INTERVIEWED BY NITA NOVENO

Her soft-spoken demeanor might fool you, but Nancy Agabian packs a wallop in her prose. The author of Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, Nancy writes about family, identity, and genocide with a critical eye, insight, and compassion. Her stories are provocative and humorous, just the way we like them. This generous, tireless writer took a break from her busy teaching and writing schedule to answer a few questions for Sunday Salon.

Nita Noveno: Nancy, this book sprang from the experiences of your Armenian family, specifically, your grandmother’s escape from genocide. What ultimately compelled you to write this story?

Nancy Agabian: In the early 90s, I had been writing poetry and doing performances about my Armenian identity. Though I knew that the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire had been wiped out during World War I, I had only a vague notion of what had happened to my grandmother. And then she passed away in 1993. But five years later my aunt invited me to go to Turkey to find the village that my grandmother and her family had been banished from. We were on a tour with elderly Armenian folks looking for the villages of their parents in Eastern Turkey, too. It was an amazing trip for many reasons. I had separated myself from the Armenian community for a long time, since they seemed so old fashioned. But now I was among people who were speaking Armenian and we were all looking at this landscape and the way of life that had been part of our histories. Some part of me wanted to know more of this culture. From my aunt, I also learned more details of our family’s history and my grandmother’s story, which helped to shed a light on the kind of loss she suffered and what she might have passed on to her family. Because she was so young when the genocide happened, and she was just 15 when she made it to the U.S. where she immediately had to start a new life, all that trauma got repressed, and it was clear to me from how I had grown up that there was a lot of shame and repression within our family dynamics. When I returned home, I made a performance, but it was so long-winded and text-based, that I realized I needed to write a book that would explore the connections among the generations and the way that loss permeated our family and culture. In the process, I learned a lot about my family’s history and my Armenian history. The book is a kind of reconciliation with my Armenian identity.

What were the challenges in writing this story?

I had way too much material. I was writing a narrative of my coming of age, but also trying to write my grandmother’s story, as well as my mother’s, since she too was dealing with loss, though in a different way. I was also writing about my three aunts who never married and lived with my grandmother, so they were an example of this old fashioned Armenian culture. But then my brother and sister both came out as gay, and I as bisexual; just one gay kid in an Armenian family was rare in the late 80s, early 90s, never mind three! So it was hard to know what stories to focus on, among these three generations. I did a lot of drafting to explore what the crux of the story was, and to find an appropriate relationship between my family’s stories and what had happened to my grandmother. At one point I had 1000 pages. Most of my process was editing; I think I did eleven drafts.

So what kind of response have you had from your readers?

Mostly positive. Recently, a book group at an Armenian bookstore read Me as her again and told me that their meetings were almost like group therapy, because they could relate so much to the Armenian family stuff. But then I did a reading in Illinois, and one woman emailed me afterwards that she’d read the book in a few days; she said that though she wasn’t Armenian or bi, the story really pulled her in and she related to it.

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the Armenian genocide. The Turkish government doesn’t acknowledge that it ever even happened. Recently (in early October 2009), the heads of Turkey and Armenia signed a pact to open up relations between the two nations. What are your thoughts on this event?

In general, I’m happy that they’re moving towards reconciliation, though it’s being done mostly for economic reasons. One part of the agreement to move towards diplomacy is to set up a historic commission to examine the veracity of the genocide, which is a concession from the Armenian side. Though most historians agree there was a genocide, and many governments have acknowledged it, the Turkish government has had such a miserable time admitting it (for nearly a century!), that it’s hard to imagine that the commission won’t be tampered with to include denialists. But there have been a lot of changes in Turkey lately. Though Turks haven’t been taught the history of the genocide, more and more Turkish citizens have been realizing the truth, and have even been uncovering Armenian relatives in their families. In the long run, I’m hoping Turkey will become a more open society that will have more cultural ties to Armenia and the Armenian diaspora; opening the border will encourage this, which could bring change in admitting their history and being more fair to all their ethnic minorities. And Armenia will change with the open border as well; I think they’ll feel less fearful of their neighbor, and less isolated and vulnerable as a nation in general.

So now you’re leading a writers workshop on cultural identity. Tell me about it.

When I came back from Armenia I lived in Woodside, Queens, which is low on gentrification and high on immigration. I’d also been teaching at Queens College for a few years and felt badly, at the end of the semester, that I couldn’t advise my creative writing students on where to go for a free or low cost writing workshop nearby. I had actually started writing in a free community workshop, not in college, so offering space for regular folks to write has always been really important to me.  I decided to apply for a grant through the Queens Council on the Arts for immigrants or the kids of immigrants to write their stories, geared specifically for Queens residents.  What surprised me was that people traveled from three other boroughs and New Jersey because such a workshop is obviously very much needed in NYC. We were hosted by Paz and Todd at Topaz Arts Center, a great art gallery/dance space in Woodside, very supportive of all arts. We had thirteen members, and over ten weeks got to know each other better, through our writing and cultural backgrounds.  Folks had ancestry and direct connections from Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Korea, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, the Phillippines, Armenia, and India. We wrote a lot about our families and migration and discrimination, and it was interesting to find commonalities among us. But the writing styles were just as diverse as the cultural identities. One member, Beatriz Gil, became inspired at a zine fest and has spearheaded a chapbook publication of the group’s work. A little plug is that we are reading from it on November 2, at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center.  More details at http://ourside.info.

Who have been your literary influences?

Practically everything I have read has influenced me in some way, from The Diary of Anne Frank in junior high to Eileen Myles’ poems, to Audre Lorde’s memoir to David Sedaris’s earlier books of essays to whatever I am teaching my English 110 class.

Cool. What’s your next book about?

I went to live in Armenia for a year as a Fulbright scholar from 2006 to 2007. My goal was to write about the lives of artists and how they were dealing with social and cultural changes in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. I was there when we were in the middle of the Bush hell years, so it was interesting to compare the corruption of Armenia to the corruption of the U.S. But I met and fell in love with an Armenian, so the book will be a mix of things: observational essays, personal journeys, and musings on identity, history and literature. I’m still exploring, so I am not exactly sure what it is, yet…

Thank you, Nancy.

If you want to learn more about Nancy, please visit her website: nancyagabian.com.

Recently, I interviewed poet and novelist, Bino A. Realuyo, whom I met at a Sunday Salon reading in 2007. He read from his poetry collection, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, a beautiful, haunting account of his troubled Philippines. In one particular poem, written in the perspective of his father, a war survivor, I was introduced to the vision and talent of a writer who gives voice to the voiceless, shedding light on forgotten histories. In this era of self-help literature and the ever-beleaguered memoir, here is a truly audacious writer of hope and change.

Nita Noveno: What is your earliest memory of growing up in the Philippines?

Bino Realuyo: The seasonal typhoons, the wallpapered house, the boarders, the relatives, and the street floods. Memories treasured, formerly resented.

Nita Noveno: When and why did you first start writing?

Bino Realuyo: I learned how to draw before I wrote. My father was an architect and my mother a beautician—both engaged in colors and the expanse of the imagination. In my house, there were always materials to draw with. I created “comics” as a child, and in doing so, learned the art of narrative. Yet, outside my world, there were the family histories—each person in my family carries an extraordinary story. My mother told me when I was a boy—You will write my book someday—as if an omen. I took it to heart. And I know one day, when I grow up, I will write her book. Perhaps I write to tell truths. I haven’t quite understood why I write, but it has become a process that seems as natural as breathing. I can’t do without it. I wasn’t a trained writer, at least not in an academic way, but then, I have been writing since childhood, from pen and paper to manual and electric typewriter to a laptop, in which I wrote my first novel and poetry collection. I took the art of writing seriously after college, which was also the time when I stopped drawing and painting all together. Strangely enough, as if a call of destiny, I met a small group of audacious poets and writers and together we formed The Asian American Writers Workshop in New York City. Now I believe you can’t quite run away from what you’re meant to be.

Nita Noveno: Who influenced you early on as a poet/writer?

Bino Realuyo: When it comes to muses, I go through phases now. I look for writers who live in the same world of the works I am currently doing. But as a young poet-novelist, I voraciously and repeatedly read Li-Young Lee, Marguerite Duras, Czeslaw Milosz, and Pablo Neruda. Of course, I read many other writers, especially writers-of-color, whose works were a prodigious political influence. Right now, I am in awe of Jose Saramago, the man and his work. We had similar economic backgrounds growing up. When I read him, I feel I’m watching him write. It’s such a spiritually invigorating process. I have read “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” a few times now; and while inside, I have always wished it would never end.

Nita Noveno: Your father, a veteran of the Second World War and survivor of the Bataan Death March and a Japanese concentration camp, has influenced your life greatly. Does his story continue to inform your writing?

Bino Realuyo: It is the subject of my next poetry collection—On Which the Summer Leans. It has been emotionally formidable dealing with my father’s war experience. I have had many failed attempts to write about it. Now, five years after his death, I still find it hard to isolate his world, so that I could unflinchingly stare at it, and deconstruct. But I am immobilized by the rush of emotion. I have come to realize that it should not be approached that way, and that no matter, I will have to be a part of his experience. I am vehemently anti-war, which makes it challenging not to locate myself in the consciousness of any war. I grew up with artifacts of wars around me—bayonets, helmets, all rusty with time. In many ways, I was in the Death March, and so were members of my family, albeit physically absent. My book will be a convergence of many disparate parts, if only to find in each, a whole, a self.

Nita Noveno: Tell me about your life in the Philippines before coming to the US and the process of writing your first novel The Umbrella Country.

Bino Realuyo: Thanks for mentioning The Umbrella Country. It is ten years old this year and is still being printed. I am so long overdue for another work of fiction! I grew up in what I refer to as “the belly of beast.” It is a working and middle class urban neighborhood that exists to this day. I lived in such a protected cocoon, being the youngest in my family. It was a life full of contradictions. We lived humbly; and by any estimation, poor, yet we were privately schooled all our lives. My mother rented out the extra room in the house to make ends meet. These boarders and “bedspacers” eventually became source of inspiration and friendship for everyone in my small family. Of course, I mentioned them in my first book. I was a very quiet, yet observant boy, and took tremendous pleasure in solitude. Manila is not made for introspective literary types. There was a constant barrage of noise—traffic, people, natural elements. At fifteen, I would write my first novel. About seven years later, I would revisit the book and from it came The Umbrella Country. Some say I was exorcising my demons—that was the easy interpretation. I thought I was doing what I did best—tell stories.

Nita Noveno: What have been your biggest challenges as a poet/writer?

Bino Realuyo: Singularly, publishing. I know I represent all fictionists-of-color when I say that. It would be easy to cop out and write “white,” to make these editors think I’m part of the Americana. But I have to honor my own narrative—the Filipino-American story. We have so much to tell, why move into someone else’s territory? But with that comes the challenges of acceptance and eventual publication. It is difficult to find a champion, someone who understands that ethnic stories are lucrative and marketable. The current state of readership in the U.S. adds to the dilemma. People are not reading literature the way they used to. The younger generation has completely different reading habits; many will find such process of collecting books a foreign matter. Lastly, American literature is so immersed in “empire” narratives—those from India and China. If you are from neither, you better find ways to get yourself in the door.

Nita Noveno: Interesting. I’m a big fan of Indian authors like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, and most recently Aravind Adiga who wrote The White Tiger. What do you mean by “empire” narratives? Does it have to do with the sheer size of the country and its colonial history?

Bino Realuyo: I am also a big fan of the writers you mentioned. Old empires are a source of inspiration and fear for new civilizations like America. The return of India and China as economic giants foments all kinds of threat in the western world. Such reaction is not the sole territory of the economic and G-8 politicking-the same can be applied to literature. Although, in the arts, there are many more elements that get enmeshed—fetishization, exoticization, romanticism, xenophobia, name it. It’s Columbus looking for the Spice Islands all over again. Where do smaller countries like the Philippines fit in the ageless dance of old and new empires? What is the responsibility of Filipino-American writers in light of the fact that native born Americans know very little about this first colony of theirs. We know that the rise of India and China as superpowers will generate more interest in the literature they produce. More American scholars will study them; more writers from those countries will find home in American publishing. But in the same token, there is a growing backlash in the globalization of big things. Small voices are becoming big voices. Filipino singers are being discovered on Youtube. I think if we understand where we place, we will know how to navigate the bigger spaces around us. We have to keep pushing. Our narratives are just as important. After all, in the overall scheme of big things, there are more of us.

Nita Noveno: Nowadays authors can bypass the publisher and self-publish, and for a select few, this has led to success. The rise of electronic tools like Amazon’s Kindle, which cuts down on publishing costs, translates to less money for writers. With these trends, the individual reader’s taste is more pronounced and less dependent on what comes out of the gates of the conventional literary establishments. What are your thoughts of the way publishing is moving towards the electronic age?

Bino Realuyo:This goes along my previous response of leveraging power in new ways, especially in the new world of technology. Your question touches on the scholar Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” theory, where every person has a unique way of learning and acquiring information and knowledge. One size no longer fits all. I am excited about the changes in literature and readership. I was part of the first generation of writers who migrated from typewriters to laptops. During my early years as a poet, I was visited by a New York Times photographer who asked me to pose next to piles of manuscript, emulating a Hemingway perhaps. I told him I didn’t have such, and then showed him floppy disks instead. The photographs didn’t get published, but the astonished look on the man’s face remained in my mind. Now, a decade later, I am once again experiencing another shift in technology, this time, in readership. I think technology will partly address the unfortunate privileging of writers by very few mainstream publishers, as if they’re being selected into a special country club of sorts. It is extremely difficult to penetrate mainstream publishing, especially if you’re a writer-of-color. There is almost a quota for how many ethnics get published in a year. Unfortunately, Asian Americans are put in the same bowl. If a Filipino writer is put next to an Indian writer, who do you think would they choose?

I believe technology will democratize literature. But, we as writers need to participate in the process. We can’t simply sit passively and wait for things to change around us. The transformation can’t happen without our input. If these so called “digital natives” are reading differently, and are using hand held devices to read literature, then how can we create new ways of writing such that we accommodate this shift in reading styles? There is much to think about and discuss, but it has to happen now. I can never separate activism from literature.

Nita Noveno: What has Barack Obama’s election meant to you?

Bino Realuyo: I am so thrilled that a community organizer has become the president of this country. He is such an unconventional politician, a maverick of sort. My first job out of college was community organizing and such work does something to your heart and mind. I still work in marginalized communities—something I could have easily abandoned for an easier job elsewhere. I know that Obama still carries with him those years of organizing in the housing sector in Chicago. Similarly, I continue to cherish the years I worked in human rights in New York City. I am such a believer in bottom-up grassroots organizing. I think Obama looks at the world through related lens. Interestingly enough, he is at the top of the pyramid, with an organizer’s frame of mind. I am intrigued by what that means and what happens to his grassroots ideas once he has climbed the ladder to the top. These are exciting years for people who believe in people.

Nita Noveno: What are you reading these days?

Bino Realuyo: After I finish graduate school at Harvard, I will have the privilege of time to read literature again. Also, I make every effort to support Filipino-American writers. I have put together a page on my website that you can visit http://www.binoarealuyo.com/filipinoamericanbooks.htm with a whole library of books published in the U.S. since 2005.

On my bedside table right now are new books published recently, Luisa Igloria’s amazing new collection Juan Luna’s Revolver, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s At the Drive-in Volcano, Jon Pineda’s The Translator’s Diary, Eileen Tabios’ Nota Bene Eiswein, and Joseph O. Legaspi’s Imago, all excellent poetry collections.

Nita Noveno: Are you working on any writing projects (prose, poetry) at the moment?

Bino Realuyo: I am trying to get an agent for my next book of fiction, The F.L.I.P Show: A Novel-in-Episodes. It has gone through so many transformations over the years. I have edited it as recently as last month, when a thought came to me that completely reshaped it. I think I am ready to let it go. This summer, when I finally join the free world, I will embark on a poetic journey, via On Which the Summer Leans, my second poetry collection. The writing life takes so many forms when you have many jobs and lead multiple lives. The literary life, at least, from my point of view is a chronic illness. For now, I am writer with a wounded soul.

Nita Noveno: Salamat Bino. Thank you.

***

Bino A. Realuyo continues to document the Filipino and Filipino-american diasporic experience with his new work of fiction, The F.L.I.P Show: A Novel-in-Episodes, and a poetry manuscript-in-progress, On Which the Summer Leans. He is the author of The Umbrella Country, a novel, and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, a poetry collection. He is the editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings about New York City and guest editor of The Literary Review’s special issue Am Here: Contemporary Filipino Writings in English. His poems, fiction, and essays have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, New Letters, The Literary Review, Manoa, Puerto del Sol, and the Norton Anthology, Language for a New Century. He can be found on the web at www.binoarealuyo.com.

Felicia Sullivan has been described by a fellow writer as a “force of nature” and rightly so. The native New Yorker and Columbia MFA graduate completed her memoir The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here while working full time. Felicia is also the co-founder of the KGB Non Fiction reading series in NYC and the award-winning literary journal Small Spiral Notebook. I caught up with the tireless writer after her reading at June’s Sunday Salon.

Nita Noveno: When and why did you decide to write this memoir?

Felicia Sullivan: In some way or another, I’ve always written about my mother. When I was eight I published a haiku that likened my mother’s voice to thunder. She’s always been my subject—I can’t really recall a time in which my work hasn’t revolved around her—the one person I couldn’t, but desperately wanted to, understand. For years I was working on a novel of lifeless, unlikable characters that did mildly interesting things. I was writing a safe book because I was afraid to commit my memories, this horrific life lived, this very unsafe book, to paper. I was ashamed of my past, of living in poverty, of a mother who loved and terrorized me. I had lived a life of my own invention for so long, I couldn’t imagine otherwise.

At one point the weight of these two lives—the accomplished, in-control professional and the frightened child who never really mourned the loss of her mother—were becoming difficult to bear. Something had to give. One afternoon a friend of mine and I were trading stories about our mothers and we realized that we had both been shamed into secrecy. We were made to feel shame by our mothers, our impoverished upbringing, and a culture where not loving your mother is unthinkable.

I wrote this book as a testament to my strength, as a celebration of my survival and recovery, to demonstrate that alternative families are possible, and that love – the most sacred of emotions – is not unconditional.

NN: What was the most challenging aspect of writing this memoir?

FS: Writing this book was at times frustrating. Because I was trying to render the most accurate portrayal of my life with my mother, I was consistently confused—caught between the memories my mother created and the events that actually happened—and found myself second-guessing events that had happened. In the cases where memory wasn’t reliable, I chose to keep those chapters out of the book. In other cases, such as in the chapter “The Burning I Don’t Remember”, I make a point to highlight how powerless I was against the history my mother invented for me. I have scars on my legs but I don’t remember how they got there. Do I believe my mother’s story that they were burned in a bathtub and a hospital trip that I don’t recall? Do I have any other option?

Regrettably, my mother excised all members of my family so accessing them was difficult because, embarrassingly enough, I don’t remember many of their last names or have any idea where they might live or whether they’re even alive. I did rely heavily on Gus—the man to whom my mother was engaged but never married, the man who I would come to call my father—to fill in the gaps. He was in our lives since I was twelve and he was privy to my mother’s confidence, which lent a great deal of perspective and sympathy to how I rendered her in the book.

Essentially, I wrote this book as honestly as I could, given the limitations. My mother tended to overuse certain phrases and I was in keeping to how she, and other characters, spoke and what they would say. But memory is a tricky thing, it’s fallible, and in the end, I wrote the book and the events in my life as I remembered them.

NN: You have founded a reading series (KGB), a literary review (Small Spiral Notebook), and host a blog talk radio show, all while writing and maintaining a full-time job. Phew! How did you manage it all?

FS: I’m a multi-tasker. Sorry, it’s not fancy or fabulous, but I know how to best organize my time to get what I need done.

NN: Do you have any words of wisdom for your fellow struggling writers?

FS: The very best gift you can give yourself when writing a memoir is distance. I think that it’s critical to discern the difference between cathartic journaling (which is integral in documenting and coming to terms with any traumatic or trying period of your life) and creating a work of art from that experience or series of events. I know this is a bit cliché, but for me, it was paramount to see the forest from the trees. Writing raw is not the best way to attempt writing a memoir. Time allowed me clarity to shape the book, render the characters sympathetic and have a deeper understanding of the events in my life from the vantage point of reflection.

NN: What’s next in Felicia’s literary-project hopper?

FS: I’m working on a novel, yet I think it’s a bit premature for me to talk about the bones of the story. Although I can say that it will be a novel focused on technology and how it disconnects people, a character will have Asperger’s, and there might be a compassionate serial killer thrown in for good measure.

You can find out more about Felicia at: feliciasullivan.com

One of the most fascinating minds wrapped around science fiction today, Matt Cheney is a columnist for the online magazine Strange Horizons, series editor of Best American Fantasy from Prime Books, and has a few things to say about his beloved genre.

Nita Noveno: When did you first discover science fiction?

Matt Cheney: Most people for whom genre fiction becomes an obsession start out young, and I’m no exception to that rule. I was an awkward, nerdy kid who liked reading and writing, and I started with mysteries and horror stories, but then my mother’s boss decided a kid like me should read something intellectually engaging and loaned me an issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine when I was 10 or 11. He revered Asimov, and I sought out Asimov’s own books at the local college library, as well as a series of anthologies he edited of stories that had won the Hugo Award. I was hooked.

Two vitally important moments, though, shaped the reader and writer I would become. First, I met James Patrick Kelly, who when I was in 7th grade came to my school as part of a writers-in-the-schools program. I’d read a couple of Jim’s stories in Asimov’s, and having a writer for my favorite magazine show up at my school was better than having the entire cast of the “A-Team” TV show appear, which would have been the only comparable event at that time for me, I think. He gave me his address and we corresponded for a long time; I’m sure I was tremendously annoying as I sent him one breathtakingly bad story after another, but Jim is one of the nicest people on Earth, and his attention kept me going.

Second, an English professor at the local college, a Dickens specialist, took an interest in my education but was somewhat dismayed by my enthusiasm for science fiction. My mother asked him if SF was literature, and he said no. I didn’t know what literature was, but I immediately perceived a slight to my beloved genre. He gave me a copy of Laurence Perrine’s ubiquitous anthology, Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, and I tried to read as much of it as I could to figure out what literature was. I still didn’t know what literature was, but I was on a quest — I was determined to come up with an air-tight argument that science fiction was literature. This led me to literary criticism of all sorts.

At this time, also, I discovered Samuel Delany’s book The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. The college library had a copy, and I had noticed that Delany had won a bunch of Hugo Awards, so I figured he was important. I had trouble reading and understanding his fiction, and I thought his essays might help. Jewel-Hinged Jaw is a somewhat difficult book, and at 13 or 14 years old, I couldn’t make any sense of it. Though no adolescent should be expected to understand Delany’s critical writings (the idea is absurd, really), my lack of understanding bothered me as much as being told that SF wasn’t literature. The two annoyances together led to my resolve to figure it all out. Delany ended up being the key — his nonfiction, once I had learned enough to make sense of his references, made me think of literary categories in entirely different ways, and helped me realize that both “science fiction” and “literature” are terms so fraught with peril that it’s best to avoid them whenever possible.

The problem, ultimately, with conjoining the terms “literature” and “science fiction” is that most people wield the former as a term of value and the latter as a term of description; thus, “good literature” is redundant but “good science fiction” is a way to distinguish from “bad science fiction”. It’s a great tension for me — on the one hand, I am wary of anybody who would try to legislate pleasure, including aesthetic pleasure; on the other hand, I am completely stunned that anybody can find things like, oh, books by Tom Clancy pleasurable. Meanwhile, I keep writing book reviews trying to say what is and isn’t a good book, which is ultimately just me saying how a particular text hits me, what it makes me think about, and where I would have wanted to think or feel differently.

Ultimately, though, I am plagued by doubts and contradictions!

NN: Wow! It goes without saying that you’re passionate about science fiction. Who are your literary heroes?

MC: Oh dear. I don’t know. Depends on the day. “Heroes” is different from “influences”, isn’t it? Heroes suggests people who accomplish amazing feats. To some extent, I think anybody who manages to write something that deeply affects even one reader is, in that sense, a hero. Who has most deeply affected me, whether as an influence or not, then, might be my own personal pantheon. The writers who made me love reading with an overwhelming passion. In childhood, Stephen King and Isaac Asimov were the most important. In adolescence, Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, and the plays of Samuel Beckett and Christopher Durang. During my college years, Georg Büchner, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and the playwrights Mac Wellman and Suzan-Lori Parks. Delany has been important to me consistently. I discovered the poetry of Paul Celan when I was in my early twenties, and it shook me as deeply as any writing ever has; it still does — I approach it with awe and humility. I abandoned genre fiction for a long time, then returned when I discovered the work of Kelly Link, China Mieville, M. John Harrison, and Jeff VanderMeer. Paul Bowles was a profound influence for a while. A few years ago I became seriously interested in fiction from or about various African countries — first Achebe, Gordimer, Soyinka, and Coetzee, but then as I began doing research and exploring more widely, I discovered Ngugi and Bessie Head and Zoe Wicomb and Zakes Mda and Marjorie Macgoye and Tsitsi Dangarembga and Helon Habila and Chris Abani and the great, great Dambudzo Marechera — that Marechera’s work is not widely available is, I think, a tremendous loss to world literature.

NN: Who influences your writing nowadays?

MC: Editors and anybody else willing to publish it! Honestly, though, I’m not sure. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have been a huge influence recently, because we’ve worked so closely together on editing Best American Fantasy, which has basically involved us throwing lots of stories at each other and saying, “Well, what do you think?” In the first round we’re all about gut reactions, no analysis, and then we look at the pile of stories to which at least one of us had a favorable immediate reaction, and we try to figure out what it is we liked, and why, and then what that reaction means. I’ve learned more about my personal prejudices when it comes to fiction over the past year than I ever had before, because when arguing passionately for a story that the other editors didn’t like as much, we have to learn how to articulate our passions, and sometimes in doing that we discover that it has less to do with anything the actual story contains than with other, ancillary elements. I think it was Ann who finally proposed a formula for how to make me completely and totally hate a story: a first-person adolescent narrator who uses short sentences to tell a story about talking animals and faeries that has, ultimately, a happy ending.

“What” influences me now is actually the question I think about most frequently, particularly as a fiction writer.

NN: Hm, okay, so what influences your writing?

MC: Because I write book reviews, and have for five years, I get a lot of books sent to me by publishers and writers. Ten to twenty books a week. I’m not a prolific reviewer or a fast reader, and the volume is more than I could ever keep up with, even if I were able to read a book a day. Now with Best American Fantasy, I also get to see hundreds — even thousands — of short stories. The effect has been to make me ask myself, whenever I send a story out to be considered for publication, if I really feel that the world needs this story. Now, I would not send anything out for publication anywhere if I always had to answer that question with a yes, because I lack the arrogance to think that anything I write is really needed by the world. But the question remains strong in my mind, and it takes a lot, now, for me to foist my fiction off on anybody. If I take the time to finish a story (and I finish only a portion of the stories I begin), I have to feel that it is doing something that is … I can’t think of the right word — not worthwhile, and certainly not unique, but … different enough from the other sorts of things I see out there that I can justify (at least vaguely) to myself its existence.

This has led me to write fiction that is, I think, often difficult for readers to figure out, not because it’s particularly “difficult” (I’m no William Gaddis!), but because what captures my passion enough for me to think a story is worth finishing and then foisting on the world is not usually the stuff that people traditionally think of as the most compelling parts of fiction. For instance, plot. I don’t go to fiction for plots — I think movies and TV shows are a better vehicle for that sort of narrative. With fiction, I like there to be some sort of movement and structure, but I’m perfectly happy if it’s just movement across a landscape. This can tend to make even my most formful stories perplexing to readers who are more fond of plot than I. Rather than plot, I’m obsessed with patterns — I notice this in my teaching, too, that I keep pointing out to students the repetitions of words, phrases, motifs, structures. I just love that stuff. I love patterns that are carefully set up, then broken. I love surprises and weirdness. I am addicted to ambiguity. If I assume that my fiction is at least partly successful at living up to my aspirations for it — and that’s a big assumption! — then what I have learned is that only a small amount of the readers who encounter it are excited by the same things that excite me in it. But it’s wonderful to encounter readers who do connect with it on that same level — and I’ve been lucky with almost every story I’ve published to have heard from a few people for whom that is true. That makes the anxieties that publications causes — and publishing fiction feels, to me, like wandering around naked in bright, glaring light — worth bearing, and the publications themselves, despite the anxieties, into moments of joy.

NN: You studied theater in undergraduate school. How does your background in theater figure into your writing?

MC: For almost ten years, I wanted to be a playwright. I was a Dramatic Writing major at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for three years. Though I became frustrated with elements of the theatre world, I still think of myself, at heart, as a playwright more than anything else. I became comfortable with fiction once I felt like I could accomplish in that genre what I had wanted to accomplish in the theatre — an obsession with language, form, and identity that often has a surrealist tinge.

More specifically and concretely, one of my friends recently told me I write dialogue like a playwright, not a fiction writer. This is probably true, and inescapable. I hope it’s an asset. I am certainly more attracted to first-person narrators than I might be otherwise; I love monologues, love the intimacy of the personal voice, love the possibilities for error and misperception that all of our particular subjectivities offer.

NN: You’re originally from New Hampshire. Is there a New Hampshire sensibility in your writing?

MC: I wish there were; I’d love to be a regional writer, to write from a sense of place. Most of my life has been spent in New Hampshire, and I’ll probably be moving back there soon, so if I were to have any sense of place, it would be that one. It’s certainly a place I love, but in many ways I am too close to it to be able to see it in the way I would want to see it to be able to write specifically about it, rather than just using places and images that are familiar to me, which I do a lot.

I tend to write about the places of the mind, though, and my interests are much more to do with how people think than with where they live. This is, perhaps, New Hampshire’s fault — it’s hard to be a nerdy kid who loves writing when you live in the rural part of a small, Northeastern state, and so I delved more deeply into myself than I might have if I had grown up in, for instance, Manhattan. Growing up in New Hampshire gave me a great sense of being an outsider, too — there was absolutely no-one around who shared my interests or inclinations. Artists of all sorts learn a certain stubbornness and trust of their own vision if they have a healthy sense of outsiderhood. But I also think it’s healthy for artists not to associate only with other artists, and my oldest and in many ways closest friends are people from New Hampshire, people I went to elementary and high school with, who have quite varied backgrounds and interests.

NN: Where do you see yourself in ten years?

MC: I’m thinking of becoming a hermit, actually. I’ve always been attracted to that lifestyle. I’ve also thought of becoming a drag queen. My friend Rick Bowes (a marvelous writer, by the way, and author of one of the few truly essential 9/11 stories, “There’s a Hole in the City”) calls me Greta Garbo, because I already tend to hide myself away, but I think he’s really onto something — I aspire to become the best drag queen hermit in the Northeast. In ten years, who knows … a cabin in northern New Hampshire … just me and the moose and … high heels and Marlene Dietrich karaoke….

NN: Ha! Fascinating. Thank you Matt.

You could say Justin Courter is making a big stink in the literary world. His debut novel, Skunk: A Love Story, about a young man’s attraction and addiction to skunk musk and his love interest in a woman with a fish fetish, is probably one of the most olfactory-obsessed, if not strangest, stories I’ve ever read. I recently interviewed Justin for the first in the series of Sunday Salon Interviews.

Nita Noveno: What inspired you to write such a bizarre story?

Justin Courter: Satan. No, actually, I often look at writing stories as a way of conducting little experiments. In this case, the assignment I’d given myself was to write about something repulsive that would also be interesting and funny enough to make a reader stay with it. I’d always felt that the raw material of a novel does not matter to me so much, that what’s important is that there are amusing characters, a voice, and a story that you want to continue to see unfolding. So this was a kind of extreme way of announcing that. Also, I think that if you can incorporate fantastic elements—in this case an absurd addiction and a bogus invention—it can add another dimension to a story.

NN: Who influenced your writing then?

JC: When I was writing Skunk, I was reading Graham Greene, Roald Dahl and T.C. Boyle, and I think their influence is pretty obvious. Franz Kafka, Anne Tyler, Tom Robbins and Helen Barnes were also influencing my writing then.

NN: Did you base the main character, Damien, on any one particular model, real or imagined?

JC: That’s a good question. The answer is no, but consciously and unconsciously I incorporated aspects of the personalities of people I’ve known and characters from other novels. I’ve seen in some alcoholics the hyper-controlled/totally out-of-control tendencies that Damien displays. And after I’d gotten halfway or so into the novel, it occurred to me that Damien was similar to the protagonists of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist and Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt.

But I think the main thing is that in writing Skunk, I thought a lot about juxtapositions. Since this character was going to have a strange, impossible addiction that leads to dissolution, it seemed appropriate to have him be very practical, uptight and pedantic. That was the logic out of which Damien came to life. He’s also extremely neurotic, isolated, a complete social misfit. And that kind of person has the freedom to try things that people with social ties don’t.

NN: That’s an interesting observation about the freedom of those who don’t have the social ties. The essence of Damien’s character seems captured in this sad, funny line, “Freedom is not to have to smell other people.”

JC: Yeah, I guess you could say that is the essence of his character. He really is a loner.

NN: How did you decide on Damien’s language, which is consistently formal and proper, more British than American it seems?

JC: Yes, his tone is very formal and I wrote it that way as part of the character. I wanted the contrast of an extremely proper voice with extremely improper behavior. Damien has spent most of his life reading books — he sees them as his companions — rather than participating in any social activity. He doesn’t even speaking to people. Damien says at one point that he despises contemporary novelists and sticks to the classics. So when he does have to speak to people, he talks like someone out of an old novel.

NN: So could you describe your writing process for this book?

JC: I started writing with only the idea of someone making this discovery—that skunk musk could give you a high that would be similar to what you feel when you’re on an opiate—and Damien’s voice. I thought at first that I would write a longish short story but I was itching to write a novel and found that I liked where things were leading. So I had to rethink it. I sketched out a vague plot with more characters, other subjects to cover, some turning points, and developed a general idea of what was going to happen over the course of the novel. Then, before I sat down to write, I’d sketch the next few scenes, making notes about new characters, little pieces of research and dialogue I wanted to get in. With an idea of where I was going, I’d find it easier to be spontaneous along the way.

NN: You have such detailed descriptions of skunk behavior. Did you do any kind of research on skunks? Observe them in the woods? Or actually find out the contents of their spray? And have humans ever used skunk musk for anything? Like, for example, weaponry?

JC: I didn’t observe live ones. I went to the library and got out books about skunks and learned a little about their behavior, what they eat, and so on. Skunks spray to defend themselves, and they will first stomp their paws, hiss and raise their tails in warning. I wrote this in 1997, and people weren’t using the internet much yet — I certainly wasn’t — but I’ve since gone online and found all kinds of sites and chat groups for and about skunks and people who keep them as pets. I think what people do is have the skunks’ musk glands removed when they’re still very young.

As far as I know, skunk musk isn’t actually used by humans for anything, but it would be nice to have a little spray bottle of the stuff to squirt at people who fart on the subway. I think that definitely could be marketed effectively.

NN: You might have something there. This idea of a SeaLawn, invented by the whacky, brilliant Pearl, Damien’s love interest, is pretty wild too. How did you come up with it? Is there anything in real life that comes close?

JC: Most of the credit for SeaLawn has to go to Ken Keegan, my publisher and editor. Previously I’d had another invention for Pearl that he didn’t think worked as well and I think he was right. Ken’s idea was based on things that are out there — it is possible to produce hydrogen, which can be a great, clean, fuel source, from algae. I think the problem is that it’s difficult to produce enough of it from algae. I came up the specific qualities of SeaLawn, and the idea of it becoming a free-floating weed that could potentially be dangerous to the planet. So it was definitely a collaboration that resulted in a Frankenstein.

NN: I find it ironic that you work at the Bronx Zoo. I know your job as a grant writer came after the book was written, but do you see animals in a different light now? Are they providing you with inspiration for a future story?

JC: I’ve always liked animals. And I’ve always been interested in animal behavior and in how it sheds light on human behavior. And yes, that’s part of the reason I wanted to work at the Wildlife Conservation Society, even though I don’t work with animals. I’m a Development Officer in Foundation Relations.

I once wrote a story in which a man marries a baboon. In my new novel, there is a minor character who is a field vet, whose job is like that of one of the field vets here at WCS. In the novel there is a disease that is spread by humans eating animals who’ve eaten humans, and I describe a little of the barbaric, inhumane conditions in modern slaughterhouses. So yes, animals continue to factor into my writing, in different ways.

NN: Can you tell me a little more about this new novel?

JC: It is similar to Skunk in that it is a satire that involves addictions, much of it takes place in the American heartland, and the activities of the characters will affect the rest of the country. But most of the things people do in this novel are things people have actually done. There is no science fiction. The story involves a cannibal who’s on the lam. He winds up in a town run by a polygamist, pedophiliac Mormon fundamentalist “prophet.” The heroine is a young girl who is trying to escape this nightmare town and the clutches of the prophet. The tentative title is Keep Sweet. So, more weirdness to come.

Justin Courter’s work has appeared in many literary journals, including Pleiades, The Northwest Review, Fugue, The Literary Review, LIT, The New Orleans Review, and the anthology Paraspheres. A collection of his prose poems, The Death of the Poem and Other Paragraphs, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing. He lives in Queens.

Skunk: A Love Story is published by Omnidawn Press (June 2007) and is available for purchase at: www.amazon.com or http://www.omnidawn.com/courter/index.htm