Those were children's stories.
No, I just--
[LAUGHTER]
You know, actually, the old fairy tales weren't
for children at all, of course.
I mean they were very bawdy stories--
B-A-W-D-Y, but also B-O-D-Y. The oldest version of Little Red
Riding Hood has Little Red Riding Hood doing a striptease
for the wolf, get in bed with him,
and then escape only by realizing he's about to "eat"
her, and she says she has to pee and wants to do it
in the woods.
And that's how she gets out.
So she runs home naked.
That's the old Little Red Riding Hood.
Folklorists think of it as the oldest one.
Actually, that was one of the questions
in the "Wildcat," right?
It was like, well, my question that I got-- and they
sort of blended our questions together,
but the question I got was, what's
the difference between writing fairy tales
and writing for children?
It was actually the same question.
And I love Maurice Sendak's great quote about that.
He wrote Where the Wild Things Are, Dear Mili, all
of these amazing books.
And when he was asked why do you write for children?
He said in his typically disdainful way-- he's great,
I love his personality.
But he's like, I don't write for children.
I write.
[LAUGHTER]
And I kind of get that.
I just sit down and write.
And my picture books--
I love my picture book editor, and I
guess those stories have maybe slightly happier endings?
But some reviewers call them creepy,
so I feel like they can be whatever to any reader.
But I do get rather dismayed when--
because Fairy Tales are on the title of that book,
I find it, sometimes, in the picture book section
at libraries or bookstores.
And I always quickly move it because some things children
shouldn't hear, and that's a line straight from old fairy
tales, too.
I don't adjust what I do.
I think that's all so much the reader, the lens
that you bring to the work.
Yeah.
Anyone else?
Oh, OK.
This one's for Ander, and I'm wondering
if you can say more about the process of writing poems
that ended up as 750-word essays or how that happened over time?
Well, a big part of that had to do
with just trying to find a constraint to get
me to keep them from expanding.
I don't know how to write an essay.
I didn't know how to write a short essay,
so all I know how is to write an essay
and then kind of let it go as long as it's going to go.
But if you limit it to 750 words,
you can't do what you normally do with an essay,
or what I normally do I guess, with an essay which is just
keep researching and adding.
You can make it a little bit narrative,
but honestly, what I found is I needed another engine.
And so I thought the better strategy would be to rely on--
as I've done in some of my longer essays also--
tools from the poetry cookbook.
And so having that sense of constraint,
writing them as lineated poems in the first draft,
keeps them from spiraling away.
Not that it inhibits discovery because I don't think--
that's constraint.
It actually inspires discovery, and that's
the benefit of constraint.
But then, having said that, I wanted
to loosen it up afterwards because I
don't think of them as poems.
I don't think they work as poems.
And some of them are actually very prose-y,
but they do rely on--
you can hear some of the rhyme, some
of the way in which I sort of swerve from one thing
to another, which is, I think, a very poetry-oriented strategy.
And they have to--
I remember one of my poetry professors,
after I just graduated from college,
she was telling this to me as a way of telling me
why my poems sucked.
And she was very kind, but--
[LAUGHTER]
--but they did, they did kind of suck, I think, in retrospect.
There needs to be a kind of transformation that happens
in the writing of the thing.
That isn't unique to poetry.
But I sort of thought of that-- it's like, no,
if I just do what my plan was in the first place,
then QED, awesome thing, appraise please.
But that's not the case.
So what I found is I would have to keep
moving and shifting and bringing things
into alignment with these in a way
that it makes a kind of logic and it's propulsive,
I hope, in different ways throughout the collection.
And so there's a little system on the micro level
with these essays, and then there's
a whole bunch of macro level systems.
And we never talked about this, Katie, I don't think.
It's like an abecedarian that's going on,
and then there's all this other stuff.
There's a lot of math that's in there, perhaps overly so.
But that's one of the pleasures of working on a collection.
It's trying to find ways of pinning it and getting
it to make new connections in the nexus--
nexuses?
Probably nexuses, yeah.
I hope this is for Kate.
This is for you.
I know.
Actually, it's for both of you, so you can--
All right.
--both get up.
OK.
That's perfectly good.
Come on, Kate.
You have to come up at least.
I'm just wondering--
--same time.
--that-- and you both talked about this a little bit.
But it seems to me like both of you
are preoccupied with things--
old things, relics, remnants, perhaps lost things,
peripheral things--
and I'm wondering where, in the process of that,
you seem like you take them, you're drawn to them,
and you have a need to transform them in a way.
And I'm wondering where that impetus comes from?
And then when you're done, how does it feel?
Thanks.
That's a pretty killer question.
[LAUGHTER]
That's a great observation.
I think that's an accurate--
it's hard not to think about, I don't if you
think about the work you do with fairy tales is
a kind of library browse, which it inevitably is.
Having said that, it's also--
if you write fiction or write anything,
it's not like we're coming up with anything new.
You hope you find something new, maybe, in combination.
But it's all configurations of stuff that we've seen before.
That's one of the really--
I wrote this whole book about library books,
right, and browsing the library as if I'm the first person
to do that or think about it.
And I was giving a reading in Maryland,
and I found in one of the libraries there, there was--
John Barth has this great essay called "Browsing"
about library book browsing.
I'm like, oh.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
Yeah, that.
What he said.
And if you even consider yourself
an experimental writer, whatever, you're
doing cool stuff on the page, and you're like,
oh, Tristram Shandy kind of did a lot of stuff
like that already.
So it's a kind of--
I guess from my perspective, it's--
I don't want to say it's like a ritual humiliation, exactly.
But it's a kind of exercise in humility and an understanding
that the things that we do are made up
of other things that already exist and have gone
in or out of people's lenses for 10 years, or for 100 years,
or for 1,000 years, or just for a year.
Or just like, whatever, since 1997 when the Wayback
Machine brings us back to this sense that we had of what
the web was, right, in 1997?
Which is completely different than what we have now.
So I guess my feeling as a writer is you want to--
you're not spinning it out of nothing.
Nothing comes out of nothing.
But you do want to make something interesting and maybe
explosive or beautiful, and most explosive things
are also beautiful in some way.
And so that's, I guess, what I hope to do.
That's a great question, and it's a good answer
and hard to follow.
Thank you, as always, Ander.
Yeah.
So fairy tales are old things, right?
But they were always contemporary to someone.
So even the 1812 first edition of the Brothers Grimm
was sort of scandalous when it was published,
or the Perrault in the 17th century,
or going to Arabian Nights, they were always
contemporary to somebody.
And so what I love so much is it just happens to be my obsession
or something about the form of the fairy tale book--
book marchen--
there's tales that are specifically
contained inside books, and there are versions.
So you're on this huge scavenger hunt.
So when I start to write a new story,
I basically do the kind of hunting
that you did in libraries.
Maybe I read 100 versions from around the world in translation
to English, and then I pick one to go from.
But it's this endless collecting that maybe partially attracts
me to this form of story and book.
And then it's also the idea that there is no original-- people
will say, well, what's the original this?
What's the original that?
And all you can do is point to a version
that people have excavated at a time
or printed at a certain time.
But what you find around the world
is that the nouns, which are some
of the things in the stories, repeat across cultures,
across centuries.
And that these things, like if you say girl, woods, wolf--
what story are we in?
Predator.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, Predator is a great fairy tale, by the way.
It is a great fairy tale movie, actually, don't you think?
Yeah.
You take these things and you kind of put them together
in a different way like one of those--
I don't know if you guys had any of those books where you could
turn the pages and you can make different creatures out
a different pages, like the top, middle, bottom,
or those Topsy-Turvy dolls where you pull the skirt up,
and on one side is one thing, and on the other side--
So just these are stories that are pieced together
Humpty-Dumpty style.
And they're always wrong.
There's never going to be a right version.
And, I guess, that's part of what
I would think in response to your really eloquent question.
But because they're so old but they were always new,
and because they're always changing, being transformed,
they're sort of vintage and futuristic at the same time.
And I think that's what people call "timelessness" about them,
but I don't think it's timeless, I think it's actually more--
there's something more time-warping about it.
So that interests me, how these things travel across time
and cultures in mysterious ways that we really
don't understand.
Neurologists study fairy tales as often as anthropologists,
so I'm really curious about all that-- the things excavated
through that.
I'd also add something just briefly that,
all you need is for, probably, I don't know what
it is, maybe 30 years to pass?
And then a lot of things seem relevant again.
There's this great book by Bob Brown called The Readies that
came out in I think 1927, and someone online
has a great version of it.
And it's his book where he's sort
of imagining the future in which we are reading things--
in which books are outdated and what we need
is some kind of electronic machine
that we can read books on at super speed.
And it's a really interesting book to read, 1927,
but it's not that far from some of the things
that people have said or thought about books recently.
So you have these things that just
keep reoccurring or showing up from some time ago,
and your job is to find them and bring them back into the light.
Along with the excavating of the history in--
there's a kind of parallel between both
of your work and the adolescent, and the Atari,
and the childhood, and all those kinds of parallels, I think,
that we can sort of see.
But to me, it also seems like there's
a kind of counter history that both of you guys
are interested in?
Like not taking the fairy tale at its surface
and not taking even something as seemingly as silly as Predator
at its surface in terms of-- especially with the violent
and the sexual in the fairy tales,
in the way that you're interested in those counter
histories and something that's kind of anti-Disney kind
of version of the fairy tale.
And also even something with clear homophobia and misogyny
of the kinds of library kinds of things that you're finding
there that you're interested in is
kind of reproducing, but also speaking against, you know?
And I wonder if you guys could talk about
that because there's a counter history that you guys are
both interested in, it seems to me--
not just finding something old and valuing it
because it's old, but battling with these other versions
of it, in a certain way, and remaking them in some way?
I wonder how that alterity or that negativity,
or those kinds of whitewashed aspects of those histories
that you guys are encountering and remaking, how that works
for you and why those things percolate or stick out
for you as notes of entry points, or wanting to speak to,
speak against?
I'll speak really briefly about that.
Thanks for that comment.
I think we do share that, actually, quite a bit.
And so many video gamers are really
interested in fairy tales.
Some of their syntax, I think.
Fairy tale-- you can't really say
there's such a thing even as fairy tales,
so it's not like there's this one history of fairy tales
and then there's the real history of fairy tales.
But because fairy tales are so adaptive--
in World War II Germany, they were
used to propagate a lot of anti-Semitic stereotypes.
There were comic strips based on fairy tales.
And I'm really interested in the way fairy tales have been
historically both sanitized and then degraded, used by those
who want to abuse power, and then sometimes
be used by those who seek to liberate.
And what a fine, tricky balance the human equilibrium
never will be, basically.
And I'm really interested in how fairy tales absorb extremes.
But in another way, I'm also interested in how fairy tales
so often are outsider stories.
There are characters who are marginalized, abused, punished,
and not always discovered, saved, or let alone,
fed and treated well.
So I'm really interested in those radical means
of survival.
And I think that in a certain way that's always
going to be a story of resistance
as long as, unfortunately, there are humans on this Earth,
right?
So that's part of that counterculture impulse
that I have.
And I'm a kid of the 70s, so I grew up
with punk and underground comic book movements and all of that.
So I think it was just in the politics of the times.
I think that that really was a gathering force for me,
why I was drawn to these stories, in part.
I think resistance is a useful way to think about it.
I guess what I look for when I'm--
one of the things I really look for when
I'm looking for stuff to respond to is
I'm looking for things that really rub me the wrong way,
and one of those is people that write in books.
Not writing in your own books, but writing in library books
and putting it back in a library book for someone else
to encounter.
Sometimes it can be--
there's a way of doing that artfully and interestingly.
There's this British artist who did a good amount of collage
work as a provocation, which was actually really interesting.
But one of the things about the act of writing back to a book
is you're asserting authority.
You are literally marginalized.
You have the margins which you can write back in.
And so in a way, it's a kind of empowerment
to write back to something.
There's this one book called--
it's Mortimer Jerome Adler's How to Read a Book, 1945.
He's trying to explain to the people
how you're supposed to read a book, which maybe could still
be a useful thing.
And I was looking at the U of A library copies,
and there's this one line, "Any book, I think,
the reader will admit is a work of art."
And then in the library copy, someone
had written in the margin, not this one.
[LAUGHTER]
Which you have to admire a little bit of like, burn.
[LAUGHTER]
But at the same time, it's a library book, man.
I mean, really?
You're just going to take cheap shots at this guy from 1945
writing to the kids about books.
But that sense--
I had a real angry response to this
and a kind of appreciative one at the same time.
But trying to push on those moments
where they're resistant, and even with my defacer--
I think of him as my defacer now because I've
just written so much about him and thought
so much about this guy, there's like five defacer essays
in the book.
And I just can't get him out of my head.
What a sad guy this guy is.
But he's writing in response to something.
He's writing in response, I think,
to his own sense of sublimated homosexuality, obviously.
You read this, it's really clear this guy's
been in the closet his whole life,
upset at all these people who finally came out
and who were able to do that once they had money,
as he says over and over.
It's a sad story, also.
But then he goes to the university library, and then--
it's a really political act.
And so they discovered these books within,
I think, three months of when Gabrielle Giffords was shot.
And so when we were having this discussion
about civil conversation--
what is civil discourse-- and I was looking
for is there any coverage of this guy who
has defaced all these books?
And one of the only bits of coverage I could find
was someone who had made some comment
about like, well, they're both in Arizona,
so obviously this guy has related
to this sense of incivility that's
going on in southern Arizona.
Which is, I think, a ridiculous statement to make,
but at the same time, it's sort of hard to parse this,
to parse him.
I would have loved to have actually found him.
If anyone knows, by the way, who this guy is,
I would love to try to have a conversation with him
because I'm really curious.
And no one will tell me.
And there's no police report that they would release to me.
So they wouldn't finally release that.
So a lot of it is trying to parse resistance,
in some case, kind of enact my own resistance
to this desire of, I don't know, the PDFing of everything.
That it's not the same, and it's not going to last,
and it's not going to be--
it's convenient, but it's not, I don't know.
It's not a necessary good.
The book is a technology, too.
The website's not the only technology
that we like to think about.
So I'm probably like an old angry person
with my graying beard--
[LAUGHING]
--and bashing my Kindle on YouTube, which I can do later.
Well, that seems like as productive a place as any to--
[LAUGHTER]
But--