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An Interview with Ander Monson
Molly Jo Rose conducted this interview with Ander Monson over email in January 2006 after a series of long conversations conducted over coffee or other beverages sporadically over the last several years.
Ander Monson is the author of the novel/short story collection Other Electricities (Sarabande, 2005), the poetry collection Vacationland (Tupelo Press, 2005), and the forthcoming book of essays, Neck Deep, which will be published by Graywolf Press in February 2007.
Molly Jo Rose is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University in nonfiction.
UpInMichigan.org: There is an interesting balance in your work between grief and irreverence, evidenced in both the novel-in-stories, Other Electricities, and in Vacationland, your book of poetry (both published in 2005 by Sarabande Books and Tupelo Press respectively). What rests in the middle of these two points and do you consciously write in this “place”?
Ander Monson: Both are sort of antidotes to the other, counterpoints or counterweights perhaps. The whole world is between the two to me—reverence and its opposite, grief and its opposite—that is a good space for me to be in. Plus I feel like I risk sentimentality slash the grandiose so often that I find it hard to take myself seriously all the time. Thankfully.
UIM: Along with the question of irreverence, you make casual language in your writing a high art. Are you aware of this drive in your writing and can you discuss whether this is a conscious stylistic choice? (Is this irreverence possibly a response to the serious state of writing today?)
AM: I like language of all sorts. I don’t know if it’s always a conscious stylistic choice as much as it is a reflection of the way my brain works. Though occasionally the mix is good—it’s pleasing to bury little surprising bombs of language in my language—and thus it is intentional, a way to keep the reader from complacency. There’s a certain element of irreverence caught up in the transgression of it, too, using words you don’t see used in poems. Crappy, for instance.
UIM: The dominant themes in your work are snow, ice, and light. The first two are overwhelmingly familiar to a resident of the Upper Peninsula and are often the cause of death that is also too familiar to someone from Houghton, Michigan. How does the third, light, operate in your writing and in your thoughts about being from a town so far North?
AM: Both snow and ice affect—and are affected by—light. Light filters down through both, variously. These are the triumvirate (or you can maybe throw in temperature or wind, too) for Northerners, especially far-Northerners. Think Finland, for instance, where the relationship with light is even more intense and important. The clearest days tend to be the coldest, too. Sometimes, being up North, light is almost all you have. The world approaches being inhospitable the colder it gets, and the only real benefit is the beauty—whether we mean the system of the world surrounded in weather or the stillness and clarity of silent, perfect cold. Both of these are brought to us by, programming made possible by, light. And I’m a very visual person—hence the design elements and such—so light is understandably one of my major subjects. It is for painters, why not for writers?
UIM: Do you view yourself as a Michigan writer, and if so, what does that encompass for you? Also, what burden of responsibility do you feel you bear as a representative of the Upper Peninsula?
AM: I view myself as a writer, a sort of dorky writer, an Upper Peninsula writer, a Michigan writer, a Great Lakes writer, and a Midwestern writer. Also an American writer, too. These are all useful tags to throw on writers or writing in various ways for marketing purposes, or for convenient packaging or editorial purposes, or sometimes for nefarious purposes. I don’t feel like it’s my problem as a writer to make these definitions. In my editorial work, though, and my teaching and my less writerly thinking I do think that these suggest some commonalities with other writers and with other writing traditions. I do like to think of myself as part of a tradition of writers from or writing about Michigan, my home state no matter where else I am, and I do feel that we are in many ways products of our environment. And hence I am responsible to my home, to my home state and peninsula first to love it. And then to write truly about it (or to lose myself to the mythology of it) as I can.
UIM: Ander, your work is nothing if not a study in form. I have heard you call for a redefinition of what narrative is. How does the form you employ work within the narrative you are telling or is the form its own narrative? (I am thinking in particular of the voices in between chapters in Other Electricities.)
AM: I think it varies depending on the piece. This new book, Neck Deep (and hopefully the title won’t change as it approaches publication), consists of strange essays that think in various ways about form. That is (to me) its subject. And the essays take a variety of forms, too. I am drawn to form as a way of pressurizing language, of pressurizing story. More simply, it is generative for me—playing with form gives me ideas and gets me to places narratively or essayistically (or poetically) that I wouldn’t otherwise get to. Certainly in OE the form of the book offers other ways to read through it, to think about the albeit-fragmented narrative, and to shape the action, language, and characters. And it almost becomes in itself an action or a character, another sort of reconfigured world.
UIM: What questions are you responding to in your exploration of form? I mean, really, when it comes down to it: why mess with straight narrative? What’s in it for writers, or maybe more importantly, what’s in it for readers?
AM: Straight narrative—it sounds so clean and simple, upstanding and American, when you put it like that, and it is of course bogglingly complex as writers of it know—offers the accessibility, the soft fiction of the belief that we are inhabiting a stream of thought, not just reading words on a page. I guess I think of straight narrative as being more stylistically transparent than I’m interested in being. I love style. I love what it does for me (as reader and writer) and the effects it can have on me. I like story too (don’t get me wrong), but it’s an absolute fiction that it can just transparently render the “true” (ha) story. One way of thinking about it is that foregrounding (or at least acknowledging the importance of and constant presence of) style is like acknowledging that words, these weird tools we use to consider and behold the world, are not objective, that “straight narrative” is not objective, and so it’s almost like the idea of implicating the writer in the scenes that are being presented. I like to smudge up that glass so you can see—to an extent, and hopefully it doesn’t distract completely—my fingerprints on it. I like that glass. It’s beautiful. It interests me. And hopefully it interests readers too.
UIM: Both Other Electricities and Vacationland include an index which functions as a continuation of the prose or poetry. Where did the idea for this originate and how did the writing of these indices inform your own awareness of yourself as a writer? Also, will you include an index in your book of essays?
AM: Totally. As it turns out, the piece that originally functioned as an index in OE shows up reconfigured in Neck Deep, albeit not a functional index. The first index I did was the one in Vacationland, that I turned in to my poetry workshop in grad school. And it did something to the words, and then to me. I got really caught up in it. The index in Neck Deep wasn’t originally composed as an index, but as more of a story, but moving it into the index form really made it click, made it activate. Though I don’t think of the index poem in Vacationland as much of an index—it certainly doesn’t index the book like the one in OE does.
UIM: Writers are too often asked the question, who would you count among your tribe, those writers, musicians, and artists who have informed your own creative pursuits? I am risking redundancy by asking you this question now – who has inspired you?
AM: I’d count people like Atom Egoyan and Jean Cocteau, the Brothers Quay, Robert Walser, Charles Baxter, Melville, Woolf, Mary Gaitskill, John D’Agata, Lucy Corin, David Lynch, the band Low, Mark Kozelek, Stephin Merritt, Galaxie 500, Joy Division slash New Order, Depeche Mode, Larry Levis, Richard Hugo...
UIM: Who are you reading now?
AM: I’ve just gotten into Georges Perec, which seems like a major oversight not having read him until now. Or maybe now I’m just perfectly situated to really have him explode on me. His work has completely been exploding all over me this last few months. I’m also reading some of the earlier Antonya Nelson stories, which are fantastic. My favorite book of the last year was Lucy Corin’s Everyday Psychokillers: a History for Girls.
UIM: Some critics of experimental fiction suggest that experimentation is an artifice of form that ultimately alters the truth. Are you concerned with bending the truth as you continue to push away from traditional narrative structures?
AM: Nah. Did I tell you about the three months I “spent” in “jail”?
UIM: Another concern about playing with form is what I have heard you refer to as the question of wankery and what I would just call being too clever. Can you discuss this question and how writers can avoid wankery in their writing while still investigating other avenues of storytelling?
AM: Maybe it comes down to the idea of the form being grounded, being organic, being necessary, tied in some way to the “content” of the piece (and I realize that the distinction between form and content is something I’m trying to play with). There should be a reason for it. Form should spring out of desperation or necessity. It should have some kind of mandate or at least an explanation. At least readers (myself included, by the way—I like reading “straight narrative” plenty well) will want these things. And it seems smart to at least be aware of what readers want out of or expect in writing.
UIM: As editor of the online magazine DIAGRAM, you are inherently invested in making online publication a respectable venue for writers. How do you see the future of online journals, magazines, and newspapers changing and what impact (if any) will that have on print publications?
AM: More and more online magazines are going to spring up and hopefully gain new readers. Print literary magazines are a tough sell in some ways—they cost a lot, requiring institutional support, which tends to tie magazines to creative writing programs at colleges for the editorial internship aspect. And online magazines will gain more and more steam and prestige (they are working their way into the Best American Poetry now in the last couple years, are eligible as official publications for NEA grants, and such), and will increasingly be strong markets for writing. The downside of it is that they won’t pay, for the most part—they don’t have good revenue streams, so they don’t make money. I think print magazines are going to have to be smarter and more savvy about the ways in which they embrace the technology of the printed page: print magazines need to spend more time on the artifactness of the book (sort of like McSweeney’s does), justify themselves as really necessarily print. The print literary artifact won’t die, or anything as grandiose as that, but online magazines will eventually rival them in importance. I mean, my magazine gets to a lot of eyes already.
UIM: You studied with Michael Martone at the University of Alabama, a writer who was fond of reminding his students that while one must go through a whole application process to get a book out of the library, there is nothing preventing them from self-publishing by leaving their handmade books in the library. Has this philosophy influenced how you view desktop publishing and the personal ambitions of a writer toward publication?
AM: Though technologies have really leapt forward in the last decade or so, writers would be wise to consider the marketplace and the academy in their self-publishing plans. I thought about the idea of self-publishing OE, partly just to retain full design and production control, to be able to control every aspect of the artifact, but it’s not always a good idea for a couple reasons. One is that collaborating with editors, designers, and publicists can really bring something new to the book, to the writing—one’s own instincts aren’t always meant to be indulged completely. The second is that if your goal is to find readers, a more traditional press will be much better able to promote the book. OE found a wonderful home with Sarabande Books, and they’ve done a great job getting it out there in the world. Still, I have a sort of anarchist or DIY sensibility, too, partly due to Martone’s work (also another one of my professors, Sandy Huss), and I very much like the idea that these new technologies are creating other ways for writers to get their work out into the world, or other ways for writers to simply compose, to write. Programs like InDesign change what it even means to write, as they offer a lot more flexibility with the page, with design, with image. This is going to eventually turn into something amazing.
UIM: Sydney Lea has a popular essay called “What We Didn’t Know We Knew”, which discusses the act of writing as revelation. How much do you know of your story before you sit down to write it and how much is a product of the writing process itself?
AM: For me writing is always a process of discovery. I would not want it any other way. I have a hard time getting my mind around writers who are able to work in a top-down model, having ideas and plans they want to render. I wish very much I could write like that, but you’re stuck with what you have, I think, and so I try to be open to accident in my work. My worst work is when I think I’m very smart and I know where things are supposed to go.
UIM: I know you to be a huge fan of music, in particular, a huge fan of bands that are experimental storytellers in their own right. Do you see any relationship between this pursuit and your own as a writer? Can you speak to a direct influence of music in your writing?
AM: One of the reviews of OE in the Village Voice compared it to the work of Sufjan Stevens, which I think both flattering and sort of apt. Or at least it’s easy to see why they’d make the comparison—the overflow of excess, the experimentation, the regional focus, and the literary ambition, especially in the lyrics that shoot through his Welcome to Michigan, the Great Lake State and his more recent and masterful Come On Feel the Illinoise. I’d like to return the favor and call out the Duluth, Minnesota band Low who get a nod in the back of OE as the soundtrack to the book. This is completely true—I have a sort of mixtape of Low songs (and one or two other bands show up there too) that I occasionally give to people to listen to while they read the book. I very much like the idea of having all these other media involved, of bringing more to a book than just the text on the page. And much of the book was written to a soundtrack of Low songs, which evoke a certain delicacy and beauty, but with darkness underneath. They feel very essentially Northern to me, sparse, quiet, shimmering, but precise, powerful.
UIM: You refer to the main character in Other Electricities as “yr protagonist”. Would you claim this as yourself and it what ways does this blur lines of fiction?
AM: Nope. Yr Protagonist is definitely a fiction, a construct, a robotic exoskeleton. Albeit one that fits me well in some places, there’s no doubt about that. And that fit or lack thereof does create another tension, another sort of plot in OE.
UIM: I have accused you of writing nonfiction and calling it fiction (as is often the case with first novels). In an effort to prove myself right, I have, on many occasions, masterfully tried to get you to respond to the following question: What happens to the brother in Other Electricities? (Your answer will somehow verify my suspicions. You have circumvented the question a million times before, but now everyone’s listening.)
AM: Ah—that’s a central mystery, yeah, that’s true. And this is explored further in the index essay that shows up in Neck Deep as well as in another manuscript, an offshoot of OE, that focuses more on that character and the big mystery, the What at the center of the story...
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