Interview

Which came first, the idea for the anthology or the choices? Did you find it difficult to define the "cause d'être" of your anthology? How did you decide what kind of linguistic play was to be included?

Kristin—

The idea for the anthology came first, in a sense, but it arose organically from our mutual fascination with linguistic texture. Because we seemed to share an aesthetic, we started there, trying to define what it was that made us like what we liked.

In terms of what kind of linguistic play was to be included, I didn’t have any real prefabricated ideas about what would or would not "belong" in the anthology. I was looking for was the delight of language used in surprising and multi-dimensional ways, not just as a transparent medium to express and convey content. I had to trust my subjectivity, though I couldn’t always explain it.

Kirby—

Yes, there was some difficulty in defining the theme of the anthology, as it seems to need a paragraph to describe it, rather than a word or two. Play was the best word we could find, although admittedly it does suggest that the work included might be just goofing around; therefore, as in the introduction, it seemed necessary to define in what context play was to be considered as the theme for the book.

As for what kind of linguistic play we were looking for: it was a question of finding work made of language so rich that the reader couldn’t avoid awareness of it, and yet that language couldn’t bring so much attention to itself that it detracted from the story or poem. It’s a very difficult balance to strike, and for this reason a reader of our anthology may find that most of the selected pieces fall into two categories: works presented in a voice bristling with energy (most often consisting of idiomatic, slang-rife language) or else in a more elegiac, adagio-like voice (more rarified and ruminative). . . . Mostly, however, the reading public hears about the static-writers, as there seems to be a rampant belief that to be clear one must write journalistically.

Kristin, many of the pieces included in this anthology speak directly to the reader, including poems such as "inside gertrude stein" by Lynn Emanuel and "The Other Hand" by Marjorie Maddox. Could you talk about this strategy as it relates to "play" in literature?

I think this is a strategy that asks the reader directly to engage, imaginatively, with the writer: to play, as it were. All of literature does this, if it does anything, but these poems make overt overtures. I probably respond to such gestures because they make apparent that the poem (or story) is surface, is medium, is representation.

Kirby, a few stories in this collection such as "Give the Millionaire a Drink" by Mike Newirth are without the traditional requirements of a short story, such as a plot or main characters. How do these stories work without these crucial crowd-pleasing elements?

I’m not sure I can explain how they work; I can only say that, to my mind, they do work. They work in the sense that once you start reading them they do hold your interest, and, once finished, you feel satisfaction at having been given an experience you might otherwise not have had. Newirth’s story captures a time and place; it’s like a portrait, and to examine the story closely one can see how many ways the author could have gone wrong: "Jeff the bartender awoke one morning to realize how much he hated his job serving drinks to the spoiled Hamptons set." Or Valerie Wohlfeld’s love letter to the sea, in "The Open Notebook": "Many times do I go to the sea and realize how much larger it is than my own small life." These would have been unlikely starting points for either of these two pieces, if they were to find the wonderful forms they have in the anthology. I think both works embody the tenet that there really are no rules in fiction; the work has to find its own form. In these two cases the form is an unusual one, and, to my mind, a perfect one also.