Interview

Your book is very original visually. Could you talk about the formal experiment of this collection?



I've gone through several stages with the radio schematics and their presence in the text. I wanted to bring a visual element to the book, because it excites me as a designer, as a writer, and as a reader (I love books like Diane Schoemperlen's Forms of Devotion that incorporate some visual elements). In Other Electricities, the radio schematics that appear throughout act as another voice or layer in the text, associated with the dead/gone/ghost mother, a sort of emanation from the ether (we are constantly bombarded with radio and many other waves; they are all around us, and I wanted a way to represent this connection visually). They also provide another way of connection for this otherwise very isolated main character in this otherwise very isolated place.



And form itself is very important to me. It provides a pressure on the language, on the characters; it is one way of producing electricity in a story.



I think a lot of writers neglect design possibilities in their work, focusing purely on the text, which is a shame. This is, after all, the traditional model, that the writer writes text only and gives it to the publisher, who then fits it into this container we call a book. And if the designer and design is good, then the container comes to resemble or at least accommodate the text. And if not, well then it's a problem. I do think, though, that more writers should keep in mind the possibilities that the book as a form (and not just as a container for text) has to offer.



You seem to know the upper Midwest psyche very well. Your young characters jump off a cliff during the first snow or recklessly drive their snowmobiles over the canal. What do you think is the root of their problems? And what, if anything, could save them?



It's the problem of many people who grow up in small towns and want something more/else (even if they eventually make their way back, as so many do). This is even more apparent in the isolated towns (and in some cases, near-ghost towns) in Upper Michigan, covered so much of the year by snow. Many of the characters in this book seem to need a connection to something else, something larger, outside of their lives and this place, whether it's the telephone system, ham radio, God, the principles of mathematics or physics, or the simple possibility of physically getting out. It is a feeling of being stuck, being trapped in the place (which sometimes defines the life). I don't know if there's anything that can save some of them, but an outlet...literature, or travel, even in small doses, might be one way to
go. It made a difference for me.




Who is the narrator in Other Electricities? Is there a narrator?



Well, this is a sticky question to answer, since it's not made overly clear in the book (and I like that haziness). Clearly there is a narrator, if only by implication, as the book has this Other voice that seems to be in control of the flow of information. It's perhaps a bit of an authorial presence, as it flirts with moments of autobiography. But it's more as if the town
itself, or the landscape and the weather and the place, is telling these stories, or channeling them for us. This is sometimes how place works for me—sometimes places do have stories, do have voices, something residual or left behind.



Your stories orbit around a number of obsessions—electric current, missing arms, radio waves, candy cigarettes—that are woven throughout the collection. Could you talk about this?



One thing that becomes very obvious when you decide to index your own book (a task that gave me much pleasure, due in no small part to my interest in the index as a form) is the obsessions that are at the heart of your work. These are the things—hopefully meaningful fragments—that the stories seem to be about (even more so than the characters themselves). I don't know if this is something that most writers do, but I suspect it is—that we have objects, words, or places that we return to over and over and over. I try to use them as another method of powering a collection (aside from the traditional elements, such as character and plot), of offering intriguing and hopefully satisfying constellations for readers to investigate. Usually there's nothing you can do with your obsessions except to explore and
excavate them.



The elements of heat and cold play such a role in your stories that they seem to be characters themselves, always battling one another. Could you discuss this?



Cold (or the lack of heat) is perhaps the single major force that operates on people from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Everything revolves around it—the weather especially. It's less like this in the more "civilized" (and I use this word skeptically) and urban parts of the country, where we control the temperature, where we move from air-conditioned houses to
Temperature-controlled cars and offices. It is a central and natural force. . . easy to forget about for some of us, but not so for me. So, the cold functions almost as a character in the book, a sort of general antagonist. Or a sculpting force for the action and emotion. It offers possibilities for respite, moments of genuine human contact/warmth, as well as for losing
oneself in it—this last idea one final option for some.



The principles of mathematics are rife in your book, informing its philosophies ("Everything is penned to a number. Everything is handled by a tone." / "This is the province of math, the hypothetics and mechanics of motion, force and impact.") and also, at times, inspiring the very structure of your sentences. Why?



I've always been fascinated with mathematics and the beauty that it brings out in (or imposes on, or is extrapolated from) the world, and as always, what excites me naturally makes its way into the fiction. I probably would have been a physicist, or possibly a civil engineer or computer scientist, in another version of my academic life, if not for an essential laziness in college (I would have had to retake the weed-out first year of Physics courses in my school in order to pursue the major, which I opted at the time not to do). I like its elegance, and the possibilities it has for offering models/ways of understanding the world and all its characters. A great book of stories that plays with these ideas is Karl Iagnemma's On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction. He does it in a much different way than I do, but I do feel a sort of kinship there with the subject matter.



To me, your narratives position the reader as an evesdropper rather than a participant, an experience that mimicks the formal, isolated lives within your stories. Is this intentional?



Yes. The book is in some way about listening in, whether that be on the phone, or on the radio, or through the window. And it is about isolation. Everyone in it is isolated (and possibly insulated) in some way. The reader acts at times as a sort of voyeur. Many of the pieces work as dramatic monologues, usually with no one else on stage. This opens up a lot of lyric possibilities for stories and for the way that language occurs in the stories. And hopefully it makes for a satisfying and maybe even moving read.