Flash Frontier: Welcome, John! You wear many hats, and most recently you are the current judge of the Bath Novella-In-Flash Award. You’ve written three NIFs yourself. Let’s start with the experience of reading a novella-in-flash. How does that differ from reading other kinds of writing, and what about the form brings you pleasure?
John Brantingam: I often go back to Michael Loveday’s wonderful craft book, Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash. In it, he discusses that often novels give us a false sense of life’s progression. We are not built of narrative arcs after all. Our lives are built out of moments, and when we write in terms of narrative arcs, we miss the significance of those moments. I don’t mean to denigrate the novel as a form, just that I love the novella-in-flash for what it can do that other forms cannot.
I love Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha for letting us into the life of an African-American woman in the 1950s. She doesn’t build a story here so much as she invites us to experience life from her perspective. It is an act of unbelievable intimacy as so many novellas-in-flash are. I love Michael Loveday’s fiction also by the way. And I love Karen Jones’s, Jude Higgins’s, Meg Pokrass’s, and many many more writers of the genre. There are too many to name. All of these writers give the same passage into their lives.
It would be easy for me to give into the temptation of assuming that everyone’s life is like mine, that my perspective is the one with pure meaning. The truth is that I would be limited. Flash fiction generally and the novella-in-flash specifically ennobles me because it lets me become more other-centered. It helps me to see the great truths, that we might be different, but that we are connected, that other people live lives of drama as important and significant as I do, and that by understanding them and my connection to them, I understand myself more completely.
We are all connected. It is the illusions of ego that make us forget this. The novella-in-flash dispels those illusions. At least, in part.
FF: Your own NIFs seem to explore the idea of self, coming from your personal connection to the world, whether it’s the story of a geographical region and its baggage (Inland Empire) or inspired by a physical and emotional exhaustion (Finding Mr Pembroke). We’re curious about the way you shift from your real-world encounters to the space on the creative page. What changes as you move to create story out of reality? What stays the same?
JB: Inland Empire afternoon was inspired directly by the work of the great director Richard Linklater, especially from Slacker, where we spend periods of five minutes with seemingly random characters in Austin, Texas. He helps us to understand the place, which is different from any other place in Texas or the world really. It’s its own special place of music and beauty. If you’ve never been there, it’s a bit like everyone’s stereotype of San Francisco in the 1960s, but that’s just another stereotype of both cities.
I wanted to do something different in my book. In the Los Angeles area, the Inland Empire is a part that is often dismissed, mocked, and insulted. I lived there for 45 years and found the discussion of it to be racist and classist. I wanted to show that it is like any other place on earth, full of chaos, evil, and weirdness, full of people struggling and feeling abandoned, but also full of extraordinary people living lives of meaning and purpose. They are distracted by a sense of self that has been created by the way we gaslight each other and ourselves, telling ourselves that we are not beautiful and exceptional. However, they have nobility, and people of mythic significance walk among us.
Finding Mr. Pembrooke is much more autobiographical. I have a wife, which he does not, but otherwise, he is very much like me when I am at my lowest. I found myself one day having been so overwhelmed with stress and anxiety that I just couldn’t move. That’s happened a few times. I am a person of emotion and ambitions, but suddenly I just didn’t care about anything. I felt like I couldn’t move. I think that’s a very human reaction to being called on to do too much work. I believe that doing too much work is a sickness of the United States and other places as well.
So far, I’ve described the books and haven’t really answered your question. The answer is that I think the emotional truth needs to stay fast. The surface facts don’t matter. So Jesus and Moses do not literally walk around the streets of the Inland Empire. Certainly, however, the new Jesuses and Moseses do. They are among us, full of self-loathing and bitterness and still trying to do good. I never taught physics. I chose that by the way because I think it’s much harder to teach high school physics well than college English (my own subject), and I wanted someone truly good at what he did. What I wanted to show was that these people acting well are giving up much of themselves to do it.
Beyond that, I wanted to fight the stereotype presented in television shows and movies that to be a good teacher means self-sacrifice. Permanent self-sacrifice is not a lifestyle. I tried it, and I ended up like Mr. Pembrooke.
FF: You are a writer of prose and poetry, and a teacher of creative writing. Can you share a bit about your experience of writing in different forms, and how you follow a path that leads to one genre over another? How do you know when you are writing a small fiction versus a prose poem, for example? What kind of exploration is poetry, for you, compared to prose?
JB: There is some fuzziness between prose poetry and flash fiction, but to me it comes down to whether or not you are working on developing story elements primarily, for example story, characterisation, the relation of a single character to their surroundings, and many more. For me, poetry is about using sound devices and other poetic elements to create an emotional reality that has little to do with the artifice of those story devices.
Of course, there is overlap.
I use poetry to directly confront my own experience. I might write an ekphrastic piece about a Paul Klee painting. That is a way for me to confront and understand what I think about what he is saying. I love Paul Klee and his work. However, I am constantly sickened by Jacques-Louis David and his participation in the French Revolution and later Napoleon’s government. Writing about his work gives me a chance simply to dwell not on any story element but how angry a casual relationship with the wholesale slaughter of thousands of people makes me, whether it is for the purpose of empire or the consolidation of power.
Fiction, however, gives me the chance to engage in the consciousness of someone else. Even when a character is based on me, that person is slightly different, and I am able to enter the world from that person’s head.
I started as a fiction writer. When I was in college though it became clear to me that I didn’t have much control over my language. I started to write poetry just as an exercise, and I realised the enormous difference between the two. It was as if I had found an entirely new way of seeing. It was brilliant.
FF: Tell us a bit about your stint as Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. Did you carry a great deal of responsibility with the role? Did you write more poetry than in any other year? What were the expectations, and what did you learn along the way, wearing this poetry cloak?
JB: I suppose I could think of it in terms of responsibility, but I don’t really. I wanted to do more and more. I’d volunteered there for years before they named me the poet laureate. I wanted to open the forests to people who’d never seen it before and help them to internalise the experience by writing about it. We’d bring in people for the week, and I’d lecture both about the natural world and how to write about it. One of the things we had to do, for example, was chase bears when they wandered into our campground. When people found that they could do this, they gained an understanding about how they were connected to nature. Then they’d often go and write a poem or story about chasing a bear away.
By the way, this is the California black bear. You should chase them out of your camp to keep them from stealing your food. If they get human food, they will eventually go down a path that leads to their death. However, this is a technique for the California black bear only. Don’t try this with other species unless directed to do so from a professional.
The other part of the job was to write about living in nature. I spent every summer for nine years living in a van under the biggest trees in the world. There is nothing to compare to that experience. What I learned though was that it wasn’t so much about the bigness of the trees. It was the connection to nature. I could have lived in any natural spot and had the same reaction. This is a truth that surfers, sailors, and backpackers all know.
The poetry was distilled into my collection Crossing the High Sierra.
FF: You recently moderated a panel that explored ‘Storytelling outside the square’ for NZ’s National Flash Fiction Day. It’s always so interesting to hear a varied set of people weigh in on topics around creativity – leading us to unexpected places. We wonder: What new spaces opened up for you in this conversation?
JB: Many, many, many. One of the things that struck me was the ways that the writers and poets played with form and what that yielded. So many of them used forms that asked me to read and re-read to gain multiple understandings. I don’t want to single anyone out because I found them all so moving. But as with all short form poetry and fiction, I found myself reconsidering my life and my place in the world. That’s the beauty of what these writers were doing with their forms. They were confronting or predispositions and beliefs and then showing the world in a different way. I was happily forced to reconsider why I make the assumptions that I make, why I see the world as I do.
FF: We’d love to hear more about your notion of ‘wonder’ and in particular about the ideas behind the Journal of Radical Wonder.
JB: The Journal of Radical Wonder is at war with the idea of banality. Working off Hannah Arendt’s ideas, we think that being able to see the world as banal is the beginning of evil. Now, the word wonder does not have to have a positive connotation. In fact, great evil evokes wonder as well, or it does for me. I don’t know how anyone does great evil. For that matter, I don’t understand how anyone does small evil. The evil that creates the greatest wonderment in me is the evil that I commit. I don’t know how I do it, but I refuse to be dismissive of it.
There is of course great beauty to wonder at as well. I was watching a pigeon courtship ritual yesterday, the male puffing up and the female moving away. It was fascinating to watch the moment play out before me, this male trying to dominate and the female wanting to be left alone. These creatures have such drama in their lives, and they are two seemingly ordinary birds.
I like to unfocus my survival mode point-of-view, especially when looking at a tree. In my everyday life, I would normally look at the tree’s truck, basically to make sure that I don’t smack into it, and no one is hiding behind it. However, if I can get past that survival mode point-of-view, I can look up to the emergent layer of the tree, the highest part and see the surreal way the light lies on the shiny side of the leaf, or the canopy layer to see the creatures hiding from me and each other or the base where insects make their lives. On the uppermost levels of giant sequoia trees, there forms a ten-foot-wide craggy platform. This is called the crown. In the crown, there are bonsai pine trees growing and little creatures, including insects that have developed specifically to live in the sequoias. There are whole biomes existing hundreds of feet above whose whole existence is in the infinite universe of those few feet.
That’s all very dramatic, but the truth is that every inch of the earth has that kind of extraordinariness to it. We tend to see ourselves and anything associated with us as being banal, but we are each richer in significance than that floating society in the trees. The people around us are richer in significance than that floating society in the trees. Once I understood that I found wonder in the moments of evil that I commit. In a place like this surrounded with people like that, how could we ever view each other through the eyes of banality? Once we see each other this way, who could ever want to colonise the other, rob the other, look the other in the eye and imply that I am better than you? Who could belittle or dismiss? Who could laugh at someone’s error or misfortune? The quest to exist in a permanent state of radical wonder is the quest to fully realize the potential of our humanity.
FF: Lastly, what are you working on now, and does it follow and resonate from any of your previous projects or is it exploring unknown terrain?
JB: I’ve recently been drawn into writing drabbles, which are flash fiction pieces that are exactly 100 words. It’s a good way of confronting the pain in your life because it is a form and once you are in a form, the form draws out meaning. You think you’re just cutting the piece down to fit the length requirement, but the truth is you are making decisions about what is meaningful and what is not. In the end, you have culled until you have the precision of deep emotions that you previously did not understand.
John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-one books of poetry and fiction including Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press) and Kitkitdizzi: A Nonlinear Memoir of the High Sierra. He is the founder and editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder. He lives in Jamestown, New York.