Sasha Fletcher is the author of when all our days are numbered marching bands will fill the streets & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds, published in 2010 by Mud Luscious Press. Fletcher is the Assistant Editor at Gigantic and is currently in Columbia’s MFA program.

Recently he and I chatted over email.

Q. The cover of when all our days are numbered labels the book a “novel(la),” but it often reads more like linked poetry. It’s not a traditional narrative with traditional story progression, but there are recurring themes, and there is a definite build toward a conclusion. How would you classify this work? Are we reading abstract fiction, narrative poetry, or what? Or do you find classification irrelevant?

A. I view the book as one piece of writing rather than a series of linked parts. It flows from one page, one image or thought, to the next and then back in on itself. The book does tell a bit of a story, at least about a relationship and about dealing with the idea of getting carried away and the necessity in life for some sort of grounding.

In terms of classifying the book, the publisher is calling all of their books novel(la)s. I am fine with people calling my book whatever they need to in order to reach some sort of understanding with it.

When it comes down to it, my central concerns are language, imagery and emotion. I want more than anything for my work to cause people, and especially myself, to feel something. And that is about the same experience I am looking for when I read.

Q. So did this process, and then its finished whole, cause you to feel? Did you “ache wide open all over everything” (I dig that line) to your satisfaction? Have reader responses been in line with what you were hoping for?

A. I’m still not certain. The book felt alive at the time I wrote it, and parts of it still do. For a while I spent so much time with it that I couldn’t even look at it anymore, but it feels like a living thing again now and that’s pretty exciting. And so far the reader reactions have all been pretty great, which is sort of strange. Mostly I just didn’t expect that anyone would care.

Q. Who are some of the writers that make you feel something? What works helped inspire when all our days are numbered, and what works might you compare it to?

A. The numbered stories in Shane Jones’s I Will Unfold You With My Hairy Hands were pretty important to me in terms of jumps and images and a certain kind of sadness. Two other books that helped me figure out how to write this one were Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth and also The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford. Deb’s book, when you read, feels as though it was put together just one sentence at a time. Which is what writing is when it comes down to it. It’s putting one sentence after another. But somehow when I think about writing novels or large books, the size of a thing is intimidating. For me, Vacation taught me that in order to write a book, you just need to write one good sentence after another until it was done. With Battlefield, something about the whole sort of epic fever dream of it just got inside me.

Q. Tell us a bit about the ”I” and “she” of your book. What are these two people going through, separately and together? And how does the constant barrage of abstract imagery help guide the narrator to answers?

A. It’s sort of hard for me to answer this. I am not generally a person who looks for answers. The I and she are just. So the I is the voice of the narrator, and she is, essentially, a response to that voice. She’s an answer to getting carried away. She also isn’t. She participates. She walks away. She holds onto him. I don’t know what they do when I am not looking, though.

Q. Talk a bit about how this book came to be published by Mud Luscious. Did J. A. Tyler approach you for his novel(la) series?

A. I wrote a piece for Lamination Colony’s THIS IS NOT A CONTEST CONTEST. I had a lot of fun writing that and thought I’d try to write another one just like it, and I did sort of, and I sent that to J. A. Tyler for the Mud Luscious chapbook series [this piece would later by published by Alice Blue Review]. I ended up writing a third piece in a similar voice for the Dollar Store Tour [which was later published in Noo Journal].

I had just quit my job at Whole Foods and moved from Philadelphia to Allentown to live with my parents before I started grad school in New York.

I had finished a book of linked prose poems that I was sending around. J. A. and I had been emailing and we had talked about it and he asked to see it. He emailed me a day or two after I’d moved back home saying that although he really liked the book he could not publish it because it was a book of poems and he wanted to publish a novella and he could not remember if that was even something we had talked about but he did really like and did I maybe have a novella because that was a thing that he would really like to see. I did not have a novella. I did have six weeks and no job and had just moved back in with my parents. So I wrote a novella using the three pieces I mentioned above. I finished the book and did a few edits and sent it to J. A. Two weeks later he emailed me telling me he was going to publish it. It was like 7 p.m. I had just moved to Brooklyn and I didn’t know anyone. I bought a pizza and ate it.

Q. Are you and J. A. and Shane Jones and Butler and Higgs and the whole HTML Giant/Rumpus crew preparing to take over the literary world? Or have you already? And can I get in on that? I like to ride coattails whenever possible.

A. As to a complete takeover, I don’t know. Shane and Blake are certainly making some headway on that front though. The first rule of complete literary takeover is that you do not talk about completely literary takeover? That’s probably not anywhere near as funny as I wanted it to be. I feel like I’m definitely a few rungs below Shane and Blake on the Able to Implement a Literary Takeover ladder. I’m glad to be a part of this thing though. It feels good. It’s pretty exciting to have all these writers whose work you love and who you can email all the time, and they email you back. You make jokes. You become friends. It’s pretty great.

Q. The ampersands. Not once in your book do we find the word “and.” Nor do we see it in the other titles of the Mud Luscious series. I figured this was J. A.’s influence. But we recently published a story of his, and within the story J. A. spells out the word. So now I’m thoroughly confused.

A. The ampersand is the editorial policy of Mud Luscious Press. I use the word AND a great deal and so then editing the book and turning all the AND’s to &’s made me really consider whether or not it was necessary to include an AND and sometimes it was and other times I learned that it was not and so that was good.

Q. Your book, and others from that crew we were just discussing, do play around a lot with language and fonts (Light Boxes, por ejemplo, and Ben Brooks’s An Island of Fifty). Do you think this is something we’re going to see much more of in the near future? Is it intended to help subvert the so-called “traditional” writing we were talking about earlier, or is it meant to be playful, just inventiveness for the sake of inventiveness?

A. I think that when it comes down to it, if you are making your decisions based on anything other than necessity. I feel that when you do something, it needs to be done because it was the only way to do it. That to be subversive for the sake of being subversive, to make a decision for any reason other than necessity makes the work is, to me, hollow. I feel that as long as people have things that they need to communicate they will need to find new and interesting ways to communicate them.

Q. You mentioned earlier that you’re currently putting your work “into lines instead of sentences.” So what does that entail? What do you think/hope the next Sasha Fletcher title will offer? How do you see your work evolving down the line?

A. Right before I started when all our days are numbered I finished a book of linked prose poems. It was a finalist for Octopus Books last year and has since been pretty heavily rewritten. This book is, I am hoping a whole bunch, the next book that will come out.

At the moment I’m working on a book of poems that is going to become my thesis. This is where the lines come in. Most of it is written in lines, which has been strange for me. I’ve written almost entirely in prose for the last two years and that’s more or less how I came to define myself as a prose poet.

The idea of thinking in lines is a challenge. I don’t think that you can just hit the enter key in the middle of a sentence and have it mean something. Prose is really stringing one thing after another. Verse is stacking one thing atop another. These are just different ways of moving, and I am trying to learn how to move a little differently.