His poem “The Host,” which was the opening piece in The Courtesy (The University of Chicago Press, 1983), was first published in CQ 35.1 (Fall 1982). We decided it was time to catch up with him again to discuss 3 a.m. epiphanies, the wisdom of Stephen Wright, and the importance of vaccination. This interview was conducted via email during the month of February.

–Nathan Vail, Intern

Carolina Quarterly (CQ): In Night of the Republic, you seem very interested in private reactions to public spaces. How would you explain this preoccupation? What sparked it?

Alan Shapiro (AS): Several years ago I found myself in a supermarket at 3 a.m. The place was brightly lit and no one was there but a cashier who was half asleep, and I thought what a strange place this is, a place I go to nearly every day and yet never really look at or think about, and the absence of people made it possible for me to see how truly weird it is, as if I were an anthropologist from Mars and was trying to infer from the look of the place the nature of the creatures that had built it. From there it was a natural step to examine other public places at night to see what secrets they’d yield about our way of life.

CQ: Li-Young Li said that he wrote The City in Which I Love You in the mornings and Book of My Nights late at night after his family had gone to sleep. He argues that different times of day carry different energies which affect the writing produced during them. Do you have a preferred time of day to write? How does the night time speak to you?

AS: My preferred time of writing is whenever I have time to write. Raising children will do that to you. You write when there are no other claims on your time.

CQ: How do begin writing? Do you have routines, rituals, or prompts that prepare you to write?

AS: I begin with the first word and go from there. No rituals, no superstitions, no voodoo, apart from reading. I sit, I write.

CQ: Readers frequently assume that the poetic “I” is autobiographical. Do you approach the first-person pronoun differently in your poetry than in your memoirs? Is it fair for a reader to assume that the speaker in your poems is coterminous with you, the author?

AS: Simple difference between fiction or poetry and creative nonfiction (which I like to think of as creative non poetry) and it is this: in fiction you tell a story; in nonfiction you tell a story under oath.

CQ: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received (this doesn’t necessarily have to be writing advice)?

AS: Get the shingles vaccine.

CQ: When people ask writers what books have influenced them, they’re often looking for a literary genealogy. I want to know which books are always near at hand. Which books do you keep going back to as a reference, inspiration, or escape? What’s the most tattered and dog-eared book on your shelves?

AS: Robert Frost, Robert Pinsky, CK Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, David Ferry, Homer.

CQ: If you could steal one line, sentence, poem, or technique from a contemporary writer and make it your own, what would it be and why?

AS: My favorite sentence in the English language is by Stephen Wright: “I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, and not screaming in terror like his passengers.” Pretty much does everything I try to do on and off the page.

CQ: Thinking about what young authors are publishing today, what aspects do you find interesting, worthwhile, or new? What trends or aspects of contemporary literature do you think are dead ends or wish would just go away?

AS: Well, I think there’s a lot of personality driven, tough-talking, jaded poems of loose association among younger poets that sometimes are charming but often rather flaccid. And they’re often very long. At the same time, the non-ideological bent of contemporary poetry, the inclusiveness with which poets view the formal choices a poet can make, the freedom from the exclusive good/bad dichotomies that dominated the literary world in the 60s and 70s when I was coming up, all that is very encouraging. And there are some wonderful young poets: Matthew Dickman, Peter Campion, Katie Peterson, Jamaal May, Terrence Hayes, Vievee Frances, Camille Dungy, Elizabeth Arnold, Josh Weiner, to name just a few.

CQ: Most writers have an origin story—what’s yours?

AS: In 1965, in a bookstore in my hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, in the late afternoon of an ordinary school day, in the middle of winter, I discovered my inner Beat poet. Anyone who might have seen me in the tiny poetry section, turning the pages of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, would have mistaken me for an unremarkable thirteen year old, in a winter coat, unbuckled galoshes, a book bag slung over his side. And up to that moment that’s exactly who I was, a typical lower middle class Jewish kid, whose parents worked long hours for little pay, with three kids and my mother’s mother to care for. Life in the household was always tense and sulky at the best of times, and now and then explosive. Terrified of blow-ups, I did my best to fit in. I tried to be the kind of person my parents expected me to be. I worked hard in school; I never got into trouble. More angster than gangster, the only tough guys I’d ever dreamed of being were the Jets and Sharks of West Side Story, which I had seen the year before with a few friends. When the movie let out, we went dancing down the street looking for Puerto Ricans to beat up. The gang dissolved later the same day when I picked a fight with Michael Lee, a bespectacled diminutive Chinese kid, the closest thing Brookline had to a Puerto Rican. Unfortunately, Mike Lee fought like Bruce Lee’s little brother, and I was crying uncle after the first punch landed.

But reading Ferlinghetti, I entered an alternative universe that turned on its head the world of my parents: its rank commercialism and status seeking, its sexual prudery. Longings I didn’t know I had suddenly sprang to life: mine was the heart Ferlinghetti described as a foolish fish cast up and gasping for love. I thrilled to his smart-alecky advocacy of contrarianism for its own sake, as if it were a badge of authenticity or the height of courage to walk out into an intersection when the sign says, Don’t walk. I wanted to be downwardly mobile like the dog trotting “freely in the street… touching and tasting and testing everything.” When I left the store, I was still the middle class kid I was, still fearful, still wanting to please. But now, in imagination, if nowhere else, I knew that I was free, or could be, reading Ferlinghetti and the other poets he would lead me to—Ginsburg, Patchen, and Corso. Lovelorn and hapless, I dreamed of Ferlinghetti’s “Isle of Manisfree,” his paradise of liberation, and even thought I’d found that blessed state a few years later when I arrived at Woodstock, not knowing that my parents too, alas, were waiting for me there in spirit, which is why I think I was the only person among the half a million people in attendance who was unable to procure either sex or drugs.

But that’s another story.

The Carolina Quarterly

His poem “The Host,” which was the opening piece in The Courtesy (The University of Chicago Press, 1983), was first published in CQ 35.1 (Fall 1982). We decided it was time to catch up with him again to discuss 3 a.m. epiphanies, the wisdom of Stephen Wright, and the importance of vaccination. This interview was conducted via email during the month of February.

–Nathan Vail, Intern

Carolina Quarterly (CQ): In Night of the Republic, you seem very interested in private reactions to public spaces. How would you explain this preoccupation? What sparked it?

Alan Shapiro (AS): Several years ago I found myself in a supermarket at 3 a.m. The place was brightly lit and no one was there but a cashier who was half asleep, and I thought what a strange place this is, a place I go to nearly every day and yet never really look at or think about, and the absence of people made it possible for me to see how truly weird it is, as if I were an anthropologist from Mars and was trying to infer from the look of the place the nature of the creatures that had built it. From there it was a natural step to examine other public places at night to see what secrets they’d yield about our way of life.

Continue reading…

The Carolina Quarterly

The winners are as follows:

$50 Grand Prize Winner:
Lauren Moore – “Dull Metal”

Honorable Mentions:
Caleb Agnew – “Time Travel”
Emily Cameron – “Spring Haiku”
Jessica Martell – “Gerard Manly Hopkins Goes Grocery Shopping”
Karina McCorkle – “Double Ear Infection”

Each Chapel Hill Transit bus will feature two poems throughout the month of April. Lauren’s poem will appear on all 98 CHT buses, while the Honorable Mentions will be randomly distributed amongst the buses. The posters go out on MONDAY APRIL 1, so keep an eye out for them.

Thanks to everyone who submitted poems, and to Rachel Richardson for judging. Immense thanks to Assistant Editors Bhumi Dalia and Heather Van Wallendael for publicizing and successfully implementing the contest. Thanks also to Assistant Transit Director Brian Litchfield of Chapel Hill Transit for helping us to get poetry onto the buses.

You can take a look at the posters here:

The Carolina Quarterly

Nadler’s first novel, Wise Men, was published in February to great acclaim. The Boston Globe found it “genuinely moving,” while People Magazine called it “A historical novel with the gusto of Gatsby.” To read his story, “Airplanes,” check out the Fall 2012 issue of CQ. The Carolina Quarterly recently talked with Nadler about looking at pictures of old Cadillacs, Cape Cod National Seashore, and what it’s like to create a town.

–Nate Young, Fiction Staff

Carolina Quarterly (CQ): You were recently selected for “5 under 35″ by the National Book Foundation for The Book of Life. What does that honor mean for you?

Stuart Nadler (SN): It was a great honor and utterly humbling, especially having been picked by Edith Pearlman, a writer whose work I love and admire––and a Bostonian! And I was especially glad to be part of such a terrific group of writers.

CQ: Your new novel, Wise Men, seems to be very concerned with geography: Cape Cod; New Haven, Connecticut; suburban New York; and rural Iowa, among other places. Do you have any connection to these locations yourself?

SN: I don’t have any particular connection to New Haven, apart from having driven through it for years when going back and forth between Boston and New York. I have, though, lived in Iowa, which is where I went to graduate school, and for the past few years I’ve been spending time in the summers out on the far arm of Cape Cod. It’s an area of the country I love, and one that everyone, at some point, needs to see. President Kennedy made this far edge of the Cape into a National Park (The National Seashore) and so it’s been left alone, and because of that it’s completely empty of all the kinds of beachy bric-a-brac and resort hotels and boardwalk amusements that you find up and down the east coast. Instead you have the trees and the spot ponds and the whole coast, unadorned and beautiful.

Continue reading

The Carolina Quarterly

Nadler’s first novel, Wise Men, was published in February to great acclaim. The Boston Globe found it “genuinely moving,” while People Magazine called it “A historical novel with the gusto of Gatsby.” To read his story, “Airplanes,” check out the Fall 2012 issue of CQ. The Carolina Quarterly recently talked with Nadler about looking at pictures of old Cadillacs, Cape Cod National Seashore, and what it’s like to create a town.

–Nate Young, Fiction Staff

Carolina Quarterly (CQ): You were recently selected for “5 under 35″ by the National Book Foundation for The Book of Life. What does that honor mean for you?

Stuart Nadler (SN): It was a great honor and utterly humbling, especially having been picked by Edith Pearlman, a writer whose work I love and admire—and a Bostonian! And I was especially glad to be part of such a terrific group of writers.

CQ: Your new novel, Wise Men, seems to be very concerned with geography: Cape Cod; New Haven, Connecticut; suburban New York; and rural Iowa, among other places. Do you have any connection to these locations yourself?

SN: I don’t have any particular connection to New Haven, apart from having driven through it for years when going back and forth between Boston and New York. I have, though, lived in Iowa, which is where I went to graduate school, and for the past few years I’ve been spending time in the summers out on the far arm of Cape Cod. It’s an area of the country I love, and one that everyone, at some point, needs to see. President Kennedy made this far edge of the Cape into a National Park (The National Seashore) and so it’s been left alone, and because of that it’s completely empty of all the kinds of beachy bric-a-brac and resort hotels and boardwalk amusements that you find up and down the east coast. Instead you have the trees and the spot ponds and the whole coast, unadorned and beautiful.

CQ: On that note, however, there is no Bluepoint, Massachusetts, Wren’s Bridge, New York or Ebbington, Iowa on any map, but you manage to make these towns feel three dimensional. Are they amalgams of real places, and what does creating a town allow you to do in your novel?

SN: I like to do this, if for no other reason than it frees me up from the adhering too closely to the real place. I lived in New York City for ten years, and because of that when I picture New York, or write about it, I’m bringing to bear my experience of the place, my knowledge of what restaurants sits on what blocks. There’s a responsibility to the truth when you write a real place. But to create a place like Bluepoint, which, in my head, exists between Wellfleet and Truro, or like Ebbington, which I picture being somewhat close to the Mississippi, is to allow myself to do anything—to put a house wherever I want, or a diner, or a ball field, and not worry about the fidelity of the image.

CQ: Similarly to the geography, cars feature prominently in the novel, from the pivotal Packard to Savannah’s Land Rover and to the Jeep Patriot with the American flags at the end. How did you select these cars and what do they bring to the story?

SN: I’m glad you saw this! I love cars but know absolutely nothing about how they work. One of the things I loved most about researching the world in which the Wise family would have lived was poring over pictures of old Cadillacs and Packards. I’m not sure if these particular cars add anything to the novel that any other well-placed detail wouldn’t have, but they were certainly fun to come up with.

CQ: Wise Men is written from the perspective of Hilly Wise looking back on his life. As a young author, how does it feel to write from the perspective of someone so much older than yourself?

SN: The great part about Hilly is that he’s such an open narrator—perfectly willing to admit his prejudices and shame and regrets and embarrassments—and I had a great time writing in his voice. The issue of how old he is, and how I am, was never something I worried about. Writing is always a process of imagination and of assuming another person’s consciousness. It’s the same process I imagine an actor takes when they’re preparing a role.

CQ: Through Hilly’s recollections, the narrative of the story spans almost 60 years. What attracted you to writing such a sweeping story?

SN: I’ve always loved novels that span time, and I always knew that if I had the opportunity that I would try to do this. There’s something wonderful about having access to a character’s life, and to see, in the end, where their story goes. In general, I’ve always loved the passage of time in stories, even on a small scale, from morning to night, or from week to week. It’s something that’s a thrill to encounter when you read, and something I’ve tried to put into my work—in both books.

CQ: Referring to time, the novel is neatly divided into three books, the first two of which cover the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the early 1970s, respectively. What is the draw for period pieces and what does that past setting allow you to do?

SN: The issue of the time periods was borne out of necessity rather than out some initial blueprint for the novel. The very first scene I wrote for Wise Men was a scene in which Hilly encounters his father by chance on a street in Washington, D.C., and ends up following him into a bar. His father, at a certain point, dictates a note to the bartender to tell Hilly that if he ever sees him like this again, not to follow him. For months this was the first chapter of the book, and from that small germ, and from answering a lot of the initial questions that scene brought up, I was able to find the rest of the story. A novel is, in a lot of ways, a series of these kinds of questions, and this small scene, which is now in the third part of the book, and which now is about Hilly and Savannah, gave me the impulse to wonder how this family got its money, and why, after all this time, there was still trouble between Hilly and his father. This is how I got to the beginning of the book—to the late 40’s and early 50’s, and by starting there, and ending somewhere close to the present day, I knew I’d get the scope I was looking for. In that, however, was the most difficult challenge for this book, which was how to go from section to section in a way that felt organic. That particular issue was probably the aspect of craft I worried and thought and fussed with most.

CQ: This first part of the novel is a miniature rags to riches narrative about the Wise family. Why is it important to show readers this rise?

SN: The crash at the beginning of the book, and the subsequent windfall of money that the family experiences—these are the central incidents of Hilly’s life. But since they happen when he’s at such an impressionable age, at that point in his development where his personality and his confidence and his view of the world is beginning to emerge, it was important to me to be able to show where Hilly had come from—and how he had truly, always enjoyed living where he’d lived, and being the boy he’d been, which is to say a boy without very much except for his family and his friends.

CQ: Many of Hilly’s relationships with his family and friends appear to be quite fraught. Is there any hope for the characters to resolve their problems?

SN: I’m not sure I can answer that question. I will say that I hold out hope for them. For all of them.

The Carolina Quarterly

Lauri Anderson’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Willow Springs, Meridian, The Greensboro Review, Bellingham Review, Passages North, and on air at NPR’s “All Things Considered” Weekend. She is the recent winner of both the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, as well as The Robert Watson Literary Prize. She lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she is a PhD student at Texas Tech University.

Take a listen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can download the mp3 here: http://cqonline.web.unc.edu/files/2013/03/Anderson_Here_Come_the_Carnivores.mp3

The Carolina Quarterly

The Carolina Quarterly

The Carolina Quarterly recently talked with one of our favorite contributors, Woody Skinner. With a name like a Jack Palance character, this word-wrangler sings of the Ozark plateau and the lonesome call of a life on the road. To read his story, “The Knife Salesman,” check out the Winter 2011 issue of CQ (http://cqonline.web.unc.edu/past-issues/61-3-winter-2011/). If you’re into Ted Nugent and the Parnassian properties of late-night infomercials, read our interview below.

–Jerrod Rosenbaum, Fiction Staff

Carolina Quarterly (CQ): I don’t want to sound weird, but you have a pretty great name.

Woody Skinner (WS): My real name is William Wood Skinner. Wood is my mom’s maiden name. But I’ve been Woody all my life.

CQ: How did the kids in grade school react to a name like Woody Skinner?

WS: There was a fair amount of good-natured teasing, but it was character building, I’d say.

CQ: So you’re an Arkansas native, but you’re living in Wichita these days. What brought you up the river?

WS: Right. I grew up in rural-northeast Arkansas. In the Ozark foothills. When I finished undergrad it took me a few years to figure out what I wanted to do. I didn’t take any creative writing classes in college, so when I sent out applications to graduate school I didn’t have a portfolio or anything. Wichita State University accepted me and their program looked good, so here I am.

Continue reading

The Carolina Quarterly

The Carolina Quarterly recently talked with one of our favorite contributors, Woody Skinner. With a name like a Jack Palance character, this word-wrangler sings of the Ozark plateau and the lonesome call of a life on the road. To read his story, “The Knife Salesman,” check out the Winter 2011 issue of CQ (http://cqonline.web.unc.edu/past-issues/61-3-winter-2011/). If you’re into Ted Nugent and the Parnassian properties of late-night infomercials, read our interview below.

–Jerrod Rosenbaum, Fiction Staff

Carolina Quarterly (CQ): I don’t want to sound weird, but you have a pretty great name.

Woody Skinner (WS): My real name is William Wood Skinner. Wood is my mom’s maiden name. But I’ve been Woody all my life.

CQ: How did the kids in grade school react to a name like Woody Skinner?

WS: There was a fair amount of good-natured teasing, but it was character building, I’d say.

CQ: So you’re an Arkansas native, but you’re living in Wichita these days. What brought you up the river?

WS: Right. I grew up in rural-northeast Arkansas. In the Ozark foothills. When I finished undergrad it took me a few years to figure out what I wanted to do. I didn’t take any creative writing classes in college, so when I sent out applications to graduate school I didn’t have a portfolio or anything. Wichita State University accepted me and their program looked good, so here I am.

CQ: So when did you figure out you wanted to be a writer, then?

WS: I think I was in denial for a long time. I wrote some real terrible stuff in high school and some truly awful melodrama in undergrad. I didn’t start taking things seriously until the end of college. I started reading more seriously, and that helped me get more serious about writing.

CQ: Well there’s some pretty country out your way… in Arkansas and Kansas. Does it inform your writing? The people? The landscape?

WS: Definitely, but each in different ways. Growing up where I did, I can’t help but have a rural perspective. I think what seems ordinary or mundane to some people is more interesting to me. But Kansas isn’t like anything I’d experienced in the South.

CQ: Do you have a day job in Wichita?

WS: I’m going to school full time. I also teach composition. I’m teaching remedial English right now; it’s challenging, but pretty rewarding.

CQ: Have your students read your fiction?

WS: I don’t think any of my current students have read it. I like to leave them in the dark about those things. Students have tried to read it in the past, but I like to remain a mystery in the classroom.

CQ: We loved “The Knife Salesman” at CQ. Tell me about it. Is there a story behind the story?

WS: Not much of a story. I wrote “The Knife Salesman” during my first semester of graduate school and it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read the first draft. I guess I wrote it for two reasons. The first is simply that I was out here, taking in Wichita, which is a weird place to live. It’s very spread out, and strip malls seem to be the defining characteristic. I wanted to write something that tapped into that a little bit. That combined with where I was on a personal level.

The first story I workshopped was a fairly ordinary piece that got real weird at the very end. People hated it. I think because it was terrible. What I learned from that workshop was that the ending wasn’t really in line with the rest of the story, but the ending was the only part I really enjoyed writing. The first 15 pages were filler. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again, so I started “The Knife Salesman” the next day. Once you have the voice figured out, all the other things fall into place.

CQ: The scene in which the young woman asks the Salesman to cut her. It’s among the strangest and most interesting things I’ve ever read. Where did it come from? What’s it all about?

WS: It’s hard to say the exact purpose it serves. I wanted the story to work on a kind of grand scale: arenas full of people, auditoriums filled with school children, the ladies’ book club, a group dynamic. But I also wanted the Salesman to interact with an individual. A different dynamic.  It was interesting to figure out how the Salesman would interact with a really intense fan, as opposed to how other celebrities might interact with fans in more traditional ways. Something about a cut seemed appropriate.

CQ: It’s his autograph.

WS: Maybe.

CQ: Can you tell me a little about your writing process? Where does an idea come from? Once you have it, what happens next?

WS: My process is constantly evolving. At this point, I tend to work on 4 or 5 pieces at once, all at different stages. I’m a plodding, slow first-draft writer. Some of my friends write quickly and do complete overhauls, but my first drafts emerge very slowly. It gives me flexibility. Sometimes I’m in the mood to finish a story, sometimes to start one. That process may reflect my experience with grad school. I have a limited amount of time to work and want to take advantage of every opportunity.

CQ: What are you working on now?

WS: I’m trying to finish up my thesis. It’s a collection of short stories. Most of them are close to finished, but I’m in the middle of one story I don’t understand yet. It’s about satellite dishes; or at least they’re the central image.

CQ: Do you often begin with an image, then write a story around it?

WS: Hmm. When I’m still in the exploratory stage, there are often certain images that keep me anchored. I’ve written a number of fish stories, several occupation stories. A Beanie Baby counterfeiter, a butcher (which also has a knife theme). I’m trying to play [the knife theme] out. After my fourth fish story, I didn’t ever want to think about fish again. Right now it’s still knives. I’ve been thinking about a deer-hunting television show host.

CQ: Wait. The show is about deer hunting, or the television host likes to hunt deer?

WS: He hosts a deer-hunting program. I feel certain that Ted Nugent influences us all in some way.

CQ: I’m inclined to agree with you on that point. Before we finish, do you have any advice for aspiring writers? For amateur knife enthusiasts?

WS: For the aspiring writers, I don’t think I have any advice. I’m in such an early stage myself… I feel like a complete novice. But for knife enthusiasts: watch a lot of late-night TV. I’ve learned a lot from infomercials. They’re usually a good place to start.

The Carolina Quarterly

Send us your most creative ballads, haikus, sestinas, sonnets, villanelles, ghazals, prose poems, or free verse compositions by 11:59pm on March 15th for consideration. Poems must be no longer than 30 lines. 4 poems per person, maximum.

The best pieces will be featured on Chapel Hill Transit buses throughout the month of April. One grand prize winner will receive $50. The winner and all honorable mentions will get a copy of their bus poster and a one-year subscription to the Carolina Quarterly.

Last Year’s Winning Poem by Liana Roux

[read more of last year's winning poems here]

To enter, please email your poems as a single attachment to carolina.quarterly@gmail.com. Please write “Bards on the Bus” in the subject line.

The contest is free and open to all students and affiliates of UNC-Chapel Hill and residents of Orange County, North Carolina.

Contest judge: Rachel Richardson

Rachel Richardson’s first book, Copperhead, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2011. She is a 2013-14 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and currently serves as the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC Chapel Hill. Her poems and nonfiction appear in Slate, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

The Carolina Quarterly