Rachel B. Glaser’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, NOÖ Journal, Barrelhouse, Invisible Ear, elimae, 3:AM Magazine, 3rd Bed, Columbia Journal, [sic] journal, CapGun, New York Tyrant, and Unsaid. She’s a student of writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Visit Rachel’s website.

The first story I read of yours was “The Kid” in elimae. The rhythm and voice instantly hooked me, and you handled the darker elements of the story with honesty and grace. The ending could have been much more graphic, for example, but I’m grateful you didn’t take it in that direction. How important is it for stories such as “The Kid” to find a balance between the dark and the light?

I hadn’t considered making the ending real graphic–maybe I like dogs too much?–but now that you mention it, it would have been a good challenge to try. I find more stories stay on the light or balanced side. Even when something really dark and gritty happens, so often words are softening or ambiguous and the dark, gritty thing is smoothed out. Like some stories in my classes use the phrase “her sex” meaning “her vagina” and “sex” in this case is a smoothing word, all encompassing, farther away from the thing they are describing. But in some cases, perhaps with “The Kid,” I think it’s stronger to leave out the graphic sentences and have the reader imagine them in their own head. I’m interested in that, what work the story will do, and what work it makes the reader do.

I love this line from “The Kid”: “Old Nintendo games littered the floor like headstones.”

Thanks Kelly. Besides the visual comparison, I think nowadays that line works in another way, like Nintendo itself has died.

Do you consider a lot of your writing experimental? Take your work in This Recording, for example.

I do consider my writing experimental, though I usually say “non-traditional,” partly because I used to think there were annoying connotations to “experimental,” sort of like the Sprockets skit on SNL awhile back. Recently, I’ve found it fun to experiment with the essay or article form and play with the reader’s expectations. A story is allowed to go its surprising path, but an essay is supposed to clearly prove a point, so it’s satisfying to de-rail an essay, or in a ThisRecording movie review, avoid talking about the movie. Also, I’m finding an experimental work to be more powerful when playing against a really traditional seeming story.

Who are some non-traditional writers you admire?

Donald Barthelme is the big one for me. I started reading him when my friend found a book of his on the street. Julio Cortazar is great as well. I’m reading Cronopios and Famas and it’s reading like Barthelme. Also John Barth (probably the craziest one on here), Gordon Lish, Judy Budnitz, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Hardwick, Thomas Bernhard.

You’re currently a writing student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Are there any writing techniques you’ve learned about that are particularly appealing to you?

The poet Seth Landman (eyeswole.blogspot.com) does a lot of ‘word bank’ poems. He seems to do it a lot with misheard lyrics and non-fiction books, but basically you take any form of writing and use it as a word bank to write new lines. This is a fun trick for writing a poem and usually gets you in the mood to write more.

Do you have any examples you can share with us?

I’m substitute teaching a Creative Writing class right now, and I asked the students to write a poem using Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems as a word bank, and many poems had a similar wistful city feel, but check out this one, by Mark Gozzo. It really twists the O’Hara to an opposite:

My blood is Judas Priest in a glass
I am like a whip made of steel
I come from the mountain of skulls
My soul grows on evil things,
I hate your children
And I think about eating them
I am the hell rocker
Don’t fuck with me

(Printed with permission of Mark Gozzo.)

Tell us about the collection you’re working on for your thesis.

I’m working on my first collection, “Pee On Water and Other Stories.” Stories I’ve been writing since 2005, and writing right now, and this winter and next spring. They’re looking pretty good together, and I hope to get the whole thing published sometime in the next couple of years.

You’re also working on a “crazy historically unsound Civil War drama.” Tell us more!

I just finished my first completed draft of that story. It’s really narrative but also experimental. Most of it seems to take place during the Civil War, but there are mentions of Jazz, which wasn’t around then, so these discrepancies rewrite the time period or else stick out glaringly, or better blur the historic setting, make it a similar parallel one. I just read Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and I love its ambiguous time and place. Writing and film seem two of the only chances to create new time periods, and I find it inviting to do so, to sink the reader in a time that didn’t happen.

You’re a relatively young (in age) writer. With all the talk about reading on the decline, and all of the technological gadgets your generation grew up with, I’m wondering how, in general, people your age regard literature and the arts. Did your high school have courses for people interested in pursuing fiction writing?

My high school did have creative writing classes, and that’s where I started to take writing seriously. I know reading is on the decline, but I hear that MFA programs are becoming more popular. Maybe the shift from television to Internet will, in time, be a positive switch for writing. Online magazines are certainly starting up everyday, and more and more books are available to read online. But maybe new literature is becoming more and more underground? It’s hard to tell because I’m stuck underground along with it. Around here (Western Mass) there are poetry readings everyday, in bookstores and houses, at colleges, all anyone talks about is writing.

How has the internet affected what you, personally, write and read?

I actually only had a few years of writing before the internet got so in our face. I think it encourages research, but maybe a hasty, goofy kind of research, which is usually the only kind I need. Without the internet I don’t think I’d read as much current/recent and unpublished work. That’s what’s been so exciting about the internet, how it equalizes publishing. Little kids have blogs just as accessible as the backlog of New Yorker short fiction. I’ve also found inspiration in Craigslist and Online Dating entries; certain selections have found their way into my stories. The Internet itself is inspiring and similar to fiction, it keeps abstracting itself and our world and our culture, and then straightening itself out and explaining and proving and communicating, then getting really self-absorbed and embarrassing, but then brave and helpful, and so on. It’s a constant montage, which is beautiful and freeing, but at the same time, sick and addicting and like a monster.

Contact Rachel: bassethoundfound AT gmail DOT com

Read:

“The Kid”
published by elimae

Two Poems
in 3:AM Magazine

“It Happened in New York”
published by This Recording

“Hidden Imagery at the Letter Level”
published by This Recording

“The Week in Film”
published by This Recording

*Painting by Rebecca Volinsky*