Michelle Elvy: You are the author of several collections. How do you go about pulling together a set of stories into a full collection? How do you know which stories hold together, and which do not fit? Do you begin with a thematic or conceptual frame, or do you write individual works and then see, eventually, how they might form a book?
Jeff Friedman: I usually write individual pieces and then after a while I start to look for patterns. But generally speaking, I have a vision of the larger world, the cosmos, (conscious/unconscious) that appears to shape what and how I write. When I think I have enough pieces for a collection, I tend to sort them into kind of pieces, maybe something like family, work, love, youth, old age, pieces inspired by biblical stories, and pieces inspired by tales. Sometimes I keep the sections intact and other times, I thread pieces through the book thematically. But then I start reading the book to see how the voice moves from piece to piece within each section and throughout the book. Usually, the order changes quite a bit when I do that. The pieces in Ashes in Paradise were informed by the pandemic and the brutal Trump administration. The first section depicted things that happened or might have happened during the pandemic. Section two contained biblical retellings either set in the past or the present. The third section explored love relationships in troubled times, and the last section was elegiac. But there was overlap in each section, pieces that could have been in other sections.
ME: Tell us a bit about the line between fiction and reality. Is this the space you most like to explore with your creative writing?
JF: The poet Wallace Stevens believed that imagination and reality interpenetrate each other. I think that’s true in my writing. For me there’s always an interaction between fabulism and realism in my micros. In my early work, I was attempting to stay true to the fact of reality, but my images were always surreal. Now my writing starts in the world of the tale or fable and discovers a path to an essential reality or perhaps uncovers it.
ME: Your stories tend to be compact and precise. How did you come to this form – did you start larger and trim away till you got to the micro?
JF: Something like that. In my book Pretenders (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), I combined prose pieces with verse poems. Some of the prose pieces were intended as prose poems, but some were stories, up to two pages in length. For Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017), I began writing pieces that were 3-5 pages, thinking that I would expand to longer stories as I had written earlier in my career. However, when I read over the pieces, I would like moments, segments, poetic passages, funny riffs, but not the entire story. Then one day, I wrote a fable in a paragraph and liked it, so I wrote another and another. And then I wrote some tales in paragraphs. From then on, I limited myself to pieces under a page. I kept a few of the more successful longer tales, ‘Pillar of Salt’, ‘Family’, ‘Night with Bonita’ and ‘Power Point Presentation’, but everything else is under one page. That was my scale for Ashes in Paradise also, with the exception of ‘Orgasms on Amazon Prime’. I went with the one paragraph pieces in Broken Signals also, with one or two exceptions.
ME: You approach topics with a sense of the absurd. Why do you think it’s important to maintain humour in the way we view the world?
JF: Though the news may show us one tragic event after another, the world we live in is comic and absurd. Comedy shows us the foibles and meanness of common men and women; it lets us laugh at ourselves. The absurd shows us the craziness of things and how that craziness in thinking and action becomes self-sustaining and often ends in tragic outcomes for the society as a whole.
ME: And, related to that: how hard is it to write humour? Do you have any insights as to how you approach it?
JF: I think it’s very difficult to write comic pieces and even more difficult to write pieces that might make someone laugh out loud. I know many people who are very funny in person, but that’s different from making something come alive in print. It’s a good start though. I know there are professional writers who can write funny for others consistently. That’s not my job. I’m trying to write the best story or poem that I can. I wouldn’t want to sacrifice the power of a piece just to be funny. My humor comes out of my particularly skewed vision of the world. While I’m writing a piece, I sometimes can see that it has the potential for humor and then I really go for it. But I don’t say to myself, “I’m going to write a funny piece today.” That piece would probably be way too self-conscious and not funny at all.
Advice? I grew up listening to recordings of comedians like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and then of course, I watched the Flip Wilson Show, Sid Caesar’s Show of Shows, Carol Burnett, The Lucy Show, and much more. So I guess I had a network of comic routines and stories in my brain. I tried doing my version of some of those routines in my own work. For example, Woody Allen’s ‘I shot a Moose’ story inspired the writing of my prose piece ‘Bear Fight’, in which the speaker is love with a woman who is in love with a bear. I guess if you want to write humorous work, immerse yourself in the kind of comic storytelling you like. Get to know it inside out.
ME: Tell us about your writing space, please. Do you think your writing environment influences what you write? Does it add to your inspiration? Do some ideas come directly from places you go, people you see? We’d love to see a few of your stories with a note about the inspiration behind them.
JF: I work in two spaces in our house: 1)sitting on the couch in the living room, writing with a pen on pages torn out of a college ruled notebook or on printer paper with old drafts that have been scratched out or in my office; 2) in a small office with a couch, writing on old draft paper; sometimes I start a story/poem directly on my laptop, but that usually occurs when I write with Meg Pokrass and other friends from prompts that we’ve made up. When I write by myself, it’s usually early in the morning when Colleen, the artist to whom I married, is still sleeping. I like to be alone to write with not much activity around me.
I used to consider myself a writer of place, and the images and details in my work were specific to St. Louis, Missouri (where I spent my childhood and teen years) and Brooklyn (where lived in the 80s and early 90s), but when I moved to West Lebanon, New Hampshire, for a long time, I had difficulty connecting to the place. Eventually, West Lebanon, Hanover and Keene, NH became the unidentified setting/background of most of my pieces, but the images and details were those that one might find in a fable or tale, less specific, more universal; instead of a particular grocery story with a name on a particular block in a particular neighborhood, just a grocery store with aisles of food and cash registers. And if I’m writing about a family, there’s an outline of the setting and the family members usually aren’t given names just referred to as ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘brother’ and ‘sister’.
ME: And finally, do you have a few stories you will share as examples of your work? Perhaps you even have a micro with the ‘circle’ theme for this month’s issue….
JF: I’ll include ‘Bear Fight’ as an example of a comic piece that derived its inspiration from comedy; ‘Spring in Air’ set in a grocery and during the pandemic; ‘Boy with Holes’, a more generic setting; ‘Lost Memory’, a micro about a fight between a brother and a sister over a memory of an experience; and ‘Newman’s Own’ from Broken Signals, an example of another comic piece, using a kind of punch line.
From Floating Tales
Bear Fight
When Liza fell in with the bear, I was more than disappointed as I had been in love with her since childhood. “What’s he got that I don’t?” I asked as we walked past the diner together. “He’s a bear.” She let go of my hand. “He gets a little jealous when I’m out with my friends.” “Why do you want to be with a bear anyway?” Two teenagers pushed past us with their skateboards. Balloon floated above Main Street, announcing a sale at the furniture shop. “Why do you want to be with me?” she asked. We parted ways when the light changed, but later I went to her home dressed as a bear. She opened the door. “Come in,” she said, putting her arms around me. “You don’t smell like a bear,” she said, Then in walked the bear, with a fierce look on his face. He growled and so did I. He cuffed me, so I cuffed him back. Then we grappled with each other, bear hugging until Liza stepped in between us and held out her hands. “I’m sick of bears,” she said. “Get out of here.” I ripped off my bear mask. “I’m not a bear,” I said. The bear ripped off his. “I quit this game,” he said. “I’m not a bear either.” Liza removed her mask, and she wasn’t Liza. We ran away as fast as we could. I made it back to my place and locked the door, turning on the outside light, but all night I heard her huffing.
From Ashes in Paradise
The Boy with Holes
The officers who shot the boy repeatedly watched him fall face first, his arms and legs jerking until all movement ceased. They kept their distance, holstering their weapons, sure that it was all over, but the boy rose, his sweet face dirt stained. He walked slowly toward the officers. Light poked through the holes in his body. The ground was wet with blood. They stepped back and took out their weapons again. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” one officer said. The other agreed. Though they told him to stop and get down on his knees, the boy kept walking until he stood so close he touched one officer on the arm. Like a breath grazing the skin, his hand felt weightless. The officer cocked his gun and held it to the boy’s head. Crows gathered around them. The trees rustled. The red sun flared so intensely they had to squint to see his shape, and then the boy vanished. Now all they could see were the holes.
Spring in the Air
In checkout lane three at the grocery, I feel my nose twitch inside my mask. The two carts closest to the cashier are six-feet apart, but the rest of us are much closer together. While some shoppers chat briefly, laughing at jokes, while some lean over their carts for support, and some pull out hand sanitizer, rubbing their hands briskly, I scrunch my face to hold back a sneeze. When the guy in the next lane asks me a question, I begin to answer and without warning, the sneeze escapes. I’m shaken, but quickly hold up my hands and shout into my mask, “Allergies—I’m not sick,” but the other shoppers look at me as if I’m dangerous. Before I can do anything about it, I sneeze again, and my mask sails off like a large butterfly, floating over heads until it lands on a grocery conveyor belt two lanes away, touching an avocado. The cashier removes the mask with her gloved hand…The shopper says “no” to the avocado, which the cashier places near her register. The other shoppers move as far away from me as they can. I try to reassure them, but a third even more powerful sneeze explodes from my mouth and nose. The automatic doors open. The plexiglass windows shake. The shoppers hit the floor, holding their breath, their heads buried in their hands. A sea of droplets and aerosols hangs over them. There’s no way for me to clear the air now. For a long moment the store is silent. The only other person standing is the cashier in lane five. She smiles and signals me to come ahead. “But I’m not next in line,” I say. “You go!” the other shoppers shout from the floor, so I wheel around them, pay for my groceries quickly, and leave the store without another sneeze.
Lost Memory
My sister stole a memory of mine from my house and took it home, hidden in her coat. I couldn’t remember the memory, but there was an empty space on the sideboard under the window. “Give me back the memory,” I said, standing outside her door. “And I won’t report you to the authorities.” She let me in. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Why would I steal a memory of yours?” It didn’t take me long to find the memory, a blue jar sitting on the glass stand between two chairs. When I picked it up, she looked puzzled. “This is my place,” she said. “These are my things.” “Not true,” I replied and unscrewed the lid. Emptiness wafted out with its stinging scent. Now I remembered something I had wanted to forget. I screwed the lid back on quickly and set it down. “That’s my memory,” she said. “You shouldn’t have opened it.” “Then what do you remember?” I asked. “Nothing—it’s gone because you let it out.” And as I stood there, angry at my sister, the scent of the memory evaporated, and all I could remember was the jar, and now that belonged to her.
From Broken Signals
Newman’s Own
My lover thought I was Paul Newman, which is probably why she became my lover. One night in bed, I told her the truth. “I’m not Paul Newman.” She started to laugh. “You’re a joker all right,” she said. “No, really! Paul Newman has blue eyes that are clear as skies. I’ve got dark beady brown eyes, Hungarian eyes. He has a square jaw, and I have a weak chin partially hidden by a scraggly beard. I’ve never made love to Liz Taylor or Dominique Sanda or Joanne Woodward, and I don’t drink two six packs in two months, let alone two hours.” “Well, she said, “your tomato sauce is pretty good.”
Jeff Friedman is the author of eleven collections of poetry and prose, including Broken Signals (Bamboo Dart Press, 2024), Ashes in Paradise (Madhat Press, November 2023), The House of Grana Padano (Pelekinesis Press, April 2022, cowritten with Meg Pokrass), The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), and Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017). Friedman’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, 101 Jewish Poets for the Third Millennium, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, two individual Artist Grants from New Hampshire Arts Council. and numerous other awards and prizes.