Interview:Amity Bitzel
Lizz Dawson
I first read Amity Bitzel’s writing on a dusty, desktop computer in the back of a classroom — and I began immediately contemplating a way to meet her. However, I wasn’t sure how to approach her without tracking her down in a parking lot some afternoon, quoting the lines that I loved as I tried not to cry. There is something about the way Amity formulates her sentences and imagery that transcends the various differences between her story and our stories, and the language sunk in, resting at a place deep, deep within me.
During the Fall 2015 semester, Amity consented to an interview for The York Review. I did not assault her about it in the parking lot, but asked nicely via email. Admittedly, I sheepishly brought with lines quoted from her writing to our interview. But Amity’s quirky, gold-glittered glasses and amazing insight made me feel right at home.
Amity Bitzel is an alumna of York College of Pennsylvania, with a BA in Literary Studies and a minor in Creative Writing. Her student work was published multiple times in previous issues of The York Review. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing & the Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore, and now teaches writing courses at York College. Her nonfiction has appeared on Snap Judgement, xoJane, and This American Life, and she’s had fiction featured in Hobart.
— Elizabeth Dawson, November 2015
In what specific ways do you find that your writing has grown since your publications in The York Review?
I don’t want to vomit quite as hard when I re-read recent work, compared to some old student pieces. The fundamentals of my personal style are still there, but I think a level of self-conscious artifice, a false kind of distance, has dropped from the work — at least I hope so. I’m much more aware of the mechanical aspects of writing — beautiful language and compelling ideas are all well and good, but if a strong spine of plot and pacing isn’t present, the work will just sag under its own weight. And simply writing non-fic as a genre has taught me a lot about voice and tone — for the work to feel authentic, you have to actually strip away all the pretty little labels you place upon yourself and expose what’s actually there, be that ugly or scary or unpleasant.
What or who are your main influences? Have they changed since you were a student here?
As a bookworm-y autodidact of a kid, I sort of plotted out a haphazard canon that jumped around from era to era: Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Anais Nin, Dickens, Thomas Mann, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, the Brontes, etc. — laced with occasional pure trash and healthy doses of Stephen King. As a lit major at YCP, the experience was gratifying because it allowed me to actually parse what I had previously read, while also discovering new writers. Grad school introduced me to new writers and new modes of expression; one of my favorite classes was an experimental forms class, where we read writers like Ander Monson and Claudia Rankine and really pushed our own stuff in interesting directions.
My core reading tastes probably haven’t changed a whole lot; anyone that really wallows in language, like rolls around in the mud of syntax and diction with no shame, is my kind of person. A formative short list would include the aforementioned Woolf, along with Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr, Sherman Alexie, Donna Tartt, Shelley Jackson, Kelly Link, Mary Gaitskill, Haruki Murakami and Karen Russell. In terms of influences, I appreciate clean, spare, stripped to the bone writing, but I’m never drawn to it, and into it, the way I am with lush, ornamental prose, the kind that verges on verbosity but gets away with it. And lastly, my inner goth always hews towards darkness in style and subject matter; for example, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love is the ultimate example of beautiful writing about dark and ugly things.
What is your favorite genre to write? Why?
I really like fabulism, or the new weird, or whatever you want to call it; the idea of fantastical things just erupting into the “real” world is so compelling. The genre is so flexible and fluid; you can examine old tropes in new ways and give voice to things we don’t often talk about. On a writing level, fabulism is actually pleasurable, allowing you to play around and see subjects and characters in novel ways. I’ve also been thinking about literary horror a lot and am trying my hand at it — I love the fact that horror simultaneously embraces and exposes what we are afraid of. Horror stories are like psychological case studies, in that way — dismantling the psyche and trying to put it back together.
What advice would you give to undergrad students considering an MFA in writing? Would you recommend it?
That is a difficult question, to be sure. If you are independently wealthy, or can ensure that the cost of your MFA is totally covered by your school, go for it. That may seem like a grim pronouncement, but I would never want a student to be crippled by student loan debt, and that’s just the harsh reality for a lot of people. Realistically, out of my MFA class, there are a handful of people who have continued to write, but the majority of them have non-writing related jobs — an MFA is not going to put food on your table.
If you are really driven to the work, if you’re a person who reads and thinks and feels like you have to write, then you’ll be okay without grad school. There are writing groups all over and places to get feedback on your work, and just reading the hell out of everything will teach you a great deal, if you’re receptive to it. That being said, there’s something incredibly gratifying, something that feels almost hedonistic, about grad school work; it’s your job to just get drunk on words and ideas, and that opportunity is quite singular. If that’s the kind of experience that’s important to you, find a way to make it happen, but realize a MFA isn’t a golden ticket.
After the success of your xoJane article and your podcast interviews, did you feel pressured to write the story everyone wanted you to write? And/or do you feel restrained at all now to that genre?
There is definitely a sense of pressure. I’m fundamentally an inward-looking, introverted kind of person, and to have that kind of focus placed upon such personal work is disconcerting. When you’re writing fiction, no one cares that much about who you are — the work is independent of your essential self. When you’re writing non-fiction, that line gets blurred; you’ve turned yourself (and those around you) inside out upon the page. Memoir work is so popular because we like to see the train wreck happening; reading it can be very gratifying in a voyeuristic way. But it also functions as a kind of catharsis for readers — I had many readers write to me, sharing their own experiences with domestic violence and abuse, and that was heartbreaking in ways I can’t even really articulate. In that sense, I do feel an obligation to continue the core story, despite the inherent thorniness of doing so. I suppose you could say the memoir is currently gestating, or maybe on hiatus — it’s slothing around on a beach right now, but will eventually pull its shit together.
I don’t feel restrained to that genre, though — I’m grateful for the opportunities it afforded me, but I’m not a one-trick pony. I have like two or three tricks, hopefully.
Do you think teaching influences your writing?
It really does; I share the writing I love with students, and try to find new texts that will spark a fire within them. Looking at all the great writing there is, just out walking around in the world, prompts me to think about what stories can do and reminds me of how important they are. When a poem or story really strikes a chord with a student, especially a student that isn’t a big reader or has little confidence in their own writing, it’s incredibly gratifying. Teaching also means your brain never turns off; you are always curious, always going down the rabbit hole of ideas. And rabbit holes are very, very good for writers.
Excerpt from work in progress, a piece of fabulist fiction — the premise here is an addiction to a smoking cessation drug, one that induces dreams so wonderful that they far exceed waking life.
All of this, the subterfuge and malingering, is a fairly recent development. The Nicban panic was spurred on by a histrionic mother who discovered her daughter was part of a Sleeping Beauty club. This was like one of those pregnancy pact type deals, only here you had a daisy chain of doll-haired cheerleader beauties popping pills to sleep and dream, sprawled over pink coverlets like puppies. They stopped going to school and their part-time jobs at Forever 21; rather, they’d lock themselves into a bedroom, ponytails limp like noodles, the warmth of their combined breath frosting over the windows with stale peppermint heat. They dreamed they were human Barbies with special powers — Sephora gift cards fired out of their hard plastic breasts like bullets. In their collective dreams, they traipsed across a beach of crushed Tic Tacs while holding fat cooing babies. They dipped their toes in an ocean of Tiffany heart pendants, the sterling cool and slick against their skin, and then they rode rainbows to their offices, a hushed palace where their only duty was to tweet crucial messages integral to female survival.
But one of the girl’s boyfriends, and you know he was a quarterback named Matt, just couldn’t accept his relegation to the sidelines. Desperate to get his girl back, he followed the pack home and broke into their shared bedroom. The sight of the sleeping, twitching girls, shirts hiked up over flat stomachs and glittering strands of drool unfurling from their rosebud mouths, caused a momentary short circuit in his football brain. When he came to, he immediately informed everyone’s parents. And the police. And the local media.
They went all tempest in a teapot; the local news station started showing footage of people nodding out at their desk, or curled up on the sidewalk like lazy commas, before the story cut back to the news anchor patting sorrowfully at the shellacked tsunami of her hair, like she gave a shit. The real question was, why wasn’t everyone doing Nicban? Who wanted to be awake, plodding through the banalities of chicken nuggets and recycling and email and laundry, when they could be dreaming the most fantastical things imaginable — where burlesque dancers swam in a pool of cherry Jell-O, spelling out “You’re the best” with the curves of their bodies, the sweet red slime coating them like some strange chrysalis. Or Sloth fed you Baby Ruths with rainbow sprinkles before Chunk gently, lovingly, taught you the Truffle Shuffle, both your bellies shaking in tremulous, perfect beauty. An entirely different world, a new one where the indignities of life were sloughed away; a dimension where the Kool-Aid man helped rebuild all the houses he busted up and then you drank him down like wine.
