Making the Tongue Dry: An Interview with Prose Prize Finalist Jen Soriano

Jen Soriano is a Filipinx-American writer whose work blurs the boundaries between nonfiction, poetry and speculative fiction. Her chapbook “Making the Tongue Dry” was a finalist for the Newfound Prose Prize.  Her lyric essay “A Brief History of her Pain” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her essays have appeared in a number of journals including Waxwing, Pleiades and TAYO Literary Magazine. Jen is an MFA candidate in nonfiction and fiction at the Rainier Writing Workship, and lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, WA with her two favorite boys in the world.

I’m learning to kick that controlling brain to the backseat and just let instinct allow words to tumble onto the page. – Jen Soriano

Eppinger: My first question is about genre. What do you consider the genre of “Making the Tongue Dry” to be? Elliptical prose? Creative Nonfiction? Something else? Alsodoes genre matter to you?

Soriano: Genre definitely matters to me, but not in the conventional sense. I care about the ways genre descriptions can work to help readers understand what they are reading. But I don’t care about genre as a rigid container that writers must fit our writing within.

So, to help readers understand my chapbook I guess I’d describe it as lyric essay and hybrid nonfiction. It’s important to me to name that it’s nonfiction because I’m deliberately trying to capture actuality on the page. Each essay in the chapbook grapples with an aspect of reality as I see it.

“Alpha Bet”: An interview with Jacqueline Kirkpatrick

“Alpha Bet,” a finalist for the 2018 Newfound Prose Prize and chapbook contest, is a memoir told in vignettes and peppered with cross-references like an index of pain in the narrator’s life. It is an intimate work, offering a reader much to process as they piece together a story. 

Author Jacqueline Kirkpatrick took the time to share a bit more with us about her process in creating “Alpha Bet”.

Delaney Kochan: One thing I love about how you wrote this piece is how clearly it teaches the power of sharing emotion by showing scene. When it appears easy, you know you’re reading a talented writer who’s crafted each sentence to be unencumbered with internal narration. What was your editing process like?

Jacqueline Kirkpatrick: It’s probably a terrible thing to admit, however, the most honest response I can offer is that I don’t edit much. One of the first writers I fell for was Jack Kerouac and not long after I started reading him I found the “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” I’ve been writing based on that method since. Most of my work is stream of conscious. I pop on headphones, queue up the tunes that bring back certain memories and I close my eyes. I’ve been lucky that it makes sense most of the time but I run the risk that it sounds absolutely bonkers. Those pieces stay safe and in the dark in the filing cabinet.

I almost never edit content.

“How to be Extraordinary in America”: An interview with Ploi Pirapokin

You know those moments when you’ve realized that even in your effort to be well-versed in something and deeply probe at it, you’ve been asking it the wrong questions the whole time? This is the effect reading Ploi Pirapokin’s essay, “How to be Extraordinary in America,” has.

A finalist for the 2018 Newfound Prose Prize chapbook contest, this piece details her experience of obtaining a “Genius Visa” so she could continue to live and write in the United States. She was gracious enough to chat with me more about her process and underlying beliefs on immigration and belonging.

Delaney Kochan: Tell me about the structure of the essay. Is there something significant about the number 82 or the way you chose to structure your piece?

Ploi Pirapokin: The essay is numbered to reflect the eligibility criteria to qualify for an O-1 visa, as though it were a checklist that needed to be ticked off once completed. I wanted the seemingly never-ending numbers to mimic the arduous process of waiting, and of constantly proving my worth as though it were easy as arithmetic—if I only did X, then I would get my visa; what do I lose when I do Y; what risks do I take if I do Z. 

Erasure and Apocalypse in Claire Wahmanholm’s “Night Vision”

In Claire Wahmanholm’s poetry chapbook “Night Vision” (New Michigan Press, 2017), the world is transformed and brought to its most primal state after some catastrophic events that readers may never be quite sure of. The chapbook includes 30 poems—21 prose poems and nine erasure poems. (Erasure poetry is a form where an entire page of found text will be erased until only a few words remain. These leftover words form a poem.)

All nine erasure poems in “Night Vision” come from the wildly popular “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan, setting a reader expectation of wonder at the universe.

Loss an destruction are detailed instead, through Wahmanholm’s gripping yet elusive prose.

Poetic Territorialization: Reading Janice Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue

Janice Lee’s “The Sky Isn’t Blue” (Civil Coping Mechanism, 2016) is a gorgeous collection of lyric essays exploring the ways that space and poetry coalesce. Each section of the book examines a different location and all of the associations, thoughts and emotions that have manifested within it.

I am Prospector, Hear My Sluice Roar!

Balancing a teeming bag on one shoulder and two gold pans and a classifier in the other, I contemplated my path forward. My boyfriend’s boots seemed to glide across the river rocks, and while I hoped for the same result, I had a sneaking suspicion I would do more sliding than gliding.

Scurrying to catch up, I trudged after those brown cowboy boots. Eyes alight with what I would come to know as gold fever, my boyfriend’s excitement had grown that morning as we neared the river. Though we would stagger back up the path to the car a few hours later, his footsteps were quick as we made our way down to the bank. For a man who towered above me, he moved with a grace and ease I could only admire. Turning about in place, he looked at me expectantly.

“Here?”

Nodding, I hoped we had picked a good spot. Though we had visited the same creek bank only a week before, our efforts then weren’t very promising. This time, however, we were prepared. Scouting done, we were in it for real now.

Beyond “Dualities” in Poetry by Jason Phoebe Rusch

Dualities,” the debut poetry collection by Jason Phoebe Rusch (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2018),  is a coming of age story told in mostly first person. The collection of poetry glimpses into someone’s life, one narrative at a time. Rusch captivates readers with vivid words describing times, places and feelings.

In “What Do You Love About Haiti?” readers get to know a little more about Rusch. He travels, including time in Haiti during an earthquake. The powerful images here suggest he witnessed the aftermath of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010, as Rusch states:

I’d never seen a dead body
before the earthquake. The earth
that day felt like something moving
underneath, in pursuit…
After the earthquake, I became accustomed
to the smell of death, no longer noticed it
clinging to my clothes, my skin. It became
the norm that houses should look like dioramas,
rooms exposed: staircases twisted and mangled,
kitchen tables tilting.

These words leave the reader uncomfortable yet compassionate. Indeed, uncomfortable yet compassionate is the theme throughout “Dualities.”

Small fires, dulled senses in the short fiction of Andrew Duncan Worthington

The main assertion of collection “A Very Small Forest Fire” by Andrew Duncan Worthington (Bottlecap Press, 2018) seems to be that the ultimate way to undermine capitalism is to be too bored to participate.

“Assertion” may be too strong a word. These 12 short-short stories employ what I suspect is purposefully dull and vague language, creating characters numbed by the constant stimulation of modern American society. Narrators (often unnamed) drift through recreation activities but don’t have any funthey don’t feel much of anything. The sparse language evokes Kerouac, but with a more limited vocabulary.

“Census” by Jesse Ball: An Odyssey from A to Z

Jesse Ball is a respected voice in contemporary fiction, with novels such as “The Way Through Doors” and “How to Set a Fire and Why.” In spite of the dark, depressing and even graphic content in his writing, his work ultimately reveals the enduring power of hope, love and creativity.

Ball is not afraid to write about disturbing topics, which makes his newest novel “Census” (HarperCollins, 2018) a modern masterpiece that presents characters who persevere in the face of adversity.

Jeff Jackson’s “Mira Corpora” Mixes Journal Entries with Fantasy

When’s the last time you picked up an old notebook?

My notebooks are filled with angry stanzas that could hardly qualify as poetry, doodles of samurai where there should be algebraic equations, and the occasional short story. If you flipped through my old journals and diaries, you could probably learn a lot about me, because I used my journals as a getaway from reality. Or maybe your journal is your archive of your reality.

Mira Corpora(Two Dollar Radio, 2013) is a collection of surreal journal entries by Jeff Jackson, a celebrated author and playwright. The book “is a coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories” according to Jackson’s website.

Deep journeys into the psyche with Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Debut short story collection “White Dancing Elephants” by Chaya Bhuvaneswar (Dzanc Books, forthcoming October 2018 and winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize) plunges readers deep into the psyche of women—largely South Asian women.

Characters have the darkest corners of their minds exposed (through their own admissions or by omniscient narrators) and what comes forth is usually disagreeable. At the same time, well-trodden narratives about immigration are upended regularly.

The main character in “Jagatishwaran” is a woman who refuses to feel gratitude for or awe of a sister who has emigrated to the U.S. “But it’s my sister who’s the smart one, the doctor lady,” she rants to the reader.

“She thinks of us as dull-witted rice eaters waiting for her borrowed Anglo china plates and blue jeans, silk ties and pantyhose, perfume in fish shaped bottles, white linen napkins and forks so we won’t eat with our hands, expensive bolts of brilliant cloth—smelling slightly of glue, precious…”

THIS POST contains the secrets of life and love and eternal contentedness:

I received an intriguing text from my cousin at the beginning of this month. We’d recently been having deep conversations, from analyzing Oscar-winning movies to mulling over relationships that appear to be unfixable. It read:

“Oh wise cousin of mine, tell me the secrets of life and love and eternal contentedness…”

Rebecca Drake’s “Just Between Us” satisfies the need for a psychological thriller

How does one separate what is true from what is false? Given the subjective nature of reality, it can be very difficult for people to trust anyone, even those near and dear to them.

This famous theme has formed the basis of countless works of fiction and major motion pictures (just one example is the 1996 film “Secrets & Lies“). As the audience, we know that secrecy can create a compelling story filled with tension, drama, and suspense. In this tradition, Rebecca Drake’s “Just Between Us” (St. Martin’s Press, 2018) provides a fascinating examination of the limits of friendships, especially when close friends lose the trust that originally bonded them together.

Geoff Manaugh Reconstructs Our Minds in “A Burglar’s Guide to the City”

If you’ve ever gone through a parkour phase, you’ve probably looked at a building and thought, “I can climb that.” If you’ve ever seen “Ocean’s Eleven,” you’ve probably thought about how cool breaking into a bank vault would be. Geoff Manaugh argues that humans are addicted to parkour videos, heist movies and crime novels because the people who climb buildings, break into them, or destroy them are misusing the architecture that we see around us everyday.

Your New Favorite Book: Brandon Sanderson’s “Oathbringer”

“Gah!” I vented as I closed the book cover, the desire to read further and know more only relenting with the knowledge that there were no more words to read—at least, not yet. There would be, but only with the passing of time. Time I knew would be necessary for such a work, but that I resented nonetheless.

I have spent the last two months re-reading the first two books of the Stormlight Archive, the three-book (so far) series written by Brandon Sanderson that had me captivated from the first page. When the third book was published, I knew I had to buy it. I suppose it seems a bit silly, buying the third book of a series when you don’t already own the first two, but for someone who uses the public library more often than 2/3 of the population, waiting to get my hands on a copy seemed like torture.

Deconstruction and Rebirth in the Poetry of Caseyrenée Lopez

Debut poetry collection “the new gods” by Caseyrenée Lopez (Bottlecap Press, 2018) uses rich language to conduct an examination of the body: how bodies are placed within pop culture, how they are valued or derided in society, and how they are the vessels that lead us through love.

Multiple Perspectives in Matthew Pitt’s “These Are Our Demands”

What would you do if you could see three seconds into the future?

Matthew Pitt’s “These Are Our Demands” (Engine/Ferry Street Books, 2017) provides an answer. In one short story, Paul is a Polish “minute oracle,” and Maddy knows it. As his English tutor, she does her best to teach him the language, but of course there are always going to be certain things lost in translation. He knows she is pregnant, but does her man know she is carrying a baby boy?

Michalski’s “The Summer She Was Under Water,” a Refreshing Read

Reading “The Summer She Was Under Water” (reissued by Black Lawrence Press, 2017) by Jen Michalski has been truly refreshing. It is a fictional story with deep and complicated characters, while still managing to be easy to read. Like water, the language is clear and the flow of the story smooth.

You Don’t Understand Bruce Springsteen

I’ll be the first to admit: I grew up in New Jersey not understanding Bruce Springsteen. I heard his songs at home (first on vinyl, then on CD), in the car radio or at sporting events but I never quite understood the appeal. He was my first live concert experience, with my parents when I was 12. I attended dutifully, sang along, but didn’t feel real love in my heart while I chanted “BRUUUUUUCE!”

Only recently have I realized that Springsteen is often misunderstoodmost gravely by his loyal fan base.

Louise Erdrich Pens a Dystopia

We’ve come to know Louise Erdrich as an established writer thanks to novels like “Love Medicine,” so it may come as a surprise that her most recent work tackles broad and philosophical questions in a dystopian setting. Her latest novel, “Future Home of the Living God” (Harper, 2017), combines poetic prose with fantastical ideas to create a spellbinding reading experience.

The protagonist, 26-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, is our guide into an America where a totalitarian state rules and babies are being born with animal traits.