In the Margins	Writing Your Way Out by Forrest Roth

Rochester poet and fiction writer Peter Conners will be in town next Thursday night for the latest installment of Just Buffalo’s COMMUNIQUE Flash Fiction reading series at Rust Belt Books, with Buffalo State assistant professor Lou Rera opening. The event begins at 7pm and is free to the public.

Conners currently works as an editor and marketing director for BOA Editions and co-edits Double Room, a literary Web site dedicated to featuring prose poetry, flash fiction and everything in between. He is the author of a collection, While in the World (FootHills, 2003), a prose poetry chapbook, The Names of Winter (FootHills, 2004), with a poetry collection, Of Whiskey and Winter (White Pine, 2007), and a short prose sequence, Emily Ate the Wind (Marick Press, 2008), forthcoming in the near future. He also edited Starcherone Press’ recent PP/FF: An Anthology, which has been receiving very favorable reviews in Rain Taxi and elsewhere.

Let’s get this out of the way: Do you consider what you write to be prose poetry, flash fiction, both, or neither? Yes. I do. Very much so. The truth is that some of my pieces nestle really nicely into one of those categories and some don’t quite fit in anywhere. So I play a little trick on myself: I tell myself that whatever I’m writing is allowed to have its own identity at the point of conception. I tell myself that all the influences—authors, genres, books, forms—have a better chance of fostering something resonant and unique if I don’t immediately define (confine?) the writing. Once the writing enters the world we can categorize for understanding, pleasure and profit, but, increasingly, I want to hold that process at bay for as long as possible.

Double Room also fosters an ongoing—and open-ended—dialogue regarding classification of these tiny pieces of writing. What are some of the best responses that have helped your understanding of the form or shed a new light on your work? We were certainly encouraged in our editorial mission to investigate PP/FF writing by Cole Swensen’s statement in our first issue, “…a genre becomes a target, tying down the other end of the piece; the beginning is necessarily tied down to the writer; if the free end gets tied down too soon, options may be missed.” Of course, Peter Johnson then came right back in issue #2 with this response to Swensen: “Concerning ‘genreless writing.’ I don’t think there is such a thing, and I don’t have as much trouble with the word genre as others do.” Because many Language poets and prose poets measure their work in units of the sentence, they’ve had much to fight about over the past 35 years. Meanwhile, this little sub-category of flash fiction crept in quietly behind the struggle and staked out its own territory. Reading the responses in each issue from writers who identify themselves with different traditions and genres has given me a deeper understanding of the logic behind these arguments. It has also reinforced my belief that many talented younger writers have studied and learned from these traditions, but are unwilling to be confined by other people’s conflicts, or even definitions. This understanding has led me to believe that PP/FF writing (writing that borrows from all prose traditions and genres while not pledging allegiance to any one) is the freshest literary art currently being created. Since I am creating this type of work, I am, of course, emboldened by these thoughts.

Readers who are not familiar with the PP/FF aesthetic may be curious as to how one begins writing very short prose that straddles this poetry/fiction line. How does the process start for you? The biggest lesson I learned from reading Russell Edson was the importance of the first line. A killer first line can set the whole machine rumbling and compel you to stay put until you finish the piece. I carry around a little notebook so I can jot down those lines whenever they show themselves. So I open up my little notebook and find sentences like, “I have never worked in an office before, but I imagine it is something like existing inside of a dead whale eight hours a day.” Or, “Triple Fat Goose would’ve rather eaten a bald eagle sandwich with the feathers still on than go back to his old neighborhood.” And then I have to figure out what the hell I’m talking about. I have to write myself out of what I just got myself into.

Could you explain the premise behind Emily Ate the Wind? Emily Ate the Wind begins with a man named Dan being beaten outside a bar. As he lays there dying of his injuries and hypothermia we meet a series of characters whose lives intersected with Dan’s at The Bar prior to the beating. So the underlying story and the characters are pretty gritty. But the story is told using a range of techniques—personal letters, question-and-answer formats, lists, vignettes, news clippings, realist narrative scenes, etc.—and moves freely through time. Simultaneity was an important organizing principle.

I was just reminded now of how the artist Marcel Duchamp used chance to guide his primary material—bricks he spontaneously picked up off the street while taking a walk, and so forth. Were elements of Emily culled together like this? I’d say the book is more Kurt Schwitters than Duchamp. There is more a collage aesthetic governing the text than a random assemblage. That said, any artistic creation involves an element of chance, the spirit of experimentation, and faith that the artist’s intuitions will lead to interesting new developments. I like pondering Duchamp’s assertion that his “choice of these ‘ready-mades’ was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.” Duchamp was a prankster artist, no doubt. But he also saw beauty where others saw banality and commonness. Part of the reason I set Emily Ate the Wind and many of the poems in Of Whiskey and Winter in upstate New York during late fall and early winter is because, to my eye, there is humbling beauty in our gray skies. People from sunny climates think we’re crazy for living here. But this is my home. I see the beauty in our environment and the people who live here—I want others to see that beauty too.