The Rumblr

Rumpus: In an early chapter of Koan Khmer, Samnang asks his cousin for help remembering their years as refugees, explaining to her how writing about their shared past “helped explain why I felt so different and alienated, why I had so much anger and hate bottled up inside…That after I started writing, it felt like a boulder had been lifted from my chest and I could breathe again.” In response, Samnang’s cousin replies, “There are things I wish I could un-remember.” Can you talk about this friction between wanting to “un-remember” trauma from our past and the urge to revisit difficult times through writing? How exactly does creative writing remove the boulders of our internal lives?

Tuon: In the novel, I have three characters who represent three possible approaches to trauma. There is Bopha, the cousin who wishes to “un-remember.” There is Pu Ly, the uncle who uses violence as a reaction to traumatic memories. As a male elder, he uses Cambodia’s patriarchal culture to hurt others because he himself is hurt. Samnang Sok, the protagonist, uses writing to tell his stories and thereby unburden painful memories and find some sort of healing. I don’t think complete healing is possible, but I think writing helps. There are studies in which survivors of war, genocide, and violence (physical, sexual, and emotional) are asked by therapists to write scripts where they tell and retell the event that caused PTSD. The more they write, the more they are able to name “the event” and control the narrative. If folks are interested, check out Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman as well as the work of other trauma scholars like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub.  

Rumpus: You call Koan Khmer an “autobiographical novel.” What’s the difference between approaching the material as a straight-up novel versus an autobiographical novel, and why did you choose this container? How did the autobiographical elements drive the plot of Koan Khmer? What fictional elements gave you the opportunity to have fun with narrative discoveries?

Tuon: The novel is loosely based on my life. Like Samnang, I lived in the refugee camps in Thailand, grew up in Revere and Malden, and went to college in Long Beach. But the specific details are made up because I wasn’t there when events happened or I was too young to remember. Take the chapter “Yellow Bird” as an example. I only heard about the soccer match brawl between Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees. I wasn’t there when the uncle came home beaten by the Thai police. And there was no yellow bird. I created the yellow bird as a symbol of violence against the innocent. I also wanted to show Samnang’s tenderness and compassion. Then there’s the Lok-Ta chapter, which was completely made up. The story needed that chapter to show the contrast between Lok-Ta’s way of being and the American way of being. When I wrote that chapter and then later read it to a live audience, I wept. There was so much in that chapter of what Tim O’Brien calls “story truth.” In other words, the narrative takes fictive turns when the story demands it. Then we have the mermaid chapter, which was totally true. But in our modern world, that passage could be described as magical realism in a novel full of realistic sensibilities. Of course, Samnang isn’t me. There are things he says and does that I find ridiculous and pathetic. I wanted to show how lost, confused, and troubled Samnang is. For these reasons, I categorized Koan Khmer an autobiographical novel. 

Rumpus: What role does spirituality or the characters’ and your Buddhist beginnings play in the plot of Koan Khmer?

Tuon: I think Koan Khmer is a spiritual novel. As a former head monk at a monastery in Battambang, Lok-Ta does embody Buddhist values of kindness, compassion, and patience. But he also presents to Samnang (and by extension to readers) a Cambodian belief that everything in this world is alive—the trees, the forest, the lake, the birds, the animals—all contain spirits. This Cambodian animism reappears throughout the novel in the forms of dreams and visions. Samnang’s parents aren’t dead; they are spirits who protect and guide him on this journey of self-understanding and self-invention. At the novel’s end, even the trees in Pennsylvania are alive with spirits. Ultimately, I wanted to capture this old way of being in the world and place it within an American context. This, for me, is what makes Koan Khmer a Cambodian-American novel.    

Rumpus: What was your writing process like? Let’s start with the Hilma af Klimt poems, a sequence of which was featured in BOMB Magazine. 

Jackson: When I visited the Guggenheim in 2018, I attended the exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s various series of paintings titled Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. It was one of the highest (if not the highest) attended exhibition in the museum’s history. People lined up around the building and the museum hours were extended. But I didn’t start writing my “Hilma poems” (as I call them) until much later. I think “The Swan No 1” is one of my earliest poems of the series which I wrote in 2020 during the pandemic.

I taught art history for almost ten years and so I am particularly drawn to ekphrasis. My process  for writing this collection involved purchasing the exhibition catalogue and a few volumes of the catalogue raisonné of af Klint’s work and staring at the images for hours. I searched for what was familiar in her abstract art; something for me to hold onto and incorporate into images in my own work. I additionally visited locations in Sweden that would have been important to her. I was able to see the Stockholm Cathedral, a site she visited often on holidays with her family when she was young. I also drove to the island of Munsö where, as an adult she built a studio (that is sadly no longer there.) Both the architecture and landscape of Sweden informed my choices of words and images for my poems. In order to bridge the distance between us in both time and place, I braided my own childhood geography of Central Florida with that of her Swedish environment. Despite her notoriety as an abstract artist, af Klint trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, painting, among other subjects, landscapes and botanical studies. These early images certainly found their way into her abstract painting and eventually into my own poems. 

Rumpus: Turning next to other poems in My Infinity, did they come to you immediately or gradually?

Jackson: The subjects of my poems emerge slowly, though the images I use might be immediate. In my poem “The Burning Bush” the small, invasive tree that I use as a symbol grew at the corner of our house in Vermont. And I added it to the poem immediately after staring out our window as I received the news of Brianne’s murder. Its bright red leaves stuck with me and became an imprinted association with her unspeakable and untimely death.

I like starting my poems with a strong image and allowing that image to shift into a metaphor or simile of some kind that then supports the design of the rest of the poem. I love that you call the images that come back to me “apparitions.” What a wonderful way to think about how images appear (or reappear) into my consciousness from seemingly out of nowhere. How fitting considering the spirits and seances that inhabit this collection.

Rumpus: There are couplets, one-stanza poems, and poems where the caesura is freely deployed. Could you speak to your use of poetic forms? 

Jackson: When reading a collection of poetry, I am happy to encounter a variety of forms. As a matter of fact, I just finished reading Paisley Redkal’s West. In it, she moves through such an exciting selection of poetic forms: a contrapuntal, sonnets, ekphrasis, couplets, snaking or meandering lines, long columns, lists, and persona poems to name a few. Each turn of the page is like opening a new present. I want that same feeling for my own readers. But, I should say that I don’t believe in the arbitrary use of form. Or variety just for the sake of variety. Denise Levertov said, “Form is never more than a revelation of content.”  For me, this is also true when writing poems that engage with visual art. I take the elements of the art (line, shape, texture, color, space, value, and form) into consideration when building a poem. I want the poem to, in some way, aesthetically model the painting, even if it is only on an intuitive level.

Rumpus: Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world?

Jackson:  Wow! Let me see. I encourage readers to take some time to get to know the paintings of Hilma af Klint. I’m not sure when they’ll be in the United States again. I hope it might be sooner than later. Also, beyond the poems about visual art, this collection is filled with an affinity for and a close observation of the natural world. Recently, I decided to take a year-long class to become a Tennessee naturalist. I recently moved to Tennessee, and I didn’t want to write about my new environment without taking the time to learn about it. Google is good, but it is also kind of cheating.  I encourage everyone to come to know all that is immediately around them. Urban wildlife is a topic many authors are thinking about now. Certain species have adapted to a landscape we have manipulated for our use. But there are so many species that are suffering for the same reason. The voiceless doesn’t just include the human world. As poets, as witnesses, we can be that voice.  

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Rumpus: How did you decide which tías to include? Were there any that didn’t make the final version?

Mojica Rodríguez: Several archetypes were cut, and in hindsight I wish I had included others! I ultimately knew that I was going to miss some archetypes, because I do believe all books have biases from the authors writing them—I knew I was going to have my limitations. And I name that in the introduction of the book. I wrote out the Femme Primo archetype, and cut it because I felt like that was not my story to tell. I think folks like Edgar Gomez (author of High-Risk Homosexual) are doing a better job writing that person out, fleshing that primo out in his own writings, better than I ever could because I am not that person.

Rumpus: So much of the book reads as a call for compassion and an invitation to heal from complicated family dynamics. Have people in your family read it yet? If so, what has their response been? 

Mojica Rodríguez: My family treats me like Tu Tía La Loca, so I am silenced often in my immediate family spaces. They do not read my work, for the exception of my sister, and they do not acknowledge my career as a writer. I was raised with very specific beliefs on womanhood, respecting your elders, and silence as protection—which in turn means that my defiance of all that is threatening and scary. 

I write my books to say the things I wish they’d allow me to say to them, if they were not so quick to dismiss me. I write down the full sentences that do not get to come out of my mouth without their defenses coming out.

Rumpus: I appreciated how you de-centered the “Pretty Prima” in her chapter, and instead focused the blame on her family for raising her as a pawn for their own social capital and proximity to whiteness. Why was it important to you to include the “Pretty Prima” in the book, and why was she saved for last? 

Mojica Rodríguez: I did not arrange the book chapters, my editor did. I get too attached to the book, to be able to see it as a reader might, so I relinquish that power to my editor.

But writing her out, because I have witnessed her, was complicated. As the not-pretty prima, because I do look more Indigenous, and non-Black Latines are still very anti-Indigenous and over-prioritize proximity to whiteness, I found resentment. 

When I wrote the first draft, I saw that I had placed blame on someone who is just a product of years of colonialism and brainwashing. So, after talking to my therapist (j/k lol! but not really j/k), I was able to see her fully. Because it was never her fault, it was never any one of our faults, and so once we can see that we can move beyond demonizing ourselves and instead hopefully we can turn our attention toward the systems. It was a trauma-informed approach, really, that helped me write this book and that chapter.

Rumpus: You write that “a decolonial lens” was important to bring to your chapter on “The Tía Who Sees Fantasmas.” You also note that conversations about ghosts and the thin veil between us and the spiritual world are seldom met with discomfort or skepticism from people raised in BIPOC low-income households. Can you share a bit about why it is important for us to honor and make space for the unexplainable in our lives? How did “Afro-circular” logic help in your construction of this chapter?

Mojica Rodríguez: In academia I learned how often low-income people are pathologized by outsiders, with oftentimes no real sense of what they are even saying. With that in mind, when I was thinking of the archetypes, the “Tía Who Sees Fantasmas” was an early entry in my list. It was so obviously going to be an archetype because so many Latines I know have personal ghost encounter stories. 

We can sometimes assume logic is just linear, from point a to point b, and the world tells us men are more logical and women are more emotional. With that framework in mind, we need to a) realize how deeply patriarchal that thinking is and b) expand beyond that limiting thinking about logic. Molefi Kete Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea was the first time I saw that challenged, where communication theory is explored through the categorization of Euro-linearity values and Afro-circular ones. And for me, thinking beyond Western logic allows me to open up my mind to other possibilities that make sense to people in the global south, even when it does not make sense to a Western perspective.

So that chapter has no clear conclusion with answers, to the Euro-linear lens, but it explains so much to those of us who understand that ghosts are real and it can be complicated at the same time. That chapter is written with a different logic centered, which I would not have been able to do without a decolonial lens.

Rumpus: You reference “childism” a few times throughout the book, citing that we have “normalized adult supremacy,” which routinely subjects children to “unchecked anger misdirected at them due to unprocessed trauma.” How has this particular prejudice against children informed and guided your body of work? 

Mojica Rodríguez: While I am not a parent, I was a daughter and a child who is now an adult healing from the wounds of my childhood. Concepts like generational trauma help me understand that it goes deeper than just blaming my parents. My book is meant to give explanations, not justifications. And with that in mind, I write about wounds inflicted on children because they are so vulnerable. Children are truly so vulnerable and we have all been socialized to want them without often thinking about the consequences of becoming parents—and that is oftentimes how we inflict the most harm. 

I have been in therapy for a decade, and seen many terrible therapists before I found a great therapist who taught me that not all therapists are made equally. And I am actually learning how to regulate and learning how to identify and name my feelings. I am learning how to express hurt better. 

I write with a picture of me at age six next to my computer, because it motivates me to write for her, to advocate for her.

Rumpus: What are you currently working on?

Rumpus: I feel like you and I have talked over the years a lot about the uses of strangeness in fiction. You talk about it a little here from the point of view of a writer—by making the world stranger, you can also write about our own world, a kind of pinhole camera—and I wonder if you can talk about what strangeness means to you.

Guild: This is such a fascinating question, and it gets me thinking about what strangeness is in art. When something is "strange," this means it has swerved from our expectations, that it has somehow defied a normal or typical pattern in its genre. It's funny, because there are whole genres—like surrealist fiction, which I write—where strangeness itself is the expected pattern, and therefore not "strange" at all! 

To be truly strange in surrealist fiction, with all its genre expectations, I think you need to zag at times in the opposite direction, to go for realism when the reader expects the bizarre. This was part of my hope with Plastic: to write a surrealist novel that also has the intimate, personal stakes of traditional literary fiction, so that the two different genre patterns would keep subverting each other, creating a tension that matches the tensions in Erin's world. Just when you think you're in this zany, wacky metafiction novel where the characters get "Brad Pitt's Disease," here comes the section where Erin cares for her father as he dies of BPD—far more Alice Munro than Thomas Pynchon. 

This connects to what I was saying in the last question: my desire to capture something of what life feels like right now. Seeing Trump high in the polls, seeing our eco-crisis ignored, seeing a global rise of fascism, many of us feel like we're trapped inside a satirical metafiction novel (and not a particularly well-written one!). But this doesn't change the depth of our connections to each other, or the inner depth of our emotional and spiritual lives.

 And this leads to another thought: what is the point of strangeness in fiction? Why seek it at all, as a writer or reader? To my mind, when something is truly strange—and strange in a way that's satisfying—it's because it finds a new way to render experience, a shift in form that gives a new window onto our personal or collective existence. In the 1740s, when Samuel Richardson pioneered detailed character interiority in Pamela, this gave readers a very strange and new literary experience, but one deeply rooted in their own personhood. Three centuries later, nothing could be more expected in a literary fiction novel—detailed inner lives are the definition of normal. Though a little less common, the same point can be made about Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness or Kafka's dream logic narratives: innovations become widely-used craft techniques, and these techniques no longer startle us. But these formal innovations were effective at the time, and continue to be effective now, because they train their gaze on something crucial about the human experience and can still speak to us centuries after their strangeness has worn off. 

Rumpus: I love this answer so much, from Pamela to notes of Alice Munro in Plastic. I wanted to ask you about the visual in the book. One of the things that struck me is how clearly I saw some of the things in the book (things that don't exist in our world, like sentient anthropomorphic waffles), while at other times I didn't need to see things in great detail because I was so busy listening: to monologues, song and dance numbers, et cetera. Even though I read the book on the page, it's somehow a real multimedia experience. Maybe my question is just, “How'd you do that? And what do you see when you write?”

Guild: This is all so wonderful to hear. In many ways, the true setting of the novel is Erin's mind, and it's a mind immersed in visual media—particularly television, which she uses to escape her traumas. When Erin looks out on the world, she sees it as close-ups and wide shots, as scenes in front of an imaginary audience; her own thoughts feel to her like a confessional to a camera in Reality TV. Like so many of us today, she's deeply disassociated from reality—all of life feels like a screen—and I wanted this type of cognition to come through in the form of the book, to immerse the reader in this space as well.

In the early drafts of Plastic, when I was writing in limited third person, I always felt like I was telling the reader about Erin's mental state, from the safe remove of a more traditional narrative form. When I began to write the book as a TV show, suddenly I could see the plastic world through her eyes and the distance between us vanished. It's incredible how evocative language is: When I'd write, "the camera zooms in on Jacob's face," or, "the camera pans across the room," it felt like this whole other visual part of my brain switched on, and I could write (and see!) the setting in much more detail. And I had to admit how steeped I am in this media myself, that a few phrases about a camera could do this!  

I didn't realize it until later, but I think I cribbed some of my formal approach from Joyce's Ulysses—I should give credit where it's due! So much of Ulysses is told through the lens of his era's dominant media—as a play, as a series of newspaper stories, as an academic text, depending on the section—and Joyce wants us to remember that we receive our whole sense of the world through these rhetorical structures, that there's really no such thing as "objective" perception. But the experience of Ulysses is one of continuous fragmentation—a major Modernist theme—and I wanted the form of Plastic to feel fluid and seamless, in the fluid way that visual media tries to present the world. 

Rumpus: You are also a musician, and have released Plastic, the album. Is it a companion piece? An essential part of the experience? 

Guild: Thanks for asking about the music! I do think of it as essential to the experience because it takes you directly to one of Erin's most important mental spaces: a space of song. Erin slips into surreal musical numbers throughout the novel—usually at her times of peak emotion—and the album is a way to experience these moments in full, with melody and arrangements for her lyrics in the book. The songs on the album are also chronological, so you can experience the whole story in about 40 minutes of music. 

The album didn't feel like an "adaptation" of Plastic—the way a movie or a musical would—but an expansion of a space already in the book. It lets Erin step from the pages and continue her story in a different narrative structure, with the amazing singer, Stranger Cat, giving her voice. I love the music videos we made as well, and what these add to the storytelling experience.

Rumpus: I know that you worked on this book over years—I saw some early iterations and was always surprised by how much changed from draft to draft. You ended up with a book that was both different in nearly all its particulars and yet at its heart, the same book, undeniably. The same in its soul, and its ambitions, and life force. How did you keep the book from seizing up as you worked on it? I suppose this is another way of saying, “How did you keep it alive, and yourself interested? How does it feels to have it out in the world and done?” 

Guild: I suppose the easy answer to this is Erin herself—staying close to her as a person through the years. (It’s been a long time since I thought of her as “fictional,” though I suppose she’s technically not alive!). With each new draft, I felt like I was coming to know Erin better, slipping more fully into her world. 

Everyone writes and develops their fiction differently—there’s no one correct way—but I usually need a feeling of discovery as I work, a sense that I’m arriving at the truth of the characters and the world, rather than “making things up.” Learning that Erin is plastic, that she breaks into musical numbers, that she gave her father hospice care, that her sister is a terrorist—all these were discoveries while I was deep in the drafting process, and then I’d get excited and start reshaping the book around them. It would take months, or in some cases, years, and I was lucky enough to have brilliant readers like you giving me feedback and guidance along the way. But it was always grounded in Erin, and in becoming more in touch with her mind and heart and world. That often changed the book formally as well, which was a fun surprise of its own—as I mentioned before, her story only made sense to me when it was written as a TV show.

Rumpus: What seeded the idea behind this novel? 

Attenberg: I actually wrote about this in my newsletter [Craft Talk]. During the pandemic, I was looking at a lot of vintage clothes on Etsy and kept seeing these white puffy shirts. I started thinking about a woman wearing it and being somebody's cool aunt. Generally, characters show me the way into a book. And so, the cool aunt, Shelly Cohen, was the first character for me. I pictured her at a kitchen counter in the suburbs talking to her family, with all of them leading different lives, interested in each other but also always a little annoyed with each other.

Rumpus: Does that dynamic have any resemblance to reality? How much of yourself is in this book and these characters and their relationships?

Attenberg: None of these characters are like anybody that I know, really. But they’re adjacent to people I know. They feel like they live in a neighborhood I’ve lived in before. Or maybe they’re a third cousin. Someone you met once and feels familiar, even if you can’t say exactly who they are. 

Rumpus: How do you find the central core of a story with multiple main characters? What are they all hovering around? 

Attenberg: The way time moves forward in this book is the core, and how the characters are impacted by time. Time is both the structure and the thrust. For example, the way they communicate at the beginning of the book has changed by the end of it, often expressed in terms of technological advancements. And those kinds of changes are ones that can only emerge specifically over the passage of years or decades of time.

Rumpus: So, technology changes relationships in this book. But you could say it just provides your main characters with new ways of ignoring each other. 

Attenberg: There’s one scene near the end of the book where two characters are driving in a car and a third one calls them on a cellphone. And they really don’t want to talk to this person, but there’s no way of ultimately avoiding it: we live in an era where you can track people’s locations all the time. It’s vastly different than earlier in the book, when it’s Nancy’s twenty-first birthday and she desperately wants to talk to her family, and she has to leave her house, walk down to the corner payphone, put money in it to make a long-distance call, and hope that somebody's there and picks up at this specific moment in time. In a way that phone call is so much more meaningful. But their communication still has meaning at the end of the book, when they finally do break through to each other. 

Rumpus: A lot of important life events in this story aren’t actually in the book but are referenced offscreen or obliquely. How did you decide what to put in the story versus what to reference offscreen?

Attenberg: These people are not confrontational until it’s too late. They’re trying to figure out how to exist with a problem without actually dealing with it. So, these things feel far away to the reader because they feel far away to the characters. They don’t like dealing with things head on. But there are still feelings that are very much present. 

These things trigger other issues down the line, though. If you don’t deal with something in the moment, eventually it’s still going to show up. One of my characters doesn’t tell another character something very important, and when the other finds out, she is furious with her. It impacts their relationship forever. By choosing to avoid conflict, she created another conflict in the process. And a lie by omission is still a lie, and that’s certainly a plot point. 

Rumpus: I also wanted to highlight one particular line: “He thought it would be easier to explain themselves to the world if they lived in the same place, when actually they only had to explain themselves to themselves and no one else.” It feels like the heart of this story.

Attenberg: I wouldn’t say that line is the heart of the book, but it’s a touchstone line, one I hope people highlight on their Kindles, ha. The characters in this novel grew up during a certain time and place where they felt like there was a path for them with specific milestones they had to achieve to please the world in a certain kind of way. I think most people understand now that we don’t have to stay on that conventional path, that we don’t have to abide by anyone else’s rules. I think the characters in the book are happiest when they figure that out. Even if it takes a long time. 

Rumpus: On top of writing novels, you also run Craft Talk and the yearly “one thousand words of summer” challenge, with daily letters of encouragement from various authors. Does this community enliven your own novel writing? 

Attenberg: It keeps me on track. And every year there’s a letter from one of the contributing writers that hits the right chord and comes at the right time. That’s the beauty of these letters of writing advice. You never know when you’re going to need it. This year, that letter came from Jennine Capó Crucet. It was about writing from a place where you know you can throw it all away. So that’s what I did. I gave myself permission to just write something I could throw away. Then I loved everything I wrote, and now I’ve written thirty thousand words this summer, the new beginning of the book, and it's great. I definitely feel the accountability. Every year. We're doing it together. It's equalizing.

Rumpus: Even somebody who's written ten books needs that accountability sometimes.

Attenberg: People need it, and it works. It really works. But also, you don't need it. We can write all the time on our own. But during one thousand words of summer, it feels like a friend is there with me. 

Rumpus: So, you’re working on another novel now. How many more novels do you have inside you?

Rumpus: I appreciated the versatility on the page. The humor is electric and sharp, and the dialogue is so astute. At the same time, the novel is deeply poignant. You also include a section written entirely in Farsi, allowing us to further access the characters despite the boundaries of language. In terms of craft, what does it mean to use different threads to tell a story?

Khakpour: Iran is really important when I’ve been grappling with Iranian-American life. I haven’t been able to return to Iran since I was a young child. I was born there, and I lived there for several years, but I don’t ever really feel comfortable writing a work set in Iran. I only have limited knowledge of that. Obviously, I can imagine it, but it’s not enough for me. There are many writers who do that a lot better than me; who write very directly from that experience. Iran, in almost all my books, becomes a symbol of an impossibility. It’s always tied to yearning, and longing, and characters wanting to go back to a homeland that they’re separated from. I wanted there to be a real distance between Iran and Iranian-America. In the novel, there are moments where I have relatives and friends in Iran calling the family, and telling them that they’ve heard about certain events in the US, and their show, and I wanted the Iranians to be different from the family. I wanted there to be this really big cultural divide. That was important to me. 

I didn’t think that I would get away with the section written in Farsi, either, but my publishers didn’t touch that at all. In fact, we just had this funny situation where we have a wonderful, well-known actress who’s Iranian-American doing the audiobook. She only speaks some Persian, and she felt that her Persian wasn’t good enough to read that whole section out loud. So, as we speak, my mother is in a recording studio in LA, reading the mother’s (Homa) part that was all written in Farsi. My dad, too, helped me write that part, because I didn’t want it to sound like my Persian. I could have written it in my Persian, but I wanted it to sound like someone of a different generation writing a little section on Iran, and nature, and things like that. I had my dad do a lot of it, and now my mom is reading it. It’s kind of a weird and unique thing for an author of books. 

Rumpus: The last two books you published, Sick and Brown Album, were incredible works of nonfiction. How did it feel to revisit fiction? Was it muscle memory?

Khakpour: I love fiction. Fiction has always been my true love, and I would have never been a writer if it weren’t for fiction. It was writing nonfiction that felt a little bit like tourism. I was working on Tehrangeles the whole time through all of these books, and I thought that Tehrangeles was going to be my second novel. It's funny, though—my nonfiction is more popular than my fiction. It’s always been like this. The amount of readers my memoir Sick had is more than all of my books combined. The success of that book was slightly frustrating for me, because it kind of proved what I was worried about—ultimately, my greatest function for people was as a nonfiction writer. It’s nice to go back to fiction, though, to remind people that this is what came first and foremost, and what I will always think of most as writing. As art, really. Nonfiction as art feels a little bit secondary for me, even though the greatest nonfiction, of course, incorporates all of those craft elements that create great art. I compartmentalize pretty heavily, and it’s just a totally different mode to be writing in nonfiction. I just try to handle that in a much more straightforward way.

Rumpus: This is also one of the first novels I’ve read that incorporated the pandemic. It plays a large role in the story, forcing the characters to confront various aspects of themselves, and each other. I’m curious about what it meant to revisit those early months of lockdown, and how it functioned in this setting.

Khakpour: I’m someone who is interested in things right after they happen, and I want to read about life as it happens. There was a challenge, though, in writing a funny book about the pandemic. I wanted the book to obviously be satire, and to be fun, but my real life experience of the pandemic was purely horrific. I lost seven friends. I lived in Queens, New York, which was very hard hit. As I was working on this book, the soundtrack was just nonstop ambulances 24/7. I felt like I did with 9/11; I was in the center of the hard hit area, and it was very disturbing. 

Ultimately, I was a character that doesn’t really exist in the book. Maybe Mina, to some degree. Mina is longing for a communal experience, and she’s trying to educate her family. And then you have someone like Roxanna, who does my worst nightmare, which is throwing a super-spreader party. That was also a fun climax for me. A book that has a super-spreader party as its climax seemed thrilling, because the odds of me ever being in that situation were zero. Then there’s someone like Haylee, of course, who is so young, and so impressionable. She basically loses her mind during the pandemic. She goes down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, and ultimately becomes MAGA. In looking at Iran and some of the responses with Gaza, people are seeing the conservative Iranians very visibly right now. Right in UCLA—the heart of Tehrangeles—the aggressors tearing apart encampments are conservative Iranians. There’s an assumption that the proper position as an Iranian is to be anti-Palestinian, which is insane. Their own internalized Islamophobia is such that it has to take any position that’s very anti-Iran. There’s a feeling that the family is kind of Republican, or Republican-adjacent, but Haylee is very blatantly conservative. It’s to the point where she keeps arguing with her sisters that she’s white, and Haylee wants to identify as white. Ultimately, she was one of my favorite characters to write, because she was just so different. I could write horrible things. That experience of writing things that you’re just so opposed to; that are so insulting to your total soul—in a sense, it was kind of thrilling. Writing her, and then trying to find a way to save her—it was a difficult tightrope act.

Rumpus: I want to explore identity erasure. With Roxanna in particular, we see what it means to reject her Iranian-ness completely. 

Khakpour: I think the whole thing about Roxanna pretending to be an ethnicity that she’s not, which is the dramatic tension in her arc, is pretty real. People may think I made that up. It’s very surreal, and how could that really happen? But there are a lot of Iranian youth, I think, who pretend to be an ethnicity that they’re not, because Iranians often do have the luxury of passing for lots of things. 

In all of our lifetimes, whether you're Gen Z, Gen X, or even a boomer—you know that there’s been a lot of anti-Iranian sentiment. This is especially true in the West, but it occurs everywhere. Even throughout the Middle East there is so much anti-Iranian sentiment. It’s very tempting for young people that are already very concerned about issues of identity to then just take that leap over there. I wanted Roxanna to be in this pickle where she’s built this other identity for herself, and it works perfectly that her last name works with it; her dad’s occupation, the fact that the sisters are spaced out in school… everything works out until the idea of reality hits. And that’s kind of a funny thing. We’re talking about reality TV, but we’re also just talking about reality. Suddenly, you have to be really real. Reality TV, of course, wants to exaggerate and embellish the real elements. How can they not talk about ethnicity? Now she’s just in a state of absolute terror about what she can do to make that work, and in the end, it kind of becomes a non-issue. Nobody cares that much, but to her, it’s the end of the world. There’s this whole reckoning with her boyfriend, who is Italian, and then it’s his forgiveness of her in the end, and what that all means… I think that it was a good conceit for a piece of fiction. And I think it’s also a very real thing. I think almost every Iranian I’ve ever known—whether for issues of protection, or whatever it could be—has pretended to be someone they’re not. I’ve done it before; certainly around the 9/11 era. There were times where I felt unsafe. I would say that I was Italian. I think it’s pretty understandable, even though it's extremely comical.

*** 

Rumpus: The five sections of the book contain complementary poems that are also very different from one another. Why did you structure the book this way?

Zeller: I think of the book’s shape as a Wunderkammer or Commonplace book on a self, fractured by contemporary pressures and mended by everyday joys. I often quote Kazim Ali on his own writing of Bright Felon, a hybrid text which he says, “wrote itself out of requirement.” I feel this way about my own organic forms, both in terms of poetic structure and in terms of a collection’s arc. In a lineage with Denise Levertov and Hopkins, I do believe art rises up and out of us and we need to listen to its need for unconventional orders, disjunctive music, and surreal images. EJ Ianelli asked me about this—which he called “difficult poetry”— in a Spokane Public Radio interview back in fall, and I told him that rendering a difficult world into art often requires us to take shapes that fragment narrative. 

In the case of Out Takes, the book’s five sections feel to me like a cabinet of curiosities or a curated set of museum rooms. It begins with a frontis poem, “Field Girl Come Home,” which is both an invocation/invitation from the mud fields, and a documentation of setting in which we might imagine the book takes place. Section 1 follows that [with] a set of poems that are “documentary” and then a series of “out takes” from that documentary—developing the conceit of film, through deep image poetics. Section 2 are all autobiographical poems of the speaker’s self, past and present. Section 3 practices embodied poetics by taking the voice of a persona: a woman who has been institutionalized because she believes she used to be a mermaid. This mythic, lyric imagining, I hope, creates a space in which we ultimately believe women—who are rarely believed, in our imaginary and real worlds—and also follow these women’s emotional truths to deeper understandings. Section 4 is a set of spells, which reiterate the need for magic as a healing space. It also suggests that revision and re-seeing allow us to fully inhabit. This section repeats two versions of one poem—the way the book keeps insisting that more than one way of existing deserves equal space. Finally, Section 5 returns us to a series of outtakes: surreal dreamscapes that pull from the book’s imagery and narrative suggestions and deepen those threads. We are invited to imagine, again, the whole book as a film with a cutting room floor ready for more collage-making.

I hope the book also serves as an invitation to create form, imagine one’s own art and art life as complicated and worth sharing in whatever shape it needs to take, to invent models, to move outside normative expectations for both poetic and book structures and allow the material itself–and our deep imaginative spaces and diverse reading canons—to guide us. 

Rumpus: The language in your poetry is thoughtful, but dangerous. Precise, but deadly. I feel like my skin is being detached from me as I'm reading. What is it about language that can do this? 

Zeller: Detached skin! I love this, and I’m overjoyed that you had that visceral experience. It recalls the well-known moment in Emily Dickinson’s letter to T. W. Higginson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.”  I love that—a feeling so many poets have written about since, and I do not pretend to really understand it—poets, who make art with words, sometimes translate an experience or feeling so successfully that someone else is able to also feel it, across time and space and in another body. That is what I always aspire to, and I’m honored you felt it. 

Rumpus: You began your reading with, “I am most comfortable when I am dissecting a dead cow..." I know I might be misquoting you, but you ended this part by saying, "I want to see the worlds inside of this..." How many worlds does a person possess deep inside?

Zeller: I was reading from my essay, “Scavenger Panorama,” originally published in Willow Springs Magazine and then listed as a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. I like to think that Vivian Gornick and anyone else who read it understood the Joan Didion feeling of being on nodding terms with our past (and present?) selves, the myriad worlds we each contain. I hope that it gives other writers—particularly those who don’t always feel themselves represented in literature—permission to share those worlds, to create space to expand them. 

Janet: How do your inherited landscapes influence your art?

Maya: My landscapes are both coastal and inland, in the Pacific Northwest, as well as probably some percent Iowan (my mother is from Des Moines). I hope that my connection to and love for these various watersheds and home-spaces comes through in the poetry—that it may be riparian and delta and converge and sheetwash and rivulet and soaking wet and barn-roof-beat, as well as ferned and mossed and also logged and fished and mud-rutted and salvaged and repurposed and gritty and glittery and full of tall grasses and flung seeds, hay and scrape and grass-cut legs and rusted gears. I hope it is as beautiful and complicated as the people and plants and animals in these places and the people who pass through, too. I think of other contemporary poets who write of rural spaces with both gentleness and unflinching questioning—poets like M.L. Smoker and Joe Wilkins and Vievee Francis and Kathryn Smith and Canese Jarboe, and feel an unwavering depth of gratitude that I get to be alive and working with language during this time, when the pastoral and antipastoral and necropastoral coexist in our conversations about life and love, on and off the page.

Rumpus: You collaborated with Kathryn Nuernberger to compile Advanced Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology. It’s an ideal textbook: the most inclusive, representative sampling of modern and classical poetry. Is this the reason you traveled to England? What is your dream for this book?

Zeller: It’s always an honor to collaborate with Kate, and we were really thrilled to be able to bring more light to the poets in its pages and moreover, to encourage every person writing to curate their own canons. That, really, is our dream for this book—that it gives permission to poets at all stages of their careers to dream their own ways forward in a web of rhizomatic literary and other ancestries.