Those were children's stories.
No, I'm 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. I mean, 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.
She runs home naked.
That's the old Little Red Riding Hood.
People, folklorists think of it as the oldest one.
I don't-- actually, that was one of the questions
in the Wildcat, right?
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 just-- 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, you know, why do you write for children?
He just-- 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.
And I kind of get that.
I mean, 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, you know, 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, like, quickly move it.
Because some things, children shouldn't hear.
And that's a line straight from old fairy tales, too.
So I don't adjust what I do.
I think that's also much the reader, the lens
that you bring to the work.
Yeah, so--
Anyone else?
Oh, OK.
This one's for Ander.
And I'm wondering if you could 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 think, I don't know how to write an essay.
I didn't know how to write a short essay.
So all I know 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.
Like, 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--
I mean, as I've done in some of my longer essays also--
tools from the poetry cookbook.
And so having that sense of constraint,
me writing them as lineated poems in the first draft,
keeps them from spiraling away.
Not that it inhibits discovery.
Because I don't think--
I mean, that's constraint.
Actually, it sort of 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 mean, I don't think they work as poems.
And some of them are actually very prose-y.
But they do-- they rely on--
you can hear some of the rhyme, some of the way in which I
kind of get kind of--
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 as a way of-- telling this
to me as a way of telling me why my poems sucked.
And she was very kind.
But they did, they did kind of suck, I think, in retrospect.
I mean, there needs to be a kind of transformation that happens
in the writing of the thing.
I mean, that isn't sort of 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 kind of keep
moving, and sort of 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 kind of 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 like 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.
But that's one of the pleasures of working on a collection,
it's like trying to find ways of pinning it,
and getting it to make new connections in the nexus--
nexuses?
Probably nexuses.
I hope this is for Kate.
I know.
Actually, it's for both of you.
All right.
Oh, yeah.
OK.
That's perfectly good.
Come on, Kate.
You have to come up at least.
I'm just wondering-- and you both
talked about it a little bit.
Speak at the same time.
But it seems to me like both of you
are preoccupied with things--
old things, relics, remnants, perhaps
lost things, material 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?
That's a pretty killer question.
I mean, that's a great observation.
I think that's an accurate--
I mean, 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,
you are-- it's not like we're coming up with anything new.
You hope you find something new, maybe in combination.
But it's all sort of configurations of stuff
that we've seen before.
That's one of the really kind of--
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 browsing.
I'm like, oh, yeah.
Yeah, that, what he said.
And if you consider yourself-- 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 in 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 like 1997, like when the Wayback Machine brings us back
to this sense that we had of what the web was,
right, I mean in 1997, which is completely different than what
we have now.
So I guess my feeling as a writer is, like,
do 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 kind of hope to do.
That's a great-- that's a great question.
And it's a good answer and hard to follow.
Thank you, as always.
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.
I mean, there's tales that are specifically
contained inside books and there are versions.
So you're sort of 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.
Like, I read 100 versions from around the world in translation
to English.
And then I pick one to go from.
But it's a sort of 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 sort of 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?
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
of different pages, like the top, middle, bottom,
or these topsy-turvy dolls, where you pull the skirt up,
and on one side is one thing and on the other side--
So it's just these stories that are kind of 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 they also have-- 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
like "timelessness" about them.
But I don't think it's timeless.
I think it's actually more-- like,
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.
I mean, neurologists study fairy tales as often as
anthropologists.
So I'm really curious about all that,
the things excavated through that.
I'd also just add something, just briefly, that I mean, 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 we can-- you know, books are outdated.
And what we need is some kind of electronic machine
that we can read books on at, like, super speed.
And it's a really interesting book to read.
I mean, you know, 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 sort of just kind of
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 and sort of-- there's
a kind of parallel between both of your work
and the adolescent, and 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,
and the way that you're interested in those kind
of counter-histories, and something
that's kind of anti-Disney kind of version of the fairy tale.
And also, even something with, like, queer--
like homophobia and misogyny of the kinds of library,
kinds of things that you're finding there
that you're interested in.
It's kind of reproducing but also kind of speaking against,
you know?
And I wonder if you guys could talk about that.
Because there's a kind of counter-history that you guys
are both interested in.
It seems to me it's not just finding something
and valuing it because it's old, but kind
of battling with these other versions of it,
in a certain way, and remaking them in some way.
I wonder how that kind of alterity,
or that negativity, or those kinds of whitewashed aspects
of those histories that you guys are kind of encountering
and remaking, like how that works for you
and why those things kind of percolate or sort of stick out
for you as notes of entry points or wanting to sort of like
speak to?
I mean, just I'll speak really briefly about that.
Thanks for that comment.
I think that is--
I think we do share that, actually, quite a bit.
Yeah.
And video games are-- so many video gamers are really
interested in fairy tales.
Some of their syntax, I think.
Yeah.
I mean, fairy tales-- 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 like the real history of fairy tales.
But because fairy tales are so adaptive--
I mean, 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 can have been
historically both sanitized and then
degraded, used by those who want to abuse power,
and then sometimes 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 kind of 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 even, let alone,
fed, and treated well.
So I'm really interested in the sort
of 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 counter culture 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 that.
So I think it was just in the politics of the times.
I think that really was sort of 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 mean, I guess what I look for when I'm--
one of the things I really look for when
I'm sort of-- 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.
I mean, not writing in your own books,
but writing in library books, and putting it back
in a library book for someone else to encounter.
I mean, sometimes it can be--
there's a way of doing that artfully and interestingly.
There's a couple-- there's this British artist who
did a good amount of sort of collage work
as a provocation, which was actually
really kind of interesting.
But one of the things about the act
of writing in an actual book is, I mean,
you're asserting authority.
Like, 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, like 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."
Which you kind of have to admire.
I mean, a little bit of, like, burn.
But at the same time, I mean, it's a library book, man.
I mean, really, you're just going
to take cheap shots of this guy from 1945 writing
to the kids about books?
But I mean, that sense-- so it's like I
had a real like angry response to this
and a kind of appreciative one at the same time.
But, like, trying to push on those moments
where they're sort of 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 kind of can't get them out of my head.
Like, what a sad guy this guy is.
But, I mean, he's writing in response to something.
He's writing in response, I think,
to his own sense of, I mean, sublimated homosexuality,
obviously.
It's like, 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.
And, I mean, which is really-- it's a sad story, also.
But then he goes to the university library.
And it's a really political act.
And so they discovered this--
I mean, these books within, I think,
three months of when Gabrielle Giffords was shot.
And so when we were having this discussion
about civil conversation, like what is civil discourse?
And when I was looking for-- is there 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, like this guy is related
to this sense of incivility that's going on
in Southern Arizona, which I--
which is, I mean, I think a ridiculous statement to make.
But at the same time, it's sort of hard to parse this,
to parse him out.
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 released to me.
So they wouldn't finally release that.
But I think so a lot of it is trying to parse resistance,
in some case like kind of enact my own sort of resistance
to this desire of, I don't know--
I don't know, like 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.
I mean, it's not a necessary good.
The book is a technology too.
The website is not the only technology
that we like to think about.
So I guess I'm probably just, like, an old angry person
with my graying beard, and bashing my Kindle
on YouTube, which I can do later.
Well, that seems like as productive a place as any to--
[LAUGHTER]