featuring Karl Jirgens (The Razor’s Edge)
talking with Steven Ross Smith (Glimmer).
“I disjoin the narrative as a parallel to psychic rupture.”
—Karl Jirgens, QUOTE from the double-interview
Steven Ross Smith is author of fourteen books. Disparate threads weave through his seven-book poetic series, fluttertongue. Smith served as director of programs at Sage Hill Writing and the Banff Centre. His newest book is Glimmer: Short Fictions (Radiant Press, 2022).
SRS:
Karl, your stories seem to like disjunction. For example, early in your first story “Cinderella Pecadilla” both your narrator and his phone caller (Sarah) introduce disruption into the narrative. During a recollection of a dream, a former home, a vision of Jesus, and a phone call interrupts the narrator’s reverie, and the story’s logical continuance. I’m interested in narrative interruption or disjunction too. Why do you use this technique?
KJ:
I disjoin the narrative as a parallel to psychic rupture. The story is broken up in way that I hope will illustrate the distracted mind-state of the narrator as well as the other characters. It seems to me that disruption is a contemporary condition of being, and that actuality for most people is discontinuous, so representing that actuality within a literary form invites rupture as a pre-existing condition that pervades the actual as well as the mind.
SRS:
You blend into the fiction moments of non-fiction (it seems). There are several such drifts into history, mythology, geography, etc. It’s a fascinating trip. You create this kind of genre hybridization in all the stories—where’s truth, where’s fiction? Which is the there?
KJ:
Good question and thanks for asking it. In many ways I reject any divisions between fiction and actuality. I don’t see a big difference. What we imagine and what “happens” to us is part of the same condition. The actual includes history, myth, geography, and in turn, those elements can convey some sense of what might be true to an individual’s perspective. However, I couch it all within the realm of fiction because it conveys a reaction to being. For me so-called fiction and non-fiction are porous, and they leak into each other. So, I write about what is ‘there’ before me, while using the mask of fiction.
KJ:
I want to know more about your story, “23:44” which starts by talking about the solstice, and then moves through a serious of encounters involving unusual people. For example a couple called Roger and Maggie experience a canoe ride, then the tale jumps to Martin, Vicki & Kate, and there’s another jump to Suzette, Terence and Jim. Those three sub-stories offer memories, sexual tensions, massage therapy, brands of wine, and juxtapositions of past and present, interjected with thoughts like: “Are humans incapable of peaceful coexistence?” The three stories-within-the-story are quite different, but all relate to the solstice and the earth’s axial tilt of 23:44 degrees. So, is there also an “axial tilt” involving the various characters within the sub-stories?
SRS:
I’m always interested in finding—for me—and by default for the reader—new ways into a story and a narrative structure. It seems to be how I keep myself entertained in a single fictional entity—to include multiplicity. There’s also the matter of simultaneity—like life—many things are going on at once within an individual or a ‘neighbourhood’—local or global, visceral, or mental. We’re all tilted in, and into, our own life narratives, and we each perceive and enact and value our proximate details uniquely. But many other things are going on elsewhere and everywhere. So, I try to present this, sort of collage-like, in a framed narrative. I think you do something similar, but in your own narrative way. I suggest we have a common aesthetic or narrative guide on this regard.
KJ:
Yes, I think we share some commonalities regarding narrative. Could you say something about your attention to senses and the sounds? For example, “23:44” and your other stories include an acoustic dimension. In “23:44” you use terms such as “rhythmic rustle,” “chuff of water,” “splash of paddle,” “the water’s mineral smell,” “rippling, vibrating,” “pool of pungent liquid,” all of which contribute to the story’s sensuality. Those phrases use alliteration and/or assonance. Please say more about the relationship between sensuality and acoustics in your writing.
SRS:
I think I write prose with a poet’s ear and attention to the phrase. Language is rich with sonority, rhythms, and other textures. I pay attention to this. It’s essential in my poetry too. The language is as important as the story—sometimes even more so. I’m always looking for a stronger, more evocative way, via the texture of language, to express a moment, a detail, an event. Language is a material, a physical entity. I try to find that fibre, be it muscle, or tissue. I believe that it makes a richer experience for the attuned reader.
SRS:
In a way, your stories seem to rely on the cerebral, perhaps more than the sensual. Your interest in hybridity is perhaps parallel to my interest in simultaneity. Is that so?
KJ:
Good point! I can’t fully comment on your interest in simultaneity, but I’ll say that simultaneity interests me. It’s true that my stories rely on movements of the mind or what Poe called “rumination.” Although when writing, I do often dwell on the physical (perhaps less so in this book), although there are the aromas and textures of food in this book, and the first two stories cover sensual topics. There’s more physicality in my upcoming novel which is centered on the Cold War, as well as the periods prior to, and following it. I think the cerebral aspect in my writing arises from being a witness to the twists and turns of life, and so, I try to represent those twists in my writing.
KJ:
Your book also features short pieces that are often satiric and amusing conceptual-art pieces. For example, you’ve got an image from a beauty salon and accompanying the image is a text that says, Aliens disguised as hair dryers feed on human brain cells. There are a number of other pieces like that throughout your book including. “Deception: A Novel" and "The Surprise Kiss." Could you say a bit more about the thinking behind those, and about the visual art used for them?
SRS:
What is fiction—stories made up using language. What is the widely accepted proper form of fiction—linear narrative. But of course, there have been many deviances from such strictures over decades, centuries even. Okay, that’s my grump. Now, I like to play around with narrative flow, structure, expectation, hoping the reader will join me in the game. The short pieces you refer to are three of thirteen in the book, interspersed with the twelve long stories. These thirteen have a few sources of inspiration—the first being Italo Calvino’s statement that he’d like to edit a collection of one-sentence stories. So, in response, I began to write what I call “Short Novels for People on the Go” —one sentence ‘novels’. I’ve written fifty. Why not? An intriguing challenge. I’m not the first. Lydia Davis has written cryptic short fictions in few sentences too. Anyway, mine do often refer to other art forms, or even reflect on the reading or writing act itself. The ‘narrative flow’ of “The Surprise Kiss” is adapted from film-maker Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon”. I’m also influenced by Dada and Surrealism. Both these ‘schools’ remind me to challenge the norm, and to be playful in my seriousness.
SRS:
My guess is that surrealism is sometimes in your consciousness as you write. For example, your story “Understanding the Sounds You Hear” weaves a dream state with the narrator’s ‘absurd’ task of photocopying appliance manuals. As I read along, I lose track of the realities—actual and ‘sur-’ which is which? And of course, none of it is real, it is all made up—or maybe it all is real. I hear echoes of Kafka, Truhlar, and others. I see references to contemporary writers who are really—but not really—outside this story—Bloom, Kristeva. How do literature or the other arts influence your writing?
KJ:
Wow. That’s a big question. I’ll try to be succinct. Regarding Surrealism, I will say that other authors have noted that angle in my writing. Dream states and waking states both constitute our actuality, so I don’t separate the two. I blur the actual and what you call the “sur.” Raymond Federman once wrote a book called Surfiction. He was talking about a style of writing that incorporates realism while being self-reflexive about its own fictionality. I guess I do that to a degree, but not overtly. For me the story is the main thing and it doesn’t matter to me if the story combines the actual with the artificial (“sur”) because both are part of our “reality.” But it seems that I do break rules by ignoring the borders between fiction and non-fiction. I openly acknowledge the influence of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the story “Understanding the Sounds You Hear.” But if I spoke of my various influences then that would take much time. So for brevity’s sake I’ll stop here.
KJ:
Speaking of the various arts and the crafts, your story, “Arnie’s Workshop” covers furniture-making, opera, and the chaos of life. That story also blends actuality with what might be called the “sur” while it blurs related actualities (regarding opera) with fictionality (regarding Arnie’s relationships with Ella and Corrinne). Could you comment on your combination of the fictive (e.g.; Arnie’s “life”) and the actual (e.g.; facts about opera) in your writing?
SRS:
Well, the surrounding elements of any character or plot in a story are taken from real life—even in surreal or sci-fi or in any other mode of fiction. We write within our knowledge bank—this is not to say we don’t imagine or invent—we’re like magpies—we find some bit of something that might be familiar or alien to us—and in any case, we bring it back to the nest. Arnie is made up and so is his story, —even the furniture is imagined—but the operas cited are real. In two other stories – “Reason to Believe” and “Hammond at the Bluenote” actual musicians appear—Buddy Guy and John Hammond—and I present them in live concert and try to be realistic and authentic. Heck, even you, Karl, appear in the latter story. Were you really there? Where is there? Perhaps reality makes us up.
SRS:
On that theme, or perhaps on surreality, one final question for you. In your Postlude: The Sound of Smoke you say: “The smoke rises to the great mystery. Words never do justice.” Do words confuse our reality or clarify it; do words make us up?
KJ:
I suppose that postlude story is saying that language is inadequate to fully express what a writer hopes to say. So, words can clarify, but they can also obfuscate. Thank you for including me in your story “Hammond at the Bluenote.” I think you are on target when you ask whether words make us up. It is through our stories that we identify ourselves somewhere “there.” Our stories outlive us, and they grant us the ability to “name” ourselves.