In which I interview one of my favorite authors, and we discuss wolves, tattoos and the power of landscape. Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria and lives in Norwich. She is the multiple-prize-winning author of four novels: Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army (published in the US as Daughters of the North) and How to Paint a Dead Man; a collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, original radio dramas and poetry.
“Later, when I knew her better, Manda told me how she’d beaten two girls at once outside the Cranemakers Arms in Carlisle. She said all you had to do was keep hold of one, keep hold of one and keep hitting her. No matter what the other was doing to you, you kept that first one pinned, and you kept hammering her, so the free-handed bitch could see you were able to take a flailing and still have her mate at the same time. It’d get into the lass’s head then, Manda said, what it would be like when the mate got put down, and you went to batter her next without a silly dog on your back making you slow. Chances were you wouldn’t have to fight them both. And if you did,that second one would be so fleart from you being still upright after her best, undefended go, she’d forget any moves she knew.”
I’ve been silent on social media and generally keeping my nose to the grindstone while working on the launch of Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. A little shamelessly, here’s some of the coverage I’m most proud of: the BBC News at Ten, a New York Times feature, NPR’s Morning Edition (with one of my favourite writers, Sarah Hall) and this great article from the Globe and Mail. If you’re in LA, we have an event tonight at ALOUD, and tomorrow we’re in Seattle, in May we come to NY, Boston and Washington DC. We’re also doing events across the UK this week and through the summer and around the world with the British Council. Here’s the full event list. Phew. Hope you can join us!
Have I got news for you! On 28 March, Plectrum: The Cultural Pick is hosting the fourth edition of their live event series at the beautiful Betsey Trotwood. I’ll be reading my White Review essay ‘Ways of Submission’. There will be tales of love, death and maxillofacial reconstructive surgery in WWI from Louisa Young, stories of London Bridge in America by Travis Elborough, English cafe blues from Tom Nancollas. Max Decharne DJs and Guy Sangster Adams hosts. (Thank you for asking me to join ou for this, Guy!) I hope to see you there.
I think what I find so fascinating about Rich Ferguson is his absolute ease with his being.
I think what I find so fascinating about Rich Ferguson is his absolute ease with his being uncategorizeable.
You see Rich, you think hey, it’s ok to be a storyteller, so long as you’re a musician, and the work looks like poetry when it’s on the page. And you got the hat (always the hat), so you are probably a spoken word guy.
And meanwhile the words come at you like it’s just a conversation among folks, but then it’s like he’s talking thunder.
Bob Holman’s introduction to your poetry collection is so spot on. How do you know Mr Holman?
I’ve known Bob Holman for some years now, since the 90s. I can’t remember exactly how we met; all I can say is that I’m so glad our paths crossed. He was extremely instrumental in helping me to share the stage with Patti Smith at the Knitting Factory in NYC. I’ll always be indebted to Bob for that. He also had me help him co-judge a Jewel poetry contest (yep, we’re talking Jewel the songwriter). Back when she came out with her poetry collection A Night Without Armor, she’d asked Bob to judge a poetry contest she’d created as a way to promote the book. Bob asked me to assist him.
At the time I was working a drab office job. Once I’d agreed to help judge the contest I began receiving poems emailed to me from all over the world. We’re talking everywhere from Perth, Australia to Perth Amboy, New Jersey. My days became a huge juggling act of trying to get work done while reading poems from tortured teens and housewives all over the world. Some of the poems were quite humorous and would make me laugh out loud. Others were so bad, so maudlin, I’d practically be yelling at my computer screen. Since I was never that engaged in my office work, my boss became suspicious. He’d occasionally come over to my desk to make sure I was getting my work done. I got very good at flipping between screens—from a dreary poem about bulimia to a spreadsheet or piece of correspondence. Ah, the things I’ve done for poetry and Jewel.
But back to Bob: he’s really been such a dear friend and true mentor over the years.
I remember a performance in Los Feliz I went to with a friend, who stood watched you intently – the music, the poetry, your gestures – and said “I haven’t seen anything like this since being in the Village in the 60s.” How did the poetry, the music and the performance all come together for you?
Good question. It’s actually been quite a journey for me. As a child, I was always interested in reading poetry and writing, but never really did much with it. I also began playing the drums while attending Rutgers University, and was taking lessons in NYC. One of my teachers—Michael Carvin—suggested that I head out to California after graduation, maybe try out San Francisco. And so, much to my father’s dismay, once I received my degree in Advertising and Public Relations I packed my car (drums, clothes, books and stereo), and headed out to California. My first stop in S.F.: City Lights Bookstore. Until that point, I’d never seen a bookstore quite so magical. The first book I picked up was Gregory Corso’s Gasoline. No pun intended, but that pretty much refueled my love of poetry.
Over the next four years, I played in a band called Blue Movie. We were a scrappy folk/punk outfit. I played drums standing up, sang, and spouted manic poetry from time to time. After the band broke up I moved to L.A. and eventually got another band together, Bloom. In that band, I mostly sang lead. Not so much poetry. There was a lapsteel player in the band, Jett Soto. I loved that guy dearly. The music he’d make on his instrument, I used to describe it as “chainsaw music for angels.” The two of us would sometimes perform as a duo, Fuzzy Doodah. He’d play lapsteel and I’d perform poetry. We did a little touring around the country, even played SXSW a couple times.
Unfortunately, Jett eventually drank himself to death and Bloom pretty much broke up after that. For a period of time, I couldn’t perform spoken word with music. It just hurt too much. Eventually, I worked my way back to it and now have a band together called We Voice Sing. It’s a hybrid of spoken word and music. I’m singing a bit too. Definitely feels good to be singing again.
Are there traditions – poetic or otherwise – that you are writing in or against? I suppose, “Who and what influences you ?”is another way to ask that question.
I don’t necessarily think there are any particular traditions that I’m writing in or against. At least not consciously. There was a period of time when I was highly inspired by the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, the usual cast of characters. I think a lot of my interest in the Beats had to do with the fact that I’d lived in S.F. But really, over the years I’ve discovered so many great writers in so many styles of writing that I’d never want to limit my writing or thinking to any one particular school of thought.
Tell me about poetry in LA. I remember being aware of a strong spoken word, self-pulished chapbook scene of young, cool men (I don’t remember reading or seeing female spoken words poets) in the early 2000s. Was that a special moment in poetry in LA?
There was a cool scene back in the 90s known as the ‘Onyx Scene.’ It was run out of a coffee shop in Los Feliz called the Onyx. The readings were attended by a wide variety of folks: poets, musicians, visual artists, hipsters, the homeless. Poets Milo Martin and Ben Porter Lewis created the reading series. Its popularity spread like wildfire. It was definitely the happening place to perform poetry. I was fortunate in that Milo would let me read any time I showed up with a new piece of work. Since then, there haven’t been many poetry scenes that have captured quite the same energy. There are, however, a couple events that are still making waves. One is Da Poetry Lounge on Fairfax. Another is run by my friends Brooke Benson and Chance Foreman in Venice. That one is called The People’s Mic. Hella fun.
Eastern philosophy and yogic teachings lace your work. What’s your connect to those bodies of thought. The way they work with your poetry strikes me as very of California, of Los Angeles. Or am I just homesick?
Well, you may be homesick, but I think you’re pretty spot on with your observation as well. Yes, those schools of thought do run through some of my work. I’d classify myself as a Buddhist of sorts (an armchair Buddhist?). There’s a lama that I visit from time to time when he comes through L.A.: Lama Marut. I really enjoy his teachings. To me, one of the many beauties of Buddhism is that the teachings make absolute sense. They’re a recipe for how to live a full and meaningful life. From time to time I also attend Against the Stream—the Buddhist center created by Noah Levine (author of Dharma Punx). I’m also a yoga practitioner, so some of that school of thought occasionally bleeds into my work. With both, I really try not to get preachy. I’m really turned off by that type of stuff.
Actually, that’s one of the things I love about my new collection 8th & Agony. It allows me to showcase some of my spiritual/humanistic work with darker poems, and some comedic pieces as well.
You have an incredible body of videos of your poetry. How and when did you start making those?
If I look back on my writing/performing career to date, I think one of the things I’m most proud of are my spoken word/music videos. Six years ago, I began thinking I needed to diversify—bust out from the page and stage—into other mediums to get my work out into the world. Around that time, I was approached by a friend, Gerry Fialka. He heads up a PXL Film Festival here in L.A.
A little bit of history: Pixel Cams were black-and-white camcorders put out by Fisher Price in 1987. They never caught on with kids, but indie filmmakers began using them. So Gerry created a film festival to showcase the films people were making with the camera.
Gerry asked if he could film me performing a spoken word piece. Of course, I was all over it. Our collaboration turned out to be my very first, and one of my most popular videos “Bones“. Since then, I’ve created a number of videos with directors like Mark Wilkinson and Chris Burdick. A few contain music and are elaborately produced. Some are just with me, sitting in front of a camera in my living room, performing solo.
Knowing you and having recently seen a number of exquisite poetry readings, sometimes I wonder should all literary events be poetry readings? I think what I mean is that poetry has such an ability to move from page to performance and across media. It lends itself well to interdisciplinary reading, listening, absorbing. Do you agree, and are there other poets you’d recommend that are working across media forms?
Being a drummer, I’m quite keyed in to rhythm. To me, poetry is all about music and rhythm. That’s one of the reasons I love performing poetry with music. The music allows me to delve deeper into the rhythm of the words. This is also one of the reasons I love attending live poetry events. When I’m watching a performing poet that has a strong command of language and rhythm, wow, that’s really amazing.
As far as poets I enjoy that are working across media forms, one that comes to mind is Saul Williams. I love his work in every form, be it the printed or performed word. I also enjoy Sage Francis.
He and I had a chance to meet and work together on a documentary in South Africa. The doc was created by UK director Jamie Catto. I consider myself very blessed to have performed poetry in Jamie’s last film What About Me? (sequel to 1 Giant Leap). It was actually my “Bones” video that turned Jamie on to my work. So I guess I owe all my good fortune to that Pixel Cam. Thank you, Fisher Price.
New Directions recently came out with four new translations of Clarice ‘Hurricane’ Lispector’s novels. I picked up her first Near to the Wild Heart at Green Apple Books after a Granta event. Everyone is a-buzz with Brazil, it seems. With Brazil at centre stage in our minds (the economy, the Olympics, Granta‘s Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, Litro‘s Rio-focused issue, Two Lines: Passageway‘s special feature on Brazilian writers, the Brazil-focus at the Guadalajara lit fest this year, the fact that everyone seems to be moving to Brazil…but I go on), the many stories of its present and past are coming to the fore. (If you haven’t seen the album preview for the Brazilian musician Tim Maia album re-release, check out the video below.) I imagine sun, beaches, long rainy seasons, favelas, wide and wildly diverse landscapes; I hear about migration, drought, why an uncle kept his TV years after it was no longer in working order, a welcoming spirit of people and place…
After a very contemporary look at Brazil through the Granta edition (and a 25+ event tour, compiling dossiers on the writers, the deftly curated Granta.com Brazil series), Clarice Lispector is a surprising find. I wonder how I could not have found her sooner. Her debut novel, which caused such a stir in Brazil she was nicknamed ‘Hurricane Clarice’ bears all the marks of the novels from Vienna/the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the start of the 20th century through the rise of fascism. Her focus on aesthetics, the amoral, inward-looking main character who is at once deeply involved with her environment and coldly detached reminds me of Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Torless (1906), with lashings of Arthur Schindler. A brief Twitter exchange about I wondered if this type of character, language and mood emerged from within Brazil independently of the Austrians. A brief Twitter exchange with Lispector’s biographer Benjamin Moser yielded this: “it seems it was Clarice herself, who both arrived with centralmeuropean émigrés AND grew within brazil. A long story. See bio!” I can’t wait.
Me: You know how you were saying that you wanted to see more writing about the Chicano experience? I found this.
Step-mother: Oh…thank you. (She moves her glasses down her nose and examines the book.)
He’s my mother’s cousin.
Me: No!
Step-mother: Yes, but we didn’t call him ‘Acosta’…
(She relays a bit of family history and starts leafing through the introduction by Hunter S Thompson.)
He was…
(Pauses. She points to a word on the page: ‘Thug’.)
I didn’t want to say it.
Dear Suzy,
Thank you for sending me a review copy of Secret Sex Lives. This is a fantastic achievement. I am so happy to see this in print and…so brave. I’ll write more when I’ve finished reading.
Kanitta Meechubot is a collage artist who I first encountered in Granta magazine’s Horror issue. In her Granta series, she told the story of her grandmother’s battle with womb cancer through images that evoke Bosch and Vesalius in equal measure. Though layered collage imagery, she traverses the body and inner life tenderly, viscerally. ‘A Landscape of the Mind’ (11 October t0 24 November, The Book Club, London EC2A) is her first solo show.
Tell me a little bit about the show. What are you showing?
‘A Landscape of the Mind’ will reveal a complete set of my new works and some previous works adapted to be related to the theme.
The concept actually continues from the piece ‘Internal Landscape’ from ‘The Seasons of a Soul’ series where I portrayed the ideas of meeting again in the afterlife when lovers died apart.
Then this new series, I recreated the imaginary place of the afterlife from the Buddhist idea of reincarnation. I just imagined when, how and where those apart lovers could be meet again and again in different place and time.
How do these pieces compare to the ones in Granta 117: Horror?
The same method of delicacy paper cutting in form and shape of trees and flora integrated with the forms of veins inside the human body will be used, as usual. For when I see the pictures portraying human’s anatomy, I always relate those blood and veins to the trees. So I personally and secretly found the hidden forest inside us.
For the differences, this series will be less detailed, more minimalized. However, more layers will be put to create the three-dimensional effect and depth. Well, it also means that each layer weave the whole story together. I also explore different kinds of paper which I found them giving the different feelings. For example, the mirror page has been used for the reflection of the viewer’s so that they can see themselves in my imaginary landscape.
However, the context will be very much the same. I’m still interested in love, death and romantic landscapes.
Who and what inspires you?
The drawings of human bodies from some French artists, Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery, the specimens of human organs at the Hunterian Museum, and those alike, and rare medical pictures in Wellcome Collection. When I see those veins and their complexities, I wished I could live there. I imagined myself walking inside human bodies as an imaginary forest. Also I like walking in the park or forests and finding intriguing and strange shapes of trees, leaves and branches for my inspiration. You would be very surprised how strange the shapes are that they form. And the movie called ‘Institute Benjamenta’ or ‘This dream people call human life’ by The Brother Quay. When I work, the mood and tone of the movie always in my head. The mysterious and haunting but beautifully direct consist with the sound very well.
You engage with the body in such a dark and tender way. Tell me a little bit about what draws you to this subject matter.
Not only do I love the landscape and the shape of tree branches, I have always been touched by the relationship of my grandparents. My granddad took care of my grandma willingly and lovingly when she had womb cancer. It’s surprising how this small disease could expand in human body and cause so much pain. I couldn’t imagine how sad he would feel when seeing someone he loves in such state of pain. He has been working hard nursing and taking care of her at all time until they are physically apart.
So when connecting those feeling to my origin liking, the passion of trees’ shapes and human anatomy, it just makes sense. I am now living with those passions and feelings. They reflected into my work then.
Kanitta’s illustrations are also featured on the cover of Granta 120: Medicine and inside the issue for Rose Tremain’s ‘The Cutting’.
Below is a clip from La Terra del Rimorso by Ernesto De Martino.
Rimorso > Remorse > re-morse > re- + mordere (to bite) > to bite again
Bitten by a tarantula in the field, she would become possessed, lascivious, writhing. Free.
Music was the cure.
The father would have to pay for the musicians to play the rhythm of the tarantula who bit his daughter…until the venom was exhausted, often driving the family to bankruptcy.
Everyone had to wait patiently while she exorcises the venom, taking the space she needs to take, occupying her body, before returning to the corners of rooms, the silence of the days.
This event looks incredible. Short interview with the author to come…
When: Wednesday, 29 August, 7pm
Where: The Free Word centre on Farringdon Road, London.
What: PEN International Writer of Courage and UNESCO World Press Freedom hero Lydia Cacho and Helen Bamber OBE, who has dedicated the past 60 years treating survivors of gross human rights violations, discuss the trade of human lives and what can be done to stop it.
Tickets: Entry costs £10/£8 concessions including a drink, with proceeds going towards our work caring for survivors of cruelty. You can read more and buy your tickets here.
About Slavery Inc: The international sex trade criss-crosses the globe using a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, wilfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children.
In a ground-breaking new work of investigative reporting internationally renowned Mexican journalist and campaigner Lydia Cachofollows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK. She exposes the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism.
Luke Rodilosso is one of my favorite artists. His work with luxury, eroticism and violence explores a peculiar melancholy and the nsettling beauty in our rhythms of consumption and our search for love and intimacy. ‘Labial tear’ is a phrase that comes up a lot in descriptions of his work. I’m fascinated by his exploration of orifices, something of a welcome change from a phallocentric visions… I caught up with him after a one-night-only exhibition in a former brothel.
Luke Rodilosso: This is a scene from Pedro Almodovar’s Matador viewed through the magnifying lens I am filming the video with.
Tell me a little more about the shot and magnifying lens…
The woman [in Matador], fascinated by the executions made by a celebrated bullfighter, replicates them at the moment of orgasm with her lovers. She plunges a dagger like hair pin adorned with a treble clef into the cross of their shoulders. This is the point between the shoulder blades and just below the neck where a matador will strike the bull with his sword.
In shooting Monsters Through the Balustrades, all of the footage both original and appropriated is filmed directly off a computer screen, the only item unmediated by the pixels of the screen is the circle of the lens. This shadowy orifice frames and selects the pixels in each scene. I have shot through the lens footage from a selection of films, replacing my parents with cinematic characters, as I did in their absence throughout my childhood.
Formally speaking I am searching with the lens for the point at which the image is reduced to the material it is made of, in Monsters images of trauma are under close inspection exploded into glistening pixels, the violence breaks and gives way to the material of the backlit screen.
Orifices feature prominently in your work. I’m intrigued by the use of the circle of the lens, like an eye. Eyes are orifices of a kind. I’m thinking of the way the open eye is used in horror films, like Dario Argento’s Opera. It references a kind of violence inherent in looking, both in terms of aggressive voyeurism and the way an image enters the body through the mind.
Orifices seem to suggest a threshold that is crossed at the expense of entering a void. As a number of the bodies openings are also erogenous, this draws attention to the thin membrane that separates love from death.
In the act of spying, the frame, slit or slat around the image seems to reinforce the awareness that one is concealed and unknown by the thing being observed.
I believe there is a distinct sexual appeal to the act of consuming a spectacle in secret. You are eating the image by stealth or consuming the appearance of a thing that cannot measure its own depletion or know from where it is being taken.
Tania James is a novelist and short story writer whose ‘Lion and Panther in London’ is featured in Granta’s Britain. In her latest collection, Aerogrammes and Other Stories, out this May in the United States, James opens a window onto a world marked by loneliness, obsession and wild animals. Granta’s Saskia Vogel speaks to the author about writing from a child’s perspective, Mary Swann’s ‘The Deep’, and the author’s alleged anger issues.
SV: ‘Lion and Panther in London’ tells of two brothers from Lahore who come to London to seek their fortunes as wrestlers. They find themselves confronted by the oddities of life in London in 1910, including crowded living spaces and ‘the sort of fare that would render them leaden in body and mind’. Tell me a bit about the genesis of this story and how your idea of Britain influenced it.
TJ: I came across an old book called Strong Men Over the Years, a rare and remarkable account of Indian wrestlers around the turn of the century, including Gama the Great and his brother Imam. I was actually doing some very dry research on the Indian Students’ Movement, but that book was lively, comic, nostalgic and completely addictive in its illustration of these Indian superheroes.
I only had a vague idea of Britain, let alone London in 1910. But ‘Strong Men’ brought certain details to surface, such as the wrestlers’ total bafflement over the Western suit – why would anyone wear something so snug and restrictive? The more I understood about these wrestlers and their very rigorous way of life, the more freedom I felt in rendering their environment, and how they might be at odds with it.
Your story ‘What to do with Henry’ moves from the perspective of a young boy who finds a baby chimpanzee and sells it at a market to the mother who purchases it, then to chimpanzee and so on. In fact, each story in the collection unfolds in a striking and unexpected way. What is it about the short form that appeals to you?
I do love how the short form allows for some risky moves. For example aI like that children have their own way of seeing, their own elastic vocabulary for explaining the worldstory can be the perfect vessel for a particular voice, or a chorus of voices, which would be harder to sustain over the course of a novel (I’m thinking of Mary Swann’s ‘The Deep’, for example). Certainly novels can and should take risks but maybe I feel more freedom in the short story form because if it fails halfway in, I don’t feel an urge to toss myself out the window.
In the collection, many of the stories have a child as a protagonist. What is it about children’s perspectives that you find compelling?
There’s a Chekhov story ‘A Trifle from Life’, which follows the perspective of a little boy named Alyosha and ends by referring to the ‘great many things for which the language of children has no expression’. I like that children have their own way of seeing, their own elastic vocabulary for explaining the world, before their minds have been entrenched with other people’s perceptions.
Your stories often engage with South Asians in the United States and a dissonance between the two cultures. Why are these stories important?
These stories are important to me, not because they happen to be about South Asians, but because they’re circling around a certain strain of loneliness that goes deeper than cultural dissonance, that has to do with the yearning to connect with someone else, or with some unreachable vision of home. That experience isn’t uniquely specific to first – or second – generation immigrants; it’s universal, and thus compelling territory for fiction.
‘What to do with Henry’, ‘Lion and Panther in London’ and ‘The Scriptological Review’, a story about a boy who compulsively analyses handwriting: each of these explores a different world. What comes first – an encounter with scriptology or the story idea? And what kind of research is involved?
A handwriting analyst studied my signature and told me I had latent anger issues, as evidenced by the tiny hook in my T. That seemed a little nuts to me, but slightly possible, so of course my imagination began to wander in that direction. I started looking into handwriting analysis – the technical term is graphology – but I didn’t delve too deeply into any real study. I was more interested in a guy who makes up his own kind of convoluted logic. Explaining that logic, in his voice, was probably the most entertaining part of writing the story.
You’ve published Atlas of Unknowns, a novel, and Aerogrammes is published in May, as is your story in the Granta. What’s next in store?
It’s a long way off, but as of now, it’s a novel involving wild elephants and those who tangle with them.
What’s the best advice you’ve received as a writer?
Write the story that unsettles and excites you, that keeps you coming back to your desk.
