Note: No one in this story is innocent, but their names have been changed, anyway.

The program was called “Explorations,” which makes the whole thing seem like a setup for a particularly bad joke. I was fourteen years old, and, by that point in time, I had a lot of important feathers in my cap. There was the feather for attending marine biology camp, the feather for being a published writer, the feather for using the word “fuck” in public, the feather for owning bellbottom jeans and a lava lamp thirty years after they were in vogue.

Those are the sort of things that make you a person of great distinction.

But, at the age of fourteen, there are certain life experiences which I had yet to encounter, and this fact dampened the quality of what feathers I did have, rendering them no more attractive than those of an avian oil spill victim. That’s a sad picture, isn’t it? Those poor birds with the oil-soaked feathers, being scrubbed raw with Dawn dishwashing liquid. Oil spill birds are the new drowned rats, don’t you think? Alicia, this girl who went to marine biology camp with me, once told me that I looked like a drowned rat after I got out of the shower. I didn’t let it get to me, because Alicia had no friends and she smelled like fish, and not in the way that everybody who goes to marine biology camp smells like fish. That was back when I was twelve. I was such a confident badass when I was twelve. Less so, when I turned fourteen, and began to take notice of how many feathers I had yet to acquire.

Like the feather you get for kissing a girl for the first time.

You might think that that feather is hot pink and covered in glitter and rhinestones, but that would be the feather you get for being a drag queen bingo host in Vegas. The feather you get for kissing a girl for the first time is actually soft and delicate and pure white and it smells like whatever your favorite smells are (freshly printed newspaper and dirt and saltwater, if you’re me), because girls are magical like that.  At age fourteen, I’d never kissed anyone before, and I’d certainly never kissed a girl, because when you attend an all-ladies’ Catholic school you don’t do that sort of thing, unless we’re talking about a specific genre of porn, in which case, you do do that sort of thing, and you’re paid for it. What I knew about kissing was limited to what I’d read in books, and what I knew about sex was limited to what I’d learned in marine biology camp, a fact that was made painfully obvious when, during study hall, ­­­­ Lisa asked me if I knew what sex was and I looked at her over my glasses, librarian-style, and responded:

“It’s the process of combining genetic materials.”

And as she walked away, laughing, I called out after her:

“Did you know that male barnacles have the largest sexual organs in proportion to their bodies?”

And that was the first time anyone called me a dyke.

I hate to think that I’ve proved Lisa right, after all these years, but even if I did, it doesn’t really matter, because I’ve seen pictures of her on Facebook, and I know that she’s destined to end up as country club arm candy and one day she’ll be ransacking her walk-in closet, engulfed by a cascade of Ralph Lauren polo shirts in varying shades and hues, and she’ll start crying and pulling at her hair and screaming, “I’ll never have every color of the rainbow!” and then I’ll burst out from the closet and say, “That’s because the gay community co-opted the rainbow years ago, you silly Trophy Wife!” and then my ridiculously hot girlfriend will descend from the skies, Ride of the Valkyries style, on a rainbow Unicorn-Pegasus named Sappho, and we’ll fly off into the sunset, and Lisa will cry “Dykes!” after us but I won’t hear her because I’ll be too busy having mind-blowing sex on the back of a Unicorn-Pegasus.

Fourteen year-old Katie didn’t believe that she’d ever actually like girls.

Then again, she also didn’t believe in the existence of Unicorn-Pegasi, which just goes to show you how dumb I was at the age of fourteen (or maybe how delusional I am at the age of twenty-one, I don’t really know which).

But this was all before Explorations.

Explorations took place at Wellesley College, a prestigious women’s college (read: a prestigious lesbian college) in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I loved the place, for reasons that would quickly become obvious. Years later, I’d end up being accepted to Wellesley, but I chose NYU instead, because NYU seemed way less gay than Wellesley. Also, after fifteen years of single-sex education, I decided that it was time for a change of scenery below the torso. The Explorations program itself was not single-sex, but the lesbian aura of the Wellesley campus didn’t take a summer vacation. Thus, from the moment I stepped foot on those vaguely breast-like rolling hills, I might as well have been inhaling sweet Sapphic smoke from a vagina-shaped hookah. I’ve never actually been high, but I hear that it can be disorientating, and even this pseudo-high did result in some disorientation. Sexual disorientation, you might say, which, when coupled with the newfound freedom that comes with being liberated from one’s parents for three whole weeks, can be absolutely intoxicating.

I ate only Werther’s caramels for two days straight, because I’d never tried it before.

I dyed my hair with Sun-In, because I’d never tried it before.

I shaved my legs, because I’d never tried before.  

And, as we’ve established, I kissed a girl for the first time, because –

“You’ve never kissed anyone?”

Sarah was a friend of a friend. I wanted to be her friend, sans middleman.

She had buck teeth and freckles, which, on her, were so charming.

“No,” I muttered, wishing that I had buck teeth and freckles, too.

And I remember lying down on the bed and feeling how I imagined it must feel when you’re about to have surgery. And all of our friends, like silly, stupid nurses, were giggling in the corner, and not one of them had the decency to offer me anesthesia.

I didn’t have to wait long, though. The surgeon was on top of me.

It seemed suspiciously like malpractice.

“You might feel kind of weird,” she said, which is the same sort of understatement as:

“This won’t hurt a bit.”

In order to ensure that it wouldn’t be a “real” kiss, she placed her ungloved thumb over my lips, not giving a thought to the sterility of the implements she was about to employ.

“Ready?”

“Mredmee.”

I wonder if she washed her thumb! I thought.

I wonder if she brushed her teeth! I thought.

I wonder where our noses will go! I thought.

The negotiation of noses during the kissing process always boggled my mind, on a conceptual level. Everything about it seemed cumbersome and decidedly unromantic. I assumed that kissing was something that was done straight-on, forcing the noses to bump into one another with all of the grace and sensuality of a Hulk-hand-smash. This was how kissing turned out to be when it was done with a guy named Christopher, so I guess it isn’t a totally invalid theory. But eventually, when I would become a bit more experienced with people other than Christopher, I’d learn that it’s about compromise, that you both tilt your heads just-so and you fit together, even when you’re certain that you won’t. And here’s how I know that, at age twenty-one, it’s been so long since I’ve kissed someone: I’m beginning to forget about the placement of noses all over again. I hope that I haven’t actually forgotten how to do it. I hope that kissing is like riding a bike, like you never forget, right?

What they don’t tell you is that, sure, you never forget how to ride a bike, but after you ride a bike for the first time in a while, you sometimes forget how to walk.

So maybe I don’t want kissing and bikes to have anything in common, unless we’re talking about the presence of those sparkly handlebar streamers. It would be nice if streamers fell from the ceiling every time you kissed someone, but then it wouldn’t be a kiss, it would be a surprise birthday party, and even surprise birthday parties lose their excitement after they happen for the tenth time.

I had a surprise birthday party, once. I was nineteen years old. I don’t know if it really qualified as a surprise birthday party, because I was fully aware that a party had been planned.

What made it a surprise was the fact that I’d forgotten that it was my birthday.

I regard surprises as one might regard Band-Aids, which is to say, if you’re going to pull one off, do it as quickly as possible.

Sarah seemed to sense my request for a fast and painless procedure, because, suddenly:

Her lips were on top of her thumb.

It was nothing like what actual kissing is like, but I didn’t know that at the time. To me, that was legitimate kissing, and, therefore, the feelings I experienced were legitimate feelings.

And, although it was woefully brief, it felt like it went on forever, as the best and worst moments in our lives often do.

When we parted, I paused before asking if we could do it again.

And then she laughed. Hard.

“No, of course not.”

Oh.

“You’ll get the hang of it, sometime. When you do it with boys.”

Of course! Boys. Boys. Right! Sure! Silly me. That’s what we’re practicing for!

So I laughed and said something like, “Duh, I was just kidding! I don’t want to do it again! Yay boys! Boys boys boys boys can’t get enough boys!”

But what I really wanted to say was:

“Bullshit, Dr. Sarah. You go to an all-girls school too. We both know what’s going on here. And need I remind you that you’re the one who called me out on my lack of experience and chose to perform the surgery in the first place? Maybe you were just trying to humiliate me in front of our stupid friends, is that it? Or maybe you thought I was just so pathetic that you wanted to be a Good Samaritan. Well, I’ve got news for you, doctor. You’re not a Good Samaritan. You’re a…a Bad Canaanite.”

I wasn’t very good at comebacks when I was fourteen. Not even hypothetical ones.

I didn’t know what to do with my hands or my face or my racing heart. So, as stupid Sarah and the other stupid girls began to settle into some stupid conversation, I tried to sink into her bed as best I could, wishing I could drop right through it, like Shadowcat in X-Men. Shadowcat’s real name is Kitty Pryde. I always liked her. I hope it had nothing to do with the fact that her name is Kitty, and that’s another word for “pussy,” which is another word for “vagina.”

I remember staring at the ceiling for a ridiculously long time. I remember waiting for the heat to drain from my face and getting frustrated when it didn’t. I remember doing that thing you do when you close one eye and pretend to squish someone’s head between your thumb and pointer finger, but I couldn’t bear to look any of my friends in the face and Sarah had an Orlando Bloom poster on her wall, so I squished his head instead.

Fuck you, Orlando Bloom, I thought, for being Sarah’s object of passion.

Fuck you for being a man.

And then Orlando Bloom said, “Katie, stop being such a bitter little lesbian.”

And that’s when I realized that I’d fallen asleep on Sarah’s bed.

“You can get off my bed now,” she said.

And then she laughed. Hard.

Girls can be devastatingly cruel. I don’t understand why I find them so attractive.

I got up, slowly, as one is apt to do when they’ve just had extensive medical work done.

(For the record: my insurance didn’t cover the procedure.)

I should have requested the strongest painkillers she had, but, instead, I pretended that I had to call my mom and I hightailed it back to my own room, where I doctored myself with a homeopathic remedy of Werther’s and back-issues of Teen Vogue. But the sweetness of the caramels seemed cloying and artificial, so unlike the subtle sweetness of another person’s lips. And leafing through the pages of Teen Vogue only added to my anxiety, because, all of a sudden, I didn’t know if I found the girls on those glossy pages so pretty because I wanted to emulate their impeccable fashion sense or because I wanted to kiss them. It’s something I still struggle with when I read magazines like that, which I do – shamefully often, in fact. When someone catches me with one, I usually insist that I bought it as a joke, and then I start talking about this fascinating article that I read in Scientific American or The Economist, because I have an ego the size of small developing country.

My ego was the reason I didn’t want to go back to Sarah’s room and demand that justice be served, potentially with a side of chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne and a book of smutty lesbian pulp fiction.

I first realized that I had a massive ego was when I was seven years old.

Seven is the age of reason, according to the Catholic Church.

When I was seven, I was lying in bed, and I was trying to find animal faces in my floral wallpaper, and I got this picture of myself in my head. It’s me, and I’m forty-five years old, and I’m alone, and I’m crouching over a busted Kenmore washing machine, and I’m in tears because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and I’ve never felt so impotent in my entire life, or maybe just since the last time I tried to fix something.

And then I wonder which scenario is worse:

The one in which I’m despairing because I’ve thrown the instruction manual away.

Or the one in which it’s sitting on the counter, but I’m too damn proud to reach for it.

That image often comes to mind when I’m faced with a situation that calls my ego into question. So it makes sense that it was what I kept picturing as I lay on my bed, beneath a pile of Werther’s wrappers and articles about sexy summer hair, except, this time, I envisioned myself not only as a pathetic grown-up, but as a pathetic grown-up lesbian, which, somehow, seemed infinitely more tragic. I convinced myself that I was doomed to a life of unrequited love and faulty appliances. I don’t need anybody anyways, I thought. I can get a cat, or maybe a Malaysian baby, and we can have a nice life together. I don’t need some stupid man or some stupid woman or some stupid washing machine to feel good about myself.

And then I heard Sarah’s laugh from across the hall – not the same condescending laugh she’d used before, but a warm, genuine laugh like the crinkling of a hearth, a laugh that reminded me that, while I was wallowing, some people were actually enjoying themselves. They didn’t deserve to enjoy themselves. Not when I was stuck in the quicksand of misery. I planned to go over there and drag Sarah into the quicksand of misery with me. I imagine that quicksand wrestling is far more difficult and far less sexy than, let’s say, mud wrestling, or pudding wrestling, but my mind was made up. I was going to march into her room, and give that heartless harpy a piece of my mind. I was going to kick down the door with my Birkenstocks and look her straight in the eye and yell –

“…Sarah?”

There she was, on top of my friend Jennifer.

Jennifer had huge almond-shaped eyes and braids.

I wished that I had huge almond-shaped eyes and braids.

Sarah looked up from her patient.

“Oh, hey Katie. What’s up?”

What’s up? I wanted to scream. What’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up, Sarah. I think I might be in love with you and here you are, whoring yourself out for the good of sexually ignorant public, even though you balked at the notion of giving me a bit of extra practice. That’s what’s up, you slutcuntbitchwhoretwatface.

But instead, I just stared at my hands.

Maybe they really were creepy alien baby hands, like my friend Mary always said.

Maybe Sarah thought they were creepy, too.

Maybe Sarah thought I was creepy.

And I said:

“MmmmnothingmuchIjustwannaseewhatyouguysaredoingorwhatever.”

“Yeah, okay.”

And then she turned her attention back to the other girls before asking them:

“Okay, ladies, who’s next?”

I clenched and unclenched my creepy alien baby hands.

“So, what, you’re just doing this with everyone now?” I asked, with all of the wounded affect of a political wife.

Sarah smirked.

“Yeah, it’s fun.”

I tried to find fault with the situation from a logical perspective.

“But haven’t some of them already kissed people?”

“Yeah, so?”

So much for logic.

“I don’t know, it just seems…”

“Seems what?”

“Unfair.”

“Stop making such a big deal out of it!”

“I’m not!”

“Yeah you are!”

“No, I’m not, I just…”

I was losing steam. I needed a second wind. I needed someone to wipe my brow.

“I thought it meant something,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” It didn’t seem worth repeating.

“You’re such a little freak!” she yelled.

“At least I’m not a bitch!” I spat back.

“At least I’m not a dyke!”

And that was the second time anyone ever called me a dyke.

“I’m not a…dyke.”

I tried to get the word out as quickly and surreptitiously as possible, as one might try to remove a piece of gristle from his mouth when dining in the presence of a king or an ex-wife.

“You liked that kiss way too much, didn’t you?”

“No,” I lied. “I just thought that it meant…”

And then she looked at me with something that seemed like pity, at first, but, from a different angle, in a different light, perhaps, could have been disdain.

“It didn’t mean anything, Katie.”

And then she laughed. Hard.

I ran out of the room, in a poorly masked attempt at self-preservation.

It was the first time I heard the words “It didn’t mean anything,” in the context of a kiss, but, unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last. I would hear them again, frequently, at gay old NYU.

“You know what your problem is, Katie?” my friend Jonathan asked, over Valentine’s Day cupcakes.

“What?”

“You need to stop kissing straight girls.”

I was offended.

“You need to…stop…kissing…straight girls,” I retorted.

Jonathan is gay.

(I still wasn’t very good at comebacks.)

But it could have been worse, right? At least those all of those straight girls didn’t end up making out with each other, like my friends Mary and Nina did. And when Mary and Nina made out, under the guise of “practicing for boys,” it was in a hot tub. In Florida.

It wasn’t done out of malice. I get it, guys, the fact that I sort of maybe like girls makes me a liability when it comes to kissing.

Katie might like it too much!

Katie might get hurt!

Katie might think it means something when it really means nothing!

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Katie!

I began to think that it would never mean anything when I kissed a girl.

So I kissed some men.

Sometimes it meant something, which is good to know.

And sometimes it was just a cigar, which is also good to know.

I don’t purport to ascribe meaning to something when it isn’t there.

I don’t just go to a library and compulsively pull out the dictionary and cross out all of Merriam-Webster’s definitions and replace them with my own.

Because when something really does mean something, you know.

Here’s how you know:

Last summer, I kissed a girl and I knew that it meant something for the first time because, when I kissed her, all I wanted to do was read The Three Musketeers aloud together and crack open geodes together and brush our teeth together and spit out our toothpaste at the same time.

It meant something because she meant something.

“You’re really something,” I would tell her.

“Or maybe really something else,” she would say.

So sometimes, something means nothing.

But sometimes something does mean something.

And other times: it might mean something else.

Which, as it turns out, can be just as nice.

More of Katie Eisenberg’s Famous Battle Cries at Used Furniture.

Before I’m out of my tie and slacks she’s already loading the car parked out front in the spot it took me twenty minutes to find. It’s too late to head out, I’d like to say, the forecast is calling for rain, but it’d be little use with her in this state. “Can I ask where?” I say.

“What?” she says. She disappears out the door hauling the last of the gear. I catch her by the shoulders on the way back.

“Lily,” I say. She looks me in the eyes for the first time. “Where are we going?”

I count the houses along Boathouse Row as we drive against the shore traffic, trying to remember how long Lily and I have been together as we pass the exit to my parents’ old place. Lily starts out mapping the hike she’s planned—up into Kittatinny Ridge to Mount Tammany then along the Appalachian Trail to Sunfish Pond—but by the time we reach Bethlehem, she’s quiet, focused on the nascent headlights in the waning light. I look over at her with the glow of the setting sun peeking over the rise of her nose. She has dark skin and mahogany eyes. Her wavy black hair has a presence of its own, less so since she’s cut it. It used to envelope us as we kissed. We’d stay that way for hours, the smell of her, where she’d been that day, what had clung, the only scent between us.

“What’s the rush all of sudden?” I say.

She keeps her eyes on the road. “I had to get away from the city. There’s too much going on. I need to get some clarity.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine.” She nods jerkily. “I’m just happy to get out of there.”

We met one summer when we were both working at a sleep-away camp in Upstate New York. She was from Burlington then, I was living in Boston. I first saw her through a bonfire on the beach beside the camp’s lake. I’d crossed to her side and asked if I could sit. She handed me a beer. “You’ll need this,” she said. We watched as the crackling red logs crumbled under the weight of each other. Stayed until there was only smoldering earth. I could still taste the sun on her shoulders that first night. She’d ran her fingers slowly over my face like she was a surveyor of imaginary lands, and we’d slept outside before the cold and the dew woke us.

Crunch of gravel, fog lights off. A blue haze cloaks us as we reach the trailhead and a sparse rain begins to fall. Lily throws me a pack and jerks the other onto her own back. “Ready?” she asks, as I’m still clipping in.

She starts up the steep incline and stops before long to toss me a headlamp as the rain falls harder. The two cones of light in front of our eyes become the only visibility—rocks, roots, and mud below, a cage of trees on either side. “You sure we shouldn’t head back?” I say. She’s bounding up the path already, head down, out of ear shot or ignoring me. Through my obscured beam, I watch as she pulls further ahead. “Lily,” I yell, and she stops. “Let’s turn back.”

The rain is streaking down her face. She has to squint. “It’s not far,” she yells. “Let’s keep going.”

She continues on at a brisk pace and I try to stay close, hoping not to break an ankle or worse in the spot she’s put me in. Just when I’ve hit my rhythm, a flash of lightning fissures the sky and I slip and scrap my knee. Lily’s off ahead, a specter skipping from rock to rock in the distance. As she crests a ridge, an explosion of thunder reverberates through the trees; another flash illuminates the forest and all the darkness turns to space.

At the top, Lily’s already setting up the tent. Two other tents share the grounds. “Kids from a summer camp,” she yells over the rain. “Counselor said he doesn’t mind if we stay.”

When we get the tent up, soaked through to the bottom, we lie down and I curl around her. She’s shivering. I should be mad—I have the right under the circumstances—but her shivering shuts up all those feelings in me. I want to ask her what this clarity talk is about, what I can do to help. I know she’ll say it’s not that simple or else dance around the issue. I decide to save us both the trouble. I pull the hair away from her ear, “Hell of an idea,” I say, and bite it softly.

“We should get out before the kids wake up tomorrow,” she says. Her teeth are chattering. “They were here before us.”

After that summer I moved up to Burlington. Lily waited tables at a sushi joint and I bartended on Church Street. On our off days we canoed on the lake or drove out to the surrounding mountains for hikes. When we could afford it, we’d take a week and go down the Appalachian, live off jerky and iodized water. We’d swim naked, sleep on cliffs or by water’s edge, sip cheap whiskey and make love with the moving night sounds around us. Back then, we lived another way. Now we look like weekenders, hipsters up from the city for a jaunt in the woods.

It was no one’s fault. My mother got sick and we had to move to Philly to take care of her. Living costs more there. I caught on with an insurance company and Lily went back to school for her teaching certificate. She changed. She wore more, did less. She took to working with a fervor I didn’t think possible. I’m sure I changed too. It would’ve been unfair of me to think we’d live that way forever.

I’m woken by the sound of boys’ voices and clanking mess kits. Lily’s still asleep. When I grab her shoulder the first thing she says is, “Shit.”

When we emerge from the damp tent, a troop of eyes are on us. One boy catcalls Lily and the rest break out laughing. “Cut it out you little bastards,” a voice yells. Their counselor, a blond haired Aussie asks if we’d like to join them for breakfast. To my surprise, Lily accepts.

“What camp are you from?” she asks.

He says a Native American name then hands us each a bowl of oatmeal and a Pop-Tart.

“I’ve heard of it,” she says. “On Regis, right?”

“Right,” he says, his attention split between us and the campers.

“We met while working at a summer camp,” I say. “Years ago. Have been together since.”

“Six years now,” Lily says.

The counselor smiles. The streak of zinc on the bridge of his nose crinkles. “That’s great,” he says.

We descend Mount Tammany and follow the trail along Dunnfield Creek. “Do you remember…?” I say but she doesn’t acknowledge me. I decide to make a game of it. “Do you remember the seventy foot bridge we jumped near Chateaugay…Remember that time the bear got into our food sack and we lived on gorp for three days…That hiker with the three legged dog who said he’d been on the trail for a decade.”

“Yup,” she says. Yup, yup, yup. Doesn’t look back once.

I don’t know what’s wrong, but she can have her way. I don’t mind. The clouds have cleared and the sun is on my face, each wet leaf winks at me as I pass. There’s the smell of damp wood, laurel and magnolia, the sound of dripping and flowing water. I start kicking rocks and singing that old Eddy Arnold song at the top of my lungs: Do you remember when you loved me / Before the world took me astray? / If you do then forgive me / And make the world go away-a-a.

Lily turns. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she says.

“Nothin’ darlin’,” I say. “Just serenading you.”

“Serenading me?” she says, then mumbles to herself in Korean like her mother does on the rare occasion the three of us find ourselves together.

“Can’t trust him,” I say, wagging my finger, mimicking Mrs. Ko. “Brought up different.”

Lily shoots me a cutting stare and I put my hands up. “I should’ve listened to my mother,” she says.

She pauses. A breeze filters through the leaves and rustles her hair. “I mean that,” she says, and turns back up the trail.

I sing: I’m sorry if I hurt you/ I’ll make it up, one day. / Just say you love me like you used to / And make the world go away-a-a…

There’s the sound of splashing water and soon we’re by cascades then a small waterfall that empties into a deep pool. Lily grins. She drops her pack, slides her shorts down her narrow hips and throws her shirt at me. She enters the water as a blur of brown and white, and comes up a different creature. As she climbs out and walks toward me, a band of sunlight sashes across her breasts. Her skin is goose-bumped. She takes my hand. “Away-a-a,” she says.

The trail mellows. We leave behind the fallen trees and slick rocks, and come to a grove that bottlenecks then opens onto a large pond. Lily finds a flat area to set up camp and I collect firewood. Before long I’ve got a spark going, kindle lit at the base of a stick pyramid, and Lily’s boiling water on the stove. As she pulls our dinner out, rice and beans, and adds the cheese and hot sauce in increments, it feels like we’ve never left these trips, never become insurance agents or teachers or parkers of cars. “That was long overdue,” I say, when we’ve finished eating.

“Yeah,” she says. “It was.”

“Any other surprises?” I say.

She goes to her pack and pulls out a pint of whiskey. Takes a healthy sip that scrunches her nose then caps the bottle and passes it to me. “I’m glad you dragged me out here,” I say.

She smiles and looks out at the water. “We needed to get away,” she says. She puts her hand out for the whiskey. “Let’s just enjoy the time. Let’s not worry about anything.”

I throw more wood on the fire and she huddles into me. We look into the flames until our eyes hurt from the hot, and pass the bottle back and forth. Lily’s face goes red like it always does. I pull her legs onto my lap and kiss her neck. I say, “Remember when we first met? We were like this. Sitting by the fire, by the water. I knew we’d be together,” I whisper.

“I didn’t feel it so much,” she says. I can see the movement of the fire in her eyes. “Not that first night, I mean. I didn’t think we’d turn out the way we did.”

In the tent, her hair brushes over me. There’s the smell of smoke and sweat, the whiskey, sweet on both our breaths. Through the thin blue material, the moon’s light seeps in. “I love you,” she says.

“Why shouldn’t you?” I say.

She doesn’t answer.

I fall asleep, deep and dreamless. Morning comes. A cool breeze blows over me. A few birds chirp in distant and uninterested rhythms. I open my eyes and see the tent door writhing in the wind. Lily’s gone. I don’t look to see if her pack’s gone too. I lie back down and pull the sleeping bag around my head and wait to see if she’ll return.

More fiction at Used Furniture.

you said these were only growing pains.

your hands are bigger than you are now
listening to old country music
you hold planets in your palms, rolling them around
making them smooth
I know they hurt but you don’t complain about it

the last time I came home you made cornbread
you poured me a glass of milk and
told me I was gettin’ so strong.

More poetry at Used Furniture

The Reviewer: Joellyn Powers

***

My hope is that people will find a page and read it. I hope they’ll fall in love with it and look for the book.

If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be married to your best friend – who also happened to be a complete stranger – then Jac Jemc’s first novel, My Only Wife, is a message in a bottle that’s disintegrated a little bit, one that has some seaweed and maybe a dead crab lingering along with the written word. It is almost just like the book pages the narrator’s wife drops from her apartment window, hoping a total stranger will find one and will become so enamored by the language that he or she will just have to find the whole thing.

Jemc writes from the point of view of the husband, crafting a story centered on a loving man and his eccentric wife who records the stories of strangers. Most every chapter begins with the phrase “My wife…”, creating a distanced perspective that evokes an Aimee Bender-like surrealism that creeps around the edges; we, as well as the narrator, never truly understand anything that is happening in the world. Anything at all.

Jemc wields a deft hand when it comes to penning beautiful phrases. In one gorgeous scene, the narrator’s wife begins smoking again. As the reader, we watch the husband watching his wife enjoy a cigarette, an experience that is so far removed it almost comes full circle and becomes a conjoined, united action. “I knew I should think it was ridiculous that [my wife] opened a window so widely, multiple times a day in December when the snow was beginning to accumulate. I was supposed to be even more disgusted by this in the morning. But I wasn’t. I liked the way she looked.” Here, Jemc’s narrator battles with himself over his own point of view: he knows how he should view the image of his smoking wife, but what he truly sees tells him otherwise; beauty triumphs over a filthy habit. Much of Jemc’s collection of scenes between husband and wife resemble this, with two perspectives battling against each other until neither overcomes, but a sort of neutrality develops that eventually settles into love — until that love is not enough anymore and the wife disappears.

This novel is lovely, with lovely phrasing and lovely characters and a lovely and strange understanding of the world. But there is still a sense of repetition that I could not shake while I was reading through the story. It almost seems too long, that fifty or even a hundred pages less would have been enough to suffice for the story Jemc tells between an overly loving husband and a progressively diminishing wife. The distorted timeline helps — we are never too far in the past or too far in the future to feel excessively distanced — but there is nevertheless a disconnect between character emotions and the emotions the reader is expected to feel for the length of an entire novel.

Despite its admittedly minimal flaws, Jemc has done something quite extraordinary with her first novel. She has created a world that is at once familiar and at once strange. Just as the husband can never quite get close enough to his wife, the reader can never quite grasp where Jemc is taking her characters on their journey. With that kind of ambiguity, who ever needs a happy ending?

***

Joellyn Powers (Books Editor) will be entering the MFA program for fiction at American University this fall. Her work appears in Bluestem, Twelve Stories and Metazen, among others. You can follow her on Twitter @hipsternonsense, or on her blog about nothing at especiallyfreeing.tumblr.com.

from Gentleman Practice

you appeared like a body bag
fulla hymnal books
unzipped in half I

never saw so many door jams fall
outta anyone’s mouth
into math like that when

Tennessee put its crooked smile
on a wadded up map
and sent you packin’

west

good

gospel gospel got god
stuck to the rock he made and
and he mighta made it larger than us
or it mighta served to save this place
sure I coulda swore I heard you calling
for a shot at a grip on vice
doesn’t mean your mouth was moving
doesn’t mean I even heard you right

all I know is that your skin keeps calling
and I don’t care if it’s a busted flint
‘cause every time you pull your thumb down on it
I get [up up] back up to my feet

again

all of them

move move
like an offering plate
on’m one by one
it’s a penchant for a savior
a tendency to over – run
whatever shook do not get shook up

whatever’s lost you don’t get lost
even if they say you must give more than
everything you ever offered up

I know a voice does not come easy
I know the words fell out in bites
I know the moment when the
abandonment looked a lot like flight
you pulled whatever got left

inside

out right

*

We Were Emergencies

from Gentleman Practice

We can stick anything into the fog
and make it look like a ghost
but tonight
let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows,
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.

Tonight
let’s turn our silly wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in our pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts.
Move forward
and repeat after me with your heart:

“I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.”

Make love to me
like you know I am better
than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this.
But I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized

that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it,
that we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it,
that if my heart
really broke
every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.

But hearts don’t break,
y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I’m having a fantastic time.

*

Print Flocking

from Last American Valentine Anthology

He wrote to you with firecracker chalk
on a blackboard background

from a free-standing landing pad
held together by choir claps

over buttercups spraying
out the mouths of doves.

Getting to his point
would require starting over

at the outer loop
of your ripple effect

swinging monkey bar style
arm over arm

parallel to parallel
minding the gaps.

Sometimes
it takes a deeper breath

to hover on holy
against the current.

He wasn’t falling out of love with you.
He was falling out of ways to tell you.

*

Healing Hermann Hesse

from Live For A Living

Hermann wants to eat nicotine
sometimes.
He asks
for a lot.
He paces space to make himself nervous
because some people are better at surviving than living.
If you wanna get heavy
he’ll teach you.
He knows it.
Spends his time falling from the weight.
Got a lead brain.
It’s a battle magnet.
He carries it around by the guilt straps.
Don’t laugh.
You didn’t see the size of the blizzard that birthed him.
Fits of snow.
Cotton rocks.
Whipped white bullet stretches
pinned with chips of teeth
to his habit of crying for help.
He doesn’t land well. Hates landing.
It reminds him of not living up.

Listen, I know there were days you wanted to die.

Hermann will not bow down to gravity,
falling,
he catches up to himself mid-air
just before the ground smacks.
Pullthroat
they call’im.
Sharp Turner.
Nothing touches the ground here.
Ground is at capacity.
He sees that.
He falls back.
He patches parachutes together with a kite knife.
It’s big enough to raise him in the updrafts
where he hides himself away in the angles of air
outlined by his knack for believing
that this life
it’s gonna work itself out.

*

In Landscape

from Gentleman Practice

There is a chance
you will show up laughing
made of fortified fan blades and Ferris wheel lights
true of heart and best foot forward
our long-awaited love made easy,
remember for sure no doubt these things:

The joy,
we are a point of complete.
This life,
standing guard over your solitude.
My eyes
are monsters for most things approaching.
I’m probably gonna need a hand with that.
This heart.
This sleeve.
Neither one of them things is all that clean.
But the rain,
my lucky number,
been doin’ her part to make things right

for the light bulbs
and the bruises.
Hiding holy water was not my forte this life.
Forte
is French
for blanket fort.
I have trusted my corners to revolving doors
but am fluent in getting better.
We are fluent in bouncing back,
lifting quickly,
learning fast.

Our courage
is a natural habitat.
Ya know we’re gonna build a body to keep the wolves out.
Hold my house
you humble barbarian,
this door only opens for the remarkable now.

So we will both show up remarkable.
Speak your piece from the I can do anything.
Say it clearly.
Follow through

on runways,
in turbulence.
There is a book
living inside your chest
with dilated instructions
on how to make a safe landing.
It was written
for crash landers.
Thank you.
I am coming home to listen.

It is time.

Please
forgive me my distractions.
There’s a freckle on your lip.
It is a national archive.
Give it to my ear
so you can see what I mean.
Here hold my breath
I will be right back.

There are gifts
hidden beneath these lungs.
Slide your hand over my mouth
and I will speak them
in hang glider,
in hilltop,
from the loyalty of a landscape,
silk in a sandpaper offering plate,
the jacket on a handsome man.
That lip
Sweet Grape, you cannibal,
kiss my eyes
until they see what it is that I wish to write down:

Your name.

Film strips of prayer.
Ribbons of a garden in stereo.
Driftwood welded to the guesthouse.
Ringfinger wrapped in a horseshoe nail.
I will meet you by the eighth day dream
in the wide open purpose of a locomotive coming
to a stand still with the sea,
like thumb

on pulse

you watch

what happens

when the air

erupts

into suction cups
opening up to breathe,
like the love in my lungs
took the tip of my tongue
and finally taught it how to read,
you five-acre ladder-backed pearl book pouring
from a pileated chest of Earth.
I know our story may look like octopus ink
to the rest of the breath in this world
(flying in under the radar
holding to a pattern of worth).
Come closer you guest of honor.
Chickens stay off the porch

in quiet,
in kindly.
We are the house gift-wrapped in welcome mats.
Your dinner’s on the table in thanks of that
and the loaves of chocolate toast,
the Book of Job and of Jet Propulsion,
raincoats floating in a rocket ship,
playing naked checkers in bed.
It is an utterly epic arrival
every time I get to see you again.

God, this is what I was talking about
for like 37 years,
a true story,
of oceanthroat,
of grace,
the holy goodness glory
I was praying to your face,
My Man,
this is what I meant
and this is what I’m meant to do
so sit me down inside us now
and let me praise the greatest good in you
by laying down my weapons
including the shield,
in rest,
inception,

on cue, my friend,
you came
your name
well lit,
stenciled on the walls of Fremont County
years before we even met
in landscape,
in scope
and so,
wing tipped,
I wrote it
down to the ground you walk on
with the heels of my helium shoes,
“Put your ear to the sky
and listen my darling,
everything whispers I love you.”

More poetry at Used Furniture

Chloe Caldwell is the author of the essay collection Legs Get Led Astray (Future Tense Books). Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and Freerange Nonfiction. She is the founder and curator of the Hudson River Loft Reading Series. She lives in upstate New York. More at www.chloecaldwell.com.

***

UFR: Congratulations on the publication of Legs Get Led Astray!

Chloe Caldwell: Thanks, Judy! It’s pretty delightful. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me about it.

UFR: I loved LGLA. Did you write the essays knowing you would eventually collect them into a manuscript? And if not, how did you choose which essays to include?

Caldwell: I just looked at the book to answer your question. Thirteen of the essays were written when I wasn’t thinking about doing a manuscript. I wrote them for fun, and in my writing workshops, and I published them online. But in the fall of 2010, my friend and I had a deal—we would do our own personal NanoWrimo, and send (snail mail) 200 pages to each other by the first of October or something like that. After I sent him my pages, I started thinking that maybe it would be possible to do an essay collection.

I worked and re-worked that manuscript for the next six months. I sent it to Future Tense Books last April. Since I had a year until the essay collection would be released, I kept writing, but we didn’t know what we would and would not put into the book until a month or so before publication. While working on it, my editor and I took out maybe four of the older essays and added almost ten new ones! But by new, sometimes I mean older, such as “The Legendary Luke” and “Getting Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable.” Those weren’t in the MS when I sent it to Future Tense, but those essays were the first ones I’d ever written. We took out the weaker essays and replaced with the strong.

UFR: I’ve never experienced so much of what you write about; never lived in New York, for instance, or gotten to watch a Trance Dance, or tried heroin, or read my mom’s diaries (though I wish I had now since she’s admitted to shredding them). I’ve never become homeless because the back wall of my apartment building rotted away, but when I read LGLA, what I felt was a strange sort of connection, an experiential understanding I can’t possibly really have. What do you think it is about your writing that allows you to connect with readers in that way?

Caldwell: You know, quite a few people have been telling me this same thing, and it rings true to me. I think maybe since the essays have such tiny personal details, it forces the reader to think about their own personal tiny details. I’m so glad this happens, for whatever reason it does.

UFR: I’m very interested in the conversation happening right now around truth in literary nonfiction, whether there is such a thing as objective truth, and whether that should be the goal. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Caldwell: To be honest, I try not to get caught up in all of this. It’s fascinating of course, but I’d rather be writing than fretting about it. I don’t want it to get me worked up and held back. In Chicago at AWP this past winter, I went to “The Ethics of Non-fiction Writing” panel where Stephen Elliott, Poe Ballantine, Lee Gutkind, Krista Bremer and Cheryl Strayed spoke. It was there that I realized that there is no right or wrong way to do it. Be respectful, was the main message that came through to me. Cheryl Strayed said, “If you’re going to show anyone’s ass, it’s going to be your own.” She also said, “You can’t be searching, exposing, and betraying at the same time. It’s not possible.” I think that is true with my essays. I think it’s pretty apparent that my non-fiction is solely my very personal and unique experience. But you can never fact-check memory, so it’s the writer’s job to do the best that she/he can to be accurate.

UFR: Whenever you write about real people, there is a chance they won’t like or agree with how you’ve depicted them. Do you worry about that? Do you ever let anyone read your essays before you publish them?

Caldwell: I let many people read my essays before I publish them. (At least, I used to.) This book didn’t come out as a huge shock to my mother or any of the other main people in the essays. They’d been reading my work for years because I am close with them. “On Snooping” almost didn’t get into the book, because my mom wasn’t comfortable with it. So my editor and I worked on it a bit, and I showed her the revised version and she okayed it, because she is great. I do worry about it, but since I haven’t written anything yet where any of my “characters” are the bad guy, it hasn’t kept me up at night. I’m usually the bad guy.

UFR: Has anyone gotten mad at you over what you’ve written about them?

Caldwell: No. At least not that they’ve told me. If anything, friends feel forgotten. They’re like, “How come insert detail about themselves didn’t make it into an essay?”  If anything, some of my relationships with people bloomed. I feel that my mom and I are even closer now than before the book. And the response from my extended family has been amazing. My Uncle sent me a blank journal that he made on Vista Print. On the front it says, “LGLA Book Club” and the back lists quotes from an email thread in which my aunts and uncles (and grandmother!) were discussing the book. My favorite one is from my Aunt Shay, who says, “She may have golden locks but this ain’t no fairy-tale.”

UFR: I know you’ve said the title, Legs Get Led Astray, is taken from a song lyric. Can you elaborate any more on that – like why that particular song lyric felt right to you?

Caldwell: Sure—the title comes from the song “Last Love Song For Now.” I’m so glad that I eventually thought of this title. I cannot imagine it having anything else. I relate to Okkervil River lyrics. The song writer, Will Sheff, has similar threads in his songs as I do in my writing. He sings about reading diaries, about being lost, about cheating, about family, and about love. I think it’s also perfect because Okkervil River was kind of the main band I listened to during the time period that these stories took place. My brother and I went to see him play quite a few times when I lived in Brooklyn.

“Last Love Song For Now” is not my all-time fave song or anything, but the stanza that I quote in the beginning of the book is beautiful to me, and that’s the bridge of the song. I played around with taking different titles from it, like “Lambs Out Wandering.” I wanted the title to convey the feeling of being lost and running around looking for your true self. “Legs Get Led Astray” implies that. Also, in Will Sheff sort of yells that part. It’s powerful.

UFR: One of the things that really pulled me into LGLA is the searching quality in your essays. Whether you’re reading your mom’s or your lover’s journals, assembling multiple conversations into a single, stunning narrative, escaping to Berlin and then escaping back to New York, there is always a sense that you’re mining the material of your life. Do you feel like that? Do you know what you’re searching for?

Caldwell: I do feel like that and I think about this quite a bit. I think that I was searching for excitement but comfort at the same time, which caused the conflicting emotions. Push and pull. I think I pushed myself to experience stuff, and often I went to my edge. But mainly the search, in everything, whether we want to believe it or not, is for love. So I looked for it: In my family, in cities, in drugs, in music, in sex.

UFR: Now that your book is available to the clamoring public, how has your life changed?

Caldwell: It’s weird. I forget that people can get it on their own. It’s disconcerting and lovely and unbelievable at the same time. If they bought it and write to me or review it, I’m like, but where did you get it? When? Who are you? Have we met? It’s like a control issue that I have to let go. It’s like I want to personally connect with everyone that reads my book.

My life has changed because I went from working on it during the first half of my twenties to not working on it. I miss it. I was incredibly driven by LGLA for a while. When I wake up in the morning now, I don’t know what to do with myself. For a long time I was only writing. I feel a freedom I didn’t feel before, but also sadness. Do you want to know the truth? Of course you do. Honestly, I fell into a depression after the book came out. The book was released on my 26^th birthday. After that, I stayed in bed for three days, which is something I’ve never done.

UFR: What’s next for you?

Caldwell: I’m doing some traveling this summer—Portland, Oregon for two weeks, and then I’m going on a Southern book tour with Elizabeth Ellen, Brandi Wells, Donora Hillard, and Mary Miller in July. In the fall I’ve decided to do a yoga teacher training program, probably at Kripalu, in Massachusetts. I’m not working on a novel or anything.

UFR: You write literary nonfiction. What genres do you like to read?

Caldwell: This will shock you—I like to read literary non-fiction. I just love it, especially when it’s stylistically exciting. I do read some poetry to help me feel like writing when I’m not writing. I read fiction here and there, but not much. I read some self-help stuff too.

UFR: What are you reading now?

Caldwell: I just read Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making The Biggest Mistake Of Your Life by Anonymous. I ordered Joy School (fiction!) by Elizabeth Berg online today, because I loved it as a teenager and would like to re-read it. But mainly I am reading Taking The Leap by Pema Chödrön. While writing this, literally, a package came for me. It’s the book The Defining Decade (Why your twenties matter and how to make the most of them now) by Meg Jay. My mom got it for me. I can’t wait to read this book. I’m like a junkie for this kind of stuff. I’m a “figuring myself out” junkie.

UFR: What do you wish I’d asked you?

Caldwell: I absolutely love the questions you asked me. I learned a lot. But I wish you asked me what music I am listening to right now, so I could tell you that I am listening to the greatest hits of Ace of Base.

Judy Clement Wall conducted this interview on behalf of UFR. Judy’s short stories and essays have been published in numerous literary journals and websites such as The Rumpus, Lifebyme, Smith Magazine and Beyond The Margins. You can find out more about her and her work at Zebrasounds.net.

It’s 6:30. Jack and I are in the car, heading west on Ray. We are driving to Superstition Review’s launch party. I enter the address into my GPS.

“I thought you said it would only take ten minutes,” I said to Jack. “Garmin says it’ll take twenty.”

I need to go over my presentation. Each of the undergraduate interns has been asked to talk about their favorite work from Issue 9. What could I say that would be different and thoughtful?

That’s the thing about Superstition Review. It places me in direct contact with living artists. I talk to them, send them e-mails, accept their work or turn their work away. I’m no longer detached—the fourth wall broken. Artists and writers of prose and poetry are in front of me. I interact with them as human beings, not as faceless names in a textbook whose work I am asked to analyze.

I’ve always known that crafting something meaningful takes time. But when so much of my interaction with poetry and art takes place in a classroom (in anthologies, art  books, and so on) there is the sense that art just happens. In textbooks and in classrooms, works of art become mythical objects, removed from the artist’s process of creation. Students are taught how to appreciate art, but frequently there is no adequate stress on how difficult (painful even) the process of creation can be. Students don’t often realize that John Milton spent most of his life preparing for his magnum opus, Paradise Lost, or that Elizabeth Bishop’s “Moose” took 26 years to write.

Because students don’t realize how long something can take to create, they work with the mentality that some people are blessed by creativity and some aren’t. They believe that creativity is a gift that is intrinsic to a person, and is almost biological. For students, this mentality can be crippling. If a student sits to write, and cannot immediately write anything good, it must be because she isn’t creative enough or inspired enough. Creating art is no longer a process, but a gift that will disappear if the ideal conditions aren’t in place.

My internship at Superstition Review came at a unique time in my life. I initially inquired about working for the magazine because I knew I needed to take my own writing more seriously. Through my time as editor, I began to see a shift in my own thinking.

After working at Superstition Review, I now see that there is something unmistakably “real” and “attainable” about creativity. I now know—I don’t just believe—that creating beautiful things involve a process. There is nothing more meaningful than the days, oftentimes, months and even years, artists devote to their art. For young writers like me, it is that devotion, that time sacrificed, that is more valuable than anything else. Superstition Review doesn’t just connect students to living artists. It reintroduces students to the process of creation, reminding us to read, and more importantly, experience art more slowly.

Maria McKee was the singer and founding member of the seminal roots rock band Lone Justice. As a singer-songwriter she has released five studio albums and scored a #1 hit in the UK with “Show Me Heaven,” which first appeared on the soundtrack to the film Days of Thunder. She has recorded songs with U2, Steve Earle, Robbie Robertson, and Dwight Yoakam, among others. Her songs have long been regarded for their narrative depth and emotional gravity.

***

Robert Stapleton: What formative books did you read as a kid?

Maria McKee: The Oz books, Laura Ingalls Wilder, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Madeline L’Engle, Ingri and Edgar Parin d’aulaire’s Book of Greek myths and Norse Gods & Giants, the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

Stapleton: What are you reading now?

McKee: Sandor Marai’s novel Embers and The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy.

Stapleton: What book or writer changed your life?

McKee: The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis. This book opened up my subconscious quite a bit as a child. I dreamed this book.

Stapleton: What stories or authors have impacted your songwriting?

McKee: Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Yeats, Harry Crews, John Steinbeck, Katherine Dunn, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

Stapleton: If you could create the soundtrack for a book, what would you choose and why?

McKee: Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Life is absurd yet we still try.

***

Robert Stapleton is executive editor of Booth and teaches at Butler University. His writing has appeared in Word Riot, OCWeekly, Bathhouse, Journal of the Gulf War, Orange Room Review and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis.

More of Robert Stapleton’s Reading the Groove at Used Furniture. 

“I bet you’ll be glad to have this off,” he said.

“Yup.”  Cool air flooded into the crack, blanching her skin.  Halfway done.  She had been dreaming about scratching her arm.

“Stinks,” he said.

“Whose fault is that?” she said, trying to be funny.  She meant that he was the one removing the cast, but realized he might think she meant the way he had fixed it, or the broken arm itself.  Her heart took off like a thoroughbred and she felt that familiar tightness in the muscles of her shoulder blades.

He stopped.  As if on cue, the dishwasher stopped as well.

“I meant with you cutting it open,” she said, and she knew they were on the edge, that it could go either way.  Sweat gathered on her upper lip.

He started with the scissors again.  Another section of the cast buckled.  He looked up at her and smiled.  “No need to get into that.”

“Indeed,” she said.

He made a few more incisions, until finally he clipped off the last edge and slid the cast from her arm.  “There.”

Her skin looked whiter.  The arm hairs were darker.  Or maybe it was the contrast, and no sun.  Some pink dots colored the top of her wrist.

“We’ll get some calamine lotion for that,” he said.

“I’d like to keep it,” she said, meaning the cast.  All of the kids in the third-grade class she taught had signed it with magic markers.

He wedged it under his arm and stood up, the mattress relaxing without his weight.  “It stinks,” he said.  He turned, left, and flipped off the light with her still inside.  The air turned on, making one of the drapes dance.

She scooted herself back onto the bed and pulled up her feet.  She laid down flat on her back. Her fingers still glided over the rash, traversing the valleys between the small bumps.  It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dark.  In that minute, she had the sensation that at any moment the mattress and sheets would begin folding up around her like a shell.

More fiction at Used Furniture.

Jürgen Fauth is a writer, film critic, translator, editor, photographer, and co-founder of the literary community Fictionaut. He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, and received his doctorate from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He lives with his wife, writer Marcy Dermansky, and their daughter Nina. More here.

***

UFR: First, do you consider yourself a writer? For you, what does that term mean, exactly?

Jürgen Fauth: Thomas Mann said that “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” and that sounds about right to me. Which is to say, sure, anybody can do it, and anybody has the right to call themselves a writer, but as you get better at it, you may find that things get more complicated, rather than easier. You start paying attention in a different way. Curiosity and empathy are key, I think. But in the end, a writer is anyone who spends a lot of time writing.

UFR: Your debut novel, Kino, is fascinating. As “the tragic story of a silent film director in Nazi Germany and his modern day granddaughter’s quest to redeem him,” it really seems to combine mystery, history and literary fiction in an interesting and accessible way. Can you talk about the book a little bit? How would you describe it?

Fauth: Kino is the story of a silent film director whose movies were lost during World War II, and who then emigrated to the US. He made one more movie — a flop — and killed himself in the early Sixties. The book starts when his granddaughter, in New York, receives a print of his 1927 debut film under mysterious circumstances and goes to Berlin to find out what happened. Some of the narrative is set in the past and some in the present. It’s concerned with the ways in which family, history, and art are intertwined.

UFR: What in particular drew you to the book’s subject matter? Why is this story the one you wanted to tell?

Fauth: I’ve always been fascinated by Berlin in the 1920s, the time between the wars that saw an incredible flourishing of culture and science before the rise of the Nazis. I also wanted to write the biography of an artist that didn’t just cover their rise and fall, the kind of thing you see your standard biopic, but something goes one step further to see their work might flourish again a generation later. Also, since I’m from Germany, I was interested in telling the story of someone who left Germany during a very dark time so I could compare notes with my fictional character. Why did he stay, why did he leave? Why did I? All of those reasons, and a few others, suddenly came together and made this seem like a promising project.

UFR: An interesting question about fiction, I think: How much personal experience do you draw from in order to produce your stories? In other words, does writing inform your life or does life inform your writing?

Fauth: It’s a balancing act. In the past, I’ve erred on the side of including too much of my personal experience, and it didn’t work—my life isn’t all that fascinating, and my personal experience turned out to be interesting to precious few people who weren’t me. Generally, I’m not a big fan of memoirs, even though they’re fashionable. I prefer fiction. Unless you have an unbelievably crazy life, I probably don’t want to read about it. Why not make something up instead?

But of course, in another sense your experience is all you have—if you include that to mean everything you’ve absorbed, all the books you’ve read, all the movies you’ve seen. That’s why everyone tells young writers to read as much as they can. It’s good to have adventures, meet people get out in the world, but it’s just as important to have a storehouse of fictional stories to draw from. In the end, it’s all fodder.

UFR: You’re also the founder of Fictionaut, a pretty successful literary community. Can you talk about the site? What inspired you to create it?

Fauth: Years ago, I figured out that the confluence of social media and online fiction would make a site like Fictionaut inevitable, and then I waited around for someone to build it. When no one did, I finally decided I’d have to do it myself. I partnered with Carson Baker, a very talented developer, and since its launch in 2008, the site has attracted a great community of wonderful writers.

UFR: For you, what’s the reason for the site? Why is it necessary? Why do you think it’s important for writers to be part of a community?

Fauth: I don’t know that it’s absolutely necessary for a writer to be part of a community, but it certainly helps. It’s a lonely business otherwise, and Fictionaut makes it possible to get feedback on your work very quickly. I’ve been involved with literary magazines for a long time, and I always felt that there had to be a way to connect readers and writers more effectively on the Internet.

UFR: You’re a photographer, too, as your photos have appeared in places such as Time magazine. What draws you to photography in particular? What do you like about it?

Fauth: I love photography because it’s very much the opposite of writing: visual, documentary, instantaneous. It gets me out of the house. It makes me look at people and things very closely. I love moving through a crowd of people and shooting everybody’s faces. It’s the opposite of sitting in your room at night by the glow of the screen and finding your way through the next scene, which often feels like being blind.

UFR: Do you see any similarities between writing and photography? Does one speak to the other?

Fauth: Conjuring images with words is a lot harder than clicking the shutter, and I think photography might be a way for me to get away from the words. I don’t try to verbalize what I do with the camera (or in the “darkroom” of the photo software), and I suspect the photos nourish another part of me than the words. Still, I’d very much like my prose to be as sharp and colorful as my photos. Generally, though, movies are more of an influence on my writing—I often conceive of my scenes the way a director might, wondering where to put the camera, how late to come in, how to pace things, how to pitch them emotionally.

UFR: How about film? Kino considers film quite intimately and you’re also film critic. What role do you see film playing in the world of art?

Fauth: Well, cinema has been called the seventh art because it combines the six others: architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, music, and poetry. At this point it’s safe to say that it’s the most vital, most popular of arts, extremely accessible but also exceedingly mysterious the closer you pay attention. There’s so much to see and hear and understand in just one movie, and some are so dense that you’re never really done with them. There are movies I can watch again and again, and always see something new.

UFR: You’re so familiar with many different crafts, all of which are part of the world of art. So what do you think is art’s greater purpose?

Fauth: I don’t think art has a purpose. Or rather, its purpose is to have none. Art is play, art is without rules, except for the ones you want it to have. Art creates a space where anything is allowed, and precisely because nothing is required of it, it can fulfill a number of crucial functions. Maybe that’s the reason for my appetite for different disciplines—I’m curious to compare notes and see what else might be possible.

UFR: As an artist, what are you trying to explore? What are you asking? What are you trying to find?

Fauth: Well, if I knew, and I found it, then I could stop, right? I think the desire to make something new has to do with not knowing exactly how it’s going to turn out. You do it so you can see what it is you made, so you can read the book you wrote, look at the pictures you took. If it’s good—unexpected but fitting, surprising but true, new but familiar, then you’ve added an experience to the world that wasn’t available before. When it’s really good, it brings you up against the moment, makes you see things in a different light, makes you ever so slightly more alive. But I don’t think you can know beforehand—you just trust your interests and your instincts, and hope they’ll take you someplace worthwhile.

UFR: Who or what are some of your creative influences?

Fauth: I’d like to cheat on this question and refer you to my tumblr, http://tulpendiebe.tumblr.com, which is a site that’s in fact run by my character Mina Koblitz to honor her grandfather Kino’s  life and work. You’ll find a ton of photos, posters, paintings, videos, quotes, and movie stills there that informed the writing of Kino – it’s a kind of Weimar art gallery, research journal, and index of influences at once.

UFR: What are you currently reading? How is it?

Fauth: I’m reading a new manuscript-in-progress by my wife, the writer Marcy Dermanksy, and it’s wonderful. I’m not allowed to say much more, but she’s pushing into some unexpected territory for her, and it’s a big treat to be the first to see what she comes up with.

UFR: What are you currently working on? As a writer and an artist, where would you like to go?

Fauth: I’d like to find the time to start another novel, but between the publication of Kino, our daughter, Fictionaut, and freelance translation and editing work, I haven’t had much time. I just put together a site for the fiction editing business I run with Marcy, mjedit.com. I’m also spending a lot of time on the Tulpendiebe tumblr I mentioned, and I’m just about to make it collaborative and invite people to participate and submit artwork inspired by the world of Kino and the Weimar era. I’m fascinated with the way art can inspire more art, and since copyright, piracy, and remixing are themes in the novel, it only makes sense to try and carry that into the real world. Anybody is invited to participate at tulpendiebe.tumblr.com/invitation.

UFR: Please share anything else you would like to say.

Fauth: Thanks for having me. And as Kino might have said, “Anything is still possible.”