POLLARI x FLETCHER

Niina Pollari: Hi Sasha! I loved your book, Be Here to Love Me At the End of the World, which is out now from Melville House, and which is filled with such threatening menace, and such breathless recappings of the very many things that ail us as a nation, and such tender moments of the brilliant love that keeps us moving forward as individuals. I have so many questions for you, but my first one is this, which I've been dying to ask you as a conversation opener: do you feel a little bit bad all the time like I do?

Sasha Fletcher: Oh my God yes. Do people not? Like what level of utter denial do you have to be living in to not feel at least a little bit bad all of the time? Right now for months the window out the room I use at home as an office is covered in screened scaffolding. Light has a harder time getting in here these days and at least in this way, it's not actually my fault.

Niina, I cannot believe I get to talk to you about Path of Totality. We came so close to sharing not just a black and white cover with a big piece of yellow down the middle, but a pub date as well. You wrote this book of poems that are impossible not to live inside of, to inhabit every inch of them with your (the reader's) whole heart. It's fucked up how you did this, Niina! I want to ask, loosely, about alchemy, about how we take our feelings and turn them into something else in someone else. I want to ask you about the alchemy of feelings.

NP: That is a fantastic way of phrasing that. Language is very alchemical, very akin to magic, and this is true of poetry in general. I do seek to make those moments, but sometimes you can't craft them, can you? You just have to wait for them to happen. When I was making these poems, I felt so very very bad for so many reasons. I felt bad because someone I loved so much had died. But I also felt ambiently bad ecologically, socially, and morally as a participant in capitalism, and also I felt bad as a writer who was trying to write about something sacred. And all those feelings of badness came out in language, eventually. But I won't pretend that it was easy or that I did it with some kind of conscious craft or practice. At first, all I had was a note in my phone, the saddest note, full of repetitions of phrases I will never share, and images that conveyed all the different ways I felt bad. For instance, something that didn't make it into the book but that I felt very deeply is this one kind of deep-sea fish that has a gelatinous body held together by pressure. And because it's not really solid, it can never be brought up to the surface intact, because it would literally dissolve at the loss of that pressure. That's how I felt, and that's what I tried to make.

Your book is also full of feeling. It's this empathetic narrator who keeps urgently insisting that we pay attention to many different things in order to understand the bad dream that is America, or at least understand something about how it is we came to be in a society where secret police live in the walls and people get shot in the street. What was your equivalent of a note in the phone? What did the central repository for this book look like? The server room? The encyclopedia? Research. Tell me how you did it. 

SF: This book started out as such a different thing! It was about Sam and Eleanor, but Warren Beatty was the president, or was playing him, or he looked like him, it ended with them going around America and robbing every bank and sending the money to Warren Beatty to then go buy up all the debt each bank held and forgive it, and so many cops died, and their ghosts followed them around. It just wasn't, like, a book. And whenever anyone would ask me what I was working on I'd be describing the last 20 pages of a novel and nothing else and I hated it. So I cut every single thing that could look like a plot, I went back to the weird winter, the ghosts worked their way back in, the secret police showed up after Ferguson (would you rather "reform" the police so that they're actually people we could trust or would you rather create a secret police force who can be anyone at any time and arrest anyone at any time?), the longer Alex and I were together and building a life the more I felt hounded by debt, it became so hard to build a life and write about building a life while the world just felt like it was getting louder.

I don't think the world got louder.

I think part of opening your heart to people is that you end up letting the world in more. So that was probably the note on my phone. So much of this book came out of so many things over such a long period of time, but everything that everyone will see in this book came from working to build a life with Alex, and what that does to your heart. My last book didn't sell. I assumed this one wouldn't either, so I wanted to see if I could just put every single bit of my heart into this book. I wanted to know if I could do that, and what it would look like. 

It's always wild how alchemy is the goal but how you can never do it by trying to do it. That we can only get to that point by finding another way to conjure it. And oh my God that makes sense. You didn't need a poem about that, you made the book about that.

This one may be for both of us? Our books are in a lot of ways, very different (poems vs. a novel; #1 new Amazon release in Grief and Loss vs. #1 new Amazon release in Absurdist Fiction; your Goodreads reviews say it's heartwarming vs. mine have people saying they need to shower the negative energy off after reading), but in a lot of ways, they're very similar (we're both blondes; both Eastern European; both our books are black and white with a big yellow stripe), but one thing I noticed we both do is the factual zoom-out and sudden perspective shifts. The sudden explanations of St Thomas, the tick, hungry ghosts. How and why do we do this? Do we change the subject in order to better talk about the subject? This should be hard to pull off and you do it all the time and the world opens up as it shrinks. Please talk about this?

NP: Small things are big things! We are driven by need, and we think we are smart about it but we're not! And we exist in a system, and I can't forget that, just as I imagine you can't. I wanted to see functional animals, because I was rendered so dysfunctional. The ticks, the crows, they just keep going. I wanted to look at things that I could try to understand, even though I definitely still don't understand them. But sometimes the shifts are more the narrator of the poem stepping back saying "look at this; it's the same too." I wondered if those explanatory moments were too prescriptive, for a time, but this difference in voice eventually helped me decide on the two different shapes for the poems in the book. 

You described the way the shifts work in our books very cinematically, and that might partially be due to our having grown up immersed in visual media. What do you think about that? I don't imagine them that way, but they do end up working like that upon reading. I love all the other things we have in common, too. When Sam and Eleanor discuss Western North Carolina, I knew which donut place I would recommend to them. And here's another thing we have in common: I also have a book that I wrote in between my first and this one, and that book didn't find its home and was scrapped for parts because it no longer worked. It was poems, as I am only an aspiring fiction writer, but I still find the process you described deeply relatable.

 I think that goal of heart is an incredibly tough one, and you fucking did it, so congrats. The book is full of heart. And the openness in love that you described is a lifetime of effort to maintain; it takes constant work to keep the doors inside that house open. I am a door-closer by nature, but I also have a family I love so much and I am working very hard to let the light in. The narrator in your book is constantly reminding the reader about love, and I think it works brilliantly, and a couple of times it made me cry out of nowhere. Because it really is that simple sometimes. You have got to throw yourself into loving because what else is there?

Speaking of light! Light is all over your book. The angels are columns of light; people and things are bathed in light for moments that linger. There is that beam of light on both our covers. And the black bags are definitely the antilight. Is light a way of asking the reader to see? Or is that too simplistic? 

SF: Niina that is such a beautiful question! It is absolutely not intended as a form of illumination. I wrote this poem a long time ago that ended with watching someone go home to their wife and becoming wrapped in a giant bed sheet of longing until they're so close that there's nothing between them anymore, nothing but light, and I don't know. That's what it feels like sometimes. That there's nothing between you but light, and then you're both light, and then that's it. And anyway, a room full of light, you can't see shit in there. I say this as someone who used to live right beside the BQE where they'd have huge lights up all night long flooding the apartment. Light, much like darkness, is an all-consuming thing.

Broken little engines of need!!! Who doesn't feel like that? I think about movies and tv all the time, the same way I think about paintings and poems and articles and feelings, they're all stuff to borrow good tricks from. I want to make these things and I don't ever really know how so I think often about what did something like what I want to try and I just write it like it was supposed to happen that way. Like we can't write the tracking shot in True Detective (I mean you kind of can, you write one single block of text with no period because the reader doesn't get to breathe until it's over because you didn't get to and so they absolutely don't get to) but we also don't need to write an opening crawl because that's what writing is.

I've noticed this move in your book I am very fond of, wherein you change the subject in order to not change the subject. It isn't a sleight of hand; you talk about something else to try to talk about something else but it's ridiculous because there's only one thing to talk about, and everything will always find its way back to it. For me, this is always a conscious decision. Is it the same for you? Are there other things you notice yourself doing in a poem and you think "you absolute fool, you really think that'll work"? Or is this not at all how your process works, in which case, how does your process work?

NP: Okay but before we go too far down a path where we talk about shit like process, can I hone in on one specific passage about light that you have? That wonderful part that everyone quotes, where you pretty much quote the Mountain Goats. The one that goes "When I look at you standing in the doorway like that all rimmed with light like that as I walk up to you like that what happens is that it feels like I love you so much that I can’t breathe"? 

I know that you and I both feel strongly about that song "Going to Georgia," and maybe can agree that John Darnielle's use of images, and his use of the sounds of words, is something special. I mean that song is like two minutes but it's permanently lodged in my brain. What else is like that for you? And maybe semi-hidden in this book?

SF: This is beautiful. I send a thing complimenting the way you change the subject and you change the subject, this is a transition, everyone should be taking notes. 

I mean the other big thing about that song is that when asked why he didn't love to play it all the time Darnielle would basically say that the issue with that song is that he wrote it as a young man and there is a particular way in which young men do not know how to express a large feeling without resorting or comparing it to violence. And that's absolutely stuck with me, because I absolutely pulled that shit when I was younger, and figuring out how to make sure that a big feeling is always its own thing and granted the appropriate size and grandeur removed from violence is vital. John Darnielle's feelings are larger than his whole body and that's why each song sounds like he nearly died to bring it to you because a part of me will always believe he nearly did, but that it was so important that I, personally, hear this. This is what art can do to us. It slaps.

This is in there but it's been edited down I think. The part in Badlands where they're living in the woods is in there. I summarize Star Wars and Moonstruck and the part with the President waking up in other bodies is a combination of Heaven Can Wait (back when the President was Warren Beatty) and International Assassin, one of the greatest episodes of television of all time. Wings of Desire is all over it, I wrote that scene about a part in a carpeted basement while listening to Any Party over and over again. I feel like I tried to just write this like Europeana.

I will tell you what is all over my goddam syntax which I need to edit the fuck down to nothing over and over again and it is Achewood. It's absolutely about time for me to do a reread and I'm so happy I'm not writing anything new right now because the syntax of these fuckers just wraps itself around my brain and it leaks into everything I do. I have a feeling like ending this with Achewood will open some things up for you.

NP: Wow, I love that thing about young men, feelings, and violence. I somehow hadn't heard him talk about that, but it makes perfect sense. A king. There is more to add to that, which is that to some degree, receiving that kind of message as a non-man time after time makes you gradually start to equate violence with love, whether consciously or not. Which makes doing what you say even more imperative. There are already so many war metaphors in relationships; we don't need to perpetuate He hit me and it felt like a kiss from either perspective, when we have total control of the world we're building. 

Oh man! Achewood! I know exactly what you mean about the stickiness of the syntax. Internalizing it is a total Paradise Lost moment; you can't unhear it, there's no going back to prelapsarian times. I'm not a regular consumer of web comics, or any kind of comics, but some friends in college introduced me to this totally insane strip and I never looked back. I started rereading it recently too; I'm so glad I'm not trying to write anything right now because it'd be filled with Achewoodisms. I love each of the characters for so many reasons, but my brain thinks most often of Todd the Squirrel. Do you remember the incredibly dark and somewhat unresolved arc where Nice Pete abducts Téodor? I think of Lurquilla and Mayner and their conversation about what to do with the poop in their front yard all the time. What's your favorite aspect of Achewood? But also can you say something lofty for the end, please? I would like to redirect back to the universal.

SF: Of course I remember that! I always get that storyline confused with Phillipe going to the dump to save his couch, but they're both just storylines where it takes people a little too long to notice that someone they love isn't where they should be, because they're so deeply involved in their own lives it's hard for them to notice that the people who are most open and empathetic are absent.

OK I mean so Achewood starts as being this strip about Cornelius Bear, Téodor Orezscu, and Philippe, all anthropomorphized stuffed animals, but without a doubt, the more compelling characters show up around the party strip, the three mean cats: Raymond Quentin Smuckles, Roast Beef Kazenzakis, and Patrick Yeynolds, the violently angry gay libertarian vegan. The world is quickly established, the focus very soon shifts to Ray and Roast Beef and Roast Beef's Depression, and from there, things expand rapidly. Achewood does what I love in sustained narratives better than pretty much anything else: it establishes a world, who lives in the world, and how they speak, and then it just sets it all loose. Absolutely anything is possible in Achewood, and it will break your heart to get there. Also, I have no idea how to talk about Achewood without sounding absolutely demented. When Philippe goes to the dump to save his couch? The shit with the flower, and with Petunia? When Roast Beef is shot, dies, goes to Heaven, meets Molly, finally for the first time in his life knows safety and love, and then is ripped away by Ray donating the organs of his Sony Aibo dogs, and Molly, who dies in like 17th century Wales, travels across space and time on a ghost train (??) to marry him? It feels nice sometimes to love something that has its own language. It is wonderful at times to feel part of something you can lay no real claim to aside from the love you carry for it, and the feelings it has graced you with.