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Q&A with Julia Stoops, author of Parts Per Million

“How seldom you recognize the start of things.” ~ Fetzer
in Parts Per Million by Julia Stoops

It’s true, hindsight is 20/20, that life moves along a trajectory of cause and effect, and that history often repeats itself. We witness as much when we turn on the TV or scroll through internet feeds and see familiar threads of concern: a loss of rights, a washing of facts, a nation on the brink of war.

We have been here before.

Julia Stoops’ debut novel is a story about that time before. Set in the early 2000s, Parts Per Million (Forest Avenue Press, 2018), tells the story of three activists–Nelson, Jen, and Fetzer, as they work to make known one environmental injustice after another. But their small operation, Omnia Mundi, falls under the eye of bigger watchdog when they uncover a local university in quiet partnership with the government to create military technology.

What unfolds is a complex story of resistance and risk and the constant effort to find balance, an effort that means re-examining the core in order to build a stronger foundation.

I’m honored to host Julia for an interview about her novel. And there’s a giveaway! CLICK HERE (by Tuesday, April 24th, for a chance to win a copy of Parts Per Million.

Now, welcome Julia Stoops!

Christi Craig (CC): I understand your novel has been several years in the making. But even with a stretch in the journey from first draft to publication and the fact that the subject itself centers around events that happened well over 15 years ago, much of this story remains current in themes and in dialogue, and (as Fetzer says) how “fear clings to the status quo.” Writing is magic, and we can’t always know how well a story first conceived in years past will reflect our present day. Are you surprised at how apropos your novel is to today’s political discourse?

Julia Stoops (JS): Writing is magic! And indeed, I am very surprised. By mid-2016, when Forest Avenue Press acquired the manuscript, I naively thought the fascist-leaning Bush administration was an aberration we had put behind us. I pitched Parts per Million as a story about a group of activists during a particularly messed-up time in our history, trying to hold onto their ideals while their world falls apart around them.

It got rejected by a lot of agents in 2011 and 2012 — one even explained they didn’t think the topic was relevant to contemporary readers. That coincided with Occupy, by the way, so the reasoning was absurd, but many liberals assumed the improvements we enjoyed on the domestic front during the Obama years were going to continue. The MS was even shortlisted for the PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, but, as time moved on, the subject matter gradually slipped into a category you could call “recent history we’d collectively rather forget.”

Laura acquired the MS because she loves the characters, and she wanted a realistic novel set in the recent past. I don’t think either of us realized how pertinent the themes and topics would become after the 2016 election.

That day after the election, I was leaving my downtown workplace to head home for the evening, and I recognized a familiar sound. I could hear it from blocks away, the chanting of people taking to the streets. Helicopters thrumming in the sky. The sound of the craziness returning. And it hit me: My novel is relevant again. Unfortunately, disturbingly relevant.

CC: Nancy is a minor character but a powerful voice within the story as a whole when she confronts Nelson, Fetzer, and Jen about the racial disparity within organized protests. ‘Those rallies of yours are all organized by white people,’ she says. ‘They don’t come into the black communities and let us in on what’s going on, or ask us to get involved.’ What might her character say in response to protests of our time–the Women’s March, March for our Lives, or maybe even activism on which mainstream media tends to ignore?

JS: The phenomenon of mostly white people marching together for liberal causes is still going on. But the difference is now more white people are noticing and starting to understand what it means. And there have been occasions where white and black people have come together such as the Black Lives Matter protests. However, systems, including the mainstream media, are slow to evolve.

For instance, Marjory Stoneman Douglas has gotten a terrific amount of coverage, and I’m glad of that. But it’s in Parkland, an affluent suburb. Now don’t get me wrong, I love March for Our Lives, and I deeply admire these young people who have been catapulted by tragedy onto the national stage, and are getting media coverage and their photos on the cover of Time, and adults on social media saying “These kids are gonna save the world when we couldn’t” (or didn’t.) The MSD survivors are saying some very sensible things and god knows we need some sense right now. I, too, want to believe in these kids as our upcoming thinkers, doers, society-shapers. They are amazing people! But they were handed the microphone because they’re light skinned and middle class. The keepers-of-the-microphone can relate to them because they’re like their own kids. When poor black kids are catapulted by gun-violence tragedy – as they are so very, very frequently – they don’t automatically land on the national stage. When they protest, they don’t get handed the microphone. And when they protest louder, they get vilified.

But the conversation is starting to shift. I am heartened to read that the new, post-MSD gun-control movement is expanding the spotlight beyond mass shootings in suburban schools, to include gun violence in urban communities, and is really connecting with those communities. I hope it becomes a strong, multi-racial coalition.

And I hope the mainstream media continues to hand it the microphone, regardless of the color of its spokespeople. Some time after the tragedy, it came out in the media that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High is 25% black, and that those kids’ voices were being pretty much ignored. But the students who are getting the attention seem to be acknowledging their privilege and working to include other voices, and that give me hope. (image above: samrodgers2 on Visual hunt / CC BY-NC)

As Fetzer says in Chapter 60: “you’re the future, young woman. Guys like me, time’s coming when we step aside because you’re the energy and the hope and you grew up with your feet in enough different worlds that it doesn’t occur to you there’s any barriers till some idiot reminds you he still believes in them.”

CC: Later in the book, Nelson tells a group gathered in protest, ‘Democracy is getting together in dialogue. It’s taking turns at the microphone.’ This line not only describes the change that he and Fetzer and Jen desire as they take in Nancy’s words, the line also highlights the structure of your novel. The story is told from the perspectives of Nelson, Fetzer, and Jen individually but the chapters are written in different POVs: 3rd person for Nelson with Fetzer and Jen in 1st person. Can you tell us a little about your decision to write the story in such a way?

JS: Stories told from multiple points of view have always fascinated me. When I learned about writing in voice, a world opened up.

First of all, it’s challenging and liberating to remove yourself as the authorial voice and speak as another character. It forces you to reconsider every single sentence from the perspective of someone who is not you.

Secondly, I love the narrative device of a story told with incomplete and sometimes unreliable or conflicting accounts — as a reader I like to sort it all out and decide what to believe and what to doubt. So it was natural to explore that device in my own writing.

Thirdly, there’s something democratic about telling a story from more than one point of view. It’s a way of working with the idea that there is no single right perspective. No person’s account carries more authority than another’s, and although we share a tremendous amount of experience, our subjectivity is the place where existential questions get interesting.

The characters’ formal POV choices relate to their personality. Jen is impulsive, angry, and quick, so we get her in 1st person present, in “real time,” so to speak. Fetzer is the oldest and wisest, and he has processed the events of the story. Thus his version of the narrative is retrospective, in 1st person past. Nelson’s POV is in the present, but the novel opens with him in a state of simmering crisis about the decisions he’s made and where he’s heading. His voice is in 3rd person, which adds a little bit of distance, or disconnect, to his version of the narrative.

CC: You are an artist as well as an author and even created the image for your book’s cover. How do you see art and literature working together to advocate or educate on the personal or political?

JS: My mind immediately jumps to Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden, which I recently read and loved so very much. I want to read more graphic journalism because I see a real potential there for art and writing working together to communicate complex ideas more powerfully than visuals or words can do alone.

In my own art practice I have done overtly political work, but it’s not on my art website because, well, it confuses people when you do different things, they don’t know how to label you, or what to expect next from you. So I’ve curated my art website to only show the process-driven paintings. Included there is a series I did about 15 years ago that features the Parts per Million character John Nelson, and it’s a piece from that period that’s on the cover of the book. But at the time Nelson was more of an “everyman” symbol I was working through. My paintings are mostly abstract and symbolic. They are like dream imagery, obscure even to me at times. My visual art comes from a different place than the writing.

But, being visually oriented, I wanted Parts per Million to have illustrations! I engaged Portland artist Gabriel Liston, who works realistically, to create illustrations for the novel. Friends asked me why I didn’t illustrate my own novel, but, mine’s a different kind of process, a different kind of art. Parts per Million needed a storytelling realist with a strong sense of history. Gabriel created seven illustrations plus three character portraits that head the chapters they represent. I hope the illustrations add a little extra depth and help readers connect with the story in a richer way.

CC: What are you reading these days?

JS: Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I moved to the US as an adult, so I didn’t get US history in school. I’m trying to understand the history of power and of dissent in this country I’ve also been reading a lot of Chris Hedges to that end. His view is more global: how do people respond to oppression? What happens when they do? How do states gain so much power (hint: in non-coercive democracies, liberal capitulation is to blame.) And what causes them to fall? Hedges’ perspective, informed by 20 years as a foreign correspondent in conflict zones, is frightening and fascinating. I’m also trying to understand war. Why oh why does it keep happening? Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is eye-opening.

Other excellent books I’ve read in recent months about the Iraq war, specifically, include Eat the Apple, just out from Matt Young, Fives and Twenty-Fives by Michael Pitre, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, and like I mentioned, Sara Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts, about the role of journalism in the context of war and imperialism – which is a major background theme in Parts per Million.

~

Julia Stoops was born in Samoa to New Zealand parents, and grew up in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Washington, D.C. She has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1994. She has received Oregon Arts Commission fellowships for visual arts and literature, and was a resident at the Ucross Foundation in 2016.

Don’t forget! CLICK HERE to enter the giveaway for a chance
to win your own copy of Parts Per Million.
Deadline is Tuesday, April 24th, noon.

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Q&A with Paul Košir, poet and author of Perspectives of Nature

A host of bluffs and relict pines, / man’s contour farms, historic mines / are found throughout the Driftless Lands / some made by God, some, human hands. ~ from “Driftless Area” in Perspectives of Nature by Paul Košir

Spring has officially arrived–ahhh. With sunny days and blue skies, this is the perfect time to soak up some much-needed vitamin D as you take a walk or hit the trail. But don’t go alone. Paul Košir, a poet from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, offers you a companion in poetry.

Košir’s chapbook entitled Perspectives of Nature: Scientifically Romantic and Experiential Nature Poetry offers poems–for all seasons, along with space for your own notes and observations.

A former teacher, Košir decided to blend his two loves–science and poetry, so that anyone might be inspired by the beauty around them but also by the ways in which nature builds that beauty. Košir taps into an audience who enjoys the rhythm and cadence of the genre, as well as the reader who wonders about the why and how of science. Perspectives of Nature is a book of lessons in 32 poems from “Sun Dogs” to “Bird Song.”

I’m honored to host Paul today to talk about his chapbook of poems. And as always, there’s a giveaway. CLICK HERE to enter for a chance to win one of two signed copies of Perspectives of Nature.

Now, welcome Paul Košir!

Christi Craig (CC): Tell us about the origins of this chapbook–what inspired you to mix lessons in science with the prose in poetry?

Paul Košir (PK): The origin of the chapbook was a handful of poems I wrote in the late 1980s while I was the naturalist at Wyalusing State Park near Prairie du Chien, WI. As the naturalist, it was my job to interpret the natural world for park visitors, to describe and explain it. That job, that way of life, inspired me to mix science lessons in with my lines of poetry. I found my voice – writing beautiful, instructive verses.

But then I didn’t write another poem for 20 years. When I did write again, I began to add a natural perspective to my poems and was pleased with the result. With a new style emerging, I joined the Wisconsin Writers Association. The WWA published 4 of my poems in an anthology, which introduced me to the anthology’s compiler. He offered to guide me through the publication of a book of my poems with science themes. I began writing poetry in earnest to create enough poems for a book, not only because I wanted to write, but also because I felt I should write.

CC: A few of my favorite poems are: 1) “Warblers” (“They never stop moving, I can’t get a good look; / when they finally sit perched, it’s not like in the book.”), because I’ve lost my focus in the middle of a bird book, wondering if there was a misprint on the number of–what seemed to be–the same image of a black and yellow bird with a million different names; and 2) “Hummingbird Trap,” which is a beautifully written poem about your experience holding such a delicate bird: Through porous bones I felt its heart, its tiny, racing, living part. // With lightest touch, I held the life that on each front found danger rife. I’ve seen hummingbirds up close but never close enough to touch; I can only imagine this–amazing! I would love to hear more about this moment.

PK: One day, the landlady where I stayed while I was the naturalist at Wyalusing State Park ran up to me and said, “Paul, Paul, a hummingbird is trapped and can’t get out!” Seeing the panic in her face, I ran after the excited woman to where the bird was trapped.

I thought it would be easy to coax the bird to perch on a pole and set it free, but after several failed attempts, I realized I’d have to take matters – and the bird – into my own hands. Knowing the hummer would have to eat soon, I quickly climbed up to it with a bag.

I paused just long enough to make a plan. I’d have to grasp it around its body gently enough that it wouldn’t be crushed but firmly enough that it wouldn’t struggle. Then I’d have to place it in the bag and close it enough that the bird wouldn’t escape. Only then could I attempt the climb back down with a bag in one hand that I couldn’t hold too tight near the hummer, but also couldn’t ease up on.

I was so afraid I’d crush the female rubythroat but grabbed her, anyway. Her heart was beating even faster than mine. I had to look at her again because I couldn’t believe I actually had a live hummingbird in my hand. I had never felt anything like it.

I felt… life.

The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, letting her go.

CC: What’s unique about your chapbook is how each poem is paired with a page for reader’s notes and often a few footnotes on terms or concepts found within the poem (like kettle and drift and esker from “Ice-Age Impact”). I love a book that engages a reader in more ways than one: in the words on the page but in the invitation to explore on their own. What’s the best way someone might use your book in a workshop or class on creativity or poetry for young readers?

PK: Earlier this month I used Perspectives of Nature for examples in a workshop on writing about nature I taught to a group of teens and adults. It could be used in the same way to teach workshops on poetry in general or on specific topics in science for many levels of study.

In a classroom setting, the book’s glossary entries could be used to familiarize students with science topics before in-depth study or as review after in-depth study. The book’s sections for notes are ideal for portfolio evaluation and environmental education objectives. For continuing and self-taught students, writing notes in these sections could form a journal that would be its own reward and act as a reference for years to come.

Perspectives of Nature engages and educates readers about scientific content and concepts in ways and that other sources cannot and it educates them by appealing to different intelligences. Using the book can be adapted to any students – old, young, or young-at-heart.

CC: Who are your go-to poets?

PK: Certainly, Robert Frost is a go-to poet for me; I even quoted him in one of my poems. And Emily Dickinson. Those are the two poets whose poems I like the best and with whose work I am most familiar and whose poetry is most like mine. But I’ve read so little poetry, even of theirs that I can’t honestly say that I’ve been influenced by either of them…or any other poet, for that matter.

My scientifically romantic style of poetry is truly singular, I’ve found no poetry to act as a pattern for it nor any poet to act as a model for me. I am the standard-bearer of this new genre.

CC: Where is your favorite place to explore science in nature?

PK: Wyalusing State Park is definitely my favorite place to explore science in nature. It has such unusual geology and plant life and bird life that it is a phenomenal place to do so, either formally or informally. The park was the venue or genesis for many of my poems, especially the canoe trail.

I have found science in nature and subsequently written poems about it in many other places I hold in favor: on our land near Hillsboro, the bluffs of La Crosse, the shores of Lake Mendota, and caves in Kentucky, even looking out from our back yard and driving down the street. Nature is all around us, so I guess any place outside a lab that I am struck by science is, in that moment, my favorite place to explore science in nature.

About the Author

The scientifically romantic nature poetry of Paul Košir has its academic roots in his nine years as a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There he earned bachelor’s degrees in math, natural science, and history. In 2010 he received a master’s degree in natural resources and environmental education from UW-Stevens Point. The experiential poetry was drawn from his twelve years as the naturalist at Wyalusing State Park near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. He also drew on this background to write articles for Wisconsin Natural Resources and La Crosse Magazine and to publish the book Wyalusing History.

Košir has taught biology, physical science, and math at the high school level and earth science, biology, and environmental issues at the college level. As a naturalist, he taught all ages about nature through hikes, programs, and displays, something he still does occasionally as a volunteer.

Born in Milwaukee, he now lives in La Crosse with his wife and their two sons. He enjoys writing, hiking, bird-watching, gardening, traveling, and working on the family’s 13 acres in the Driftless Area near Hillsboro, Wisconsin.

DON’T FORGET: Enter the giveaway for a chance to win a copy
of Perspectives of Nature. The deadline to sign up
is Thursday, March 29th!

*Hummingbird photo (above) credit: cuatrok77 on Visualhunt.com/ CC BY-SA
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Q&A with Lynn Sloan, author of This Far Isn’t Far Enough

“Right here, I’m laying you down, Momma,” I say, but I don’t feel anything important, just unbearably tired. I start to sing, “Precious Jesus, let me live my life in thee,” and lift the urn up–it’s not heavy, it’s not light–and swing my arm in as wide an arc as I can manage, and there she goes, sifting into the air, drifting full wide between the trees and over the brush, and out across the creek I can’t see, toward the distant houses with the lighted windows, through the night, maybe flying all the way to Egypt.

~ from “The Sweet Collapse of the Feeble” in This Far Isn’t Far Enough

Letting go is never easy. We are rooted in tradition, in promises, in expectations. And yet, we inevitably reach that moment when the old, the familiar, the safe no longer serves, when we must release whatever anchors us in order to survive.

Lynn Sloan’s new collection of stories, This Far Isn’t Far Enough, is full of characters faced with the choice of letting go. For some, the choice is liberating, soothing. For others, the release is pinching, dangerous. In either case, such decisions are never simple, never so clean in consequence.

I’m honored to host Lynn Sloan today to talk about This Far Isn’t Far Enough. Her opening story, “Ollie’s Back,” will be read on NPR’s Selected Shorts in March. Here, gain insight into her work and enter the giveaway for a copy of her book (courtesy of Fomite Press & Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity). Sign up by Tuesday, February 27th. Now, welcome Lynn Sloan!

Christi Craig (CC): This Far Isn’t Far Enough brings together a myriad of stories about a young woman who wants to be a prizefighter, a widow living under the thumb of her husband even after he’s gone, and about an artist lost between fantasy and reality–just to name a few. Which was the first story you wrote, and how did this collection grow from there?

Lynn Sloan (LS): The earliest story included in this collection is “The Sweet Collapse of the Feeble,” the one about a young woman who wants to become a prizefighter. That story came to be when I had a friend who wanted to become a prizefighter. After serious training, she invited me to her first fight. “What must your mother think?” I wondered as I watched my friend get pummeled, and pummel her opponent. My friend had not invited her mother to that fight or to any that came afterward. As far I know, her mother never found out about my friend’s short, but prize-filled boxing career. I had a little baby at that time, and I must have been grappling with how one adjusts to one’s beloved child getting beat up.

You asked if my collection grew from there. In fact, this collection didn’t grow up, it collected, like filings around a magnet. I like variety. Each time I finish one story, I want to try something different with my next. After I’ve written from a middle-aged mother’s point of view, in first person, as in “The Sweet Collapse of the Feeble,” I want to try something entirely different: a naïve Army grunt, his third person point of view, and I want to try a different time frame, after WWII in Germany, before my own time. This became “The Gold Spoon.” Investigating varied characters and situations is a way of challenging what I do, and is my pleasure. A couple of years ago, I broke my ankle and was told I must keep my cast above my heart-level for a few weeks. Stuck on my couch, without the slightest urge to write, I decided to clean up my computer files. As I re-read these stories, I discovered that certain emotions link them all, even though the circumstances are different. Discovering this was an “ah hah” moment. My characters ache for love, they are compelled by regret and loss, and they can’t escape their pasts. These recurrent emotions and desires were the magnet that drew these stories together into this collection.

CC: In an interview on The Literary Fiction Book Review, you say, “Fiction reveals how we live beneath the surface of the obvious and the visible.” I’ve been ruminating on this sentence for a while now. Do you mean fiction allows us to embrace certain truths that we choose to ignore otherwise? Or do you mean fiction gives us more liberty to explore a character, a situation, a reaction to such depths that we uncover a piece of our core we hadn’t known existed?

LS: What’s below the surface is where the action is. Gestures and words can be deceptive or genuine. And isn’t everything more complicated than it appears? We read news items about a postal worker who leaves a million dollars to a medical school, and we wonder what did he deny himself to save that money? We read about a rancher who lined his driveway with Cadillacs half buried in the dirt, and we wonder if this was an expression of mockery, fury, or delight, or some impulse we haven’t thought of. You ask if writing might allow us writers to examine what we might prefer to ignore in our own lives, to “uncover a piece of our core”? I would say that writing opens us to empathy. By probing our characters’ needs and desires, we become more empathic with those unlike ourselves, and perhaps even those who are unlikeable. What makes this empathy possible is understanding ourselves and the links that connect us to others.

CC: With the last question, I’m thinking of “The Collaborator” and the protagonist, Daveen, who is caught in the politics of tenure and gender and her own version of #MeToo. I imagine this story was written well before the movement, so I wonder, when reality takes on the role of fiction and reveals how we live and think below the surface (which isn’t always pretty), does it change the way you view your work in retrospect? Do you ever think back on a character like Daveen and wonder how her story might shift if it were set in a post-#MeToo time?

LS: You are right. This story was written fifteen years ago, when feminists were regarded as scolds, hopeless bores, and pathetically retrograde. That’s how Daveen is regarded, especially since she broke off a friendship with a male colleague because of his sexual relationships with students. What was true when this story was written, what was true in the world that Daveen inhabits, and what is true today: patriarchy rules. In institutions like colleges, some men with power are attracted to younger, less powerful women, and it’s also true, some young women are attracted to men who possess power. Sex and power are two of the most elemental forces in culture. In “The Collaborator” sex, sexual politics, and power are the forces operating, but the story is about one woman, a thwarted feminist, and her response to a student whose sexual game upends her sense of self.

Each fictional character lives in a particular moment, as we all do. One of the things that interests me is how lives are lived within a historical context, and that context determines choices and possibilities. For Daveen, if she were living in this #MeToo time, she could turn to Human Resources with her complaints about sexual misconduct and she’d be taken seriously. If she were living twenty years earlier, she wouldn’t have a tenured position. Every story is set in a moment.

CC: What are you reading these days?

LS: I’ve just finished reading Joan Silber’s wonderful novel Improvement. Right now, I’m reading Patrick Modiano’s Such Fine Boys, a marvelous, moving novel that follows a group of school friends who are thrown into adult situations for which they were unprepared. Both novels include many characters, many stories braided together. Multiple stories—that’s what I like about story collections, too.

CC: What fuels your writing…coffee, tea, a certain view from the window, or a favorite pen? 

LS: My desk. It’s a small desk in a small room that’s really a hallway, but sitting at my desk focuses me. Sometimes I want to write somewhere else, like in a comfy chair by a window, or in nice weather, I’ll want to write outside, but as soon as my thoughts and words start to flow, I need to get to my desk.

~

Lynn Sloan is a writer and photographer. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and American Literary Review, among other publications, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the novel Principles of Navigation (2015 Fomite). Her fine art photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. For many years she taught photography at Columbia College Chicago, where she founded the journal Occasional Readings in Photography, and contributed to Afterimage, Art Week, and Exposure. She lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband.

Don’t forget: Enter the book giveaway by Tuesday, February 27th,
for a chance to win a copy of This Far Isn’t Far Enough.