The Story Garden 5.0
Interviews
A Conversation with Mary Corinne Powers
Q:
Writing. Art or Craft? What say you!
Just kidding. Uh jeeze. Let's see.
Do you like peas? My grandfather told me a story once about a pea eating contest he saw. I guess this Asian guy (I think I can say Asian even though he was Chinese, can you say Chinese?) told this...wow this is a boring story...this Chinese guy and this..hell...Caucasian guy? Well these two guys had a pea eating contest. The Chinese guy said he could eat peas faster with chopsticks than the other guy could with a spoon. Really, as I tell this I realize it was probably all a bunch of BS. My grandfather was a dirty liar! Don't tell my grandmother I said that, she'd go after me with a wooden spoon. Anyway, the Chinese guy filled his chopsticks with peas, you know, lined up on the chopsticks, and ate them and..oh forget it.
A:
Some, anyway. Not the frozen birdseye ones or the canned french-named ones, but the kind you can buy from guys who grew them themselves, or the kind you leave in the pod and dump into a stirfry.
Q:
If you were a metaphor, what would you mean?
A:
But I AM a metaphor, and the meaning of course is open to interpretation.
Here is a true story that no one ever believes. I once went to a writing conference in Taos. I drank a bit one night, and woke up with a headache that would cripple a walrus. So I went staggering down to the soda machine to try to get a diet coke before the workshop started -- caffeine being my only hope, or so I thought. I stuck my seventy-five cents in the slot and pushed the button. I heard the can clunk inside the machine but it didn't come out. What DID come out, I kid you not, was three fresh green beans grouped together on a little vine.
Now THAT'S a fucking metaphor.
Q:
Fresh green beans are the best. Do they have those in Utica? Wait. Wrong interview.
Do they have them wherever you live? I thought you lived in the Salt Flats or something. Who would want to live there? Do you drive rocket cars? I'd probably tinkle myself. You must be really brave. Kids and rocket cars.
I'm not sure we're allowed to use the F word though. It might be one of those words that won't make it past the censors. I have a list around here somewhere.
A:
I don't live on the Salt Flats, heaven forfend! I cross them now and then, going to California, and I may drive too fast, but only in the good ole Subaru. I have an obnoxious theory about people who drive rocket cars, but as you say, some things might not make it past the censors.
Once when I was coming back from California and trying to make it in one day -- and this was back in the days of the Volvo wagon, 197,000 miles, no air conditioner, no radio, crossing Nevada -- I was almost home, on the west edge of the Salt Lake, and a jack-booted statie (all of 19, by the looks of him) pulled me over. OF COURSE he shines a flashlight into the back seat, waking all three kids, who are immediately scared/cranky/unhelpful. He takes my license and registration and is heading back to his car when Charlie pipes up -- in a voice that would shatter glass -- "Wow mom! Good thing you don't have any DRUGS or GUNS with you!"
The joys of roadside cavity searches....
But the green bean thing was in Taos, anyway.
Q:
(MCP) Okay. Is ANY of this REALLY part of the interview?
A:
(JP): Maybe. Yes? Uhh. I think so?
Q:
(JP) Hey. Who’s asking the questions around here!
A:
(MCP) Oh! Oh! I know this one! Wait...no, I don't.
Q:
I sort of forgot what we were talking about. Did I ask you about peas yet? The metaphor thing?
What about grocery shopping?
A:
What about grocery shopping?
Q:
I don't know. Just grocery shopping. I know people would be interested in reading your last grocery list. Have at it.
A:
Here's the thing...I cook once a month. Then I freeze all these dinners. Then on Sunday I figure out how many dinners the kids are going to be with me -- it's different different weeks, because the custody situation is so weird -- so then I stick however many dinners in the fridge, for the week, and cook 'em one at a time when I get home from work. I am actually really proud of this, because I'm an utter flake and used to waste thousands -- I mean that, really, thousands -- on taking the kids out to dinner because I didn't have any food in the house. And now we eat at home, and read books at the dinner table. We're working our way through the Artemis Fowl series, and then we're doing Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker books... but that's not really about groceries.
Q:
I really didn’t want to talk about books. Thanks for ruining everything.
A:
I don't really have strong opinions on kids' books. Except the Series of Unfortunate Events ones are pretty funny. And Captain Underpants is a Biblical sign of the Apocalypse. Please look up that word and spell it right, if you use it in the interview, so I look intelligent and shit.
Q:
Ok. Well this interview is basically a train wreck. I blame you. I wasn't going to do this but let's talk about writing.
Shoot.
Ok. Here's a writing question. Let's see...tell me about your writing process.
A:
Sit down. Open Word. Get up. Clean the toilet. Sit down. Get up. Let the dog out. Sit down. Type a sentence. Delete the sentence. Get up. Let the other dog out, and the first dog in. Cuss floridly. Mop the paw prints. Sit down. Retype the sentence. Delete the sentence. Get up. Let the next dog in. Cuss again. Mop again. Eat.
Q:
Sounds like an interesting process. Is that just for the first draft?
A:
I'm more of a wine drinker.
Q:
Really? When I drink I either drink just enough to make me tired or so much that I can think of lots more interesting stuff to do than drink. I guess I need to find my balance. I respond better to stimulants in that regard.
A:
Oh, balance. Well, for balance I think you need to look more at meditation. And yoga.
Q:
I'll look at yoga all day but I won't try it.
So what are you working on now? Anything?
A:
The crow.
Or do you mean writing?
Q:
That must be an English teacher joke.
Writing. C’mon. This is serious!
A:
No it's a yoga joke. It's a position that requires upper body strength -- in other words, one that I will never, ever be able to do.
Okay writing. Serious. Well actually, I guess I'm working on serious writing. Or kind of serious. I'm working on non-fiction, mostly because I want to take a workshop with Brenda Miller this summer, and it happens to be a non-fiction workshop, so I kind of thought I'd have to put up or shut up. Although it turns out, and I'm so delighted about this, that it's going to be a generative class -- writing on the spot, not workshopping each other's ... um, stuff. So I'm writing a lot of stuff, and kind of half-heartedly going through journals, about "real" things. I doubt it's of any wider interest or merit, but hope springs eternal.
Q:
If you would have said downward facing dog I would have been all in but, you know, the crow is probably a hard position and junk whereas downward facing dog is just sort of making a triangle of yourself. That's the one right?
When you say non-fic you're talking about creative non-fiction? How do you go about that differently?
I'm such a loser.
A:
I don't really go about it any differently. All my fiction is true anyway. Well, most all of it. No, wait, all of it, but mostly true. Plus, you can lie in Creative Non-fiction too (yeah, that's what I meant), because it's all about how you experience and remember an event, rather than the event itself.
And that's my interest in narrative, anyway. I love the relationship between the the reader, the narrator, and the story... that the reader knows the story different from the way the narrator knows (and tells) the story, and that difference is really how the reader comes to know the narrator. I'm sorry, I don't think I remember what the question was.
Am I supposed to comment on all the "I'm such a loser" stuff? Because you're not, and of course I want to tell you you're not, both because it's just the polite thing to do and, more importantly, because you're not, but then I think if I comment on it you will have to leave it in the interview, which you probably weren't planning on doing. Oh! Or you could just cut my comments out, that would work too. Okay, so -- no, you're not a loser.
Q:
I’ll probably delete the stuff about me being a loser. Or just change loser to something like “I’m so sexually incompetent.” Then your answer would make me look really cool and junk. Like you were calling me a sex god. Whatever.
The stuff about fic/non-fic being true is pretty cool. I was going to say something about how I thought the line wasn’t really there. That stuff I write could be considered either most of the time. Then I realized that this interview isn’t about me . . . more or less . . . so I asked that lame question. Then you pretty much answered the one I was going to ask and . . . Forget it.
So do you think about that whole narrator/reader/story thing when you write or did you mean you are interested in it in general? Or both. Or neither. I don’t know.
A:
I think about it all the time. In writing, and not in writing. I teach a whole class about it to my seniors, for one thing. It also has a ton to do with my understanding of dependent causality and the subjective nature of reality when I try to understand Buddhism, which of course I don't understand but I try.
So anyway. Yeah, I think about it when I'm writing, in the sense that my writing tends to be voice driven -- I hear a voice telling the story, and the tension, the interest for me, comes from that dissonance I experience between the story as I hear it told to me, and the story as I experience or "know" it. The story Poptarts that you're publishing is an example of that for me -- largely a failure, but an example. I am so fascinated by the narrator of that story, although you don't really get to see or know him, except in these microscopic glimpses of his apartment, etc. But the way he tells Dog-Boy's story is different than Dog-Boy's telling of it, which in turn is possibly/probably different than the "actual" (whatever that is) story of the knifing.
I think I just got really boring. Edit that WAY down, okay?
Q:
Can you expand a little bit on that dependent causality part? How it relates to writing or anything else I guess.
And isn’t trying sort of defeating the purpose when it comes to Buddhism? That was a joke. You can answer that if you want though.
It sounds like writing is sort of a spiritual experience for you almost. Henry Miller used to say that he was just the filter for all the stories/writing that was just sort of floating around out “there”. All he did was tap into it and it flowed through him. He didn’t feel like he was really even the author of anything sometimes. I thought that was sort of cool. I feel like that when I’m on a good roll. When I’m not writing turns into something else altogether.
A:
Oh, I really can't explain the dependent causality stuff. If I try to explain every real and intelligent Buddhist in the universe will smack their forhead and yell the Buddhist equivalent of "Oy fucking vey" at the same time. Maybe the closest I can come is to say that I try very hard to remember that, although I may be 100% committed to the way I see something, it's still very possible to see that same something in a completely different way; it's still very possible that there's not even "really" (whatever that means) something there to see.
I remember I heard Sherman Alexie speak once and he said he tried to remember to look himself in the mirror every morning and ask, "What if I'm wrong?"
But that's drifting away from what I meant in terms of writing non-fiction. What I really meant was that I try to tell the truth the way I remember or experience it, but I give myself permission to be "wrong." Does that make sense?
As for writing being spiritual to me, yeah, it really is. But I cringe at entering into this part of the discussion because I can hear the collective sigh, actually hear the rattle of the eyes rolling in their collective sockets... That shouldn't bother me, and if I stop and breathe from a deep place I can say that it DOESN'T bother me, but my knee-jerk reaction is a defensive one. If it's spiritual, then it's personal and it's very important; at the same time, it has a tremendous potential to sound damn silly to the outside observer.