Backlist Bulletin #11: Made-up Interview with Imaginary Artists
There was a period of my life in which I talked often to mormon furries.
I was interning for a magazine right out of college, and I thought that I would put my Media Studies degree to good use by dipping a toe into the cesspool of modern day digital-based journalism.
It was in this short venture that I found myself encountering, for the first time, the dynamics inherent in the interview form: the seesaw of vulnerability between interviewer and interviewee, the gentle arching of conversation, the swearing of certain utterances to secrecy, the emotional demand of the audio recorder. In connecting with people in the Mormon-Furry community (or, as I was told, to offer a more politically correct mouthful — the furry community of the Church of Latter Day Saints), I felt the great and heavy mantle of journalistic integrity drape itself across my shoulders. This is my best explanation for why I could never bring myself to actually finish the article. I felt as if I was exploiting the people who had made themselves vulnerable to me for a story. I was reducing them to catchy lead sentences and out-of-context quotes — to click-bait. The mantle was too much for me to bear.
The lesson that came from this short misadventure, besides the fact that I’m definitely too soft for journalism, was that interviews are tricky beasts. They often lay bare just as much of the bias, neurosis, and insecurities of the interviewer as they do the perspectives and stories of the interviewee. Famously skilled interviewers, from Oprah to Studs Terkel, are known for being kind, empathetic, and thoughtful interlocutors. We intuit this not from any specific proclamations they make, but from the delicate way they prompt and respond to others — from the quality of the mirror they hold up to their subjects.
This brings me to Alex Stein’s Made Up Interviews with Imaginary Artists (UDP, 2009).
This book is in fact two books:part one, FACTions (real interviews) and part two, Made Up Interviews (made up interviews). The book in its entirety is an experimental, hybrid exploration of conversational interview as medium, as architecture. How does the interview ‘make up,’ construct, a person from the beams of the cultural imaginary that exists around them?
The art of the interview, like the art of translation, is about maintaining and rendering, or — hat is to say — registering (and that is perhaps the most subjective term of all) the spirit of the occasion, without corrupting beyond recognition its material surface.
(From “The Practice and Theory of the Interview-as-Translation”, p. 13)
In part one, Stein conducts a series of interviews with the artists Pat Ament, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Peter Grandbois, Joanne Greenberg, and Cecilia Vicuña. FACTions is a mixture of transcriptions of actual interviews, anecdotes surrounding the conversations, and conversational ephemera.
From the outset, Stein posits failure as central to the success of the “FACTions” — Stein’s name for the ‘interpretive biographies’ he is constructing out of the interviews. “Without the prospect of failure,” he states, “the FACTion cannot be considered art.” The entire ethos of these ‘interpretive biographies’ centers around the concept of their potential failure, ‘the tension of process’ that, as Stein argues, is central to making art: “success that succeeds by incorporating every failure bodily demeans art” (p 15).
Rather than erasing failure by incorporating it into a seamless narrative, the FACTions joyously highlight failure as part of the process of interview. It is this act of ‘failing’ — at dialoguing in a ‘correct way,’ at neatly painting within the lines of portraiture — that makes the interviews so interesting. Alongside the more standard transcriptions of conversations, there are chapters made entirely of quotes, scattered intentionally haphazardly throughout the book, that illustrate fascinating, decontextualized snippets of conversations — “failed” conversations. Stein edits these snippets together to make found-poem type texts out of them. Reading these transcriptions is like sitting at a party and overhearing the intimate, fleeting, and drunkenly profound stories that strangers share when they are taken out of their familiar contexts.
“You are so damn slow-moving and yet here you are at age 26 half-way through a Ph.D. program and with a published novel under your belt. How do you account for that?
‘I never run past myself.’”
(From “Overheard At a Latino Literature Conference,” p. 80)
Lorna Dee Cervantes is a particularly mesmerizing character study. “It is no less difficult to gain an audience with Lorna Dee Cervantes than it is to catch lightning in a jar” (p. 17). Stein revels not only in the scattered and passionate way she speaks but also in the dynamic that is formed between them. I wish, here, I could offer an excerpt that exemplifies Dee Cervantes’ brilliance, but the paragraphs that Stein offers are long and flowing, scattered. It is in trying to excerpt a sentence or two that one realizes what an impossible task it is to capture Lorna Dee Cervantes’ language and stories in any sort of pared-down way. Instead, I will offer a small moment between Stein and Cervantes:
“Nobody tells me anything,” says Lorna Dee Cervantes. “They keep me in the dark like a mushroom and they feed me bullshit.
This little plaint registers in me as a flute-like trill, and I burst into laughter.”
(From “Legions Of The Disappeared,” p. 41)
This exploration of the interview as a storytelling medium and as a form unto itself culminates in part two, Made-up Interviews with Imaginary Artists. These interviews are explicitly fantastical, further exploding and abstracting the interview form into another medium entirely. The interview becomes dialogue between two parts of the self, a dialectical mirror held up to its most abstract extent — an interior monologue.
: Soul?
: Yes?
: I just don’t have time for your weirdness.
: You don’t? Who doesn’t?
: I don’t. I just don’t have time for it. I’m busy. Always trying to build myself into something.
: Oh, you, Self, you are always the same. Always trying to build yourself into something. What is it this time?
: A bridge.
(From “Dialogue of the Self and Soul”, p.149)
This final section does not feel like a conclusion, rather another entry point into the text. As a faceless voice of profound truth states in the chapter “Overheard at a Latino Literature Conference:” ”the realm of the poetic has a million-million open doors” (86). Made-up Interviews is as close as I have read so far to a truly rhizomatic text, one that can be accessed at any point, that grows horizontally and is ever expansive, that offers its root network up to a fruitful and chaotically abundant harvest. The voices of the artists featured in this book form a poetic cacophony of advice for writing and living. And like writing and like life, it is scattered, a bit messy, and edged with failure.
— Noa Mendoza
Made-up Interviews with Imaginary Artists is available directly through UDP (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and from Small Press Distribution (here).
The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices and Interns.
