Former Fringe contributor Molly Gaudry is the author of We Take Me Apart, published by Mud Luscious Press in 2010. Recently she and I chatted over email about anapest and enjambment and all that fun poetry stuff.

Q. We Take Me Apart was the first in MLP’s novel(la) series. Can you tell us a bit about its origins? My copy is a second edition; was there some reworking of it to fit J. A. Tyler’s concept for the series?

A. This is an interesting question. We might have to get JAT’s input. What I remember, though, about the manuscript’s origins is this:  I had a car full of everything I owned and I drove it to Chicago for AWP. I guess that was February ‘09. After AWP, I drove to Philadelphia. It was on that long drive that I said to myself, aloud, over and over, “We take me apart. We take me apart.” And I kept thinking “Who is ‘we’?” And in Philadelphia, I accepted the key to the room I had rented and began to write this very long poem that was part found text (from Anatomy for the Artist), part prose, and ended up about ten pages, single spaced. 

I was like, “What the hell am I going to do with this?” 

I thought about JAT’s chapbook series and queried him, saying, “I know this is too long, but would you consider it?” He responded and said to send it. I did. He kept it for a few days, during which I agonized and distracted myself by blogging about how I thought maybe the poem/prose/medical text thing could become something longer, possibly even full-length. When he finally responded a few days later, he asked, “Did you mean it about making it longer?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Make it longer and when it’s done I’ll consider publishing it.” We agreed on a deadline and I hardly wrote a word until about a month before that deadline. Which is when I started freaking out. I mean, it seemed as if I was going to totally blow a potential book deal. But I had exhausted the character. There was nothing else to write about her. That ten-page single spaced poem thing was done. (And it was later published as an e-chapbook by Blossombones, in its entirety, as Anatomy for the Artist.)

So in the final month, I started from scratch. I borrowed words from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and started making lists from them. I started connecting those words with my own words. “Glass” led to retelling “Cinderella.” “Cocoa” led to bean, led to retelling “The Princess and the Pea.” Once fairy tales became part of the storyline, the mysterious “you” became important. It would be the narrator’s mother, and the “you,” and the narrator herself, who would make up the collective “we.” 

JAT read an early draft, gave me an extension to finish it, sort of astonished that I had decided to start over from scratch, but I remember after he read the first few pages, he said something like, “Keep going! Don’t stop now! Why are you writing me? You should be writing them instead!” So I kept writing. And I sent it. And we loved it. And we edited. And we cut so many words. And at the final hour, I added that section about the dresses, the flower parts. That was the last section I wrote, after everything else. And that section, by itself, became a Mud Luscious chapbook, became a sneak peek of We Take Me Apart, which became Mud Luscious’s first full-length title. Damn, I’m getting nostalgic and sentimental.

Q. I’m glad you mentioned the fairy tales right away, because I enjoyed following that thread. Certainly not a fairy-tale ending to WTMA. Did you decide early in your life that fairy tales are poppycock?

A. I wish I could say yes, but I think I still read and reread them because there is some sort of satisfaction in having suspended so much disbelief throughout that, by the end, we’re ready to believe in happiness. By suspension of disbelief, I’m recalling Hansel and Gretel, whose parents abandon them to starve to death in a forest where a witch who eats children lives and lures them in with a spell that turns her house to candy; or Cinderella, who wears shoes of glass and travels in a pumpkin-turned-stagecoach; and the list goes on. I feel these tales are so familiar to us that we can easily forget the magic—both the magic taking place in the stories and the magic of reading (or hearing) and believing these things could happen. 

Remember, too, that many fairy tales begin with so much attention to poverty, injustice, death, oppression. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with our wanting, on allegorical levels, good to overcome evil, or for justice to be served. The happy ending seems the heroine’s due, her reward, and sometimes just as magical as the spells and transformations.

Still, though, I understand your point. And as a writer, I’m most interested in retellings of familiar tales, particularly when those tales are subverted. Perhaps even more simply, I love drama. And it seems to me that the moment of “happily ever after” is actually less an ending than it is a beginning. It is where the story really just gets interesting. The rest of their lives! I mean: What happens next?

Q. Interesting. See, my take was that your narrator’s … well, “reliance” is a bit too strong, but her constant referencing of fairy tales led me to believe that you are intentionally turning the “happily ever after” idea on its head. I mean, unless my reading is flawed (and let’s face it – as you know, we editors can’t always be insightful readers), your narrator ends up in a ward after having blinded herself with a pair of scissors. Cinderella at first is stuck inside four walls but in the end she’s whisked away by the prince. Your narrator at one point is whisked away by who she believes to be her prince (or princess?), but at the end of her fairy tale she’s stuck inside four walls. That’s subversion if I’ve ever seen it.

I don’t know. Perhaps I’m already (after two questions!) beating this fairy tale thing into the ground. I seem to be basically restating what you’ve already said — that you enjoy the idea behind fairy tales, but in your writing you like to overthrow those ideas.

Now that I’ve answered my own non-question, what the hell shall we talk about next?

A. It’s interesting:  the book’s been out almost a year now, and I read from it quite often, but I rarely ever read the story lines dealing with the ward. I usually read the fairy tale sections. Which is to say:  it is easy to forget about the ward. About what happens after the “happily ever after.” 

I’m probably a bit too pleased with myself about the scissors part, particularly as self-inflicted punishment for having poisoned and killed her mother . . .

Q. So you do reread your own book. Before we went on the record, I mentioned that an excerpt from WTMA appeared last year in a lit mag next to a short story my girlfriend wrote. You told me that you no longer had that magazine, that you had gotten rid of it before moving. Which I was curious about, because I cling to every silly little magazine in which I publish a book review, and I guess I just assumed that all writers did the same. Has publishing in magazines and journals become sort of ho-hum for you? Or do you still enjoy the process, but don’t really feel a lot of sentimentality about the actual end-result object?

A. Oh, I meant that I read from it at readings! The fairy tale sections seem to work for the live audience, and I guess I choose to read those sections because they are more inviting to the ear than, perhaps, the other sections. 

Let’s see, yes, I donated a lot of books and magazines to a library and that was that. As for publishing, absolutely not ho-hum! I still tingle and awe when some kind editor writes to say a piece of mine has been accepted. And I hope I am only at the beginning of that process, that many more submissions will go out into the world and that some of them may meet with the thrill of publication. As for the end result, I figured that my contributor’s copy of Whiskey Island would be happier collecting dust on a library shelf than collecting dust on mine.

Q. Let’s talk about some of your various endeavors, because I’m wondering if maybe you’re actually an octopus. According to the bio in WTMA, you edit Willows Wept, co-edit Twelve Stories, are associate editor at Keyhole, and a book reviewer for a magazine based in Hanoi.  And those are just the activities you deem bio-worthy. And if your Fringe piece is any indication, you’re environmentally conscious enough to spend time writing about nature writing. Is your day-to-day life a whirlwind, or does this all just seem more time-consuming on paper than it really is? And do you have other projects going on besides those listed above?

A. “Octopus” is awesome. Actually, I stepped down as editor of Willows Wept. Troy Urquhart is now at the helm and doing an amazing job. Twelve Stories is the success it is because of my partner-in-crime, Blythe Winslow. At Keyhole, I’m now the interviews editor, which is one of my favorite things ever—rather than write reviews (a solitary, and by its nature critical, endeavor), I get to ask the authors themselves questions and give them a chance to share the things on their minds about their work. And I no longer review for East&West. 

Day-to-day, I keep busy. I’ve got several new manuscripts in the works. It’s slow going, but it’s also rewarding to get down a few lines a day. I’m happy with that pace. Worth mentioning is my editorial work for Cow Heavy, a fiction mini-book press, which will soon be paired with And Floral, its poetry counterpart that will be edited by Donora Hillard. Cow Heavy has seven titles coming out between now and December 2011, so that’s keeping me/us fantastically busy. 

As for the Fringe piece, I wish I had more time to write long literary criticisms again. Maybe one day, in a PhD program, I’ll return to it. For now, though, I think I have enough on my plate.

Q. I’m curious about the use of pronouns in your book. You have an “I” narrator speaking to a “you” character in a book with “We” and “Me” in the title. Not that it gets confusing or anything, but can you talk about the decision to write WTMA in direct address? And why did you choose the narrator’s love interest (for lack of a handier term) rather than her mother?

A. I really like the direct address. I’m using it now, again, in another manuscript. I don’t have a studied answer, but I think that in a first-person stream-of-consciousness narrative the use of the second person makes sense. There’s an obsessive quality to it, and I think when negative connotations are removed from the word “obsessive,” there is potential for real honesty to be revealed, perhaps even more revealing than any first-person confession. I would never write this line, but “You broke my heart” rings truer to my ear than “He broke my heart.” I mean, in the latter, there’s an implied audience other than the person who broke the heart. It’s like the narrator’s stroking and telling her cat, “He broke my heart.” I don’t want the reader feeling like she’s the narrator’s conspiratorial, sympathetic shorthair that just has to sit there silently. I want the reader feeling like she’s the one who broke the narrator’s heart. I want the reader to feel at fault while simultaneously being privileged to the narrator’s thoughts. In this way, the reader experiences two characters, gets to sympathize and empathize with both the narrator and the lover. 

I feel like all of that might come off as foolish-sounding and problematically didactic. But I think it gets at some measure of honesty about why I think the direct address is or can be effective. 

As for why the mother and not the lover, I don’t know. It just happened that way?

Q. Like others in this MLP series, WTMA is a narrative in verse. Did the format seem to fit the story from the beginning, or did you write the story/poem to fit the format? 

A. My line breaks, as they appear in the book, are how they appeared in the manuscript’s early drafts. Remember, I had about a month to write the book. So the more white space on the page, the more pages I’d get through in a day. The line breaks are easy; they are all end-stopped and there is no enjambment. Aside from the need to produce a lot of pages quickly, I also didn’t feel qualified to write “in verse.” So I didn’t want to try to break lines on my own, which sounds stupid: what I mean is it was a lot easier for me to let a grammatical rule dictate the lineation:  commas, periods, question marks all got a break instead. I’m not sure I had seen this anywhere before. Poets don’t lineate so predictably, I feel. So it felt new to me, and I justified it out of necessity but also because I thought it lent interesting rhythms to the overall narrative flow. 

Still, for some time during the revision process with JAT, I worried about it but ultimately decided to let it be. It’s obvious to me now though that I wasn’t satisfied to lineate in this way again:  I’m now working on a manuscript called Flora the Whore and it’s looking like another verse novel, but metered. Iambic pentameter, but I definitely take advantage of the two-substitution rule and throw in some trochees and anapests to mix it up.

Q. I love when a poet talks poetry to a non-poet. Trochee, anapest. Enjambment. The only reason I know anything about enjambment is because I recently read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. Most poets I know will call themselves “poet” instead of “writer,” whereas most prose writers refer to themselves first as writers, and then maybe they’ll categorize. So do you tell people you’re a writer, or do you tell them you’re a poet? Or do you tell them to mind their own damn business?

A. Haha, I guess I go with “writer” first. And then, if asked to clarify, go with “non-genre specific or hybrid forms.” That usually shuts them up. Or, if it doesn’t, I get to talk shop. And who doesn’t like to do that when the opportunity presents itself?

Q. Have you been pleased with the overall response to WTMA? Looking back, anything you wish you’d done differently? Anything that worked so well you wish you’d done more of it?

A. I’m pleased. There are a few minor tweaks and additions I wish I could make now, but overall I’m so glad it’s my first book. For so many reasons, it’s the story that should belong to my first. And I’m calmed, or reassured, that it’s the right one if it so happens to be the only book I ever publish. I would never want a do-over, I will never be ashamed, I will only look back on it with this great big aching in my throat, that somehow, miraculously, it came out of me. I rarely wax religious, but those words poured out, it seemed, by the grace of some divine kind creature who led my way. I’m grateful the book—the narrator, her life, her story—exists in the world. I’m grateful I served some purpose in ferrying her comedies and tragedies into the world. This book is special to me. It will always be.