of 2009, immediately following the AWP conference. I’d packed my bags, hit the road for the conference, moved into the Hilton, then hit the road for Philly, with a brief pit-stop in Cleveland where I slept for a few hours. On the drive from Ohio to Philadelphia, I repeated the phrase “we take me apart” over and over again. I loved everything about it—its suggestiveness, its aural qualities, and the way it prompted all these thoughts about the literal and metaphorical process of dissembling a human body, mine. Upon arrival to Philadelphia, I moved into my room-for-rent, shut the door, and wrote a ten-page, single-spaced poem that I then blogged about. I said it was too long to be a poem, too short to be a story, too weird to be either, really, and the best thing I’d ever put on paper. I knew that if anyone would get it, that person would be J. A. Tyler. I queried him for the mini-chapbook series, told him I knew it was over the 1,000 word limit but wondered if he’d make an exception. He said he’d give it a read.
I then blogged about how I thought it could become something longer, a full-length work, perhaps. He read that post, I guess, and a few days later sent me a note saying he’d like to read it again when I’d turned what I had into a longer work. We set a deadline, and as it approached I began to freak out. What I’d sent him just wasn’t going anywhere. I kept trying to force this longer storyline, and it was awful. The deadline grew closer and closer, and at the final hour I abandoned all the new pages and started over from scratch, borrowing key phrases from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. I sent J. A. a note saying, “Hey, I started over, I hope you don’t mind, and here’s what I’ve got,” and he was nothing but encouraging. I think, probably, most publishers would have pulled the plug right there, but J. A. supported the new material. When the deadline arrived, I sent him the first draft of what is now We Take Me Apart. In no way does it resemble the original poem (which is to be published as an e-chapbook titled Anatomy for the Artist by Blossombones), but the essence of the initial idea—the taking apart and putting back together again—remains. Without the pressure to deliver (on time) to the guy who was willing to publish my first book, and without his support and encouragement, and, later, his editorial genius, I might have given up altogether. I will be eternally grateful to him for everything he gave me—most importantly, his belief in me.
As for Kate Bernheimer’s blurb, I’m still in shock. Here’s a woman whose writing I absolutely love, a writer who ignored all my fan mail, a (now-former) professor at the university that rejected my MFA application, and what does she do for me totally out of the blue? She writes the best damn blurb a doe-eyed fan could have asked for. I want to hug her. I will hug her. When she calls security and I’m led kicking and screaming from this year’s AWP, you’ll know why." - Interview with David Erlewine


An excerpt :

long ago
in a different version
it was not a glass slipper but a glass dress
it was not beautiful
it was not flowing like a stream
it did not have a train wider than an acre
in this version everyone could see everything
nothing was left to the imagination
due to the drought
all the people in the town
children too
used their spades to uproot the vegetable gardens
day after day
after day
the day finally came when all they could do was look into the cloudiness & pray
disgraced
for why else would the gray lining of their clear sky withhold unless it had been
decided that the only useful thing was for them to suffer
there was not so much as a cabbage leaf that year
cold came to be known as night
heaviness was no longer a worry
the town turned to violence
a rich man's cook was discovered making sauce in the heart of his house
as everyone knows that food does not smell until it boils
until it sweats
the people still there
who had not yet gone away
their bellies round with malnutrition
tongues useless calluses
detected that woman's sauce
came for her with a knife
the first ingredient they added was her toe
cut at a neat incline
they called it butter
they added her bottom half
called it custard
her top half
they called tea
when she cried they heard only the whistles of their stomachs filled with her
they raised their glasses
toasted
*
this is the story Mother told to get me to behave
tucked into my bedding
I once asked BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GIRL IN THE
GLASS DRESS & Mother's answer was JUST COUNT
YOUR LUCKY STARS YOU'RE SAFE IN BED & NOT A
COOK FOR A RICH MAN
the way he made her feel
the way he looked at her
she left nothing to the imagination"


Molly Gaudry, Parts (Mud Luscious Press )

"Stories in verse, as a concept, are fairly amorphous. Abstract yet accessible. After all, literature (all of it) stems from them and the oral tradition. With this plethora of history, you’d think talking about modern stories in verse would be easy. Instead the discussion often becomes mired in debates about form. What is a prose poem, what’s the difference between a story in verse and a regular poem, when is a story a story? Each link of this chain is broader than the last. Have we yet asked when is writing writing? If not, we will soon.
Parts by Molly Gaudry is an excerpt of We Take Me Apart, and while, like any good writerly-nerd, I am intrigued by all the questions of form and content that so often plague discussions of “genre-confused” (for lack of a wittier description) work, I decided to simplify things and think of Gaudry’s piece in two ways: first, as a poem, and second, as a story.
Parts poetically fits into the grand tradition of the feminist canon, by which I mean to invoke the reclamation of the female gender as an identity, as it is so beautifully rendered in the work of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Ellen Bass, and many others. Gaudry defines the femininity of her subject with an adept strokes that move from the women’s outer shell (their clothing) to their inner terrain (their bodies). She begins:
I began to produce several dresses a week &
in the making of them not a single flower
part was left out because every part has a function…
While the narrator’s gender remains ambiguous, Gaudry here has introduced the subject of gender with a single word, namely, “dresses”. Two stanzas later she writes, “for we are more than our parts,” letting the reader know, this poem isn’t just about what makes us or what separates us, it’s about the human condition, the ultimate muse of great poets. As the poem moves on, the parts of the flowers are given, acting in the absence of the what that is not given: the body. Gaudry, working almost the way a Soviet montage in film works, weaves images of the tailor putting dresses together with the flowers, these disparate images inferring different meanings, allowing open-ended interpretations:
I sewed buttons so that
those dresses would not come undone &
leave those women bare without their
wanting to be
This passage is followed up by the word “stalks”, a stanza unto itself, listing the next flower part, but also playing off the idea of a woman bared. Not a sexual image, but one of an identity having been stripped away. But in the end nothing is hidden from the tailor:
I like to think now of these
women in the moment of their undressing
fragmentary
ripe for fertilization
These final lines tie the whole piece together, bring us back to the beginning of the poem where Gaudry writes, “we are all of us more than our parts.” At the same time, though there is the feeling that though we may be more, there is no escaping our parts, just as the flower cannot shed its petals without remaining a flower. And though this assertion is humbling, and possibly, given your mood, morose, it is also comforting, especially to the tailor, one can assume, as he or she clearly finds solace in his or her occupation which only exists because of the parts in the first place.
In a story one must look at plot or at the very least the arc from the beginning to the end. What happens, where does the story take you as a reader? Parts, ostensibly, is about a tailor, working on a dress detailed with flowers, reflecting o what they mean to the women who wear them. The tailor likes to
think of these women sitting
cross-ankled on park benches thinking of
their ovaries
We are, of course, drawn back to reflect on gender, but not in a banal way, as the next stanza reads:
I liked to think of these women thinking of
how to decrease the contamination of their
ovaries
The women in the tailor’s imagination are not concerned with the latest fashions, with reality television shows, or making babies. They are concerned with the health of their womanhood, as represented here by their ovaries. Fertilization is a pervasive theme in Parts, as the word is used once for every two pages of the chapbook. But here it is a source of conflict. As the tailor sees the women as “ripe for fertilization” he or she also feels the need to give the women shelter: I made
hidden pockets because every woman
should have a place to hide her personals
While she clearly sees the utilitarian view of fertilization, the tailor wants to give women protection, a way to secrete themselves from the world if need be.
More than anything, Parts, as a story, is a learning process. A character study. The reader is given a chance to learn how the tailor’s mind works, how he or she views the world." - Ryan W. Bradley

Ben Brooks - New form of the novel: emotional montage like experimental film only wishes it could be

Ben Brooks, Fences (Fugue State Press, 2009)

«Deeply Russian in its sense of life, bitter, very funny, and shattered in its love of beauty, Fences by Ben Brooks shows what happens when the art of poetry and the art of the novel get in a head-on collision. Told in flashes and fragments of compressed emotion, this novel tells its story through glimmers of an intense personal narration: about a Russian girl, a librarian and an Italian man's mysterious wife, a hopeless car trip across Europe, judgement, inadequacy, God in his drunkenness, death at the end of time, and the fury of an apocalyptic search for meaning.
Ben Brooks has invented an involving new form for the novel - emotional montage like experimental film only wishes it could be - but more importantly has cut human desperation into pure form and made it go 180 miles an hour.»

«I think, in terms of capturing real suffering, Brooks writes best about heartbreak. In many ways, the narrator of Fences seems to be evacuating all the thought in the book to overcome the loss of his lover, even the things he writes about that are unrelated to it. It all comes back to the distance apart from her and the slow breaking-down of their hypothetical future. And even if the narrator is determined to give up on that, his mind can’t help from bubbling up with thoughts of her or sudden primitive exclamations of “I fucking miss you.”
Fences is definitely a dope book. It’s described as an “emotional montage” and no matter how many words I put in this I don’t think I could sum it up better than that. A full-throated reconsideration of the world and a photograph of the mind when stuck in the clamps of loss and depression.» - Forrest Armstrong

«...Within its few pages it manages to overturn centuries of literary tradition without apology, pretence or verbosity. A concise, thoughtful, clean form for the modern age. The text takes the form of a combination of prose, disembodied philosophical statements and provocative, yet eminently quotable, sound bites. But if on first viewing the book seems to be made up of random thoughts, when read through a story is immediately evident, or at least the retelling of the authors emotional thoughts invoked by a passage of events... [that] weaves around a small cast and their personal connections, apocalyptic world view, mainly failed relationships, and a European road trip... In the same way that earlier religious writings were allegorical and designed to provoke thought, such as the New Testament parables or the Zen Buddhist Koans, I see the purpose of Fences to move beyond mere language and inspire powerful sentiment for the reader to meditate on. Possibly an agnostic Book of Revelations for a postmodern End of Days?... Such a new approach is brave enough, but Brooks is more than happy to take literature into the world of graphic art. Its pages, paragraphs disjointed, in seeming random font and format, take a step into the visual realms, any one of which could be framed and exhibited in its own right... Like all good philosophical works, you come away with many more questions than answe rs. It is thought-provoking, fresh, innovative, immensely brave and possibly a whole new step for the modern literary form.» - Dave Franklin

«This book absolutely slays. The language completely destroyed me in the best way possible, and I considering immediately starting the book over upon finishing it. The narrative that moves through here is terrifying, but there is abject humor that serves to heighten the intensity of narrative even more. yes yes yes.» - Mike Kitchell

«Fences contains some of the strongest lines i have read in a while... you can feel the filth of solitude from the very beginning where the narrator is 'in a hole' where 'nicotine eyes' stare at him. the book then seems to progress by branching off endlessly into different tracts of hopeless love, self-hatred and general dismay. this book is the message left by a burning tree blowing ash against the side of a garage where inside a man huffs gas to feel like a king. the biggest success of this book to me was how disconnected it was while remaining engaging. fuck. good job ben. don’t kill yourself yet." - Sam Pink

«Told in numbered sections that read like super rhythmic breaks, Brooks has created a narrative hinged on volume and aggression, the words often snapping out at the reader, taking skin and layers with them. The most apparent of these techniques is Brooks adherence to variable text formatting, where some words are in microscopic print and others are in extended sizes. And while Chapman is know for selecting texts that challenge the reader, often referring to his own press as a place seeking ‘unreadable’ books, Brooks is the mastermind behind this altered format, asking his language to speak in screams and whispers even beyond the words themselves.
But it would be a mistake to get caught on or hung up in Brooks formatting, as if that is all the text had to offer. In fact, it has much more, including a story that vibes in and out of philosophy as the character takes to the road and a structure that is part poetry, part prose, and always framed by conviction and import. Brooks wastes few words in FENCES, and writes a book where we are both drawn to finding our own similarities with his characters while also made acutely aware that this is Brooks’ own landscape, a private apocalypse, and something we should feel lucky to witness.
Ben Brooks is doing something significant with words, risking language and testing readers; and for that alone he deserves a wide audience.
I read recently that you relate the format of your fonts in their variable sizes as something akin to language as volume – talk to us about how you structure writing and when in the process that happens for you.
The font sizes thing is pretty strange I guess. It was never intended, like I didn’t set out to write something deliberately “wacky.” I think someone once said that I hid a lack of content behind those font sizes. For me its just another tool to be used. Its like someone giving you a whole new box of punctuation marks and telling you not to worry about paragraphing. The sizing and breaks tend to happen during writing, occasionally I go back and alter things but I pretty much know how I want the words to feel as I write them. I don’t really structure plots either. There will maybe be a few bullet points about some scenes I have in my mind, but mostly I just sit and go with things.
Let’s talk briefly about that notion of content too – how some may wrongly assume the formatting means the content is thin – for those who have not yet read FENCES, what is it about, what is its content, how does it mean?
FSP called FENCES “a private apocalypse.” I think that sums it up well. Its about a man on a road trip, meeting God, watching people grow and die around him, always heading for one person. One person he doesn’t reach. He’s shooting for a hypothetical future with that person but in the process he abandons everything else and that search takes everything over. The book is told in whispered thoughts and screamed phrases. There is no flat-lining. His thoughts are never ordered or confined.
Interesting. That seems something akin to WAITING FOR GODOT or other absurdist / existential texts – are those any influence on your writing? Or is there anything drawn from more contemporary examples of apocalyptic / aggressive journey novels like McCarthy’s THE ROAD?
FENCES had no conscious influences which I could list. After taking the book on, James Chapman asked me what I had been reading whilst writing the book then declared it to bear no resemblance to any of the books I listed. I guess there’s a degree of that Russian bitterness in the book. I like Dostoevsky.
You say the contracting of FENCES with Fugue State gave you a much needed boost to work on the next two projects, both now contracted as well – are those two structurally similar, using formatting and volumes in language? And if so, are they also similar in content, or is the content vastly different?
Both still make heavy use of unconventional formatting and erratic font sizing although I think AN ISLAND OF FIFTY does so to a slightly lesser degree. FENCES and THE KASAHARA SCHOOL OF NIHILISM are both very emotional books whereas AN ISLAND OF FIFTY deals more with the nature of men and civilization and so it involves less meandering trails of thought and more omniscient narration. I still wanted things to jump and hide so I didn’t abandon my unusual formatting.
You are, as may surprise some people, a 17 year old writer – and FENCES is a perceptive and complex book – are there elements of your personal or writing life that have afforded you this advanced authorial skill, or do you think many young writers are this capable and perhaps simply written-off or overlooked by publishers / editors?
Thanks a lot. Age never really came into things for me. I didn’t tell James Chapman my age until he had rejected my first two things, accepted FENCES and had gotten a good way into getting it all laid out. I used to feel quite secretive about my age. I thought it might effect how people read what I wrote. Now I don’t really mind so much. So I guess I’m lucky I’ve never really encountered an age prejudice but I think with the internet its easy to get judged on your writing alone, unless you start a cover letter “I’m a twelve year old writer” and enclose a poem about how dope your dog is. You just have to practice typing like a man. There are a bunch of really talented young writers in the blogosphere, like Jillian Clark and probably a bunch of other guys who I‘ve read places and never been told how young they are. I probably wouldn’t claim “advanced authorial skill”, just an interest in something a lot of people my age would never want to devote time to. I would say I had an imagination perhaps. As for personal life, I think its impossible to know how much things influence you. Sometimes I’ll write something and it will be a few weeks before I recognise how clear a reference to some past event in life it is. There are probably some references I will never pick up on myself. When I was younger we lived in Latvia. I think that played a part in my interest in eastern Europe.» - Interview with Ben Brooks by J. A. Tyler