writers questionnaire

Response to writers questionnaire:

1. What do you consider good poetry, fiction, or CNF? Who then by your definition, is a poet or a fiction/CNF writer?

Good poetry, fiction, ect. would be a piece that elicits an emotional subconscious response in which a reader becomes aware of something they previously didn’t. Ideally the ultimate global effect of a good piece of writing will create empathy within a group. Historically people like Mary Shelly, Shakespeare, JD Salinger, Hemmingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Carver would be among the less contemporary. Mary Gaiteskill, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Saffran Foyer, Michelle Tea, among the more contemporary are some examples in my opinion, of people who create “good” works.

2. Write about something you learned recently, away from school, that you are proud of.

I learned that every action has a reaction. That something as simple as not calling someone back, or dropping a cigarette into a trashcan can cause a big ordeal. I picture it as a zoom outwards into space, and all these tiny specks moving… it’s hard to put into words, but something is always happening, and everything you do in consequential.

3. What do you hope to accomplish with a single piece of written work?

I hope to create empathy. I hope to show people that things are not always as they seem and there is always another way to look at something. Even if I only affect one person, I will feel like I have accomplished something.

4. What is modern?

Modern is such a crazy thing to try and define in this day in age. I feel like when someone says modern they turn into a TV screen flashing ads for Mac-books and skinny jeans or something, but for me modern is just a state of awareness. I guess being aware that change is constantly happening, that trends are coming and going faster than anyone can catch a hold of, and the universal state of affairs is all flux as well. So modern in terms of Literature, would be the ability to express these changes, view them, dissect and mostly be aware of them. Modern is knowing that all is life, and all is flux, all in now.

5. What is original?

Original… hah, here is a subject I could rant on and on about. Original is hard to come by, I don’t think anything is original anymore, instead we have today (2009) our own form of “modern” originality, which is individual perception, and distortion. Now, to be original, you need to view your contemporaries and your heroes and mimic them, only to distort them. Use their formulas to obtain different outcomes.

That or you totally have to lose your marbles and just go with it.

6. What is the present?

The present is this really crazy place between past and future where everything happens so fast that it is almost automatically past tense. Present is the number you are reading on the clock, its forward momentum in giant spirals and it’s a freeze frame of you blinkingeatingbreathing while everyone is paused mid action. The present probably exists in the same realm as space storms, black holes, Genesis P. Orridge, giant squids and poltergeists….


7. Where do you imagine yourself, if you imagine yourself as a poet or fiction/CNF writer, in ten years?

I am a huge pessimist. I am dead convinced that humanity will be eradicated in the very nigh future. That said, assuming we don’t all die in a massive earthquake/flood/nuclear bomb/TB outbreak/mass suicide cult, then I hope to be twice published (and embarrassed by my first novel) living with a cat, a typewriter, my brilliant writer/artist partner, and a really excellent French press in Shangri La, New Orleans, or maybe some backwoods southern county channeling Henry Miller and day dreaming of some fantastical love affair while writing about post apocalyptic pathology.

8. Do you believe the poet, or the writer is the true historian?

I believe that 100% the writer is the true historian. Percy Shelley in his essay A defense of poetry wrote “Non Merita nome di creatore, sennon iddio ed it poeta” (None deserves the name of creator except god and the poet)” I wrote an essay recently called “Empathy Through Synthesis in the Romantic Ideal: A Defense of Literature in Society.” in which I explain why I believe so much in the power of art and written word. I am going to excerpt a small section where I talk about a conscious awakening that occurs through literature which I believe will answer this question.

“A writer must contend a million times over with the insulting question of Why? Why do what we do? Why create texts, explain our theories, and share our memories? Many will say that literary pursuits are vain and pointless. That there is no real purpose for someone to talk through text and expect the masses to care, and this is a very good point. But people sometimes are blind. They only see things as they appear: the chair is composed of four legs, and two square segments. A non-writer thinks: the upholstery is red and the walls are large and white. But a writer, artist, or poet will sit in the same room and say No. These walls are not just white, but they are shields against the unknown, they are containers and vessels. They are ears when no human ears are available. The poet will lend his eyes to an ignorant man and show him how the world around him is not just shapes and colors, rather concepts and ideas, movement and feeling. The writer lends his eyes as he does his words. When there are no words to explain intangible feelings or experiences, a writer loans his own to his society.
A bomb drops in Hiroshima and thousands perish slowly, painfully. A mass genocide occurs as nations turn their back to their suffering brothers; a war wrecks half the globe. These leave people scared, scarred, and void of any voice. Theodore Adorno once said that "…to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”( Adorno, Theodore. "An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society.") What Adorno means is that after a travesty like the holocaust, lyrical poetry has no place in society. I beg to differ, because the writer is able to pull from himself the ability to put himself back into these horrific places, and to recall with acute detail the suffering around him. It is not only for record, but for history, and therapy; the horrors of history beg us to create new paradigms. And while certain conventions of expression may have been stifled by such horrific occasions, a new voice must arise to help create apathy. Percy Shelley writes "Poets are the un-acknowledged legislators of the world”(Shelly, Percy. "A Defense of Poetry.") Born from our experiences is not a verbatim technical history, but the metaphoric value that comes from this.


9. How do you think your written work stands in relation to your other coursework, the rest of your life, the rest of the visible/invisible world?

I try to create fiction that is as far away from me as possible. I am a fantasist, I don’t sleep much, so that extra 8 hours a day really helps with the creative flow. I definitely pull from my own life, whether that is a really fantastic argument with a lover, or some strange creep on the bus. I like to create real characters who can, and probably do exist in real life. Only I like to torture and distort them, give them extreme flaws and magnify them, which seems to be a pretty real trend in actual life (the exploitation of ones flaws) so although my characters are distant from myself, everything around me serves as inspiration and everything in my life is relevant to one another through my writing.

10. What, to your way of thinking, is alien to good work?

Well, I think appreciation on a deserved level is pretty alien to good literature. I also thing that you cannot have normalcy and formulas and expectations in good writing, but I guess I am still trying to figure out what exactly “good writing” is. Oh! and Queer writers writing non queer fiction is pretty alien (for now…)

11. What was the last non-fiction book you bought? fiction? poetry?

The last book on non-fiction prose that I bought was “Me talk Pretty Some Day” by David Sedaris, and I couldn’t even bear through the first chapter… I’m sorry, I think his writing is unbearably trite. The last book of fiction I bought was tonight actually and it is “Mister B. Gone” by Clive Barker… I’ll tell you what I think! The last book of poetry was Amy Silbergeld’s chapbook.

12. Whose was the first written work you came upon that made you want to write?

I have two answers to this question. a. I have always known that I wanted to write, I loved reading and writing just seemed natural. b. the first time I ever felt the urge to really create a world of my own and share it with people was when I was 13 and I was OBSESSED with this series of fantastical teen lit called “Dangerous Angels” By Francesca Lia Block. She had created this magical realm that moved me in such a profound way that I immediately immersed myself in all things F.L.Block. I felt her characters and still to this day have a deep love. It was in the middle of reading her book for the second time that I wrote a full coherent short story.

13. Do you judge poetry, fiction, CNF by any ethical standard? Do you think aesthetics and ethics are mutually dependent or independent terms?

Yes. I judge everything by a cocktail of ethics, aesthetics, and bias (shaken, not stirred please…) I cannot read a book that I know contains blatant discrimination or hatred, but from the authors mouth. If the author him/herself is projecting their skewed beliefs onto the characters and there does not seem like there is anything discerning from the author and the character then I believe that is a breach of ethical standards. I also wont read anything I know that deals with extreme opposition to things that I hold dear to me (that is for my sanity’s sake) and I also cant bear to get through a book that completely disregards the beauty of words. Henry Miller, Nabokov, Michelle Tea, Anais Nin, Mary Shelly, Oscar Wilde, they were all provocative writers who wrote about extremely controversial things that were unethical to some, but they kept the audience in mind and they also paid their dues to the beauty of words. They played with their own form and grammar and yet still were able to make the cocktail just right.

14. What writers from past centuries would you choose to have a nice, long dinner conversation with?

Oh Man! okay here are a few (in no particular order) :
Anais Nin & Henry miller
Lord Byron
Oscar Wilde
F. S. and Zelda Fitzgerald
Vladimir Nabokov
Anthony Burgees
Alan Ginsburg
Francesca L.Block

15. Name a few writers from differnet countries or cultural origin with whom you are familiar.

G.G. Marquez
Jiri Grusa
Cees Noteboom
Baudelaire


16. Why write?

I am going to (obnoxiously) excerpt from my essay again to help answer this.

“… if one were to extract themselves from the public by ignoring literature, (or more globally) we were a society apathetic to creative voices, we would become a society filled with the wicked and grow increasingly amoral. Percy Shelley says in “A Defense of Poetry” that:
“Poetry strengthened the faculty in which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.” (2, 961)
Shelley explains in “A Defense of Poetry” how the importance of the writer is not just to lend his voice, but to create. To drill into his imagination and bare witness to everything he sees, regardless of how vicious, splendid, or unbelievable the event. So that through him the reader can experience truth as well. Shelley writes “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth….the [poem] is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator which itself the image of all other material.” He goes on to write “the story of particular facts is as a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”


Without the imaginative pictures painted by poets, there would just be words. Thick, dense, texts filled with philosophies and theories serving no purpose but to exist. It is through the imagination that the poet is able to relate to his audience, bend on one knee and let the public sip his knowledge, awakening them to the possibilities of foreign ideas. We can easily speak of the fallacies of man, love, death, betrayal in simple scientific and technical terms, but it becomes poetry and relatable when you can speak of love as a nightingale singing in night, death as a dense silent fog, betrayal as a succubus living in the depths of the sea. When an intangible feeling becomes an image, a public can imagine and relate. Through this relationship forms a mutual understanding felt globally. As every poet writes, and every person reads, a bond is created linking man to each other and subconsciously, we raise our glass in a toast to the unity of species.
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moves not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” – Percy Shelley”
So, then being able to create in this manner… I am obligated to share if for nothing else, than to awaken.