Last week, Metazen’s parting editor Finnegan Flawnt, known for his reticence, met the Queen of Flash Meg Pokrass in the formal gardens of Metazen’s sanatorium for insane writers. Lean back and enjoy this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious* feast of the senses including some awesome poses, unbelievable hairdos and absolutely no reference to human genitalia.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2KOjZ4LP90

(reposted from Metazen Blog)

(* uncommonly pronounced: ˌsuːpərˌkælɪˌfrædʒəlˌɪstɪkˌɛkspiːˌælɪˈdoʊʃəs)

Here’s to the truth: we all need to be worse more often to be better off. Cut out all the crap about ‘permanent improvement’ of: production times, efficiency, knowledge, operations. Even writers are supposed to become more efficient as they age, gain degrees, and become thin tee-totallers as they watch the world go round and the sun up and down and up and down. Is Lean Writing right for Lala Orange? Whatever happened to the pleasures of stagnation? What about the Greek ideal of stasis? You want to get to Nirvana faster? – Order some bodhi via Amazon. Hurry through that last confession: bad conscience is an outmoded concept if only because it takes up so much time. Whatever happened to “moral fiction” rooted in deep, slow truths? What to the novel that took 20 years to complete only to be eaten by fire on the day of its completion. A friend of mine lost his 110,000 word tome in the tube one day and began another novel on the next. The journey is its own reward, folks. Be bad more of the time, be a dog when you’re a dog and you’ll have more fun being good again one shiny day. Let death have its dominion, one lousy moment at a time. … I’m just saying, as always: I’m not making this stuff up, it was on a fortune cookie that fell out of my wallet this morning.

(photo and caption reblogged from Metazen Blog)

The title of this interview is an allusion to “Mad Hatters Review“, the quirky, crazyxture of literature, art and music which currently delights with a mash-up issue and will publish three pieces by Flawnt this fall. mhr is edited by Carol Novack (twitter name: slumgoddess) whose flash quadruplet was published on Metazen. Meeting Carol online was almost as good as other good things (though not quite as good as yet other things, but it would go to far to explain that), and the interview, which took place over a couple of chat sessions, as Carol was leaving her native NYC to move to NC, has got as rich a texture as anything she writes.

(Photo: Carol Novack – self-portrait with womannikin.)

Metazen: Hi Carol, go meta right away and tell us more about “4 Love Story Poems“, please. Oh wait, these aren’t even poems. Are you trying to fool us?

Carol: What do you want to know? Their intrinsic meaning, whatever they are? Details of their breech birth?  Ach, what’s in a genre classification? And what’s the meaning of “poem?”  I hear and read fiction that has the heart of poetry and poetry that has the heart of fiction.

Metazen: I am not really that keen on the distinction either – I just thought I could get a fox (that’s you) out of her hole by provocation… We’re still curious to know something about how you came up with these pieces … if you’re aware…and if you asked me the same question, I’d probably ramble on without saying anything. Still, you might be a lot more focused than I am!

Carol: I, focused? Where did these little tales come from anyway.  I have no idea.  A germ of a concept, a cluster of words, a character poking her head out of the sea of me, out of dreams I don’t remember or never had. I like to think that my writings speak for themselves, without me. I mean really, the characters were the ones who wrote the tales. I was merely their conduit. I like what you said about the stories in your letter of acceptance, I mean it was very flattering and I appreciate your appreciation, way above the call of duty. I could never have said this myself:

“Though i wouldn’t classify your pieces as “poems” they surely are full of love and represent some of the best flash fiction i have read in a while. they also fit together well and the end of “Nostalgia”  - “And so they went and that was the beginning.” – is marvelous. i love it when pieces loop back on themselves: i always think it rounds off the little world that you’re giving us. the characters – Auntie and Happy Henry (poor sod!), Carla, Carl and Mabel, Lili and the mysterious man and, yes!, Rilke himself, Kandinsky as cameo – are breathtakingly drawn. this flash really makes me hungry for more. that i know that this has most likely been it makes me sad and heightens my feelings. oh well. it’s a short life in a large world.”

Metazen: why, thank you. The obscure, unsolicited review is our specialty over at the editorial offices. But a little more about those prose poems of yours: do the characters in these pieces come back, ever?

Carol: They haven’t thus far.  They’re transient.

Metazen: even though I write Flash and only Flash I have noticed that I seem to have a circle of characters, almost like a theatrical company. Is that not your experience? Nobody ever comes back? – Sorry to beleaguer the point.

Carol: Well I do have recurrent themes and words that could be characters.  There are lots of fish in my upcoming collection and there are certain names that repeat, I think.

Metazen: Tell us more about that collection, please, and about your recurrent themes. If you have a favourite word or two, we’d love to print it, too.

Carol: Some words I seem to be hooked on are “bluefish,” “moonshine,” “breast,” “donkey,” and “chandeliers.” As far as the book is concerned, it’s due to be published this summer or fall and is color-illustrated by many mainly Mad Hatter artists. It’s called “Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack.”  The collection is comprised of what I call “inventions,” for lack of a better descriptive word I can live vaguely with, as I view genre labeling as an exercise in conventional constriction.  There are poetic narratives hovering on the brink of “prose poetry,” prose poem/flash pieces, rhythm-driven stories, a “playpoem,” a dramatic monologue or two or three, even some pieces and bits of pieces that resemble poems, at least in terms of form. I won’t reveal the name of the publisher till the contract’s signed, but I love the press.

Metazen: that’s ok, we can live with openness, in fact we love openness of form and content at Metazen (opens a window, too) . . . As you know, you’re young and innocent. You’re an experienced editor – What do you think Metazen should do/not do as we enter our 2nd year of publication … (takes out fat, empty notepad).

Carol: From my aesthetic perspective, I’d advise publishing writers with distinct, exploratory voices, those who aren’t doing what everyone else is doing.  Try to publish authors that are actually saying something rather than churning out the same old coming of age and domestic tales, Bukowski bar scene stories, cute, glib nonsense, “shocking” sex scenes, stories of drug addiction.  Never publish yourselves and clarify your mission statement, if you think it needs clarification. Avoid publishing an author simply because she or he is popular. Most often, what is “popular” is not “best.”  Go for quality, delight in, and reverence for language. Make your readers think. Not everything has to be easy reading. Not everything has to be amusing.

Metazen: That’s too bad about the sex scenes. Can Mad Hatter Review’s mission statement be expressed briefly in an interview such as this one? Just to clarify because not everyone may understand “mission”. It sounds so corporate – at least to my (ex-corporate) ears.

Carol:  We have an About page that’s an expanded mission statement.  I learned the term when I was in school for my Master’s Degree in Social Work (community organizing).  “Mission” means goal or aim, that’s all. Nothing corporate, perish the thought.

Metazen: John Gardner didn’t like meta-fiction, calling it “by nature a fiction-like critique of conventional fiction.” What do you think of that? And don’t be nice just because Metazen has a heart for metafiction.

Carol: I take issue with Gardner’s definition, at least out of context, and anyway, what’s wrong with critiquing conventional fiction? You know, those little love stories aren’t meta-fictions. I’ve written a few, though.  One is here. The term “meta-fiction,” also called “self-reflective” fiction, as I understand it, refers to stories that are really about the process of writing stories: they’re like those dogs fascinated by their own tails. I think that it’s fun to write obliquely and metaphorically about writing, tongue in cheek really, while also weaving a tale.  But meta-fiction is unpopular in today’s American market, as is literary satire. I was just discussing this with my foreign-born friend Amir Parsa, who has had many books published in France.

Metazen: Two of metazen’s four editors live in europe. one even is a European…I think that metafiction (the way you define it) has always been fairly popular in Europe  perhaps we are more self-reflective over here?  According to our mission, Metazen is “a flytrap for metafiction, existentialism and absurdism”.

Carol: You talk about “existentialism” and “absurdism,” but these are only terms, and “absurdism” is a passe movement rather than an accurate genre label, for what it’s worth, which is up for grabs. One can write a narrative that contains many elements and various genres. One can write a poem like piece, let’s say, in three parts, like two in my book (“Fish Tryptich” and “In the beginning is”) and craft at least one of those parts as prose, in terms of form.

Metazen: I have noticed that your own writing transcends traditional form. I cannot say too much about “absurdism” though my own work is often labeled “absurd”. But “existentialism” i know something about – it is concerned with the human condition and takes questions seriously that may well be labeled philosophical. We do believe that there is a need to ask serious questions and that the meta-position may be a good place to ask questions on issues like: death, birth, aging, love. Are these themes important to you?

Carol: Yes, we have that in common: the acknowledgment of the absurd. In regard to “existentialism,” I think of the writings of Sartre that I’ve managed to read and read about: the burdensome acceptance of freedom from gods and society’s rules, etc., the overwhelming realization that one must create one’s own meaning, the isolated self’s confrontation of its own short-lived existence, the significance of being human and humane. I don’t see how any thinking writer can avoid the big questions.

Metazen: We like writers who think. We think we do. John Gardner also said about “jazzing around” – as a form akin to “metafiction” – that it “is the hardest kind of fiction in the world,” and “the world’s greater praise will go to the serviceable drudge who writes about more or less lifelike people who labor through . . . find their destinies and stir us to affirmation.”

Carol: Well, I don’t think that meta-fiction or “jazzing around” (which I love to do – don’t know what Gardner means by it) is the hardest kind of fiction to write, but it’s certainly an impossible sell here in the States. This is, in general, I shudder to say, a voyeuristic, naïve, infantile society that adores idiotic reality shows, plot-driven novels and “true tales” (memoirs) about people overcoming adversities. Americans are generally myopic Pollyanna’s and Pollyandies. I often write in frustration about the destructive and vapid “hope” hook. That’s one of my themes, I guess. Sure, “everything will be okay.” Look the other way if you happen to see a tsunami coming to get you. Just kill all of those Arab terrorists, whether or not they’re terrorists, and everything will be alright. Conventional “fiction” is formulaic: create and develop a compelling character; create a dramatic arc full of conflicts; never include a thread or character that doesn’t push the narrative forward; always “show” and never “tell;” end with a “resolution,” preferably an epiphany, etc. etc. Yes, AFFIRM like crazy: go for it, boys and girls! Ok. End of rave.

Metazen: (Gasps, in a good way). We know that you’ve got a lot on your plate right now – with a new issue of Mad Hatter’s Review, your move away from NYC etc. – but what do you read, if anything, right now?

Carol: Lately, I’ve been reading “A Vital Fluid” by one of our contributors, Tom Bradley, and an anthology I’m in, “Diagram III.” I jump around a lot, start to read many books and leaf through various journals. I have hundreds of books in storage and the past year has been crazy-chaotic in every respect, not a time to focus; I mean, I’ve moved three times in preparation for the final move, empty and sell my ancient family home and buy another, etc. I’m amazed that I managed to write anything.

Metazen: we are certainly happy you did!

Carol: Thanks!

Metazen: What’s next for you? What would you like to do?

Carol: I’m really looking forward to collaborations, perhaps one with you, and one with Tom, more with Sheila Murphy (the first can be viewed online) and Amir Parsa (see here for a soundbite from the middle of the writer’s life’s journey). Harmonious collaborations expand what you can’t write by yourself… add another creative voice/mind and heart into the mix. I also want to get back to and complete my great European ruminative novel, a novella, and a multi-genre voyage that will contain video segments and perhaps a short play or two. Oh yes, I wrote a one act play that I’d love to see performed, and I’ve started another.

Metazen: We’re running out of time and we did not manage to talk about … (slightly stuttering) the great Americananan novel.

Carol: Is there such a creature? “Great” and “American” and “novel” are open to so many interpretations and possibilities. Is there a formula for “the great American novel?” Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” qualifies as a potent, eloquently scribed statement about the mentality of this society, but what’s the point of calling it THE “great, American novel?” In any case, it’s a wonder that the book made it to the charts, as DeLillo’s a thinking writer.

Metazen: Diana Sheets agrees with you – she has said that the publishing industry, being a global enterprise, places emphasis on “literary tofu” (in an article about why there is not going to be a Great American Novel for our age).

Carol: I like that. Tofu connotes blandness, lack of authentic imagination and originality.  True. That’s what’s happening.  Not to mention skinless, boneless, tasteless chicken breasts, and the ubiquitous, toxic bottled water.

Metazen: We’re happy you could take the time to join us today for this metaview. Thanks a lot good luck with settling in and with the new contest over at mhr!

(reblogged from metazen blog)

It is wonderful to be in a group, feel part of something bigger, know that there are others wanting the same thing, striving, working hard. It’s warm it’s fuzzy cuddly comfort. But writing is not that, it’s solitude and solipsism, it’s feeling like the planet Jupiter knowing that from outside you look like a speck and will for some time. Writing is continuous chatter not on facebook or twitter, it’s continuous chatter inside your own thick, thoughtful head. But even the hermit is part of a group of hermits, outcasts and eccentrics defined by their being borderline and beyond. There may not be any escaping from group in the end – even if it’s the group of failed writers. (Though as long as you’re writing you will not be a failed writer. Doing what you love constitutes success, not failure.)

(Taken from the missing metazen photo journal titled “people that time forgot”) Metazen editors working as a team to save body and soul of an author after rejection by another literary magazine. Notice how seamlessly they collaborate to guarantee publication of the finest storytelling and poetry. Later at camp, they will feed the writer warm drinks and good food, patch him up and send him back into the battle of wills and writing wonders where no man’s an island entire of itself.

(photo/caption reposted from metazen blog)

Fellini’s fascination with masks is fascinating. I’ve got my own fascination with masks, with false names, fictitiousness, fake identity. “What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over.” Bloody proverbial truths. What the heart does not grieve over will not be remembered, will not become part of the continuous, persistent dream that we must create for the reader with our writing. We live in existential times. We do, we do, we do. We do. Oil spill? Earthquake? Tsunami? – A slight sore throat can throw us off balance. Camus was the last to write about the Fall. Since then, unjustified rumor has spread that we re-entered the paradise, got to keep our wisdom and our clothes and can do whatever we want: nobody’s there to kick us out again because there’s no god (he died from neglect). Eva’s turned feminist, the serpent is in online marketing now and Adam’s naked and conflicted.

(photo/caption reposted from Metazen blog, Oct 2009)

I am interested in the journey from flash fiction to the novel.

I am not just interested in the journey as a scholar would be, I am interested in undertaking said journey myself. I don’t even know if it’s possible – I’m not aware of any novelist I admire who went by that route. Except perhaps Nabokov who wrote his novels from index cards, in fragments (cp. “The Original of Laura”).

John Gardner, in “The Art of Fiction”, mentions “fictional pointillism” as a possible structure for large-scale works and gives Coover as an example for a writer who mastered this form – Cortazar comes to my mind as well – what Gardner says is worth reproducing here at length:

In this form the writer lets out his story in snippets, sometimes called ‘crots’, moving as if at random from one point to another, gradually amassing the elements, literal and symbolic, of a quasi-energetic action. No rules governs the organization of such a work but that the writer be a prose-poet of genius. Even if he has some intellectual system for arranging his crots, the basic principle of his assembly is feeling: He shuffles and reshuffles his fragments to find the most moving of possible presentations, and he achieves his climaxes not, as in linear fiction, by the gelling of key events, but by poetic force. Depending, as it does, so largely on texture – having abandoned structure in the traditional sense (events causally related and presented more or less in sequence) – the mode runs the great risk of overrichness, the writer’s tendency to push too hard, producing an effect of sentimentality. The great advantage, on the other hand, is the necessary focus on imagery whereby repeated iages accrue greater and greater psychological and symbolic force.

It does sound as if this is something that I may use for my own journey to the novel. Perhaps other flash fictionistas feel similarly. I believe that my own fiction so far avoids the abovementioned risk by being humorous and by having a tendency to pulsate even in short bursts of 100-200 words (here’s an example). When there is no pulsating, no coming back to boring ground, you get pure Pynchon where every line counts but there’s also no relief ever from the poetic persuasion of the author.

So – watch me shuffle my flash cards at the usual place for the next year or so.

Have begun to age. I think you know what I am talking about. Went to a coffee shop this morning (they used to be called “Kaffeehäuser” around here and later ”Café”, when French existentialists were more favoured than they are now) to write and realized that young men must have wavy hair that falls fashionably over their eyes and young women must wear hip-high bright red leather boots and look above the heads of men into a murky metrosexual future. Can you guess that I’m mildly depressed? Cranked up the old depresso machine in order to deal with two rejections of a story I thought one of my best. Would I have been able to deal more easily with rejection twenty years ago? – Actually, I don’t think so. I’ve got a lot more resources to bring to the bleak table of “no -thank you” now than I had then. I wore a corduroy jacket, for god’s sake, I listened to Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, I read Camus! Oh yes – and my hair fell all the way down onto my pointy shoes. I was miserable for no reason then – today at least I have a reason: there is no fountain of youth (see below – accompanied by a caption that originally appeared on Metazen Blog).

we don’t talk much about another important effect of metazen the mag, especially for the aging writer: the magazine will keep you eternally young if you read every one of its installments and comment profusely, and positively. in the picture, its editor-in-chief, frank hinton, can be seen standing on the right hand side (the chap with the black cap) holding out his hand to one of the youthful maidens emerging from the fountain. flawnt, a writer also associated with metazen (in ways which are currently being investigated by the Factory of Blind Infants) is pictured on the left, with beard, carrying a middle-aged lady (ms flawnt) off. the “fountain of youth” is a frequent motive in stories of flawnt, who is also rumoured to be an incarnation of the legendary alchemist nicolas flamel.

(photo/caption reposted from metazen blog)

a new beginning beckoned when …
just now i came out of hot tub – i don’t often take baths i prefer the invigorating almost taunting effect of a shower – where i had read a book by carolyn see that i’ve owned since 2002 but not really read or used. it’s called “making a literary life”,  written in a most charming supportive way and it made me realise that i, and this blog by inclusion, need a change. so here we are. must make a change.

the good old days…
for this blog began in january 2009 when i went online with my texts and quickly gathered a small group of readers in part, i believe due to flawnt’s quirky, mysterious ways. people like personality and flawnt evidently had a lot of it. certainly his writing was off at times but he kept on producing. people and readers, i think, like continuity and routine – i know i do. in the art world this often leads to people doing the same thing forever because it was successful. writers do it too, some (like, say, stephen king) retain the passion for their subject matter even though they do the same thing over and over again, others (like, say, joyce or stein) don’t and must move on, be bold and risk all. now, over the past 12 months, i have joined and left communities, i tried to fit in and outfit myself properly and did all the things you do when you wish to be accepted. nothing wrong with that – i gained a number of precious friends and i was interviewed, published…

the murky present unfolded when…
in 2010 i began publishing usually fresh flash pieces elsewhere – what is, with few exceptions, essentially my daily production of words, on a new blog. in spring, i joined frank hinton’s glorious group of editors for metazen. it seemed as if i had less and less to say and was happy to say it in short bursts. no long stories came out of my mouth. this puzzled and distressed me. to work off some of my tension, i started to translate my very short fiction into german. too early to say what it means and while i don’t love it, i like it enough to continue for the good of my countrymen.

furiously fiddling with the future could’ve gone on…
until i realised that, perhaps i could chill. keep doing what i was doing, indulge in uncapitalised unrest, even if there was no novel and no particular direction and things were not magically falling into any recognisable place and, in particular, take the pressure off this site by turning it into an actual (non-fiction) blog.  maybe even invite others to guest write – make a topic out of this difficult, painful process that i’m in, which doesn’t even seem to have any direction or goal. heck, is this what the greek heroes went through on their way to greener pastures?

anyway, it’s decided. for fiction, go elsewhere (except the 24-hours series and metazen blog editorial flash – one shouldn’t break off a journey around the world whimsically). come here for an irregularly served dose of reflections on life and writing. a bit like what i did for virtual writers.

case closed, keep breathing. let’s do something practical, like buy shoes.

Every time I read a great line by another writer, I feel fear, in case I might, journeying the desert, come to a hut, knock at the door and, upon seeing eye to unseeing eye with my destiny, be required to speak my mind and need that line because no other will do.

And it wouldn’t be my own.

(published in Litsnack)

for booger who had the idea.

two writers sat down for a meal, carefully avoiding any talk of their art. they shared stories of their wives and children. of cars to let loose on the fast lane. of tech gadgets to play with as only boys play, exploring all keys and functions. they mentioned their fathers in passing and how similar they had become to them. they had a laugh, and when the pretty waitress with the blond hair bun and the wide swinging hips appeared at their table, they flirted a little in tandem, kicking gallantries back and forth until the maiden culled one and appointed a winner of their innocent game, which made their three hearts beat faster for a bit and the food that showed up on their table the better. all the while, as they were enjoying a full glass of friendship, they were secretly spinning yarns like giddy spiders. when they parted, with a manly handshake and a hug for the road, each had a good tale to tell.